The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature 9780748653911

Citation preview

The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd i

30/01/2012 16:24

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd ii

30/01/2012 16:24

The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature e di t e d b y a d a m p i e t t e a n d ma rk ra wlin so n

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd iii

30/01/2012 16:24

© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2012 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12 Goudy by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3874 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5391 1 (webreadyPDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5393 5 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 5392 8 (Amazon ebook) The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd iv

30/01/2012 16:24

content

s

CONTENTS

Illustrations Illustrations acknowledgements Introduction: The Wars of the Twentieth Century

ix x 1

Part I: Wars and their Literatures 1. Occasioning Peace: Three Poems of the Anglo-Boer War 11 Helen Goethals 2. ‘The essentially modern attitude toward war’: English Poetry of the Great War 20 Jane Potter 3. Debatable Ground: Freedom and Constraint in British First World War Prose Fiction 31 Sharon Ouditt 4. One of Ours in Context: The American World War I Novel 40 Jennifer Haytock 5. The ‘moaning of the world’ and the ‘words that bring me peace’: Modernism and the First World War 47 Sara Haslam 6. The Great War and the Moving Image: Cinema and Memory 58 Michael Paris 7. Irish Writing of Insurrection and Civil War, 1916–39 64 Matthew Campbell 8. The Poetry of the Spanish Civil War 75 James Fountain 9. ‘Lucid Song’: The Poetry of the Second World War 85 Jonathan Bolton 10. American Poets of World War II 94 Margot Norris 11. Writing after Nuremberg: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of the Trauma Trial 101 Lyndsey Stonebridge 12. The Second World War in American Fiction 110 John Limon

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd v

30/01/2012 16:24

vi 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

contents The Second World War in British Drama since 1968 Victoria Stewart Holocaust Testimony: Understanding and Criticism Bob Eaglestone Holocaust Film Barry Langford O, Do Not Dream of Peace: American Poetry of the Korean War William D. Ehrhart The Fictions of Nuclear War, from Hiroshima to Vietnam Adam Piette Cold War Films Jonathan Auerbach Britain’s Small Wars: Domesticating ‘Emergency’ Lee Erwin The Disappeared and the Damned: Duplicity, Complicity and Reality in the Literature of the Pax Americana Kris Anderson Vietnam Fictions Mark A. Heberle ‘Will there be peace again?’: American and Vietnamese Poetry on the Vietnam/American War Subarno Chattarji Poetry and the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ Fran Brearton The Literature of the Falklands/Malvinas War Jon Begley ‘An Uneven Killing Field’: British Literature and the Former Yugoslavia Andrew Hammond Sacrifice and the Sublime since 11 September 2001 Alex Houen

Part II: Bodies, Behaviour, Cultures Introduction: Bodies, Behaviour, Cultures 27. War Memorials David Goldie 28. Unsettled Memory: A Meditation on Contested Ground Jane Creighton 29. War, Policing and Surveillance: Pat Barker and the Secret State Jessica Meacham 30. American Psychiatry, World War II and the Korean War Martin Halliwell 31. Pacifists and Conscientious Objectors Ian Patterson 32. The Representation of Refugees in Arthur Koestler’s Arrival and Departure and Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore Sissy Helff

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd vi

118 126 134 151 160 172 181

190 205

214 222 231 241 251

265 269 277 285 294 304

317

30/01/2012 16:24

contents 33.

34.

35.

‘These rooms / run into each other like tunnels / leading to the underworld’: Race in War Literature Mark W. Van Wienen A Spy Under Every Bed: Espionage and Popular Literature from the First World War Celia M. Kingsbury Reflections on the Enemy: From Evil Nazis to Good Germans Petra Rau

Part III: Technology Introduction: Technology 36. Camouflage and the Re-enchantment of Warfare Mark Rawlinson 37. Warplane David Pascoe 38. Monsarrat’s Corvettes and the Battle of the Atlantic Jonathan Rayner 39. Submarine Novels ‘After History’ Hamish Mathison 40. ‘An ecstasy of fumbling’: Gas Warfare, 1914–18 and the Uses of Affect Santanu Das 41. Paul Virilio as Twentieth-Century Military Strategist: War, Cinema and the Logistics of Perception John Armitage 42. Word Electric, So Finite: Radio, Poetry and the Séance in World War I Jane Lewty Part IV: Spaces Introduction: Spaces 43. The Trenches Allyson Booth 44. Literature of the Camps in the Second World War Sue Vice 45. ‘That fighting was a long way off ’: Desert and Jungle War Poems Peter Robinson 46. Cityscape: The Bombed City in the Second World War Leo Mellor 47. The Eight-week College of the Age of Extremes: The Barracks and the Training Ground Glyn Salton-Cox

Part V: Genres Introduction: Genres 48. Contemporary War Drama: Caryl Churchill Julia Boll

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd vii

vii

326

334 341

351 356 366 380 388 396

406 413

427 431 439 448 456

465

475 479

30/01/2012 16:24

viii

contents

49.

Nuclear War in Science Fiction David Seed The Children’s War Katie Trumpener The Troubles with the Thriller: Northern Ireland, Political Violence and the Peace Process Aaron Kelly Fantasies of Complicity in the Second World War R. W. Maslen Visualising the Transformations of War: War and Art in the Twentieth Century Roger Tolson Twentieth-Century Spy Fiction James Purdon ‘Play Up and Play the Game!’: The Narrative of War Games Esther MacCallum-Stewart War Correspondence Kate McLoughlin Thinking War Nick Mansfield

50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

Notes on contributors Index

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd viii

490 498

508 516

524 536 544 553 562

570 577

30/01/2012 16:24

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12

Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15 Figure 16 Figure 17

Still from The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC, designed by Maya Lin; photograph by Wendy Watriss Vietnam Veterans Memorial; photograph by Wendy Watriss Vietnam Veterans Memorial; photograph by Wendy Watriss Louis Raemaekers, The Gas Fiend (1916) Louis Raemaekers, Slow Asphyxiation (1916) John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum Percy Wyndham Lewis, Before Antwerp (1915), woodcut. Cover for Blast, War Number Percy Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled (1919), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum Paul Nash, The Mule Track (1918), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum Paul Nash, We are Making a New World (1918), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum Stanley Spencer, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (1919), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum William Orpen, Blown Up (1917), pencil, watercolour on paper. Imperial War Museum Henry Moore, First Shelter Sketchbook page 26. © Trustees of the British Museum Elsie Hewland, A Nursery-School for War Workers’Children (1942), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum Paul Nash, Battle of Britain (1941), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum

4 278 282 283 398 399 401 525 526 527 528

529 530 531 532 532 534

ix

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd ix

30/01/2012 16:24

ILLUSTRATIONS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Publisher wishes to thank Wendy Watriss for permission to reproduce the three photographs of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Chapter 28; the Imperial War Museum for permission to reproduce John Singer Sargent’s Gassed, Percy Wyndham Lewis’s A Battery Shelled, Paul Nash’s The Mule Track, We are Making a New World and Battle of Britain, Stanley Spencer’s Travoys Arriving, William Orpen’s Blown Up, Elsie Hewland’s A Nursery-School for War Workers’ Children; and the British Museum for the right to reproduce Henry Moore’s First Shelter Sketchbook page 26. It has made every effort to contact the copyright holders for Louis Raemaekers’s The Gas Fiend and Slow Asphyxiation and we will be happy to acknowledge them appropriately if they contact us.

x

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd x

30/01/2012 16:24

Adam Piette

INTRODUCTION: THE WARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

T

his Companion is the first reference book to deal comprehensively and incisively with the literary and cultural representations of war in twentieth-century British and US literature and film. The wars covered are not only the major wars of the century but also specific conflicts which engendered widespread literary and imaginative responses from British and US writers, such as the Boer War, Spanish Civil War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Korean War, the decolonising conflicts in Africa through to the war on terror. It addresses topics as well as specific wars, with sections that have specific relevance to the ways war studies are currently taught and researched. The focus on the two World Wars since the 1990s has revolutionised the ways modern literature is explored by university students and academics, significantly shaping the ways cultural studies and historicist methodologies have impacted on both British and American literatures. War studies is now one of the leading, core approaches to the twentieth-century literary-historical record, determining new modes of engagement with key research areas such as modernism and postmodernism. The First World War is now an essential factor when exploring the high modernism of writers such as Lewis, Joyce, Eliot. Writers previously rendered anodyne by overly ahistorical and aesthetic approaches are being reconsidered as important cultural commentators on the war-determined cultures of their time. The 1940s, so long neglected by scholars, are now being understood as the dark decade influencing both the years that precede (particularly 1930s radicalism) and the subsequent decades. The current international military engagements, the Gulf Wars, Iraq, the war on terror have also meant there has been significant, renewed interest in all twentieth-century wars and their effect on culture, especially the wars fought for colonial and decolonising purposes, such as the Boer War, the wars in Africa, Korea, Vietnam. The growth of the military–industrial complex generated by the Cold War is increasingly understood as the key shaping force in post-war culture. These two emergent fields – decolonising conflicts and the Cold War – have established a crucial emergent sphere of research. Its specific relevance to contemporary Anglo-American war culture makes this new field of study, when integrated into the well-established World War studies, a significant and exciting area for students, not only in British and American studies programmes and core modules, but also in dissertation and research topics at undergraduate, Master’s and PhD levels. Literary studies is following history in all these developments. Historians have long acknowledged the vital importance of war not only in decisively shaping period divisions, but as being a motor driving politics, economy and culture in the West. As literary

1

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 1

30/01/2012 16:24

2

adam piette

studies has in recent years returned to its more empirical and cultural base post-theory, so a more focused historicism has led inevitably to a reassessment of the twentieth century as a century of wars, of war culture, of war as the force driving technology, geopolitics, and the political unconscious of citizens in the UK, Ireland and the US. It is perhaps a defining characteristic of writer-intellectuals that they seek to represent the secret influence of hidden cultural forces within the private zone of the citizen imagination. The emergent field of literary war studies is revealing the true extent of the influence of wars on the imagination, most clearly in the nightmare of the trenches, the death camps and nuclear warfare, but also in the impact of Vietnam on American culture from the 1960s to the present day, the extraordinary ways in which we are all haunted by war technology, the abiding effects of the militarisation of landscapes, the destructive and liberating stories of decolonising conflicts, the massive impact of military events such as the Spanish Civil War, the Irish civil war, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the war on terror. War dominated the twentieth century. It dominated it not only in the incontrovertible fact of its impact on history, predominantly through the two World Wars, and in the frightening number of wars across the globe and in each decade, but also in the effects mass-industrial militarisation had on institutions, on economies, on technologies and, more intimately and subversively, on the ways citizens lived their lives, dreamt their fantasies. Warfare and the technologies of war have revolutionised the world, imposed new fluctuating and permeable borders on nation states, have been the secret engines of history and development, and have shaped and defined globalisation, modernisation, and military/militant forms of control and resistance. They have done so, partly, because the development of mass culture and the technological revolution, inaugurated by the inventions of the internal combustion engine, of mechanised flight, of entirely new and superpowerful communications and information systems, coincided with the unleashing of industrial forms of warfare, the invention of weapons of mass destruction, and new ways of targeting, destroying and concentrating enemy populations. The relationship between technological mass culture and the military–industrial complex generated by the twentieth century is the story all of the essays in this volume, collectively, help to tell. It might be naïve to argue that fiction, poetry, film and theatre are arts of peace, as that would be to avert one’s gaze from the warmongering, propagandistic and drum-thumping texts war culture can throw up. Nevertheless, it might still be useful to make the case that the literature we respect which has war as its topic or context does more than simply represent states of belligerence. War makes literature ethical in this strict sense: the spectacle and imagining of the death of others in state-sponsored conflicts demands writing that pays due witness to that suffering, accompanies that suffering with the attention due to extreme and lethal experience, and accomplishes representations of that suffering without recourse to the usual contractual conventions that govern polite engagement with a sophisticated and jaded readership. One ethical demand is that the extreme historical moment is recorded faithfully and with a feel for the affect and sensations of those undergoing war’s transformations. This is why we begin with accounts of the stories generated by the wars of the twentieth century. Each war had its own extremities, its own specific geopolitical, cultural and historical convolutions, its own way of smashing into local cultures and populations, of organising its armies and deciding the fate of its victims. Those specificities are important ethically because the dead demand the ‘blood’ of our real affective time and text; but also because

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 2

30/01/2012 16:24

introduction: the wars of the twentieth century

3

the bigger story of the emergence of massive national security states, of the globalising power of the military–industrial complex, and of culture-revolutionising technologies was felt by witnesses as a story that had to be told, and told one war at a time. Each war, in sequence, saw the megalith of transnational modernity grow exponentially. The Boer War gave the world the concentration camp, experiments in state propaganda, and a drawing in of colonial populations into the states of warfare that had governed Europe. The First World War saw the emergence of state control and surveillance, control too of mass media, communications and transport of populations, as well as an industrialisation of death that intoxicated the world. The Second World War saw mass death become a bureaucracy and factory of suffering and persecution, as well as the unleashing of the Bomb and its child the Cold War onto the world. The wars after 1945 continued the global spread of European warfare under the new conditions of late modernity into zones of colonial conflict: and the networks of power, information and commerce we associate with the Internet and globalisation are fruits of those Cold War conflicts. We concentrate on Anglo-American wars not only because our discipline is English studies, but also because the Anglo-American warfare state created the model for the globalised militarisation of world spaces which still continues to function as normative, disciplinary, global-governmental, delusional and fantastic as only imperial projects can be. We cannot hope to cover all the wars that occurred; and the essays do not pretend to be any more than contributions to the passionate hurly-burly of scholarly and intellectual debates about those conflicts. We do hope, though, that they can act as both small-scale surveys of some of the work out there and also as essays in their own right; readable, rationally argued, with a point of view and hold on the specific war and its literatures. They stand here in this volume as a measure of the work that still needs to be done as much as indicators of the work that has been done – they should be read in this spirit; as inspirational of potential further writing, as well as, cumulatively, as demonstrating the scope of a war-focused textual field. We stop short of the wars in the Middle East, in the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, for that story is still being written and told. Our introductions will give some indication of the current work in this specific field, by way of prefaces to the specific sections of the volume. For once we have covered some of the conflicts that have shaped the Anglo-American world, we move to topic-based sections that try to cover the other ways war stories have been told. If war has been so critical in manipulating behaviour and culture, then our next section gives some thought to this. The essays under the heading ‘Bodies, Behaviour, Cultures’ deal with some of the more important contexts for understanding the representational regimes of modern warfare. Topics include: memorials and memory; pacifism; race; the enemy; refugees; psychiatry; espionage. Many wars sport as their chief war aims regime change in terms of a change in a subject population’s hearts and minds. Modern conquering armies are accompanied by fleets of spokesmen, information control experts, propaganda technicians, goodwill managers, media teams, psychological warfare geeks. Their role is often not only to control the ways war stories are fashioned and disseminated – a lesson learnt when too much control was ceded to journalists in Vietnam – but also to condition national and international thinking and feeling; to deliver the war-aim ideology as an internal state of mind in subject citizens, and home front audiences. The aim, then, is not only, as the Americans have done (taking British control of television war correspondents in the Falklands as their model), to embed journalists within controlled regimental environments; but also to mediatise the wars being covered so that they enter

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 3

30/01/2012 16:24

4

adam piette

Figure 1: Still from The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) citizen minds as natural-technological spectacles, and not conflicts that need to be resisted as real killing and maiming wars. The trick is subtler than it sounds, for twentieth century war is by its nature always already mediated by technology – visualised and consumed as televisual and news-conventional. If the audience, however, takes those wars into their own inward televisual screens and embeds the stories into their own mental media teams, then resistance is that much more likely to become pre-militarised and media-passive, not passionate and pacifist. The essays in this section ponder, in their different ways, the literary texts that have taken on and analysed the history behind the internalising effects of state-sponsored war representations. One might take a contemporary example: the bomb disposal movie, The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2008), based on a screenplay by Mark Boas, who had been embedded in a bomb disposal team in Iraq. It is about an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team during the Iraq War led by William James (played by Jeremy Renner), who has dangerous and ‘intuitive’ methods, fearless, even heartless. The film is intense and stages an emotional conflict between Sergeant Sanborn, one of James’s two assistants, who is broken by the things they witness and have to do, and dreams of returning home to his son. William James also returns from duty to his son, but has become so hardened, so battle-minded, that he confesses he only loves war. What makes the movie of more than Hollywoodpsychological interest, however, are the images of James at work in his bomb suit. These blast suits are thick and heavy, encasing the body in massive layers of armour, and the head in a bubble with visor – James in the film is shown both from his team’s perspective, creeping towards the explosive devices like a moonman, or from James’s own POV, inside the suit, seeing the war’s world through the lens of his prosthetic defence system. The images become eerier and eerier as James works on, encountering blasts, agonising approaches to reluctant suicide bombers, etc. What emerges is a slow-burning enigma as to the film’s view of America’s Middle Eastern wars, and the possible answers to the enigma are intriguing. The film suggests that America goes to war in these desert zones with the affectless indifference and war-technology-entranced mad courage of William James. Encased within his bomb suit, he has the glamour of an Armstrong on the moon, boldly going into alien worlds, the desert dust of Iraq (especially in the slow-mo shots of cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd) blooming like the dust of the moon. The Iraqis are dis-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 4

30/01/2012 16:24

introduction: the wars of the twentieth century

5

tant aliens; the technology is king; the American a hero in his ideology-protective gear. The cruelty in his kind of bravado judges the United States in its own foolhardy incursion into the war zone; the view through the blast suit visor like the self-delusional visions of the movie-goer watching the war through war culture’s lenses and frames. Like James, the country the Bush presidents sent to war has become addicted, to war televisual, war cinematic, war as video game. Heartless, affectless, ruthless, the country as viewer enters the zones with the indifference and lust of a player-as-proxy, the desert conflict a playground lodged deep in the cerebral cortex of America. Our next section moves on to consideration of war-related texts as boosted and shaped by specific technologies. We do not, of course, cover all the technologies that pertain to the practice and performance of war. We do not have chapters on radar, on the tank, on the machine gun, on artillery, for instance. The topics we have commissioned, however – on the fighter and bomber, on the warship, on gas, on camouflage as a technology, on the uses of cinema and radio in warfare – do present case studies of the kinds of work which really needs to be done. It is not only the medium which is the message; but also the technologies that have acted as psyche-transforming prosthetic armoury and perceptual apparatuses, changing the way we imagine our own species and its relationship to the world under its control. These technologies revolutionised modern warfare, changing the relationship of soldiers to the enemy and to the act of killing, and extending violence to civilian populations. Some of the new technologies generated whole new genres of literary text, as in the submarine thrillers and war-at-sea narratives detailed in this section. Some had profound effects on culture more generally, as in the era-defining changes inaugurated by cinema and radio in the first half of the century. In all cases, the net effect of reading a section like this is to confirm the view that the arms race during the twentieth century led to more than a tug of war between powers, but also to a radical adjustment of the constitution of culture. Again, a contemporary example might give an indication of a technology-focused approach to the war story. Many of the protests against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the war on terror, especially after Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and the wikileaks, targeted the technologies that gave form to the warfare ideology. In Britain, the poet Keston Sutherland produced powerful invective poetry through a complex procedure of satire, deliberate self-infecting appropriation of war coalition rhetoric, and threaded allusion to older texts. His Stress Position considers the torture used on Iraqi and war on terror prisoners. ‘The Proxy Inhumanity of Forklifts’ from Stats on Infinity explores the complicitous horror of the war in Iraq, based on the 2003 story of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers pictures showing them stringing up Iraqi prisoners of war from a fork-lift truck.1 A special issue of Sutherland’s poetry journal, Quid, gathered responses to Abu Ghraib, including J. H. Prynne’s ‘Refuse Collection’: Go on, do it, we’ll photograph everything, home movies hold steady on while they is we do it, by eye it takes oozing huge debt. Reschedule value credits, war for oil, oil for food, food for sex molest modest reject stamp on limp abjected lustral panoply. Little crosses everywhere, yours and mine makeshift parlour chicken rape private sold down DIY there is a country.2

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 5

30/01/2012 16:24

6

adam piette

‘They is we’ because war culture makes all citizens not only complicit in the violence done in their name, but because the citizen imagination has been colonised (as language, as image) by the war’s secrecies, folding its own lustral desires into the ‘home / movies’ propagated by the war machine. The forklift trucks, the photographs and home movies: it is the technology that renders what is already unspeakable an especially obscene form of uncanny. War is performed through its tools; and the techne of war is not only ordinary materiel, but all visualising technologies, all engines and machines co-opted and weaponised within the fieldforce of the violence done to others. Moving on from technologies, we then commissioned work that engaged with the geopolitical and spatial dynamics of war, the special (and again uncanny) zones generated by warring states. These include the dreadful horror of the camps in the twelve years of Nazi rule; the trenches; the stranger battlegrounds of the Second World War, its deserts and jungles; the bombed city; the barracks. The spaces, landscapes and territories which define the experience and meaning of modern war link up sometimes, in nightmare crossings of cultural memory, as in the ways the desert wars of the Bush presidencies wove together the desert campaigns of the Second World War (the Gulf War’s Mile of Death along Highway 80 recalling the abandoned tanks and vehicles after El Alamein) with intimations of Vietnam in the indiscriminate bombing. In Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, Anthony Swofford (who served in a US Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper Platoon), gives a grunt’s view of the war’s occupation of desert space: ‘A tent city can crop up anywhere, a sign of the mobile Marine Corps, the quick and lethal movement of troops, the coming desecration of the enemy.’3 The rhetoric is juvenile, shock-Biblical, hard-Corps; but it indicates the equation set up by the army’s own training/brainwashing between the living quarters and the killing fields. The equation stands and falls on the arrogation of desert culture’s nomadism and Arabic mobile warmongering, melded in to the rhythms of the book of the desert, the Bible. To desecrate the enemy (not simply defeat it) means to militarise with your own army law and governance the spaces and practices of the enemy country. War occupies and corrals and kills, transforming peacetime space into death’s uncanny zone. The Companion then moves to consider genre and war writing, addressing fields such as war and theatre; science fiction wars; war in literature for children; the war thriller; war and detective fiction; war art; war and fantasy; the war correspondent; war and theory. Again we have not aimed for absolute coverage: there is room, after all, for work on the relations between war and the television play, or war and documentary, war and musicals, etc. But the pieces we commissioned hoped to cover the more important genres, as well as indicating, again by example, further fields of enquiry. Literature and visual media are drawn to the story of war for obvious sensational reasons, but also because there is a generic pressure created by extraordinary and extreme events of all kinds. The story must be told to very different communities and audiences, in different manners and conventions. War tends to alter the genres it inhabits, like a cuckoo in the nest. It stretches and distorts the normal obligations and expectations, and gives the genre a special ethical edge, as well as menace and dark intention. Our contributors have tried to show the complexity of the engagement of war with their genre through focused concentration on specific conflicts or specific texts: this has the virtue of demonstration in depth rather than in survey; an effect we very much hoped for. For it is only through close attention to the specific conflict and genre that the genre can be seen being distorted and inhabited by war’s energy and dark story.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 6

30/01/2012 16:24

introduction: the wars of the twentieth century

7

By way of example: if we do consider the relations between war and documentary, for instance, it is salutary after all the hundreds of grim, masculinist and gunslinger documentaries that poured out from Iraq and Afghanistan to listen to the radio documentary produced by the BBC’s war correspondent Jonathan Charles for the World Service. Charles had appealed to Afghans for their own war poetry and translated them, broadcasting ‘Lost Voices of Afghanistan’ on 21 January 2011.4 The response was enormous, and included this haunting song by Fazlullah Zacoub: Right now, 4,000 Marines with 600 lamplighters from the towers of the world are aiming at the horns of a goat kid which is grazing feebly in the shades of the poppyfields and waving its beard along with the weeds of the fields. Cover your eyes, as our sheik has put the rider of justice on the back of a stallion with no reins; yes, without a shred of doubt, he has put the rider on the back of a stallion with an allusion from somewhere else, other than God. Charles extends the war correspondent documentary convention of quoting sources and embedding interviews with informants into the account of the war event into a field for Afghan poetry – this suits the nation, for Afghan culture has a very rich oral tradition of poetry making. But it also offers up the genre to the voices of the subject civilian population, and takes war poetry from combatant to civilian by so doing. Fazlullah Zacoub’s enigmatic poem turns on what the allusion might be: the poem is entitled ‘Isztikhara with an Allusion’, Isztikhara being a prayer for guidance for the Sunnis, which contains this: ‘You have power, while I am without power, and You have knowledge, while I am without knowledge, and You are the One who knows all things invisible.’ The address to God, however, in the poem is addressed to the warlord sheiks and Marines running the war: they have become the controllers of power and knowledge, and the Afghan people become a sacrificial goat between the invisible forces. Jonathan Charles’s offering of radio time to the poems and stories of the Afghan people enacts the transformations demanded by the extreme event of war to the conventions of the genres we consume.

Notes 1. Keston Sutherland, The Stats on Infinity (Brighton: Crater Press, 2010). Cf. also Andrea Brady’s Wildfire: A Verse Essay (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2010). 2. J. H. Prynne, ‘Refuse Collection’, published in Quid in 2009, and available at Barque Press website: http://www.barquepress.com/quid13.html, accessed 25 January 2011. 3. Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (New York: Scribner, 2005), p. 89. 4. Fazlullah Zacoub, ‘Isztikhara with an Allusion’, ‘Lost Voices of Afghanistan’, broadcast 21 January 2011, available at BBC World Service website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/ documentaries/2011/01/110119_doc_lost_voices_afghanistan.shtml, accessed 25 January 2011.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 7

30/01/2012 16:24

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 8

30/01/2012 16:24

1

OCCASIONING PEACE: THREE POEMS OF THE ANGLO-BOER WAR Helen Goethals

Peace: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911 Taking Malvern van Wyk Smith’s Drummer Hodge as an inescapable starting point, I would like to revisit the resistance to war evoked in the fifth chapter of that work: All over Britain – indeed, all over the western world – liberal, radical, socialist, humanitarian, feminist and religious leaders and groups were stung into militant pacifism. Organizations such as the Transvaal Committee, the Stop the War Committee, the National Reform Union, and the South African Conciliation Committee gathered an enormous momentum of publicity (if not of influence) which filled the English press for at least the first year of the war, led to blows at several public meetings, came to a climax during the Khaki Election of October 1900, and left its traces in the form of thousands of pamphlets.1 My question will be a profoundly simple one: why was this ‘militant pacifism’ so spectacularly unsuccessful? I will argue that it is best answered by looking more closely, not at the poetry that was written in condemnation of war, but at that which was written in celebration of peace. One of the most striking features of the war in South Africa is that it was waged within the unprecedented context of a debate which cross-examined not only the causes and the conduct of a particular war, but the philosophical foundations of war itself. If the period 1875–1914 was, historically, an Age of Empire it was also, philosophically, an Age of Ethics. What was at stake in South Africa was not just pax britannica, but pax itself. Never had a finer case been made for the avoidance of war than that put forward during the half-century preceding the Battle of the Somme. The naturalistic picture of the unpleasant realities of war drawn by front-line journalists such as William Russell and novelists such as Bertha von Suttner in Lay Down Your Arms, Émile Zola in La Débâcle or Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage, had spread the idea that war ought to be avoided, and the proponents of Free Trade had pointed the economic way to that end. Meanwhile, ways to limit the evils of war were debated in Universal Peace Congresses, held almost annually from 1889, attended by members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union of Arbitration (founded 1889) and the International Peace Bureau (1891), international lawmakers, assorted peace societies, Quakers, and philanthropists such as Andrew

11

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 11

30/01/2012 16:24

12

helen goethals

Carnegie. In 1899 alone, three important (and very different) critiques of militarism were published: Stephen Crane’s War is Kind, Gustave de Molinari’s The Society of Tomorrow, and W. T. Stead’s translation of the last volumes of Ivan de Bloch’s monumental work, under the English title of Is War Now Impossible?2 It is in the mass of intellectual, artistic and practical activity of ‘militant pacifism’ that we may find an explanation both for the apparent success of the first universal Peace Conference in The Hague (18 May–29 July 1899), convened by Tsar Nicholas II and attended by a hundred delegates from twenty-six nations, and the simultaneous failure of the peace talks between Alfred Milner and Paul Kruger in Bloemfontein (31 May–5 June). In Bloemfontein and throughout the three-year war which diplomacy had failed to prevent, the Boer leaders appealed in vain to the principles laid down in the international convention drawn up at that historic conference in The Hague: a permanent court for arbitration, arms limitation and the protection of civilians. Yet it was because of the peace movement set in motion by that first Hague Conference that the word ‘pacifist’ entered the English language, it being felt that a new word was needed to designate the people involved in opposing the organisation of war. Thus a ‘pacifist’ was simply the antithesis of a ‘militarist’. It is against the background of this embryonic ethics of peace that I would like to read three very different responses to the signing of the Peace of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902.3 These three are of particular interest because they are occasional poems and, to my knowledge, the first clutch of poems specifically written to celebrate the occasion of peace.4 What makes them interesting is the way in which each expresses something of the roots and restrictions of the new thinking about the nature of peace. ‘The First of June’, a Shakespearean sonnet by Charles Algernon Swinburne, is not only perfectly representative of the group of five sonnets and an ode concerning the Boer War that were collected in A Channel Passage and Other Poems (1904) but also largely in tune with the prevalent political mood. Being the shortest and most formally emphatic of the three responses, it may be quoted in full: Peace and war are one in proof of England’s deathless praise. One divine day saw her foemen scattered on the sea Far and fast as storm could speed: the same strong day of days Sees the imperial commonweal set friends and foemen free. Save where freedom reigns, whose name is England, fraud and fear Grind and blind the face of men who look on her and lie: Now may truth and pride in truth, whose seat of old was here, See them shamed and stricken blind and dumb as worms that die. Even before our hallowed hawthorn-blossom pass and cease, Even as England shines and smiles at last upon the sun, Comes the word that means for England more than passing peace, Peace with honour, peace with pride in righteous work well done. Crowned with flowers the first of all the world and all the year, Peace, whose name is one with honour born of war, is here. It is tempting to dismiss this as ‘political verse’, mere propaganda not worth the literary critic’s attention, and indeed it should be pointed out that aesthetic criticism was invented at just this time in order to set such verse apart from respectable poetry. In ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’, his 1901 inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, A. C.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 12

30/01/2012 16:24

three poems of the anglo-boer war

13

Bradley argued that poetry and verse should be distinguished on their intrinsic (aesthetic) merits and not by an appeal to values outside the autonomous world of the poem, and he cited as proof the fact that an appeal to the moral value of patriotism would not help explain the self-evident literary value of ‘Scots, wha’ hae’, as against the doggerel of ‘We don’t want to fight’. I, on the other hand, would argue that the poetic experience of a text cannot be separated from its political concerns, and that poetry and verse are not essentially different languages but different uses of language. Since both draw on the same power of significant form, which works not for its own sake but in the service of a perceived truth, what differentiates poetry from verse is the nature of the truth. As T. S. Eliot wisely noted, ‘Poetry is condemned as “political” when we disagree with the politics.’5 Verse may give force to truths that are trivial, comic, half-true or false, but only poetry can empower substantial truth. Swinburne’s sonnet rings false not because it is poorly written, but because it shapes and is shaped by a false idea of peace. Swinburne’s meditation on peace jars the reader from the very first line. Whether in proof of England’s deathless praise or anything else, it is linguistically and ethically monstrous to proclaim that ‘Peace and war are one’, and the fruit of such a forced coupling is bound to produce the repellent violence of the language used to refer to England’s enemies, those who allow ‘fraud and fear’ to ‘grind and blind’ their faces, deserve to be ‘shamed and stricken blind and dumb as worms that die’. A curious choice of language for the celebration of peace! Again, one might be tempted to dismiss the images of an ‘England crowned with flowers’ and the blossoming hawthorn as mere pastoral convention, were it not that they usefully draw our attention to the political power of poetry, its capacity to seduce the citizen-reader by true or false analogies. Here the transfer of poetic value to political value can be refused on three grounds. First, a pastoral theme is singularly inappropriate in the context of an imperial war, since, as John Masefield was to point out, British imperialism depended not on agricultural exports, but on ‘Tyne coal, / Road-rails, pig-lead, / Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays’.6 Second, the seasonal link between the blossoming of the hawthorn and the conclusion of the Anglo-Boer War obscures the fact that thousands of lives might have been saved, if peace had been agreed in Middelburg in February when (in England) no hawthorn was in blossom. Third, as T. H. Huxley had so admirably argued in ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (1893), not only was there no scientific evidence that cosmic forces were working towards the progress of man in general, let alone the Englishman in particular, but rather the manifest indifference of nature to the plight of man was precisely what gave man a duty to use his scientific knowledge to engineer not his own self-destruction but mutually beneficent social change. The central conceit of the sonnet, that the peace of Vereeniging could be compared to the naval victory of 1794 just because the two events happened to fall on the same day, fosters an equally pernicious confusion between imperial policy and divine providence. While it was at least possible for a few to argue that peace in 1902 came from ‘righteous work well done’, though some called the farm-burning and the concentration camps ‘methods of barbarism’, the foemen of 1794 were certainly not scattered because of righteous deeds but because of a storm. The end result of such confused thinking is the staggering arrogance of ‘England smiles and shines at last upon the sun’. Pastoral and religious references also abound in the second occasional poem I would like to refer to: a rhymed Pindaric ode, entitled ‘Peace’, by Francis Thompson. There is not

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 13

30/01/2012 16:24

14

helen goethals

space here to quote its four irregular verse paragraphs, totalling some one hundred lines, in full, but its opening and closing lines will suggest its main theme: Peace:– as a dawn that flares Within the brazier of the barrèd East, Kindling the ruinous wall of storm surcease To rent and roughened glares, After such night when lateral wind and rain Torment the to-and-fro perplexed trees With thwart encounter; which, of fixture strong, Take only strength from endured pain: And throat by throat begin The birds to make adventure of sweet din, Till all the forest prosper into song:– Peace, even such a peace, (O be my words an auspice!) dawns again Upon our England, from her lethargies Healed by that baptism of her cleansing pain. In the next three stanzas the poet wonders whether this peace will be merely a respite from war because England’s ‘jarring sons’ have fought for ‘unhindered mart or the inveterate stains of too-long ease’ or whether it will be ‘war’s surcease’, blessed by God, because it was fought for ‘that imperishable thing, a Name’. The ode ends: And in this day be not Wholly forgot They that made possible but shall not see Our solemn jubilee. Peace most to them who lie Beneath unnative sky; In whose hearts is dipt Our reconciling script: Peace! But when shouts shall start the housetop bird Let those that speak not, be the loudest heard! Thompson is not, like Swinburne, celebrating peace as interchangeable with war, but both poems rest on the idea that moral prestige can only be won through war. Peace is a reward that has first to be earned by the dead before it can be enjoyed by the living. Such thinking found in peace ‘a moral equivalent of war’, to borrow the title of a wellknown essay by William James. This was a Fabian idea which could reconcile Christians and socialists and indeed James cites H. G. Wells: In many ways, military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street, of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and intermittent employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps onto a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and cooperation and of infinitely more honourable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do. They are fed and drilled and trained for better services. Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking.7

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 14

30/01/2012 16:24

three poems of the anglo-boer war

15

In the words of Wells we find baldly stated the idea that underpins Thompson’s ode: the spirit of efficiency and self-sacrifice involved in training for war was equally useful for the organisation of peace. In the opening stanza of the ode, peace is evoked as the calm after the storm in the night, when those who have taken ‘strength from endured pain’ emerge still upright and birdsong heralds a new dawn. The pagan imagery is combined with a Christian ritual, baptism, and it becomes clear that the forest which is now poised to ‘prosper into song’ is England, ‘from her lethargies / Healed by that baptism of her cleansing pain’. In this image Thompson expresses the dominant political anxiety of the time: England had become lethargic, unproductive, uncompetitive, in a word, inefficient. War was necessary because, like a sick man, a sick nation might be cured by a controlled amount of blood-letting. In the work of anthropologists such as James Frazier, war could be seen as a sacrificial and a redemptive force, a rite of passage into a new life, a ‘cleansing pain’. A peace treaty was written out of the ideals and in the spilt blood of those ‘In whose hearts is dipt / Our reconciling script’. This idea was to be developed by Rupert Brooke in the sonnet ‘Peace’, in which war was a cure for ‘half-men’ and ‘sick hearts’, to be welcomed by ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping’. It was not until Wilfred Owen’s ‘Parable of the Old Men and the Young’, that the ‘sacrifice’ was to be seen as a murderous fallacy: Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.8 In the final stanza of Thompson’s ode, the personified idea of ‘England’ becomes an abstract plural: ‘they’, ‘them who lie / Beneath unnative sky’, ‘those that speak not’. In this newly heeded silence we can see the beginning of a dialogue with the dead that was – literally and figuratively – to haunt the war poetry of the twentieth century. In an age of increasing unbelief, the ethical urgency of this metaphysical dialogue had been anticipated by John Ruskin: It made all the difference, in asserting any principle of war, whether one assumed that a discharge of artillery would merely knead down a certain quantity of red clay into a level line, as in a brick-field; or whether, out of every separately Christiannamed portion of the ruinous heap, there went out into the smoke and dead-fallen air of battle, some astonished condition of soul, unwillingly released.9 The poetry of Ruskin’s prose lends life to Thompson’s final line. What ‘some astonished condition of soul, unwillingly released’ might have to say to the living was to become a locus of warning against war, variously imagined by, among others, Thomas Hardy in ‘The Man He Killed’ and ‘Channel Firing’, Charles Sorley in ‘When I see millions of the mouthless dead’ and Wilfred Owen in ‘Strange Meeting’. As Kant had once elliptically observed, the fate of those killed in war might have much to do with our thinking about the path to ‘Perpetual Peace.’10 ‘The Peace of Dives’, our third poetic response to the Peace of Vereeniging, offers a quasi-blasphemous reversal of this theme of a return from the dead. In the biblical story of Dives (Luke 16: 19–31), the rich man condemned to the torments of hell wants to return to the land of the living in order to warn his five brothers of the fate that awaits them, but

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 15

30/01/2012 16:24

16

helen goethals

Abraham tells him that this is forbidden, because of the great gulf fixed between the dead and the living, and because those who had not listened to Moses and the prophets would not be likely to listen to someone coming back from the dead. Rudyard Kipling’s poem did not appear as an immediate and public response to peace, but as one of the poems in The Five Nations (1903). It is a characteristically lively variant on the late Victorian and Edwardian ballad: twenty-two highly regular stanzas of five lines each, with a limerick-like rhyme aabba. For reasons of space, I shall quote only two groups of stanzas, but which give the gist of the political allegory in which free trade imperialism, as pursued by the followers of Cecil Rhodes (Dives) is seen as more powerful than the traditional militarism of the Devil. The first three stanzas set the scene and the general tone: The Word came down to Dives in Torment where he lay: ‘Our World is full of wickedness, My Children maim and slay, ‘And the Saint and Seer and Prophet ‘Can make no better of it ‘Than to sanctify and prophesy and pray. ‘Rise up, rise up, thou Dives, and take again thy gold, ‘And thy women and thy housen as they were to thee of old. ‘It may be grace hath found thee ‘In the furnace where We bound thee, ‘And that thou shalt bring the peace My Son foretold.’ Then merrily rose Dives and leaped from out his fire, And walked abroad with diligence to do the Lord’s desire; And anon the battles ceased, And the captives were released, And Earth had rest from Goshen to Gadire. For the next ten stanzas, Dives settles among the money-changers and maintains peace on earth by lending kings money to buy ‘king-compelling arms’, much to the chagrin of Satan who is finally reduced to demanding the secret of his strategy: Then answered cunning Dives: ‘Do not gold and hate abide ‘At the heart of every Magic, yea, and senseless fear beside? ‘With gold and fear and hate ‘I have harnessed state to state, ‘And by hate and fear and gold their hates are tied. ‘For hate men seek a weapon, for fear they seek a shield – ‘Keener blades and broader targes than their frantic neighbours wield – ‘For gold I arm their hands, ‘And for gold I buy their lands, ‘And for gold I sell their enemies the yield. ‘Their nearest foes may purchase, or their furthest friends may lease, ‘One by one from Ancient Accad to the Islands of the Seas. ‘And their covenants they make ‘For the naked iron’s sake, ‘But I – I trap them armoured into peace.’

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 16

30/01/2012 16:24

three poems of the anglo-boer war

17

As the last line quoted indicates, the Peace of Dives is a variation on the theme of the balance of power. The scientific law according to which mutually opposing forces neutralise each other is transferred to the political field by way of the assumption that human psychology is motivated by ‘hate and fear and greed’.11 As well as introducing some of the realities behind diplomacy, such as money-lending, the arms trade and the power of the press,12 the ballad is also a masterly expression of what we would now call triangulation, the political leverage to be found when a wedge angle is created by joining two previously opposite political positions. The wedge angle here is that of free trade imperialism, a political position which was soon to be adopted by such self-proclaimed opponents of war as Norman Angell and Joseph Schumpeter.13 The political failure of that particular strand of ‘militant pacifism’ could have been foreseen if more attention had been paid to these poems of peace. In these poems, and others, we can read a common and misguided quest for a way in which peace might be seen as being as honourable a state as war. Swinburne had declared that ‘Peace, whose name is one with honour born of war, is here.’ Thompson had affirmed that peace could be considered honourable if it was seen as a sacrifice in a worthwhile cause. Kipling proposed a peace that was only honourable in the sense that there can be honour among thieves. The lesson that businesspeople could learn from the war was the lesson that Disraeli had learnt when in 1878 he returned from the Congress of Berlin having settled ‘the Eastern question’, to declare: ‘Lord Salisbury and myself have brought you back peace – but peace with honour, which may satisfy our Sovereign and tend to the welfare of our country.’ Kipling was right with a vengeance: as another trip to Berlin was to prove, ‘peace with honour’ tended to be among thieves. Because it is in the nature of poetry to draw attention to the uses to which language may be put, it cannot help but expose the contradiction contained in the expression ‘armoured peace’. The contest between the cunning Dives and the angry Devil might appear to stage the quarrel between different ends (peace and war) but in fact it unwittingly exposes the (false) rivalry between two equally predatory means. Whether the means used be the development of economic superiority or that of military superiority, they are both motivated by the same ‘gold and fear and hate’, which of necessity lead to the same end of subjugation. Pace Niall Ferguson,14 the outbreak of World War I did not signal the defeat of pacifism; it signalled the defeat of those who had argued that an economic contest could prevent an armed contest. There is no moral equivalent to war; there is only moral opposition to war. Enduring progress towards peace has only been made by those who have experienced non-violence as a moral imperative. From the writing of such pioneering pacifists as Tolstoy and Gandhi, it would appear that ‘the peace which passeth all understanding’ must be a mystical experience before it can become a political programme. That mystical experience cannot be found in the thunder and lightning of the press but perhaps it can be induced, as was the case for Bertrand Russell,15 by poetry. The full implications of what Swinburne, Thompson and Kipling were saying deserve a much closer study than is possible here, and many other reactions to the peace could be added to these few examples16 but what even a rapid reading can begin to show is that the failure to prevent war in the years preceding 1914 was a failure to give political, economic and cultural shape to the revolutionary idea of peace. War broke out, and continues to break out, not, as Kipling and many historians would have it, because the rulers and the ruled do not learn the lessons of war, but because they fail to school themselves in matters

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 17

30/01/2012 16:24

18

helen goethals

of peace. To understand what makes war all too possible, we need to explore not just the sites of resistance to war but also to take a much closer look at the sites of the promotion of peace.

Notes 1. Malvern van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. 120. 2. All primary sources cited are available online at the Internet Archives. 3. The eight articles that make up the Peace of Vereeniging can be found online and may be compared to the 440 articles of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. See also J. D. Kestell and D. E. van Velden, The Peace Negotiations between Boer and Briton in South Africa (London: Richard Clays and Sons, 1912). 4. Scattered broadside responses to the announcement of short-lived periods of peace have survived from the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. 5. T. S. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), p. 7. 6. John Masefield, ‘Cargoes’, in The Story of a Round-House, and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 242–7. 7. H. G. Wells, First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rules of Life (London: Putnam, 1908), pp. 214–15. 8. Wilfred Owen, ‘Parable of the Old Men and the Young’, in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C. Day Lewis, 1963, p. 42. In the first published version, edited by Edith Sitwell and introduced by Siegfried Sassoon in 1920, the last line is omitted. 9. John Ruskin, A Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic, and War (New York: John Wiley, 1866), p. 10. 10. Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795) begins: ‘PERPETUAL PEACE. Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper’s sign upon which a burial ground was painted had for its object mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, it is not for us to decide’, available at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm, accessed 28 August 2011. 11. But see Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: Cosimo, [1904] 2009). 12. The uneasiness of an armed peace was a theme that was often explored at the time, in wellknown works such as J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbet, 1902) and H. N. Brailsford’s War of Steel and Gold: A Study of the Armed Peace (London: Bell, 1914), but also in lesser-known ones such as Stephen Crane’s ‘The Assassin in Modern Battle’ in Last Words (London: Digby Long, 1902). 13. Norman Angell’s early pamphlet Europe’s Optical Illusion (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1909) and Joseph Schumpeter’s extended essay ‘The Sociology of Imperialism’ (1919) were stalwart defences of Free Trade as a rampart against war. See also Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (London: Longman, 2001). 14. Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane, 1998) makes this wry comment: ‘overt “pacifism” – the word was coined in 1901 – was undeniably one of the early twentieth century’s least successful political movements’ (p. 20). 15. During the Boer War, and after hearing Gilbert Murray read part of his new translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus, Bertrand Russell, ‘profoundly stirred by the beauty of the poetry’, returned to the Whiteheads’ to find Alfred Whitehead’s wife in the midst of a painful angina attack, and had the following experience: ‘Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 18

30/01/2012 16:24

three poems of the anglo-boer war

19

except the highest intensity of that sort of love that the religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. [. . .] At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. [. . .] Having been an imperialist, I became a pro-Boer and a pacifist.’ Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vols (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), vol. I, pp. 219–21. 16. Limits of space have precluded a survey of the responses to peace in the European and South African press. Other documents might have been discussed, such as the sermon preached in St Paul’s, and other poetic responses such as Robert Bridges’ ‘Peace Ode’, written in Alcaics, and the first volume of Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts.

Further Reading Boyle, H. L., History of Peace (Grand Rapids, MI: History of Peace Publishing Company, 1902). Hirst, F. W., A Library of Peace and War (London: Speaker Publishing, 1908). Leonard R. M., The Poetry of Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918). Pick D., War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). White, R. S., Pacifism in English Poetry: Minstrels of Peace (London: Macmillan, 2008). Wyk Smith, M. V., Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 19

30/01/2012 16:24

2

‘THE ESSENTIALLY MODERN ATTITUDE TOWARD WAR’:1 ENGLISH POETRY OF THE GREAT WAR Jane Potter

I

n its Special Christmas Number of 1918, which featured a cover portrait of Colonel John Buchan, the periodical The Bookman included a supplement devoted to the poets of the Great War.2 Mounted portraits on heavy paper accompany the article ‘Poets in Khaki’ by A. St. John Adcock. Featured are Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, Julian Grenfell and Ford Madox Ford, but equally prominent are the now lesserknown, if anthologised, Herbert Asquith and Gilbert Frankau. It is an international gallery of poets with the American Alan Seeger, the Canadians Robert W. Service and John McCrae, and the Australian Leon Gellert considered alongside their British counterparts. The lone woman in this feature (though she is not accorded a portrait) is Vera Brittain. St. John Adcock lyrically outlines the metamorphoses of war poetry over the years of conflict as the ‘syrens are sending a long-drawn cry into the November mists’, bringing the ‘news that the Armistice is signed’. He discusses the early enthusiasm for the cause in poems by Asquith and Service before admitting that: after the eager swiftness of the onset, our soldiers settled down to a dogged endurance of the filth and peril and tedium of trench warfare, to a fixed determination of ‘seeing it through’ which, let me emphasise again, was only the old enthusiasm adapting itself to the circumstances and magnifying itself in a sober and more durable form.3 The mood change was reflected in the verse the men were writing and no longer did they ‘reiterate the shining ideals’, but ‘instead expose[d] and denounce[d] with a stern outspokenness the injustice, the madness, the tragic misery and indescribable beastliness of war’.4 The Bookman feature is interesting for the ways in which the canon of war poetry was already being set out, although St. John Adcock’s choices for the poets ‘who represent as faithfully and potently as any the later, essentially modern attitude toward war’, Gilbert Frankau, Alec Waugh and Siegfried Sassoon, have not entirely stood the test of time. His assessment of Sassoon, as ‘perhaps the truest and most imaginatively realistic poet this war has produced’,5 shows that for all of Sassoon’s ‘subversive’ protests, he maintained his position as a respected literary figure at the time. Such an article also demonstrates how the horrors of war were not unknown to a civilian public, and that this civilian public was in tune with the sentiment that war was a misery. What differs is the emphasis on seeing it through: poetry was not just a vehicle for protest – as later twentieth-century readers have stereotyped the literature of the Great War, important though protest poetry was as an expression of endurance – but more importantly it was a

20

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 20

30/01/2012 16:24

english poetry of the great war

21

vehicle for expiation, a way in which one’s suffering could be worked through and grief assuaged, though not forgotten. Absent from St. John Adcock’s analyses and celebration are Owen and Rosenberg, the poets that are now considered the greatest of the 1914–18 war, demonstrating how littleknown they were in their own lifetimes. Rosenberg was certainly well regarded as both a poet and a painter in literary and artistic circles that included Edward Marsh and Mark Gertler, but was not widely recognised until the 1970s. Owen’s reputation, too, is mainly posthumous, with only five of his poems published before he was killed in November 1918. (One of these, ‘Song of Songs’, received a special mention in The Bookman’s May 1918 Poetry Competition, one of its regular monthly features. Yet this short lyric does not figure in the late twentieth-century conception of Owen’s oeuvre. With its opening line, ‘Sing to me at dawn but only with your laugh’, it owes more to the influence of Swinburne rather than Sassoon.6) Seven poems appeared in Wheels 1919, and Poems of Wilfred Owen, introduced by Sassoon, was published in 1920. By 1922, a reviewer of Poems of To-day (published by Sidgwick and Jackson) remarked specifically about the absence of Owen in the collection: ‘How is it that a book that draws “mostly from younger men who have written mainly under the influence and reactions of the war” has left out Wilfred Owen, who by that token should have been the very first choice?’7 The emphasis placed by The Bookman on poetry not just in such a special edition, but in its regular features on and reviews of collections is indicative of the ways in which verse was part of the public imagination. Marion Scott, who championed Ivor Gurney’s music and poetry, wrote in 1917 that there was an ‘enormous increase in poetic output’, ranging ‘from genius to doggerel’: ‘For poetry is a real, live thing nowadays, and poems are written, not as artistic exercises, but as irresistible impulses towards the expression of thought and emotion [. . .] poetry satisfies certain mental needs better than prose.’8 Pacifist and patriotic, by men and by women, by combatants and non-combatants, published in individual volumes, anthologies and newspapers, the output of poetry, which was impressive during the war years, continued well after the Armistice. And it has had lasting resonance, profoundly influencing the literary interpretations of later wars especially the Second World War and the Vietnam War, whose poets found models in the work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others, yet also felt constrained and overshadowed by them. This chapter will analyse and interpret the work of these ‘canonical’ soldier-poets alongside lesser-known voices to show how English poetry of the Great War acted as both catharsis and commemoration, and how it continues to be one of the prisms through which war is culturally interpreted and ‘understood’ in the early twenty-first century. Writing soon after the Armistice, Margaret Wynne Nevinson argued that: It is little wonder that the long-drawn tragedy of the war, the agony and bloody sweat of millions of young men, have driven many to find the relief of expression in the written word for the varied emotions and experiences of the battle-field.9 Decades later in his foreword to Catherine Reilly’s invaluable bibliography, which identified over two thousand poets who published their verse between 1914 and 1918, Laurence Cotterell asserted that ‘the immense tide of poetry that surged up out of the minds of the fighting men, especially, but also of civilians in widely differing circumstances’ is what ‘helped to make’ the ‘immense agony’ of the Great War ‘just bearable’.10 Early war enthusiasm of the kind demonstrated by Julian Grenfell in his poem ‘Into Battle’ was matched in popularity only by Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’. The latter was

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 21

30/01/2012 16:24

22

jane potter

praised from the pulpit by Dean Inge in his Easter 1915 sermon in Westminster Abbey,11 and newspapers across the country extolled what they perceived as Brooke’s high-minded sentiments. Some soldiers were less complimentary. Ivor Gurney commented: ‘I do not like it [. . .] his manner has become a mannerism, both in rhythm and diction. I do not like it.’12 Charles Hamilton Sorley, after reading the news of Brooke’s death in the Morning Post, wrote: He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) as a highly intense, remarkable and sacrificial exploit, whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances, where non-compliance with this demand would have made life intolerable. [. . .] He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude.13 Gurney’s and Sorley’s opinions presage those of many late twentieth-century critics who viewed Brooke’s poems as self-absorbed and naïvely optimistic. They are often positioned alongside the now much-maligned patriotic rhymes of Jessie Pope’s War Poems, which exhorted ‘my laddie’ to enlist and not ‘to save his skin’. Although seen as the archetypal jingoistic civilian, Pope, an essentially humorous versifier for periodicals such as Punch, was not the only home front voice to make such exhortations. Herbert Kaufman in ‘Forty Men from Simpson’s’ is equally scathing about those who enjoy a fine meal at the expense of the men who have gone ‘to fix the Kaiser’s soup’: Forty men from Simpson’s! Don’t you blush with shame, While they play the soldier’s part And you, the waiting game?14 In fact, Pope’s ‘The Beau Ideal’ could be said to be every inch as critical as Sassoon’s ‘Glory of Women’, but to focus solely on a few of her poems, as readers and critics have done with Brooke’s, has ignored the more contradictory messages in others: The lad who troth with Rose would plight, Nor apprehend rejection Must be in shabby khaki dight To compass her affection. Who buys her an engagement ring And finds her kind and kissing, Must have one member in a sling Or, preferably, missing.15 To suggest that the people of 1914 did not understand the dangers of war is seriously to misunderstand the historical context. The Second Anglo-Boer War was in living memory, and although it was fought in a country much further away than France, war memorials in larger towns and cities, such as those in Newcastle, York and London, are testament to its scars.16 And as Dominic Hibberd and John Onions in their 2007 anthology The Winter of the World point out, the first attempts ‘to write in simple, direct words about front-line realities [. . .] came from civilians, not soldiers, and very early in the war’.17 These attempts include Harold Monro and Wilfrid Gibson. And it is also a myth that 1 July 1916 marked ‘a turning point’, for Charles Hamilton Sorley, killed at the Battle of Loos in October 1915, had already foreseen the enormous scale of the tragedy:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 22

30/01/2012 16:24

english poetry of the great war

23

When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men have said, That you’ll remember. For you need not so. Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know It is not curses on each gashed head?18 But poetry even after the so-called Somme watershed still maintained idealistic views, faith in the cause, and steadfastness in the face of fear and bereavement. Those that grieved for their loved ones published their poetic catharses, and numerous ‘memorial’ volumes of verse by the ‘fallen’ were also printed. Sidgwick and Jackson were one of the premier poetry and drama publishers of their day, best known for Rupert Brooke’s 1914 and Other Poems (1915). They also published volumes by Rose Macaulay, Two Blind Countries (1914), Herbert Asquith, The Volunteer and Other Poems (1915), John Drinkwater, Swords and Ploughshares (1915), and F. W. Harvey, A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad (1916) and Gloucestershire Friends: Poems from a German Prison Camp (1917).19 The firm was highly regarded. Katherine Tynan proclaimed in her article entitled ‘War Books and Others’ for The Bookman in 1916 that ‘Sidgwick and Jackson’s name on a volume of poetry is nearly always a guarantee of its quality.’ Other publishers were less well regarded, and less scrupulous in their business practices. Galloway Kyle, under the guise of Erskine Macdonald Ltd, ‘cashed in’ on the new market for war poetry. Among the volumes that appeared under the Erskine Macdonald imprint were: Leslie Coulson, From an Outpost and Other Poems (1917), Colin Mitchell, Trampled Clay (1917), J. W. Streets, The Undying Splendour (1917) and Gilbert Waterhouse, Rail-Head and Other Poems (1916), all of whom were killed in the war. Survivors too were part of the Kyle–Macdonald ‘enterprise’, including Edmund Blunden (Pastorals, 1916) and Vera Brittain (Verses of a V.A.D., 1918). Kyle ‘was able to perfect an ingenious racket’ of publishing volumes of verse at the author’s (or the author’s family’s) expense and being elusive when it came to royalties: ‘Kyle well knew that his authors, if still alive, would be more interested in getting into print than in being paid.’20 Many poetic offerings were not of lasting quality or merit, but they served to comfort those left behind. Often high-minded in their outlook, they communicated little if any of the horrors of the fighting. Arthur Graeme West, himself a poet and soldier killed in 1917, found such volumes irritating: God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men, Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves As soon as you are in them, nurtured up By the salt of your corruption, and the tears Of mothers, local vicars, college deans, And flanked by prefaces and photographs From all your minor poet friends – the fools – 21 In this poem West contrasts the attitude of youthful exuberance that found itself ‘happy’ ‘to have lived these epic days’ with the reality of the trenches, ‘the huddled dead [. . .] hung in the rusting wire’, a soldier’s ‘head / Smashed like an egg-shell, and the warm grey brain / Spattered all bloody on the parados’. Like Owen and Sassoon, West does not idealise or romanticise. In fact, he is deliberately provocative with his gruesome descriptions, a stance

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 23

30/01/2012 16:24

24

jane potter

that has since created the belief that poetry which does not communicate such horror, or privilege the combat experience, is not really ‘war poetry’. Such ‘combat gnosticism’ has, according to James Campbell, greatly influenced late twentieth-century views about, and severely limited the canon of, First World War literature.22 Yet the poets and poems featured in The Bookman demonstrate the ways in which ‘war poetry’ was not just about the trenches, about the ‘huddled dead [. . .] hung in the resting wire’. Equally, both ‘modernist’ and ‘Georgian’ poetry coexisted in 1914–18. The modernist movement was not engendered by the War, but as Samuel Hynes argues, was invigorated by it.23 Modernism’s emphasis on fragmentation fitted the emotional experience of mechanised, modern war, but the Georgians were far from simplistic. Although steeped in the pastoral, they were concerned with the elements of everyday life, and wrote with an ear for direct speech. Although some significant modernists like T. E. Hulme were also killed in the war, it could be argued that had Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen (who was thrilled to be counted among the Georgians) survived, they might have challenged the supremacy of the modernists, shaping English poetry in ways very different to what it became in the interwar period and beyond. Hibberd and Onions argue that ‘the Georgian achievement has been seriously undervalued. No other group of writers made a greater contribution to First World War poetry.’24 Their collection demonstrates how war satire did not begin with Owen and Sassoon. Even those who wrote in support of the war, such as Kipling and Hardy, were ‘well aware of the suffering and loss that it caused’.25 It is a myth that civilian poets wrote idealistic verse while soldiers wrote realistic poems. Despite criticisms for and against the quality of women’s poetry, which has been deemed to be uneven at best, doggerel at worst,26 Mary Borden’s ‘The Song of the Mud’, Elinor Jenkins’s ‘Last Evening’, May Cannan’s ‘Rouen’ and Carola Oman’s ‘Unloading Ambulance Train’ are among those poems that demonstrate how evocative and grounded visions of the war were not just created by combatants. Wilfred Owen is not the only poet to communicate the sickening ‘sludge’ of the battlefield. Borden is unsparing in her graphic rendering of ‘the obscene, the filthy, the putrid, / The vast liquid grave of our armies’ that has ‘drowned our men. / Its undigested belly reeks with the undigested dead.’27 Less gruesome, but no less evocative visions of the war are conveyed by Jenkins, Cannan and Oman. The tension of imminent parting, ‘the bitterness of incomplete goodbyes’ is subtly portrayed in ‘The Last Evening’ in which ‘The doom that marched moment by moment nigher’ and ‘the legions of beleaguering fear’ are ‘kept at bay’, ‘A little while, a little longer yet’: Till the hour struck – then desperately we sought And found no further respite – only tears We would not shed, and words we might not say.28 ‘Rouen’, on the other hand, a snapshot of the busy port town at the height of the war, records the incidentals of Cannan’s experience as a canteen worker and her abiding, elegiac memories that assail her ‘When the world slips slow to darkness, when the office fire burns lower’: Can I forget the passage from the cool white-bedded Aid Post Past the long sun-blistered coaches of the khaki Red Cross train To the truck train full of wounded, and the weariness and laughter And ‘Good-bye, and thank you, Sister’, and the empty yards again?29

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 24

30/01/2012 16:24

english poetry of the great war

25

Similarly elegiac, for the nameless wounded, is ‘Unloading Ambulance Train’, where the rhythm of Oman’s lines and resonance of her imagery create a vivid sense of the neverending, sorrowful convoy: Into the siding very wearily She comes again: Singing her endless song so drearily, The midnight winds sink down to drift the rain. So she comes home once more.30 Elegies for a lost pastoral world and protests against the ravages inflicted on men and the land permeate and in many cases define the canon of Great War poetry. Edmund Blunden’s poems appended to his memoir Undertones of War (1928) bear witness to the destruction of the Picardy countryside and memorialise it through the naming of its towns and villages: ‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Château’, ‘A House at Festubert’, ‘Third Ypres’ and ‘The Zonnebeke Road’. Edward Thomas’s ‘As the team’s head brass’ quietly evokes a lost Eden, a Paradise lost, as the speaker watches the ploughman ‘narrowing a yellow square / Of charlock’: As the team’s head brass flashed out on the turn The lovers disappeared into the wood. I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm That strewed an angle of the fallow [. . .]31 The ploughman’s matter-of-fact, yet poignant, acknowledgement that ‘a good few’ of the village’s young men have been ‘lost’ in the war combines with the poem’s central message – ‘Everything / Would have been different. For it would have been another world’ – to remind the reader of the peace and the lives that have been shattered. Such tropes about the destruction of the landscape persisted long after the Armistice, as in David Jones’s later modernist rendering of his wartime experiences, In Parenthesis (1937). The epic poem describes ‘a splintered tree scattered its winter limbs, spilled its life low on the ground’, ‘the spilled bowels of trees, splinter-like, leper-ashen, sprawling the receding, unknowable, wall of night’ and ‘low sharp-stubbed tree-skeletons, stretched slow moving shadows’.32 The similarities between the French and British countryside – ‘the gentle slopes are green to remind you / of South English places’ – are also uncanny as well as treacherous, for amongst the beauty is concealed: cork-screw stapled trip-wire to snare among the briars and iron warp with bramble weft with meadow-sweet and lady-smock [. . .]33 Ivor Gurney’s ‘To His Love’ is striking in its juxtaposition of the unscarred pastoral and violent death. Gurney’s love of his native countryside, the hills and rivers of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire infuses the first two stanzas of the poem, with its opening declaration ‘He is gone’, with nostalgia for the peaceful pre-war world: ‘We’ll walk no more on Cotswold / Where the sheep feed / Quietly and take no heed.’ The ominous lines ‘His body that was so quick / Is not as you / Knew it’ and ‘You would not know him now. . .’ build the tension for the final stanza that destroys all sense of tranquillity that

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 25

30/01/2012 16:24

26

jane potter

might have been suggested by the calls to ‘cover him over / With violets of pride / Purple from Severn side’: Cover him, cover him soon! And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers – Hide that red wet Thing I must somehow forget.34 Gurney’s subtly developed horror, in which the ‘red wet / Thing’ signals a new traumatic form of elegy, contrasts with the immediate desolation of Isaac Rosenberg’s epic and biblically resonant ‘Dead Man’s Dump’. Both aurally and visually graphic, the poem elicits revulsion and pity, and owes much to Rosenberg’s training as a painter. The speaker, who is both observer and perpetrator of suffering, is in a cart, meandering over the battlefield strewn with bodies: The wheels lurched over the sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan, They lie there huddled, friend and foeman [. . .]35 The battlefield scene is hellish: ‘The air is loud with death, / The dark air spurts with fire/ The explosions ceaseless are.’36 Observations of the attempts to recover the wounded and the dead offer no patriotic gloss: A man’s brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer’s face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness.37 And the closing lines compound the horror as the cart ‘crashed round the bend’ and its occupants hear the ‘weak scream’ and the ‘very last sound’ of ‘one not long dead’: ‘And our wheels grazed his dead face’. Yet for all the revulsion such scenes elicit, Rosenberg conveys a pathos and pity which communicates the ultimate futility of war, how ‘friend and foeman’ are destroyed equally. The shared pain of ‘friend and foeman’ is also forcefully evoked by Wilfred Owen in ‘Strange Meeting’. Here a reconciliation of sorts takes place, one based on the recognition that the hopes and desires of soldiers of both sides of the conflict, both killers equally, were essentially the same – ‘Whatever hope is yours, / Was my life also’: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. . . .’38 In ‘Strange Meeting’ Owen also points to another key theme of English Great War poetry, that of mental violation: ‘Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.’ In ‘Mental Cases’, he is even more direct in his evocation of pity for the suffering souls that have been ‘dealt’ ‘war and madness’:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 26

30/01/2012 16:24

english poetry of the great war

27

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight? Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows, Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, [. . .] – These are the men whose minds the Dead have ravished. Memory fingers in their hair of murders, Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.39 Whether wounded in body and/or traumatised in mind, the men who survived the fighting and came home were very different in spirit from when they ‘marched away’. Irene Rathbone remarked that ‘There were men whom the war made. There were a far greater number whom it ruined.’40 With very few exceptions, women who returned from active service bore no physical, outward signs of injury or trauma. Yet their ‘post-traumatic stress’, as we would now call it, went largely unrecognised. They came back to a world in which a duty of care towards returned soldiers was expected of them. In poetry, the voice of the survivor is often female; the lonely mourner feminine. May Cannan’s poems in particular communicate the sense of loss, the depth of grief of those left behind. For many women, the celebrations that accompanied the end of the war rang hollow, as Cannan asserts in ‘The Armistice: In an Office in Paris’, ‘peace could not give back her Dead’. In ‘When the Vision Dies’, the realisation that continued grief ‘is your War’ is tempered by the poignant, if ultimately forlorn lines: ‘Though he comes no more at night he will kneel at your side, / For comfort to dream with you.’41 Such shades or ghosts of the dead populate the work of male writers too, and Edmund Blunden, in particular, was candid about their lasting presence: ‘My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.’42 The revenants of 1914–18 returned to haunt the poets of the Second World War. In answer to the cry, ‘Where are the War Poets?’, Keith Douglas, later killed at Normandy in 1944, voiced the anxiety of influence, the burden of following in the shadows of the earlier generation: ‘hell cannot be let loose twice: it was let loose in the Great War and it is the same old hell now. . .. Almost all that a modern poet on active service is inspired to write, would be tautological.’43 The same may be said of current attempts to write poetry about Iraq and Afghanistan. In calling for voices – combatant and non-combatant – to bear witness to these early twenty-first century conflicts, the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy acknowledged that: most of us, when we think of ‘war poetry’ will find the names of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon coming first to our lips, with Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke. . . What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?. . . There’s some corner of a foreign field. . . Such lines are part of the English poetry reader’s DNA, injected during schooldays like a vaccine.44 Our cultural DNA is not naturally inherited but artificially infused, vaccinating us against all other voices, as if they could infect the ‘true’ vision of war laid down by the ‘lost generation’. In a statement that would rankle military scholars, yet which anticipated contemporary pedagogy and curriculum of the kind Duffy identifies, Vero W. Garratt asserted in 1921 that ‘soldier poets are the true historians of the war’ because ‘barren communiqués’ and ‘“worked up” documents’ cannot communicate its truth: poets ‘have given life and literature a genuine interpretation of warfare stripped bare of artificiality’.45

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 27

30/01/2012 16:24

28

jane potter

Our culturally constructed and selective memory of the poetry of the Great War does not reflect what was in fact a very ‘small part of the nation’s poetic response’.46 We should reasonably pay attention to those poems of patriotism and of protest equally, poems which, while not celebrating the War, do not wholly condemn its aims, and which see the events of those years as ones which tested the spirit of a nation, while causing it almost unimaginable grief in the process. The poetry of the Great War was generated across a continuum in which protest and patriotism, modernists and Georgians, propaganda and remembrance, humour and pathos, coexisted, if uneasily. Being attuned to what Vivien Noakes calls ‘more immediate, less poetically self-conscious’ responses allows for a more inclusive understanding of how the war was experienced and commemorated.47 As literary critics and military historians continue to wrestle on the scholarly battleground over who has the most say in how the ‘war to end all wars’ should be interpreted and understood, the ‘truth’ of 1914–18 is that, more than any historical tome or stone monument, the memory of the dead, refracted through many different lenses, is enshrined in poetry.

Notes 1. A. St. John Adcock, ‘Poets in Khaki. Some Soldier Poets of Great Britain, Canada, Australasia, South Africa and America’, The Bookman (December 1918), pp. 83–100 (p. 95). 2. Selections from this issue may be found online at http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/ dec2008.html, accessed 12 April 2010. 3. St. John Adcock, p. 95. 4. Ibid. p. 95. 5. Ibid. p. 98. 6. ‘Song of Songs’ was among the early work Owen showed to Sassoon on their first meeting at Craiglockhart. Unimpressed by most of the poems, Sassoon did praise ‘Song of Songs’ as a ‘perfect work, absolutely charming’ and ‘begged’ that Owen ‘would copy it out for him, to show to the powers that be’. It was published in Craiglockhart’s journal The Hydra in September 1917, but by the time it appeared in The Bookman, Owen had ‘outgrown’ his ‘old lyric’ (The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy [London: The Hogarth Press, 1985], p. 66). 7. Review of Poems of To-day, Manchester Guardian, 25 July 1922. 8. Marion Scott, ‘Contemporary British War-Poetry, Music, and Patriotism’, The Musical Times, 1 March 1917, pp. 120–1. 9. Margaret Wynne Nevinson, ‘Some of Our Young War Poets’, English Review (September 1919), p. 224. 10. Laurence Cotterell, ‘Foreword’ to Catherine W. Reilly (ed.), English Poetry of the First World War: a Bibliography (London: G. Prior, 1978), p. v. 11. Christopher Hassell, Rupert Brooke: A Biography (London: Faber, 1964), p. 502. Inge noted the similarity between ‘The Soldier’ and Isaiah 24: 19: ‘The dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust.’Although he extolled Brooke’s ‘pure and elevated patriotism’, he felt the poem ‘fell somewhat short of Isaiah’s vision’. On his deathbed, Brooke read the notice sent to him by his mother and reputedly ‘remarked out of the darkness that “he was sorry Inge did not think him quite as good as Isaiah”’ (Hassell, p. 507). 12. Michael Hurd, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 56. 13. Charles Hamilton Sorley, The Collected Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley, ed. Jean MoorcroftWilson (London: Cecil Woolf, 1990), pp. 218–19. Sorley also criticised the newspaper: ‘The Morning Post which has always hitherto disapproved of him, is now loud in his praises because he has conformed to their stupid axiom of literary criticism that the only stuff of poetry is violent physical experience, by dying on active service.’ Such an attitude is characteristic of Sorley’s clear-sighted outlook on the war. He recognised Germany’s culpability, but he loathed

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 28

30/01/2012 16:24

english poetry of the great war

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

29

rabid propaganda: ‘I wish the silly papers would realize that they are fighting for a principle just as much as we are’ (The Letters of Charles Sorley, with a chapter of biography, ed. W. R. Sorley [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919], p. 235). Herbert Kaufman, ‘Forty Men from Simpon’s’, in Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (eds), The Winter of the World: Poems of the First World War (London: Constable and Robinson, 2007), p. 9. Jessie Pope, ‘The Beau Ideal’, in Hibberd and Onions, p. 11. There are two outdoor Second Anglo-Boer War memorials in York, one at Duscombe Place opposite York Minster, another at Skedersgate. The huge memorial to the Northumbrian Regiments that served and died in the war stands opposite Haymarket Metro Station in Newcastle. The memorial at Coombe Hill, near Wendover, commemorates the 148 men of Buckinghamshire who died in South Africa. Innumerable plaques can be found in the churches of towns and cities. The UK National Inventory of War Memorials, sponsored by the Imperial War Museum, is a useful online resource: http://www.ukniwm.org.uk/. Hibberd and Onions, p. xv. Charles Hamilton Sorley, The Poems and Selected Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley, ed. Hilda D. Spear (Dundee: Blackness Press, 1978), p. 77. R. C. Jackson was killed in action. Hibberd and Onions, p. xxii. See also Dominic Hibberd, ‘A Publisher of the First World War Poetry: Galloway Kyle’, Notes and Queries (June 1986), pp. 185–6 and ‘Galloway Kyle and The Poetry Review’, in Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 270–3. Arthur Graeme West, ‘God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men’, in Hibberd and Onions, p. 140. James Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’, New Literary History, 30 (1999), pp. 203–15 (p. 203). Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, new edn (London: Pimlico, 1992). Hibberd and Onions, p. xiii. Ibid. p. xiv. See Gill Plain, ‘Great Expectations: Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets’, in Vicki Bertram (ed.), Kicking Daffodils: Essays on Twentieth-Century Women’s Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 25–38. First published in Feminist Review, 51 (1995), pp. 41–65. Mary Borden, ‘The Song of the Mud’, The Forbidden Zone (London: Heinemann, 1929), pp. 179–82. Elinor Jenkins, ‘The Last Evening’, in Vivien Noakes (ed.), Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2006), p. 14. May Wedderburn Cannan, ‘Rouen’, in Jon Stallworthy (ed.), The Oxford Book of War Poetry, 2nd reissue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 220. Carola Oman, ‘Unloading Ambulance Train’, in Noakes, p. 209. Edward Thomas, ‘As the team’s head brass’, in Stallworthy, War Poetry, p. 180. David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), pp. 21, 31, 44. Ibid. p. 165. Ivor Gurney, ‘To His Love’, in Stallworthy, War Poetry, p. 181. Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, in Vivien Noakes (ed.), Isaac Rosenberg (21st-Century Oxford Authors) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 113. Ibid. p. 115. Ibid. p. 115. Wilfred Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’, in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, p. 125. Wilfred Owen, ‘Mental Cases’, in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, p. 146.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 29

30/01/2012 16:24

30

jane potter

40. Irene Rathbone, We That Were Young (London: Virago, 1988), p. 432. 41. May Wedderburn Cannan, ‘When the Vision Dies’, in Hibberd and Onions, p. 251. See also Charles Sorley’s ‘Le Revenant’. 42. Quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 256. 43. Dawn Bellamy, ‘“Others Have Come Before You”: The Influence of Great War Poetry on Second World War Poets’, in Tim Kendall (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 300. 44. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Exit Wounds’, The Guardian, 25 July 2009. 45. Vero W. Garratt, ‘The War-Poetry of Soldier Poets’, English Review (July 1921), p. 50. 46. Noakes, pp. xi–xiii. 47. Ibid. p. xi. See for instance, Gordon Hampden and Joyce Dennys, Our Girls in Wartime (1917) and Our Hospital ABC (1916).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 30

30/01/2012 16:24

3

DEBATABLE GROUND: FREEDOM AND CONSTRAINT IN BRITISH FIRST WORLD WAR PROSE FICTION Sharon Ouditt

I

n recent years much First World War fiction and analysis of that fiction has concentrated on combatant experience and, in particular, on trench warfare as the most futile and damaging form of fighting. Trauma, breakdown, the disruption of memory and the incapacity of language to speak the unspeakable are seen to characterise fractured narrative strategies presenting acts of bravery, the tenderness of men for fellow men and the absurdities of military discipline, all of which are structured by an apparently inflexible class system. The effect of this approach is often to throw into dull relief the non-combatants at home; to assume a universal epistemological chasm, such as that dramatised in Sassoon’s and Owen’s poetry, between war and the home front. The enormity of suffering on one side is counterbalanced by banal concern with the price of domestic commodities on the other. The non-combatants who ‘love us when we’re home on leave’ or are ‘wounded in a mentionable place’,1 are presented in these texts as believing unreflectively what they read in the papers and speaking only in clichés beyond and behind which they dare not think. Although there is ample evidence of this kind of reflex patriotism, as we shall see in the texts under consideration, this is, nevertheless, a travesty of the finely grained complexities of the home front experience. One of the more tantalising elements of the period 1914–18 was that it coincided with a historical moment in which social, political and moral values were already under pressure from suffragists, syndicalists, Irish Nationalists, and reformists of many kinds, all of whom presented proposals for radical alternatives to the social conservatism that the war seemed to prescribe. The potentially revolutionary nature of these proposals was intensified by the sudden scrambling for cover of a population that had to decide whether they were for or against the war, where they stood on the persecution of enemy aliens, whether sex outside marriage was excusable, and whether women should be encouraged to take on the roles and values of absent men. While the majority rapidly found their own trench, reinforced it and prepared to sit in it until the armistice, some were left in no-man’s-land, unsure how to respond to the calamity, how much to permit themselves to rebel, whether to embrace new social and political possibilities or to take refuge in the old ones. Looking at the literary fiction of the period generally, we see these situations played out in novels, usually realist in form, and often written by women. These novels of ideas frequently adopt discursive, dialogic strategies in which position statements are made, debated and negotiated. Their characters, variously enlightened or confused, work their

31

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 31

30/01/2012 16:24

32

sharon ouditt

way through these arguments from a number of standpoints but tend to concentrate on the immediate domestic and emotive trauma, which is affected by, but also separate from, the trauma of war. Some see hope for a new way of living that might emerge from the mess of the present and commit themselves to that. Others respond more conservatively to common, or uncommon, demands (to marry, to object to war on the grounds of conscience, to work against rather than for the war). Invariably the decisions they make require discomfort; they have to consider whether to adapt, to absorb the consequences of conclusions drawn by the larger forces around them, to challenge the status quo or to change radically. Arguments take place in public and in private: in cafés, meeting rooms, studios, and drawing and dining rooms. This chapter will examine in these debates the clashes that arise between issues of national identity, the complexities of moral and religious traditions, the language of political liberation and the possibilities of sexual freedom. Four novels by women published during or immediately after the war will be taken to exemplify these concerns: G. B. Stern’s Debatable Ground (1921; first published 1919), Mary Agnes Hamilton’s Dead Yesterday (1916), Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916) and Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected (1918).2 Richard Marcus, in Debatable Ground, has to face the relatively unusual problem of how his nationality is to be determined, and how this will affect his standing in his community and his sense of patriotism. More like Robert Graves (who had German relatives on his mother’s side) than, say, Ford Madox Hueffer (who, despite writing British war propaganda and later enlisting, had a stronger sense of himself as a European), Richard has been brought up to think of himself as English. His German father has taken English nationality, he has been sent to an English school, where he has learned to play football and, along with many of his similarly unreflective peers, he looks forward to a commission in the Royal Flying Corps. On the threshold of adulthood, at seventeen, he discovers that he was in fact born in Germany before his father was naturalised, and is thus thrown into confusion. He has a deeply felt but as yet unexamined love of England. He claims to hate Germany in a similarly irrational way, but he now finds himself in a kind of no-man’s-land, asking, ‘Where do I belong? What am I? Who can claim me?’3 He spends the larger part of the novel shaking himself out of public-school-generated complacency, engaging sympathetically, almost against his will, with Germans in similar – or worse – positions, and discussing his preoccupations with friends, peers and antagonists. His family’s financial situation is such that they have had to give up their private address in favour of rented rooms, which involves sharing dining facilities with other dispossessed or temporarily embarrassed individuals. This provides the novelist with a theatre in which to dramatise Richard’s predicament, which is played out through verbal battles between his unapologetically German grandfather, who clashes regularly with a crass British patriot who would gleefully see all those with any kind of German ancestry deported or at least interned. It is the latter future that Richard faces when, on his eighteenth birthday, he will be officially old enough to enlist. The context for this is the extreme anti-German sentiment that saw the boycotting of German (and sometimes Jewish) businesses, attacks on shops and individuals, and occasional rioting. One evening, Richard finds himself caught up in the violence that followed the sinking of the Lusitania. The scapegoat for the mob is Gottlieb Schnabel, a harmless baker: ‘Can I help for it?’ he asks Richard, when they unexpectedly find themselves face to face. The plaintive, non-idiomatic phrase haunts him as a fractured articulation of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 32

30/01/2012 16:24

british first world war prose fiction

33

blameless dislocation. On the other hand, he is dismayed by the absurd antics of family friends, the Rothenburgs, who, in a bid to face down the hostility against them, change their name to Redbury, ignore their former acquaintances, deliberately mispronounce the names of German towns, and insincerely yet loudly hope for the death of those German babies that might grow up to be enemy soldiers. This risible behaviour is motivated by fear and insecurity and a similar motive sends Richard to seek reassurance in the formerly welcoming family home of a school friend. The Dunnes are a thoroughly English family, whose patriotism, although ‘largely a matter of habit’,4 is so deeply ingrained that they find themselves suspicious of Richard now that his status is unclear. Thus rejected, Richard finds himself in the ‘dropping spaces’ of no-man’s-land.5 He has no clear identity and no guidance. In this vertiginous world he is hated by strangers and distrusted by friends. His idealistic conviction that people should be able to wander, drift, pitch their tents in alien places with the ‘subconscious trust in the brotherhood of nations’6 is shattered by the increasing evidence of blind nationalism that reduces apparently intelligent individuals to bellicose stereotypes in a wartime environment that increasingly resembles a police state. The one person with whom Richard can discuss his predicament openly is his friend David Rothenberg. Although he has German relatives, David was born in England, so does not share Richard’s immediate problem. He is also fully Jewish (Richard is halfJewish) and experiences that as his primary mode of identification: I’m not a pro-German, Marcus, but there’s a kinship between English Jews and German Jews and Russian Jews and Italian and American and Polish and Roumanian and Austrian Jews, that no war ever waged can entirely destroy. I don’t want to see a Jew hurt – and, oh God! I don’t want to hurt another Jew. We’re a race of artists and financiers and wanderers – not of fighters.7 An allegiance to Zionism, which had a high political profile during the war as part of the strategy to convert neutral countries to the Allied cause,8 disrupts purely national forms of identification, and by enlisting with a Zionist regiment David manages both to fulfil the national and parental demand that he should fight, and to stick to the principle that he should not be required to kill another Jew.9 This is probably the closest to any notion of internationalism that the book gets. International Socialism, although mentioned in passing, provides no practical or ideological solution to Richard’s problem, as it might have been had he been a character in Despised and Rejected: Richard experiences all the emotions of genuine patriotism, but the nation of his choice has rejected him as a subject. In the end he simply has to bear this with fortitude. There is no challenge he can make on legal grounds, and, despite his private-school education, no British regiment will take him. The circumstances of his birth were accidental, but that provides him with no protection. The laws regarding the treatment of enemy aliens are utterly inflexible and the novel closes on the morning of his eighteenth birthday, as he prepares for internment. While Richard is attempting to come to terms with his national identity, his older sister, Deb, finds herself having to negotiate her sexual identity. She has been brought up with the broadly liberal attitude that young women should have liberty, should be free to make mistakes, and will eventually, having made a choice of their own, bring home a suitable young man to marry, without any constrictive parental interference. This set of attitudes represents her parents’ reaction against the stern paternalism of her German grandfather, who provides an easy focus for a light-headed form of rebellion. Deb’s upbringing and attitudes are, however, a matter for debate among her friends and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 33

30/01/2012 16:24

34

sharon ouditt

the question of ‘how to dispose of [one]self sexually’10 is a topic to which they repeatedly return. Antonia retains a certain conservatism with regard to sexual self-expression and argues that liberty for women should not mean behaving as men do. Deb has no clear principles and frequently finds herself in difficulty, uncertain how to behave. Her crisis point comes when it becomes known that she spent the night alone with a man. The encounter was, in fact, quite innocent, but her reputation is, nevertheless, damaged. It becomes the subject for a family row in which Deb criticises her father for his apparent broad-mindedness in appearing to believe that ‘a girl had wants and claims. . . that a girl is human. . . and the marrying her off business is extinct’ while nevertheless judging her by the values of the last century.11 But although she seems to win this argument, she is called to account by her friends. Antonia cannot approve of her reckless, bohemian existence, and insists on finding war work for her. Furthermore, she keeps her apart from another unconventional friend, Gillian, fearing the effect of their influence on each other. The separation is short-lived, however, and in one triangular discussion between Deb, Gillian and a younger girl, Nell, Deb occupies the ‘debatable ground’, being seen, more than any of the others, as a product of the ‘transition period’ between a Victorian age and one in which liberty for women might be realisable. Gillian explains her reasons for moving in with her (already married) boyfriend as a rational response to an impossible situation. ‘I’m fed up with the type of woman who can’t sling sex out of her mind,’ she says: The mind isn’t the proper place for sex. I want my mind for my work. Enforced virginity [. . .] is unbalancing; it hangs about and takes up more room than it ought to. . . My work has got to come to fruition sooner or later and all this has got to be cleared out of the way, somehow, first.12 Gillian, a gifted and successful medical researcher, does not want to compromise her work. The sacrifice she does have to make, however, is not to have children, for that would bring with it the interference of ‘the Herd’, as a result of which a child would suffer.13 Her supremely rational, forward-thinking position inspires young Nell, who persuades herself (and her young soldier boyfriend, who is about to leave for the front) that marriage is unnecessary in the modern world. She inevitably becomes pregnant and her young man is killed, leaving her ostracised from her family with no obvious means of support. Antonia is furious, blaming both Gillian and Deb for Nell’s predicament. Deb, in the meantime, has made the conservative decision to marry a good Jewish man, partly in the hope that he might secure her brother a place in the British Army. ‘The Jewish girl isn’t meant to be a pioneer of freedom,’14 she says. And she makes the even more conservative decision to bring up her child according to the ‘old’ rules rather than the new, which brings from Gillian the reflection that Our lot are not sure yet – stumble forwards and backwards in the twilight – let go of established tradition before they’ve grasped at an equivalent to support them. And some of us must be sacrificed down the wrong paths to prove them wrong.15 The strength of this novel lies in its discursive intricacy and intensity. Set before the war’s end, it provides no clear overview on questions which, to the modern reader, might appear essential, such as the extent to which the war was responsible for women’s sexual freedom – or for their sexual conservatism, for that matter – for both, of course, are seen to vie with each other for the higher rational ground. What it does is to present the war as a period of transition in which it is pragmatically easier to make socially conservative

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 34

30/01/2012 16:24

british first world war prose fiction

35

decisions, although spiritually and morally more honest to go against the grain. All sides of the argument are represented. No single solution is recommended and we are left with the feeling of being in medias res: the narrative of sexual liberation, like that of the war, although intricately represented, has yet to be concluded. The same applies to Zionism, internationalism and even patriotism. The glimmers of hope for a different kind of future offered by Debatable Ground are articulated clearly enough, but are seen as presently ungraspable for those hindered by popular conceptions of national, sexual, social and racial identity, reified by wartime legislation and propaganda. In Stern’s novel, the onus is on the individual to adapt rather than to challenge and change. The other novels discussed in this chapter take a more radical view. Mary Agnes Hamilton was a socialist thinker, who, after the war, became a Labour MP. Her novel Dead Yesterday takes its cues from the school of thought articulated in Irene Cooper Willis’s treatise, How We Went Into the War: A Study of Liberal Idealism (1919),16 in which she analyses the religiously exalted rhetoric of the Liberal press as a means of explaining how and why the argument in favour of the war gathered such force in the early months. Dead Yesterday and Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others were both published in 1916, and were written before the horrors of the Battle of the Somme had infiltrated the public imagination. Both argue a case through the narrative technique of placing a young female character in ‘debatable ground’ at the centre of the novel, and by subjecting her to a barrage of opinions on the war from friends, acquaintances, relatives and lovers, and to a highly polished and focused anti-war position represented by a mother-figure. In these novels, then, a member of the older generation inhabits the higher – and more radical – moral and political ground. These mothers are not creatures of the domestic hearth, but are highly educated and well-connected internationally. They have, particularly in the case of Rose Macaulay’s Daphne Sandomir, plans to re-educate the population into less bellicose ways of thinking. Both are rather ‘alarming’ and appear to the more conventional around them to be unnecessarily ‘serious’. But they have a job to do. In Hamilton’s novel, Aurelia Leonard, as subtly as she can, needs to pull her daughter away from the charms of the liberal newspaper journalist Nigel Strode – while avoiding the power of his influence herself. In Macaulay’s novel, Daphne Sandomir has to console her daughter for the loss of her brother, and persuade her that there is a course of action worth taking in response to the war, that involves neither working for it, nor ignoring it. In both works, as in Stern’s, it is the discursive method that operates most effectively as a means of exemplifying contemporary debates. Daphne Leonard, the daughter of Aurelia, is enthralled by Nigel Strode’s personal magnetism, but less so by the more commonplace utterances of the supporters of war with whom he surrounds himself. Daphne remains mostly quiet as the gathering storm of war clichés builds discursively around her. Unlike Nigel, she cannot feel ‘thrilled’ by the unity of purpose of the crowds as they collect to hear the declaration of war. Nigel describes this as ‘the sense of having escaped out of a tunnel into the air’,17 echoing Rupert Brooke’s ‘as swimmers into cleanness leaping’.18 Daphne reacts quite differently, and three conversations help to confirm her alternative point of view. One is with a working woman whose daughter is ailing in futile anticipation of the return of her (dead) father. Another is with a serving soldier, who succinctly undermines the home front ‘cant’ that German soldiers are cowardly and that British soldiers are universally eager to mutilate their enemy counterparts. The third is with a friend who has recently given birth, and whose husband has just been reported killed in action. If the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 35

30/01/2012 16:24

36

sharon ouditt

novel represents a dialectic between the abstract ‘thrill’ of the war represented by Nigel (who is accused of feeling ‘all the poetry of life in verses about six lines long’19), and the more human voices of individual suffering, then Daphne turns, unreservedly, towards the latter. Once the glamour has worn off, the former has little more to recommend it than facile sentimentality. Daphne’s private debate concludes with abandonment of the idea of marriage and the decision to invest her passions in nurturing new life and in the search for alternatives to war as a means of resolving conflict. Rather like the ‘manly’ Antonia in Debatable Ground, she undertakes the care of the bereft woman and the helpless child, with the assistance of her own mother. The plan is unlikely to instigate world peace, but it nevertheless provides a vote of confidence in an alternative set of values to those produced by the ‘newspaper language’ of the majority Liberal press. It may run the risk of being labelled essentialist, subjective, even cowardly, but its faith in immediate human relations represents resistance to those powerful linguistic abstractions that the novel presents as morally corrosive. The discursive ‘truth’ of the novel ultimately resides not in the words or speeches of any one of the individuals, but in the spaces in between. Alix Sandomir’s situation in Non-Combatants and Others is slightly more complex in that, from a position of studied indifference to the war, muddled and muffled further by the suburban vacuities of her relatives’ home, she has to come to terms with her brother’s suicide in the trenches, and her unrequited love for fellow artist, Basil Doye. Rather like Storm Jameson’s Hervey Russell in That Was Yesterday (1932),20 it is only with the death of her younger brother that the war makes any impact on Alix. She imagines – visualises in some detail – the horrors he endured and diagnoses them both as having undergone a mental and moral breakdown. Unlike Hervey, she decides to do something about it. She is tentative, and gives part of herself over to tuition by her mother, who has attempted to attend the Women’s International Congress in the Hague, who has met leaders of belligerent and neutral nations, who addresses meetings on mediation without armistice, and who is a member of the Society for Promoting Permanent Peace.21 Her mother arrives in the final quarter of the book, whisks her daughter away from the facile comforts of home, and commands her attention during a lecture tour of Cambridgeshire. Her talks and lectures are reported in detail, and the tone of the novel, hitherto ironic, rather brittle and implicitly dismissive of those who are smugly self-confident in their views, struggles to accommodate this more earnest turn of events. Fiction here is being used as a noticeboard on which to pin anti-war arguments. It relies heavily on reported speech (Daphne’s) and refracted reflections of support (Alix’s). Again, however, the ‘truth’ is not permitted to reside in one viewpoint. Alix decides to join the church. The Rev. Christopher West, who shares rooms with Alix’s brother, Nicholas, represents a particular brand of Christian Pacifism. Nicholas retains a sceptical stance of non-participation, but tolerates West’s declaration of support for the UDC and the articulation of his faith in Christianity to reform the nation’s values. The overall approach is perhaps more didactic than Socratic, but its end result is to require Alix to change her views and, essentially, not to adapt herself to the unthinking majority, which is Deb’s fate in Debatable Ground. The novel ends with the depressing conclusion of the year 1915, with its losses, stalemates and compromises. But, animated by the spirit of the attempt to oppose the all-engulfing nightmare of war, at least for a moment, ‘idealism wholly dominated cynicism’.22 Rather like these two novels, Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected has the trajectory of a doomed love affair in which the vacuum created by unreciprocated affection is occupied by the embattled arguments of political idealism. It is different from both Dead Yesterday and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 36

30/01/2012 16:24

british first world war prose fiction

37

Non-Combatants and Others, however, in that the main female character finds no solace in the search for alternatives to war. It is sexual politics that preoccupies her. Antoinette and Dennis are both, initially, seen as homosexual. Antoinette turns towards Hester ‘in unquestioning obedience to the dictates of her inmost nature’.23 Dennis, having thought he was attracted to Antoinette, finds his affection for her derailed by his love for Alan, and Antoinette, having given up Hester, then finds herself fruitlessly pursuing Dennis. Dennis opposes the war on grounds of conscience, will not volunteer, and later finds himself at a tribunal, objecting to his conscription. Much of the novel is given over to speech-making. Sometimes this occurs in the confines of the private dining or drawing room (Dennis’s comfortable middle-class family is appalled by his attitude; only his mother and, when she can, Antoinette, are capable of defending him against the platitudes of the small minds of the home counties). Otherwise it is in public, whether in the formal setting of the tribunal or the bohemian atmosphere of the semi-subterranean café, Miss Mowbray’s, the meeting place of those non-conformists rendered misfits by the war. To Dennis’s pacifism, then, is added Alan’s more vocal socialism, the views of Barnaby, a disabled journalist, a couple of Irish Nationalists, a young Jewish man, an actor, a poet, a musician and a loyal wife, who stands by her man as he goes to prison. A suffragette is given the opportunity to say her anti-war piece at a tribunal, although there is no further representation of feminist politics in the novel. Unlike in Hamilton’s and Macaulay’s novels, the complex arguments of feminist pacifism are left unvoiced, bringing male homosexuality to centre stage, along with the humiliation and agony of those who suffered imprisonment under the Military Service Act. The café acts as a metaphor for ‘underground’ value systems, presently submerged and alienated from mainstream thinking, but which will one day emerge and be fully recognised. From the basement windows it is possible to see the bodiless legs of those striding past, emblematic of an unfaltering dominant ideology that has energy but no conscience; rather like Hugh Infield’s vision of London’s crowds in Dead Yesterday, made up of ‘men and women with no knowledge, no views, no ideas, no power of resistance’.24 Any view opposing this mass hysteria is forced underground with little opportunity to alter jingoist prejudice. Although Antoinette supports Dennis, her motives are personal rather than political. Otherwise the opposing elements are ranged against each other and the socialist pacifists have no more chance of successfully challenging the cultural conservatives than the complacent tribunal members have of persuading conscientious objectors to abandon their principles and enlist. The atmosphere is of hopeless stalemate. Both sides are uncompromising and no practical – social, political, military or moral – resolution is available. At this point the novel takes a metaphorical turn as Dennis seeks refuge in musical composition. This, he believes, might contain the ‘chaos of conflicting motives’ he sees in the war: ‘he could hear each instrument clamouring at cross-purposes with all the others in the orchestra; clashing rhythms and counter-rhythms battled for supremacy’, each of which ‘stood for the innumerable beliefs and reasons, ideals and madnesses that had led the peoples into war’. Music, he hopes, might resolve social cacophony into the harmony of peace.25 Barney’s judgement is that there is no possibility of a resolution until there is ‘more light, more breathing-space, more tolerance and understanding’ for homosexual men,26 and, anticipating the biblical language of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness,27 he says: ‘They’re despised and rejected of their fellow-men today. What they suffer in a world not yet ready to admit their right to existence, their right to love, no normal person can realise.’28 In alluding to one of the best-known lines from Handel’s Messiah he

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 37

30/01/2012 16:24

38

sharon ouditt

is drawing on a universal Christian symbol of sacrifice, and pointing up the irony of the appropriation of the prince of peace in the service of mass murder. In each of these novels, then, another way of being is imagined, even if the constraints of the present day do not permit it to be lived out freely. Richard and Deb Marcus have visions of, respectively, a relationship to national identity that is built on trust and a form of sexual freedom untrammelled by considerations of ownership, but both are required to adapt to the political and social demands of the immediate and overwhelming present moment. Daphne Leonard and Alix Sandomir, influenced by their mothers, can imagine a set of values in which bellicosity and the cheap newspaper thrill are outweighed by the search for peace. Dennis and Alan seek a world characterised by the internationalist values of socialism: one in which same-sex love is nurtured rather than despised, and where aesthetic preoccupations with music and art have the capacity to resolve conflicts. These are brave propositions in a period in which the nation’s capital – financial, moral, physical and industrial – was harnessed to a fight to the death, and the ancillary ideological forces such as propaganda and legislation followed suit. Not all of these texts eluded the grasp of DORA, but they all gave voice to values that contravened the popular view of a home front in thrall to a ‘newspaper language’ that constructed its own ideological prison house. Articulations of individual experience, descriptions of suffering at the hands of belligerent patriots, allusions to larger international movements for peace, freedom, a Jewish homeland, female sexual autonomy, social equality and justice all find a voice here and belie the notion that the home front was anything but socially, culturally and politically conflicted. The female protagonists of these stories hardly have the iconic stature of a Sassoon or an Owen and the texts, knitted in as they are to the minute details of social life, lack the symbolic resonance of the best-known war poetry. But they are nevertheless a testament to the desire to respond, rather than to react to the exigencies of wartime; to challenge rather than condone the resulting social conservatism, and to hail, in however compromised a form, the possibility that there was a way of seeing things differently.

Notes 1. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Glory of Women’, in Collected Poems, 1908–1956 (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 79. 2. G. B. Stern’s Debatable Ground (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, [1919] 1921) was published in England by Duckworth in 1919 under the title Children of No Man’s Land. Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected (London: GMP Publishers, [1918] 1988) was originally published (by C. W. Daniel) under the pseudonym A. T. Fitzroy, and was prosecuted, in 1918, under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). 3. Stern, p. 96. 4. Ibid. p. 34. 5. Ibid. p. 312. 6. Ibid. p. 397. 7. Ibid. p. 144. 8. See, for example, Seamus Dunn and T. G. Fraser (eds), Europe and Ethnicity: World War I and Contemporary Ethnic Conflict (London: Routledge, 1996). 9. Stern, p. 345. 10. Ibid. p. 285. 11. Ibid. p. 211. 12. Ibid. p. 257.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 38

30/01/2012 16:24

british first world war prose fiction 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

39

Ibid. p. 283. Ibid. p. 374. Ibid. p. 373. Irene Cooper Willis, How We Went Into the War: A Study of Liberal Idealism (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1919). This was the first of three volumes analysing Liberal idealism as expressed in the speeches of leading politicians and the Liberal press. They were later published together as a single volume, England’s Holy War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928). Mary Agnes Hamilton, Dead Yesterday (London: Duckworth, 1916), p. 233. Rupert Brooke, ‘Peace’, in Rupert Brooke: The Poetical Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 19. Hamilton, p. 266. Storm Jameson, That Was Yesterday (London: Heinemann, 1932). Loosely modelled on the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, of which Catherine Marshall, Helena Swanwick and Irene Cooper Willis were prominent members. See, for example, Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women (London: Pandora, 1985) for an account of the Hague Congress and its aftermath; and, for some of the rhetoric itself, Margaret Kamester and Jo Vellacott (eds), Militarism versus Feminism: Writing on Women and War. Catherine Marshall, C. K. Ogden and Mary Sargant Florence (London: Virago, 1987). Rose Macaulay, Non-Combatants and Others (London: Methuen, [1916] 1986), p. 186. Allatini, p. 69. Hamilton, p. 215. Allatini, pp. 317–18. Ibid. p. 347. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928). Ibid. p. 348.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 39

30/01/2012 16:24

The American First World War Novel

4

ONE OF OURS IN CONTEXT: THE AMERICAN WORLD WAR I NOVEL Jennifer Haytock

T

he First World War was a cataclysmic event, but it was not the only force changing people’s lives and perspectives in the first decades of the twentieth century. The 1918 influenza pandemic that spread throughout the world killed more than twice the number of people as the war, mostly the young and the fit. For Americans, the war was an interruption of isolationism, which resumed as soon as the war was over, and it fuelled a xenophobia directed at Eastern European immigrants and a public tightening of morals that led to the enacting of National Prohibition in 1920. The women’s suffrage movement, put on hold by the war, regained its momentum, resulting in the ratification of the 20th Amendment, which gave women the vote, in the same year. On the surface, the post-war years were peaceful and prosperous – if one overlooks the increased racial violence in the 1920s, the persecution of immigrants, including but not limited to the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and the veterans’ demands for more money and assistance from their government, culminating in the 1932 ‘Bonus March’. In the United States, authors of ‘war novels’ responded not only to the war itself but also to other contemporary social, cultural and political pressures; what is at stake in an American World War I novel cannot be separated from so many other issues in the decades previous and following. This chapter explores some central issues in American World War I novels, many of which are fault lines in the broader culture of the United States. While I draw on the work of several authors, including John Dos Passos, Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather’s One of Ours serves as my central text; since approximately two-thirds of the story takes place before the war, the novel demands an interpretation that places the war in a specifically American context. Violent conflict began in Europe in the summer of 1914, but the United States did not officially enter the war until 6 April 1917. It took months longer for a significant number of troops to get to the front; consequently the American experience of the war, both at home and abroad, deviated significantly from European experiences. One of Ours makes those differences clear in a way that A Farewell to Arms, for example, does not. One of Ours was published in 1922, and despite some sharp public and private critical attacks, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.1 Cather based her main character, Claude Wheeler, partly on her younger cousin, Grosvenor P. Cather, who died in the war. Drawing on his letters to his mother as well as interviewing veterans after the war, Cather created an idealistic soldier, who, as critic Mary Ryder points out, is ‘as green as

40

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 40

30/01/2012 16:24

the american first world war novel

41

[his] money’.2 In the first sections of the novel, Claude suffers a series of disappointments, all of which are rooted in his belief that there should be ‘something splendid about life’3 and most of which are more broadly associated with the culture of the United States. He cannot find comfort in religion because, for Claude, manliness resides in the American ideal of strength and independence, which the novel’s feminine preachers undermine. Claude challenges the American celebration of youth: ‘Every one was always saying it was a fine thing to be young; but it was a painful thing, too.’4 American football leads Claude to a friendship with a German family whose members value ideas over property, but he feels he does not truly belong among them because of his narrow upbringing. When his father decides that Claude will take over the family farm, Claude leaves behind his education and his friendships with a sense that fate means for him to live a small life. His attitude towards farming is limited by the closing of the American frontier; if he could find open and unknown territory, he feels he could make something not only of the virgin land but also of himself.5 He courts a neighbour girl, Enid Royce, but she, a vegetarian and Prohibitionist who actually wants to be a Christian missionary in China, lacks the physical passion that Claude seeks. Their relationship is partially undermined by the typically American automobile that allows Enid to spend her time driving around the country working for the temperance movement – but even more so by the American, or at least Western, reluctance of others to interfere and give advice. Claude’s bad marriage leaves him, once again, feeling cheated. American society and customs fail to provide Claude with a sense of significance. Most problematic for Claude are American capitalism and consumerism. His experiences shopping indict a materialist and consumer society that values only money, not quality or beauty: The farmer raised and took to market things with an intrinsic value [. . .] In return he got manufactured articles of poor quality; showy furniture that went to pieces, carpets and draperies that faded, clothes that made a handsome man look like a clown.6 Claude’s brother Bayliss is a businessman and a Pacifist who ‘kept telling people that if only the United States would stay out of this war, and gather up what Europe was wasting, she would soon be in actual possession of the capital of the world’.7 Obviously this is a caricature of the Pacifist position, as not all Pacifists wanted to stay out of the war in order to profit from it. Nevertheless, American production and consumerism pervade the battlefields that Claude encounters in France. As Claude walks through a ruined village, he sees people living in ‘little wooden barracks made from old timbers and American goods boxes’8 with names that he recognises, and he finds the Red Cross food storage stocked with supplies ‘all with American trade names he knew so well’.9 To Claude, these names are comforting, but they also show that Bayliss’s dream for the United States to make a fortune off the war has come true.10 Claude believes that enlisting as an officer in the army is the event that changes his life – that turns him from a failure into a true man with a meaningful purpose. Cather’s narration, however, consistently deviates from Claude’s perception of himself, and in the manner of the American adventure novel, One of Ours shows that joining the army is literally Claude’s running away from a stifling American culture.11 Thus, to understand One of Ours as a war novel, we must first recognise it as an adventure tale in the American tradition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales, or even of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Furthermore, it is a satire

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 41

30/01/2012 16:24

42

jennifer haytock

of such tales. Claude is off to fight his white whale: the perpetual disappointments and disillusionments that have plagued his life. To Claude the voyage overseas seems to be the beginning of his real life: ‘This fog which had been at first depressing had become a shelter; a tent moving through space, hiding one from all that had been before, giving one a chance to correct one’s ideas about life and to plan the future.’12 The narrator, however, identifies Claude’s feeling as an ‘illusion’,13 and disappointment, though less apparent, follows him in Europe. Claude’s experience in the war is only an extension of the purposelessness that plagues him growing up. War literature often focuses on the tension between the individual, who may hope to find himself in the experience of battle, and the military, which demands conformity. For American soldiers, submitting to military discipline – giving up one’s will and subsuming one’s identity – directly clashes with the lure and demands of the ideology of American individualism. For Claude, joining the army and entering battle are ways to lose as well as find himself. Long before the United States enters the war, Claude imagines being at the Marne: ‘There was nothing on earth he would so gladly be as an atom in that wall of flesh and blood that rose and melted and rose again.’14 Believing himself a failure as an individual, he wishes to lose his identity entirely, but he also feels the military has made him his best self. Other war novels, such as John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1920), investigate the inherent conflict between the individual and the military in more detail.15 This novel, based in part on Dos Passos’s own experiences driving an ambulance in France and in an army camp in Pennsylvania, follows the military careers of Fuselli, who sees the military as an outlet for his ambition; Chrisfield, a farm boy who focuses on a personal grudge; and Andrews, an educated musician who joined the military to ‘forget himself ’.16 The soldiers are repeatedly represented as a mass, long lines of brown uniforms without individuality.17 Andrews sees his fellow soldiers as ‘one organism. This was what he had sought when he had enlisted [. . . ] He was sick of revolt, of thought, of carrying his individuality like a banner above the turmoil.’18 But the individual never goes away. Fuselli seeks a promotion and is crushed when he does not get it, blaming his failure to advance on ‘[getting] in wrong’;19 he ends up working a labour detail and suffering from a venereal disease. Chrisfield takes his resentment against an officer so far as to kill him during battle, and although no one knows, he becomes paranoid and deserts. Andrews finds he cannot suppress his individuality and comes to resent the dehumanising military, which he regards as the strongest arm of conventional society that forces individuals into ‘slavery’. Discipline is a pervasive issue in the novel, as soldiers frequently talk back to their superiors, break the rules in search of liquor and women, or go AWOL. One soldier even deserts his unit in order to get to the front sooner because military bureaucracy drags its feet getting him there. Cather ends Claude’s story with his death, but his death is not the end of the novel; she acknowledges that soldiers are not the only casualties of war. Claude’s mother plays a prominent role in his life, and he takes satisfaction in his belief that she wants him to be part of the idealistic fight for France. Yet after Claude’s death, Mrs Wheeler finds comfort in knowing that her idealistic son will not have to suffer the disillusionment of post-war life: ‘She would have dreaded the awakening, – she sometimes even doubts whether he could have borne at all that last, desolating disappointment.’20 The final chapter suggests that the war would have been merely one more in the long sequence of disappointments in Claude’s life rather than the making of his success. By including Mrs Wheeler’s experience of the war – from searching in the attic for a map at the beginning of the war to following

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 42

30/01/2012 16:24

the american first world war novel

43

the war news to meditating on her dead son – as well as that of other women that Claude meets in France, Cather makes clear that the soldier’s tale is not only his own; families, communities and nations also have war stories. Edith Wharton too took this view of war in her novel A Son at the Front (1923). Like Cather, she was attacked for being a woman writing about war, which was perceived to be the territory of men only, as well as for publishing a war novel at a time when Americans no longer wanted to hear about it. Like One of Ours, A Son at the Front was criticised for its sentimentality and idealism, and until recently, critics have overlooked the irony in the narration of both novels. Cather and Wharton, though always considered distinguished writers, benefited from the feminist movement of the 1970s that encouraged scholars to examine their work for greater complexity and to reassess their relationship to modernism. These trends have resulted in more critics, including Dorothy Goldman, Claire Tylee and Jean Gallagher, to name only a few, acknowledging the contributions women have made to war writing. Wharton does not portray life at the front, even though she visited the front lines many times on volunteer missions for the French Red Cross. A Son at the Front focuses instead on an American father whose son George, having been born in France, is conscripted into the French army. John Campton, an artist, believes at first that France’s war is not his or George’s, and he and his ex-wife conspire to keep their son out of the battle lines and in a safe desk job. George Campton, however, soon comes to feel the pull of the war and switches to a front-line position. His parents struggle with the idea of sacrificing a child to a war. Fathers of sons at the front find themselves, as Campton says, the chorus of the tragedy [. . . ] As soon as I open my lips to blame or praise I see myself in white petticoats, with a long beard held on by an elastic, goading on the combatants in a cracked voice from a safe corner of the ramparts.21 While One of Ours and A Son at the Front include or even focus on the relation of parents and friends to soldiers and hence to the war, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms depicts the experience of a woman at the front lines. Catherine Barkley, a British VAD, has served as a nurse’s aide on the battle front in France, where her fiancé was blown ‘all to bits’ rather than struck down by a romantic sabre cut.22 Catherine has seen war, and it has changed her values. She would not sleep with her fiancé because she ‘thought it would be bad for him’,23 but now that she has seen what war is like, she has no such compunctions in her relationship with Frederic Henry. She refuses to worry about the unconventionality of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy. As Sandra Whipple Spanier has shown, Catherine’s death in childbirth takes on a significance equal to that of a soldier in combat because of its lesson in stoicism for the soldier-hero and how it exposes the illusion that war affects only men. Representing violence in texts poses problems of realism and meaning: how can an author portray the full extent of the horror of the violence of World War I? American authors found themselves responding to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage as a defining war novel, and writers about the Great War attempt to show modern warfare as worse than Crane could have conceived. When Claude Wheeler encounters his first wounded soldiers, he discovers that the devastation war causes on the human body is far more horrible than he imagined: ‘[the soldiers’] skin was yellow or purple, their eyes were sunken, their lips sore. Everything that belonged to health had left them, every attribute of youth was gone.’24 For Claude, such a fate is neither noble nor transforming: ‘To shed bright blood, to wear the red badge of courage, – that was one thing; but to be reduced to

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 43

30/01/2012 16:24

44

jennifer haytock

this was quite another. Surely, the sooner these boys died, the better.’25 Claude would have regarded his own death, shot while standing on a parapet to encourage his men in battle, as heroic, but while Claude’s men do hold off the attack, the main result of his death is a promotion for an officer who was not even present at the battle.26 In Three Soldiers, violence is associated with ignorance and lack of control, such as when Chrisfield tosses grenades at his own officer, and with randomness, such as when Andrews is wounded by a shell while examining frogs in a puddle. Representing violence means representing a complex web of motivations and lack thereof, and authors tend to suggest the failure of language at these moments. After World War I, authors were inclined more than ever to feel that words cannot fully convey human experience. Many post-war writers relied on indirect methods, such as Cather’s and Wharton’s use of irony. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway describes Frederic Henry’s wounding through a stream-of-consciousness narration: Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh – then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind.27 Later, Frederic Henry articulates post-war disillusionment with language in perhaps its most well-known form: I had seen nothing sacred [. . .] There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.28 Hemingway’s economy of language is not entirely original with him – Ezra Pound was promoting Imagism and the reduction of adjectives before the war – but this need to experiment with language spread after the war, resulting in such unconventional works as Dos Passos’s U. S. A. trilogy, with its Newsreel and Camera Eye sections, and William Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness masterpiece The Sound and the Fury. In most if not all World War I novels, characters proceed along an arc from idealism to disillusionment. Cather’s Claude Wheeler fights for a ‘feeling’29 and Wharton’s John Campton believes his son fights for ‘France, an Idea’,30 but the narrators of both novels suggest that going to war is much more complicated for these soldiers. Claude, after all, has found no meaning elsewhere, and his mother believes he would have died of disappointment afterward; indeed, Claude, ‘so afraid of being fooled’,31 is tricked just before his death into believing his friend David Gerhardt is still alive. George Campton, as I have shown elsewhere,32 does not participate in the idealistic rhetoric surrounding him and in which his father believes. Wharton’s portrayal of the soldier suggests his motivation is in everyday relationships among other soldiers; he insists on his need to ‘get back to my men’.33 Cather’s surviving soldiers evoke the now-familiar sense of disillusionment and alienation portrayed more famously in A Farewell to Arms. Sergeant Hicks, in particular, rejects the ideology of patriotism and ‘making the world safe for democracy’, wanting only to ‘roll up his sleeves and look at the logical and beautiful inwards of automobiles for

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 44

30/01/2012 16:24

the american first world war novel

45

the rest of his life’ in his ‘memorial shop’ named partly after his dead friend.34 Hicks thus memorialises the dead while rejecting the rhetoric of war for which that friend died. All of these novels remind us that wars are fought by individuals as well as nations. The ironic distance between Claude Wheeler, who believes in his purpose as a soldier, and his author, who sees that the war has not changed the world, illustrates some of the conflicts and contradictions of the American experience in the First World War. What are ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ if the individual must be destroyed to ‘save’ them? What does the individual have left if his or her ideals are destroyed? Nations, communities, families and individuals must find answers to these questions, for individuals, whether they are willing participants in the transformation of their independence into machine-like collectives or whether they resist, will continue to affect the larger society around them. War novels provide an opportunity for individuals to write their visions, and those authors provide the rest of us with the chance and responsibility to consider the consequences of our wars and their connection to apparently disparate aspects of our lives.

Notes 1. Willa Cather, One of Ours (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). The most notorious of these attacks came in a letter from Ernest Hemingway to Edmund Wilson: ‘Wasn’t that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere’ (Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker [New York: Scribner, 1981], p. 105). In a recent article, however, Janis Stout points out that the impressive sales of One of Ours showed that ‘a different and more general public was affirming her’ (‘Willa Cather and Her Public in 1922’, Cather Studies, 7 [2007], pp. 27–45 [p. 39]). 2. ‘As Green As Their Money’, Cather, p. 145. 3. Ibid. p. 46. 4. Ibid. p. 100. 5. Ibid. p. 100. 6. Ibid. pp. 84–5. 7. Ibid. p. 190. 8. Ibid. p. 307. 9. Ibid. p. 311. 10. As historian Jennifer Keene demonstrates, after the war, veterans demanded that the federal government find a way to compensate them equally with the people who did not fight but profited financially from the war (Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001], p. 5). 11. Cather, p. 194. 12. Ibid. p. 246. 13. Ibid. p. 246. 14. Ibid. p. 142. 15. John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers (New York: Penguin Books, [1920] 1997). 16. Ibid. p. 25. 17. Ibid. p. 220. 18. Ibid. p. 21. 19. Ibid. p. 253. 20. Cather, p. 370. 21. Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), p. 190.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 45

30/01/2012 16:24

46

jennifer haytock

22. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, [1929] 1957), p. 20. First serialised in Scribner’s Magazine, May–October 1929. 23. Ibid. p. 19. 24. Cather, p. 270. 25. Ibid. p. 271. 26. Ibid. p. 368. 27. Hemingway, p. 54. 28. Ibid. p. 185. 29. Cather, p. 312. 30. Wharton, p. 188. 31. Cather, p. 370. 32. See Jennifer Haytock, ‘“A Sign of Pain’s Triumph”: War, Art, and Civilization’, in Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 101–30. 33. Wharton, p. 359. 34. Cather, p. 369.

Further Reading Boyd, Thomas, Through the Wheat (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923). Cather, Willa, The Professor’s House (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925). cummings, e. e., The Enormous Room (New York: The Modern Library, 1934). Daly, Victor, Not Only War (1932) (College Park, MD: McGrath, 1969). Dos Passos, John, One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, [1921] 1969). Faulkner, William, Soldiers’ Pay (New York: Liveright, 1926). Hemingway, Ernest, In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1925). —, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1926). March, William, Company K (New York: Smith and Haas, 1933).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 46

30/01/2012 16:24

5

THE ‘MOANING OF THE WORLD’ AND THE ‘WORDS THAT BRING ME PEACE’: MODERNISM AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR1 Sara Haslam

Introduction: Modernism and the War

T

he First World War produced more than one kind of testament of experience, with more than one journey into print. This remains true whatever the current critical – and partial – consensus as to the relationship between narrative, language and the literature of the war.2 Herbert Read was unable to find a publisher for his war memoir in 1919 because people did not want to read ‘anything bleak’, but other writers had much more luck.3 Readers in the early 1920s feasted on, for example, Robert Keable’s Simon Called Peter (1921) and Ernest Raymond’s Tell England (1922). Such books offered patriotism, not originality. War was presented as a personal and moral development opportunity – a far cry from the modernists’ dazzling and deafening ‘equinoctial storm’.4 In the main it took some years for those texts which activated the relationship with modernism, or which struggled with a new force in language, to appear.5 Soon, though, they became culturally dominant: the war books. Keable and Raymond are little read now. Heralded by Ford Madox Ford with Some Do Not. . . in 1924 (followed swiftly by Read’s In Retreat when the Woolfs finally published it at the Hogarth Press), this tradition gathered force throughout the rest of the decade and into the next. There was a mid-point climax in 1929 with the appearance of Goodbye to All That, Death of a Hero and All Quiet on the Western Front. Such texts may have been the result in print of a ‘turn in speech’ identified by Sam Hynes, brought about when ‘articulate men experienced the trench world and tried to record what they saw there.’6 They certainly shattered a particular kind of silence about the war. (As indicated above, large numbers of patriotically popular war books appeared, and were read, early on.7) But they often only emerged as a result of a protracted and painful debate within the minds of soldier-writers. Books like Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1930), displayed a new vision, a new understanding and new experience of war, though the words had taken time to come. Such territory was familiar to the modernists around and among them. Modernism, Shari Benstock reminds us, was a ‘literary, social, political, and publishing event’.8 Its ‘character’, according to Herbert Read in 1933, was ‘catastrophic’.9 Malcolm Bradbury’s Modernism was published forty years later, but also describes the ‘cultural

47

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 47

30/01/2012 16:24

48

sara haslam

seismology’ of the period (roughly 1890–1930) as an ‘overwhelming dislocation’ and a ‘cataclysmic upheaval’.10 In the twenty-first century, ‘renovation’ is still identified as key to the modernist project, even while the extent of its complexity and variety is being tested anew.11 In addition, over recent years – partly due to growing critical interest in technology and modernism12 – the violence of modernism’s upheavals has been increasingly identified as a consequence of the First World War. Critics have debated the extent to which the war exacerbated existing tendencies within culture towards ‘truth-telling’ or experimentation with formal possibilities.13 Some prioritise the business of Empire as well as war. Others, however, talk up the causative role of war in modernism’s tendency to experiment with destruction.14 Modris Eksteins relates this specifically to temporal laws. When he writes that ‘history as purposeful meaning [. . .] had not survived the war’,15 he reminds us of readings of modernism which emphasise the way war created a psychology of despair, or punctuated the sense of a stream of time. Such shifts are recognisably axiomatic for modernist writers, including many who thought deeply about the war, but did not fight – Virginia Woolf, for example, or H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Even H. G. Wells showed (as early as 1916) what the rupture of time might look like in a war novel. Though it is in terms of technology particularly that this chapter will address the interrelationships between war and modernism, a sense of temporal rupture was broadly fundamental to the time. Approaching 4 August 1914, the narrative of Wells’s Mr Britling Sees it Through becomes increasingly fragmented, ‘frame-breaking’ as real events demote the characters. Finally, time and progress are over-shadowed by the figure of war, looking very much like a statue by Jacob Epstein:16 In this fashion it was that the great war began in Europe and came to one man in [the village of] Matching’s Easy, as it came to countless intelligent young men [. . .] The familiar scenery of life was drawn aside, and War stood unveiled. ‘I am the Fact,’ said War, ‘and I stand astride the path of life. I am the threat of death and extinction [. . .] There can be nothing else and nothing more in human life until you have reckoned with me.’17 There is something attractive about the obstruction. Wells implies that the ‘scenery of life’ before was merely that; war, in contrast, offers a troubling and paradoxical vitality. Secret, or suppressed, until this point in time, its domineering and demanding energy will now be exacted from ‘countless young men’. ‘We English’, Britling complains, ‘are everlasting children in an everlasting nursery.’18 No longer: war’s threat of death generates active (and, in time, newly communicative) adulthood where there was none before. Though few of the later novels reproduce Wells’s sense of vitality, many of them share with Mr Britling a crucial and often overlooked reliance on the sounds of war as they go about their revisionist work.19

Modernist Trauma: Sound This chapter explores the proposition that the creative energies of modernism are, for the most part, inextricably bound to the experience of the First World War. Men and women fought, or suffered, or thought about war, and then used it in their work in ways that often refine and challenge our understanding of modernism. As binding relationships go, this might be described as a particularly tight one, in part due to the idea that, in Adam Phillips’s resonant paraphrase of David Trotter, ‘what we have learned to call modern-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 48

30/01/2012 16:24

modernism and the first world war

49

ism is more akin to a cumulative trauma’ – the trauma of loss, of narrative disability, of madness, of the ongoing ‘death of God’.20 Jay Winter’s study, among others, understands the war primarily through the trauma of loss: the ‘Great War brought the search for an appropriate language of loss to the centre of cultural and political life’.21 And there are also, of course, many examples of the ‘cumulative trauma’ of modernism in the narratives of war, as in this cataclysmal, maddened, extract from Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune: [T]he Hun searched for them scrupulously; the air was alive with the rush and flutter of wings; it was ripped by screaming shells, hissing like tons of molten metal plunging suddenly into water, there was the blast and concussion of their explosion, men smashed, obliterated in sudden eruptions of earth, rent and strewn in bloody fragments, shells that were like hell-cats humped and spitting, little sounds, unpleasantly close, like the plucking of tense strings. . .22 This chapter suggests, in addition, that we need to refocus attention on the ways that the experience of war, and therefore the development of modernism, were mediated through sound. Manning describes a trauma of all the senses in the face of war’s extreme force; of the body, the eye and yet more intensively of the ear. And so I take issue with Trotter’s chief indicator of war’s trauma – the ‘proximity’ sense of smell – in an essay on war fiction published in 2005.23 The exploration of modernity Trotter uses for a source (Steven Connor’s ‘The Modern Auditory I’) is interested in the primacy of the senses in the ‘era of neotechnics’.24 Writers about war borrow heavily from all the ‘technologies of perception’ (to use a more recent critic’s phrase), that invigorated modernism generally.25 Modernists are known for their attempts to realise Woolf ’s ‘myriad impressions’ – of sight and sound in particular, and touch in relation to sculpture and architecture.26 But as the quotation above from Manning might suggest, it is sound, not the perhaps more likely sight, or even smell, that Connor identifies as a ‘disintegrative principle’ in his essay on modernity.27 And it is the overwhelming experience of sound that Mary R. Habeck argues was most commented on by soldiers, particularly novices, as they entered the front.28 ‘I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns’, as Sassoon put it in one famous poem.29 ‘[N]oise rushed like black angels gone mad; solid noise that swept you off your feet’ in Christopher Tietjens’ trench in A Man Could Stand Up – (1926).30 Connor cites Martin Jay on the war’s ‘chaotic, crowded, and cacophonous conditions’;31 in resounding confirmation of this modern summary, contemporary soldier Gerhard Gürtler wrote a letter home on how men ‘hear nothing but the drum-fire, the groaning of wounded comrades, the screaming of fallen horses, the wild beating of their own hearts, hour after hour’.32 Equally crucial for soldiers, though, in terms of their relationship with sound, was the requirement to ‘learn to hear all over again’, or to ‘hear it new’ to adapt Ezra Pound.33 One way to try and stay alive was to determine the exact nature of each artillery threat – by listening to it. As a history of military psychiatry explains: Each [shell] had its special noise and characteristics in the air [. . .] and its own special way of raining destruction on the ground [. . .] The first thing you learnt [. . .] was how to tell the different types apart. There was the five-nine [. . .], the whizz-bang and the four-two. There was the ‘minnie’ [. . . and ] later on there were other new fangled-weapons [. . .] Of all the things that preyed on the nerves and the senses [. . .] shellfire was the worst.34

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 49

30/01/2012 16:24

50

sara haslam

Even from the relatively sheltered environment of London, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1917 that ‘having trained one’s ears to listen [for shells and guns] one can’t get them not to for a time.’35 The germ of this experience is there in Septimus Smith, one of the most terrible fictional victims of shell shock, who kills himself, on the day of Mrs Dalloway’s party, because he has been unable to stop listening as he was taught to by war.36 Such experiences, in fiction or in the reality that cohered in and produced it, provide examples of the most dramatically heightened ways in which sound can act as a ‘disintegrative principle’. Shell noises not only threatened, but communicated information about, death. Hearers (usually) knew it; many broke down under the strain.37 The twin contemporary contexts of enhanced senses and technological facility, as discussed above, could only heighten them further. War as ‘threat of death and extinction’ elicits quintessentially modernist outpourings in print because of the new parameters of language in relation to sense, experience and representation but also because it was the ultimate mechanical symbol: standing astride the age as Wells imagines, and giving rise to high modernism and The Waste Land. The remainder of this chapter explores the ways in which sound (whether technologically manipulated or not) functions as a disintegrative principle in war writing. In three sections – ‘Communication’; ‘Shell-shocked culture’; ‘Boredom’ – I discuss the ways in which this essentially modernist concept manifested itself in texts, and in the contemporary cultural contexts which informed those books written by the returning soldiers when they did decide to speak.

Communication ‘The self defined in terms of hearing rather than sight is a self defined not as a point, but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a channel.’38 Connor offers just such redefinitions of the self in the early twentieth century, making up for the perceived neglect of the ‘intensely auditory experiences of modernity’.39 A membrane presents little challenge to the external world; a channel likewise. This might, on many occasions, be a cause for celebration. For the men on the front line, it was almost never thus: noise could be so invasive as to be maddening, or indicative of terror or suffering among one’s comrades (the ‘moaning of the world’ of my title). Technology for testing the membrane was always close at hand. On the opening page of A Man Could Stand Up – (1926), the third volume of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (which Bradbury calls the ‘central’, ‘exemplary’, modernist text of the 1920s),40 Valentine Wannop, Physical Instructress, Latinist and suffragist, is on the telephone. It is Armistice Day and she cannot hear the speaker due to the ‘intolerable noises’ from the street. Nor can she place the speaker, for it is a voice she only ‘seemed half to remember’. Nor can she understand the speaker – it is ‘incomprehensible news’.41 In 1877 (two years after its invention) the telephone had been welcomed by The Times as bringing the ‘whole human race’ within ‘speaking and hearing distance’.42 Like the railways before it, it could ‘lessen the vicissitudes of time and space’; its social impact was liberating; it was a ‘new toy’.43 But the wartime world is different. It is far noisier for a start, more complex; and this image of clarity and efficiency is the inverse of our view of Valentine on the phone. ‘“I haven’t,” Valentine Wannop shouted into the mouthpiece, “the least idea of what you want or who you are”’:44 her telephone impedes her memory, is unable to compete against external noise and occludes her understanding. It is a contextually aggravated version of Woolf ’s telephone experience, recorded in her diary, not

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 50

30/01/2012 16:24

modernism and the first world war

51

on Armistice Day, but only two weeks earlier, that ‘to my great surprise a voice upon the telephone developed into the voice of Lady Mary Murray.’45 As a textual symbol of modernism, the telephone in this instance demonstrates above all the notable desire for unreachable distance. A need, if you like, for a thicker membrane. Ford depicts Valentine’s ear trying to regulate and process the especially invasive and traumatically unclear noise from the phone while assailed by what is also ‘intolerable’ outside – but which signifies the end of the war. Undeterred by Valentine’s shouted response, her interlocutor evidently wants very badly to deposit poison in her ear: gossip about her relationship with protagonist Christopher Tietjens that will inflict psychological trauma (it is important to note that other early reactions to the phone linked it both to insanity and witchcraft).46 And although the message is tortuous and fragmented, it is lodged – after several pages – successfully within Valentine. Not only could sound work, via the phone, as a principle of disintegration in fictional ways like this (because of the way the technology manipulates distance and borders), it could also do so because the telephone was often even less successful at communicating clearly at the front. Here, as Ford would have known due to his service as an officer, there were increased stakes – in the disjunction between its symbolic promise of communicative ability and the possible reality in that kind of war. Ford chooses two runners to open No More Parades – mirroring Valentine on the phone at the start of the subsequent book – to show its seriousness. Gary Sheffield’s and Dan Todman’s Command and Control on the Western Front details the mad scramble to get hold of as many instruments as possible in the winter of 1914–15.47 Telephones were fairly suddenly conceived of as the main solution to problems of communication, particularly between commanders and the front line. And yet cables were not laid deep enough, generally because of the state of the ground. As a result, they were easily cut by the first hostile shellfire in any bombardment (for example at Neuve Chappelle in 1915), leaving stranded commanders waiting by phones for news that was never going to arrive, and reliant once more not on modern technology but on vastly more primitive and restrictive methods of communication. The ‘final instrument of communication’, was too often not the telephone at all but the runner.48 Pre-selected and trained, with particular attention paid to their knowledge of the terrain and trench systems of the battlefield, the runner was both the most basic and therefore perhaps a most human casualty of the failure of the communicative promise of the telephone. (Ford’s two runners are sat down on the floor of a hut at first; it is a sympathetic, primitive, quasi-domestic scene – but sent on an errand, by a Sergeant Major ‘whispering at’ their ears, they are killed almost immediately.)49 When a distance needed to be maintained, in other words, it was quite possible that a telephone would cross it, however confusingly, to invade the autonomy and sanctity of the self in various painful ways; when a distance needed to be collapsed, a telephone could serve to signify the traumatising impossibility of communication. The phone lines themselves were obliterated by the most fearsome technological developments of the time: weaponry. What is perhaps the most well-known section of Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune is clearly indebted to the techniques of cinema and photography. The ‘Once during the night’ sequence50 is a cinematographic replay of the scenes of the day. Bourne’s mind acts as a projector, and also visually arranges and orders events, countering the ‘sudden, vivid flashes’ experienced at the time. But it is sound that starts things off. It is dark, and before he can see anything, in his mind or anywhere else, he hears the whimperings and ‘halfarticulate obscenities’ of his dreaming, shell-shocked comrades. The self is being defined

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 51

30/01/2012 16:24

52

sara haslam

as a membrane again, open to communicative acts, from one’s pals or from tormenting subordinates – as Tietjens discovers. Face-to-face communication posed as many existential challenges (just ask the runners-as-human-telephones) as telephonic varieties in the context of war, and is a common focus for writers. The shock of one Australian poem, ‘The Jester in the Trench’, lies in its depiction of sudden death, as a well-known funny man is about to hearten his comrades with a joke. ‘They heard no tale’, Leon Gellert’s poem recounts, ‘No further word was said. / And with his untold fun, / Half leaning on his gun, / They left him – dead.’51 Signified in this way is both the interrupted communication war perpetrates (linking back to experiences on the phone) and, contrary to much of the propaganda about war, the terrible ambivalence of its friendships. The fun is ‘untold’ but the men leave their mate, with whom they had just been talking, quickly and move on. ‘War began in comradeship’, writes Sarah Cole, and ended instead in the distancing mechanisms of ‘killed-friendship’,52 or ‘the tatters of speech’, as James Dawes describes it, thinking about Hemingway’s altered view of language post-war.53 ‘Two Masters’, a short story set after Gallipoli, in December 1915, provides examples of both Cole’s and Dawes’s views of communication at war. The narrator is deprived of his consoling but naïve trust in his mates’ upbeat tales by the keenly sarcastic Ralston (‘he had put out the little lights I thought were stars, and I would dream no more’). But he also hears later in a letter from Ralston that his ‘heart is broken’ by the fact he has had to kill a German friend while spying for his country – Ralston’s nationality is betrayed when he slips into English quoting Goethe’s Faust.54 Language might be said to ‘run out’ in situations like these, under strains like these. Woolf ’s depiction of the quiet patience of wounded soldiers, waiting for the noise of ‘Peace day’ (19 July 1919) to be over, is transmuted into the ‘unspeakability’ of war in Jacob’s Room (1922).55 And yet words are put together, though the arrangement may be new.

Shell-shocked Culture Is sound at war always experienced as trauma, and constructed as such in print? Some writing that it produced suggests that a disintegrative principle can also work, if never comfortably, at least regeneratively. Placing scenes from Wells’s Mr Britling56 alongside J. M. Barrie’s play The New Word (1918), we find fathers and sons stripped bare of their social and semantic protections, their vocabularies pushed to a new extreme of expressive vulnerability by war. ‘I’m going to cast a grenade into the middle of you,’ says Mr Torrance in The New Word, alarmingly, to his soldier son the night before he leaves for training. ‘It’s this, I’m fond of you, my boy.’57 (Roger is horrified.) In modernist texts, characters are also re-made in painful communicative acts. When Valentine comes to Tietjens, later on Armistice Day, she thinks that the phone in his empty house has ‘probably been disconnected’.58 The thought brings both joy – they won’t be interrupted – and terror – the physical connection that they will then make, is adulterous, illicit, new. And is only possible because the war has occurred.59 The phone (of course) does ring. It is Valentine’s mother. Both Valentine and Christopher speak to her in an excruciating confession of the fact they are about to embark on an affair. ‘Her mother said, after a long time: “Have you got to do this thing?. . . My little Valentine. . . My little Valentine!” She wasn’t sobbing. Valentine said: “Yes, I’ve got to do it!” She sobbed.’60 In Ford’s earlier masterpiece, The Good Soldier (1915), which does not take the war as its explicit subject but is nonetheless suffused by it, the traumatised narrator must negoti-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 52

30/01/2012 16:24

modernism and the first world war

53

ate his psychological state. For his cure, he imagines he shall ‘go on talking’, to a ‘sympathetic soul’, for days.61 Dowell’s instinct, for a man of 1915, is not surprising. Sound was, of course, fundamental to the ‘talking cure’.62 Even from its early manifestations as hypnosis, acoustic apparatus additional to the human voice was necessary to the doctors who practised with their hysterical patients.63 Freud clearly prioritised the voice in his psychoanalytic treatments, positioning his patients specifically to avoid eye contact so that the session could proceed instead ‘like a conversation’.64 Later, neurologists adopted similar techniques in their treatment of shell shock. In most accounts of war neurosis, emphasis is given to the various ways it amplifies soldiers’ psychological trauma. Here, though, I would like to focus on the way in which the gradually evolving therapeutic response to war neurosis represents both the need for repression and the healing powers of communication – however fragmented, painful, hesitant, and perhaps delayed, that communication must be. (Dowell knows that from time to time he will have to get up, walk around, disrupt the flow of talk; his curative, fantasy conversation is also happening years after the events he describes.) The disintegrative principle of sound, as embodied by the talking cure, is tied equally to the effects of war, and the building blocks of psychological reassembly.65 Though the clinical encounter is, of course, a distinct entity, in the portrayal of trauma modernism similarly allies its appreciation of the disintegrative principle of sound to an understanding of regeneration. In sound there is hope. Laying himself astonishingly bare as he recounts his traumatising war memories, Tietjens admits first on the phone to Mrs Wannop that, post-war, ‘One has desperate need. Of talk.’66 It is conversational, almost more than physical, access to her daughter that he craves. And, while he has a mother’s attention, he craves it from her as well. Other soldier-writers knew voices as a redemptive as well as a disintegrative force: ‘They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.’67

Conclusion: Boredom It is important to acknowledge, in conclusion to this chapter, that sometimes things went quiet. As Tietjens puts it, You hung about and you hung about, and you kicked your heels and you kicked your heels: waiting for Mills bombs to come, or for jam, or for generals, or for the tanks, or transport, or the clearance of the road ahead.68 It may well be true that the most ‘frequently endured experience for most soldiers’ was boredom.69 (It can be a surprisingly productive aspect of the therapeutic encounter, too.) As well as attending to their heightened, damaged senses, soldiers drank when they could; they had sex.70 Lice picking was a necessity. Football and cards were popular, but so, Parade’s End would have it, was sonnet writing.71 Though this activity may not have appealed terribly widely, absolutely everybody sang. Gramophones were sometimes available, even in the trenches. When they were not, the human voice, pluralised, connected the men in comedic, if bitter, tune. Communicative acts when the guns were silent by poets of faith and enthusiasm, and of terror, cynicism and doubt. Such acts were performed, if not in the hope of hearing the responsive words of peace Paul Baümer seeks from his comrade, then something related to them. The ‘moaning of the world’ has always made such a return, for whomever is listening, a formidable, but not an impossible, task.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 53

30/01/2012 16:24

54

sara haslam

Notes 1. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen (London: G. P. Puttnam’s, 1929), pp. 72, 108. 2. Past, but not too distant, examples include Paul Fussell, John Keegan and Eric Leed on the war as an event which ‘transformed language’, a summary found in Jay Winter and Blake Baggett, 1914–1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century (London: BBC Books, 1996), p. 12; also Trudi Tate’s observation in Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 3, that reading modernist writings and war writings together means the distinctions between them begin to dissolve. 3. Samuel Hynes, ‘An Introduction to Graeme West’, in Michel Roucoux (ed.), English Literature of the Great War Revisited (Amiens: University of Picardy, 1986), p. 82. See also Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 15. 4. Amy Lowell’s description, from her preface to Tendencies in American Poetry (1917). See extract in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane A. Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 342–4 (p. 342). 5. This time-lag is discussed by many commentators (though it glosses over key texts: Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire [1916], Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier [1918], and Richard Aldington’s Images of War [1919], for example). The reasons posed are many, and include the need for distance from the trauma by both reading and writing public, and the later contexts provided by the General Strike and the Depression. 6. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992), pp. 109, 114. 7. Such as those by Keable and Raymond. See Douglas Jerrold’s controversial essay on war literature, ‘The Lie About the War’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), in which he argues that the earlier books contained ‘more of the truth’. 8. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (London: Virago, 1987), p. 21. 9. Herbert Read, Art Now (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 59. 10. Malcolm Bradbury, Modernism 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 19. 11. ‘In the past two decades [. . .] the texts of modernism have been queered; racialized [. . .]; gendered, regendered and cross gendered; classed; globalized; postcolonialized; popularized’ – though the focus for this chapter at least remains a Western one. David Bradshaw and Kevin Dettmar (eds), A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 3–4. The term ‘modernisms’, as opposed to ‘modernism’, is also increasingly common. 12. See Sara Danius’s survey essay, ‘Technology’, in Bradshaw and Dettmar, pp. 66–78. 13. Critics such as, for example, Vincent Sherry, Jay Winter and Samuel Hynes. For a summary, see Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 2–5. 14. See Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and James Dawes, The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the United States from the Civil War Through World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 75. 15. Modris Eksteins, ‘The Cultural Legacy of the First World War’, in Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker and Mary R. Habeck (eds), The Great War and the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 335. 16. Rock Drill, perhaps (first version, 1913). 17. H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees it Through (London: Cassell, 1916), p. 182. 18. Ibid. p. 47. 19. Wells’s method in Mr Britling is to show the ‘loud report’ of the Archduke’s assassination being

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 54

30/01/2012 16:24

modernism and the first world war

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

55

‘altogether inaudible’ to Mr Britling and his companions at his country-house weekend (p. 76) – and then how things change. Adam Phillips, Side Effects (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 264. Winter, p. 5. Frederic Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 7. David Trotter’s essay, ‘The British Novel and the War’, in Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, pp. 34–56 has much to recommend it, however, including discussion of the lack of violence in war fiction. Steven Connor, ‘The Modern Auditory I’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 203–23 (p. 204). Danius, p. 73. The quotation comes from one of the most well-known passages in one of the most well-known essays on the subject, Virginia Woolf ’s ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919), in Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 6–12 (p. 8). Connor, p. 213. Mary R. Habeck, ‘Technology in the First World War: The View from Below’, in Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker and Mary R. Habeck (eds), The Great War and the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 99–131 (p. 104). Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Repression of War Experience’, in Collected Poems, 1908–1956 (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 89–90. See also Ivor Gurney, ‘On Somme’, in Collected Poems, ed. P. J. Kavanagh (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004). Ford Madox Ford, A Man Could Stand Up –, ed. Sara Haslam (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), p. 77. A Man Could Stand Up – is volume 3 of what became the tetralogy Parade’s End, and was published first in 1926. Some Do Not. . ., volume 1, was published in 1924; No More Parades, volume 2, was published in 1925; Last Post, the final volume, was published in 1928. Connor, p. 209. Cited in Winter et al., p. 202. The first quotation is from Habeck, p. 105. Pound’s exhortation to the modernists to ‘make it new’ is a first principle of modernism. Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–1994 (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 33–4. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. I, 1915–19, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 85. In Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), a car backfires on a busy London street. Mrs Dalloway knows what it is, but for Smith it represents something different entirely. The post-war Robert Graves wrote that ‘I couldn’t face the noise of heavy shelling now. The noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover’ (Goodbye to All That [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975], p. 220). Shephard writes that ‘by 1915, soldiers had learned that shells could come unannounced’, p. 34. Even the keenest listener may not hear every shell. Connor, p. 207. Ibid. p. 209. Quoted in Max Saunders’s introduction to his edition of Ford’s Parade’s End (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xiv. Ford, A Man Could Stand Up –, p. 7. Quoted in Herbert N. Casson, The History of the Telephone (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), p. 250. Ithiel De Sola Pool (ed.), The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 69, 9, 40. Ford, A Man Could Stand Up –, p. 8. Woolf, p. 210.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 55

30/01/2012 16:24

56

sara haslam

46. De Sola Pool, p. 209. Also, Ford has used phones similarly before. In A Call (1910), protagonist Robert Grimshaw’s mental breakdown is instigated by one. 47. Gary Sheffield and Dan Todman (eds), Command and Control on the Western Front: The British Army’s Experience 1914–1918 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2004), pp. 21–41. 48. Sheffield, p. 123. The resultant chaos – written messages were ‘often long-winded and sometimes unclear’, writes Martin Gilbert of this battle – was exacerbated by the fact that crucial messages crossed in mid journey. See Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), pp. 132–3. 49. Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), p. 22. Despite the kindly figure cut by Sergeant-Major Cowley, this depositing of information, because of its result, prefigures Valentine’s poisoning exchange. When the runners are killed, and carried back inside, the scene is awash with blood, ‘just like fresh paint, moving!’, p. 28. It suggests other exponents of primitivism in modernism: Picasso, perhaps; Eliot, too, in a different way. 50. Manning, pp. 6–9. 51. Leon Gellert, ‘The Jester in the Trench’, in J. T. Laird (ed.), Other Banners: An Anthology of Australian Literature of the First World War (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1971), p. 4. See also Remarque, p. 315. 52. Cole, pp. 149, 187. 53. Dawes, p. 132. 54. A. W. Wheen, ‘Two Masters’ [1923], in Criterion Miscellany, no. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), pp. 18, 30. 55. See Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 275. 56. Wells, p. 245. 57. J. M. Barrie, ‘The New Word’, in Echoes of the War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), p. 82. 58. Ford, A Man Could Stand Up –, p. 188. 59. War has ‘made a man of ’ Tietjens (Ford, A Man Could Stand Up –, p. 210), a man prepared to acknowledge both his physicality and his need for talk. It is more complex than that, however, and Tietjens is also plagued by a sense that communications about sex and war are interrelated. The promiscuity of his wife during the war, and the ways in which news of it reached Tietjens in the trenches and became confused with his duty (Tietjens was rumoured to have ‘sold’ Sylvia to Generals; Major-General Campion was said to have put Tietjens in harm’s way because he ‘wanted Sylvia Tietjens’ [ibid. p. 204]) mean that he has to discuss this thoroughly embarrassing mess – but can remain potentially exultant in his newly realised, newly expressed desire. 60. Ford, A Man Could Stand Up –, p. 193. 61. Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (London and New York: Norton, 1995), p. 15. 62. Originally, one of Anna O.’s descriptions of her treatment with Breuer. 63. Machines were deemed necessary to reproduce the traumatic sounds, or physical experiences, resulting in the neuroses. See Andreas Mayer, ‘Lost Objects: From the Laboratories of Hysteria to the Psychoanalytic Setting’, Science in Context, 19.1 (2006), pp. 37–64 (pp. 41–3). 64. See Mayer, p. 55. The key section of this essay is called ‘Voice Control’ and traces the soundscape of the consulting room. 65. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy constructs numerous examples in her depiction of the work of W. H. R. Rivers with his shell-shocked patients at Craiglockhart (including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen). 66. Ford, A Man Could Stand Up –, p. 199. 67. Remarque, p. 232. 68. Ford, A Man Could Stand Up –, p. 92.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 56

30/01/2012 16:24

modernism and the first world war

57

69. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005), p. 5. Others make a similar point. 70. Joshua Levine has recently compiled many first-hand accounts of both in Forgotten Voices of the Somme (London: Ebury Press, 2008). 71. Ford, No More Parades, p. 37.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 57

30/01/2012 16:24

6

THE GREAT WAR AND THE MOVING IMAGE: CINEMA AND MEMORY Michael Paris

I

n 1914, the war was greeted with huge public enthusiasm; almost the entire population of Britain was intensely excited by the prospect of war. Young men could not wait to get to France, and those left at home eagerly looked forward to the exciting dramas the war would offer. Today it seems curious that war, with all the associated horrors – death, destruction and hardship – could arouse such eager anticipation at the prospect of young Englishmen killing and being killed. So how can we explain this? The major reason, perhaps, was the manner in which war had been represented in British popular culture during the fifty years or so before 1914. The emergence of a mass popular culture began around the middle of the nineteenth century; increased leisure time, economic improvement and improved literacy, combined with significant developments in the technologies of production and distribution, resulted in a constantly expanding consumer market looking for cheap reading materials and entertainment of all kinds. In the latter decades of the century, this growing market, seeking exciting entertainment, avidly consumed theatricals, music hall varieties, reading materials and cheap prints. And one of the most exciting themes for all these entertainments was war. At that time the British experience of war was unique among Europeans. There had been no battle on British soil since 1745, thus the British had been spared any direct experience of the realities of war for well over a hundred years. What most people knew of war came through the reminiscences of veterans, and what they heard in the popular soldiers’ ballads, saw in theatricals and read in popular accounts, and that image of war was softened, sanitised and often wildly romantic. War, for the British was exciting, exhilarating and inevitable. Colonial wars were sold to the public as the inexorable march of the British people towards a preordained position of supremacy among nations – a necessary consequence of the need to extend and defend the empire on which national prosperity and prestige depended. Faced with such powerful arguments, most Britons simply enjoyed the spectacle provided by the representation of war – an exciting antidote to the boredom of everyday routine in factory or counting house. The danger, though, was that these versions of the ‘war story’ divorced the spectator from the brutal realities of battle by emphasising individual heroism, and chivalric behaviour.1 Even the development of photography had little effect on these sanitised representations. The equipment Roger Fenton took to the Crimean War in the 1850s was bulky and difficult to use. The plates required long exposures and made it impossible to record anything but a static pose. His images of that war, one of the most gruesome of the period,

58

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 58

30/01/2012 16:24

the great war and the moving image

59

reveal little but smiling faces and the quaint domesticity of the trenches. The invention of cinematography in the 1890s inherited these conventions and the cameramen who went to South Africa to film the war against the Boers, constrained by the limitations of their equipment, recorded little but columns of passing men and guns going into action. For the experience of battle, audiences had to turn to representations of war made by filmmakers at home who were eager to exploit the public’s interest. In films like The Sneaky Boer or The Attack on the Red Cross Tent, the spectator could see plucky Britons and barbarous Boers fight it out, man-to-man in close combat – detail which cameramen filming the ‘real’ war were unable to capture. In August 1914, the British government saw little place for film or filmmakers in the war effort. The cinema was simply frivolous entertainment; a crude indulgence for the pleasure of the lower classes. The political and military elite had no inkling of just how powerful film could be as a weapon of mass persuasion, and filmmakers found their offers of assistance in the war effort rejected again and again. In September 1914, Kine Weekly, the foremost trade paper, was arguing that film was uniquely placed to ‘arouse patriotism’. A few days later its rival journal, The Bioscope, suggested that citizens had the right to be informed about the conduct of the war, and cinema, with its ability to record the ‘actual likeness of events’, was well placed to play this role.2 The government, however, disagreed. Yet in those early months some footage of the war did appear on the screen. The newsreels were full of scenes of marching men, laughing as they accepted cigarettes and flowers from the crowds of onlookers who cheered them on their way to France. Movie cameramen even found their way to France with the British Expeditionary Force, and recorded even more smiling, laughing columns as they trudged along country roads looking for the enemy. But as soon as the armies came into contact and the retreat from Mons began, the generals sent the cameras home, fearful they would record information ‘of value to the enemy’. But those smiling, confident faces in this early footage belonged, of course, to the hardnosed professionals of the British Army, well trained and experienced in a dozen imperial campaigns and who believed victory was inevitable. Many in fact worried that they would be in France too late for the fighting. But they were not too late; nor were the million or more volunteers who followed them to France in 1915, and who quickly realised there was little to smile at. As the months passed, more and more men, and more and more material, were needed to feed the war, which had now become a bloody slogging match of attrition, in which both sides attempted to bleed their enemy to death in a series of battles, each bigger and more bloody than the last. Denied films or photographs that actually showed the fighting, the public relied on artists’ impressions in newspapers and magazines: heroic figures gallantly charging the German lines, struggling hand-to-hand with the wicked Hun and performing all manner of courageous deeds. Images that drew upon the experience of colonial warfare and which, of course, conformed to the public expectation of what battle was like. Filmmakers, however, determined to demonstrate their patriotism, set about recreating the war in their studios. In October 1914, the Hepworth studio released the narrative film Unfit or The Strength of the Weak.3 Bioscope reviewed it thus: ‘Both brothers wish to enlist, only the older is accepted. The younger is “unfit”. He goes to the front as a war correspondent and in the end gives his life for the sake of a girl they both love.4 Other patriotic films of 1914 included On the Russian Frontier, The German Spy Peril, The World at War and Wake up, or Dream of Tomorrow. It was through the government’s acceptance that this was ‘total war’ that things began

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 59

30/01/2012 16:24

60

michael paris

to change. Politicians awoke to the fact that they needed the full cooperation of all citizens, and thus needed to inform them about the manner in which the war was being fought, about its insatiable demands for ever more men and material. And what better way to inform the public than through film, a medium that reached millions and which was widely regarded as ‘the very picture of reality’? Positive images of war, then, would serve to encourage the war effort and raise public morale, dented by the fact that the war had not been won by Christmas 1914 and by the growing casualty lists. Finally, in mid 1915, the government, under pressure from the propaganda agency at Wellington House, appointed the first official war artists and allowed photographers to go to the front. With them went two cinematographers, Lieutenants Geoffrey Malins and J. B. McDowell. The footage they shot was released to the newsreels and thus, for the first time, cinema audiences were allowed to see what this war was really like, or rather what the movie camera could record of it. In the days before telephoto lenses and fast film, and with bulky, unwieldy cameras, the filmmaker was for the most part relegated to a safe position well behind the front line. Thus it was impossible to record the war in any detail. Film, then, was a disappointment to an audience weaned on graphic, detailed images of war created by the artist and popular illustrator. For viewers, film lacked the detail of battle to which they had become accustomed from other forms of popular culture. But this technical limitation actually served government interests – for they wanted a sanitised image of war that would not frighten the public or, more importantly, future volunteers and conscripts who would be needed to swell the ranks. By April 1916, the newspapers were still complaining that the films that had been released offered such little access to life at the front they might as well have been taken in this country. This attitude changed, however, in August with the release of the McDowell and Malins documentary, The Battle of the Somme, the official film account of the preparations and opening phase of the Somme Offensive in July, and one of the war’s bloodiest and most ill-conceived battles.5 The film had a tremendous effect on spectators and added a new dimension to the visual imagery of the war. While many of the scenes would have been familiar – columns of smiling troops moving up to the front, the preparations behind the lines and so on – it included a short sequence of British troops going ‘over the top’ and advancing on the German front line. This twenty-one-second sequence had tremendous effect on audiences – here was the real war at last. As we now know, but which contemporary audiences did not, the attack sequence was faked, filmed in Britain. The real footage of British troops going into action was filmed from such a distance as to be almost meaningless. The Somme equally distorts truth in other ways. The endless scenes of German POWs trudging back under guard, and the scenes of German dead appear to suggest that the battle was successful; indeed captions about objectives taken reinforce this suggestion. But in reality of course, the First of July was the most disastrous day in the history of the British Army. Yet while the film evades the truth in many ways, it cannot evade all the consequences, for The Somme also includes unprecedented footage of the pain and trauma on the faces of the troops, and a longer sequence that presents graphic images of the dead – German, of course – a slow pan across a heap of bodies at the bottom of a crater and later the unceremonious mass burials of the enemy dead. The Somme broke all box office records: Lloyd George wrote a dedication that was read aloud in many cinemas, and audiences across the country were shocked and horrified at the conditions at the front – far more horrible than they could ever have imagined; and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 60

30/01/2012 16:24

the great war and the moving image

61

nothing could disguise the suffering of the soldiers. It also introduced audiences to a new factor – that modern industrial warfare destroyed not only men but the environment as well. It is impossible to view The Somme without becoming aware of what the war had done to the gentle landscape of northern France – a theme that would be developed by the war artists, most notably Paul Nash. Cooperation between the government and the film industry was now assured and the War Office Cinematograph Committee, chaired by the press baron Lord Beaverbrook, became responsible for all film propaganda. The Somme was followed by other official films in the same style, The King Visits his Armies in the Great Advance (1916) and The Battle of Ancre (1917), but these images of the real war had a depressing effect on audiences; perhaps the pictures they offered were just too real after such a long diet of ‘seasoned’ images? Nor could audiences identify with the documentary format in the same way as narrative film; they preferred to be drawn into the story, to become part of the drama in a way that was impossible with this actuality footage. It was Beaverbrook again who, in 1917, perceiving that weariness and low public morale was having a deleterious effect on the war effort, took the next step and invited the celebrated American filmmaker, D. W. Griffiths, to make a narrative film about the war that would increase anti-German sentiment and provide the incentive to ‘carry on’ to victory. The Cinematograph Committee even partly financed the film. Hearts of the World – the Story of a Village is set in a village in eastern France.6 It begins in 1912; the villagers are happy, peaceful and content. A boy courts a girl, they plan to marry. The only fly in the ointment is an unpleasant German tourist, Von Strohm, who displays a curious interest in the strategic position of the village. Time passes; we are shown shots of leading politicians dealing with the political crises leading to 1914. In August, the men go to war and the village itself is attacked and occupied. Von Strohm now reappears in his true colours as an arrogant Prussian officer. The villagers suffer under the occupation and we are presented with moralistic captions like Month after month piled up with its legend of Hunnish crimes in the book of God. Finally, the Prussian, who has long been attracted by ‘the girl’, attempts to rape her. She is saved by ‘the boy’, and an advance guard of French and American troops who drive out the Germans – a typically naïve Griffiths scenario, but one which had enormous appeal for audiences. To establish the authenticity of the film, it opens with scenes of Griffiths in France looking for locations and later meeting Lloyd George. Curiously, it predicts the end of the war, for its final scenes are of the soldiers returning home. Griffiths and his crew did film in France and were given unprecedented access to the front line. But as Griffiths later explained in an interview: Viewed as drama, the war is in some ways disappointing, everyone is hidden away in ditches. As you look out over No Man’s Land there is literally nothing that meets the eye but an aching desolation of nothingness. . . It is too colossal to be dramatic!7 Thus while some of the footage shot in France was used, it was supplemented with material created on a Hollywood sound stage while the battle sequences were recreated on Salisbury Plain using British and Canadian troops. And it was these scenes which provided the necessary ‘realism’ to convince audiences that finally they were looking at the real war. Karl Brown, Griffiths’s cameraman, has recorded just how complex an operation it was to put together scenes, or parts of scenes, filmed in these different locations:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 61

30/01/2012 16:24

62

michael paris The film was continually switching from Hollywood to France to England and back to Hollywood, all within seconds of running time. A gun was fired in France and its shell shattered a wall on a [Hollywood] lot. . . three feet here, a foot there, ten frames somewhere else, and it’s done. . .8

Trickery, sleight of hand, indeed – yet what appeared on the screen conformed exactly to how audiences thought the war should look. Griffiths put into Hearts of the World the narrative drama that audiences felt the real war lacked – the ‘up close and personal’ element that cameramen at the front were incapable of capturing and which spectators, conditioned by fictional representations of war, had come to expect. Released just before the Armistice, Hearts of the World stunned audiences in Britain and America into silence. But its propagandist function – to encourage a flagging, war-weary public to fight on – was never tested. It is common for historians to argue that with the Armistice, the war disappeared from the screen; but it did not. It is true that fewer films were made, but the impact of the Great War on British society was so great, that it was an ever present shadow in popular culture, and not least in cinema. Between 1919 and 1939, more than thirty major feature films were made by British studios about the war; Hollywood produced three times that number; and if we add European productions to the list, it becomes clear that the Great War was a major theme in cinema throughout the period. Nor does that include those films that referenced the war in some way or another – films about war widows, disillusioned or damaged veterans and so on. It has equally become commonplace to argue that after the mid 1920s, British society turned against the war, recognising it as a futile struggle that achieved nothing but the death of a generation. Disillusionment was indeed present – particularly in the memoirs and novels by young veterans – and by implication in film. Viewing these films reveals a far less determinist picture, however. Between 1919 and 1929, British war films reflected a positive, almost heroic, interpretation of the war. Yes, they admitted, it had been terrible and many young men had been killed or maimed, but it was a justified struggle that ended once and for all the menace of Prussian militarism. Typical of this group of films were the British Instructional Films series of reconstructions of famous battles. Beginning with The Battle of Jutland in 1921, these included Ypres (1925) and Mons (1926). Made with the assistance of the government, these films were concerned to tell the story of the war in ‘heroic, value-affirming terms’; testaments to courage, patriotism and the nobility of sacrifice. Here the war was a justified crusade against tyranny, in which those who fell found immortality in the memory of the nation. Interestingly, they returned to pre-1914 imagery of war with captions that emphasised adjectives like ‘valorous’, ‘heroic’ and ‘brave’. Hugely popular with British audiences, these films acted as a form of commemoration – a monument to justified loss that fitted in with an official view of the war expressed through memorials and remembrance ceremonies. It is not difficult to understand why the public wanted to remember the war in such terms. After all, it was a far more comforting idea for the hundreds of thousands of bereaved families than accepting that their loved ones died for no good reason. One simply had to believe the war had been justified in order to give their death meaning. During the 1930s, however, the interpretation began to change, and the key text here is All Quiet on the Western Front, released in 1930, and still one of the most powerful antiwar films ever made.9 This American-produced version of a German novel tells of the plight of young German soldiers, but it speaks for all those young men who had gone to

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 62

30/01/2012 16:24

the great war and the moving image

63

war, and perfectly encapsulates the increasingly negative interpretation of the war, a view reinforced by films like the British documentary Forgotten Men (1934). The death of Paul, in the final scene of All Quiet, shot by a sniper as his hand reaches for a butterfly from the blasted trench, spoke to the pacifist sentiments of the interwar years. All Quiet paved the way for the final phase in filmic representations of the Great War which began after 1945. The Second World War was so obviously a just war that it threw into relief the senselessness of 1914; thus when later filmmakers approached the subject, it was with cynicism and bitterness. One has only to look at films like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) or Regeneration (1998), to realise just how far the filmic memory of the Great War has been transformed since The Somme and Hearts of the World.

Notes 1. On the development of the war story, see Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994); Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000). 2. Kine Weekly, 27 August 1914, p. 63; Bioscope, 3 September 1914, p. 859. 3. Unfit or The Strength of the Weak, film, directed by Cecil Hepworth. UK: Hepworth, 1914. 4. Bioscope, 10 September 1914, p. 873. 5. The Battle of the Somme, film, directed by Geoffrey Malins and J. B. McDowell. UK: War Office Cinematograph Committee, 1916. 6. Hearts of the World – the Story of a Village, film, directed by D. W. Griffiths. UK: Artcraft Pictures, 1917. 7. Quoted in Andrew Kelly, Cinema and the Great War (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 25. 8. Karl Brown, Adventures with D.W. Griffiths (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 195. 9. All Quiet on the Western Front, film, directed by Lewis Milestone. USA: Universal Pictures, 1930.

Further Reading Dibbets, K. and B. Hogenkamp, Film and the First World War (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995). Kelly, Andrew, Cinema and the Great War (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997). —, Filming All Quiet on the Western Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). Kester, Bernadette, Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Film of the Weimar Period (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003). Malins, Geoffrey, How I Filmed the War (London: IWM, 1998). Midkiff DeBauche, Leslie, Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War One (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). Paris, Michael, The First World War and Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). —, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000). Reeves, Nicholas, Official Film Propaganda During the First World War (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986). Robb, George, British Culture and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 63

30/01/2012 16:24

7

IRISH WRITING OF INSURRECTION AND CIVIL WAR, 1916–39 Matthew Campbell

T

he Irish Free State sat out the Second World War. This was not entirely due to an Irish propensity to pacifism: Claire Wills says that there were 5,000 members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the last years of the 1930s, and in 1939 they carried out 127 terrorist attacks in Britain. These culminated in a bomb in the centre of Coventry on 25 August, the week before the German invasion of Poland. Five died and sixty were injured.1 This was perhaps small-scale compared with the Luftwaffe’s firebomb attack on Coventry the following year, when the medieval city was destroyed and 600 were killed. But for some, Germany and Ireland shared a common enemy in Britain, and for all that Ireland was fairly securely established as a parliamentary democracy after the revolutionary formation of the State, the Irish Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, was not the only Irish politician who could not bring himself to support a primarily democratic alliance in which Britain played a leading role. Others were less ambivalent. Returning to occupied France from the safety of neutral Dublin in 1940, and eventually to join the Resistance as a noncombatant, Samuel Beckett was later to say, ‘You simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded.’2 Whatever the unfinished business with the United Kingdom after the island of Ireland was divided after 1921, whereby Northern Ireland remained in the UK, the fact was that the Irish were both determined to assert their hard-won (partial) sovereignty and exhausted after the nine years of fighting the Great War, war against the British and civil war up to 1923. That experience had also rendered them economically and militarily unfit to join an anti-Fascist alliance. Wills points out that Ireland was very much a ‘friendly neutral’ during the war, and the realist De Valera knew that ‘it was in Ireland’s long-term interest that Britain should win.’3 It was also no small matter that millions of Americans claimed Irish descent. But in certain ways, the Irish experience of war at home and abroad in the decades from the middle of the First World War to the outbreak of the Second was marked with a bloodshed perhaps different in intensity, but certainly no different in kind from that of other European countries. There was a weariness borne not only of involvement in world war, but also of revolution and its aftermath, the irresolution of partition. In the first two days of the Battle of the Somme, in July 1916, the Ulster Division took 5,000 casualties. Between 1914 and 1918, 30,000 Irish were to die in France and Belgium. At the same time, smaller-scale losses were occurring at home. Two months before the Somme, in the week following the rising of 24 April 1916, just over 400 insurgents, British soldiers and civilians were killed in the streets of Dublin. In the War of Independence from

64

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 64

30/01/2012 16:24

irish writing of insurrection and civil war

65

1918–21, 1,300 British and Irish were to die, and nearly 1,000 Irish died in the ensuing Civil War which ended in 1923.4 The experience of Russia after its revolution and Spain in its Civil War might have been more bloody, but there were similarities between these broadly contemporary wars and civil wars. Like Spain and Russia, the experience of war on their own land was followed by internal conflict, reaction and international isolation. It also occurred at the same time as, and was consequent upon, a period of extraordinary cultural resurgence. The so-called ‘Irish Revival’, on the stage and in poetry and fiction, like the Catalan modernism based in region, language and resistance to a centralising power, was one of the major artistic movements of the early twentieth century, also bringing with it an anti-imperialist politics. As the Irish novelist Colm Toibín has pointed out, we can compare Gaudí, Picasso and Miró with Yeats, Joyce and Beckett.5 Just before his death, in 1939, Yeats phrased the relation between cultural revival and political violence in typical Parnassian fashion, in which assumed remorse gives way to self-regard. Referring to his Cathleen Ní Houlihan of 1902, a play in which the eponymous Jacobite heroine exhorts the young men of Ireland to shed their own blood for her sake, Yeats asked, ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’6 The ‘certain men’ were those executed by the British after the 1916 Rising, and this is a famous question about the relation between poetry and violence. Later in the century, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon assumed the character of the exiled W. H. Auden, disillusioned after the victory of Fascism in Spain, in his fantasy poem of 1987, ‘7, Middagh Street’ composed of a number of imagined monologues spoken by artistic refugees from the war. The character ‘Wystan’ answers Yeats’s question more categorically: ‘Would certain men have stayed in bed / if Yeats had saved his pencil lead?’7 Another Muldoon character, whose historical original fled Catalonia to take refuge in the United States, ‘Salvador’ [Dalí], is allowed to express a sort of no-man’s-land between Yeats and Auden, as well as between the political and the aesthetic: We cannot gormandize upon the flesh of Cain and Abel without some melancholic vegetable bringing us back to earth, to the boudoir in the abattoir. Our civil wars, the crumbling of empires, the starry nights without number safely under our belts, have only slightly modified the tilt of the acanthus leaf, its spiky puce-and-alabaster an end in itself.8 Muldoon was writing towards the end of a century of violent Irish politics, and while that slight tilting of nature by wars is admitted, his ghastly half-rhyme, ‘the boudoir / in the abattoir’, has much to say about his predecessors in the earlier part of the century, seeking to occupy the safe spaces of the artistic, the domestic or even the erotic while aware they lingered near the spaces of industrialised death. The absence of a categorical political or historical position in the face of individual fear and the immeasurable facts of war is

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 65

30/01/2012 16:24

66

matthew campbell

typical of what might be at worse a sceptical and at best an oblique approach to the subject matter of war. Muldoon prefigures his compatriot Seamus Heaney’s statement in his 1997 Nobel Prize acceptance speech ten years later: ‘It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.’9 Later exiled writers like Heaney and Muldoon had their own massacre from which to escape, the Northern Irish Troubles after 1969, which were in one way a result of the partition of 1921. The earlier Irish writing about war, insurrection and civil war – frequently written while in the midst of it, usually published with much revision in its aftermath – is in its way exemplary of a tradition of early twentieth-century art devised, performed or published in the environs of a political violence happening at a slight distance from ‘the crumbling of empires’, but playing its own part in an imperial endgame. Whether that writing is made to speak back from the abattoir, like much British First World War writing, or to tell of the euphoria of a just war enthusiastically pursued, or just to find itself uncomprehending at the margins of a barely understood conflict, its authors occupy a range of possible positions, conveying a variety of experience, caught, as much war writing is, between perspective and engagement. Perhaps the most notorious attempt to separate out aesthetic, or even epic, perspective from the urge to bear witness to direct engagement was the comments in William Butler Yeats’s Preface to his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, justifying the omission of the British war poets. Yeats invoked the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.’ Yeats’s own tastes, not just for the epic, but the macabre and the burlesque, led him to recount a tale of questionable taste related to the overheard laughter of troops remembering a sergeant, who ‘struck by a shell turned round and round like a dancer wound in his own entrails’.10 He invokes the Irish ballad ‘Johnny I hardly knew ye’, which gave its tune to the popular American war ballad, ‘When Johnny comes marching home’ – but not its sense of the consolations of return. The dismembered soldier returns from the imperial service, to the bitter scorn of the girl he left behind him: You haven’t an arm, you haven’t a leg, Hurroo! Hurroo! You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg, Hurroo! Hurroo! You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg You’re an armless, boneless, chickenless egg; You’ll have to put wid a bowl to beg: Och Johnny I hardly knew ye!11 This is one version of aftermath, told in the voice from the street. Yeats had earlier fallen out with just this sort of writer, the working-class Dublin playwright Sean O’Casey, over how to write about those returned from war. O’Casey’s trilogy of Dublin plays of 1923–6, set in the Easter Rising (The Plough and the Stars), the War of Independence (The Shadow of a Gunman) and the Civil War (Juno and the Paycock), had expressed all the ambivalence and war-weariness of the newly liberated nation on the stage of what was to become its National Theatre, the Abbey. They had also proved remarkable hits, establishing with the theatre’s audience a rapport in which the demotic, the slapstick and the tragic edged away from a melodramatic mix to the experimental forms of theatrical modernism, and indeed cinema. Juno and the Paycock was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in London in 1930, and The Plough and the Stars by John Ford in Hollywood in 1936. The latter fol-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 66

30/01/2012 16:24

irish writing of insurrection and civil war

67

lowed Ford’s 1935 multi-Oscar-winning adaptation of Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel, The Informer, a proto-film noir telling a highly stylised tale of betrayal and tragedy in the streets of revolutionary Dublin. The second act of O’Casey’s next play, The Silver Tassie (1928) experimented with expressionism, set in a blasted Northern European battlefield, mixing song and verse drama with the witness of suffering brought back by those returning from the Great War. The Abbey management turned down the play, and Yeats’s extraordinary rejection letter to O’Casey was handed by the furious playwright to the London Observer. The resulting controversy was greeted with much glee among those in Dublin who shared O’Casey’s view of Yeats as printed in the paper: ‘Could anything equal the assumption of Zeusian infallibility?’ Yeats’s main objections were against removing the play from the specificities of the Dublin working-class and Irish political background that O’Casey had recreated so memorably in the earlier plays. But they were also against what Yeats saw as an anti-war feeling presented as the ‘journalism’ of the problem play, something not redeemed by the structure of tragedy.12 All of the Abbey directors agreed on the failings of the final act, in which the returned soldiers, crippled and blind, are unable to participate in the play’s eventual dance of life. Such symbolism has its creaky moments, but among the tricks O’Casey learnt from popular melodrama were the mixing of modes – the quick shift from tragic to comic, from an operatic intensity to music hall sentimentality, from the folk tradition to the gramophone – and the subsequent unease of the audience. In the 1920s this also meant viewing events on stage that had yet to be relegated to historical memory. The final act of The Silver Tassie seems to veer uncontrollably from a piece of extended slapstick over how to use a telephone, the skewed farce of two illicit lovers trying to hide from the girl’s wheelchairbound ex-athlete fiancé (who had earlier sung a ‘Negro Spiritual’ to the accompaniment of a ukulele), and a strange incantatory verse spoken by both maimed soldiers. It has a typical double O’Casey ending, although the earlier endings of the Dublin plays, where tragedy gives way to irony, are replaced here with a symbolism which borrows heavily from the lingua franca of kitsch. One of the lovers, Susie, seems to assert a new life, through dance and rhyme, repeating a variation of lines which had earlier been sung by the crippled soldier to the tune of the tango to which the other lovers are dancing: Time to look sad when we know, So let us be merry again. He is gone, we remain, and so Let him wrap himself up in his woe – For he is a life on the ebb, We a full life on the flow.13 O’Casey cannot allow this to be an assertion of the healthy in the aftermath of wounding and war. So a comic character, Mrs Foran, must give the play its final words, in which mode and feeling are underscored by the bogus: It’s a terrible pity Harry was too weak to stay an’ sing his song for there’s nothing I love more than the ukelele’s tinkle, tinkle in the night time.14 The banality of the international new – the telephone which had ‘tinkled’ earlier, the tango and ukulele crazes of the 1920s – supplants the Robert Burns ballad which had given the play its name. ‘The Silver Tassie’, a song of departing for war which had been sung by the soldiers at the end of Act One, is replaced with the consolations of consumerism.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 67

30/01/2012 16:24

68

matthew campbell

The Jacobite ballad gives way to the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Apart from his opposition to the experimental ideas gathered from the European socialism and modernism he loathed (‘this filthy modern tide’, as his 1939 poem, ‘The Statues’ would put it15), Yeats’s aesthetic objections were to dogmatism overriding dramatic form. O’Casey had also betrayed the principles of the national theatre, first sketched over thirty years previously: We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted & imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, & believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts & emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome.16 One of the features of prose writing about Ireland’s wars, either as fiction or autobiography, was its exploration of the connection between a revolutionary cause and its inspiration in an ideal of the ‘uncorrupted and imaginative’ people and place. Such stereotypes were wilfully propounded by the early Abbey writers as a corrective to the ‘stage Irishness’ in which Ireland was ‘the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment’.17 The Gaelic West was to replace inauthentic music hall and Punch-cartoon Irishmen. But while many Irish people were still living in the country, and a significant number were still Irish-speaking, Ireland’s internal wars, of independence and its aftermath, resulted in a confrontation of the modern and the pastoral. The meeting of the urban and the literate, in the figure of the ideologue-turned-guerrilla-fighter caught in the moment of war, with the long time of Irish landscape and history is a recurrent plot in post-Civil War Irish fiction. The Cork short story writers Frank O’Connor (born Michael O’Donovan) and Sean O’Faolain (John Whelan) were both to start their careers with fictions based on the revolutionary youth that they subsequently repudiated. This was not wholly to do with the dissatisfactions of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and resultant civil war: O’Connor’s best-known story, ‘Guests of the Nation’ (1931), rubs the humane – the friendship between IRA activists and the working-class British soldiers they are holding – against the inhuman – the killing of the soldiers in reprisal for British executions of republicans. The moments of grave-digging, final words and eventual shooting are all related with a vividly detailed naturalism robbed of political point, ideology emptied out so as to focus on those caught up in the nasty business of war and atrocity: I alone of the crowd saw Donovan raise his Webley to the back of ’Awkins’s neck, and as he did so I shut my eyes and tried to say a prayer. ’Awkins had begun to say something else when Donovan let fly, and, as I opened my eyes at the bang, I saw him stagger at the knees and lie out flat at Noble’s feet, slowly, and as quiet as a child, with the lantern-light falling sadly upon his lean legs and bright farmer’s boots. We all stood very still for a while, watching him settle out in the last agony. Then Belcher quietly takes out a handkerchief, and begins to tie it about his own eyes (for in our excitement we had forgotten to offer the same to ’Awkins), and, seeing it is not big enough, turns and asks for a loan of mine. I give it to him and as he knots the two together he points with his foot at ’Awkins, ‘’E’s not quite dead,’ he says, ‘better give ’im another.’ Sure enough, ’Awkins’s left knee as we see it under the lantern is rising again. I bend down and put my gun to his ear; then, recollecting myself and the company of Belcher, I stand up again with a few hasty words. Belcher understands what is in my mind. ‘Give ’im ’is first,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind. Poor bastard, we dunno what’s ’appening to ’im now.’ As by this time I am beyond all feeling

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 68

30/01/2012 16:24

irish writing of insurrection and civil war

69

I kneel down and skilfully give ’Awkins the last shot so as to put him forever out of pain. Belcher, who was fumbling a bit awkwardly with the handkerchiefs comes out with a laugh when he hears the shot. It is the first time I have heard him laugh, and it sends a shiver down my spine, coming as it does so inappropriately upon the tragic death of his old friend.18 O’Connor relates this scene from the point of view of the reluctant executioner, the soldier who at first cannot watch the shooting but then participates almost out of kindness. The guilty excitements of the scene – the teller as reluctant killer, the soldier waiting to be shot who lets out the laugh of the condemned, the seemingly extraneous detail of the handkerchief as blindfold – all create a scene of little half-understood dislocations of purpose more memorable than the ostensible reason for the act. The story’s celebrated final sentence is explicit about the significance of this aggregation of sickening epiphanies: ‘And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.’19 The sentence might be read as expressive of the way that other Irish people turned away from the abattoir of history, but other versions of such scenes still maintained that such acts might be necessary. The fumbling, along with another handkerchief-blindfold, also features in a first-hand account of such an execution, at the end of Ernie O’Malley’s War of Independence memoir, On Another Man’s Wound (1936): The six men of the firing-squad stood near the other side of the road. One of the men fumbled for a while with his magazine. He could not click it into place. An officer pulled down his handkerchief and looked at us, then he put it back over his eyes. Perhaps he thought we were trying to frighten and test them and that we did not intend to shoot. ‘Ram in the magazine,’ I whispered to the QM [Quarter Master].20 As with O’Connor, a pared-down style is used to convey experiences of a certain kind of psychic intensity. This is perhaps more common in history than might be wished, the stare of the eyes of the person you are about to kill despite the ritual of the blindfold. But the common experience is matched with the specifics of something belonging utterly to these unforgettable moments, the forgetting or slipping of the blindfold and the denial of its double relief, for killed and killer. In both accounts, the position of the narrator is that of executioner rather than executed. In his 1961 memoir, An Only Child, O’Connor revealed that in his own Civil War experience, he had been in the position of the prisoner fearing execution. Captured by Free State soldiers, he meets a prisoner who has been beaten and tortured, and is about to be shot for an attempt to burn a republican family in their beds. O’Connor recounts the stare thus: what seemed to me to be a bundle of rags was trying to raise itself from the floor. I reached out my hand and shuddered because the hand that took mine was like a lump of dough. When I saw the face of the man whose hand I had taken, I felt sick, because that was also like a lump of dough.21 The young Michael O’Donovan rapidly lost his youthful revolutionary zeal, and the rest of his memoir tells of a detachment from rhetoric made real, of blood sacrifice made manifest in atrocity. O’Connor reiterated the psychological fact which thirty years previously had ended ‘Guests of the Nation’: ‘Certainly, that night changed something for ever in me.’22

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 69

30/01/2012 16:24

70

matthew campbell

The careful aesthetic construction of O’Malley’s extraordinary memoir into three sections, ‘Flamboyant’, ‘Gothic’ and ‘Romanesque’, has been described by Nicholas Allen as art history in ‘reverse chronology [. . .] going forward is going backwards, the art image drawing the imagination back to a source obscured by the new state’s forward march.’23 O’Malley betrays little ambivalence about what he is doing in his memoir. Although such ideological reasoning as he gives is slight, he conveys the intuitive rather than fully developed intellectual position of the soldier rather than the politician. For the historian, one of the most revealing things about On Another Man’s Wound is its description of the organisation of the IRA as a guerrilla force, as told through O’Malley’s task, to communicate from the centre and organise a regional structure of ‘cells’. But O’Malley’s experiences of solitary, and dangerous, travel across a warring Ireland heightens the nationalism of the text in its telling of a perception of place and land. He conveys a feeling for the patterns of nature and the seasons as grasped in the intensity of a historical moment which is imitative of the larger patterns that these actions appear to be bringing to an end. It is seeking freedom. Allen rightly draws attention to the gathering together of the seasons in the impressionist prose-poem that is the closing pages of chapter 10.24 O’Malley can also bring together the sheer excitement of war with the naturalist’s eye and ear for a wild-life worth fighting for. In chapter 6 he recounts an experience from 1918, of nearly being arrested and then being shot as he escapes. He finds himself later, wounded in the calm of the dawn, one animal among the others who have been here in nature, and even in language, longer than his pursuers: In the grey of dawn I stepped into the Suck. It was deeper than I had thought and very cold. I came back to the bank and tied a tin box of cartridges to my wounded wrist, then, holding my gun out of the water, I swam. I saw two bog larks go up high to sing in the morning. I was in a marshy land amongst rushes; further on I found quaggy bog which squelched beyond my knees. I heard the bleat of a young lamb; then it sounded like a kid. There was someone lost beside myself. I circled around looking for the lost lamb. I imitated the noise. The sound came again and then I laughed as I saw what it was. Above me a jacksnipe was rising in spirals, then curving down with a rush; the beat of his wing made a noise like that of a young goat. I must have been close to the nest and I might have saved myself trouble if I had remembered the Irish name for jacksnipe, mionnán aerach, the airy kid. Perpendicular shafts of silver rain fell to the west, the grey clouds went away and the sun came out.25 ‘I might have saved myself trouble’: working out whether he was hearing a bird or a goat or a lost lamb is surely small trouble compared with being up to the waist in water, with a bullet-wound to his ankle. O’Malley’s writing is full of such deliberate distractions, in part the extraordinary physical and linguistic empathy for place – as if only the poetic precision of a Gaelic phrase could tell him what sort of thing a jacksnipe was – and in part the sensations of the conscienceless soldier, immune to personal danger, conveying the adrenalin of war as the euphoria which enables a heightened perception. In fiction and poetry, even given the ambivalences of disillusioned authors writing after the unsatisfactory conclusion of the Civil War, such euphoria translates into a sort of romanticism. Sean O’Faolain’s 1931 ‘Fugue’, for instance, keeps its characters breathlessly on the run, while seeking a pause for the normalities of love. Its narrator twice meets a young woman, and is denied consummation as news of the death of his companion wrenches him away from the girl. On the one hand, the story’s modernity seeks the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 70

30/01/2012 16:24

irish writing of insurrection and civil war

71

abstract and international musical form of the fugue of its title. On the other, it replays the erotic disappointments of the Irish aisling tradition, in which the poet is greeted with a vision of a beautiful but untouchable woman pining for the loss of a lover. These are allegories for the loss of Irish sovereignty, and if O’Faolain’s story is caught in a later struggle for that sovereignty, its aesthetic structure is somehow at odds with its historical construction. The story ends with a translation from an ancient Irish poem, and invokes two images from Yeats, the dawn and the gyring patterns of history, in its final sentence: ‘The dawn moved along the rim of the mountains and as I went down the hill I felt the new day come up around me and life begin once again its ancient ceaseless gyre.’26 O’Faolain was later to repudiate such dawns and their sense of a pattern authenticated from the ancient. His terms would later have more in common with those of O’Connor than O’Malley, a dazed and not concentrated reflection on what it is to look in the face of death. Besides, when I wrote ‘Fugue’, my first successful story, I had come out of an experience which had left me dazed – the revolutionary period in Ireland. Not that it was really an experience as I now understand that word. It was too filled with dreams and ideals and a sense of dedication to be an experience in the meaning of things perceived, understood and remembered. I perceived all right, I remembered all right, but it had been far too much to understand; especially the disillusion at the end of it, for, as few people who are not Irish now remember, that revolutionary period ended in a civil war, and civil war is of all wars the most difficult for its participants to understand. Besides, as I found myself yesterday making a character in a novel I am writing say, ‘It’s a terrible and lovely thing to look in the face of Death when you are young, but it unfits a man for the long humiliation of life.’27 But historical change did come to Ireland in this period, and there was a tilt in the social structure of a place no longer under the rule of the British, a place in which previous rulers and landowners had been dislodged. Whether this was ever an encounter of the oppressive old and the revolutionary new is moot. Ireland was not Russia, and the system of landowning and property was not radically to change. One aspect of what O’Faolain calls the disillusion at the end of the revolutionary period was simply that one old thing changed places with another, the power of the Anglo-Irish aristocrat simply handed over to his previous tenants while his property remained with him, albeit in disgrace and ruin. In the title story of the volume in which ‘Fugue’ appeared, ‘Midsummer Night Madness’, O’Faolain’s combatant-narrator returns from the city ostensibly to deal with an ill-disciplined local IRA cell. He is confronted instead with mayhem, the burning of old houses and the coupling of aristocrat and peasant in a grim parody of the eugenicist discourse which was to wreak such horror on 1920s and 1930s European reactionary thought. The aged alcoholic aristocrat Old Henn has impregnated a serving girl whose ‘tinker’, and thus indeterminate, origins are summed up by the only name she is given, Gypsy. Following the destruction of his Anglo-Irish neighbour’s house, and his own imminent exile, he consoles himself with the thought that if the girl’s child is a boy, ‘’twill keep the name alive’. The narrator glosses this simply, with a single-sentence paragraph, ‘As if he were a Hapsburg or a Bourbon.’28 It is a scenario played out again by Yeats in his 1939 play Purgatory, in which the last remaining member of a big-house family is doomed to replay the burning of the house and the killing of his illegitimate son, ‘because had he grown up / He would have struck a woman’s fancy, / Begot, and passed pollution on’.29 In his 1923 ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, Yeats had recounted being barricaded

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 71

30/01/2012 16:24

72

matthew campbell

in his own house, a converted Norman tower, symbol of long occupation and surveillance turned to legitimate target. His commentary on the mess of the new state recasts his originary formulation of the heroic act of resistance of Easter 1916 as a ‘terrible beauty’, in which the doubt of fanaticism had been entertained: ‘And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?’30 In the final section of the ‘Meditations’, ‘The Stare’s Nest by my Window’, the result is this: We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare; More substance in our enmities Than in our love.31 In his 1931 ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’, Yeats excuses himself thus: ‘Out of Ireland have we come / Great hatred, little room’.32 The sense of a local feud turned inwards to the anger of ‘A fanatic heart’ was to result for Yeats in a dalliance with fascism in the face of the insecurities of the new state. O’Casey was to spend the rest of his working life in London. O’Malley went into political and artistic exile, at one stage spending time with Georgia O’Keefe and D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico. As one of Ireland’s best-selling authors of the mid part of the century, O’Connor’s battles with the Free State were against its illiberalism: his translation of eighteenth-century Irish poet Brian Merriman’s Cúirt a Mheán Oíche / The Midnight Court was to be banned, a fate which was spared the Irish-language original, which the censor presumably viewed as unread. Through his stories, novels and journalism, particularly in the journal he founded and edited in 1940, The Bell, O’Faolain was to act as the voice of a sort of bourgeois liberal cosmopolitanism, writing in reaction to the dominant Catholic ideology of the new state forged by Eamon de Valera. It is perhaps the outsiders, or non-participants, in this demise of revolution in the bitterness of civil war who might ultimately be allowed to speak of the dominant obliquity of later Irish writing on the subject of war. For Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett, religion and class set them apart from the historical events convulsing the country in which they were born. All three participated in various ways in the Second World War, in propaganda, surveillance or resistance. Like Beckett, and unlike his fellow imaginary denizen of 7, Middagh Street, Auden, MacNeice returned from America to assist with the war effort as a BBC writer and radio producer in London. Beckett’s war experience in France was to result in his own version of blasted landscape and the aftermath of shock. He had earlier seen that artistic form as well as European society was facing a different sort of crisis of the unresolved in the interwar years, the new aesthetic forms which partake inevitably of the geography of the battlefield. He wrote in 1934 of his modernist contemporaries: the younger Irish poets evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object, whether current, historical, mythical or spook. The thermolaters [. . .] would no doubt like this amended to breakdown of the subject. It comes to the same thing – rupture of the lines of communication. The artist who is aware of this may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects; he may state it as no-man’s-land, Hellespont or vacuum, according as he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic or depressed.33

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 72

30/01/2012 16:24

irish writing of insurrection and civil war

73

‘The breakdown of the object’, ‘rupture of the lines of communication’, ‘no-man’s land’: this is a philosophico-critical vocabulary inevitably contaminated by memory of the Great War, broken further in the vacuum left by civil war. Bowen was later to report back to the British Foreign Office from ‘neutral’ Dublin, and her 1948 novel The Heat of the Day was set in the London Blitz. But it is in her earlier War of Independence novel of 1929, The Last September, in the character of Lois, the inexperienced daughter of the Big House, that she may have summed up the position of these writers, bystanders drawn into conflict, soldiers desiring the perspective of the bystander. Early in the novel, caught alone in the garden at evening, Lois is passed unseen by a man in a trench coat. He appears to her merely as ‘the rise and fall of a stride, a resolute profile, powerful as a thought’. Lois does not see the gunman’s face, just his profile, but she wonders what he might be doing: It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry; down from the mountains taking a short cut through their demesne. Here was something else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: it was a way of living, an abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of being detached and washed out west from the British coast.34 The Last September ends with the tragedy of the assassination of Lois’s lover and more burning of ancestral houses, the ruin of family and class that Lois has unconsciously been aware will happen. Whether or not in the general course of the catastrophes of early twentieth-century European history, Ireland was merely ‘an oblique frayed island’, its writers approached these unresolved moments in its history with the obliquity which comes from frayed nerves. The end result of something Lois frames as ‘because of Ireland’ resulted in a sort of collective shock, one which was to continue to erupt into violence in the decades following after wars which nobody really won, and over which the stare of the dying was to exert an increasingly baleful influence.

Notes 1. Clair Wills, That Neutral Island (London: Faber, 2007), pp. 38–9. 2. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 304. 3. Wills, p. 10. 4. See S. J. Connolly (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 196, 488, 15 and 265. 5. See Colm Toibín, ‘Ireland and Catalonia: Fearful Symmetries’, Bells: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies, 11 (2000), pp. 243–8. 6. W. B. Yeats, ‘Man and the Echo’, in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950). 7. Paul Muldoon, ‘Wystan’, in ‘7, Middagh Street’, in Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 178. 8. Paul Muldoon, ‘Salvador’ in ‘7, Middagh Street’, in Collected Poems, p. 186. 9. Seamus Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-lecture.html (accessed 20 September 2011). 10. W. B. Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. xxxiv–xxxv. 11. Stopford Brooke and William Rolleston, A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue (London: Macmillan, 1900), pp. 10–12.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 73

30/01/2012 16:24

74

matthew campbell

12. See R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), vol. II, pp. 365–72. 13. Sean O’Casey, The Silver Tassie (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 131. 14. O’Casey, pp. 131–2. 15. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Statues’, in Collected Poems, p. 376. 16. W. B. Yeats, manifesto for ‘The Celtic Theatre’, 1897, quoted in R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vol. I, p. 184. 17. Ibid. p. 184. 18. Frank O’Connor, ‘Guests of the Nation’, in The Best of Frank O’Connor, ed. Julian Barnes (London: Everyman, 2009), pp. 13–14. 19. Ibid. p. 17. 20. Ernie O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound (London: Anvil, 1979), p. 376. 21. Frank O’Connor, An Only Child (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 243. 22. Ibid. pp. 243–4. 23. Nicholas Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 149. 24. See Allen, pp. 147–8, and O’Malley, pp. 150–6. 25. O’Malley, pp. 91–2. 26. Sean O’Faolain, ‘Fugue’, in Stories of Sean O’Faolain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 64. 27. Sean O’Faolain, ‘Foreword’ to Stories, p. 10. 28. Sean O’Faolain, ‘Midsummer Night Madness’, in Stories, pp. 15–48 (p. 48). 29. W. B. Yeats, Purgatory, in Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1952), p. 688. 30. W. B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, in Collected Poems, pp. 204–5. 31. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Stare’s Nest by my Window’, in Collected Poems, pp. 230–1. 32. W. B. Yeats, ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’, in Collected Poems, p. 288. 33. Samuel Beckett, ‘The Bookman’ (1934), in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), pp. 70–9 (p. 70). 34. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (London: Penguin, [1929] 1942), p. 34.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 74

30/01/2012 16:24

8

THE POETRY OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR James Fountain

B

ritish and American poetry of the Spanish Civil War can perhaps best be understood as a network of personal causes or crusades. The desire for a common British crusade for freedom is reflected in C. Day Lewis’s ballad The Nebara. ‘Phase One’ opens: Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage Of statesmen, the tyrant’s dishonoured cheque, or the dreamer’s mad Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.1 Day Lewis’s speaker displays clear Republican sympathies: the ‘base coinage’ of all those whom the Republican brigades are battling against, the bankrupt ideologies these armies are fighting to overthrow in the process of defeating Franco: the ‘statesmen’ and ‘the tyrant’ who issues a ‘dishonoured cheque’, pitched against ‘simple men’, the Loyalists, who would rather not fight, but prefer to die ‘than see the image betrayed’. The Communist crusade was, in many respects, an image-conscious crusade. The need to be consistently seen as unified was expressed in a willingness to kill and be killed. Blood became the key metaphor for Communist unity in British poetry of the Spanish Civil War. Day Lewis’s poem ends with a stanza beginning: ‘freedom was flesh and blood – a mortal / Body, the gun-breech hot to its touch’2 – the ‘flesh and blood’ of a Republican soldier naturally conjoining with the ‘gun-breech’. George Barker, a British surrealist poet, also uses the blood-red metaphor as a conceit in his depiction of British Communist crusaders, in Section X, stanza three of Calamiterror (1937), an experimental long poem typical of the poet’s early work, incorporating both the archaic and the futuristic though its symbols, though rooted in the troubles of its time: The centre of my heart like a red tree Puts forth a hand and indicates the common red rose; Which when I take lifts its petals like tongues Articulating red; speaks of privations, poverty, Duplicity, oppressions, camouflaged collusions; And I observe that every move of its lips leaves blood. What flower then shall the red tree in your heart wear But the red tongues of the rose, which speak and bleed?3

75

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 75

30/01/2012 16:24

76

james fountain

The symbol of ‘the common red rose’ whose ‘petals’ move like ‘tongues’ is used to articulate the social problems the speaker views as pervading the Western world, listed as: ‘privations, poverty, / Duplicity’ and ‘oppressions’. Barker’s poem is very obviously dominated by the metaphor of the red rose as a political flower, offered as a symbol for passionate communism.4 Indeed, he questions how anyone could not feel sympathetic to the Communist cause in their ‘heart’ when those representing ‘the rose’ in defence of the oppressed ‘speak and bleed’. Laurie Lee, another British poet who wrote of the war and fought there, uses symbolism comparable to Day Lewis’s and Barker’s, such as in ‘A Moment of War’ (1944): It is night like a red rag drawn across the eyes the flesh is bitterly pinned to desperate vigilance the blood is stuttering with fear.5 Lee’s speaker places an emphasis upon the ‘desperate vigilance’ of the soldiers in the International Brigades – clinging to their anti-fascist crusade, but fearing failure and death may be the inevitable consequences of their mission. The ‘red rag / drawn across the eyes’ could be said to represent the Communist vision. However, unlike the speakers in Day Lewis’s and Barker’s poetry, the ‘blood’ with which this ideological belief is linked is left ‘stuttering with fear’, suggesting a futility of vigilance both physical and ideological, thereby questioning the possibility of true Communist unity, making Spain a hopeless crusade. This seems even more likely since the poem was published five years after the war had ended. The presence of varying degrees of commitment to Communism in British poetry of the Spanish Civil War is indicative of the differing personal crusades of each writer. The fractious nature of the Loyalists, their failure to decide upon one overreaching ideology, is clearly evident in the literature produced by the International Brigades. The concept of ‘crusade’ was one the many US participants in the Spanish Civil War would certainly have understood, given their acute and recent exposure to it by US administrations. M. J. Heale comments that in the twenty years prior to the Spanish Civil War: a Christian moralism animated the highest in the land. Theodore Roosevelt saw the world in terms of good and evil [. . .] It was necessary to make war on ‘grave evils’, to expose ‘every evil man’ [. . .] Roosevelt’s theme song at the Progressive Party convention of 1912 was ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’6 During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson ‘read the Bible daily’, and believed that he had been ‘sent to the White House by God’.7 The collective consciousness of the United States was greatly affected by the religious fervour of their premiers, and Wilson’s in particular, during the American crusade for lasting world peace which began with the Great War. However, Roosevelt’s Second Neutrality Act of 1936 prohibited private loans as well as arms sales to belligerents – including Republican Spain. Melvyn Dubofsky argues that ‘many Americans sympathized deeply with the Loyalists and saw them as between democracy and dictatorship (“totalitarianism”), but most citizens supported the cautious neutrality of the administration.’ He goes on to add: ‘Later Roosevelt did contemplate raising the embargo but did not act because of domestic opposition and the hopelessness of the loyalist cause.’8

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 76

30/01/2012 16:24

the poetry of the spanish civil war

77

In spite of this, a great number of Americans did go over to fight, and there are many poems by prominent American writers who fought in Spain. Because like the British they did not have the backing of their own government, American soldiers’ crusades in Spain were often deeply personal. At the end of the war, Edwin Rolfe recorded his disgust at Roosevelt’s ‘cowardly’ non-intervention, and, indeed, the non-intervention of anybody who enjoys freedom and who is unwilling to fight for it, in ‘Brigadas Internacionales’ (1939): To say We were right is not boastful, nor We saw, when all others were blind nor We acted, while others ignored or uselessly wept. We have the right to say this because in purest truth it is also recorded: We died, while others in cowardice looked on.9 The use of italics adds to the shrill anger of Rolfe’s response. The poem was published in November 1939, by which time Spain was under fascist control, neither of the major Western powers having lifted a finger to help. British and American writers in the International Brigades, animated by the intense propaganda and urgency of the situation as experienced in Spain, raged at their respective governments and identified them as proFranco. Having fought in the war, the speaker insists, a soldier has ‘the right to say this’. Kenneth Rexroth’s ‘Requiem for the Spanish Dead’ (1937) published toward the start of the campaign, seems doom-laden from the start, documenting a hopeless crusade: I see the unwritten books, the unrecorded experiments, The unpainted pictures, the interrupted lives, Lowered into the graves with the red flags over them, I see the quick gray brains broken and clotted with blood, Lowered each into darkness, useless in the earth.10 There is a huge sense of wasted intelligence as the ‘quick gray brains’ are lowered ‘useless’ into the earth, minds which could have been used to secure and sustain equality and freedom. Yet by the end of the poem, as in so much British verse of the Spanish Civil War, the speaker is arguing that a unity nevertheless remains, despite the growing number of casualties. Rexroth describes the crusade as ongoing, transcending the war itself: ‘I hear the voice of a young woman singing. / [. . .] / Voice after voice adds itself to the singing.’11 Langston Hughes was one of many African Americans who recognised the significance of the Spanish Civil War as a crusade against fascism for Communism which could cause radical changes in society. Communism in Spain offered a radical means of introducing a racial and social equality which was lacking in the US. Hughes’s contribution to Writers Take Sides illustrates his thoughts on the significance of the Spanish Civil War: Of course, I am against fascism with its spread of color prejudice and race hatred and working class oppression. How could any sensible Negro be otherwise? Therefore, I favor the legal government of Spain in its struggle against the Franco Rebels and all who believe as Franco does in crushing the people by force of arms.12 In ‘Postcard from Spain’ (1938), Hughes proves the war was of far more significance for him than as a struggle ‘against fascism with its spread of color prejudice and race hatred

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 77

30/01/2012 16:24

78

james fountain

and working class oppression’. The poem introduces the crusade with which Hughes aligned himself in Spain. Written in the form of a letter addressed to Alabama from ‘Lincoln-Washington Battalion, / April, 1938’, the speaker is black, and his colloquial mode of expression and Alabama drawl suggests that he is working class. The key emphasis is placed upon the central lines: ‘Folks over here don’t treat me / Like white folks used to do.’ This is counterpoised with the following lines which hark back to the ‘color prejudice’ of late 1930s Alabama: ‘When I was home they treated me / Just like they treatin’ you.’13 Spain proved to be an arena in which black and white people could interact as equals, and the speaker sees this as a major turning point in race relations, as he conducts his own personal crusade: I don’t think things’ll ever Be like that again: I done met up with folks Who’ll fight for me now Like I’m fightin’ now for Spain.14 This final stanza represents the great African American hope placed in the Spanish Civil War: that it would be a war that would finally bridge racial and class divisions. James Yates, a Black American who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, comments on this in Mississippi to Madrid (1989) that by early spring 1937 Spain had become a ‘United Nations of a special kind’. He goes on: Men and women of all different tongues and nationalities, young and old, all came together to fight side by side with the Spanish people. The Spaniards were not only fighting to save themselves and their country from fascism but Europe and the whole world from plunging into the horrors of war.15 ‘Letter From Spain’ (1937), a poem in which Hughes uses the same speaker, but dated six months earlier, is equally optimistic regarding this unifying cross-racial attempt to preserve peace: ‘I looked across to Africa / And seed foundations shakin’’: Cause if a free Spain wins this war, The colonies too, are free – Then something wonderful’ll happen To them Moors as dark as me.16 The poem’s speaker is addressing a dying Moor, stating ‘old England’ and ‘Italy’ are ‘afraid to let a worker’s Spain / Be too good to me and you– / / Cause they got slaves in Africa– / And they don’t want them to be free’.17 Hughes notes the link between Spain and British imperialism, the lessons learnt from the actions of Hitler and Mussolini, and the moves taken by the British Empire to impose their will upon native colonies. A ballad-epistle written in dialect, the poem presents an ordinary black speaker who is aware of contemporary international politics, and looks across to Africa and sees ‘foundations shakin’’, the link made between Hughes’s hometown of Harlem, Spain, Africa and the wider world. The possibilities of a ‘free Spain’ which would cut across racial prejudice and disregard class delighted Hughes, and he thus set about his own personal crusade in Spain, staying there from late July until just after the middle of November 1937 in support of the cause: ‘In the Civil war in Spain, I am a writer, not a fighter. But that is what I want to be, a writer, recording what I see, commenting upon it, and distilling from my own emotions

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 78

30/01/2012 16:24

the poetry of the spanish civil war

79

a personal interpretation.’18 In a rousing address given on 19 July 1937 in the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin as part of a group of four US delegates which included Malcolm Cowley, Anna Louise Strong and Louis Fisher, and entitled ‘Too Much of Race’, Hughes explained the importance of his presence in Spain, enabling a ‘recording’ of these scenes: We Negroes of America are tired of a world divided superficially on the basis of blood and color, but in reality on the basis of poverty and power – the rich over the poor, no matter what their color. We Negroes of America are tired of a world in which it is possible for any one group to say to one another: ‘You have no right to happiness, or freedom, or the joy of life.’ We are tired of a world where forever we work for someone else and the profits are not ours. We are tired of a world where, when we raise our voices against oppression, we are immediately jailed, intimidated, beaten, sometimes lynched. . . I say, we darker peoples of the earth are tired of a world in which things like that can happen. And we see in the tragedy of Spain how far the world oppressors will go to retain their power. . .19 The fact that Hughes made this speech only a week before travelling to Spain indicates he had already formulated his opinion of the symbolic significance of the war. He saw ‘the tragedy of Spain’, fascism’s impingement on Spanish liberty, as reflective of black American oppression, the potential annihilation of liberty representing a danger to issues not only of ‘blood and color’, but also ‘poverty and power’. A symptom of his communist beliefs is the care Hughes takes to bind poverty and racial prejudice in this speech, a European attitude which had the potential to be adopted in the United States. Spain provided him with stark symbolic tools which expanded the polemical debate on race, and these were confirmed when he arrived. In a broadcast from Madrid on 27 August 1937, he reported that in Spain he had encountered ‘no prejudice’.20 The discovery of an oasis where the prejudices of his own country had seemingly never existed rekindled Hughes’s desire to effect change where racial problems now seemed outmoded and connected with imperialist intentions. This particular brand of idealism might be seen as optimism of the will, as well as, of the intellect, yet fascism presented a new, tangible enemy which could be attacked by a unified black and white population. With the advent of the Spanish Civil War, African Americans could for the first time envisage the potential for an end to racial prejudice. British Spanish Civil War verse gradually took on a tone of melancholy despair, and writers began to question their very motives for being involved in the conflict. The humanitarian crusade upon which British writers initially embarked was eventually to appear hopeless. C. Day Lewis’s ‘Newsreel’ totters on the edge of dejection: ‘Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious / At what your active hours have willed.’ The ‘common source’ of the Republican crusade leaves the persona ‘Sleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious / Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.’ For Lewis, the political intentions of the crusade recede into ‘pregnant fancies’, while a ‘politician’ wishes to prove the mayor’s ‘oyster season’ is successfully underway by appearing ‘In fishing-waders to prove that all is well’.21 Day Lewis reflects upon the immediate political interest that lured him to the war, but the reflection is swiftly followed by an after-effect of repulsion. Other British writers gradually realised the hopelessness of the Republican crusade, and the ultimate fruitlessness of the cause. The final stanza of Roy Fuller’s poem ‘Times of War and Revolution’ looks back by bringing this sense of British dejection sharply into focus:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 79

30/01/2012 16:24

80

james fountain The pages char and turn. Our memories Fail. What emotions shook us in our youth Are unimaginable as the truth Our middle years pursue. And only pain Of some disquieting vague variety gnaws, Seeing a boy trace out a map of Spain.22

The war is reduced to the uncontrolled ‘emotions’ of ‘youth’, set against the sobriety of middle age, a generational split separating republican and fascist supporters. As for Day Lewis, a ‘disquieting vague variety gnaws’ at Fuller’s mind as he remembers the Republican failure while watching ‘a boy trace out a map of Spain’. The Spanish Civil War, then, became a symbol of lost justice and hope, an emblem of the insurmountable struggle as the 1930s came to a close, ending just as Europe was catapulted into World War II. At the beginning of World War II, two years after his experiences in Spain, W. H. Auden meditated upon the pattern of violence which repeats itself in ‘September 1, 1939’: ‘The habit-forming pain, / Mismanagement and grief: / We must suffer them all again.’23 W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘Politics’, written during the period of the Spanish Civil War, wryly meditated on the distractions of politicians, and how they could persuade a man away from the true point of life, towards a crusade which offered little hope: ‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.’ – THOMAS MANN How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here’s a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there’s a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war’s alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!24 Yeats’s inclusion of a quotation from Thomas Mann is important. Mann was part of the exodus of writers, artists and scientists from Nazi Germany, and thus a representative of ‘the travelled man’.25 The truth of war comes from what the travelled man ‘knows’ and ‘talks about’, from the mind of a politician who has ‘read and thought’, and finally ‘what they say’. This would appear to be Yeats’s implied reason for why war begins: ‘they’ submerge the individual, persuade him into being part of a mass charging into war, so that ‘the girl standing there’ in the speaker’s memory remains standing there, the speaker left in later years reminiscing, wishing he had had no care of ‘war and war’s alarms’, which in hindsight appear nothing more than temporary distractions. Yeats cements, as an Irish exile living and working in Britain, and with his only commentary on Spanish politics, the British attitude of wasted life and wasted breath, cheering for a doomed revolution. This was not only a British attitude: the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 80

30/01/2012 16:24

the poetry of the spanish civil war

81

returned to America on controversial terms, and were shamefully treated by their countrymen. Ted Veltfort, an ambulance driver for the brigade, made the remarkable comment: ‘The individuals that went over there, for most Americans, were fighting on the wrong side.’26 Peter N. Carroll suggests that this view, given the public opinion polls of the 1930s, was ‘patently false’27. However, he admits that upon examining individual cases among the veterans, a strongly anti-communist governmental attitude resulted in such events as a seaman’s passport being refused, veteran George Cullinan explaining that his whole past record was ‘reeking with communism’.28 Such cases ‘set the precedent for the postwar period’29 and it would not be until the 1980s that the brigade gained a semblance of national recognition, though this was not endorsed by Ronald Reagan. American Spanish Civil War poetry is thus pervaded by a sense of disillusionment, due to the failure of their representatives’ idealism through a doomed republican campaign. Yet, as with the British poets Day Lewis and Fuller, it is a dejection which sees the war’s purpose outweighing any argument against the struggle. This is especially visible in poetry which followed the Republican defeat. Archibald MacLeish wrote in ‘The Spanish Lie’ (1939): The tears are dry on the faces. The blood is dry on the sand. The tears were not answered: the blood was not answered. This will be answered.30 The full stops at the end of each line, coupled with the gaps between the lines, create the sense of anger and loss, of the furious silence the Republican armies felt in defeat. The crusade was bludgeoned, the American and British participants aware that their governments had done nothing to prevent it. This sense of outrage remained evident in verse published long after the war had ended. As Alvah Bessie’s poem ‘The Dead Past’ (1952) states, ‘thirteen years’ after, the questions remain: ‘Is it the past and is it dead and gone / and was Spain lost or does the battle sound?’31 The feeling of unfinished business which the war left in the minds of those who supported the Republicans is as indubitable as the fact of the war’s occurrence. Furthermore, the failure of the crusade required an ‘answer’, as MacLeish’s poem states, and an answer was sought for. Bessie’s speaker argues that when an answer has been found, these discontented participants ‘will stop talking about’ the past and laying so much emphasis on what is dead and gone and lost and dry, and return to the present that has grown out of this past and cannot be separated from it.32 Bessie’s speaker speaks to the living memory of the Spanish Civil War, the duty of its participants to perpetuate the process of improvement in the aftermath of the conflict. He differentiates what is ‘dead and gone and lost and dry’ from ‘the present that has grown out of / this past and cannot be separated from it’. For Bessie, the Spanish War grows in significance over time, the outsized proportions of the pain felt in connection with the failure to liberate Spain imparting an important warning for future crusades. This attitude was reflected through the interventionist American foreign policy that emerged in the post-Spanish Civil War world, in World War II, Vietnam, Korea and, more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 81

30/01/2012 16:24

82

james fountain

Counterbalancing the republican view were poets who fought for Franco in Spain, such as Roy Campbell, a South African-born poet who moved to Britain in 1918. The opening section of his long poem Flowering Rifle: A Poem from the Battlefield of Spain (1939) is written in rhyming couplets in the form of a lay, and is an embittered and rabidly antiRepublican attack. His speaker describes the ‘Meetings’ of the ‘fist-shut Left’ that ‘leaves its labour to the hammering tongue / And grows, a cactus, out of hot-house dung’.33 The hardiness of the resultant cacti is emphasised: Like the raised claw-bunch of an ancient stork, With cork-screwed fingers, as a crumpled fork, In a rheumatic ecstasy of hate Clenched at the world, for being born too late; This weary fist infests the world entire As common in the palace as the byre, As limply fungoid in the idle rich As when it grimly toadstools from a ditch, Or, friend to every cause that rots or fails, Presides in Bloomsbury with tinted nails; As doomed anachronisms, Sire and Son, Capitalist and communist make one, The scrawny offspring and the bloated sire Sentenced by nature to the same hot fire.34 Campbell had always been critical of the Bloomsbury intelligentsia, sentiments most notably expressed in his poem The Georgiad (1931). Here, Campbell ridicules the efforts of activists such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘friend to every cause that rots or fails’, and who ‘Presides in Bloomsbury with tinted nails’, organising her pro-communist garden parties in what ironically was (and still is) one of the wealthiest areas of London. Campbell argues that capitalist and communist are one and the same, and a quotation he places in a footnote after the line ending ‘rots and fails’ underlines this: ‘“All we have succeeded in producing is totalitarian State Capitalism instead of Communism.” Lenin.’35 The ideas behind Campbell’s cleverly worded satire were not altogether opposed in Britain. As the Writers Take Sides publication indicates, Evelyn Waugh was pro-Franco, and T. S. Eliot refused to state where his allegiance lay. Spender writes in his New Statesman review of the poem: ‘Here we have the Talking Bronco, the Brute Life armed with abusive words, and, most unfortunately, not with Mr Campbell’s Flowering Rifle, but with Flowering Machine Guns, Flowering Heinkels, Flowering Capronis.’36 There is decadence in Spender’s attachment of the naturalistic ‘flowering’ to destructive weaponry, befitting what for many of its participants was a highly self-conscious crusade. Campbell’s response was highly articulate, a committed defence of the ideology in which he believed. At the root of his defence are the ‘lies’ which he argues are at the heart of British procommunist poetry, particularly those of a volume entitled Poems for Spain, inspired by the conflict: The form of collective bedroom palmistry which they mistake for poetry can be guaranteed to work out inversely and reversely to a hair. So he [Spender] has no right to talk of ‘inversion’. What but a rapacious appetite for, and a continuous diet of lies or inversions of fact, could produce such a flawless and continuous inversion of their

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 82

30/01/2012 16:24

the poetry of the spanish civil war

83

day-dreams in real life: it is surely what they live on that causes them to live in a perpetual state of abortion. It is surely an innate falsehood in themselves, coupled with a degrading credulity, that enables them to bring out, without any conscious shame, a book in support of a Spain which never existed.37 Campbell attacks the propaganda surrounding the Republican crusade, thereby also attacking Spender’s own participation in the war as a propagandist. There is a connection between the concerns Campbell states here and the idealism which turned to disillusionment, expressed by such British poets as Day Lewis and Fuller, and the Americans Bessie and MacLeish. Campbell, however, clearly viewed support of the Republican armies as pure folly, the beliefs of those who fought as constructed out of ‘day-dreams’. He hints that the social-realist documentary verse emerging in late-1930s Britain was in reality little more than ‘inversions of fact’. Ironically, Campbell’s comments articulate ideas similar to the words of International Brigade and Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran poets in defeat mentioned earlier. Certainly his response indicates that anti-Republican feeling was as common as antifascism was, which is important when considering the poetry of this war: the feelings expressed in the poetry were always decisive and strong, regardless of which side the poet chose to pledge his allegiance. Yet, as indicated throughout this chapter, the left-right divide in Spain created a vital platform for various political causes, many of which were documented not only in iconic photographic and cinematographic form, but also in effective and at times powerful verse which helped to shape political and literary culture. Political commitments became muted in Spain, particularly racially, as Langston Hughes’s poetry indicates. Orwell’s POUM anarchists also became silenced, and various forms of communism were shown to fail. Finally, the war appeared to produce one common feeling among Republican supporters, which was reflected in the art and literature produced: that, whatever its source, oppression is cruel, and therefore the struggle to prevent it is a worthwhile and courageous one; yet ultimately hopeless, in an age of modernity, mechanisation and mass production: the kind of climate which naturally encourages oppression of the many, by the few.

Notes 1. C. Day Lewis, The Nebara, in Valentine Cunningham (ed.), The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse (London: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 236. 2. Ibid. p. 245. 3. George Barker, Calamiterror, in Cunningham, p. 105 4. Barker’s poem links with another of his ‘blood-red’ communist poems, ‘Elegy on Spain’, particularly the opening lines of section one of the Elegy: ‘The hero’s red rag is laid across his eyes, / Lies by the Madrid rock and baptizes sand / Grander than god with the blood of his best’. (In Cunningham, p. 157.) 5. Laurie Lee, ‘A Moment of War’, in Cunningham, p. 147. 6. M. J. Heale, Twentieth-Century America: Politics and Power in the United States 1900–2000 (London: Hodder Headline, 2004), p. 9. 7. Ibid. p. 9. 8. Melvyn Dubofsky, The United States in the Twentieth Century (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1978), p. 267. 9. Edwin Rolfe, ‘Brigadas Internacionales’, in Cary Nelson (ed.), The Wound and the Dream: Sixty

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 83

30/01/2012 16:24

84

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

james fountain Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 148. Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Requiem for the Spanish Dead’, in Allen Guttman (ed.), The Wound In The Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), p. 95. Ibid. p. 91. The League of American Writers, Writers Take Sides: Letters about the War in Spain from 418 American Authors (New York: The Rumford Press, 1938), p. 30. Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Vintage Classics, 1995), p. 202. Ibid. p. 202. James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Greensboro, MC: Open Hand, 1989), p. 123. Hughes, p. 201. Ibid. p. 201. Ibid. p. 341. Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes Volume I: I Too Sing America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 344–5. Rampersad notes: ‘as if unshackled after years of bondage, Hughes spoke out with unusual passion and singularity of purpose.’ Ibid. p. 343. C. Day Lewis, ‘Newsreel’, in Cunningham, p. 411. Roy Fuller, ‘Times of War and Revolution’, in Cunningham, p. 458. W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’, in W. H. Auden: Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 57. W. B. Yeats, ‘Politics’, in Collected Poems (London: Picador, 1990), pp. 392–3. Guttmann, p. 95. Guttmann writes: ‘The exile of Bardolt Brecht, Arthur Koestler, Thomas Mann, Gustav Regler, Ludwig Renn, Ernst Toller, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Walter Gropius, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud suggested – even to the most conservative – that neither art nor science breathes easily in an illiberal atmosphere.’ Quoted in Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 375. Ibid. p. 375. Ibid. p. 264. Ibid. p. 264. Archibald MacLeish, ‘The Spanish Lie’, in Guttman, p. 144. Alvah Bessie, ‘The Dead Past’, in Guttman, p. 200. Ibid. p. 202. Roy Campbell, Flowering Rifle: A Poem from the Battlefield of Spain, in Cunningham, p. 423. Ibid. p. 424. Ibid. p. 424. Stephen Spender, ‘The Talking Bronco’, New Statesman, 11 March 1939, p. 370. Roy Campbell, ‘Flowering Rifles’, New Statesman, 8 April 1939, pp. 540–1.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 84

30/01/2012 16:24

9

‘LUCID SONG’: THE POETRY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR Jonathan Bolton

B

ritish poetry of World War II was destined to be minor. The Great War was recent history, and many poets felt not only that their experience duplicated that of their parents’ generation but also that earlier poets had fully articulated, in Roy Fuller’s words, the ‘Pity, revulsion, love and anger, / The vivid allegorical / Reality of gun and hangar’. ‘Our fathers felt these things before’, the poem continues, ‘In another halfforgotten war’.1 Fuller’s generation knew the Great War poetic canon too well even to ‘half-forget’ it, and they often repeated its auto-elegiac ‘If I should die. . .’ hypothetic conditionals, its doomy prognostications, its intervals of boredom, elegiac and empathetic gestures, documentation of heroism, and needless reminders that war is hell. The poetry of the Second World War that seems worthy of notice, then, is that which offered something new, either through frank admissions of repeated experience or by lending insight into how the second war was different from the first, that the enemy had invaded not only Poland and Czechoslovakia, Manchuria and Malaysia, but the realm of language. As Stephen Spender wrote in 1941: If words expressing ideas have been used often enough to express debased or even contradictory meanings, finally the word loses all meaning, and the idea itself is in danger of becoming lost [. . .] the task of the poet is to organize words in such a way that their meaning is clear and unmistakable. This is betrayed if the poet takes over the propaganda of political parties.2 Louis MacNeice echoed these fears a year earlier, remarking that ‘the artist’s freedom connotes honesty because a lie, however useful in politics, hampers artistic vision. Systematic propaganda is therefore foreign to the artist in so far as it involves the condoning of lies.’3 A poetry informed by this heightened sense that the authenticity of language was being threatened and misappropriated, I would argue, is a distinguishing feature of the Second World War. A number of writers of the Second World War were clearly conscious of this insidious collusion between propaganda and creative speech in ways that anticipate the linguistic discourse of post-war Britain: the ‘swindles and perversions’ George Orwell discusses in ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1945); T. S. Eliot’s arguments in ‘The Idea of a Christian Society’ and ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Culture’ about the degradation culture suffers when it is divorced from ethics and morality; Sir Ernest Gowers’s Plain Words series, with its advocacy of ‘elementalism’ in English prose; and perhaps most

85

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 85

30/01/2012 16:24

86

jonathan bolton

poignantly the ‘performative’ correlation between words and actions that J. L. Austin catalogued in How to Do Things with Words (1955). The work of Second World War poets spearheaded this reaction against European modernism’s fascination with manifestoes, visual and rhetorical propaganda, and the ideology of literary movements in ways that anticipate post-structuralists’ concern with the relationship between discourse and power. As Robert Hewison noted in Under Siege, with everyone living, as it were, inside a newsreel, with propaganda now the State art, it was inevitable that the centre of balance would shift [. . .] the need was to understand what was happening to oneself as an individual rather than as part of a movement or class.4 The most enduring response to the threat of fascist domination, then, is the poetry that sought to rescue language from the effects of tyranny either by simplifying it, by questioning the relationship between words and meaning, by cautioning readers about calls to action, or by self-reflexively attending to nuances of speech – the problems inherent in saying what one means and meaning what one says. In this chapter, I will focus on four poets – W. H. Auden, Roy Fuller, C. Day Lewis and Keith Douglas – each of whose work, rather than merely reiterating the martial themes of the Great War poets, represents a deep level of engagement with the utility, economy and control of writing, and whose work self-reflexively meditates on the value of poetry in a totalitarian age. They were not alone in this project, but serve as exemplary models of the kinds of performative and consequential (perlocutionary) concerns shared by many poets of the Second World War who often appear hamstrung by their own heightened awareness of language’s agency. These poets sensed keenly the impotence of poetry when faced by the authority of political inscription, and many of them became increasingly conscious of the poet’s marginalised status, which they expressed in a kind of anti-poetry – verse that is critical of its own attempt at counter-discourse, often proceeding by fits and starts, positing and retracting in a manner that undermines the force of its own utterances in an effort to communicate without ‘infelicity’, J. L. Austin’s term for what happens when the desired consequence of locution is insincere or inauthentic.5 The war was a significant cause of W. H. Auden’s return to the Anglican Church in 1940, but it also challenged his spiritual beliefs in ways that intensified his work. In 1933, he had experienced what he came to classify as a vision of agape, which revealed to him the divine quality of brotherly love. This formative experience, coinciding with the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, induced him to communicate more clearly, as he abandoned the cryptic and allusive style of the early 1930s for more direct, oratorical lines. Although he emigrated to the United States in 1939, during the war years Auden sought to retain his place as a public poet, frequently using historical events – Hitler’s invasion of Poland or the deaths of public figures – as occasions for deliberating on the function of art in society and the value of poetry during wartime. Tensions within Auden’s verse during this period derive partly from his conflicting feelings about the socially transformative potential of verse, and his wartime poetry often subverts its own logic through restatement, retraction and sometimes self-contradiction. For instance, he is famous for writing, in Part II of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.6 However, in Part III of the poem, he turns to the topic of war and urges poets to ‘persuade us to rejoice’, to ‘Sing of human unsuccess’, to ‘Make a vineyard of the curse’ and to ‘Teach the free man how to praise’. Clearly, the series of imperative statements

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 86

30/01/2012 16:24

the poetry of the second world war

87

urging poets to speak assumes that poetry, or the example of a great poet, does indeed institute change (that is, ‘makes things happen’). In what some consider the first poem of the Second World War, ‘September 1, 1939’, written on the occasion of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Auden commands in a polarising, either/or conditional statement that ‘We must love one another or die’, thereby suggesting the central role agape must play in saving civilisation. Yet later he removed the conditional syntax so that the line reads, ‘We must love each other and die’ (my emphasis), excised the closing two stanzas in yet another draft, and then ultimately rejected the poem altogether as ‘trash’. While various reasons have been given for Auden’s disavowal of the work, the poem itself seems to contradict its own conditional resolution. In earlier stanzas, Auden is brutally critical of language that smacks of sloganeering. He warns of ‘the elderly rubbish’ spoken by dictators and ‘the windiest militant trash / Important persons shout’.7 Looked at this way, the poem contains from the beginning the content of Auden’s subsequent self-censorship. Conscious of a close link between language and action, he is clearly reluctant to formulate his own imperatives. Instead, he says, ‘all I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie’.8 Hence, Auden comes to envision a more modest role for the poet: his own wartime work often subverts its own performative utterances, and he seemed inclined only to caution, subvert action and expose untruths. Auden’s most ambitious wartime poem, ‘New Year Letter’ (1940), asserts inaction through the meditative perambulations framed within a rigid tetrametre design in an effort to reconcile feeling and reason through the discovery, as he says, of ‘an ordre de coeur’.9 Auden asks, ‘O when will men show common sense / And throw away intelligence. . .?’,10 a paradoxical appeal that suggests logic works best when it combats its own powers of persuasion. Like Dante, Auden searches for an amor rationalis to govern his actions, enable him to seek a passionate and rational grounding for moral choices and, as an artist, lead others to the logical life of the heart. Here, still, he is refining his vision of agape, responding to world crises by rearticulating the overly simplistic statement that ‘we must love one another’. For instance, he concludes part I of ‘New Year Letter’: Though language may be useless, for No words men write can stop the war Or measure up to the relief Of its immeasurable grief, Yet truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense [. . .]11 While Auden spent the war years celebrating and eulogising the great writer-citizen, his work also reveals a deep mistrust of the linguistic act as a prelude to the physical act. Poetry, like all potential abuses of the rhetorical power imbedded in language, is to be mistrusted. Auden’s reflections on the function of art and poetry during times of political crisis are evident in Roy Fuller’s ‘Soliloquy in an Air-Raid’,12 an exemplary piece of cautious and self-reflexive prosody. While Fuller would later experience the war more immediately as a Naval NCO in Africa, ‘Soliloquy’ was written in England during a radar course he was taking while waiting to be drafted. The suddenness of the attack prompts an urgent and unrehearsed interrogation of his poetic impulse amidst the chaos and death around him, but this need to speak is thwarted initially by reflections on the impotence of poetic speech. As Fuller witnesses for the first time war’s destructive force, the verbal response is

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 87

30/01/2012 16:24

88

jonathan bolton

overwhelmed by physical reflex. As he writes in the third stanza: ‘Inside the poet the words are changed to desire, / And formulations of feeling are lost in action / Which hourly transmutes the basis of common speech’.13 Fuller’s poem, then, stems from this crisis in which language must take the place of action, and it is resolved through an awareness that the value of poetic speech, or more specifically the ratiocinative process of writing, is that it does postpone or replace the impulse to act. A. T. Tolley rates the poem as ‘well developed and controlled in structure’ but argues that Auden’s influence ‘obtrudes to create an effect of poetic posturing’.14 However, the poem seems consciously to question the efficacy of Auden’s civil and rational voice. Fuller’s clinical, Audenesque diction in the opening two stanzas (‘formication’, ‘phthistic’, ‘necrotomy’) gives way to a more prosaic speech, as if in answer to his own questions: ‘who shall I speak to with this poem?’ and ‘who can speak and still retain the tones of this civilization?’15 This precise dilemma is addressed by Orwell in his 1944 essay, ‘Propaganda and Demotic Speech’, where he recommends that political rhetoric undergo a ‘process of simplification’ in order to reach the masses.16 Consequently, if simplification can be used by tyrants and artists alike, simple matters of diction offer little hope of separating poetry from propaganda. In response to this problem, Fuller speaks only to himself and to whatever audience may be within earshot. In addition, the progress of his thinking self-reflexively modifies itself as it searches for an appropriate discursive style. In the middle section of the poem, Fuller invokes some eminent English precursors – Jonson, Shakespeare, Pope, the Romantics – and recognises that ‘The verse that was the speech of observation [. . .] / Is sunk in the throat between the opposing voice’.17 Such verse is remarkably similar to what J. L. Austin called ‘constative’ speech, statements that have truth value because they report on observations and/or describe some state of affairs.18 Fuller seems to valorise a tradition of verse that foregrounds the subjectivity of observation; the only truth poetry dare posit is that someone at some time saw and felt this way. In the closing stanza, Fuller invokes the example of Alexander Kerensky, the charismatic leader of the Russian revolution who was ousted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks because of his determination to honour his country’s commitment to Allied forces in World War I. Kerensky, known for his liberalism and for his oratorical skill, seems to exemplify the failure of rational speech and humane values amidst the turmoil of war and revolutionary ideology and the exile to which such figures are consigned. Fuller identifies with the ‘irrelevan[ce]’ of Kerensky’s ‘liberal emotion’, and recognises that he must either accept his role as a soldier or endure a similar form of exile and isolation. And while Fuller relents and accepts his journeyman role in the war, he is also determined to speak, even if it must take the form of a soliloquy. Unlike those who, such as Cyril Connolly, urged artists to remain above the fray, in ‘Soliloquy in an Air-Raid’, Fuller says ‘goodbye to the social life which permitted melancholy / and madness in the isolation of its writers’.19 The role of war poet, he says, might be for actors, but it is a compulsory part – an obligation to himself even if his speech goes unheard. Interestingly, J. L. Austin himself excluded literary language from his study of language because it was not spoken in ‘ordinary circumstances’, thereby rendering it ‘hollow or void’ as if ‘said by an actor’ or ‘spoken in soliloquy’.20 Fuller seemed conscious of the soliloquy as an exceptional form of utterance and, though it often resolves the character on a course of action, it can also, as with Hamlet, be an exercise in inertia. This inability to act physically terminates Fuller’s soliloquy, as his poem ends with the ‘author mumbl[ing] to himself ’.21

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 88

30/01/2012 16:24

the poetry of the second world war

89

Cecil Day Lewis’s ‘Where Are the War Poets?’ is perhaps best known as an ivory-tower riposte to public demands for war poets resembling those of the Great War. However, when read in the context of Word Over All (1942), the volume in which the poem appeared, ‘Where Are the War Poets?’ appears to be less about highbrow elitism than an attempt to reclaim poetic speech from those ‘who in folly or mere greed [. . .] / Borrow our language and bid / Us to speak up in freedom’s cause’.22 The title of the volume, which asserts the primacy of language over temporal events, is borrowed from the opening lines of Whitman’s ‘Reconciliation’. Whitman’s lines optimistically predict that the beauty of language will survive while the ‘carnage’ of the American Civil war will be ‘utterly lost’. Day Lewis clearly invokes Whitman to summon some of his optimism and he shared his belief that war creates a contest between language and ‘carnage’. But Day Lewis wavers between a hope that language will survive unscathed and a fear that it will not, and the poems in Word Over All enact a competition between uncertainty, doubt and fear, and a hopeful attitude about the transformative power of language. In ‘Ode to Fear’, for instance, Day Lewis’s pessimistic catalogue of physical decay, spiritual dissolution and barbarisation wrought by wartime fear is feebly challenged by the poet’s effort to document experience and use language as a mirror: Today, I can but record In truth and in patience This high delirium of nations And hold to it the reflecting, fragile word. Come to my heart, then, Fear, With all your linked humiliations, As wild geese flight and settle on a submissive mere.23 The poems in Word Over All are often interrogative, saying and unsaying, balking and contradicting as if afraid of the consequences of making a false or infelicitous statement. For instance, sensing the ‘ghost-guise of impermanence’ around him and the futility of recording the ephemeral, Day Lewis constructs the title poem around a series of interrogatives: ‘What can I say. . .?’; ‘How shall. . .?’ ‘How can I speak. . .?’ As a poet, he feels impotent compared with the ‘the preachers, the politicians weaving / Voluble charms around / This ordeal’. Yet he presses on, ‘words there must be’, words to ‘lighten the innocent’s pang [. . .] / to set a man’s joy and suffering there / In constellations’. Yet, in conclusion, Day Lewis confesses that ‘We speak of what we know, but what we have spoken we truly know not’.24 Unable to posit that his words are indeed ‘over all’, particularly the preachers and politicians who mimic poetic speech, Day Lewis hopes that such admissions of ignorance could undermine all claims to knowing. However, the inquisitive formulations of these poems in the volume are gradually replaced by more affirmative speech acts. As Albert Gelpi has noted, ‘the poems [in Word Over All] repeatedly unmask their own wish fulfillment’,25 a process in which tones of defeat and submission give way to affirmation. In fact, Day Lewis presents his war poems in Part II of Word Over All, bracketed by the more personal poetry in Parts I and III. This structure suggests that more friendship and marriage precede and succeed the temporality of world conflict. In ‘The Assertion’, he calls upon Love, in the imperative, to counteract action and vanity: ‘Let your kindness tell us how false we are, your bloody correction / Our purpose and our pride’.26 The reversals of outlook of which Gelpi speaks are often induced by these affirmative speech acts. ‘The Stand-To’, for example, a poem that aims

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 89

30/01/2012 16:24

90

jonathan bolton

modestly to record the names and types of men who served with Day Lewis in the civilian guard, ends with a moving imperative statement that recalls the oracular power of poet as medium: ‘Blow, autumn wind, upon orchard and rose! Blow leaves along / Our lanes, but sing through me for the lives that are worth a song’.27 Likewise, one half of the lines in ‘Airmen Broadcast’, begin in the imperative, urging airmen to ‘Speak for whatever gives you mastery’, ‘Speak of the rough and tumble of the blue’, and ‘Speak from the air, and tell your hunter’s tales’.28 In the poem that concludes Part II, ‘Will it be so again?’ Day Lewis mimics the interrogative syntax of the earlier poems, both in the title and at the beginning of each stanza: ‘Must it be always so’, ‘Will it be so again’, ‘Will it be as before’.29 This persistent questioning implies perhaps only one answer: that the war will, in fact, claim ‘the brave’ and ‘gifted’, that peace will once again succumb to war. In the closing line of the poem, however, Day Lewis declares, ‘It shall not be so again’, as if through the incantatory power of affirmative speech he can negate the tragic outcomes of war. Among the poets mentioned here, Keith Douglas was closest to the soldier-poet archetype established by the Great War poets. Like Isaac Rosenberg, he eulogised the dead; like Rupert Brooke, he composed his own epitaph; like Siegfried Sassoon, he satirised officers; like Wilfred Owen, he sympathised with the fallen enemy; and like Owen and Rosenberg, he fought and died heroically. Douglas keenly felt this sense of belatedness, writing that ‘the hardships, pain and boredom; the behaviour of the living and the appearance of the dead, were so accurately described by the poets of the Great War that everyday on the battlefields of the western desert [. . .] their poems are illustrated.’30 Still, he has emerged as the major poet of the Second World War for his ability to build upon that tradition of war poetry and present his horrific experiences through a spare and intensified prosody that he termed ‘extrospective’,31 by which he meant a poetry that is unflinching and at times hawkish in its response to violence. Douglas’s champions, however, poets like Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, praised his terse and brutalised diction. In a letter to his friend, J. C. Hall, Douglas wrote that my object [. . .] is to write true things, significant things in words each of which works for its place in a line. My rhythms, which you find enervated, are carefully chosen to enable the poems to be read as significant speech.32 This remark, along with his late verse, particularly his unfinished ‘Bête Noire’ lyrics, reveals the extent to which Douglas had come to perceive language as an animate, active and at times hostile medium. Composed in March 1944, three months before his death, the ‘Bête Noire’ fragments attempt to describe an ‘indefinable’ demonic and ‘persuasive’ force that inhabits him, a dark muse or doppelganger whom he depicts as ‘black care sitting behind the horseman’.33 As his biographer, Desmond Graham, sees it, the ‘Bête Noire’ fragments reflect ‘a struggle to master destructive feeling through poetic control’.34 Douglas engages this demonic double in a kind of combat that he is doomed to lose, and one of the crucial battlegrounds is language. The beast has an ‘easy language’ that Douglas ‘speak[s] well, though with a stranger’s accent’.35 Douglas also writes that he breaks into my conversation with his own words, speaking out of my mouth can overthrow me in a moment writes what I write, or edits (censors it).36

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 90

30/01/2012 16:24

the poetry of the second world war

91

In this sense, his bête noire seems to be a demonic impulse that has the ability to channel and appropriate his poetic speech. In the prose notes that accompany the fragments, Douglas speaks of having ‘sensations of physical combat’ during the process of writing,37 suggesting again that he must wrest control of his own speech from the censorship and intrusive power of this verbal adversary. Douglas notes that the beast talks of going but never does. In his speech, then, there is dishonesty as well as a fundamental divide between saying and doing – the speech act does not execute its own verbal promise or poetic impulse that cannot resolve itself. The consequence of Douglas’s struggle with this demonic influence seems to have been inertia and reticence. Aside from the ‘Bête Noire’ fragments, only three poems survive from the last months of his life – a poem to his former lovers, ‘To Kristin Yingcheng Olga Milena’; a poem of repatriation, ‘On Returning from Egypt’; and a poem of anticipation, ‘Actors Waiting in the Wings of Europe’. None of these poems reflect the struggle Douglas claims to have been undergoing or resemble the new style (longer lines, abrupt enjambments and free prosody) of the fragments. In this sense, they seem to embody lyrics written free of the demonic influence of his bête noire, containing a sparseness, a simpler, more mellifluous diction that hints at the poetry that might be written without the corrupting influence of politics and persuasion. In ‘To Kristin Yingcheng Olga Milena’, for instance, there is an attempt at a simple speech act conveying gratitude and offering restitution to former lovers: Here I give back perforce the sweet wine to the grape give the dark plant its juices what every creature uses by natural law will seep back to the natural source.38 The performative utterances upon which the closing stanza is constructed reassert the simple connection between sincerity of speech and humane action; the return gift of love offered up in lucid, promising language wills the desired action into being. If war, then, brings on a struggle between poetic speech and honesty, between saying and doing, love seems to reconcile them. In one of his lesser-known wartime poems, ‘Voltaire at Ferney’, Auden conjures the great satirist as the ideal citizen-poet and the commune of potters and watchmakers founded by Voltaire as a model of civic harmony in the midst of mid-eighteenth-century turmoil. Thinking of Voltaire, Auden surmises that ‘the fight / Against the false and unfair / Was always worth it’, and Ferney comes to represent not so much flight and exile as an extension of the writer’s work. And, despite the commune’s success, Auden imagines Voltaire as restless, aware that ‘the night was full of wrong’, dreaming of a ‘lucid song’ that could challenge the evil in the world around him.39 This ideal vision of transparent speech seems an apt metaphor for the poets of World War II who became intensely aware that the creative use of language, although threatened by the infelicity of propaganda, needed to be reclaimed in a way that made their practice and use of language separate from political discourse. Their work found a creative means to make such acts of reclamation, and the frustrations involved in their lofty project, a central component of their verse.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 91

30/01/2012 16:24

92

jonathan bolton

Notes 1. Roy Fuller, ‘Poem’, in The Middle of a War (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), p. 42. 2. Stephen Spender, ‘The Creative Arts in Our Time’, Penguin New Writing (Autumn 1941), pp. 125–37 (p. 137). 3. Louis MacNeice, ‘The Poet in England Today: A Reassessment’, New Republic (March 1940), in Selected Criticism of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 113. 4. Robert Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 89. 5. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 14. Austin served in the Intelligence Corps in London during World War II and, although he worked in operational planning, he clearly acquired expertise in propaganda. 6. W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelsohn (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 248. 7. W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’, in Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelsohn (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 87. 8. Ibid. p. 88. 9. W. H. Auden, ‘New Year Letter’, in Collected Poems, p. 212. 10. Ibid. p. 212. 11. Ibid. p. 206. 12. Roy Fuller, ‘Soliloquy in an Air-Raid’, in The Middle of a War, pp. 20–1. 13. Ibid. p. 20. 14. A. T. Tolley, The Poetry of the Forties in Britain (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1985), p. 214. 15. Fuller, ‘Soliloquy in an Air-Raid’, p. 20. 16. George Orwell, ‘Propaganda and Demotic Speech’, in Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), vol. 3, pp. 135–41 (p. 138). 17. Fuller, ‘Soliloquy in an Air-Raid’, p. 20. 18. Austin, p. 55. 19. Fuller, ‘Soliloquy in an Air-Raid’, p. 21. 20. Austin, p. 22. 21. Fuller, ‘Soliloquy in an Air-Raid’, p. 21. 22. C. Day Lewis, ‘Where Are the War Poets?’, in Collected Poems of C. Day Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), p. 228. Collected Poems includes all volumes by Lewis up until 1954, including Word Over All, with the original ordering of poems; subsequent page citations for Word Over All are from Collected Poems. 23. C. Day Lewis, ‘Ode to Fear’, in Word Over All, pp. 220–2. 24. C. Day Lewis, Word Over All, pp. 220–2. 25. Albert Gelpi, Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 99. 26. C. Day Lewis, ‘The Assertion’, in Word Over All, p. 226. 27. C. Day Lewis, ‘The Stand-To’, in Word Over All, p. 228. 28. C. Day Lewis, ‘Airmen Broadcast’, in Word Over All, p. 229. 29. C. Day Lewis, ‘Will It Be So Again?’, in Word Over All, pp. 233–4. 30. Keith Douglas, A Prose Miscellany, ed. Desmond Graham (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985), pp. 119–20. 31. Ibid. p. 121. 32. Keith Douglas, Complete Poems, ed. Desmond Graham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 124.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 92

30/01/2012 16:24

the poetry of the second world war 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

93

Ibid. p. 120. Ibid. p. 235. Ibid. p. 118. Ibid. p. 118. Ibid. p. 120. Keith Douglas, ‘To Kristin Yingcheng Olga Milena’, in Complete Poems, p. 121. W. H. Auden, ‘Voltaire at Ferney’, in Collected Poems, pp. 250–1.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 93

30/01/2012 16:24

American Poets of the second World War

10

AMERICAN POETS OF WORLD WAR II Margot Norris

F

rom the perspective of the twenty-first century, World War II has assumed the impact of such a monolithic phenomenon that one might intuitively expect a literature commensurate to its geographic scope, its political complexity, its violence and cruelty, and its significance as the defining event of the twentieth century. But as critics remind us repeatedly, the Second World War commenced less than twenty-five years after the First, and was therefore greeted with little celebration and enthusiasm. Paul Fussell writes: Almost entirely absent from the Second World War were those gung-ho celebrations uttered at the beginning of the First War by Rupert Brooke and W. N. Hodgson. By the time Hitler had invaded Poland and the Allies knew they would have to fight, the old illusion that war was anything but criminal and messy was largely in tatters.1

Harvey Shapiro notes the consequences of this for American poetry: ‘The American poets of World War II wrote poems that are neither pious nor patriotic.’2 Instead, the American poets produced a poetic mode that Janis Stout has characterised as ‘a poetry of fact, a kind of utterance springing out of the ironic, often bitter poetry of late World War I but with far less apparent emotional investment’.3 In addition, the sense of camaraderie and brotherhood produced by the British poets of the First World War is not reiterated by the American poets of the Second. ‘For the most part the Americans write in quite a different tone’, Shapiro notes. ‘Their poems are often bawdy, bitchy, irreverent. They do not glory in brotherhood and they do not, as a rule, find nobility in one another.’4 Shapiro points to other differences as well, such as the way the more aggressive use of the aeroplane made combat even more dehumanised than the cruel trench warfare that had characterised it in World War I. Not surprisingly, the emphasis on the Second World War as a largely civilian tragedy5 had less impact on American literature than it did on British and European, and as a result much of the American World War II poetry was produced by soldier-poets with military and combat experience. A large number of these poets eventually served in academic institutions and universities in the United States, won Pulitzer Prizes or other awards for their published poetry collections, and held such distinguished positions as consultants at the Library of Congress, chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, and poet laureate. In addition, the critical works of such World War II veterans as Paul Fussell and Samuel Hynes revised literary conceptions of war. By looking at the conjunction of poetic themes with the poetic language of their speakers, the anti-heroic characteristics

94

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 94

30/01/2012 16:24

american poets of the second world war

95

of WWII American poetry discussed by the critics above can be illuminated and brought into specific focus. A good place to see ‘the poetry of fact’ can be found in the work of William Meredith. Meredith, a Princeton graduate who later taught at Connecticut College for many years, joined the US Army Air Corps in 1941 and then between 1942 and 1946 served as a carrier pilot for the US Navy in the Pacific campaigns. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and a National Book Award in 1997. His experience as a Navy pilot illuminates his poem ‘Navy Field’ (1944) in an oblique way that places the emphasis on the ordinary, the everyday occurrences of a pilot’s life that overshadow the danger and drama of aerial missions. The subject of the poem is anecdotal: a pilot lands a damaged plane at a seaside base for repair, tells of being hit by flak from an enemy ship, reads the weather charts while having cake and coffee at the restaurant, presumably shares photographs with an interlocutor, and takes off again once his plane is repaired. The poem’s poignancy comes from the speaker’s prosaic language expressing this mundane event. ‘Limped out of the hot sky a hurt plane, / Held off, held off, whirring pretty pigeon, / Hit then and scuttled to a crooked stop’.6 A wounded bird, fearful of landing, the plane evokes the sympathy of the reader as much as the people on the ground – ‘the still mechanics / Who nodded gravely’ when they heard the pilot’s story – and then ‘wheeled it with love / Into the dark hangar’s mouth and tended it’. Meredith domesticates the experience, pushing the drama and the trauma of an aerial attack behind the telling, and foregrounding its aftermath as an alighting into a provisional haven, a bird sanctuary, as it were, where pilot and plane are welcomed, kept safe for a bit, made well again, and then released again into the wild. The pilot’s understatement – ‘Flak had done it, he said, / From an enemy ship attacked’ – is mirrored in the poem’s understatement, showing him sitting alone in that restaurant, ‘reading the numbered sheets / That tell about weather.’ The technique here resembles the quiet evocation of hidden lives in the restaurant scenes of Edward Hopper’s paintings, with their anonymous subjects whose humanity touches us by nothing more specific than their ordinariness. Stanley Kunitz’s ‘Reflection by a Mailbox’ can be read as a curious inversion of Meredith’s ‘Navy Field’ in the sense that here the ordinariness of standing by a mailbox waiting for mail is charged with overt and ponderous political significance and commentary. The ‘fact’ of waiting by the mailbox functions as an anchor for the meditations that precede the later revelation of what the speaker is waiting for. In the opening line, the speaker is positioned in ‘the center of that man’s madness, / Deep in his trauma, as in the crater of a wound’.7 ‘[T]hat man’ need not be named because the word ‘madness’ identifies him as Hitler, the arch-madman who has plunged the world into trauma and deeply wounded civilisation itself. Kunitz locates the poet in the centre and depth of that human and political pain at the outset, and then slowly personalises its specific historical dimension. ‘There’s mother in a woven shawl’ could indeed refer to Kunitz’s own Lithuanian mother, Yetta Helen Jasspon, or to many other old-country mothers. The Jewish immigrant roots of so many Americans are brought forward in time – ‘[o]ne generation past, two days by plane away’ – to conjure up with immediacy the depth of persecution that has afflicted them: ‘[m]y house is dispossessed, my friends dispersed, / My teeth and pride knocked in’, ending with ‘my people game / For the hunters of man-skins in the warrens of Europe’. Underlying this evocation of Eastern European pogroms is the trope of the human body as victim of trauma and deep wounds: teeth knocked in, skin flayed, hunted by nightmarish creatures with ‘hatchets sunk into their skulls’. This deliberately lurid set

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 95

30/01/2012 16:24

96

margot norris

of details is abruptly generalised into a modern condition, ‘the new estate’, or the product of spiritual depravity, ‘a dying age, corrupt / And passion-smeared’ ‘[a]s if a soul had been given to petroleum’. The poem’s pivotal line, ‘How shall we uncreate that lawless energy?’, has no answer since god has been ripped ‘out of the machine’, and there is no deus ex machina who might come to the rescue. The scene now shifts to that prosaic contemporary American scene, with a young man standing at the end of his driveway by a mailbox on the road, waiting for the red-haired postman to shift the gears of his car as he curves and approaches to deliver mail at noon. Only the poisonous hemlock casts an ominous shadow on an ominous delivery: the draft notice that will be his ‘passport to the war’.8 ‘Reflection by a Mailbox’ conveys how the brutal genocides of World War II infuse an ordinary moment in American life with trauma. The Harvard-educated Kunitz received a Pulitzer Prize in 1958, served as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress in the 70s, and was named US poet laureate in 2000. William Stafford introduces yet another variant of the production of ordinariness in relation to World War II by shifting the focus to the perception of the politics. His ‘Explaining the Big One’ (1992) will simulate, with considerable irony, how a relatively naïve person might try to explain the War to an even more naïve interlocutor, by alluding to several of the dominant leaders and personalities of the conflict. In effect, Stafford mocks the ‘poetry of fact’ by trivialising what ordinary folks consider as fact. Although Stafford also enjoyed such distinctions as receipt of the National Book Award and a stint as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, his years in the Midwest and Northwest produce a more populist perspective on people’s perceptions of the War. Like Kunitz, he begins with Hitler, but instead of the trauma- and pain-inflicting madman, his speaker asks his listener if he remembers ‘that leader with the funny mustache? – / liked flags and marching?’9 He holds little against Hitler – except that he ‘gave loyalty / a bad name’ – but without mentioning the atrocities and war crimes that that loyalty produced. The next figure is also remembered by dint of a moustache, ‘the big mustache / and the wrinkled uniform, always jovial / for the camera but eliminated malcontents / by the millions’. But Stalin’s ruthless regime needs direct mention because of his status as an ally. ‘He was our friend, I think’,10 the speaker remembers, not unreasonably, given that Stalin was named ‘Man of the Year’ by Time magazine in both 1939 and 1943. The focus now turns to the women – ‘Oh yes, women’ – remembered chiefly for their USO service. ‘We loved them, except Tokyo / Rose – didn’t we kill her, afterward?’ The speaker’s fact is wrong if the allusion is to Iva Ikuko Toguri D’Aquino, who was convicted on a single count of treason, imprisoned and paroled after six years, never deported, and finally pardoned by President Gerald R. Ford in 1977 on the ground that she had been convicted on the basis of tainted and perjured testimony. Finally, the speaker turns to ‘[o]ur own leaders’, again identified synecdochically, this time by such accessories as ‘the jaunty cigarette holder’ and ‘the pearl-handled / revolvers’, or by their avocations, ‘[a]nd Ike, who played golf ’. He then offers a final summation: ‘It was us / against the bad guys, then. You should have been there’. Stafford reproduces the simplistic perceptions of an ordinary person grasping the issues of the Second World War by picturing the signature features of its personalities as they would have appeared in news accounts and film footage, and then sorting them into good guys and bad guys. Stafford’s evocation of General George Patton’s putative ‘pearl-handled revolvers’ (actually ivory-handled, by many accounts) recurs also in Lincoln Kirstein’s long poem, ‘Patton’, which also refers to the General as a ‘[p]earl pistol-packin’ poppa’.11 Like Kunitz,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 96

30/01/2012 16:24

american poets of the second world war

97

Kirstein was also Harvard educated with an impressive cultural résumé. But Kirstein’s career as a poet was overshadowed by his contribution to American dance, which includes his founding of the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine in 1948. His stint in the US Army from 1943–5 saw him assigned to Patton’s Third Army in the role of ‘monuments officer’, an assignment that included tracking the fate of historic European monuments and looted art. But it nonetheless gave him considerable contact with other enlisted men. Kirstein’s early verses were met with disparagement from his good friend Christopher Isherwood: ‘when you ask what I think of them from a literary point of view, then I can’t just be kind or polite.’12 Isherwood urged him not to have the poems published (‘You will regret it’) but Rhymes of a Pfc was nonetheless published in 1964. As the title suggests, Kirstein stays close to the sensibilities and experiences of the ordinary soldier, to occasionally disconcerting effect. His poem ‘Snatch’ describes a morning visit to a brothel whose red-stained glass initially evokes a chapel only to have its rose reflection illuminate not only ‘brass and bench’ but also a bar, where ‘some GI’s lounge against the glass / To sip warm beer and drag dead butts and wait their rationed piece of ass’.13 The soldiers are nervous and exhausted – ‘We’ve just been dumped upon this town. We’ve fucking little time to waste, / And vice versa. Here she comes, with nothing on but rhinestone drawers, / To toss her tit and wink her twat and cense her scent of musky pores’. Like a priestess mechanically performing a tired rite, the prostitute is as sexually perfunctory as the soldier who would ‘almost just as soon / Hang around, bull-shit, drink and piss, and make it back to chow by noon’. If the soldier’s crude idiom dehumanises the woman, he is himself dehumanised by the business of the war, which has him servicing her as mechanically as he would grease a jeep – ‘[s]lips off the brakes; gives her the gas, dog tag and rosary entwine’.14 Having managed a ‘five-minute stiff routine’, he ‘slicks his cowlick in the glass; unchanged his mug her mirror shows. / His pecker limp, he pats her ass and blindly back to business goes’. But the entangled necklaces of the couple, his dog tag and her rosary, give their dreary union a strange poignancy. It is instructive to compare Lincoln Kirstein’s poem about a soldier in a brothel with one on a similar theme by Richard Wilbur called ‘Place Pigalle.’ Like Kirstein, with his lifelong commitment to support and develop classical ballet in the United States, Richard Wilbur (US poet laureate, 1987–8) also contributed to the sophistication of the American arts, most notably with his respected translations of Molière and Racine. His poem ‘Place Pigalle’ reflects his military service, which took him to France as well as to Italy and Germany during the war, between 1943 and 1945. Place Pigalle in the district of Montmartre continues to be touted as the ‘epicenter of sex shops, peep shows, strip clubs, cabarets and general adults-only, X-rated adventures’15 as well as the home of the historic Moulin Rouge and the Musée de l’Érotisme. During World War II it was phonically dubbed ‘Pig Alley’ by American GIs, and Wilbur nods to its status as a red-light district whose ‘[b]right bars explode against the dark’s embraces’ marked by the ‘electric graces’ of ‘glares and glass’.16 But in contrast to Kirstein’s degraded soldiers degrading the brothel women with their obscene slang, Wilbur elevates ‘the boys with ancient faces, / Seeking their ancient friends’ by giving them a literary overlay. In the tradition of the modernists who glossed their meditations on World War I with classical referents, Wilbur turns ‘the soldier and the whore’ into Shakespearean and classical figures. Introduced first as ‘wry hares’ who might be prey to the hounds of a hunting party, the couple is ‘[b]razen at bay’ and able to seek refuge behind a ‘gaudy door’. There they form a strange tableau: ‘She on the table, he in a tilting chair, / With Arden ease’. Our attention is caught by the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 97

30/01/2012 16:24

98

margot norris

descriptor ‘Arden’ with its evocations of ‘ardent’, of Shakespeare’s ‘Forest of Arden’, and of its possible derivation from ‘Ardennes’, the forested mountains ranging through Belgium, Luxembourg and France that became the site of the German offensive in late 1944 and early 1945 now known as the Battle of the Bulge. Wilbur now describes the couple’s engagement as a classical encounter between a Pan-like figure (‘his priestgoat face’) and a nymph (perhaps a Corycian nymph) whose ‘gold whorls’ of ‘Corinthian hair’ he touches with cloven ‘hand’s thick tines’. But when the transformed soldier speaks, he pours out a lyrical declaration utterly remote from the ‘Pig Alley’ of crude soldiers like Kirstein’s: Girl, if I love thee not, then let me die; Do I not scorn to change my state with kings? Your muchtouched flesh, incalculable, which wrings Me so, now shall I gently seize in my Desperate soldier’s hands which kill all things.17 Except for this cry from the heart to reclaim his humanity, Wilbur’s soldier acknowledges himself as a killing machine, although hopefully at this moment, when he is about to embrace the prostitute, he is merely anguished by his ‘ionized innocence’, as the poem calls his condition. The brothel theme in both Kirstein and Wilbur suggests that war kills not only life, but also the ability to love and the humanity of men. In spite of the differences in their treatment of the brothel theme, Kirstein and Wilbur share another characteristic that deserves comment: both write their verses in disciplined meters and in rhyme. The formal features of the American World War II poets differ widely, and it is therefore difficult to make general statements about them. One could argue that Meredith’s and Stafford’s blending of spoken English with free verse rhythms reflects the particular American modernism of a poet like William Carlos Williams. But Kirstein’s and Wilbur’s rhymes present a different set of resonances and poetic strategies. Kirstein himself responded to Isherwood’s criticism of his verses by claiming Rudyard Kipling – a precursor who also conveyed his message with regular meters and rhymes – as his model. ‘I wanted to do what Kipling did. . . I wanted to express, in a combination of exalted and colloquial language a common experience, that is war.’18 Richard Wilbur, on the other hand, is subjected to a different kind of criticism with respect to the formality of his war poetry. James Dickey, himself a noted World War II poet famous for ‘The Firebombing’, commented in Babel to Byzantium on ‘the feeling that the cleverness of phrase and the delicious aptness of Wilbur’s poems sometimes mask an unwillingness or inability to think or feel deeply’.19 But although it is difficult to miss the complex abxc abxc rhyme structure of a Wilbur poem like ‘Mined Country’, it is equally difficult to miss the poignancy of his description of a pastoral landscape that has been robbed of its innocence and rendered lethal by the buried explosives: Danger is sunk in the pastures, the woods are sly, Ingenuity’s covered with flowers! We thought woods were wise but never Implicated, never involved.20 One could argue that Wilbur is able to recover from his shock at the way the Second World War ruthlessly assailed attempts to cling to faith in goodness, beauty, honour or love only by producing a new intellectual order that counters the militarisation of the pastoral with the discipline and ingenuity of his meticulous poetic form.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 98

30/01/2012 16:24

american poets of the second world war

99

Another poem that deploys rhymes, but in a deliberately undisciplined manner is Charles Butler’s ‘Rifle Range: Louisiana’ (1945), which sets out to show how soldiers will be transformed into disillusioned killers. Before they are sent to the front to kill, soldiers ‘rehearse’ this act on the rifle range – presumably with mechanical exercises that will refine their skills at marksmanship. ‘Do not pull the trigger: squeeze, instead, / Gradually, so that you will not know / The instant of persuasion and release’,21 the recruit is told. But the instruction is quickly amplified with the rationale for the manoeuver – a rationale the reader is nudged to interpret as a rationalisation: (Nor will the soldier who receives the lead Be quite aware of the instant he is dead And perhaps at peace.) Neither the slayer nor the slain Will be quite aware: They will share The ignorance of the pain: At least so we are told.22 The recruit is ostensibly taught how to kill quickly and painlessly, leaving his victim unconscious of his fate and, arguably, ‘perhaps at peace’. In turn, the shooter is reciprocally spared the pain of inflicting pain, promised an ‘ignorance of the pain’ that will blunt awareness of the significance and consequence of shooting lethal bullets at human beings. But the collective speaker’s unease with the facile rehearsal of ‘the gesture by which a man will die’ shows he distrusts the lesson – ‘[a]t least so we are told’ – whose import is decried by the deafening ‘obscene cry’ of the bullet’s sound. That sound causes the stillness to ‘bleed’, and neither the southern summer sunlight nor the soothing voice of instruction can change the function of the rifle range as the place where ‘in the summer sunlight men rehearse / That men may die’. The insistent rhyme of ‘sky’, ‘lie’ and ‘die’ in the first three lines will be ruffled by the insertion of a ‘cry’ in the last three. If Charles Butler represents the anxious and sceptical feelings of the new recruit on the rifle range, W. D. Snodgrass’s ‘Returned to Frisco, 1946’ offers the feeling of the veteran returning from duty after the war, still ‘dulled and shaken / By fear’.23 Snodgrass’s more famous World War II poetry may be his dramatic monologues of Hitler’s High Command figures facing their last days, collected in his 1995 The Fuehrer’s Bunker: The Complete Cycle, whose most harrowing offering may be Magda Goebbels feeding morphine and cyanide to her six young children.24 ‘Returned to Frisco’ oscillates between lightness and darkness in mood – conveying the troubling overlay of two lives for young soldiers, the civilian life before and the civilian life after the military and after combat – lives, the poem implies, that will not be the same. The soldiers have been transformed into frightened animals by the military, ‘shouldered like pigs along the rail’ about to be delivered from slaughter and sacrifice, but remembering how they had ‘scrambled like rabbits / Up hostile beaches’.25 Having survived, they wonder why they remain afraid. ‘What could still catch us by surprise?’ they ask, and ‘why should we fear this land / Intent on luxuries and its old habits?’ A whole new freedom, remembered from the old habits of the old life, beckons them: ‘We would have liberty, the privilege / Of lingering over steak and white, soft, white bread’, ‘free to prowl all night / Down streets giddy with lights, to sleep all day’.26 By the poem’s end, they have imagined a future of such pleasure and delight that we assume they are home free, until the last stanza:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 99

30/01/2012 16:24

100

margot norris

Off the port side, through haze, we could discern Alcatraz, lavender with flowers. Barred, The Golden Gate, fading away astern, Stood like the closed gate of your own backyard.27 The image of Alcatraz symbolically negates the promise of freedom – a threat reinforced by the Rock’s history as the Western US Military Prison between 1909 and 1934. Internees during that history included World War I conscientious objectors. But while the returning soldiers need not fear detention there, the image of the barred Golden Gate, standing ‘like the closed gate of your own backyard’ conjures a sense of deterrence, of a psychic if not a physical barrier to home. The same threat of psychological damage foreshadowed for Butler’s recruit is here intimated for Snodgrass’s returning veterans. War does not end for the World War II soldiers – or for any soldiers in any combat – when the fighting stops.

Notes 1. Paul Fussell (ed.), The Norton Book of Modern War (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 312. 2. Harvey Shapiro (ed.), Poets of World War II (New York: The Library of America, 2003), p. xxii. 3. Janis P. Stout, Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), p. 142. 4. Shapiro, p. xxi. 5. Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 6. 6. William Meredith, ‘Navy Field’, in Shapiro, p. 132. 7. Stanley Kunitz, ‘Reflection by a Mailbox’, in Shapiro, p. 39. 8. Ibid. p. 40. 9. William Stafford, ‘Explaining the Big One’, in Shapiro, p. 94. 10. Ibid. p. 95. 11. Lincoln Kirstein, ‘Patton’, in Shapiro, p. 51. 12. Martin Duberman, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 392. 13. Lincoln Kirstein, ‘Snatch’, in Shapiro, p. 45. 14. Ibid. p. 46. 15. http://gofrance.about.com/cs/sexadultsonly/a/pigalleplace.htm, accessed 20 October 2010. 16. Richard Wilbur, ‘Place Pigalle’, in Shapiro, p. 151. 17. Ibid. p. 151. 18. Duberman, p. 392. 19. James Dickey, quoted in Poetry Foundation website: biography of Richard Wilbur: http://www. poetryfoundation.org/bio/richard-wilbur, accessed 20 October 2010. 20. Richard Wilbur, ‘Mined Country’, in Shapiro, p. 148. 21. Charles Butler, ‘Rifle Range: Louisiana’, in Shapiro, p. 59. 22. Ibid. p. 59. 23. W. D. Snodgrass, ‘Returned to Frisco, 1946’, in Shapiro, p. 216. 24. W. D. Snodgrass, The Fuehrer’s Bunker: The Complete Cycle (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 1995). 25. Snodgrass, ‘Returned to Frisco, 1946’, in Shapiro, p. 216. 26. Ibid. p. 217. 27. Ibid. p. 217.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 100

30/01/2012 16:24

11

WRITING AFTER NUREMBERG: THE JUDICIAL IMAGINATION IN THE AGE OF THE TRAUMA TRIAL Lyndsey Stonebridge

M

uch has been written on the question of representing the horror of war. But what kind of imagination is required to picture the passage of war into law? The history of the trials that took place in the wake of World War Two tell of the effort to bring the particular, and unique, horrors of that war into the courtroom, and to forge a form of legal representation adequate to a totally new kind of atrocity. The Nazi genocide, Hannah Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers during the Nuremberg Trial, had exploded the limits of the law. ‘We are simply not equipped’, she wrote to her friend and mentor, ‘to deal on a human, political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue.’1 From Nuremberg to the Eichmann trial, from the first international efforts to come to grips with administrative massacre to current efforts to bring the late twentieth century’s perpetrators of genocide to account, the law has struggled to find a form for the unprecedented, a ‘guilt that is beyond crime’. That struggle, on the one hand, testifies to the political and moral will of a generation determined to salvage something out of the wreckage of the war. The ground for a newly international legal consensus was forged by Roosevelt and Churchill as early as 1944 (in the Atlantic Charter), but it was at Nuremberg that two new crucially important legal concepts, ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’, first seeped into a court of law. ‘Seeped’ is right here because the issue of exactly what was on trial at Nuremberg was far from straightforward. Popular accounts of this period which start with death camps and end with establishment of the legal and historical authority of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998, although morally elegant, belie a far more chequered and tortured history of the passage of genocide into both the law and the post-war political and cultural imagination.2 But to say that genocide trials attempted to breach the gap between historical injury and jurisprudence in the post-war period is not merely to recognise, as the law has long recognised, the affective power of its theatricality. In the wake of the Holocaust, it is also to countenance a new form of judicial imagination. That imagination was charged with finding a legal and moral form adequate to an unprecedented crime in an age in which the terms of historical, legal, psychic experience themselves had been transformed completely. So as much as the trials of Nazi perpetrators laid the grounds for a new postwar legal and moral consciousness, they were also caught up with the job of legislating for a new kind of history; traumatic history, a history that was as much felt as seen, as existential and psychic as material and empirical: ‘the juridical unconscious’ is the title

101

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 101

30/01/2012 16:24

102

lyndsey stonebridge

of Shoshana Felman’s provocative account of the rise of the trauma trial in the twentieth century.3 Given this history, it is perhaps not surprising that writers who were drawn to the trials not only show a flair for a particularly striking kind of journalism, but are those whom we associate not, as one might assume, with a mid-century return to historical realism, but with late modernism. Despite claims that historical trials offer a similar kind of moral authority to the best nineteenth-century novel, it is those writers who were sensitive to the unconscious of the image, the duplicity of narrative voice, the moral suppleness of genre, who took their places in the press galleries of Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial.4 In this chapter I want to focus on just three: Rebecca West, whose trial writing was credited by Truman Capote as establishing the genre; Hannah Arendt, whose account of the Eichmann trial occupies a central place in legal and political history; and Muriel Spark, keen reader of Arendt’s reports, who also travelled to Jerusalem in the early summer of 1961.

Nuremberg: An Event that Did Not Become an Experience The evocative quality of Rebecca West’s reporting on the Nuremberg Trial has long been praised by literary critics and historians alike. Equally powerful, however, is what West’s prose has to say, about what it meant ‘to experience’ Nuremberg, to see it and feel it. West visited the tribunal in the summer of 1946, and returned again in the autumn to hear the final judgment. Her accounts of the trial appeared in the Telegraph and The New Yorker and were later revised as part of her trilogy on post-war Germany, ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens I, II and III’ published in the 1955 collection of her trial writing, A Train of Powder: Six Reports on the Problem of Guilt and Punishment in Our Time. Today legal historians are keen to point out something that West already understood very well in 1946: that the wider historical value of Nuremberg was its function as a legal drama, a spectacle of legality for a lawless world. West’s Nuremberg writing demonstrates an acute awareness of the importance of spectacle and vision to the event. Hers is a prose that understands that at least as important as what was said at Nuremberg, was what was seen – or only half-seen. West’s memorable descriptions of the grotesque figures of the defendants which open her first piece for The New Yorker, for example, with Hess looking as ‘if his mind had no surface’, Baldur von Schirach, the Youth Leader, like ‘Jane Eyre’, and Goring, with his ventriloquist’s dummy smile, ‘the coarse bright skin of an actor who has used grease paint for decades’, recalling the madam of a Marseilles brothel, put into prose the anxiety of attempting to register the nature of the crime on trial; an anxiety, in particular, about looking and knowing and, correspondingly, about seeing and judging.5 Clothing the trial in metaphors and allusions belonging to the gothic, in this respect, does not merely make the horror of Nuremberg grotesquely vivid. West’s gothic excesses also enact the moral and representational perplexities of Nuremberg itself. On one level the genre lures us into sense-making: perhaps, as in a gothic novel, some physical feature, some tell-tale degenerate sign, a leer, a laugh, might give a clue to the moral pathology of the crime? But this is not a gothic novel, nor is it just an ironic rewrite of early twentieth-century degenerate fiction with the rhetoric of degeneracy turned smartly back to sender. It is a portrait of a trial that is struggling to anchor its legal and historical meaning. There is in fact a chasm, West’s writing suggests, between looking at the men on trial and trying to comprehend the crime on trial. ‘They were visibly receding from the field of existence’, she concludes

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 102

30/01/2012 16:24

judicial imagination in the age of the trauma trial

103

of the group, as if she knows she has dressed her subjects in a genre that obscures as much as it illuminates; as if they cannot be framed by the gaze either of the gallery, or indeed of the court.6 What could and could not be framed by the law was in fact precisely the issue at Nuremberg. For all its legal and historical courage and inventiveness, while the tribunal set in place the groundwork for the successful prosecution of crimes against humanity and genocide, it failed to put the genocide of European Jews into either law or history. The defendants were tried not on the count of administrative genocide, but on conspiracy, the pursuit of aggressive war and war crimes; and while they were indeed charged with crimes against humanity, the import of this new crime was to be felt only in the wake of the trial’s legacy. The result was that the really unprecedented crime, the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people, was sidelined by the trial. Or more accurately, and this is where West’s judicial imagination is perspicuous, it was both seen and not seen. As the legal historian Lawrence Douglas has argued, the images that haunted the Nuremberg Trial, the thousands of photographs, for example, including those of human pelts from Buchenwald which were widely reproduced in the world press, the shocking film Nazi Concentration Camps, which took filmed documentary evidence into the courtroom for the first time, were not, in fact, anchored in the other legal narratives pursued in the trial; indeed, the status of the images as evidence in themselves was far from clear to the court itself.7 The images were rather, to adopt a phrase from Walter Benjamin, something like the trial’s optical unconscious; traces of an experience, a crime beyond guilt, which at this point of history could not get into either words or, indeed, the law. To recognise that the Nuremberg Trial was a new kind of predominantly visual and aesthetic legal event, as West did, then, is to encounter something of a paradox. For all the seeing that was going on, the demonstration of justice to a war-tired world, there was a great deal of not seeing, or half-seeing, happening too. West herself was in no doubt that the failures of Nuremberg were as much aesthetic and imaginative as they were legal or historical. In the third part of her post-war Germany trilogy, an elaboration of her 1953 review of Hans Fritzche’s (one of the defendants) toe-curling rant about the injustices Nuremberg inflicted on those on trial, West explicitly describes Nuremberg’s failure in visual and aesthetic terms: Conducted by officials sick with the weariness left by a great war, attended by only a handful of spectators, inadequately reported, constantly misinterpreted, it was an unshapely event, a defective composition, stamping no clear image on the mind of the people it had been designed to impress. It was one of the events which do not become an experience.8 At Nuremberg, we could say, the judicial imagination failed to keep pace with legal innovation. The crime was tried, but it was not felt. Less a legal failure, than an aesthetic one: a failure, or disturbance, of vision.

Eichmann: The Man in the Glass Booth There are also a number of disturbances of vision in The Specialist (1999), Rony Brauman’s and Eyal Sivan’s film of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, made entirely of original documentary footage from the proceedings.9 In one of the film’s opening sequences Eichmann diligently cleans his glasses: finished, he brings them to his nose, and then pauses; he has

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 103

30/01/2012 16:24

104

lyndsey stonebridge

forgotten that he is already wearing a pair. If Eichmann cannot see out for multiple panes of glass, neither can the viewer get a clear look at him. Throughout the film, reflected back at us from the glass are the faces of the trial’s audience in Jerusalem, survivors many, living ghosts in a glass pane. In one scene the film Nazi Concentration Camps, first shown at Nuremberg, is played to a darkened courtroom. As Eichmann blinks into the mid distance, looking not seeing, the black and white images in the film are cast back onto the glass of his booth: a grey face among white corpses. The Specialist is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s famous account of the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, originally published, like West’s reports, in The New Yorker, and, to great controversy, as a book in 1963. The question of how the law could reimagine itself in the wake of the Holocaust had preoccupied Arendt since the early 1940s. Twenty years on, in Jerusalem, she rediscovered the moral void of the genocide in the ‘banality’, the twittering idiocy, the weightless verbosity of Adolf Eichmann; this ‘new type of criminal’, as the prosecution described him, ‘an enemy of humanity’ itself, who despite his cold and his glass booth, just could not stop talking. ‘The longer one listened’, Arendt wrote, ‘the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.’10 Eichmann had been deflecting the lives, sufferings and judgements of others long before he was plucked from Argentina by Israeli Special Forces and dropped into his glass box. It is in this non-reflective (in all senses) thoughtlessness that Arendt locates the evil of the genocide – whence its ‘banality’. As Arendt imagined it, the task of the court in Jerusalem was to find a mode of judgement adequate to this new kind of criminal. Jerusalem, she thought, was the right place for this endeavour since nowhere else, not Nuremberg, nor any of the other occupied countries that had held Nazi trials after 1946, had shown willing to put the genocide of the Jewish people on trial. But if Arendt, along with others, saw Jerusalem as the natural birthplace of a boldly ambitious form of international law, the Israeli prosecution team, led by the hugely charismatic Gideon Hausner, had other ideas about the kind of trial Eichmann should have. Indeed, it was not really the case that Eichmann was on trial at all, as his guilt was obvious to everyone including Eichmann himself (‘not guilty in the sense of the indictment’ was his typically evasive plea). Rather his trial became the event that, on the one hand, turned the Holocaust into collective memory while, on the other, redefined the terms for all atrocity trials to come. Where Nuremberg was an event that failed to become an experience, the Eichmann trial demonstrated how the experience of traumatic memory could become a legal event in its own right. Crucial here was the prosecution’s decision to put the testimony of survivors, many of whom had published accounts of the Holocaust, at the centre of its case. The effect of those testimonies was to resonate way beyond the courtroom. ‘It was during the Eichmann trial’, Geoffrey Hartman later wrote, ‘that I first understood the power of personal witnessing.’11 When the writer-survivor Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (Yehiel Dinoor) collapsed on the stand in the middle of his testimony, it was as if, Shoshana Felman has argued, the trauma of his imprisonment within the concentration camp universe was experienced in the courtroom itself.12 What could not be seen, or was only half-seen, at Nuremberg, then, returned in the Jerusalem courtroom in the form of traumatic testimony. The effects were shattering. The Eichmann trial, Susan Sontag wrote shortly after, ‘was a great act of commitment through memory and the renewal of grief ’, clothed in the legal apparatus of a trial.13

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 104

30/01/2012 16:24

judicial imagination in the age of the trauma trial

105

But for Arendt, such an outpouring of grief was, at best, a distraction from the urgent task of redefining the law and moral thought in the wake of Eichmann, and at worst, a dubious sanctification of suffering grafted onto an emerging political mythology of the state of Israel.14 If the Eichmann trial marked the moment when testimony found new legal force, for Arendt this was not so much a triumph of the judicial imagination, as another moment of failure. Unsurprisingly, Arendt’s sharp critique of the prosecution’s use of witness testimony, coupled with her controversial (but hardly unique) attack on the role played by the Jewish Councils in the Holocaust, won her few friends. Indeed, the famous controversy that was unleashed upon the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem frequently took the form of a row about her style. ‘It is that heartless, frequently sneering and malicious tone with which these matters, touching the very quick of life, are treated in your book to which I take exception’, wrote Gershom Scholem to Arendt in a heated public exchange following the publication of the book.15 Detached, ironic, cosmopolitan, Arendt’s dry worldliness is, to put it mildly, out of step with the reverent pathos that characterises much commentary on the trial. This does not mean, however, that her writing is without its own form of judicial imagination. On the one hand, Arendt did indeed have strong ideas about the kind of testimony that was adequate to the Holocaust. Such testimony or storytelling, for Arendt following her friend Walter Benjamin, is ‘righteous’ because of its precious power of illumination in an over-communicative, banal world. Amid the cameras, microphones and headphones, the round-the-clock world coverage of the Eichmann trial, Arendt discovered such ‘innocence of heart and mind’ in the testimony of just one survivor, Zindel Grynzpan, who was beaten over the Polish border in October 1938.16 ‘Who says what is’, Arendt later wrote of testimony, ‘always tells a story and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning.’17 If, in the main, the outpouring of witness testimony at the Eichmann trial failed to confer ‘humanly comprehensible’ meaning for Arendt, it was not because of the stories themselves, but because the political and historical narrative to which they were being yoked, in her eyes, did not do justice to the evil on trial. To this extent, Arendt’s irony was hardly incidental. Far from being disrespectful, in intent at least, the tone of her report is intimately linked to her quest to find a form adequate to the crime on trial. ‘That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true’, she later conceded when asked about the style of Eichmann in Jerusalem. ‘The tone of voice in this case is really the person.’18 For Arendt, irony can be a person because it enacts the kind of two-in-oneness of a thinking person. If Eichmann is defined by his thoughtlessness, finding a mode of judgment adequate to his banality, she suggests later, must begin with thinking itself, specifically with a thinking that enacts the sort of ‘two-in-oneness’, the thinking from a position of another, that Eichmann had demonstrated himself incapable of.19 As a mode of discourse which depends on having two thoughts in one voice for its power, a thinking irony is thus a mark of resistance against the banality of evil. ‘I never made Eichmann out to be a “Zionist”’, Arendt snaps back at Scholem at another point in their exchange. ‘If you missed the irony of the sentence – which was plainly in oratio obliqua – reporting Eichmann’s own words – I really can’t help it.’20 The only response to the moral obscenity of Adolf Eichmann declaring to a Jerusalem court that he is reader and admirer of the founding text of contemporary Zionism is to parrot his words back to him: ‘Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, which converted Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism’.21 The tone most proper

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 105

30/01/2012 16:24

106

lyndsey stonebridge

to the perplexed and reflective, irony, we could say, is Arendt’s way of speaking outside of the glass box.

Writing in Jerusalem If the power of testimony in the Eichmann trial ensured that the memory of the Holocaust got into the theatre of law, that it was seen, felt and experienced, Arendt’s irony raises a critical question about what kind of judgement, and what kind of judicial imagination, is possible in the wake of traumatic memory. For Muriel Spark, who arrived in Jerusalem just after Arendt, the answer to this question lay within the power of fiction-making itself. Sent to Jerusalem by the Observer, Spark did not in the end write about the trial directly. Rather she worked her experience of the trial into her novel, The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), the first three chapters of which appeared like a coda to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, in The New Yorker. As sharp and as ironic a writer as Arendt, Spark was never going to write a novel that directly engaged with the suffering on display at the trial. ‘The cult of the victim is the cult of pathos, not tragedy’, she later remarked. ‘The art of pathos is pathetic, simply; and it has reached a point of exhaustion.’22 And, as with Arendt’s irony, Spark’s barbed humour was at the time read as a form of detachment, a contrived distancing from the trauma experienced in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann, Alfred Kazin complained in his review of the novel, was subsumed in the novel by a theologically driven, dispassionate plot, blind to dramas of contemporary Jerusalem (the novel was more favourably reviewed by Rebecca West).23 But for Spark, finding an alternative to the art of pathos was her response to the trauma unleashed by the Eichmann trial. The story of part-Jewish convert to Catholicism’s, Barbara Vaughan’s, pilgrimage into Israel/Jordan (which was also Spark’s own story) is, indeed, theologically driven, but tellingly, it is also over-driven: far from being dispassionate, the novel is characterised by a febrile madness that infects almost every character in the novel, a madness that seems to testify to the sheer effort of being in Jerusalem in 1961. Spark was not the only writer for whom the act of witnessing the Eichmann trial at second hand provoked an exploration of the power of the trial to drive people mad.24 What makes her imagination judicial, however, and what distinguishes it from the pathos she abhors, is her moral and formal focus on the question of judgement. Two forms of judgement vie throughout the novel. The first is Biblical and absolute. ‘I know of thy doings, and find thee neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert one or the other. Being what thou art, lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, wilt make me vomit thee out of my mouth’ – this uncompromising verse from Apocalypse is repeated across the novel. Jerusalem in 1961 is a place where it is not possible to be neither hot nor cold, as Barbara discovers as she slips through the Mandelbaum Gate into Jordan and into a world of spies and anti-Semites. This mode of judgement is as absolute as one of Spark’s plots. It is also a form of judgement that can only, in the novel form at least, be sustained by fiction itself. In this sense, Spark’s fictional judgments are plots which, as Frank Kermode noted in his review of the novel, are at least as absurd as God’s.25 But neither Spark nor her heroine inhabit a world of pure fiction. They also exist in a world that makes secular judgements: the world of the Eichmann trial. ‘Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him to use him as a mere means to some external purpose.’ Spark copied this famous passage from Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in her notebook as she

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 106

30/01/2012 16:24

judicial imagination in the age of the trauma trial

107

drafted the second part of the novel.26 Kant’s parsing of moral reason was at the heart of the endeavour to legislate for crimes against humanity in the post-war period, from Nuremberg to the drafting of the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 to the Eichmann trial and beyond. What troubled Spark, as it did West and Arendt, was the question of how it was possible to imagine Kant’s moral and legal imperative in an age of genocide. Spark visited the Eichmann trial on 26, 27 and 28 June. When she writes the trial into her novel, at moments literally transcribing from the translated transcript given daily to journalists during the trial, it is to let the absolute power of fiction assert itself over the terrifying meaningless of Eichmann’s testimony: Eichmann was being examined day by day by his own counsel, in a long-drawn routine, document by patient document. Many journalists had gone home. Barbara was not prepared to be taken in by the certainty, immediately irresistible, that this dull phase was in reality the desperate heart of the trial. Minute by minute throughout the hours the prisoner discoursed on the massacre without mentioning the word, covering all aspects of every question addressed to him with the meticulous undiscriminating reflex of a computing machine. Barbara turned the switch on her earphones to other simultaneous translations [. . .] What was he talking about? The effect was the same in any language, and the terrible paradox remained, and the actual discourse was a dead mechanical tick, while its subject, the massacre, was living [. . .] She thought, repetition, boredom, despair, going nowhere for nothing, all of which conditions are enclosed in a tight, unbreakable statement of the times at hand. She had changed her mind, without awareness at the moment, of any disruption in the logic of personal decision, but merely allowing herself to recognize, in passing, that she would inevitably complete her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This mental fact was the only one that seemed able to throw light on the ritualistic lines which the man in the glass box was repeating or to give meaning to her mesmerized presence on the scene.27 Recoiling, like Arendt, from the thoughtless senselessness of Eichmann’s speech, it is at this moment that Barbara makes the decision to go on her pilgrimage. Except, of course, this is not ‘her’ decision at all: she changes her mind ‘without awareness at the moment’, as the divine intervention of the novel’s author puts her on another path of moral meaning-making. In the end, then, Spark avoids the art of pathos by opting for the absolute power of the occult; ‘the supernatural processes going on under the surface’, as she puts it in the novel, generate moral meaning where the trial, in Spark’s eyes, failed.28 The genre most suited to articulating the moral occult, as Peter Brooks demonstrated in his classic study, is melodrama.29 For Brooks the melodramatic excess of the late nineteenth century signalled a kind of moral deficit. In The Mandelbaum Gate the inability of the Eichmann trial to make sense is substituted for by the frenzied fiction-making of a hilariously fevered plot, driven by pseudo-causalities that make a kind of moral sense unavailable to the court in Jerusalem. There is nothing tepid, and nothing boring and repetitious, about the drama of judgement in Spark’s novel. In one of the final scenes, a fevered Barbara attacks the anti-Semitic British spy, Ruth Gardner, with a pair of headphones: ‘Barbara threw these objects at Ruth, then in a frenzy leapt upon the woman and battered her head with the disconnected earphones of the wireless.’30 Icons of the desire to translate international justice for a new world, at Nuremberg the defendants had once worn their headphones

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 107

30/01/2012 16:24

108

lyndsey stonebridge

as though they were a new form of defensive armour. In the Eichmann trial, Phillips, the makers of the headphones used, insisted that their logo be removed for fear of upsetting the neighbouring Arab market. In Spark’s melodrama, the headphones seem to have lost the power to translate international history into law, and have instead become weapons of attack. Gothic, irony, melodrama: to be attentive to the relationship between style and judgement, form and the law, as these writers were, is not to trivialise the crime that took them to the courtrooms in Nuremberg and Jerusalem. These are, rather, modern attempts at an aesthetics of judgement for an atrocious history. As in Kant’s understanding of judgement, in the post-war period the task was to make sense of moral reason: to make the law felt, in other words, or ‘experienced’, as West would have said. And ‘experienced’ here means not only by conscious reason, but by other parts of the mind too: by those parts, for example, that are haunted by the black and white of a flickering screen. Recent critical legal theory has taught the law to be attentive to questions of narrative and storytelling. For these first witnesses of a totally unprecedented type of legal event, it was always the case that the form of the law had to be imagined before it could be effective. In what Philippe Sands has described as a ‘lawless world’, today the task of forging a judicial imagination adequate to our times remains no less urgent.31

Notes 1. Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, 17 August 1946, in Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (eds), Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985), p. 54. 2. For an excellent critical account of this history see Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 3. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 4. Sadakat Kadri, for example, defends the war crime trial thus: ‘It dramatizes some of the core beliefs of the Western tradition, that individuals have a choice, that bad things happen because people do them, and that a moral order remains capable of restoration.’ Similar claims about individualism and moral order have been made about the European novel. See Sadakat Kadri, The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson (London: Harper Collins, 2005), p. 287. 5. Rebecca West, ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens I’, in A Train of Powder: Six Reports on the Problem of Guilt and Punishment in Our Time (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1955), pp. 5–6. 6. Ibid. p. 7. 7. Douglas, pp. 11–96. 8. Rebecca West, ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens III’, in A Train of Powder, p. 246. 9. The Specialist, film, directed by Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman. France: Momento!, 1999. 10. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, [1963] 1994), p. 49. 11. Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 22 12. Felman, p. 145. 13. Susan Sontag, ‘Reflections on The Deputy’, in Eric Bentley (ed.), The Storm over the Deputy (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 119. 14. For an account of this history and Arendt’s critique of it see Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 108

30/01/2012 16:24

judicial imagination in the age of the trauma trial

109

15. Gershom Scholem, letter republished in Ron H. Feldman (ed.), The Jew as Pariah: Hannah Arendt (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 241. 16. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 229. 17. Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, in Peter Baehr (ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 545. 18. Hannah Arendt, ‘“What Remains? The Language Remains”: A Conversation with Gunter Gaus’, in Baehr, pp. 15–16. 19. See Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), pp. 159–89. For a fuller discussion of the significance of Arendt’s irony see Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Testimony: Judging in a Lawless World’, New Formations, 67. (Summer 2009), pp. 78–90. 20. Hannah Arendt, ‘A Daughter of our People: A response to Gershom Scholem’, in Baehr, p. 395. 21. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 40. 22. Muriel Spark, ‘The Desegregation of Art’, The Blashfield Foundation Address, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York: American Academy of Arts and Letter, 1971), p. 26. 23. Alfred Kazin, ‘Dispassionate Pilgrimage’, Sunday Herald Tribune Book Week, 17 October 1965, pp. 2–3. 24. Compare, for example, Norma Rosen, Touching Evil (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969) and Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet (London: Wedenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), both of which track the psychic effects of witnessing the Eichmann trial on US Jews. 25. Frank Kermode, ‘The Novel as Jerusalem’, Atlantic Monthly (October 1965), p. 93. 26. Notebook, 39/5, Muriel Spark Archive, Macfarlin Library, Tulsa. 27. Muriel Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate (London: Penguin, 1967), pp. 177–8. 28. Ibid. p. 199. 29. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1976] 1995). 30. Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate, p. 270. 31. Philippe Sands, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules from FDR’s Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush’s Illegal War (London: Viking, 2005).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 109

30/01/2012 16:24

12

THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN AMERICAN FICTION John Limon

I

t is hard to tabulate the dead of the Second World War; it is hard to get the estimate within several million. We are accustomed, in such matters, to separating countable military from countless civilian casualties. In this case, military figures are also guesses; perhaps 20,000,000 soldiers were killed. But we need to add to that a continuum of civilians directly targeted by the military, civilians killed in military campaigns, civilians targeted not for military but for ideological reasons; finally we add civilians who merely died by the way. The final death toll ranges from 35,000,000 to over 60,000,000. If the death of modernism seems in comparison a trivial regret, at least we should grant that the death of modernism is an outcome of the capacity of the Second World War to annihilate human individuals even in their statistical, actuarial aspect. In canonised American fiction, there were two Second World Wars to mark the literary passage – the late modernist (Pacific) war of Norman Mailer and James Jones, and the early postmodernist (European) war of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. Taking as a sample Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), and Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951) and The Thin Red Line (1962), we can trace the demise of modernism as the failure of the salvation of personal style. Taking Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) as a successor tradition, we can conceive postmodernism as an acknowledgement of the inescapability of impersonal terrorism within the inescapability of the text. The Naked and the Dead begins twice, on competitive formal tactics. Here is the first paragraph: Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach of Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.1 ‘Nobody could sleep’ is an abbreviation of a previous draft: ‘Nobody could sleep on the night before the invasion of Anopopei.’2 The string of prepositions homing in on the mythical Pacific island of Mailer’s novel would have identified Hemingway as precursor; the truncated sentence, all subject and predicate, is not formally identifiable. The second sentence of the paragraph imitates reportage; the final word of the third sentence falls with the weight of unmediated, unpropitiable reality. There interposes a white space, and suddenly, as if upon reconsideration, the book is mannered:

110

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 110

30/01/2012 16:24

the second world war in american fiction

111

A soldier lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide-awake. All about him, like the soughing of surf, he hears the murmurs of men dozing fitfully. ‘I won’t do it, I won’t do it’, someone cries out of a dream, and the soldier opens his eyes and gazes slowly about the hold, his vision becoming lost in the intricate tangle of hammocks and naked bodies and dangling equipment.3 This is a response, sentence by sentence, to the first paragraph. In place of ‘nobody could sleep’, Mailer writes, by a vague specificity, that ‘a soldier [. . .] remains wide-awake’. The soldier will be named, but for the moment he is the Unknown Soldier, because Mailer is after a hallucinatory, Stephen Crane-ish effect not available to the first paragraph. The second sentence of the second paragraph replaces ‘a first wave of troops would ride through the surf ’ with ‘like the soughing of surf, he hears the murmurs of men dozing fitfully’. That the men pick up oceanic rhythms is implicit in the mock-clichés of the first paragraph – in the morning, the wave of men will ride through the surf – but in the eerier vision of the night before, it is unclear whether the ocean is attuned to the soldiers or the soldiers are disturbed by a maternal, endlessly rocking discontent. Only the second paragraph allows the consonance, the metaphor, the preciousness of ‘soughing’; even the Anglo-Saxon alliterations, remnants of an oral past, reinforce the writerliness of the sentence. Both third sentences generalise: the monosyllables of the first paragraph point towards the imminence of dead bodies; in the second paragraph, intricate sonic effects imitate the intricately tangled hammocks with their naked bodies. The second paragraph of the book represents its ‘Naked’ style, and the first paragraph its ‘Dead’ style, or anti-style. In question is how much style is appropriate to a book that aspires to tell the brutal truth about war by an apprentice author with disparate masters, including Melville, Tolstoy, Crane, Hemingway and Dos Passos. Later, Mailer would condescend to the stylelessness of the book – ‘I knew I was no stylist. I think one of the reasons I became a stylist was precisely because I had so poor a sense of style to begin with’4 – but he was forgetting that the irrelevance of style was one of the novel’s themes: ‘The only thing to do is to get by on style’, [Lt. Hearn] had said that once, lived by it in the absence of anything else, and it had been a working guide, almost satisfactory until now. The only thing that had been important was to let no one in any ultimate issue ever violate your integrity [. . .] Hearn felt as if an immense cyst of suppuration and purulence had burst inside him, and was infecting his blood stream now, washing through all the conduits of his body in a sudden violent flux of change.5 That style was integrity was the first dictum of Hemingway’s aestheticism; much of modernism taught that nothing in the twentieth century remained to be trusted except the artist’s uncompromised idiolect. But the meaning of suppuration and purulence was that the integrity of style was sacrificed to war alongside the integrity of the clean, perdurable, discrete body. James Jones like Mailer went to war with modernism on his mind, and his post-war best-seller, From Here to Eternity, is to some extent pastiche. The expansive rhythms are from Thomas Wolfe; the sexual jousting is partly out of Fitzgerald; some conventions of hardboiled poetics are due to Hemingway. There is conceptual borrowing – centrally, the opposition of music and the law – from Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers. Yet the counterpoise of music to the law that is represented by Prewitt’s bugling has diminished to almost inaudible lightness. Prewitt has sacrificed his role of bugler to principle; he picks up the bugle

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 111

30/01/2012 16:24

112

john limon

only once during the action to play taps, whose ‘infinite sadness’ is out of proportion to the function of signalling lights out, but proportionate to the extinction of its own beauty.6 And the law is larger than in Three Soldiers; it is incommensurable with the humanity it punishes. When Prewitt refuses to box for the team, he is induced to rebel, committed to the stockade, savagely tortured and entombed alive in the Hole. Another disobedient soldier is tortured to death. The lesson, as in Mailer, is that the totalitarian mind exists on the inside of the army mobilised to defeat it. A corollary is that the war against the human individual will not end with victory over Japan and Germany. On the one hand is power so great as to be not merely transnational but also inhuman: ‘What you got to do now is to remember that it aint nobody’s fault. It’s the system. Nobody’s to blame.’7 On the other hand is the mortally systematised person: ‘“In this world,” Stark said, “today, nobody is left alone”.’8 The implication for the novelist, creator of the buglist, is that art can no longer pretend to be an asylum of stylistic integrity. Jones therefore writes crudely. The final, late modernist, proto-postmodernist step in the closing of the aesthetic refuge from war is taken by Jones in The Thin Red Line. Mailer inferred from the relative constriction of the book that Jones had ‘apparently decided to settle for being a very good writer among very good writers. [. . .] He is no longer the worst writer of prose ever to give intimations of greatness.’9 What Mailer sees as lack of ambition is actually a new one: Jones does not stage the defeat of art in his Guadalcanal novel. There is no artist figure, so no artist figure to destroy. The Thin Red Line submits to the tautological commandment that if there is nothing outside the army, no peacetime after war, then there shall be no art beyond the army and war. In The Thin Red Line, Jones no longer desires the kind of uncultivated force, sign to Mailer of greatness, that would translate the power of the war he describes; the clumsy prose serves a different end. The possibility of an artistic opposition to the war machine fades in the manner of Blane’s consciousness when he is shot: ‘He lay on his back and, dreamily and quite numb, stared at the high, beautiful, pure white cumuli which sailed like stately ships across the sunny, cool blue tropic sky.’ Then War and Peace, to which this alludes, devolves into War and Nothingness: ‘He was dimly aware that he might possibly die as he became unconscious.’10 After a sentence in which beauty drifts not quite beyond Blaine’s appreciation, this last sentence lends him an infinitesimal consciousness (‘dimly aware’ ‘that he might’ ‘possibly die’), and retracts it. Why reserve anything to individual consciousness beyond a suspicion of mortality if Welsh is right that ‘There’s no choice left for anybody. And it aint only here, with us. It’s everywhere. And it aint going to get any better. This war’s just the start’?11 Because the war is endless and the war machine everywhere, graceless writing is the only authenticity: Keck and Beck have a dialogue at one point; Doll and Dale feel mutual antagonism at another; Culp and Culn have a little talk. And Stein ‘motioned furiously to Fife to hand him the phone, to take up the call to Colonel Tall which Tella’s first screams had interrupted’.12 You cannot approximate nursery prose this closely without trying: the pointless alliteration of furiously, Fife, phone; the jingle of call and Tall; the interference of call and Colonel, Tall and Tella; the distracting affinity of Tella and phone. Evidence that this is intentional is Bead’s emblematic killing, while out defecating, of his first Japanese soldier: because (in his own appraisal) of his ‘stupid incompetence, his foolish idiocy, [. . .] whatever he did, done so badly and in such ugly style, gave no satisfaction: action without honor, travail without grace’.13

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 112

30/01/2012 16:24

the second world war in american fiction

113

The dialogue of Beck and Keck is a clue to Jones’s self-positioning in literary history; in The Thin Red Line, he is writing as if he were Samuel Beckett’s brawnier younger brother. When Tella is wounded, there is much Beckett in Jones’s description: ‘Lying on his back, his head uphill, both hands pressed to his belly to hold his intestines in, he was inching his way up the slope with his legs.. . . Inching was hardly the word, since Stein estimated he was making less than half an inch per try.’14 In calibrating the minimum point of humanity – How motionless can progress be? How rote can gestures be? How belated can consciousness be? How long will the endgame last? – Jones meets Beckett at the gateway of postmodernism. The boundary is World War II: ‘Modern war. You couldn’t even pretend it was human.’15 Yet we may feel that for Mailer and Jones, the category of the ‘human’ continues to serve, as in this last sentence, the purposes of theoretical critique, a diminished function almost evacuated in Heller, Vonnegut and Pynchon. Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity’s Rainbow concern the European war against civilians in which rockets and bombs bring mass, anonymous, equivocal destruction. Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim finds himself in fire-stormed Dresden; Gravity’s Rainbow bears witness to attacks on Lübeck as well as London; in Catch-22, American soldiers live intimately among the Italian civilians they are ordered to bomb, and they also bomb themselves, not for military purposes but to fulfil Milo Minderbinder’s contracts. Heller, Vonnegut and Pynchon do not neglect the military targeting of beleaguered individualism; but they found their novels on the indiscriminateness and general inescapability of terror. The three novels of this paradigm can be identified by a family of characteristics, none of which appears in Mailer or Jones. Each book, for one thing, makes a strong appeal to adolescents, though it takes a particularly polymathic adolescent to master Gravity’s Rainbow. Each novel is funny, and the humour may be silly, whimsical, black or gross. Each indulges, in this way, the dream of escape from serious responsibilities. Accordingly, none of the novels is linear; characters and narratives seem temporally, in Vonnegut’s word, ‘unstuck’.16 Science fictional time travel is a feature of SlaughterhouseFive; déjà vu and traumatic repetition are experiences shared by characters and readers of Catch-22; Slothrop’s inversion of stimulus and response informs Gravity’s Rainbow. Erik Erikson helps us conceive the adolescentness of this: adolescent pathology is marked, he writes, by ‘a loss of consideration of time as a dimension of living’ because the adolescent’s identity is stranded between childhood and adulthood.17 In postmodern war novels, the protagonists – grown-up adolescents – are trapped between a sweet lingering innocence and a premature death terror. Though Erikson’s perspective is psychological, he historicises this ramification of adolescence: the term ‘“identity crisis” was first used [. . .] for a specific clinical purpose in the Mt. Zion Veterans’ Rehabilitation Clinic during the Second World War’, in the aftermath of which ‘we have recognized the same central disturbance in conflicted young people whose sense of confusion is due, rather, to a war within themselves, and in confused rebels and destructive delinquents who war on their society.’18 The characters especially of Heller and Pynchon are ‘confused rebels and destructive delinquents’, though their warfare has been internalised even while it is still external. We may suspect that the precocious introjecting of combat in these characters prevents their rebellions from interfering unduly with the war machine still operating. Michel Foucault writes of the modern prison that it ‘makes possible, even encourages, the organization of a milieu of delinquents, loyal to one another, hierarchically ready to aid and abet any future

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 113

30/01/2012 16:24

114

john limon

crime’.19 The intention is to eliminate the political threat of crime (dear to Jones and Mailer), to allow delinquency to be infiltrated by social mechanisms that are adjusted to it (prisons, psychiatric institutions, schools), to produce individuality as the object of this control: ‘the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent.’20 Postmodern combat novelists find in war a similar production of hierarchical criminality; nevertheless, Heller, for example, cannot imagine much more for the individuality of his sympathetic characters than infantilism, sickness, craziness and delinquency, all channelled through the medical system, and rebellion does not go further than unrealised plans of fragging and dreams, indescribable and incredible even when reported, of miraculous, irresponsible escape. The human individual, epitomised as juvenile delinquent, does not threaten the war machine but is manufactured inside it. At times, Foucault seems to be writing Gravity’s Rainbow criticism: ‘The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside [. . .] It saves everything, including what it punishes. It is unwilling to waste even what it has decided to disqualify.’21 ‘There is no outside’: Jones and Mailer had imagined an individualism that could only be punished by the army (which did not save what it punished); Heller, Vonnegut and Pynchon, no longer writing from late modernist disillusion, attempted to reimagine an individualism suited to the army. But if inescapability is the shibboleth of postmodernism, what is the point of writing novels? ‘There is nothing’, Jacques Derrida writes in his own version of inescapability, ‘outside of the text’.22 You can assimilate Derrida and Foucault if you imagine the text as a replica of the carceral city, less an aesthetic asylum than a lunatic asylum for preserving characters and authors in a temporally unstuck terror. The best text for understanding the connection of text and terror is Catch-22, because it was written before metafictional or post-structuralist premises would make its literary selfconsciousness conventional. Of course, Heller wrote Catch-22 with years of experience in advertising after the end of the Second World War and well into the Cold War – part of the background of the self-reflexive fictionality of Catch-22 is a nation that produced domestic reality out of seductive language and global reality out of threatening language. If this were the whole explanation, however, Catch-22 would seem essentially anachronistic and anomalous; but Vonnegut and Pynchon wander in their own war novels in similar metafictional labyrinths. Language is always triumphant in Catch-22; the central question of the book is why that triumph occurs at the heart of war. When the colonel persecutes Clevinger, for example, he has a precise and dim-witted corporal taking notes, which entails the following purely linguistic exchange between them: ‘Now, where were we? Read me back the last line’. ‘“Read me back the last line”’, read back the corporal who could take shorthand. ‘Not my last line, stupid!’ the colonel shouted. ‘Somebody else’s’. ‘“Read me back the last line”’, read back the corporal. ‘That’s my last line again!’ shrieked the colonel, turning purple with anger. ‘Oh, no, sir’, corrected the corporal. ‘That’s my last line’.23 The passage connects echolalia worthy of Abbott and Costello’s pre-war ‘Who’s on First?’ to citational involution worthy of John Barth’s post-war Lost in the Funhouse; what part did the war play in the transmission? In the midst of an interrogation, this contretemps reads like an amusing verbal distraction of power arranged by Heller, the trickster artist.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 114

30/01/2012 16:24

the second world war in american fiction

115

Still: there is a peculiar mapping, in the passage, of Heller’s ingenuity and army idiocy. We may be uncertain whether we are in the presence of Heller’s linguistic derailment of army punishment or Heller’s own shorthand recording of its hierarchical, polyvalent, selfgenerated, self-aggravating fury. At another moment of the same interrogation, Heller makes a multiple negation joke that anticipates Tom Stoppard. ‘When didn’t you say we couldn’t find you guilty?’ ‘Late last night in the latrine, sir’. ‘Is that the only time you didn’t say it?’ ‘No, sir. I always didn’t say you couldn’t find me guilty, sir’.24 The choreographed cleverness of the dislocated inanity of this dialogue is picked up in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: ROS: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? GUIL: No, no, no. Death is. . . not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat. ROS: I’ve frequently not been on boats.25 This is to say that Heller seems to have fathered a post-structuralist, metafictional, high postmodern lineage, but did so as witness to a surfacing within the American army of the inquisitional spirit that provoked in Mailer and Jones a massively unfunny and unplayful realism. One more example of Heller’s influence will give the final clue as to how this epochal shift might be comprehended. In Catch-22, Yossarian delights in juggling the name John Milton: ‘John, Milton is a sadist’; ‘Have you seen Milton, John?’; ‘Is anybody in the John, Milton?’26 Pynchon, in homage, writes: ‘You never did. [signed] The Kenosha Kid’ [. . .] ‘Bet you never did the “Kenosha,” kid!’ [. . .] ‘You never did “the”, Kenosha Kid!’27 The phenomenon under scrutiny is the redistribution of the name, dismantled, inverted and bounced between proper and common noun. This does not mean that the individual in war dies along with his name in these texts; in fact, the name itself, wrested from the individual it is supposed to indicate, has unexpected survival skills. (Over two pages of Catch22, one of the greatest modernist names of all, T. S. Eliot, gets repeated eleven times but his identity is not at issue.28) When the family of an Italian-American soldier arrives too late for deathbed leave-taking, Yossarian agrees to substitute for him but insists on retaining his own name, though with limited effect: ‘Giuseppe’, said the mother, who had seated herself in a chair with her veinous fingers clasped in her lap. ‘My name is Yossarian’, Yossarian said. ‘His name is Yossarian, Ma. Yossarian, don’t you recognize me? I’m your brother John. Don’t you know who I am?’ ‘Sure I do. You’re my brother John’. ‘He does recognize me! Pa, he knows who I am. Yossarian, here’s Papa. Say hello to Papa’. ‘Hello, Papa’, said Yossarian. ‘Hello, Giuseppe.’ ‘His name is Yossarian, Pa’.29

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 115

30/01/2012 16:24

116

john limon

And later: ‘Ma, make him feel good’, the brother urged. ‘Say something to cheer him up’. ‘Giuseppe’. ‘It’s not Giuseppe, Ma. It’s Yossarian’. ‘What difference does it make?’ the mother answered in the same mourning tone, without looking up. ‘He’s dying’.30 The mother’s point is unexceptionable: mortality is the common denominator of mortals. If Yossarian agrees, why not indulge her? Why accept all the family relations required of him, dying son, dying brother, but not the family’s name for him? Yossarian cannot be proceeding on the assumption that his unprecedented name guarantees his uniqueness; when Yossarian had previously asked the mother’s own rhetorical question, he had, like her, granted the perfect irrelevance of his identity: ‘They’re trying to kill me’, Yossarian told [Clevinger] calmly. ‘No one’s trying to kill you’, Clevinger cried. ‘Then why are they shooting at me?’ Yossarian asked. ‘They’re shooting at everyone’, Clevinger answered. ‘They’re trying to kill everyone’. ‘And what difference does that make?’31 From Clevinger’s point of view, Yossarian is paranoid. We recall, for the purposes of diagnosis, that in the locus classicus of Dementia Paranoides, Freud’s Dr Schreber considered himself ‘the only real man left alive’,32 and there are echoes of that view in the portrayal of Yossarian, who awakes from a night visitation to learn – or so he believes – that the last of his buddies had been killed, and in the portrayal of Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who is the only survivor of two separate catastrophes. To be persecuted to death is first to be singled out for prolonged life. There are two ways to conceive this surviving and singling out. If in Jones and Mailer, late modernists, it is the individual and his personal style that the war machine brutalises, in Heller are signs that what the war machine needs is precisely individuals, prevented by their eccentric styles from any sort of communal uprising; thus in the place of an unregimented authorial aesthetic, he invents a brilliantly comic verbal self-consciousness whose desperate tactic is to mimic the comprehensive involutions of military power. The multifaceted rule that entraps soldiers lends its name, Catch-22, to the book, and the paradoxicalness of the rule is formally characteristic of the book that abhors it. When Yossarian obdurately insists to the grieving family of Giuseppe that he is Yossarian, he demands his identity only with the catch that it implies his equal participation in anonymous death: why grieve over Giuseppe’s dying if it is indistinguishable from Yossarian’s? Yossarian too has been singled out for the inescapable, indifferent terror. Modernist style comes to seem the last paranoid fantasy of the survival of the objectified human person, in light of a postmodernist paranoia that sees the human subject as an artefact of power and its language. It is the Second World War that makes plausible this revision.

Notes 1. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 3. 2. Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 105.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 116

30/01/2012 16:24

the second world war in american fiction 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

117

Mailer, p. 3. Manso, p. 119. Mailer, p. 326. James Jones, From Here to Eternity (New York: Dell, 1951), p. 249. Ibid. p. 409. Ibid. p. 237. Norman Mailer, quoted in Frank MacShane, Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), p. 208. James Jones, The Thin Red Line (New York: Scribner, 1962), p. 185. Ibid. p. 79. Ibid. p. 241. Ibid. p. 163. Ibid. p. 234. Ibid. p. 429. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (New York: Dell, 1969), p. 21. Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 169. Ibid. pp. 16–17. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1979), p. 267. Ibid. p. 193. Ibid. p. 301. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), p. 77. Ibid. p. 78. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (New York: Grove, 1967), p. 108 (ellipsis in original). Heller, p. 96. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), pp. 60–1. Heller, pp. 36–7. Ibid. p. 183. Ibid. p. 184. Ibid. p. 16. Sigmund Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), vol. XII, p. 68.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 117

30/01/2012 16:24

13

THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN BRITISH DRAMA SINCE 1968 Victoria Stewart

D

uring and immediately after the Second World War, playwrights considered both the personal and social effects of the conflict in their work. Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path (1942), filmed as The Way to the Stars (1945), focused on life at an RAF base, considering the impact of the war on both airmen and civilians. Later, in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (1952), the difficulties that the married Hester has in maintaining a relationship with her younger lover, Freddie, are exacerbated by his inability, as a former fighter pilot, to find a role for himself in peacetime. While the next generation of playwrights, including, for example, John Osborne, were implicitly concerned with lamenting the disappointments of victory, which were identified as a lack of thoroughgoing social change in the post-war period and a feeling of having missed the chance to participate in the ideological struggle of the war itself, the conduct of the war was rarely central to the action of their plays. During the 1970s, however, the attention of a number of playwrights, many of them part of the post-war ‘baby-boom’ generation, turned back not only to the war itself and its legacy, but also to the ways in which, in the intervening years, the conflict had been presented in popular culture. This chapter will focus on how authors including Howard Brenton, David Hare and Stephen Lowe anatomised what they felt to be the dangerous mythologising of the war. There are a number of reasons for this upsurge of interest. In 1970, previously secret documents relating to the war began to be released into the public domain under the 30-Year Rule, but the decision was soon taken to declassify documents for the whole of the conflict, rather than to continue in piecemeal fashion. This meant that new details about issues as various as attitudes towards evacuation of children, Anglo-Soviet relations in wartime, and the post-war settlement could be considered by writers.1 An increasing interest in social history meant that the ‘Home Front’ experience was scrutinised more closely, while in plays from the later part of this period, including Diane Samuels’s Kindertransport (1993), the effect of the legacy of the war on subsequent generations, and specifically on inter-familial relations, is brought to the fore in a manner which anticipates current critical debates about trauma and postmemory. A number of these plays engage with the popular cultural representations of the war with which the writers themselves grew up. Some also recognise their specifically theatrical antecedents. Writing about his play Plenty (1978), which deals with the post-war disappointments of a former SOE agent, David Hare acknowledged the influence of Rattigan’s Freddie, ‘a brilliantly realized part’.2 However, several playwrights and directors identify a particular historical text as having spurred them to reconsider the war. Angus Calder’s

118

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 118

30/01/2012 16:24

the second world war in british drama since

1968

119

The People’s War (1969) examined life on the ‘Home Front’, suggesting that during the conflict, ‘with parliament muted, with the traditional system of local government patently inadequate [. . .] the people increasingly led itself.’3 At the end of the war, however, the ‘forces of wealth, bureaucracy, and privilege survived’ and, Calder argued, ‘this war, which had set off a ferment of parliamentary democracy, was strengthening meanwhile the forces of tyranny, pressing Britain forwards towards 1984.’4 In Hitler Dances (1972) Brenton goes further; Max Stafford-Clark, the director of the first British production summed up the play’s argument: ‘In order to fight fascism [. . .] the country had to become fascist itself.’ 5 The playwright David Edgar put it this way: Britain had been on the right side in the war against Hitler, but had squandered its moral capital afterwards. There’d been a change after the war to create a genuine egalitarian, emancipatory socialism, but it was implemented too half-heartedly by the 1945–51 Labour government and the opportunity was lost.6 The attraction of this type of analysis can be contextualised in relation to the aftermath of the ‘Events’ of 1968. Interviewed in 1973, Howard Brenton described May 1968 as ‘a great watershed [which] directly affected me [. . .] First it destroyed any remaining affection for official culture [. . .] But it also, second, destroyed all notions of personal freedom, anarchist political action.’ 7 At what they perceive as a historical watershed, these playwrights look back to the end of the war, an earlier moment when social change seemed possible. Describing the genesis of Hitler Dances, Brenton recalled visiting Eindhoven in the Netherlands with a touring production in the late 1960s: ‘I saw a bomb-site there with children playing on it [. . .] and there the idea was lodged in my mind, because it was like children playing on this heap of rubble – history.’ 8 The play emerged from workshops with actors, and incorporates both children’s games and the image of a German soldier, rising from a ‘heap of rubble’ and wanting to return home. As in Dennis Potter’s television play Blue Remembered Hills (1977), the cruelty and violence of the children’s games stand as a synecdoche for the violence of war. During the workshop process the actors drew on their own knowledge of the war, which was generally ‘second-hand’ in nature and also began what Richard Boon describes as ‘a more detailed examination of received attitudes regarding the war’, considering in particular ‘the treatment accorded to the subject in films’.9 The second half of the play focuses on retelling the story of Violette Szabo, a British SOE agent in France, who was executed in Ravensbrück. Szabo’s story was the subject of the 1958 film Carve her Name with Pride, based on R. J. Minney’s book of the same name and starring Virginia McKenna. In the company’s view, the film contributed to the mythologisation of the war, overlaying its violence with glamour. Historical research suggested a counter-narrative in which Szabo’s apparently heroic end was shown to have been the result of organisational difficulties within SOE. In Hitler Dances, then, Szabo’s story is defamiliarised, with each of the actresses in the company taking a turn at playing her. The critique of the heroic cinematic portrayal of the war coincided with Brenton’s interest in Situationism, with its notion of public life as a ‘screen’, and this is underlined when the resurrection of the German soldier is accompanied by commentary from an onstage audience of actors representing the unengaged voyeurism of television viewers. A long speech at the end of the first half of the play suggests that Szabo’s desire to be part of the war effort was the result, at least in part, of the death of her husband Etienne on active service in North Africa. The following extract shows how the actress performing

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 119

30/01/2012 16:24

120

victoria stewart

the role of ‘Violette’ at this point is required to switch between first and third person, enacting a commentary on her own portrayal of the character: Traditional scene! How Violette got widowed. There was a knock on the door, and my mum went. It was a telegram.. . . Said ‘Regret to inform. In Action. Due process of burial.’. . . They wouldn’t tell me how he. . . [. . .] Only, if he died in North Africa, he must have. . . died. . . in the sand. And it must have been. . . hot. And I know he crawled. Somehow I know he crawled. At once she’s cheerful. And I picked myself up! And I dusted myself off. And I became a killer. A. T. S. Ack Ack. Battery outside Newcastle. Planes come to bomb the Tyneside. And with my little gun – bang – bang! [. . . ] And Germany will be a desert. And all the Germans will crawl in the desert, that once was their Hitler Reich. And these were the thoughts of Violette, and she became a heroine.10 Brenton here foregrounds his own use of cliché in his reference to the ‘traditional scene’ of the telegram arriving, while the benign song-lyric image of Violette picking herself up and dusting herself off is undercut by the declaration, ‘I became a killer.’ Any authentic emotion that might fight its way through the mechanisms of mediation is immediately caught up and redirected by the ideology of wartime: thus Violette’s grief itself becomes a weapon, inflicting more harm. Later, during the ‘Brutal English Officer. . . Brutal training routine’,11 the officer makes explicit reference to Violette’s loss in order to encourage her belligerence: ‘I’m the Bosch that spewed your old man’s guts out in the sands [. . .] Learn from that. To kill a man, you use YOU and all of YOU – YOU’ve got. Your body and your hate.’ 12 Violette, bereaved by the war and therefore its victim, is transformed into a combatant. There is no room here to question the ideology that has led to war, and what also emerges in this training scene in particular is the convergence, identified by StaffordClark, between the methods used by both sides in the conflict. This convergence is also implicit in David Hare’s Licking Hitler (1978), a television play that takes a different aspect of the secret war as its focus. Hare drew on the memoirs of Sefton Delmer, a former journalist, who worked with the Political Warfare Executive producing ‘black’ propaganda during the Second World War. Describing a disconcerting encounter with Delmer at the Wiener Library, Hare remarks: ‘I took a less playful view of the unit’s activities than he had done. To me they seemed to speak not just of England then but of England now.’ 13 These sentiments echo Brenton’s forging of links between 1945 and 1968, but unlike Brenton, Hare chooses a realistic idiom, and, while he also expresses his debt to Angus Calder, he admits that his ‘urge to write about [the war] came as much from a romantic feeling for the period: for its violence, its secrecy and, above all, its sexuality’.14 However, Licking Hitler critiques this romanticism as well as questioning the allure of secrecy. Hare’s central protagonist in Licking Hitler is Anna, a young woman from a privileged background, who is sent to a requisitioned country house to assist in the production of propaganda broadcasts. Hare’s model here is Woburn Abbey which for part of the war was

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 120

30/01/2012 16:24

the second world war in british drama since

1968

121

the home of the PWE; it was from here that ‘black’ radio broadcasts emanated. Unlike ‘white’ propaganda, the general source of which could be identified, ‘black’ disguised its origin; in the play, Anna and her immediate superior, the irascible Scotsman Archie, are creating broadcasts, spoken by cooperative German prisoners-of-war, which to the listener will appear to be originating within Germany. (One could compare this with the broadcasts made by William Joyce – ‘Lord Haw Haw’ – the origin of which was not disguised.) Producing this material to a convincing standard requires complex manoeuvring on Archie’s part; some of the tactics shown in the play are drawn from Delmer’s autobiography Black Boomerang (1961) and Hare, like Brenton, is clearly concerned with the moral implications of such secret work. Anna’s upper-class background, emblematised in her inability to make a cup of tea, initially sets Archie against her, but a violent – if not abusive – sexual relationship develops between them. This personal entanglement is used against Anna when she feels moved to protest to Langley, the army officer overseeing the operation, about a plan that Archie has suggested to counter the praise that Goebbels has bestowed on doctors running blood transfusion units on the Eastern Front: Now our idea in reply is to say that the units are getting their supplies of blood not from good clean fellow Germans, but from Polish and Russian prisoners who have not even had a Wassermann test. In other words, our job is to convince an army which we believe had just sustained the most appalling losses in the history of human warfare that those of them who have managed to escape death are on the point of being consumed with venereal disease.15 In response, Langley maintains that the only way to combat the propaganda directed at Germans from within Germany is to produce broadcasts with ‘the same vigour, the same passion, the same intelligence that [Goebbels] has brought to his’, even if this ‘means covering the whole continent in obloquy and filth’.16 Langley also tells Anna that Archie has accused her of trying to seduce him, showing that propaganda does indeed begin at home. Anna’s consideration of the wider moral implications of the proposed broadcast is set against the narrower view of Langley and Archie, who are focused on the task in hand with no sense of the broader consequences. The implication here, reinforced perhaps too bluntly by Hare’s epilogue, which traces the stories of the members of the unit into the post-war period, is that such attitudes cannot necessarily be contained within the boundaries of the war. Writing to Archie many years later, Anna remarks that ‘whereas we knew exactly what we were fighting against, none of us had the whisper of an idea what we were fighting for.’17 Like Brenton and Hare, Ian McEwan chose a female central character for his exploration of the wartime covert operations in the television play, The Imitation Game (1980). Whereas Brenton and Hare dealt with aspects of the war that had begun to enter the public domain in its immediate aftermath, McEwan focused on the code-breaking activities that had their headquarters at Bletchley Park, an aspect of the war that, at the time, was less familiar and still occluded, its workings having been kept secret in the belief that it might be necessary for similar techniques to be used again. McEwan’s researches were foiled because the papers relating to these operations had yet to be released to the Public Records Office; Andrew Hodges’s biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma, which was the source for Hugh Whitemore’s play Breaking the Code (1986), was not published until 1983. McEwan made a virtue out of necessity, and instead of using Turing as a central

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 121

30/01/2012 16:24

122

victoria stewart

protagonist, focuses on Cathy, who becomes a radio operator after joining the ATS and determines to find out more about the organisation of which she is a part. McEwan suggests that part of the reason for women’s confinement to the periphery of the code-breaking operation was precisely the threat of their sexuality. In his play, Hugh Whitemore is able to draw out the tensions of the double burden of secrecy imposed on Turing: both the nature of his work and his sexuality must be kept hidden. McEwan’s code-breaker, Turner, is an object of desire for Cathy, but there is ambiguity about the source of this allure. Taking her to bed, Turner asks: TURNER: Cathy, are you. . . is this your first. . . CATHY: Yes, it’s my first time. TURNER: You don’t mind me asking? CATHY: No, of course not. CATHY smiles slightly mischievously. What about you? TURNER: What about me? (Lying) It’s not. . . it isn’t really my first time. . . CATHY: That’s good. You know exactly what to do then. TURNER: Well. . . CATHY kisses him. CATHY: You know all the secrets.18 There follows a cut to the aftermath of their sexual encounter, with Turner furious and humiliated, throwing her words ‘You know all the secrets’ back at her. The implication is that Cathy knows more than she realises, and that Turner’s ‘secret’ knowledge is strictly circumscribed. His secrets have a political worth, but her own apparent knowledge is perceived as having highly disruptive potential. As in Licking Hitler, it is the woman who is blamed for leading the man astray; left alone in Turner’s room, Cathy (rather improbably) finds a file on the Enigma machine, and she needs only glance at a few lines of this for an unexpected visitor to order her arrest, telling her, ‘You know more about Ultra than any other woman alive.’19 In these two plays, female characters are used to provide, or to attempt to provide, a corrective view within a masculine world; in this regard they anticipate the moves that would be made to refocus attention on women’s wartime experiences by historians such as Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield in the later 1980s and 1990s. Other playwrights have focused on a different aspect of women’s involvement with the war. Stephen Lowe describes growing up with ‘the usual pulp of heroic war film, and comics’, and gaining ‘a fairly graphic picture of the life of the soldier’ only to realise while talking one day to his mother that he ‘had hardly any picture of the lives of those who stayed at home’.20 Lowe’s Touched (1977), which he acknowledges also owes a debt to The People’s War,21 focuses on the lives of a family of women in the period between Victory in Europe Day and Victory in Japan Day. Awaiting news of her husband, who is a prisoner of war in the Far East, Sandra believes herself to be pregnant, and admits that she has been sexually assaulted by an Italian prisoner of war. This pregnancy, it transpires, is hysterical; Sandra learns that her husband has been sent to recuperate in Australia, and the couple are still not reunited at the end of the play. Lowe bookends the action with a sound recording of Richard Dimbleby’s report from the liberation of Belsen and General MacArthur’s announcement that ‘The Holy Mission has been completed.’ 22 The intercutting of these two, combined with ‘a sudden intense

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 122

30/01/2012 16:24

the second world war in british drama since

1968

123

blinding’ lighting effect23 at the climax of the play, implies the cost for the success of this ‘Holy Mission’, as well as suggesting a moral parallel between the Holocaust and the use of atomic bombs against Japan. But most striking is the intersection of these historical traumas with the personal trauma, itself a product of historical circumstances, that is represented by Sandra’s false pregnancy. Sandra, it is revealed, has previously lost a son, ‘hit by a car in the blackout’.24 The new ‘pregnancy’ is partly a response to her earlier bereavement, but Sandra’s eventual realisation that it is a fantasy reveals her loss of faith in such compensations. Towards the end of the play, Sandra’s younger half-sister Betty reminds the family of an earlier incident when Sandra read the tea leaves and predicted that Betty would become engaged to a Polish airman. Betty wears a curtain ring on her finger, and when she pretends it is an engagement ring, the rest of the family play along: ‘JOAN: Now you say, I do begin to see summat. The green of that emerald is a bit flashy [. . .] BRIDIE: (Laughing) Must have cost a fortune.’ 25 But when Sandra is asked to join in, she refuses: BETTY: See what my Polish airman gave me? SANDRA: A curtain ring. BETTY: No, Sandra, come on? Look again. Isn’t it the most fantastic engagement ring you’ve ever seen? With all those diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies. . . [. . .] SANDRA: I have to tell you there is no Poland. I made it up. It’s a fairytale. I dreamt it. Doesn’t exist. You will never get there. It doesn’t exist. It’s a curtain ring. Never be anything else. Do you understand what I’m saying?26 Having confronted reality herself, Sandra cannot allow even this harmless fantasy of Betty’s. The intrusion of the news broadcasts at the end of the play gives some hint of what facing that reality might entail; the degree of realism demanded by Sandra seems as intolerable as the blinding white light directed into the eyes of the audience. A different perspective on how to engage with the legacy of wartime within the context of a matriarchal family unit is offered by Diane Samuels in Kindertransport (1993), a play which considers the effect on Faith, a woman in her early twenties, of the discovery that her mother Evelyn is actually Eva, a child sent to England as a refugee in the late 1930s. Samuels has adult Evelyn and the child Eva played by different actresses and on stage simultaneously; Evelyn’s present-day conversations with her daughter and her adopted mother Lil are intercut with Eva’s experience of leaving her parents and becoming accustomed to living with Lil in England. This device dramatises the separation which Evelyn has achieved between her younger and her present day self; it is this separation which Faith, learning the truth, finds intolerable: FAITH: Talk to me. EVELYN: There is nothing to talk about. FAITH: Please tell me the truth about yourself [. . .] EVELYN: Whatever it is you think you’ve discovered. You must forget it. FAITH: Of course I can’t forget it. EVELYN: I certainly have.27 It is eventually revealed that Eva’s father was killed in Auschwitz, but that her mother Helga survived and came to find her in England. When they are reunited, Helga tells Eva, ‘These people were just a help to you in bad times. You can leave them now behind. The bad times are finished.’ 28 But Eva, no longer the child who was sent to England, cannot

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 123

30/01/2012 16:24

124

victoria stewart

simply resume her former identity; she is even unable to follow her mother’s German.29 Evelyn’s own daughter’s demand for a reconnection with this past is left unresolved at the end of the play. Once Faith’s anger has passed, she asserts: I want to find out what everything means. Get in touch with my relatives. I want to meet them. EVELYN: I have nothing in common with them and neither have you [. . .] FAITH: We can do this together. It would make us closer to each other. EVELYN: I’d rather die than go back. FAITH: You might change your mind. . . EVELYN: I can’t.30 For Faith, discovering a new aspect of her family history is potentially enriching and exciting; for Evelyn, looking to the past will only bring back the pain of loss. Faith may be excited at the prospect of meeting relatives she never knew she had, but for Evelyn this is a threat to a carefully crafted subjectivity that has served as a buffer against the confrontation of her traumatic loss. In this selection of plays, a movement can be discerned from the public to the private, from active service to the domestic, as the focal point of the action. This is not to imply that the activities of statesmen, politicians and soldiers have been neglected in recent drama; what is revealed, and, I would argue, recognised by these playwrights, is precisely the continuity between public and private spheres, a continuity encapsulated in the notion of the ‘Home Front’, which reminds us that no aspect of life was immune from mobilisation. What these playwrights also acknowledge is the continuing importance of the war to British identity and the need to interrogate its representation and appropriation.

Notes 1. Philip Howard, ‘How the Headlong Rush of History Ended in a Cabinet Quibble’, The Times, 1 January 1972, p. 4. 2. David Hare, ‘Introduction’ to The History Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 9–16 (p. 15). 3. Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London: Granada, [1969] 1982), p. 21. 4. Ibid. p. 21. 5. Peter Ansorge, Disrupting the Spectacle: Five Years of Experimental and Fringe Theatre in Britain (London: Pitman Publishing, 1975), p. 16. 6. David Edgar, ‘Provocative Acts: British Playwriting in the Post-war Era and Beyond’, in David Edgar (ed.), State of Play: Playwrights on Playwriting (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), pp. 1–34 (p. 7). 7. Howard Brenton, quoted in John Bull, New British Political Dramatists (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 14. 8. Howard Brenton, quoted in Catherine Itzin and Simon Trussler, ‘Howard Brenton: Petrol Bombs Through the Proscenium Arch’, Theatre Quarterly, V.17 (1975), pp. 4–20 (p. 14). 9. Richard Boon, ‘Introduction’ to Howard Brenton, Hitler Dances (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. vi–xiii (pp. ix–x). 10. Brenton, pp. 39–41. 11. Ibid. p. 52. 12. Ibid. p. 54. 13. Hare, ‘Introduction’, p. 12. 14. Ibid.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 124

30/01/2012 16:24

the second world war in british drama since

1968

125

15. David Hare, Licking Hitler, in The History Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 89–128 (p. 122). 16. Ibid. p. 123. 17. Ibid. p. 128. 18. Ian McEwan, The Imitation Game (London: Picador, 1981), p. 138. 19. Ibid. p. 141. 20. Stephen Lowe, ‘Author’s Note’, in Touched (London: Nick Hern Books, 2006), p. vii. 21. Ibid. 22. Lowe, p. 65. 23. Ibid. p. 77. 24. Ibid. p. 47. 25. Ibid. p. 71. 26. Ibid. p. 74. 27. Diane Samuels, Kindertransport (London: Nick Hern Books, 1995), p. 41. 28. Ibid. p. 78. 29. Ibid. p. 76. 30. Ibid. pp. 87–8.

Further Reading Boon, Richard, Brenton the Playwright (London: Methuen, 1991). Braybon, Gail, and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora, 1987). Brenton, Howard, The Churchill Play, rev. edn, in Brenton: Plays One (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 107–77. —, H.I.D. (Hess is Dead) (London: Nick Hern Books, 1989). Edgar, David, Albert Speer (London: Nick Hern Books, 2000). Greig, David, Dr Korczak’s Example (Edinburgh: Capercaillie Books, 2001). Hare, David, Plenty (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). Norton-Taylor, Richard, Nuremberg (London: Nick Hern, 1997). Shellard, Dominic, British Theatre since the War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Taylor, C. P., Good (London: Methuen, 1982).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 125

30/01/2012 16:24

14

HOLOCAUST TESTIMONY: UNDERSTANDING AND CRITICISM Bob Eaglestone

G

eoffrey Hartman writes of the ways in which ‘new instruments’ have been created to ‘record and express what happened’ in the Holocaust.1 These ‘new instruments’ include not only technological innovations – videos of testimony, for example, collected at the Fortuoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, or the new digitised wartime archives – but intellectual innovations, too. Historians of the Holocaust explore and use different patterns or models to begin to explain the events: in the late 1990s, for example, Christopher Browning and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argued over whether the low-level perpetrators were ‘ordinary men’ or ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’, and this debate itself was an echo of the more celebrated ‘functionalist or intentionalist’ debate between historians in the 1970s. Similarly, philosophers have extended and tested arguments: Giorgio Agamben, voicing a widely held thought, argues that ‘almost none of the ethical principles our age believes it could recognise as valid have stood the decisive test, that of an Ethica more Auschwitz demonstrata.’2 And literary critics and theorists, too, have approached the same issues and have tried, in attempting to understand the Holocaust, to construct ‘new instruments’ to understand the accounts and memoirs of survivors – testimony – and so come to terms with the Holocaust and other ‘limit’ events. There have been, of course, essays and books by major figures (Maurice Blanchot’s essays on Robert Antelme in the late 1950s, for example, or Theodor Adorno’s literary reflections, or George Steiner’s Language and Silence [1967]) and there have also been major critical studies: Terence Des Pres’s outstanding The Survivor (1976), Lawrence Langer’s The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975) and James Young’s very significant Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988). However, for the study of Holocaust testimony specifically, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony (1992) stands out, not least for its enormous contemporary influence for understanding Holocaust testimony. Testimony is an explicitly ‘high theoretical’ book, with a commitment to both psychoanalysis and to de Manian deconstruction. Indeed, it is itself in no small part a response to the ‘de Man affair’, the discovery that the very influential Belgian literary critic and thinker Paul de Man had published a small number of articles in a collaborationist newspaper during the Occupation of Belgium in World War II. This book, at its heart, makes two main linked claims, both of which shape current critical views on testimony and both of which are open to question. First, Felman and Laub argue that testimony, a form of writing that does not ‘simply report facts but, in a different way [. . .] makes us encounter [. . .] strangeness’, is a separate

126

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 126

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust testimony

127

genre from other forms of writing, with special generic demands and characteristics.3 In arguing this they draw on an established idea of the specialness of the Holocaust. This is not the same as the idea of Holocaust uniqueness, now widely questioned, but rather a sense of the singularity of this event of suffering. Raul Hilberg writes that survivors seem to have ‘a special kind of knowledge’: They have referred to it in expressions like ‘planet Auschwitz’ and in such sentences as ‘Those who were not there cannot imagine what it was like.’ Clearly, they were there, and thus they are set apart or set themselves apart from anyone who did not share their fate. The outsider can never cross this divide and can never grasp their experience.4 This view, supported time and time again by survivors, would seem to imply that there is something ‘strange’ and ‘generically unique’ about these texts – something analogous to the ‘combat gnosticism’ that James Campbell identifies in the ideology of First World War poetry criticism.5 Elie Wiesel’s celebrated remark that, if ‘the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the Epistle, the Renaissance the Sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony’ is the leitmotiv of this view that testimony is a new literature to represent a singular suffering.6 More than this, Felman and Laub argue because of this, testimony is not only performative – it performs what it does, it is an act of witnessing – but also has a profound ethical burden. These ideas, of the generic singularity of testimony and of its burden, have been taken up in the work on trauma of Cathy Caruth and others. Second, and more contentiously, Felman and Laub suggest that works of testimony give access to a historical reality beyond the reaches of the work of historians or of the historical record. An emblematic and powerful example of this lies in a section of the book that has been widely cited. Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst and a collector of survivor video testimonies, discusses an interdisciplinary conference about video testimony at which the audience watch a survivor recalling the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz: ‘“[A]ll of a sudden”, she said “we saw four chimneys going up in flames. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was unbelievable.”’7 He then goes on to recount how the historians present point out that this testimony was flawed: according to the records, only one chimney was blown up. He continues: A psychoanalyst who had been one of the interviewers of the woman profoundly disagreed. ‘The woman was testifying’, he insisted, ‘not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence [. . .] The woman testified to an event that broke the all-compelling frame of Auschwitz [. . .]. She testified to the breakage of the framework. That was historical truth.’8 This claim – that this ‘was historical truth’ – is a powerful one, and, as could be expected, upset the historians. Laub goes on to argue that: it was through my listening to her that I in turn came to understand not merely her subjective truth, but the very historicity of the event, in an entirely new dimension. She was testifying not simply to empirical historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination. The historians could not hear, I thought, the way her silence was part of her testimony, and essential part of the historical truth she was precisely bearing witness to.9

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 127

30/01/2012 16:24

128

bob eaglestone

Laub’s view here is not simply that the historians are not good in meeting the special demands of oral history, but that they are displaying a deeper failing: that the discipline of history cannot ‘hear’ the truth of testimony, nor ‘see’ the person. This idea, this antagonism to history in testimony, has been taken up repeatedly in the understanding of testimony in literary studies. However, and while it is true that history is often a very conservative discipline, this position in this context might be seen as rather rash. (James Young, by contrast, is also concerned with the peculiarity of testimony, but for him a key question lies in how this is domesticated both by the ‘epistemological climate’ in which writers and readers live and by the very nature of representation itself.10) In a recent exchange in the journal History and Memory, Thomas Trezise has questioned the claims that Laub makes: he suggests that not only does no one from the conference recall this conversation (the ‘psychoanalyst’ of the story turns out to be Laub himself) but that the woman survivor is a composite figure, which together suggest that Laub is both ‘losing’ the actual survivor to replace her as a ‘type’ and is, in fact, blurring his historical sources in order to make and win an argument. He goes on to suggest that ‘the lines between historiography, testimony, and art are no longer so clearly drawn’ and, significantly, that testimony is a hybrid and complex genre.11 The questioning of this emblematic anecdote is, in fact, an implicit critique of many of the claims of Testimony, specifically its claim that testimony offers something beyond history and that testimony is in itself a separate genre. Laub’s response is to deny many of Trezise’s findings and to reassert the special role of testimony. It cannot be understood in other terms, Laub argues, for in: our scholarly work with the Holocaust, our focus should be on integration. This does not only require that we respect traumatic experience and try to look at it from within its own frame. We also have to forge methods that enable us to grasp and understand the fragmentation of the Holocaust experience and not get caught up in the enormous destructiveness that shattered all frames of reference.12 More than this, Laub suggests that it was the: very notion that it is possible to unearth the deeper layers of extreme experience related to historical trauma and to convey them in the intimate dialogue of the testimonial process that made the book Testimony so useful to educational projects.13 Here again is the insistence both on testimony as a separate and unique genre, and on its ability to ‘unearth’ the very deepest layers of history. Testimony, then, set running two interlinked ideas about testimony: that as a genre it is in some way separate with special concerns; and that testimony is somehow beyond, or deeper than, history. I am now going to turn to how those ideas, set out in 1992, have been questioned or developed as communities of scholars and critics continue to attempt to understand Holocaust testimony.

Testimony as Genre? To analyse the division between Trezise’s view (testimony as a hybrid genre) and Felman and Laub’s (testimony as a distinct genre), it is possible to look at the actual tropes of Holocaust testimony to see how far claims for either distinctness or hybridity are borne out in the actual texts. Many testimonies use a ‘historical’ style, either throughout or, more often, by interrupt-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 128

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust testimony

129

ing their personal narrative by an excursus on, for example, Jews in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Others actually refer to or include historical texts: Rudolph Vrba’s testimony, for example, includes the sworn affidavit he submitted to the Eichmann trial. Others – Primo Levi is especially well known for this – switch from the perfect to the pluperfect tense, or from the depiction of a particular event to a more general, everyday repeated event. This grammatical switching unbalances a personal narrative and sets it into a more historical context. Others, too, use historical knowledge to inculcate a bleak irony. The protagonist of Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness is not, at the beginning, afraid of the SS or the Hungarian police. When Olga Lengyel approaches Auschwitz she smells a ‘strange sickening sweetish odour’: ‘We asked one of the guides, an old inmate, about this structure. “It is a camp ‘bakery’”, she replied. . . Had she revealed the truth we would not have believed her.’14 Testimonies also often frame their narratives using metatextual devices. Some begin with an introduction in the ‘present’, others (Jean Amery, for example) frame their moments of testimony in and as essays. Others, too, enclose metatextual citations naming the dead or the missing. Several ghostwritten testimonies begin in medias res, a well-known ‘ghosting’ technique. Just as most testimonies draw on the traditions of realist prose, so do they also draw on the trope of the epiphany, central to much modernist writing. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the murder of the babies is this moment of horror in his first hours at Auschwitz-Birkenau – this is when the ‘night’ of the title falls. Testimony texts are also full of interruptions that disrupt the flow of narrative. Sometimes these are almost Shandean, as in the work of Jorge Semprum, where the text seems to advance by digression. Charlotte Delbo, too makes use of this trope quite frequently. After her description of ‘living skeletons that dance’ she writes ‘[P]resently I am writing this story in a café – it is turning into a story.’15 And finally, as an unending interruption, these texts fail to offer closure. This is one crucial difference between these testimony texts and contemporary ‘misery memoirs’ or texts of illness and recovery: far from a ‘satisfying ending’, these Holocaust survivors’ texts, while they finish, do not end. In the last chapter of The Truce, called ‘The Awakening’, Levi dreams he is once more in the Lager: and nothing is true outside the Lager [. . .] a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘Wstawàch’.16 Here, unlike an illness in a memoir of illness, the camps do not interrupt daily life ‘afterwards’: rather daily life in the post-war years interrupts the continued and traumatic experience of the camps. This explains, in some little part, too, why survivors go back over and over events, and tell and retell their stories. These tropes, and others identified by critics, are not unique to Holocaust testimony. Indeed, they have been used by many postmodern writers for several decades. It is unclear whether they have been adapted from survivor literature (indeed, some postmodern fiction clearly adapts these tropes for its own devices) or whether, in a more Derridean vein, one might say that these possibilities are simply present in writing itself as a ‘technology’. Overall, this seems to suggest that ‘testimony’ is more of a hybrid genre, as Trezise suggests, drawing on other genres and forms of writing, and as a genre is not ‘special’ (although, as a ‘hybrid’, can still be distinct). However, this very contrast (‘distinct’ or ‘hybrid’ genre) reveals, of course, that no genre is really distinct or ‘pure’ in any profound sense. There are

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 129

30/01/2012 16:24

130

bob eaglestone

not ‘lines of descent’ for novels, or for works of history, and all writing is the constructive piecing together of ways of writing, the self-creating of a genealogy: the question of the specialness of testimony as a genre, then, cannot really be answered by reference to generic textual qualities. Indeed, the clearest example of this is Fragments, the ‘false testimony’ of Bruno Grossjean/Benjamin Wilkomirski. This text takes on many of the tropes of testimony and, while it was assumed to be testimony for a period, it has been shown to be totally invented. It is true that Fragments, like many false testimonies, is rather histrionic, a quality it shares with an older book, Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 The Painted Bird, also now considered historically inauthentic, and with Misha Defonseca/Monique de Wael’s 1997 false testimony Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, in which she claimed wolves helped her survive during the Holocaust: but this quality is not enough to ‘disprove’ a testimony. Indeed, it is one shared with a number of historically accurate testimonies. If, then, the text itself cannot justify the ‘specialness’ of testimony, this ‘specialness’ must lie in the metatextual elements. This consists in part of what is often called the ‘autobiographical pact’ – the affirmation that the writer is the protagonist, and is retelling the ‘story’ – but also of a whole range of supplementary metatexts – scholarly apparatus such as introductions, references in other works, accounts available online and so on. As I have suggested, some testimonies offer their own metatexts (affidavits, framing devices) but these ‘internal’ metatexts are, of course, also literary devices as old as the novel and could equally well be invented (as they are in Frankenstein, for example). It seems odd to say that it is effectively what is not in the testimony text that creates the ‘specialness’ of this genre, but this may be part of the case. However, it seems to me that this does not get to the real issues that concern Laub and Felman, and their sense of the ‘oddness’ of testimony. One perhaps anecdotal symptom of this ‘oddness’ is in the experience of reading Holocaust testimony: it is unlike the experience of reading, say, a novel or a book of history. While a novel, or a more conventional autobiography, might hold the attention and be fascinating, it also, usually, offers pleasure: but the experience of reading these texts, while fascinating, is not pleasurable. Indeed, people do speak of being ‘gripped’ by testimony, they do not (without irony) speak of ‘enjoying it’. One reason for this is the sense of closure that much fiction offers. As I have already suggested, Holocaust testimony often lacks this and returns, insistently, to Levi’s terrible ‘dawn command of Auschwitz’. Another reason for this is what Laub discusses as the ‘historicity of the event’.

Testimony Beyond History This second claim to Testimony, and a key part of the ‘oddness’ of these texts, is the large claim that they reach beyond historical truth to the ‘very historicity of the event’. Does this claim mean that the texts are unaffected by or outside history? In one way, this seems impossible: testimony texts, like all texts, are created, in James Young’s phrase, in their own ‘epistemological climate’. Following a debate engendered by Peter Novik’s The Holocaust in American Life (2000), it has become increasingly common to divide the ‘history of the history’ of the Holocaust into three rough phases, each with its own characteristics. The first of these is a period in which, while the war was much discussed, there was relatively little discussion of the Holocaust in the public sphere. When Auschwitz survivor Kitty Hart arrived in the UK for the first time, in 1946, her uncle met her and her mother at Dover. She goes on:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 130

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust testimony

131

The moment we got into his car he staggered us by saying: ‘Before we go off to Birmingham there’s one thing I must make quite clear. On no account are you to talk about any of the things that have happened to you. Not in my house, I don’t want my girls to know. And I don’t want to know.’17 And indeed, she did not describe her experiences until 1961, in her book I Am Alive, written primarily for her children and heavily self-censored. This sort of reaction seems common. However, historians like Hasia Diner and David Cesarani have contested this ideal of a ‘myth of silence’: Diner’s 2009 book We Remember With Reverence and Love argues that while there were many forums in which testimony was given and the events were discussed, these tended to be specifically Jewish – often Yiddish – and either these did not ‘reach out’ to a wider context or, in the heated rhetoric and political complexities of the early Cold War, were simply ignored. However, at the end of the 1950s, various political and cultural events changed this view: the arrest of Eichmann in 1960 and his trial in Jerusalem in 1961; the success of a film based on Anne Frank’s diary in New York in 1959; the issuing of the most comprehensive history of the Holocaust by that date, Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961; in Paris, the success of André Schwarz-Bart’s Holocaust novel The Last of the Just, which won the Prize Goncourt in 1959. These, and other events, meant that there was a growing interest in and demand for Holocaust testimonies. However, these tended to be of a certain sort, focusing on Auschwitz and only gradually piecing together a wider picture of Jewish suffering. In the UK, for example, the story of Rudolf Vrba and his escape from Auschwitz was serialised in the Daily Herald in March 1961 and was published in 1963, as I Cannot Forgive. The extent, scope and range of the genocide were still only becoming clear. While, of course, these cultural changes cannot be said to have a strict chronology, the third stage is often dated from the Spielberg film Schindler’s List (1993). This globally successful film is credited with bringing the Holocaust to global memory. While this is rather an exaggerated claim – a similar claim was made for the 1978 television miniseries Holocaust – it is true that the 1990s saw a huge growth in ‘Holocaust memory’. For example, 1993 saw the opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: other countries also began to plan and open museums and Holocaust centres. The Imperial War Museum in London opened its Holocaust exhibit in 2000. This now global reach of memory seems to have had a number of effects on testimonies. There has been some considerable concern about the ‘Americanisation’ of the Holocaust – a sort of ‘colonisation’ of this European event into American memory, and a range of testimonies seem to echo this: they were collected and written in the US, and, in some cases, they have a strong sense of a US audience. There has also been some criticism that this ‘global Holocaust memory’ encourages an over-identification with testimony accounts. Alan Berger, for example, writes of the ‘real danger in trying to appropriate for oneself symbols of an experience that the witnesses themselves contend is beyond the imagination’.18 Michael Bernstein goes further in arguing that ‘no amount of empathy can make one a witness to events at which one was not present’ and that such identifications pander to one of the most pervasive myths of our era, a myth perhaps partially arising out of our collective response to the horrors of the concentration camps, [. . .] the absolute authority given to first person testimony. Such narratives [. . .] are habitually regarded as though they were completely unmediated, as though language, gesture

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 131

30/01/2012 16:24

132

bob eaglestone

and imagery could become transparent if the experience expressed is sufficiently horrific.19 Bernstein, and other scholars, argue that analysing such accounts is not to question their veracity – although after the experience of forged accounts, this activity is not itself open to question – but only to point out that all texts are shaped and mediated by forces beyond the writer. It might even be possible to suggest that – while all testimonies are exceptional and each survival was astounding – there is a market demand for even more astonishing accounts of survival. For example, Edith Hahn Beer survived the War in hiding and by using false papers. While she did marry a Nazi officer, this event is not the most exceptional thing about her, yet her (ghostwritten) testimony was called and marketed as The Nazi Officer’s Wife. While this history of the forms of Holocaust testimony seems to suggest that even testimony texts are products of their time, it does not answer the question of whether testimonies get to the ‘historicity’ of the events. Jorge Semprun’s Literature or Life? revolves around exactly this question. Semprun has had a frankly astounding life, from his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, his capture as a partisan during World War II, his imprisonment at Buchenwald, ten years as an undercover spy for the communists in post-war Spain, a spectacular leave-taking of Stalinism, a writing career littered with prizes, including an Oscar, and a career in high political office as the Spanish Minister for Culture. His testimonies are influenced by Proust (on the one hand) and Beckett (on the other) and perform a constant fugue of memory and narrative. In Literature or Life?, apart from revising and revisiting his own earlier testimonies (again, a refusal of closure), the narrator constantly asks if people who had not experienced the camps can come to understand them, to understand what Laub would call the ‘deep historical truth’. The book does not answer the question, although it puts it in many ways: it does make it clear, however, that perhaps only a survivor of these experiences could make that judgement, and those of us who have come after are left, as it were, outside, unable to tell. And perhaps it is this that characterises testimony most of all: it shares something terrible, with all the techniques of literary writing and often the support of scholarship, and yet, despite this, it maintains a divide between the reader and the events than cannot, in honesty, be crossed.

Notes 1. Geoffrey Hartmann, The Longest Shadow (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 1. 2. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 13. 3. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. 4. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (London: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 187. 5. James Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’, New Literary History, 30.1 (1999), pp. 203–15. I would like to thank Hope Wolf for bringing this to my attention. 6. Elie Wiesel, ‘The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration’, in Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 7. 7. Felman and Laub, p. 59.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 132

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust testimony

133

8. Ibid. p. 60. 9. Ibid. p. 62. 10. James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 192. 11. Thomas Trezise, ‘Between History and Psychoanalysis: A Case Study in the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony’, History and Memory, 20. 1 (2008), pp. 7–47 (p. 35). 12. Dori Laub, ‘On Holocaust Testimony and its “Reception” within its own Frame and as a Process in its own Right: A Response to “Between History and Psychoanalysis” by Thomas Trezise’, History and Memory, 21.1 (2009), pp. 127–50 (p. 143). 13. Ibid. pp. 142–3. 14. Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (London: Panther, 1959), pp. 33–4. 15. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (London: Yale, 1995), p. 26. 16. Primo Levi, If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1979), pp. 380–1. 17. Kitty Hart, Return to Auschwitz (London: Panther, 1983), p. 14 18. Alan Berger, ‘Theological Implications of Second Generation Literature’, in Efraim Sicher (ed.), Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 251–74 (p. 256). 19. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (London: University of California Press, 1994), p. 47.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 133

30/01/2012 16:24

15

HOLOCAUST FILM Barry Langford

W

ithin the enormous corpus of British and American films portraying the experiences of combatants and civilians in World War II, the Holocaust has gradually come to occupy a place of paradoxical centrality comparable to the role it now plays in wider cultural understandings of the war. Gradually: because as numerous histories have attested, for complex ideological and political reasons Nazi persecution of the Jews during the war itself and in the immediate post-war years was imperfectly understood, culturally and historiographically marginalised, and only rarely portrayed onscreen. Central: because in the last quarter of the twentieth century the cultural significance of the Holocaust increasingly and irreversibly shifted from the margins to the defining core (at least in the former Western Allied nations) of the generally accepted public narrative of the war. In landmark commemorations (notably the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end in 1995) and public events such as the inauguration of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, major films and television programmes such as Holocaust, Shoah, Schindler’s List and The Pianist have played an important part in this ‘recalibration’ of the Holocaust.1 Yet paradoxical too: because inasmuch as the unoccupied Allied nations (primarily Britain and the United States) did not directly experience the Holocaust on their own soil or, with a few exceptions, against their own citizens – nor was the liberation of the Jews understood as a principal war aim by Allied leaders – the Holocaust’s latter-day instantiation as the conflict’s defining attribute is predicated not only on a vicarious and mediated relationship to history, but on understandings of the Holocaust as a philosophical and existential problem as much as, or more than, lived experience. For these reasons, this chapter will not rehearse the history of English-language Holocaust film and television – a narrative that is already well addressed in several surveys and monographs as well as an extensive scholarly literature on a few individual films – notably Alan Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog, Shoah and Schindler’s List.2 Instead, it will approach the question of Holocaust film from an oblique angle intended to illustrate the ways in which ‘Holocaust awareness’ has entered the cultural and cinematic mainstream as essentially a matter of morality and ethics (rather than, say, of testimony). Taking the single, abortive Holocaust-related project of one of the most important postwar American filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick, as a starting point, this chapter will explore the ways in which evolving perspectives on the Holocaust have informed both films about and films, in a broader sense, of the Holocaust.

134

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 134

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust film

135

Kubrick’s Holocaust What can a single film tell us about the nature of Holocaust cinema? A film, at that, that was not merely unfinished or never completed, neither ‘lost’ nor newly reconstituted or restored, but one that was never made, for which not a single frame of finished footage was ever shot, which in fact never got beyond the earliest stages of pre-production, and which exists only in the spectral form of a first-draft screenplay, voluminous files of research material, and a few suggestive images of a single actor. Given the innately precarious nature of film production, the improbable combination of personnel, invention, opportunity, money and sheer luck that need to converge to enable any film to get made, any filmmaker is liable to have as many or more unrealised or stillborn projects as completed films to his account: all the more so when you work, as did Stanley Kubrick, in a highly personal way on challenging, non-generic subjects as a semi-independent director-producer – notwithstanding his sweetheart deal with Warner Bros. (which offered Kubrick a highly unusual degree of creative licence, budgetary control and an unequivocal right of final cut). Indeed, the unfilmed Aryan Papers, based on Louis Begley’s autobiographical 1991 novel Wartime Lies,3 is not even the best-known or most celebrated of Kubrick’s own ‘what-ifs’, a standing shared in different ways by his mooted Napoleon biopic of the early 1970s and by A.I., the science fiction film Kubrick developed on and off for over a decade and which was realised after Kubrick’s death, in a slightly different form, by Steven Spielberg. It is not perhaps surprising that we should wonder how Kubrick’s powerful, unsettling imagination, which so often tackled subjects whose sheer scale extends the capacities of narrative cinema to the very limit – subjects like nuclear Armageddon in Dr Strangelove4 or human evolution on a millennial scale in 2001: A Space Odyssey5 – would have attempted to give artistic form to probably the most monstrous crime in recorded history. But what makes the combination of Kubrick and the Holocaust so potent – yet in context, of course so tantalising – is a sense of the aptness of this conjunction, a sense that this topic might have indeed found its ideal cinematic chronicler in Stanley Kubrick. In 1991, Kubrick settled on Begley’s novel as the property on which he would base a film about the Holocaust, a subject by which for a number of years he had been both magnetised and, it appears, somewhat intimidated. Over some twelve months Kubrick invested himself in his characteristically meticulous, immersive creative process, building up his already considerable library of published material on the Holocaust (his widow Christiane has said that ‘Stanley read everything’ there was to read on the subject), accumulating a mass of visual research materials, and writing a draft screenplay entitled Aryan Papers (the phrase refers to the false identity documents which allow the novel’s protagonists, a young Jewish boy Maciek and his aunt, to masquerade as Gentile Poles in occupied wartime Warsaw). For the lead role of Tania, Maciek’s resourceful and courageous aunt, Kubrick considered a wide range of possible castings including Mia Farrow and Michelle Pfeiffer but eventually settled on the unfamiliar Dutch actor Johanna ter Steege, best known for her role in George Sluizer’s The Vanishing.6 Having conducted camera tests and costume fittings with ter Steege, however, Kubrick abruptly abandoned the project and never returned to it. Various reasons have been proposed for Kubrick’s decision to give up on Aryan Papers, ranging from anxiety over his inability to do justice to so overwhelming a subject to, more prosaically, pique at having been pipped to the post by the news of Spielberg putting Schindler’s List into production. Christiane Kubrick professes herself to have been relieved by Kubrick’s decision since he was, she says, ‘deeply depressed’

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 135

30/01/2012 16:24

136

barry langford

throughout the period he worked on the project. Since, however, Kubrick himself never commented publicly on Aryan Papers, his motives for dropping the film remain even more speculative than those for taking it up in the first place.7 And, as far as the available record goes, that is pretty much that. Clearly, the available evidence is far too scanty to try to reconstruct the Holocaust film Kubrick might have made. However, the films Kubrick did make may illuminate his reasons for turning to this subject matter. We need not trawl through Kubrick’s filmography looking for references to Nazism or World War II, although these are certainly present – Peter Sellers’s crippled Nazi nuclear scientist Dr Strangelove hailing the US president (also of course Peter Sellers) as ‘mein Fuhrer’, or the savage relish that Alex in A Clockwork Orange takes in imagining himself in the role of an SS officer;8 nor to collect imagery which might seem redolent of Holocaust iconography were one minded to find it – such as Danny in The Shining concealing himself in the hotel kitchen from his father’s murderous rampage.9 Geoffrey Cocks has devoted an entire book, The Wolf at the Door, to arguing that the Holocaust was a pivotal preoccupation of Kubrick the man and central to his creative sensibility – but paradoxically so central and so difficult that Kubrick was unable to bring himself to confront it directly. Cocks suggests, in Freudian fashion, that it is the very absence (that is, repression) of overt Holocaust imagery or references in Kubrick’s cinema that testifies to the crucial importance of the subject for him.10 I will not be following Cocks’s lead, which explores Kubrick’s filmography as a form of psychoanalytic dreamwork, finding the inadmissible presence of the Holocaust symptomatically present in a multitude of symbols and veiled allusions. Quite apart from its teleological tendency (that is, having decided that the Holocaust was Kubrick’s abiding preoccupation, Cocks then proceeds to read the films on the basis that the Holocaust is a structuring presence and unsurprisingly comes up with the goods), Cocks’s claim that Kubrick was obsessed by the Holocaust from an early stage aligns itself with another tendency one encounters elsewhere in writing about Kubrick, namely to portray him as an artist who somehow stands outside the contexts of the larger culture to which he addressed himself, setting the cultural weather rather than responding to it. Undoubtedly, Kubrick is a singular figure in contemporary American cinema: an independent filmmaker who established himself outside the studio system yet who for the last three decades of his life enjoyed a harmonious and commercially successful working relationship with a major Hollywood studio, Warner Bros.; a director who always stood apart from his contemporaries and, while in some ways sympathetic to the ‘New Hollywood’ which from the late 1960s challenged the stylistic and ideological orthodoxies of the studio era, was never part of that, or any other, school or movement; whose career encompasses a wide variety of genres yet simultaneously subjects generic conventions to his own unmistakable sensibility while evidencing little interest in ‘genre revisionism’ (for example, Full Metal Jacket is a Vietnam combat film, Barry Lyndon a literary adaptation and costume drama, but they resemble most other films in those genres very little and equally seem uninterested in contributing to or commenting on those genres11); and who as an expatriate producer-director (and usually producer-director-writer) working with almost complete creative autonomy and control gave every appearance of marching to no drumbeat but his own. Yet for all that, Kubrick is often more closely attuned to the temper of the times than he is given credit for, and his relationship to the Holocaust demonstrates this. So in this chapter, by locating Kubrick within larger contexts of Holocaust awareness and representation, I suggest that his cinema demonstrates a sensibility whose own ongoing preoccupa-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 136

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust film

137

tions relate closely to key questions asked of the Holocaust by historians, sociologists and philosophers, and indicates the ways in which ‘Holocaust awareness’ flows through the main currents of American cinema.

Making the Holocaust To do this, first we need to consider how the meaning, or meanings, and significance of the Holocaust have evolved over the more than sixty years since the end of World War II, years which also encompass Kubrick’s entire career. In the last two decades in particular, the Holocaust has become a central ‘location’ in European culture, an all but ubiquitous focus of education, public commemoration and debate, academic research and media representation, importantly including cinema. We should recall that this was by no means always the case. For more than twenty years following the end of the war, the murder of the European Jews was at best a marginal dimension of European consciousness. This was certainly not because of a lack of interest in the Nazi period in general, its principal figures, methods, structures, aims and implications, which starting during the war itself generated a torrent of analysis, commentary, history and representation that continues unabated to the present day. Nor did the sidelining of the Holocaust (a term which did not come into general usage to denote the murder of European Jewry until the early 1960s) come about because of ignorance or denial of the basic facts of the genocide (which term was itself first coined in 1943 by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin specifically to denote a new category of mass murder for the post-war system of international law to be established at the Nuremberg Trials). The extent and methodology of the ‘Final Solution’, which had been broadly if hazily established during the war, were in their essentials laid out at the first Nuremberg Trials and sixty years of subsequent scholarship has not uncovered any revelations that fundamentally alter the account presented there.12 However, while it was readily recognised that the Jews had consistently been the victims of the worst excesses of Nazi terror, for a variety of reasons neither the very specific nature of the continent-wide campaign to exterminate European Jewry, nor the utter centrality of racial ideology to Nazism, was widely understood. Throughout the 1950s, mainstream official and public accounts of the Nazi terror in East and West alike tended to fold the extermination of the Jews into the general narrative of German ‘war crimes’ or ‘crimes against humanity’. In the Eastern Bloc, Jews were classed alongside soldiers and civilians of all nationalities as victims of fascism (so memorials at Holocaust sites frequently commemorated Jewish and Polish persecution indiscriminately, without acknowledging the specific and unique nature of Jewish martyrdom).13 In the West, the project of rebuilding shattered European culture and economy had no obvious place for reflections on the annihilation of a central part of European society, while the attempt to understand the particularities of the Third Reich was distorted by the Cold War, in which it was ideologically convenient to collapse the differences between the twin ‘totalitarianisms’ of Nazism and Soviet Communism.14 On both sides of the Iron Curtain, moreover, a tacit consensus ensured that awkward questions about the extent of complicity in the genocide in occupied nations, whether by state apparatuses or amongst the general population, which might undermine cherished national myths of resistance or martyrdom that underpinned the post-war order in those countries – in France, say, or Poland, Romania and Lithuania –were also best avoided. Both academic and popular historians of Nazism relegated the Holocaust to a secondary place: in William L. Shirer’s 1959 best-seller The

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 137

30/01/2012 16:24

138

barry langford

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, for example, the persecution and murder of the Jews is covered in some 40 scattered pages out of a total length of 1,200. (By contrast, a comparable recent work like Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich devotes almost a third of its 900 pages to Nazi racial policy and cites the Holocaust unequivocally on the first page of the introduction as the central fact of the historical record and ‘a uniquely terrible event in modern history’.15) For Jews in the immediate post-war period, of course, this strategic oversight of the Holocaust – Dan Stone describes it as an ‘aggressive silence’ – was impossible.16 The scattered survivors themselves bore the physical and psychological scars of unrecuperable trauma. Diasporic Jewish communities suffered a complex mixture of grief at the annihilation of their friends and relatives, guilt (however unjustified) that they had not somehow found ways to have done more to prevent or limit the tragedy, alongside the general war-weariness and desire to focus on building for the future that Jews shared with non-Jews. Amongst Zionists, primarily the Zionist leadership in Palestine – whose own attitude to news of the slaughter emerging from Europe during the war had been remarkably stoical – the tragedy of European Jewry was mobilised in complex ways in the drive to found a Jewish national home. On the one hand, the annihilation of European Jewry validated the claims that Jews needed their own state, released from the anxious reliance on the provisional tolerance of host populations which could so easily turn into murderous hostility. On the other hand, the perception of terrorised, cowed Jews going meekly and unprotesting to their deaths was at odds with the new Zionist archetype of the fighter and pioneer. So a heroic yet arguably unrepresentative event such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became the preferred means through which the Holocaust was acknowledged in the early years of the State of Israel. (We can see this clearly reflected in Otto Preminger’s 1960 Zionist epic Exodus, in the portrayal of a young Holocaust survivor whose experiences as an Auschwitz Sonderkommando gave him practical knowledge of handling dynamite, and is accepted into the Irgun on that basis.17) In these ways the Holocaust took on a variety of discursive positions and functions in post-war Jewish life. As a Jew (albeit a thoroughly non-observant one) growing up in what had now become the largest single diasporic Jewish community, New York, a city whose already vibrant Jewish culture had been further animated by the post-war influx of refugees and survivors, Kubrick would of course have shared in this complex relationship to the catastrophe of European Jewry. Nonetheless, the Holocaust was in this early post-war period far from the central dimension of post-war Jewish culture that it would represent as the century drew to its end. In many ways, the relative silence about the Holocaust – relative at least to the outpouring of testimony and remembrance in later years – in the post-war Jewish world seemed symptomatic of the repression of a trauma as yet too great to be satisfactorily accommodated to a clear and consistent narrative. There is no reason to think that as a secular and far from academic third-generation Jewish-American whose own ambitions had little connection either to traditionally ‘respectable’ Jewish professions (medicine, accountancy and so on), or for that matter the tradition of Jewish showbiz hucksterism on Broadway and Hollywood, Kubrick would have any reason to make the not-yet-clearly-defined subject of the Holocaust a defining part of his creative sensibility. James B. Harris, Kubrick’s partner in the films he produced between 1955 and 1961, suggests that Kubrick’s interest in the Holocaust during their working partnership was no different than Harris’s own, ‘or for that matter millions of others’.18 If this attitude changed over the ensuing decades, and clearly it did, this reflects Kubrick’s sensitivity to shifting cultural trends, not his indifference to

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 138

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust film

139

them. His own growing consciousness of the Holocaust kept pace with a general trend towards heightened ‘Holocaust awareness’ starting in the 1960s. The history of Holocaust film charts this process clearly enough: it is both an index of and a significant player in changing cultural attitudes to the Holocaust. One of the best-known examples is Alan Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog, certainly the most celebrated non-fiction film about the camps at least until Claude Lanzmann released Shoah three decades later, and to this day a film whose hugely powerful and intensely distilled visual impact (its running time is just 28 minutes) mean it is still extensively used in Holocaust education.19 Yet what the film demonstrates more conclusively than anything is that the understandings of the genocide available in the mid 1950s were very different from those of today. In 1981 West German director Margareta von Trotta’s Die Bleierne Zeit/The German Sisters, a fictionalised biography of the Baader-Meinhof leader Ulrike Meinhof, depicted the future urban guerrilla as a teenage schoolgirl attending a showing of Night and Fog at her secondary school with her elder sister; afterwards, the two girls console each other, sobbing, in the vestibule.20 This scene both depicts the visceral impact the film continues to exert on everyone who sees it for the first time, and is historically accurate in that a revulsion against the unaddressed and largely unacknowledged legacy of the Third Reich played a major part in the radicalisation of the German New Left of the late 1960s, of which the Baader-Meinhof was an extreme manifestation. On the other hand, what is also striking about this scenario is how Jewish experience is marginalised. The reaction of the 1968 generation in Germany against their parents concerns only German politics and society. And Night and Fog is a wholly appropriate instrument for this particular form of consciousness-raising because, despite opening and closing in present-day Auschwitz and including a mass of archival images of the deportations and the camps, the word ‘Jew’ occurs in the film just twice. For that matter, ‘Nazi’ is used only a handful of times: the more generalising term ‘fascist’ occurs much more often. Like other works of this period, Night and Fog does not distinguish the singular fate of the Jews within the totality of German war crimes: in fact, the film’s title itself refers to Hitler’s decree that political deportees from France be arrested and evacuated under cover of darkness. (Jews, of course, in France and elsewhere, were rounded up and deported in broad daylight and in plain sight.) The approach taken in Night and Fog, bringing to light crimes that were supposed to remain hidden, ironically relegates the unique nature of the Holocaust to obscurity.21 The film also has a contemporary political agenda which militates against a clear focus on Jewish experience, namely to warn against the dangers of domestic fascist revanchism in France during the period of the Algerian revolt: underlining that, as the historian of Holocaust film Ilan Avisar has observed, ‘Holocaust films are always accommodated to the ideological demands of the present.’22 This de-emphasising of the Jewish genocide, which one also finds in a wide variety of dramatic films of this period dealing with Nazi war crimes, many of which centre on nonJewish protagonists like Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stop, Andrezj Wajda’s Kanal or Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg,23 makes for a rather schizophrenic perspective, in which the very fact that what above all distinguished Nazi tyranny from others and which makes it so frighteningly compelling a subject – the decision to murder en masse, down to the last individual, a people who were not party to any conflict – is oddly absent from depictions of the events themselves. A series of unrelated but important events over the course of the 1960s started to

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 139

30/01/2012 16:24

140

barry langford

change the picture. The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 was stage-managed by the Israeli prosecutors to demonstrate as clearly as possible the full extent and above all the distinctiveness of the ‘Final Solution’. It was following the Eichmann trial that the term ‘Holocaust’ itself entered general usage as a term to designate the Nazi campaign of racial extermination. The same year saw the publication of Raul Hilberg’s monumental three-volume The Destruction of the European Jews, the first major scholarly study of the genocide as a discrete set of policies and events – though Hilberg had to battle the scepticism and indifference of the scholarly establishment to get his book published at all.24 The mid 1960s saw a new wave of highly publicised trials in West Germany of former camp personnel at Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The Six-Day War of 1967 (and again the Yom Kippur War of 1973), which pitted Israel against the allied armies of most of its Arab neighbours, revitalised the importance of the Holocaust within Zionist circles as the justification for Israel’s increasingly militarised stance in reaction to Arab rhetoric of annihilation and ‘pushing the Jews into the sea’. Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and memorial, first established in 1953, underwent a major expansion and reorganisation. (And, as a nasty corollary, this period also saw the start of the widespread circulation of Holocaust denial and traditional anti-Semitism in the Islamic world.) By the mid 1970s, the first single-volume English-language histories of the Holocaust aimed at a general as well as an academic readership, such as Lucy Dawidowcz’s The War Against the Jews,25 were published by major mainstream trade publishers. This enhanced visibility of the Holocaust, now much more clearly defined and comprehended as a coherent set of events, reached a climax of sorts with the broadcast in 1978 of the NBC miniseries Holocaust. Holocaust was unashamedly didactic, using the familiar device of ‘representative’ empathetic characters – an assimilated German Jewish family – to present a comprehensive account of the persecution of the Jews from the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 through to the end of the war, with the various fates of each member of the extended family illustrating (in highly implausible fashion) a different aspect of the history of the Holocaust. Holocaust was as diligent in focusing on the fate of the Jews as Jews as Night and Fog had been generalised – and also unashamedly ideological, promoting a Zionist agenda at every possible opportunity. Holocaust was heavily criticised for its crudely melodramatic and soap operatic treatment of its subject at the time, and it has certainly not worn well. Yet it remains a watershed in popular-cultural representation of the Holocaust and in West Germany has a much broader historical significance, as the series is widely credited with having punctured the national culture of silence and denial, and unleashed widespread debate and discussion of the Holocaust amongst the general public for the first time since the war. The series also ignited a debate concerning the relative aesthetic, social and political merits of challenging, self-aware modernist approaches to the Holocaust (of the kind that had previously predominated in European cinema, including Night and Fog) versus the populist mainstream narrative and representational strategies of Hollywood cinema and network TV.26 Such debates would continue throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, with mimetic fictions such as the TV miniseries War and Remembrance (1989) and movies like Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) being set against, above all, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental, austere and non-representational 1985 documentary Shoah. Bar the ‘Lodovico technique’ brainwashing sequence in A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick’s films in this period, decades when his rate of production slowed markedly and each film

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 140

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust film

141

emerged following years of gestation, make no explicit reference to the Holocaust, Nazism or even World War II. Yet this was also the period when we have firm evidence that Kubrick had begun to engage seriously with the subject. In 1976 Kubrick approached the Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer about the possibility of developing a screenplay on the Holocaust, only to meet with Singer’s gentle rebuttal that he ‘didn’t know anything about it’.27 Michael Herr, who would collaborate with Kubrick on the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, records Kubrick remarking to him around 1980 that ‘the real topic for a film is the Holocaust—but good luck getting that into a 2-hour movie.’28 Perhaps most interestingly of all, by the early 1980s Kubrick had begun an intermittent correspondence with Raul Hilberg that continued through to the 1990s. Kubrick had asked his brother-in-law Jan Harlan to obtain for him a copy of Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews in 1975. Subsequently, according to Geoffrey Cocks, Kubrick started to use Hilberg as a sounding board for his slowly developing ideas for a film centred on the Holocaust. At one stage Kubrick apparently proposed a multi-stranded, polyvocal narrative using the novels of the American modernist John Dos Passos as a model. To Hilberg, this was too reminiscent of the ‘panoramic’ and ultimately two-dimensional approach of the Holocaust miniseries. Hilberg himself later suggested to Kubrick a film entitled simply Auschwitz and chronicling, with minimal dramatic invention, the evolution of the death camp. As we know, none of these initiatives came to anything.29 However, that Kubrick and Hilberg formed a working relationship of sorts not only indicates the growing seriousness of Kubrick’s consideration of the Holocaust, but provides an enormously suggestive starting point for trying to discern in more detail which aspects of the subject matter Kubrick might have found particularly compelling, and why. In the next section of this chapter I will briefly discuss half a dozen themes that anyone familiar with Kubrick’s work will recognise as characteristic, and show how these preoccupations relate organically to key issues and debates around the Holocaust.

Intentionality, Individuality and Institutions As previously noted, it is particularly thought-provoking that Kubrick settled on Hilberg as his Holocaust scholar of personal choice: for while Hilberg’s undoubted pre-eminence in what was in the mid 1970s still a small field would be sufficient recommendation, Hilberg’s interpretation of the Holocaust is a very particular one. Indeed, Hilberg’s view of history has its own important role in the history of Holocaust film, when Hilberg became a film star of sorts in his own right by featuring prominently in Lanzmann’s Shoah.30 Hilberg’s presence in Shoah is especially remarkable as he is the film’s solitary speaking voice not to have participated directly in the Holocaust. All of Lanzmann’s other interviewees fall into one of the categories of victim, perpetrator or bystander. That this taxonomy of Holocaust participants is in fact Hilberg’s own indicates how Lanzmann uses Hilberg to provide a methodological model for his own painstaking investigative procedures. When Hilberg is introduced, Lanzmann permits him a credo of sorts: ‘All my life’, he declares, ‘I have not wanted to ask the big questions, for fear I would come up with small answers.’ Hilberg thus supplies the theoretical justification for Lanzmann’s sometimes maddeningly meticulous focus on the minutiae of his witnesses’ daily experiences of living, dying and killing in the ghettoes and the death camps. Beyond that, however, as demonstrated by a sequence in which Hilberg performs a bravura exegesis of a railway timetable recording the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw area to the death camp

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 141

30/01/2012 16:24

142

barry langford

Treblinka, Lanzmann also clearly subscribes to Hilberg’s understanding of the Holocaust as a relentless, all but inevitable process in which individual actions and intentions counted for very little: touched on in this sequence in Hilberg’s emphasis on the unremitting regularity of the ‘death traffic’. Dan Stone characterises Hilberg’s view of history as ‘governed by iron laws [. . .] which cannot accept the possibility of contingency’.31 Subsequent Holocaust historians have strongly challenged the deterministic and totalising quality of Hilberg’s view, which they find both at odds with the often-anarchic and improvisational processes of decision making in the Third Reich, and which allows little or no room for individual agency and in particular pays no attention to how Jewish communities under siege found ways to offer both cultural and physical resistance to their murderers. It should, however, be immediately obvious why Kubrick would have found such an account powerfully compelling. Few filmmakers, after all, so frequently portray characters who are subject to vast, powerful and often occluded forces over which they have no control and of which they are all but ignorant, often though not always expressions of the coercively rationalistic and cynically utilitarian structures of the modern state. Think of the doomed poilus in Paths of Glory,32 selected for execution almost at random for purely political reasons; the bomber crews dispatched to send the world to nuclear oblivion in Dr Strangelove, unaware that they are acting on the orders of a madman; the astronauts on board the Discovery in 2001, similarly deceived about the real reasons for their mission to Jupiter and on a vastly larger scale the entire human race, its evolutionary leaps motivated by an extraterrestrial super-intelligence about whose nature, motives and intentions we have no inkling; or the marine grunts in training at Parris Island in Full Metal Jacket, deindividualised, dehumanised and sent to fight and die in a purposeless and incomprehensible conflict. Kubrick’s impersonal voice-over narrators, whether the stentorian, omniscient analyst of The Killing33 or the detached ironist of Barry Lyndon, also convey a sense that these films’ protagonists are subject to a narrative logic that encompasses and diminishes them. But perhaps the best example of all is Jack Torrance in The Shining, literally petrified at the film’s end by the history he now, it appears, will rehearse in an endless loop along with all the other spectral inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel. This sustained focus on the subordination of the individual to power and authority, and the reduction of the scope for freedom of choice and action, marks out Kubrick as one of cinema’s most consistent interrogators and analysts of fascism, understood not as a political movement but as a particular form of unfreedom specific to modernity. Raul Hilberg’s identification of the relentless drive of essentially impersonal forces as the harbingers of historical fascism’s most destructive hour clearly and understandably struck an answering chord with Kubrick. The question this in turn raises, however, is whether Kubrick follows Hilberg in producing a totalising, sealed account which can only demonstrate the pernicious structures of power he examines, but offer no prospect of resistance to them. Effective human agency does remain in some measure at least an occasional possibility in Kubrick’s world, but its outcomes are rarely positive ones. The bomber crew in Dr Strangelove manage to frustrate the combined defences of the world’s nuclear superpower states through classic American virtues of pluck, improvisation and determination and deliver their nuclear payload – but the result of course is the end of the world. Danny and Wendy escape their apparently preordained fate at the Overlook thanks to Danny’s telepathic abilities, although Jack is not so lucky. The ‘clockwork orange’ itself is a metaphor of precisely this tension between free will and the dictates of a mechanistic instrumentalisation of human freedom. And Alex exercises this freedom at key points in the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 142

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust film

143

narrative including the end, however perversely: but at the end of the film it seems that the only alternative to the kind of exploitative, self-serving dehumanisation practised upon Alex by the state is the innate, predatory violence with which he begins and ends the film. (Kubrick of course excised the conclusion of Anthony Burgess’s original novel, in which Alex freely chooses to forego violence and enters into pro-social adulthood, and Burgess condemned Kubrick for doing so.) Any more utopian possibility seems to have been thoroughly foreclosed on. This of course reflects Kubrick’s fairly bleak estimation of the innate propensities of human nature as well as his analysis of how human sensibility is further impaired and deformed by modern societies. These aspects of Kubrick’s worldview also resonate surprisingly closely with some of the most challenging and powerful accounts of the Holocaust.

Civilisation and Barbarism Kubrick sees the relationship of civilisation and barbarism not in the terms of classic liberalism, as antagonistic, but rather as fundamentally and disturbingly conjoined. In one of the most famous passages in all of Kubrick’s cinema, the match-cut from the bone/ weapon to the spacecraft at the end of the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence from 2001 states more powerfully than any words – the voice-over narration Kubrick originally planned for the film would have made it clear that the spaceship is an orbiting nuclear weapons platform – Kubrick’s thesis that human technological progress has not been accompanied by any comparable moral evolution. On the contrary, aggression and genocide (if we see, as we surely must, the hominid horde’s murder of one of their own kind as not the last but the first step in a campaign of annihilation) are the harbingers of ‘civilisation’ itself. In the immediate aftermath of Wold War II, the ‘official’ understanding of the Holocaust, as expressed through the arguments of the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials, adopted by the Allied and subsequently the West German governments, and disseminated through academic historiography, was that Nazism and its crimes – amongst which the mass murder of European civilian populations was the most infamous, even if the specificity and significance of the ‘Final Solution’ was hardly widely appreciated – represented a catastrophic failure of enlightened Western culture, an atavistic resurgence of barbarism and irrationalism which had been defeated by not merely the military might but the moral force of rational, democratic enlightenment, and which could only be held in check by the continued development and extension of those forces. That the Holocaust could instead be understood not as the negation, the opposite, of enlightened modernity, but rather as its direct consequence, its monstrous but legitimate offspring, was at this stage a completely marginal perspective, articulated if at all through the then barely known writings of the Frankfurt School, notably Theodor Adorno. From the 1970s onwards, however, as the mid-century faith in the unquestioned validity of the Enlightenment tradition grew increasingly uncertain under the scrutiny of a sceptical postmodernism, the relationship of modernity to its apparent barbarous Other also came under renewed interrogation. It became ever more apparent that not only did the Holocaust employ the technologies of advanced Western civilisation – bureaucratic management, division of labour, transport and communications – it would have quite literally been impossible without them. Even the conceptualisation of ‘race’ which enabled the Nazis to determine whom to kill relied on widespread early twentieth-century theories of eugenics and social engineering. Furthermore, the structures of modern mass society

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 143

30/01/2012 16:24

144

barry langford

which, according to mid-twentieth-century sociology and liberal political philosophy, ought to have mitigated the ability of criminal factions to seize and manipulate political power while protecting the rights of the vulnerable minority, did nothing of the kind: in fact, in certain ways – for example, the frenzied participation in mass political movements geared to isolate and victimise minority groups like Jews and homosexuals – they seemed to expedite it. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, writing in 1990, argued powerfully that the Holocaust should not be seen as the rejection of modern civilisation but as its culmination. The Enlightenment, Bauman claims, had not expunged primitive, irrational pre-modern phobias and hatreds; it merely disallowed them while developing a new order based on the control, improvement and engineering of society. The structures that emerged from this process in the twentieth century ultimately enabled these unresolved, pre-modern aggressions to substitute for their inchoate, fitful traditional outbursts a new form, as totalising ideologies allied to techniques of distanced killing. It is in a sense the translation of the frenzied Jew-hatred of Mein Kampf into the legal frameworks of the Nuremberg Laws, and beyond to the activities of Eichmann’s ‘Department IVB for Jewish Affairs’.34 This perception of human civilisation as no guarantor of ‘civilised’ values is one clearly shared by Kubrick. Alongside these very large sociological claims, however, Kubrick also paid close attention to the ways in which human moral and ethical capacities could be eroded at the individual and interpersonal level, and how this attenuation could exacerbate cruelty and violence.

The Psychology of Violence and the Banalisation of Evil Historical research on the Holocaust in recent years has deepened and broadened our understanding of those who carried out the murder of the Jews of Europe. Until fairly recently, the image of Nazi war criminals remained firmly in one of two well-worn moulds. The first owed much to wartime propaganda, including Hollywood war films, and the postwar Nuremberg Trials, combined aspects of such infamous historical figures as SS chief Heinrich Himmler and Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, and depicted the Nazi as simply a monster: a sneering, pitiless sadist, driven by ideological fanaticism to extremes of cruelty and inhumanity. In recent cinema, a figure such as Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) in Schindler’s List owes much to this tradition. The second variation on the Nazi theme drew primarily on the very different impression created by Adolf Eichmann, captured and tried by Israel in 1960 for his key role in organising the deportations to the death camps from Western and Central Europe. The undemonstrative, unremarkable, balding, bespectacled and middle-aged Eichmann, more bureaucrat than barbaric killer, conveyed an image of bloodless, amoral efficiency encapsulated in German political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s unforgettable and influential formulation, ‘the banality of evil’. This image of the desk-bound killer ‘just following orders’, reducing millions of deaths and unspeakable suffering to entries in a ledger and the efficient coordination of railway timetables, became a popular symbol of the erosion of individual morality and the dehumanisation of what Arendt termed ‘totalitarian’ dictatorships – a term which could and did apply equally well to Nazism and the West’s new enemy in the post-1945 Cold War, Soviet Communism.35 Both of these powerful explanations of Nazi crimes thus created archetypes – strong, streamlined versions of historical truth which were powerful and effective precisely to

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 144

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust film

145

the degree that they were simplified and easily understood. But recent historiography has widely challenged these straightforward conceptions of the Holocaust perpetrators. Underlying this historical work, which is based on painstaking analysis of archives and historical documents, has been the often unspoken conviction that to confine our conception of Nazi perpetrators to these familiar, somewhat stereotypical conceptions is less about serving the needs of historical understanding and more about preserving our own ‘comfort zone’. For neither in the blood-crazed zealot, nor in the dessicated bureaucratic killer, do we see our own reflection. Quite the opposite: by the distance between ourselves and these deformed personalities we obtain a reassuring measure of our own decency and humanity. The lessons of recent scholarship are a good deal less comforting. This scholarship has focused less on the marquee names in the Nazi hierarchy and more on unearthing the experiences of the thousands of men who actively participated, sometimes over two or three years, in the bloody daily business of the killing fields in Eastern Europe: SS officers and enlisted men, but also soldiers in the regular German army and middle-aged reservists. The recurring conclusions of such research are that these men did not seek out this ‘work’ but in most cases neither did they flinch from it; that they were not typically motivated by sadism or ideological conviction but by utterly commonplace combinations of factors – careerism, moral cowardice, the brutalising effects of combat, groupthink, the insidious effects of a decade of relentless Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and activity, moral numbness and corruption cumulatively instilled by the routinised killing itself and so on. They were, in a phrase made famous by the work of the historian Christopher Browning, ‘ordinary men’. And this ordinariness means that we today, rather than comforting ourselves by the contrast between our (as we believe) common decency and these killers’ unique horror, must consider the unsettling evidence that these killers were themselves, once, as ordinary as us: indeed that, apart from these few bloody months in which they butchered thousands of innocent and helpless men, women, children and infants, they mostly led unremarkable, unviolent, law-abiding lives as family men, traders, businessmen, workers and members of their communities. A common theme of this research has been precisely to disabuse conventional assumptions that participation in perpetrating crimes against humanity can only be explained by fanaticism or pathology, and furthermore that ‘evil’ is transparent, readily visible and accordingly vulnerable to individuals and groups of courage and good faith.36 Few Holocaust films have centred on the portrayal of perpetrators. Although Hitler himself continues to exert a demonic fascination for filmmakers and – perhaps especially – for actors ranging from Alec Guinness and Bruno Ganz to Steven Berkoff and Robert Carlyle, the overwhelming majority of Holocaust films prefer as their protagonists the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and/or their German or other Gentile sympathisers and rescuers. Few if any dramatic portrayals have approached the complexity and comprehensiveness of documentary films such as Marcel Ophuls’s Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie.37 As the film’s subtitle suggests, the understanding Ophuls seeks of the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ takes in not only the war years but the entirety of Barbie’s career – where he proved his usefulness both to post-war US intelligence and subsequently to a variety of Latin American dictatorships. The opposite of the demonic portrayals of fanatical Nazis often encountered in Hollywood cinema, Ophuls’s film argues that however particular the structures and genocidal policies of the Third Reich, it relied in the final instance on personnel – exploitative, ambitious and ruthless men devoid of compassion and scruple – who are all too commonplace, and whose ‘talents’ recommend them to murderous and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 145

30/01/2012 16:24

146

barry langford

repressive regimes at diverse times and places. Ophuls fully exploits the multivocal, openended qualities of what Linda Williams has termed the ‘postmodern’ documentary to offer a portrait of a war criminal that – without ever qualifying its obvious revulsion at Barbie’s crimes – avoids facile judgements or a straightforward accounting of guilt. Rather than calling down condemnation on Barbie alone, it explores the ramified networks of complicity, self-interest and evasion that enable the ongoing perpetration of atrocities.38 Kubrick’s films, which are filled with violence and cruelty, share this understanding of evil as habitual and circumstantial rather than (with the possible exceptions of General Jack Ripper, and much more importantly the title character, in Dr Strangelove) purely ideological or pathological. Even the most theatrical and hyperbolic instances of violence in Kubrick – the drill instructor Hartman in Full Metal Jacket and Jack Torrance in the full-blown ‘Here’s Johnny!’ phase of his homicidal mania in The Shining – are to an overwhelming degree shaped by context (which includes institutions) and function as critiques of those contexts (which in the case of The Shining includes the institution of the patriarchal family). Hartman’s job, after all, is quite simply to mould his recruits into killers. Elsewhere, violence is undertaken for all the reasons noted above in the context of Holocaust research: in Dr Strangelove, in terms of helpless, flustered reasonableness that hopelessly fails to grasp the inherent irrationality of the situation; in Full Metal Jacket, driven by ferocious male warrior bonding which James Naremore has suggestively compared to the patterns of gynophobic bloodlust amongst the proto-fascist post-World War I German Freikorps analysed by Klaus Theweleit in his book Male Fantasies; amongst the World War I staff officers in Paths of Glory, simply out of the cynicism and moral paralysis which are an inevitable outcome of modern total war.39 Kubrick’s films also offer a new perspective on the vexed concept of the ‘banality of evil’. A consistent theme of Kubrick’s work is the contrast between situations that seem to demand sustained moral or even existential reflection and self-enquiry, and the utter banality of the actual responses which are all his characters’ etiolated consciousnesses seem able to generate. Frequently, this yawning gap that opens up between the immensity of the context and the wholly inadequate responses to it, is expressed in the measurable collapse of language. A textbook example is the jargon of megadeaths and the accompanying stupefying indifference to the moral enormity of nuclear war on display in the War Room in Dr Strangelove. But we see the same process on a more intimate scale when Alex’s parents obscure their rejection of their own son with mumbled clichés about things being all for the best. The second part of Full Metal Jacket is in large part an exploration of this crisis where language is used not to communicate but to conceal that which it denotes, whether in the Marines’ dialogue, which oscillates between clichés and brutally dehumanised slang, or the mendacities Joker undertakes as a reporter for Stars and Stripes. In 2001 the failure of language is less obviously working to mask violence and betrayal; instead the robotic functionalism of Kubrick’s spacemen (as has often been observed, the computer HAL is by far the most fully human character in the film) demonstrates the uneven development of humanity’s technological and conceptual capacities, respectively. The deformation of language, the use of euphemism and the bloodless discourse of bureaucracy to conceal the reality of genocide was of course central to the Nazi project. ‘Evacuation’ or ‘special treatment’ meant mass murder; deported Jews were typically referred to as ‘cargo’ or ‘pieces’. ‘Never to use the language that was appropriate to the act’, as Raul Hilberg observes in Shoah, was crucial. In a chilling passage elsewhere in Lanzmann’s film, two survivors of the Vilna ghetto recall that when they were forced

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 146

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust film

147

to exhume and incinerate the corpses of earlier victims (including their own families) they were ordered by their SS overseers to speak of ‘rags’, ‘dolls’, ‘shit’ or ‘rubbish’, never bodies.40 This practice both served to cover the murder in a veneer of deniability, however transparent, and perhaps more importantly extended the process of the dehumanisation of victims beyond the grave (the mass grave). Beyond this, however, the implosion of language testifies to a catastrophic landslip of moral and ethical capacity. This banalisation of sensibility has been seized upon by imaginative writers, most recently Jonathan Littell in his controversial novel The Kindly Ones: The road left the town from the west, skirting round Beshtau, the largest of the five volcanoes; below, one could glimpse now and then the bends of the Podkumok, its waters grey and muddy. I didn’t actually have much to do in these other towns, but I was curious to visit them, and I wasn’t burning with desire to go and see the Aktion. Yessentuki, under the Soviets, had been transformed into an industrial city of not much interest; I met the officers of the Teilkommando there, discussed their arrangements, and didn’t linger. Kislovodsk, on the other hand, turned out to be very pleasant, an old spa town with a faded, outmoded charm, greener and prettier than Pyatigorsk.41 The speaker here is an SS officer in the Einsatzkommando massacring Ukrainian Jews behind the advancing German lines in 1942, and this slew of touristic drivel enacts linguistically the same strategy of avoidance that that the narrator is describing. Conversely, one of the persistent Kubrickian beacons of hope is his characters’ sometime capacity to generate an authentic and memorable idiolect. This ability is in no way associated with right action or right thinking: the two most memorable speakers in all of Kubrick’s films, Alex and Hartman, are both violent and sadistic, yet their ability to use language memorably and vividly makes them somehow attractive or (in Hartman’s case) at least vital in ways that the drones around them are not. Particularly in Alex’s case, Kubrick’s manipulation of the audience into a position of half-reluctant identification with this unapologetic yob, rapist and murderer is a tactic for requiring us to examine our own ethical standards and categories of moral judgement. Of course, both films share with almost all Kubrick’s work another inescapable quality: they are, perhaps blackly and provisionally, but undeniably funny. In fact, if anything typifies Kubrick’s sensibility it is the mordant humour he discovers in the most extreme situations. How might that perspective might have lent itself to, or been challenged by, the Holocaust?

Holocaust Piety and the Ironic Gaze Humour and the Holocaust have, for fairly obvious reasons, always been extremely uneasy bedfellows. Although over the last decade a few films have touted themselves as ‘Holocaust comedies’, upon closer inspection they usually prove to be, like Roberto Benigni’s La Vita è Bella/Life Is Beautiful or the Robin Williams vehicle Jakob the Liar, sentimental humanist fables of love conquering death.42 Films that have had the courage to look the Holocaust in the face and find a path to humour, however black, are vanishingly few. Genuine black comedies such as Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties or Jan Hrebejk’s Divided We Fall achieve their effects by tackling narrative material at a distance from the atrocious heart of the genocide (Seven Beauties concerns a political prisoner in a concentration camp, not a

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 147

30/01/2012 16:24

148

barry langford

Jew in a death camp; Divided We Fall is set in German-occupied Budapest).43 The rarest of creatures, an out-and-out Holocaust comedy like Radu Mihaelenau’s Train of Life, resorts to wildly surreal farce.44 What bringing humour to bear on the Holocaust demands above all is the abjuration of what has sometimes been called ‘Holocaust piety’. The idea that the Holocaust is finally beyond our understanding and therefore beyond representation is a very well-worn theme. If used to trouble naïvely or reductively positivist accounts of the genocide, it can be a useful tool for undermining over-confident explanatory claims. At its extreme, however, this approach can produce what the literary theorist Dominick LaCapra has described as a perverse ‘sacralisation’ of the Holocaust, in which the subject is constructed as an ultimate mystery, too ineffably profound to be approached or rendered in the conventional terms of language or art. So the Holocaust acquires an almost religious aura.45 Kubrick was of course no stranger to subjects wherein final meaning and accountability are elusive: 2001 and The Shining are perhaps the most obvious examples. But this was typically tempered by the mocking, ironic gaze Kubrick not only directed at his characters but, in one of his most characteristic and disconcerting gestures, turned outwards, back onto his audience. Indeed, these two poles, the ineffable and the ironic, are perhaps more closely conjoined in Kubrick than in any other filmmaker. Think of the extraordinary frisson in Kubrick’s conjuring of the grotesque spectre of Dr Strangelove, a figure in whom awe, terror and laughter are inextricably blended. Or note how seamlessly the Starchild’s otherworldly (in all senses), unguessable and apocalyptic gaze towards the audience at the close of 2001 seems to morph into the equally fatal yet entirely human and mocking challenge of Alex’s similarly unblinking stare at the start of Kubrick’s next film. As I have tried to show, Kubrick’s persistent themes and concerns armed him peculiarly well to engage in a uniquely sophisticated and relevant way with the huge cognitive and ethical challenges the Holocaust poses to any filmmaker. Kubrick’s displeasure at what he saw as the illegitimately redemptive trajectory of Schindler’s List – as he observed to Frederic Raphael, ‘the Holocaust was about six million people who died. . . this picture is about six hundred who survived’46 – must surely have been exacerbated by his recognition that Spielberg’s film makes no attempt to engage with the larger questions, about institutions, agency, brutalisation, violence, modernity, that are so central to any serious engagement with the Holocaust and that Kubrick’s own work had already explored so extensively. Yet of all the dimensions Kubrick brought to the Holocaust, perhaps none was as germane as this ability simultaneously to register what lies beyond representation and to persist in the grounding and tangible power of ironic laughter. It seems, for all that, as if Kubrick was himself finally not immune to the paralysing effects of ‘Holocaust piety’. Several of those who knew and worked with Kubrick during the period he was developing Aryan Papers have suggested that he felt himself finally unable to do justice to the subject, and terrified by the prospect of ‘getting it wrong’. It may of course be that Wartime Lies/Aryan Papers was simply the wrong property for Kubrick. Like Schindler’s List, it tells a story of survival, not death. Although this story at least centres on Jewish protagonists, even more than Spielberg’s tale it seems to suggest that individual actions by Jews could allow them a measure of control of their own destiny: again and again, the child narrator Maciek is saved by the courage, endless resourcefulness and insight of his aunt Tania. This not only runs counter to one of the central truths of the Holocaust – that bravery and intelligence made all too little difference to one’s prospects of survival (Roman Polanski’s The Pianist memorably demonstrates

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 148

30/01/2012 16:24

holocaust film

149

that sheer luck played a greater part than individual agency) – but allows only limited access to the issues of institutionalised violence, routinised cruelty and the degradation of human sensibilities that elsewhere preoccupy Kubrick as they preoccupy Holocaust scholarship. So it may be that Kubrick came to realise that the property he had was not suited to his purposes. Or it may be that for once he simply lost his nerve. Either way, Kubrick’s abandonment of his Holocaust project may have denied world cinema the Holocaust film it needed most.

Notes 1. Holocaust, television programme, directed by Marvin Chomsky. USA: NBC-TV, 1978. Shoah, directed by Claude Lanzmann. France: Les Films Aleph, 1985. Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Universal/Amblin, 1993. The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski. USA: RP Productions/Canal+/Heritage, 2002. 2. See amongst others Annette Insdorf, Indelible Images: Film and the Holocaust, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallflower, 2008). 3. Louis Begley, Wartime Lies (New York: Ballantine, 1991). 4. Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: Columbia, 1964. 5. 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: MGM, 1968. 6. The Vanishing, directed by George Sluizer. Holland: Argos Films, 1988. 7. Details of the Aryan Papers project from Alison Castle (ed.), The Stanley Kubrick Archives (London: Taschen, 2005), p. 509. 8. A Clockwork Orange, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA/UK: Warner Bros., 1971. 9. The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: Warner Bros., 1980. 10. Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). 11. Full Metal Jacket, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: Warner Bros., 1987. Barry Lyndon, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: Warner Bros., 1975. 12. See Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003). 13. See James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 14. See Robert Cherry, ‘Holocaust Historiography: The Role of the Cold War’, Science & Society, 63:4 (1999–2000), pp. 459–77. 15. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. xi. 16. Stone, p. 138. 17. Exodus, directed by Otto Preminger. USA: United Artists, 1960. 18. Cocks, p. 2. 19. Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog, directed by Alan Resnais. France: Argos Films, 1955. 20. Die Bleierne Zeit/The German Sisters, directed by Margareta von Trotta. West Germany: Bioskop Film, 1981. 21. See Ewout van der Knaap (ed.), Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of Night and Fog (London: Wallflower, 2006). 22. Ilan Avisar, ‘Holocaust Movies and the Politics of Collective Memory’, in Alvin H. Rosenfeld

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 149

30/01/2012 16:24

150

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

barry langford (ed.), Thinking About the Holocaust: After Half a Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 38–58. The Last Stop, directed by Wanda Jakubowska. Poland: P. P. Film Polski, 1948. Kanal, directed by Andrzej Wajda. Poland: Zespól Filmowy Kadr, 1957. Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer. USA: Roxlom/United Artists, 1961. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Octagon, [1961] 1973). Hilberg recounts his struggle to get the book published in The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). Lucy S. Dawidowcz, The War Against the Jews 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). See the special issue 19 (Winter 1980) of New German Critique devoted to the impact of the transmission of Holocaust in Germany. See also Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 155–78. Castle, p. 509. Cocks, p. 14. Cocks, p. 161. On Shoah generally and Hilberg’s participation, see Sue Vice, Shoah (London: BFI, 2011). Stone, p. 78. Paths of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: United Arstists, 1957. The Killing, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: United Artists, 1956. See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (London: Polity, 1990). Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1977). Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, directed by Marcel Ophuls. West Germany/ France/USA: Samuel Goldwyn/Memory Pictures, 1988. Linda Williams, ‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History and the New Documentary,’ Film Quarterly, 46.3 (1993), pp. 9–21. James Naremore, On Kubrick (London: BFI, 2007), pp. 215–18. A transcript of Shoah is available online at http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/s/ shoah-script-transcript-holocaust.html, accessed 4 January 2011. Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009), p. 183. La Vita è Bella/Life Is Beautiful, directed by Roberto Benigni. Italy: Cecchi Gori, 1997. Jakob the Liar, directed by Peter Kassovitz. USA: TriStar, 1999. Seven Beauties, directed by Lina Wertmuller. Italy: Medusa Productions/Jadran, 1976. Divided We Fall, directed by Jan Hrebejk. Hungary: Ceská Televize, 2000. Train of Life, directed by Radu Mihaelenau. France/Romania: Belfilms/Canal+, 1999. A littleseen exception to this rule is Genghis Cohn, a 1992 BBC TV adaptation of a novel by Romain Gary directed by Elijah Moshinsky. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 103. Cocks, p. 157.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 150

30/01/2012 16:24

16

O, DO NOT DREAM OF PEACE: AMERICAN POETRY OF THE KOREAN WAR William D. Ehrhart

O

n 25 June 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel, the demarcation line between Kim Il Sung’s Communist North Korea and Syngman Rhee’s nonCommunist South Korea (ROK) established by the Allied victors at the end of World War II. This was a full-scale assault, the object of which was the reunification of the Korean peninsula by force of arms. Whether the attack was provoked or not is a matter of debate; certainly US-backed autocrat Rhee had made no secret of his own desire to conquer the North by force. In any case, the attack caught both South Koreans and Americans completely off-guard and disastrously unprepared. The North Korean army took Seoul, Rhee’s capital, in just a few days, and by September, subjected to defeat after defeat, US-ROK forces held on by their fingernails to a tiny perimeter around the southernmost port city of Pusan. But the North Koreans had exhausted themselves and could not penetrate what came to be known as the Pusan Perimeter, and soon the sheer weight and volume of American industrial might, combined with the rapid mobilisation of draftees and reservists, allowed US-ROK forces to drive the North Koreans out of South Korea. But they did not stop at that. By November, US-ROK forces held most of North Korea as well, and were approaching the Yalu River, the boundary between North Korea and newly Communist China, in spite of Chinese warnings to keep away. The warnings went unheeded, however, and as the harsh Korean winter was just beginning to settle in, hundreds of thousands of Chinese ‘volunteers’ smashed into the approaching US-ROK forces, sending them for a second time in six months into headlong retreat that did not stop until Seoul had been lost again. But by then Communist supply lines were once more stretched thin and US-ROK forces, with shorter supply lines and vast amounts of materiel, were able to push the Communist armies back to the 38th parallel where the fighting had begun almost a year earlier. Along this line, for another two years and more, while truce negotiations dragged on and on and on, the combatants waged a war of attrition rivalling in ferocity and futility if not in size the trench warfare along the Western Front during the Great War. By the time the truce was finally signed in the summer of 1953, nearly two million Koreans and Chinese, military and civilian, were dead, wounded, or missing. US forces suffered 34,000 dead and over 100,000 wounded or missing. To call what happened in Korea a ‘police action’ or a ‘conflict’ was and is to play semantic games at the expense of reality. It was a war.

151

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 151

30/01/2012 16:24

152

william d. ehrhart

Indeed, it has become known – by those who know it at all – as the Forgotten War; a war fought in an obscure backwater of the world while the main event, the Cold War, played out in Europe; a war that saw the American army thrashed not once but twice in just six months, and that finally ended up after three long years right where it had started with nothing to show but lost blood and treasure. Just as the war itself has been largely forgotten, so too has its literature. While the Korean War never produced a body of writing comparable to the wars on either side of it – World War II and the Vietnam War – there is in fact a literature of the Korean War that warrants serious attention. Among novelists, Richard Hooker’s M.A.S.H., William Styron’s The Long March, James Salter’s The Hunters, Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate and James Michener’s The Bridges of Toko-ri stand out, along with short stories by the likes of James Lee Burke, Eugene Burdick and Stanford Whitmore. So, too, there is a poetry of the Korean War. Three poets in particular – Keith Wilson, Rolando Hinojosa and William Childress – have produced substantial bodies of work relating to their Korean War experiences, and an assortment of other poets have produced poems worthy of attention. Annapolis graduate Keith Wilson went to Korea for the first time as a 22-year-old ensign in 1950 and returned from his third tour in Korean waters in 1953. Deeply disillusioned by then, Wilson abandoned his ambition to make the navy his career and instead became a poet and professor. The causes of his disillusionment become readily apparent in his 1969 collection, Graves Registry & Other Poems.1 In ‘Guerrilla Camp’, Wilson is confronted first by the dead and wounded ‘from the / raid the night before’, then by a ‘retired fighter’ no older than himself whose hand has been ruined by a bullet and who demands to know ‘how a man / could farm / with a hand like that’. In ‘The Circle’, Wilson’s ship steams for hours through hundreds of Korean bodies floating ‘in faded blue lifejackets’, victims of a sunken troop ship, no survivors: ‘We sailed on. I suppose that’s all / there is to say’. But one body in particular remains fixed in his mind: God knows why but his ass was up instead of his head; no pants left, his buttocks glistened grayish white in the clear sun, the only one. Whatever illusions of service and nobility Wilson entered the war with are evaporating. By ‘December, 1952’, once again ‘back in the combat zone’, he recalls the heroism of great naval commanders of the past – Nelson, Farragut – and the grand enterprise to which he had thought he himself was attached: A blue United Nations patch on the arm, a new dream. One World. One Nation. Peace. But now he realises that nothing has changed since the days of Nelson and Farragut, that ‘the old bangles’ still work, allegiances are still bought, and ‘tracers hit a village, / the screams of women, children / men die’. And while the New York Stock Market rises and ‘cash registers / click’, Wilson is finally forced to confront:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 152

30/01/2012 16:24

american poetry of the korean war

153

the cost of lies, tricks that blind the eyes of the young. Freedom. Death. A life safe for. The Dead. ‘Commentary’ is equally scathing, a recitation of what has become, for Wilson, only the squandering of lives, especially Korean lives, in the name of Americans back home: whose enemies are always faceless, numbers in a paper blowing in the Stateside wind. How many bodies would fill a room living room with TV, soft chairs & the hiss of opened beer? We have killed more. The children’s bodies alone would suffice. [. . .] O, do not dream of peace while such bodies line the beaches & dead men float the seas, waving, their hands beckoning. Wilson’s poems are not about the big battalions and the pitched battles, but about coastal operations and guerrilla raids, shattered villages and shattered ideals. They are peopled by Americans, but also by Koreans and Japanese, refugees and cripples, and by warriors, but also and more so by the defenceless and the innocent who always become the wreckage of war. They are Wilson’s explanation of how he began his life expecting to kill people and ended up dedicating it to teaching people instead. Rolando Hinojosa, in contrast, was very much involved in the war of the big battalions. Serving with the US army of occupation in Japan, he was among the first US soldiers sent to Korea in early July 1950, where he fought for over a year as a tank crewman in a reconnaissance unit. A prolific novelist equally at home in English and Spanish (he is the child of a Mexican-American father and an Anglo-American mother), in 1978 Hinojosa published his first and only major work of poetry, Korean Love Songs,2 though one could accurately call it a novel-in-verse. The narrator of the sequence is Rafa Buenrostro – Rafe – a young artilleryman who figures prominently in many of Hinojosa’s novels. As the sequence begins, Rafe is preparing to embark from Japan to Korea. What awaits him is death. In ‘A Sheaf of Percussion Fire’, Rafe says, ‘there was death, / Out of breath, / Trying to keep count’. In ‘Possession for All Time’, he adds: It’s ugly. The division’s out for blood [. . .] It doesn’t matter when Seoul is retaken:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 153

30/01/2012 16:24

154

william d. ehrhart

Now the mission is to kill; It’s people we’re after, Not land. In ‘January–May 1951 Slaughter’, Rafe tells us: I’m sick. They didn’t stop coming, And we wouldn’t stop firing. [. . .] They died in the city, They died in the fields and in the hillsides. They died everywhere. But it is not just Chinese and North Koreans who are dying. ‘Incoming’ begins: The radio guys are in pieces. . . in pieces of meat and bone. They’ve been blown up and down Into small pieces. . . Christ, What am I doing here? As the sequence progresses, the terrible stress of battle takes its toll. In ‘Above All, the Waste’, Lt. Phil Brodkey, ‘resourceful and kind, calm, precise’, shoots himself to death. His replacement, in ‘Brodkey’s Replacement’, jumps into a latrine and refuses to come out. And in ‘Jacob Mosqueda Wrestles with the Angels’, when pieces of two of his companions end up on his sleeve, Mosqueda ‘screams and faints and soils his fatigues’. Many of the poems deal not only with the war itself, but also with the tensions between Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans. One of Rafe’s companions, on leave in Japan, decides to desert rather than go back to Korea and ultimately to the racial discrimination he and Rafe face in south Texas. ‘This is home’, he says of Japan in ‘Nagoya Station’. ‘Why should I go back?’ Finally, however, these are poems about war, not about culture or ethnicity. One of the most bitter poems in the book, ‘A Matter of Supplies’, begins: It comes down to this: we’re pieces of equipment To be counted and signed for. On the occasion some of us break down, And those parts which can’t be salvaged Are replaced with other GI parts, that’s all. In the book’s final poem, ‘Vale’, when Rafe tallies up all he has lost in Korea, though he mentions his Chicano friends first, he includes ‘Hat’ Hatalski and ‘Hook’ Frazier, ‘Boston John McCreedy from Quincy, Mass.’, Brodkey, Louis Dodge and ‘others: Not friends, no, but just as dead’. For Hinojosa, war is an equal-opportunity destroyer. William Childress, who grew up in a family of sharecroppers and migrant farm labourers, joined the army in 1951 so he could have meat at every meal and a bed he did not have to share with his siblings. Sent to Korea in 1952, he served as a demolitions expert and secret courier in the later stages of the war. Childress’s Korean War poems are scattered among an assortment of other poems in two separate collections, Burning the Years (1971) and Lobo (1972), later consolidated into Burning the Years and Lobo: Poems 1962–1975 (1986).3

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 154

30/01/2012 16:24

american poetry of the korean war

155

Unlike Wilson and Hinojosa, Childress did not arrange his Korean War poems sequentially; thus, they do not have the kind of narrative progression from green youth to weary veteran that both Wilson’s and Hinojosa’s poems exhibit. Nevertheless, Childress’s poems are powerful and evocative, and help to fill the major gap in war literature created by the absence of attention to the Korean War. ‘Korea Bound, 1952’ emphasises the unwillingness of those who were being sent to fight. The soldiers on the troop ship are ‘braced’ against the railing as they listen to the ‘shrill complaining of the waves.’ Ostensibly free men in a democracy, they are likened to Pharaoh’s slaves, and the ship itself to Pharaoh’s burial tomb. In the poem’s final irony, they sail past Alcatraz Island, then a federal prison, where the prisoners’ ‘lack of freedom guarantees their lives’. In ‘Letter Home’, Childress assumes the persona of a young American soldier, newly arrived in Korea and still able to see beyond himself and his own misery to the misery of ‘children with bellies swollen, / and O, the flowers / of their faces, petals all torn’. Such empathy will not survive what is to come, however. In ‘The Soldiers’, Childress reminds readers that ‘lives narrow / around living’s uncertain center’ and ‘soldiers can’t be soldiers and be / human’. In ‘Shellshock’, Childress moves from generic soldiers to a soldier with a name: MacFatridge. A poem about the cost of war on those who survive it, it immediately suggests those men in John Huston’s 1946 documentary Let There Be Light,4 which was filmed in the psychiatric ward of a military hospital – though the film was withheld from public release by the US government until 1979, seventeen years after Childress’s poem first appeared in Poetry. Childress’s empathy for his fellow soldiers is matched and more than matched by his contempt for the generals who commanded them. Both ‘Combat Iambic’ and ‘Death of a General’ are scathingly unrelenting, reminiscent of Siegfried Sassoon at his angry best. And in ‘The Long March’, a soldier pulls from a puddle: the arm of someone’s child. Not far away, the General camps with his press corps. Any victory will be his. For us there is only the long march to Viet Nam. Here, in the last line of a poem beginning ‘North to Pusan’, Childress makes explicit what must have been a steadily rising horror among many Korean War veterans as the 50s became the 60s and the 60s became the Vietnam War. The ‘we’ in the third line of the poem, and the ‘us’ above, are not just the soldiers themselves, but the American people ‘dumbly following / leaders whose careers / hang on victory’. It seems to be no coincidence that all three of these poets wrote and published the bulk of their Korean War poetry only after the Vietnam War was well underway. Three other veterans of the Korean War deserve some mention here as well, though none produced more than a small handful of poems about that experience. William Wantling served in Korea in 1953 as an aviation radio repairman with the US Marine Corps, later did time in the California state prison system, and died in 1974 after years of drug and alcohol abuse. He never got beyond the smallest of small press publications with his poetry, and most of what he said about his life in Korea and afterwards turns out to be

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 155

30/01/2012 16:24

156

william d. ehrhart

fiction. But a few of his Korean War poems are worth noting. ‘Korea 1953’ records ‘endless weeks of zero’ where murder is ‘sanctioned’ in ‘that strange war that was not / a war’. In ‘I Remember’, a tough lieutenant, finding the frozen body of a soldier who has been missing all winter, kicks the corpse, swears and spits: ‘You Sonofabitch, if you’d been more careful I wouldn’t hafta write all those Goddam letters’ – but then stares directly into the sun to give himself an excuse in front of his men for the tears in his eyes. In ‘The Awakening’, a crushed but still struggling bee reminds Wantling of ‘the agony on the face of wounded friends / and the same dumb drive to continue’. Any appreciation of Wantling’s poetry, unfortunately, is tempered by his shameless efforts to blame his subsequent problems after the Korean War on combat experiences he simply did not have. James Magner, Jr., on the other hand, didn’t need to manufacture combat stories about himself. Joining the army in 1948, he was fighting as an infantry sergeant in Korea when he was badly wounded by machinegun fire in early 1951. Evacuated and eventually discharged as medically unfit for further duty, he spent the next five years in a Catholic monastery before venturing out into the world again. Magner’s poems are not always successful. The language can sound pompous and stilted; the frequent references to God, Christ-God, Human-God and the like can be off-putting, especially for anyone who does not share Magner’s religious bent. But there is a sweetness to some of his poems, a love for his fellow sufferers, a sense of innocent bewilderment, that touches the heart. It is clear that Magner cannot bear the madness of the war, the unspeakable misery, the destruction of bodies and minds and hearts, without the hope and reality of divine grace and human redemption. One does not know if ‘The Man Without a Face’ is Chinese or Korean or American, but only that he is ‘gutted, tangled – sprawled’ on barbed wire, ‘dead and alone in his body’. And the cold, bleak, unforgiving moonscape of Korea in winter could not be better rendered than in ‘Zero Minus One Minute’: The dawn has come to sleepless night again and it is time for us to answer from the gray, crystal holes that seem to womb just northern night and nothingness. The cold, the pain, the fear, the loneliness are palpable, the soldiers ‘splinters / in bundled rags’. But while ‘the world doubts / that we exist’, Magner nevertheless insists that: we are there and we shall creak our frozen bones upon the crystal mount that looms in silence and amaze the world.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 156

30/01/2012 16:24

american poetry of the korean war

157

Perhaps the most reluctant Korean War poet is former army infantry platoon leader Reg Saner, who never even uses the word ‘Korea’ in any of his four collections of poetry, barely alluding to war at all amid poems about hiking, mountain climbing, skiing, and camping under the stars. Indeed, two of his three most explicit and powerful Korean War poems do not even appear in his books, and in the one that does – ‘Re-Runs’ in his third collection, Red Letters – Saner says only that he is ‘alone within a nameless grief ’ where ‘what’s buried won’t cry / and won’t go away’. What troubles Saner, however, he will not say beyond ‘flying iron’, ‘a torn head’ and ‘crossfire tracers’. He records only that sometimes there are ‘odd nights’. The other two poems, ‘They Said’ and ‘Flag Memoir’, remain uncollected.5 Like ‘Re-Runs’, ‘They Said’ does not identify the Korean War, but the vehemence of the sarcasm bespeaks something very personal: an old grudge, a raw nerve, an unhealed wound. The repetition of the unnamed ‘they’; the Big Brother authoritarianism masquerading as benign paternalism; the smiling insistence upon conformity; the use of modifiers like ‘nicely’, ‘suitable’ and ‘quite’; all powerfully suggest why Saner, like Sassoon before him and the Vietnam War veterans of Dewey Canyon III after him, rejects the decorations given for actions in which he can take no pride. Finally, in his stunning prose poem ‘Flag Memoir’, Saner offers a series of tight, hard vignettes, very specific, and very particular to the war in which he fought, recalled to mind by 4th of July municipal fireworks that: report to the eye as muzzle flash and sheared jaw, red teeth, clay dirt on the brains. Or maybe with one long zipper-pull some corporal exactly my age throws open a dark rubber bag, there yet, in any such zipper I hear [. . .] A stadium anthem can do it, or flag at a ballpark [. . .] The flag slowly dipping, lifting, over nobody there. Explaining. Trying to explain. Neither Hayden Carruth nor Thomas McGrath served in the Korean War (both are veterans of World War II), but each wrote a single poem inspired by the Korean War that ranks among the very best war poems of the twentieth century. Carruth’s ‘On a Certain Engagement South of Seoul’ first appeared in The Nation and subsequently in Carruth’s 1959 collection The Crow and the Heart. Written in terza rima, it begins, ‘A long time, many years, we’ve had these wars’, and carries a sense of weariness, of sad inevitability. ‘The nations undertake / Another campaign now’, and as Carruth reads the account of a ‘slight encounter somewhere below / Seoul’, he is reminded that one war merely gives way to the next in an endless succession, and he can find no saving grace, no redeeming qualities in his own experiences or the misery of others, but only a sense of loss: Is this a bond? Does this make us brothers? Or does it bring our hatred back? I might Have known, but now I do not know. Others May know. I know when I walk out-of-doors I have a sorrow not wholly mine, but another’s. McGrath’s poem, ‘Ode for the American Dead in Korea’, first appeared in his 1955 collection Figures from a Double World. Written in an unusual combination of rhymed and blank verse, the poem manages to interweave the loneliness of war (‘God love you now, if

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 157

30/01/2012 16:24

158

william d. ehrhart

no one else will ever’), the bleakness of death in Korea (‘Corpse in the paddy, or dead on a high hill’), the naïvety of ordinary citizens (‘All your false flags were / Of bravery and ignorance’), the venality of those who take advantage of the naïvety (‘the safe commanders’), the common humanity of soldiers (‘ready to kill [. . .] your brother’), and the insignificance and anonymity of the dead (‘tumbled to a tomb of footnotes’) to those who send them to die (‘distinguished masters whom you never knew’). And this is only the first stanza. In the second and third stanzas, he likens ordinary Americans who answer the call to duty to bees and moles (‘happy creatures’) running on ‘blind instinct’, neatly condemns church and state (‘the state to mold you, church to bless’) and school, too (‘No scholar put your thinking cap on’), offers perhaps the bleakest and most succinct explanation of evolution ever put forth (‘in dead seas fishes died in schools / before inventing legs to walk on land’), dismisses the Christian belief in a benevolent and caring God (‘whose sparrows fall aslant his gaze / Like grace or confetti’), implicates Big Business (‘the stock exchange / Flowers’) and disparages politicians (‘the politic tear / Is cast in the Forum’). For all his anger and scorn, however, McGrath in the end pays tender and loving tribute to the dead American soldiers ‘who did not know the rules’. His poem is a lament for those who die for the interests of those who risk nothing, certainly not their own lives. Above a bleak dawn landscape, ‘the lone crow skirls his draggled passage home’ while God blinks ‘and you are gone’. But McGrath vows that after ‘the public mourners’ have done with their empty rituals, ‘we will mourn you: brave: ignorant: amazed: / Dead in the rice paddies, dead on the nameless hills’. In summary, while little attention has been paid to the poetry of the Korean War – or to anything else about the Korean War, for that matter – there is indeed a body of work, however modest, that deserves a better fate. Fortunately, in recent years, a few anthologists and scholars are beginning to recognise and rectify this state of affairs. Both Old Glory: American War Poems from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terrorism (2004) and American War Poetry: An Anthology (2006)6 contain selections of Korean War poetry, the first general anthologies of war poetry to do so in the fifty years since the Korean War ended. One hopes that these are not passing anomalies, but rather recognition at last that the poetry of the Korean War merits a permanent place in the canon of war literature.

Notes 1. Keith Wilson, Graves Registry & Other Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1969); reprinted in a much expanded edition as Graves Registry (Livingston, MT: Clark City Press, 1992). 2. Rolando Hinojosa, Korean Love Songs (Berkeley: Justa Publications, 1978). 3. William Childress, Burning the Years (New York: The Smith, 1971); Lobo (New York: Barlenmir House, 1972); Burning the Years and Lobo: Poems 1962–1975 (East St. Louis, IL: Essai Seay, 1986). 4. Let There Be Light, film, directed by John Huston. USA: US Army Pictorial Services, 1946. 5. Both uncollected poems appear in both W. D. Ehrhart and Philip K. Jason (eds), Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of the Korean War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999) and War, Literature & the Arts, 9.2 (1997). 6. Robert Hedin (ed.), Old Glory: American War Poems from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Persea, 2004); Lorrie Goldensohn (ed.), American War Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 158

30/01/2012 16:24

american poetry of the korean war

159

Further Reading Ehrhart, W. D. (guest ed.), War, Literature & the Arts, 9.2 (Fall/Winter 1997). ––, ‘Howard Fast’s “Korean Litany”’, War, Literature & the Arts, 12.1 (2000), p. 54. ––, ‘Setting the Record Straight on William Wantling’, War, Literature & the Arts, 12.2 (2000), pp. 224–30. —, ‘Burning the Years: The Korean War Poetry of William Childress’, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, 8 (2001), pp. 77–103. ––, ‘“In Cases Like This, There Is No Need to Vote”: Korean War Poetry in the Context of 20th Century American War Poetry’, Colby Quarterly, 37.3 (2001), pp. 267–84. ––, ‘A Dirty and Murderous Joke: The Korean War Poetry of Keith Wilson’, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, 9 (2003), pp. 39–64. ––, ‘Rolando Hinojosa: Native Son Home from Asia’, Proceedings of the Center for the Study of the Korean War, 3.1 (2003), pp. 1–88. ––, ‘James Magner, Jr., William Meredith & Reg Saner: Reluctant Poets of the Korean War’, Cycnos, 21.2 (2004), pp. 169–89. ––, and Philip K. Jason (eds), Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of the Korean War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 159

30/01/2012 16:24

The Fictions of Nuclear War, Hiroshima to Vietnam

17

THE FICTIONS OF NUCLEAR WAR, FROM HIROSHIMA TO VIETNAM Adam Piette

O

n 16 July 1945, the first atom bomb was detonated at Trinity at the Alamogordo Test Range in New Mexico. The Manhattan Project observers who witnessed the blast gasped at the quasi-divine energies released over the sands. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell was in awe at the new military sun that had been unleashed on earth: The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. [. . .] Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday.1

The light released by the blast is a revelation, an epiphanic display of the secret doomsday force at the heart of nature. That force is a thing of beauty to the generals not only because it heralded, in General Leslie Grove’s words in his report of 18 July, ‘the birth of a new age – the Age of Atomic Energy’,2 but because it proved that war’s destructive power lay at the heart of every atom. The Americans had the ultimate weapon in their hands, a force that was warfare in excelcis, a war-god of their own, with a power over cities, nations, the planet itself. The A-bomb was a demonstration of war as planetary power, a sun-god of apocalyptic proportions, brought down to earth and incarnate in the bombmachine. The vision of splendour on the Trinity sands was a god to trump the old Trinity itself: a triple-headed fission monster of krypton, barium and neutrons released from the uranium core; and as the light, mushroom cloud and radiation of its manifestation. For Sir Edwin Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron and British observer of the Trinity blast, it was ‘as if God himself appeared among us’. He had witnessed ‘a vision from the book of Revelations’.3 To Oppenheimer, the war god was beyond Western comprehension, the nearest equivalent Vishnu, multi-armed, from the pages of the Bhagavadgita: ‘Now am I become Death, destroyer of worlds.’4 On 6 August 1945, at a quarter past eight in the morning, ‘Little Boy’ revealed the military God unto the Gentiles, in a burst of heat, blast and radiation, killing 140,000 in Hiroshima, utterly destroying 90 per cent of all buildings within two miles of the epicentre.5 The event changed history, disrupting the space-time of modernity, spawning a new globalisation of military power so unprecedented it beggared the imaginations even

160

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 160

30/01/2012 16:24

the fictions of nuclear war, hiroshima to vietnam

161

of those who came to the revelation through print and screen. John Hersey’s account of the attack, ‘Hiroshima’, stitched together six Japanese and German survivor eyewitness reports into a narrative for The New Yorker in 1946 that served as Pauline dissemination of the god’s new reign of terror. The Reverend Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, bore witness to the birth of Little Boy: ‘Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it travelled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun.’6 The sun-god annihilated 140,000, and cruelly irradiated the survivors. ‘Fat Man’, the bomb that fell on Nagasaki, killed 70,000, and its atomic flash also shot from east to west, to be seen by the young J. G. Ballard in the internment camp at Lunghua, near Shanghai. He fictionalised the vision in his memoir-novel Empire of the Sun, sensing the revelation of Death, destroyer of worlds: ‘the light was a premonition of his death, the sight of his small soul joining the larger soul of the dying world.’7 The flash inaugurated the post-war world by annihilating the past, for Ballard: ‘the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age.’8 The flash is a strange and demonic sun in the sky, a second source of light/heat/energy decreating the world by unhinging humanity from its premodern histories. This nuclear sun destroyed the rising sun of Japanese militarism, ushering in the superpower Cold War between the US and its only atomic rival (after 1949), the Soviet Union. But at the social and psychological level, for Ballard, Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a new world out of the destroyed pre-nuclear cultures, ‘a nihilistic world’, in the words of Ballard critic Simon Sellars, ‘with no boundaries, no spatial coordinates except those of inner space, the cognitive remapping of a world that has lost its bearings in time and space’.9 Postmodernity was created in the military godhead’s flash across Japanese skies in 1945. It gave postmodernity its nihilistic model for the destroying of all past logic, measure and grand narrative. And it gave the West a new post-Christian sublime to worship and fear, a new imperialism of the nuclear sun. Most critically, it defined all forms of sublime power as war-generated, as the visible manifestation of the god of war. The shock of the atomic flash across the psyche of the globe created a new form of post-war humanity, a global population for the first time united in the spectre of its own annihilation. War had become Death’s new name, destroyer of worlds: and Death’s empire was under the control of the United States, 1945–9, and the Soviet Union thereafter. By the 1950s, the nuclear arms race between the Cold War superpowers had established two national security states with the power to destroy the world. Globalisation was a creature of this unprecedented militarisation of all air spaces, all territories, all powers and dominions. With the development of thermonuclear weapons, and the nuclear stand-off between the two powers, the Third World War, in the words of Robert Jay Lifton, would make the whole world into ‘Hiroshima’. Hiroshima had not only destroyed a sense of the past, it had generated a ‘radical sense of futurelessness’ in the human mind. Immortality through children, artwork, monument or artefact could no longer be guaranteed.10 Lifton interviewed Hiroshima survivors, the hibakusha, and defined this new nightmare present-tense angst as a form of psychic numbing which spread from their agony out to every citizen of the post-Hiroshima world.11 The empire of the sun was simultaneously an empire of imminent death, one’s own joining that of the dying world. The godlike force unleashed at Trinity and Japan was unleashed again at the bomb-test sites developed by the military in the 1940s and 1950s. Those test sites were in the Pacific islands for the United States (and later France) – and the vision of the thermonuclear

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 161

30/01/2012 16:24

162

adam piette

blasts and massive mushroom clouds became the staple iconic image of the Cold War. The shift to the remote islands, and their utter destruction by the blasts, generated more than the flimsy bikini. As Simon Sellars argues, Ballard’s obsession with the Pacific islands stems from their eerie association with the inaugural god of war and its species-destructive power. That obsession is the topic of his short story, ‘The Terminal Beach’. In the story, the retired Air Force pilot Traven retreats to Eniwetok, the Pacific atoll that saw the detonation of the first H-bomb in 1952, ‘Ivy Mike’, which vaporised the island of Elugelab, as well as 47 other tests between 1948 and 1958. In 1977, the US military took the contaminated soil and debris from the islands of the surrounding atolls, mixed them with cement and buried them in one of the bomb craters on the island of Runit. This is where Traven resides, haunting the blockades and concrete dome, meditating on the loss of identity brought on by the nuclear age. That identity is encountered in the zany form of the plastic mannequins used in the testing, ‘half-melted faces contorted into bleary grimaces [gazing] up at him from the jumble of legs and torsos’.12 Escaping the US military, he hides himself among them, becoming hibakusha: ‘their deformed faces gaped at him sightlessly from the tangle of limbs, their blurred smiles like those of the soundlessly laughing dead.’13 Traven finds himself ‘reborn’, Sellars argues, as nuclear survivor in mind and psychic body, ‘scrambling for meaning among the detritus of the old world’.14 Ballard’s fictions acknowledge the ways in which nuclear culture, as the states of citizen mind and text inaugurated by the nuclear blasts in the 1940s and 1950s, drew dark energy from the display of A-bomb and thermonuclear destruction. Enough energy was drawn to isolate each individual within an ‘island’ territory of the mind. Old human nature has been destroyed and buried, and new forms have been shaped by militarisation, contaminated and deformed, under constant threat from military presences, locked into an eerie nuclear present tense presided over by death. Ballard’s terminal beach remembers the (island) shorelines of key Cold War fictions: the island of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), the first draft of which had opened with a nuclear holocaust; the island-continent of Australia glimpsed through the submarine periscope after a nuclear holocaust in Nevil Shute’s 1957 On the Beach; the desert in the South-West where Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz (1960) is set; the island of Labrador in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955). The nuclear anxieties which had been triggered by Hersey’s account and by the findings of the scientists investigating the effects of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially the fallout radiation, had abated somewhat once the world had settled into nuclear stalemate. Those anxieties came back to prominence, as Michael Hogan has argued, with the atmospheric testing of the late 1950s, the US and Soviet Union outvying each other with the power and frequency of their bomb-blasts.15 The renewed anxiety shifted more to the long-term genetic damage being wreaked upon the whole world by the drifting fallout, the strontium-90 in the mother’s milk, the freaky mutational timebomb being laid down in the human genome. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey has put it, ‘seven decades of nuclear tests, radioactive isotopes of carbon, cesium, strontium, and plutonium have been absorbed by all post-war humans on the planet’, radioactive carbon in teeth and bone now one of the main forensic tools used to date modern human remains.16 Campaigners against the bomb tests invited twenty-five young women scarred and maimed by the A-bomb to undergo reconstructive surgery in the States, as well as to tour with their anti-war message. They were christened the Hiroshima Maidens and helped generate a new surge of fear and compassion in the nuclear heartlands of the United States.17 The campaign saw a flurry

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 162

30/01/2012 16:24

the fictions of nuclear war, hiroshima to vietnam

163

of films and texts critiquing nuclear weapons, nuclear culture and the militarisation of the world through American superpower, the most important of which was the anti-war satire, Kubrik’s 1962 Dr Strangelove, which imagines nuclear apocalypse triggered by a mad general obsessed by communist infiltration of his ‘precious bodily fluids’ and ending with the unmotivated launch of a nuclear missile ridden rodeo-style by Major ‘King’ Kong. The film’s satire is equally aimed at the subtle psychological control systems in place which redirected citizen desire towards admiration and erotic attachment to the nuclear technology of war, how, in short, the populations of the West should ‘Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, as its subtitle has it.18 By the time intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and nuclear submarines had been developed in the late 1950s, Cold War nuclear culture ossified imaginations into static, death-entranced, technology-eroticising states of mind, and specifically into a hightech bunker mentality. The ICBMs went underground into extraordinary silos; nuclear governments built enormous caves and tunnels to wargame their apocalyptic futures in; nuclear bunkers were constructed under public buildings, halls and private houses across the developed world. The move underground, socially and psychologically, gave material form to the uncanny relations between public superpower politics and the citizen unconscious. Ballard argued that the Cold War isolated the individual mind into inhabiting inner spaces, and saw prewar surrealism inverted and become systemic to the way the world was governed. In other words, nuclear culture engendered a nuclear unconscious within each mind, warfare inhabiting the secret spaces of the mind, forming its ‘underground’, encouraged by the concrete materiality of the bunkers, silos, test explosions and Cold War propaganda to accept surreal postmodernity as always the world’s case. That surreal postmodernity displayed, in televisual, cinematic, newsprint and fictional forms, the global security state’s erotic fictions of the end, visions of apocalypse that fed off neoFreudian fictions of the libidinally fuelled death drive. Ballard was in this following Thomas Pynchon’s lead – Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) had staged the rocket science of nuclear postmodernity as originating in the V2 strikes on London at the end of the Second World War.19 Working with his own insider knowledge of the systems research insanities of the missile industry at Boeing, Pynchon computed the surreal inputs secreted within the feedback circuitry and probability functions of rocket warfare. The V2 missiles are found to seek out targets keyed into the sexual desire of one American lieutenant, Tyrone Slothrop, in London, hinting at a secret erotic logic underpinning the military system that would generate the Cold War and its nuclear rockets. The United States had ‘inherited’ Nazi rocket science with Operation Paperclip at the end of the war, smuggling Wernher von Braun and the other Peenemünde V2 scientists out of Europe and into their own missile programmes. By so doing, the Nazi erotic/military logistics of death were incorporated into the new superpower’s warfare state. For Pynchon, the nuclear security state functioned as a breeder of semi-illegal state–private networks, combining massive military spending on weapons systems with equally intimidatingly large superpolitical corporations with their own murky wartime history. Those state–private networks were alarming enough to frighten a president – Eisenhower warned against the power of what he termed the ‘military–industrial complex’ when leaving office. That complex was termed a colossus by Fred J. Cooke, in his influential 1962 The Warfare State.20 The ‘surreal’ erotics of the military–industrial warfare state depend, then, on turning the Freudian topics inside out: instead of inward triple-mindedness, ego, id and superego, facing an Oedipally inflected culture of norms and taboos, nuclear culture had generated

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 163

30/01/2012 16:24

164

adam piette

a triple system, on an international level, of unconscious ‘underground’ systems of apocalypse, conscious government value-systems of domestic ideology, and superego displays – through media propaganda – of Cold War ‘parental’ autocracies. The triple system was calqued on the Trinity of the Bomb, summoning the citizen imagination – through the glamour of the technologies of war and death – into the secret matrices of the state–private networks that constituted the political unconscious. What frustrated the warfare state, however, was the lack of any real test of their wargod. Deterrence and the ICBM stand-off after the limited test ban of 1963 had effectively disallowed any real exercise of the nuclear option outside the elaborate war games of the principal players. Generals had threatened to use the Bomb at Korea and General Nathan Twining, Air Force chief of staff, wanted to deploy ‘three small tactical A-bombs’ against the Viet Minh besieging the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.21 But military logic, survival instinct and public opinion made even the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons the stuff of Dr Strangelove’s dreams. Instead of a full-scale nuclear blast in real-time war situations, the warfare state had to create a substitute – and that substitute was Vietnam. The bombing campaigns in Vietnam after LBJ’s Operation Rolling Thunder were as close to nuclear events as conventional bombs could muster. The massive explosive ordinance dropped on the jungles was accompanied by napalm strikes and Agent Orange defoliation by the ten-year RANCH HAND operation. The unholy trinity of explosive, napalm and Agent Orange mimicked a nuclear strike: the explosives gave the blast, the napalm the heat and fireball flash, the defoliant the long-term radiation effects through the dioxin poisoning of milk, teeth and bone. The relationship between the bombing of the Vietnamese and the memories of Hiroshima was not entirely unconscious. Colonel Joseph E. Fox observed after the 1968 ‘interdiction’ bombing runs he had witnessed west of Dak To, that they were a ‘“horrible psychological weapon” not unlike the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One moment, he recalled, everything was peaceful and serene, “and all of a sudden all hell erupts”.’22 The bombs were designed to shock the VC into Hiroshima-style submission by reducing ‘“the triple canopy jungle [to] desert”’ (as a major observing the same runs noted), and through subjecting the populations to a neo-nuclear hell of fire, blast and genetic poison.23 This open secret was deniable through the hearts-and-minds propaganda and newspeak of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV); but blown open by the witness reports of the damage caused on the ground. The revelations streak through the combatant poetry of the period. African-American Vietnam War poet Rolland Snellings’s ‘The Song of Fire’, for instance, sang a loud song of protest against the white bourgeoisie through a napalmfuelled vision of revolution: fire ‘will scorch the “Lonely Crowd” with Death’s embrace / like Mushroom suns. . . in mutant Hiroshima! (Fire!)’24 For the dissenting combatants, the whited sepulchre of the hearts-and-minds war aims was a sham disguising a nucleargenocidal mission on the part of the Pentagon. The cant phrase, ‘Winning Hearts and Minds’ (inherited by the Americans from the example of British counter-insurgency in Malaya), was reduced by the grunts to its explosive acronym WHAM, becoming the rallying call and title, as Michael Bibby has shown, of the ‘first collection of dissident poems in US history produced by soldiers during wartime’.25 The collection was edited by three veterans active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Jon Barry, Basil Paquet and Larry Rottmann, and was published in 1972 by 1st Casualty Press, appearing as the ‘culmination’, Bibby argues, ‘of the anti-war activism centered around the Winter Soldier Hearings’.26 The storytelling of the returning shell-shocked veterans bore keen witness

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 164

30/01/2012 16:24

the fictions of nuclear war, hiroshima to vietnam

165

against the warfare state’s ‘nuclear’ assault on the Vietnamese peasantry. It colours the dark meditative poems of many soldiers decades after the war. Bruce Weigl’s 1988 collection, Song of Napalm, takes stock of the shocking memories warping everyday America in veteran imaginations. ‘Apparition of the Exile’ watches a soldier suffering PTSD, obsessively drawing mazes on white paper every day: All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.27 The apocalyptic visions of napalm/phosphorous firestorms, harbinger of mass death, turn his own body inside out, his eyes mere screens for the displays of the destroyer of worlds, his hands militarised to wire as barbed as his nightmares, his expression reduced to obsessive reproduction of the Pentagon’s maze. Weigl turns to his own memory system in ‘Song of Napalm’, which details his trip home to his horse ranch, and his own bouts of shellshock. He watches a storm pass, ‘the rain pounding’ – after it passes, he sees ‘branches / [crisscross] the sky like barbed wire’, and he gazes at the horses through ‘the black screen’ – the horses reduce to cut-outs, and recede beyond the hill, and he hopes his mind will clear of Vietnam melancholia: But still the branches are wire and thunder is the pounding mortar, still I close my eyes and see the girl running from her village, napalm stuck to her dress like jelly, her hands reaching for the no one who waits in waves of heat before her.28 The PTSD substitutions of natural event for remembered war scene resolve themselves into the most terrifying image of the war, the napalmed girl screaming her pain and seeking succour with her outlifted arms. It is an image that haunted America, doing more than any other single act of protest to end the obscene holocaust of the villages. But it haunts Weigl more than most, since the girl is running for help towards the camera eye of GI memory – but that eye is identified with the ‘waves of heat’ of the napalm blast. She is the sacrificial victim of the pseudo-nuclear colossus being fabricated by the Agent Orangenapalm-explosive destroyer, turning the horses of Weigl’s ranch to RANCH HAND horses of the apocalypse, and the eye of his imagination into the ‘black screen’ of the black propaganda of the Vietnam war machine. The girl in the celebrated June 1972 photograph by Nick Ut, later identified as Phan Thi Kim Phuc, is called ‘Fleeing Girl’ in Michael Perlman’s Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima. For Perlman, she signifies the ultimate vulnerability of the human body after Hiroshima: All the masculine armor, nuclear ‘defenses’ and space-weapon fantasies of nations notwithstanding, we are totally vulnerable – as if naked and defenseless – in the nuclear world. This girl brings to the fore, with the horror of Vietnam, the largelyforgotten sense of terror and unsafety that many felt in the years immediately after Hiroshima.29

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 165

30/01/2012 16:24

166

adam piette

Perlman sees the power of the image of Fleeing Girl as lying in its evocation of the ghastly primal scene created by the public unconscious unleashed by the Bomb, a scene that stages ‘war’s explosive, deadly, poisoned rape (this girl is [. . .] fleeing a napalm attack)’: The rapist is death-terror to which we all may be prey in the nuclear world. In myth, images of innocence often constellate a dark violating pursuer: remember Death, who rapes Persephone; and Pan, the goat-God of terror who pursues fleeing nymphs. Both Gods, we have witnessed, are associated with the place of Hiroshima: DeathTerror. We remember these as we remember Fleeing Girl.30 The nuclear war-god unleashed on Trinity sands has generated the napalm Death-Terror deity of the Vietnam hawks. The gaze on Fleeing Girl adopts the gaze of the war-god, the waves of heat combining neo-nuclear apocalyptic energies with sado-military erotic desire. That gaze is stark and vivid in Yusef Komunyakaa’s shellshock memory of a napalmed girl, and is internalised as a dark motivating power behind the act of making that is poetry. The poem is the inscription not of his own voice but hers: ‘the cry I bring down from the hills / belongs to a girl still burning / inside my head’.31 And the metaphorical work of the poem is ceded to vicious figures for her destruction, images that cross the guilty pleasure of profiting from her death with the apocalyptic gaze of the war-god: She burns like a shot glass of vodka. She burns like a field of poppies at the edge of a rain forest. She rises like dragonsmoke to my nostrils. She burns like a burning bush driven by a godawful wind.32 Her napalm sacrifice entwines with the rhetoric of war poetry (the poppy fields of the Somme), medieval epic and Biblical revelation to create a hymn to the ‘godawful’ godgames of the neonuclear Vietnam warmongerers. The godawful power is internalised as guilty memory in the Vietnam combatant memories – but it is a memory lodged in their insides as though an alien presence, an external unconscious that is the war’s own policies of violence and victimhood. Morton Marcus, in his poem ‘Confession’, remembers his own body count as though feeling for shrapnel in his torso: My count is indefinite but probably includes the 8 mothers who ran through the caves of my colon with burning hair; the baby shaped like a scream; the two girls with hands and wombs of flaming water; and, on my spinal road,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 166

30/01/2012 16:24

the fictions of nuclear war, hiroshima to vietnam

167

the boy who crawls farther and farther from his legs.33 The napalm nightmare is the product of nuclear culture’s dissemination of images demonstrating the long-term damage to the insides of all citizens. War guilt, the poem argues, has spread to all minds in the form of these horrific images of burning women and children – lodged in the bones and spinal columns of the militarised imagination. John Balaban was a conscientious objector during the war, and did alternative service in hospitals in Vietnam, especially on wards for war-injured children. He experienced some of the horrors of Agent Orange at first hand without knowing it. In the first section of his poem ‘Along the Mekong’, he recalls reading the first report of the terrible genetic damage wreaked by the pesticide, the New Yorker article in 1970 by Thomas Whiteside: ’2, 4, 5-T, teratogenicity in births; / South Vietnam 1/7th defoliated; residue / in rivers, foods, and mother’s milk’. Balaban wonders, when ‘I ushered hare-lipped, tusk-toothed kids / to surgery in Saigon’, whether he or his wife were affected: What dioxin, picloram, arsenic have knitted in my cells, in my wife now carrying our first child.34 The fear of genetic damage woven into the DNA of cells allied to the vision of malformation in children is a direct replay of the images of radiation damage during the atmospheric test protests. The PTSD poetry of combatant witness is corroborated by the anti-war activist poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Duncan, in his preface to his 1968 anti-Vietnam collection, Bending the Bow, recognised the ways a political unconscious had been generated by the spectacle of Vietnam napalm-apocalypse: Our defense has invaded an area of ourselves that troubled us. Cities laid waste, villages destroyed, men, women and children hunted down in their fields, forests poisoned, herds of elephants screaming under our fire – it is all so distant from us we hear only what we imagine, making up what we surely are doing.35 The distance lies in the uncanny nature of the vision of US-orchestrated apocalypse (‘our fire’), strangely familiar since it replays the Hiroshima violence of the Second World War, and, like the Bomb blasts, internalised and therefore deniable as government-sponsored dreamwork. In his poem ‘Up Rising’, published that same year, Duncan develops the concept of American nuclear apocalypse as secret scare tactic in the way the war in Vietnam was fought: As Blake saw America in figures of fire and blood raging, . . . in what image? the ominous roar in the air, the omnipresent wings, the all-American boy in the cockpit loosing his flow of napalm, below in the jungle ‘any life at all or sign of life’ his target.36 The ‘all-American boy’ over the Vietnamese jungle is the ghost of the pilot of Enola Gay, the napalm flow a jism of apocalypse from the surreal desire of the nuclear war-god. The search-and-destroy mission directives of the MACV are aligned with planet-destructive

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 167

30/01/2012 16:24

168

adam piette

ecocide. And Duncan relates this to weapons of mass destruction held in the silos of the nuclear state: ‘back of the scene: the atomic stockpile; the vials of synthesized diseases eager biologists have developt over half-century dreaming of the bodies of mothers and fathers and children and hated rivals swollen with new plagues’.37 The original sin of American democracy, the genocidal violence of Indian removal, is dark origin, replayed in Rolling Thunder’s napalm fires: ‘a holocaust of / burning Indians, trees and grasslands’.38 The pilot-poet Walter McDonald expressed absolutely this erotic delight in the Vietnam bombing campaigns. His ‘Caliban in Blue’ sings an ironic hymn to ‘air power’, ‘targetdiving, / hand enfolding hard throttle / in solitary masculine delight. // Focused on cross hairs, / eyes glazing, hand triggers switches in / pulsing orgasm, / savage release’.39 For George Hitchcock in 1966, American sponsorship of napalm bomb campaigns had changed the concept of democracy to mean the levelling death-by-fire of Christian apocalypse. Fireflies rising through the night ‘bear the sweet gospel of napalm’ and ‘Democracies of flames are declared / in the villages, the rice-fields / Seethe with blistered reeds’. And in the new democracy of neo-nuclear apocalypse, the figure of Fleeing Girl is imagined, years before she was caught on camera, performing the trope of Cold War: ‘Freedom, a dancinggirl, / Lifts her petticoat of gasoline’.40 Denise Levertov wrote a ballad to white phosphorous, and sensed its erotic charge, its insinuating voice of Death, its realisation of fallout’s effects: ‘I prefer flesh, so smooth, so dense / I decorate it in black, and seek the bone’.41 Louis Simpson in 1966 felt what many felt experiencing the war from the United States: that they were witnessing a dream generated by the war machine. That dream was a dream of the Cold War: ‘Dream, you are flying over Russia, / Dream, you are flying in Asia’. The air strikes in Vietnam drew their surreal power from the Cold War forcefield, the B-52s carrying virtual nuclear weapons over Asian airspace. And the visions of exploding jungle seen on the television screens of America triggered a nuclear response: As I look down the street On a typical sunny day in California It is my house that is burning And my dear ones that lie in the gutter As the American army enters.42 The burning girl that haunted all minds was Vietnamerican, and the fires that fell a dream of the nuclear end. The poets at home and ‘up country’ were sensing, therefore, the nuclear relations disguised in the sado-military drive to bomb Vietnam. It is no irony then that their proleptic feel for the three-pronged assault on the Vietnamese peasantry as neo-nuclear, and the shellshocked certainty by combatant poets that that was the motivating fiction driving the genocidal extremism of the blanket bombing should also be confirmed by historians. As Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri revealed in 2003, on October 27 1969, the SAC launched a series of B-52 bombers, armed with thermonuclear weapons, on a ‘show of force’ airborne alert, code-named Giant Lance. During this alert operation, eighteen B-52s took off from bases in California and Washington State. Three bombers crossed Alaska, were refueled in midair by KC-135 tanker aircraft, and then flew in oval patterns toward the Soviet Union and back, on eighteen-hour ‘vigils’ over the northern polar ice cap.43

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 168

30/01/2012 16:24

the fictions of nuclear war, hiroshima to vietnam

169

That extraordinarily dangerous thermonuclear flight is now called the Madman Alert. ‘The alert’, Sagan and Suri explain, was a loud but secret military signal ordered by President Richard Nixon. Nixon sought to convince Soviet and North Vietnamese leaders that he might do anything to end the war in Vietnam, in accordance with his ‘madman theory’ of coercive diplomacy.44 It was a theory Nixon had cooked up in 1968 in the aftermath of Rolling Thunder. He told Haldeman: ‘I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “For God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry – and he has his hand on the nuclear button” – and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.’45 In other words, Nixon was inspired by the neo-nuclear vision of the B-52 raids to contemplate mimicking a real thermonuclear strike in the autumn of 1969, to convince the Soviets that he was ready to nuke Vietnam. At the same time, Kissinger was attempting to bounce the Pentagon into accepting the logic of small-scale nuclear bombs in order to close what was called the ‘deterrence gap’. The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) needed to be revised by Air Force Plans and Operations and RAND to include the option of ‘selective nuclear operations’ to restore the credibility of deterrence.46 Again, it is arguable that the facsimile of nuclear attacks in the Agent Orange-napalm-explosive attacks on Vietnam may have encouraged the search for limited nuclear options. The Pentagon’s vicious Vietnam fictions were based on a virtual remake of Hiroshima shock-and-awe conditions on the ground through the craters, incendiaries and biological warfare of their neo-nuclear trinity of TNT, Agent Orange and napalm. The Cold War encouraged the expansion of nuclear godhead strategies into the hot wars through nuclear culture’s extrospective surrealism of achieved dreams of wanton apocalyptic destruction. Hiroshima had a long aftermath in the shaping of the nuclear imaginary in citizen fears and citizen internalisation, through inversion of surrealist desire, of the atomic war-god and its Fleeing Girl victim. As alarming, however, is the fact that nuclear capability and shock and awe continues to shape superpower war-making. The globalisation of nuclear militarisation has made it feasible, desirable and WHAM-justifiable to inflict neo-nuclear damage on populations in the name of a fiery Democracy of flames, with citizens miming inside their heads the flight of Freedom, the dancing-girl in her petticoat of gasoline. Minds in the nuclear age, without a pre-war past and uncertain of any unapocalyptic future, can only envision the bombing of civilians with the preternatural calm of the war-god gaze and its waves of heat, the new secret configuration of the American Dream. ‘Wherever I go, there’s fire // My dreams are napalm’, as Walter McDonald, vet at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, sang.47 And so it goes. The Vietnam veteran poet, W. D. Ehrhart, he who had warned American readers not to forget ‘memories of Kent and My Lai and Hiroshima / [. . .] and their connections with each other’,48 as the Cold War waned and segued into the wars in Iraq, felt the pains in his old body, and the fact he cannot shave without bleeding as strange symptoms of that old war:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 169

30/01/2012 16:24

170

adam piette

On the radio news, nothing but war. American planes are bombing Baghdad. Knicked in three places, you remember The nameless dead you carried home. You remember you promised to bury them. You thought you could. You didn’t know There’d be more then you ever imagined.49 Nixon’s Madman Alert is still potential in the new American wars, and seeps like a memory into the bodies of all the citizens of the West as a body shame, a self-harming, bleeding guilt complex. The three knicks Ehrhart inflicts on himself each morning as he listens to the war news ring out the three persons of the post-nuclear war-god, its blasts, its heat, its radiation into the bodies of everyone on this dying world.

Notes 1. From General Leslie Groves’s ‘Report on Alamogordo Atomic Bomb Test’, 18 July 1945, quoted in Martin J. Sherwin A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 312. 2. Sherwin, p. 312. 3. Sir Edwin Chadwick, quoted in Ian Welsh, Mobilizing Modernity: the Nuclear Moment (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 37. 4. In recollections in interviews in the 1960s, quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 676. 5. Welsh, p. 38. 6. John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Bantam, 1946), p. 7. 7. J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (London: Harper, 1967), p. 267. 8. J. G. Ballard, ‘Some Words about Crash!: Introduction to the French Edition of Crash!’, Foundation: the Review of Science Fiction, 9 (November 1975), p. 47. 9. Simon Sellars, ‘“Extreme Possibilities”: Mapping “the sea of time and space” in J. G. Ballard’s Pacific Fictions’, first published in Colloquy (August 2009), available at http://www.simonsellars.com/extreme-possibilities-jgbs-pacific-fictions, accessed 29 January 2010. 10. Robert Jay Lifton, ‘Beyond Nuclear Numbing: A Call to Teach and Learn’, 1982, quoted in Michael J. Hogan, Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 156. 11. Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (University of North Carolina Press, [1967] 1991). Cf. also his The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). 12. J. G. Ballard. ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964), in The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), vol. 2, p. 33. 13. Ibid. p. 44. 14. Sellars. 15. Hogan, pp. 150–1. 16. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Radiation Ecologies and the Wars of Light’, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 55.3 (Fall 2009), pp. 468–95. DeLoughrey is summarising Eileen Welsome’s argument in her The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (New York: Dial, 1999). 17. The Hiroshima Maidens campaign, coordinated by activist Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, prompted the famous handshake between Mr Tanimoto and the co-pilot of the Enola Gay on the This is Your Life show in May 1955 – the pilot gave the host a cheque for the maidens (Hogan, pp. 150–1).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 170

30/01/2012 16:24

the fictions of nuclear war, hiroshima to vietnam

171

18. Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, film, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: Columbia, 1964. 19. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973). 20. Fred J. Cook, The Warfare State (New York: Macmillan, 1962). 21. Andrew Jon Rotter, Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 266. 22. Colonel Joseph E. Fox, quoted in Bernard C. Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam, 1968–1975 (Washington, DC: USAF, 2000), pp. 77–8. 23. Major Eugene Carnahan, quoted in Nalty, p. 77. 24. Rolland Snellings, ‘The Song of Fire’, in LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (eds), Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (New York: William Morrow, 1968), p. 326. 25. Michael Bibby, Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), p. 147. 26. Ibid. p. 147. 27. Bruce Weigl, ‘Apparition of the Exile’, in Song of Napalm (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), p. 56. 28. Bruce Weigl, ‘Song of Napalm’, in Song of Napalm, pp. 33–4. 29. Michael Perlman, Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima (New York: SUNY Press, 1988), p. 134. 30. Ibid. p. 134. 31. Yusef Komunyakaa, ‘“You and I Are Disappearing”’, in Scandalize My Name: Selected Poems (London: Picador, 2002), p. 46. From the 1988 Dien Cai Dau collection. 32. Ibid. p. 46. 33. Morton Marcus, ‘Confession’, quoted in Subarno Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 85. 34. John Balaban, ‘Along the Mekong’, in W. D. Ehrhart (ed.), Unaccustomed Mercy: Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1989), p. 8. Though Balaban dates the reading 14 August, and presumably 1969 while he was finishing his Vietnam service, the Whiteside article actually appeared on 7 February 1970. 35. Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. i. 36. Robert Duncan, ‘Up Rising – Passages 25’, in Diane di Prima (ed.), War Poems (New York: The Poets’ Press, 1968), p. 13. 37. Ibid. p. 14. 38. Ibid. p. 15. 39. Walter McDonald, ‘Caliban in Blue’, in Ehrhart, Unaccustomed Mercy, pp. 101–2. 40. George Hitchcock, ‘Scattering Flowers’, in Robert Bly and David Ray (eds), A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (Madison, MN: Sixties Press, 1966), p. 38. 41. Denise Levertov, ‘Overhead Over South East Asia’, in Footprints (New York: New Directions, 1972), p. 8. 42. Louis Simpson, ‘American Dream’, in Bly and Ray, p. 55. 43. Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri, ‘The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969’, International Security, 27.4 (Spring 2003), pp. 150–83 (p. 150). 44. Ibid. p. 150. 45. Richard Nixon, quoted in Sagan and Suir, p. 156. 46. William Burr, ‘The Nixon Administration, the “Horror Strategy,” and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 7.3 (Summer 2005), pp. 34–78 (p. 57). 47. Walter McDonald, ‘Black Granite Burns Like Ice’, quoted in Chattarji, p. 153. 48. W. D. Ehrhart, ‘To Those who have Gone Home Tired’, in Ehrhart, Unaccustomed Mercy, p. 61. 49. W. D. Ehrhart, ‘More Than You Ever Imagined’, in The Distance We Travel (Easthampton, MA: Adastra Press, 1993), p. 10.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 171

30/01/2012 16:24

18

COLD WAR FILMS Jonathan Auerbach

T

he Cold War is unlike any other war described in this volume. Rather than armed conflict fought in a clearly demarcated geographical region or regions, the Cold War refers to an ideological struggle between two different ‘ways of life’, to borrow the president’s phrasing from his famous 1947 ‘Truman Doctrine’ speech. Having as much to do with competing ideas, values and patterns of behaviour as physical force, this was a perceived clash between capitalism, or ‘the free world’, and communism, or ‘totalitarianism’, that lasted from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Popularised by Walter Lippmann in a series of 1947 articles, the adjective ‘cold’ suggests how this ‘war’, particularly in its earliest stages, was largely constructed, defined and waged by rhetoric such as the catchphrases quoted above, along with other metaphors including ‘iron curtain’ (Winston Churchill, 1946) and ‘containment’ (George Kennan, 1946).1 Given this conflict’s strong rhetorical dimension, it becomes impossible to identify Cold War films strictly by setting (battlefields), character (soldiers) or plot (organised mass killing). A pair of highly acclaimed 1950s movies, for example, High Noon (1952) and On the Waterfront (1954) have commonly been read as allegories about McCarthyism: the cowardice of group mentality and the courage of naming names, respectively.2 Allegorical readings also abound for historical costume dramas such as Reign of Terror (1949), The Robe (1953) and The Ten Commandments (1956).3 Going beyond explicitly political subject matter, this chapter will therefore focus on a more amorphous set of features and feelings – paranoia, panic, secrecy, insecurity, surveillance and conformity – that permeated all aspects of the US at mid century. I propose to discuss how these overlapping, quintessential Cold War elements operated in a variety of popular film genres: spy movies, westerns, science fiction and film noir.4 Such a survey will necessarily be highly partial, limited to a selective handful of 1940s and 1950s American films (although this ideological conflict was clearly global in scope). While classic Cold War films such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Dr Strangelove (1964)5 continued to be made well into the next three decades, many follow the narrative models and thematic concerns established by these earlier films. At the onset, it is important to emphasise how the Cold War’s initial impact was most profoundly registered not in these films but rather by those who worked in Hollywood. Even before World War II, the Hollywood industry was a source of suspicion for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was set up by Congress in 1938 to monitor internal security threats such as the pro-Nazi German-American Bund.

172

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 172

30/01/2012 16:24

cold war films

173

HUAC’s subsequent post-war hounding of screenwriters, actors and directors deemed ‘un-American’ is a notorious story too familiar to need detailed reiteration, leading to Hollywood studios’ self-imposed blacklisting of hundreds of its own. But a closer look at the actual HUAC hearings record of 1947 reveals some curiosities. Recently accustomed to seeing wartime propaganda on the screen (both Allied and fascist), the anti-New Deal Republican reactionaries running HUAC rightly understood Hollywood’s potential to deeply shape and inform (and not simply reflect) American culture, its values and ideals. Yet where exactly was the threat? As the newly elected Screen Actor’s Guild President Ronald Reagan mildly concluded in his 23 October testimony, ‘I do not believe the Communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion-picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology.’6 Focusing on personal histories rather than film content, HUAC members engaged in rituals of humiliation, including guilt by association, and only dabbled in cinema criticism of the most primitive sort, for instance, worrying about the title and a few lines of Tender Comrade (1943).7 Perhaps the most substantive attempt to address the thorny question of politics in film came during the testimony of writer Ayn Rand, the intellectual leader of The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group of Hollywood conservatives founded in 1944. Rand claimed that pro-Russia war movies like Mission to Moscow (1943)8 were patently dishonest propaganda because they falsely depicted our allies as smiling and happy, when in fact they were miserable slaves living under Stalin’s dictatorship, according to Rand. When pressed about this movie, studio boss Jack Warner colourfully railed against ‘ideological termites’ that ‘have burrowed into many American industries, organizations, and societies’, but then defended the film’s intention to aid the war effort, asking reasonably how anyone could ‘know in 1942 what the conditions were going to be in 1947’.9 How, indeed? In the short space of five years, heroic allies had become dreaded adversaries, and former foes, conquered and rehabilitated, were now fast becoming friends. Pressured by Richard Nixon and other HUAC members to make more anti-communist films, Warner and other studios turned to prior leftist productions like Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) as the basis for early Cold War espionage thrillers such as The Iron Curtain (1948), scripted by the same writer (Milton Krims) who had previously co-authored the powerful anti-fascist Confessions.10 These espionage films present the most overt treatment of un-American treachery. They tend to fall into two categories – police procedurals that concentrate on the stalwart efforts of law-enforcement officials, and family dramas that are more interesting for my purposes in that they actually try to imagine and represent how traitors act, think and behave. Pseudo-documentary-style police procedurals like Walk East on Beacon! (1952)11 hark back to G-Men films of the 1930s that feature FBI agents busting gangsters. Lest we think this familiar generic association between gangsters and Communists simply a convenient bit of Hollywood fancy, it is worth recalling that starting in September 1939, right after Hitler invaded Poland, FDR by an executive memo declaring a state of wartime emergency significantly broadened the scope of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to investigate internal subversion, which was now regarded as serious domestic crime. The big-budget My Son John (1952)12 takes the opposite tack by focusing on the personal anguish of an overbearing father and doting mother who gradually realise that their effete, aloof son, a high-ranking civil servant, is actually an atheist and Communist agent – a thinly veiled Alger Hiss. Gunned down like a gangster by fellow party members on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the son is an emotionally dead sissy, so that the red scare

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 173

30/01/2012 16:24

174

jonathan auerbach

shades over into the lavender scare – the fear that homosexuals in government would be vulnerable to recruitment by Soviets as spies. I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951)13 offers something of a hybrid case between public and private concerns, in that going undercover to stir up trouble among labour unions forces agent Frank Lovejoy to turn his back on his brothers and his patriotic son, who until the truth is finally revealed remains painfully ashamed of his pinko father. While undercover, single parent Lovejoy’s head is momentarily turned by his son’s beautiful high-school teacher, herself a Communist who begins to have doubts about the party. A twist on the femme fatale, this trope of the red seductress also shows up in The Red Menace (1949),14 perhaps the most strident and shrill of these films featuring a female party member who in one astonishing scene goes insane under an Immigration and Naturalization Service interrogation. Betrayed by her all too flawless German accent (rather than the more customary case of an imperfect English), ‘American citizen’ Yvonne Kraus, now exposed as the foreign-born Commissar Bloch (note the Jewish name), bodies forth in an auditory hallucination that only she can hear the marching, drumming triumph of the Soviet state, an unsettling scene that ends with her mad, hysterical laughter. As we shall see again with film noir, this uncanny scene of un-Americanness reveals sharp anxieties about who belongs in the US, and who does not. These explicit anti-communist films were not very profitable, not those made by top studio directors, and not even the heavy-handed John Wayne star vehicle Big Jim McLain (1952)15 that went so far as to glorify HUAC rather than the more predictable FBI. Less ostensibly political than HUAC, Hoover’s organisation profoundly helped to shape Cold War ideology, and was often applauded for its professionalism by liberals like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who were appalled by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crude tactics. For a more subtle and complex set of responses to America’s Cold War consensus, especially its fearful embrace of surveillance and the security state, we need to turn to maverick director Sam Fuller, whose idiosyncratic productions transcended many Hollywood conventions. Depicting the theft of microfilmed state secrets, Fuller’s 1953 Pickup on South Street dwells on the vexed relation between common crime and treason at a time when the US was still engaged in a ‘hot’ war in Korea.16 Usually not noted for his subtlety, Fuller is actually very shrewd in Pickup, showing how the FBI and Communists function as mirror images of one another: bureaucratic entities that squeeze the autonomy and individualism out of a low-life underclass caught in the middle of the era’s Manichean politics. When petty crook Richard Widmark in one key scene views under a library microfilm reader the atomic secrets he has inadvertently pickpocketed, Fuller slyly inserts for an instant a New York Times front-page headline from 31 December 1946 that arguably represents the defining moment of the entire Cold War: ‘Truman Declares Hostilities Ended, Terminating Many Wartime Laws. . . States of Emergency and War Continue. . .’. So one war is ended, while another begins; although enemies have changed (from Nazis to Communists), by this hidden headline Fuller suggests how America is still operating under one continuous wartime ‘state of emergency’ that would enable the FBI and other government agencies to suspend civil liberties in the name of national security. Fuller more openly goes against the grain in The Steel Helmet (1951),17 the first movie made about the Korean War that uses the war to examine race relations at home. A captured Communist officer bluntly confronts a black medic, and then a Japanese-American soldier regarding their second-class status in the US, baiting one about ‘the back of the bus’ and the other about the shameful 1942 mass internment of thousands of law-abiding citizens: a taboo subject rarely if ever otherwise mentioned in American popular culture during the 1950s.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 174

30/01/2012 16:24

cold war films

175

Westerns: Frontier Violence Sam Fuller made one western during the Cold War, Forty Guns (1957).18 Featuring naked men bathing in barrels while singing the praises of the ‘woman with a whip’ (rancher boss Barbara Stanwyck), the movie served mainly to express Fuller’s peculiar (parodic?) take on American masculinity at mid century. Yet in the obligatory climactic shootout scene, the hero coldly guns down his love interest Stanwyck, who is being held hostage as a shield by her lawless brother, so that when she falls to the ground seriously wounded, he can then calmly fill the exposed brother full of lead. Such surprising brutality raises questions central to virtually all westerns of the period: what are the acceptable or appropriate means to counter dire threats? When could violence be justified to impose order and stabilise community? It is no wonder, then, that the western is the most popular film genre during the Cold War, since precisely these sorts of questions weighed heavily on the minds of many Americans worried about Soviet expansionism around the world in the wake of World War II. By taking as its point of departure the distinctively American mythos of the frontier, the western allowed viewers to displace their growing concerns about global geopolitics onto a familiar national register, in effect domesticating their anxiety over foreign affairs, just as Soviet aggression itself was meant to be ‘contained’ through equal and opposite force exercised by the US and its allies, as George Kennan first proposed in 1946. While other genres reacted viscerally to the perceived perils of communism, with feelings of intense dread, panic and confusion, playing cowboys and (frequently) Indians allowed filmmakers to treat frontier violence as a moral dilemma, often with an impressive degree of ambiguity and complexity. Take John Ford’s great John Wayne cavalry trilogy, for instance. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) opens on a clear Cold War note by suggesting how disparate native tribes have banded together against the US to form a dangerous conspiracy; and yet, in greater sympathy with Indians, Ford’s first movie in the trilogy Fort Apache (1948) dramatises one sort of extreme, crazy response to this ‘red’ menace: Henry Fonda, brilliantly cast against type, assumes the role of a gung-ho Indian-hating army officer à la George Custer (complete with a disastrous ‘last stand’), who fails to be restrained by more moderate John Wayne, likewise cast against type. Fonda also turns out to be a rigid, overprotective father, suggesting how his poor judgement as a parent parallels his poor military leadership – a fatal weakness that Wayne in the end covers up to protect his fallen commander’s posthumous reputation. In the third movie of the trilogy, Rio Grande (1950), Ford probes yet another Cold War moral dilemma, imagining circumstances that would compel military incursion across borders in open violation of a nation’s sovereignty, in this case Mexico where Apaches have been harbouring hostages and safely conducting raids into US territory.19 Wayne’s dramatic rescue mission across the Rio Grande graphically gives credence to General Douglas MacArthur’s defiant plan in late 1950 (beyond containment and against Truman’s prohibition) to bomb Chinese supply depots across the Korean border, although more careful consideration might suggest some key differences between these two kinds of mission. While Communists and Indians could not always be so easily equated, the western became the film genre best suited during the early years of the Cold War to make sense of Soviet–US tensions around the globe. Westerns such as Red River (1948)20 and dozens of lesser ones like it narrated the course of empire, from wilderness and savagery to civilisation, with the frontier serving as contact zone among a mingling of peoples (Anglos,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 175

30/01/2012 16:24

176

jonathan auerbach

natives, Hispanics). Not only did these frequently elegiac narratives of national origin tend to legitimise conquest and domination, but almost invariably in these films it is a solitary outsider who single-handedly (or with the help of a good woman) enforces law and order to make the frontier fit for habitation – and commerce. In an updated version of this familiar story, Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)21 plays a wounded veteran who encounters nearly lethal hostility when he travels to a small Western town searching for the father of a Japanese-American World War II buddy. No other movie of the period offers such a powerful portrayal of suspicion and xenophobia, and yet the fact that Tracy until near the end remains a tight-lipped stranger to us, his motives still mysterious, suggests how a mode of concealment has so totally pervaded Cold War America, even for those striving to uncover its secrets.

Science Fiction: Alien Contagion As scholars long have recognised, mid-century science fiction is the film genre par excellence for the Cold War, conflating anxieties about infection, germs, viruses, atomic radiation, thought control and information flow (the new field of cybernetics), all conceived as a form of alien invasion analogous to the Communist infiltration of the American body politic. Contagion is certainly not unique to the genre; consider, for instance, Kazan’s 1950 film Panic in the Streets, about foreign plague coming into New Orleans, whose climax ironically takes place in a warehouse filled with imported Latin American staples (coffee and bananas).22 But science fiction did enable filmmakers to represent contagion with a degree of consistency and with a coherent affect that differed from westerns, which typically would depict threatening foes (such as Indians) as driven by recognisable, rational motives. Not so in science fiction movies, and hence their capacity to provoke emotions of dread and terror, often plunging into sheer horror. Although it is most often the absolute otherness of the monstrous invader that triggers such fear, one early politically progressive pacifist film, The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951),23 tried to present the alien (played by Michael Rennie) as benign, in fact more rational than us. Rennie becomes a strong protective figure who helps to plug the obvious gap (a missing father) in the movie’s otherwise conventional nuclear family – a cherished Cold War ideal. Yet even here the sympathetic alien betrays himself in relation to the American way of life, since he does not recognise the value of the diamonds he freely distributes: perhaps a more unsettling anti-capitalist abnormality for Cold War audiences than if he had two heads. While there is a clear resemblance between the maimed outsider Spencer Tracy in Bad Rock and the stranger in Earth, Rennie ultimately remains perhaps the more difficult for viewers to accept because his message of tolerance comes from outer space. The Day the Earth Stood Still is unusual for 1950s science fiction cinema in that the alien looks perfectly human. Virtually all other monsters of the period are freaks of nature, the self-multiplying The Thing from Another World (1951), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), mutated gigantic female ants in Them! (1954), irradiated colossal (tongue-incheek) angry housewives in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) or gelatinous protoplasm in The Blob (1958), not to mention the dozen or so set on other planets (usually ‘red’ Mars).24 Beyond casting doubt on science and scientists (often portrayed as inept and befuddled), and beyond bolstering the authority of the US military (often depicted as vanquishing the creature and restoring order), these films discharged worries about spreading chaos or holocaust, frequently understood as procreative (motherly) forces gone haywire,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 176

30/01/2012 16:24

cold war films

177

and characteristically apocalyptic in scope, as in the aptly titled The Night the World Exploded (1957).25 The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)26 is perhaps the most self-reflexive of these crisis films, mixing fear with a more profound sense of unease by making normalcy itself seem utterly uncanny. Echoing the lesser-known but almost as unnerving film Invaders from Mars (1953),27 about a boy’s fears that his scientist father and mother have become ‘Mutax’, taken over by alien creatures, Invasion presents an even more disturbing view by abandoning the artifice of implanted control devices, making the behaviour of the false, menacing parents less zombie-like, and removing the ‘it-was-all-a-dream’ comforting ending. Invasion more subtly calls into question what it means to be human, or more precisely, what it means to live in small-town 1950s America. The suspicion that family and friends as they sleep are one by one being replaced is experienced from the perspective not of an insecure child’s panicked imagination (as in Invaders from Mars), but of a recently divorced doctor who watches his possessed neighbour-patients go about their everyday business with a slightly glazed look in their eyes. Conformity here is brilliantly conceived as sheer absence, an emptying out or loss of affect akin to the traitorous queer’s simulation of filial affection in My Son John. Yet the movie’s explicitly pronounced ‘epidemic’ of ‘mass hysteria’ resists any clear-cut political allegorising, because even after the source of contagion is identified as extraterrestrial pods, the feeling still lingers that these are Americans mimicking Americans, whose malaise remains within: ‘the trouble is inside you’, as the doctor early on tells a woman who suspects, correctly, that her uncle is not her uncle. Just as Indians in Cold War westerns did not always function as simple stand-ins for Soviets, neither did science fiction aliens, especially considering the problematic legal status of the Communist Party of the United States. CPUSA members were largely native-born citizens, not foreign agents under the sway of Russia, despite the best efforts of HUAC and the FBI to criminalise them as such: hence this film’s uncertainty about how and where to locate malignancy.

Film Noir: The Enemy Within Some twenty minutes into Invasion of the Body Snatchers, during our first glimpse at a blank, still unformed face of a pod person lying on a pool table, we might notice in the background decor something unusual for a 1950s recreation room: a modernist poster that reads ‘Miroir Noir’. Crafty but no surprise, given that the screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring a decade earlier had authored the script for one the greatest of all film noirs, Out of the Past (1947),28 about a decent fellow trying to lead an honest life who cannot escape his dark past, much as those in Hollywood were confronted in 1947 about their prior un-American activities. Until the pods are positively detected as the otherworldly source of malevolence, in fact, Invasion itself could be read as a film noir in its unsettling, ambiguous depiction of alienation, doubling, impersonation and delusion. Specific aspects of certain noirs have been glossed in relation to Cold War mentality – for example, the glowing atomic Pandora’s Box in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and the eavesdropping technology a Mexican federal agent uses to spy on a corrupt American cop as he crisscrosses between countries in Touch of Evil (1958).29 But in general film noir has been deemed too private, too psychological and existential in its preoccupation with murder, betrayal and lust, to reflect or illuminate the more public politics of the Cold War. Questioning such assumptions, I would argue that the uncanny feelings at the core

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 177

30/01/2012 16:24

178

jonathan auerbach

of 1940s and 1950s films noir correspond closely to anxieties about un-Americanness during this same period, indicating how the genre from the start intimately engaged questions of citizenship and dispossession central to the Cold War. We might begin with debatably the first, Stranger on the Third Floor, a low-budget B-movie produced by RKO in the summer of 1940, directed by the Russian émigré Boris Ingster, starring Peter Lorre as the (mostly silent) Stranger, shot by Nicholas Musuraca (who would go on to photograph Out of the Past), with art direction by Van Nest Polgase (whose next project would be Welles’s 1940 Citizen Kane), and scripted with the uncredited help of Nathanael West.30 In my admittedly unconventional view, the Cold War domestically begins right around this time, well before the end of World War II, if we de-emphasise external Soviet threats and focus instead on the state of emergency FDR secretly declared in September 1939 that enabled the FBI to police the US against all kinds of subversion from within. Sinister and surreal, the movie contains an accelerating series of uncanny episodes, starting with the tense relations between a guilt-ridden reporter whose testimony has helped sentence an innocent man to death, and his spying neighbour Mr Meng (played by Charles Halton), whose name and bespectacled appearance is sufficiently ambiguous to suggest an oriental lineage as well as a German one, thereby combining America’s two Axis enemies, the Nazis and Japan. We then add to this mix some remarkable, politically resonant dialogue in which the mild-mannered reporter fantasises about killing the meddling Meng, stomping on him ‘with heavy boots’ and having the informer’s mind ‘launder[ed]’ (this some twenty-two years before The Manchurian Candidate). The reporter’s fantasies culminate in an expressionist nightmare montage sequence where he imagines himself found guilty of Meng’s murder in front of a jury fast asleep in shadows, a mocking judge, and a prosecuting attorney who flashes a Nazi salute while objecting to his protestations of innocence. This feverish hallucination of fascistic interrogation and injustice in the US ends only with the death of Meng’s real murderer – the homeless, lurking Stranger (Lorre), escaped from an asylum, who when finally confronted by the reporter’s fiancée hysterically vows, ‘I’ll not go back.’ Like the suddenly exposed German Communist in The Red Menace, here too it is the threat of deportation that drives the forlorn madman’s refusal to ‘go back’. And like that film, insanity is envisioned as a foreign country, or to put it more precisely, a political state of dispossession has been transposed into a psychological register. Visually and thematically Stranger on the Third Floor set the tone for the next two decades of noir cinema. Rather than embodying existential states of alienation, as commonly assumed, these dark, moody movies more pointedly dramatised the sense (following Freud’s analysis of unheimliche) that the home becomes strange, that mid-century US citizens often felt ‘like a stranger in my own country’ (as a character in Body Snatchers confesses), especially given the obsessive quest of the national security state to detect and root out un-Americanness. To examine the geopolitics of noir, we need to consider border crossings more historically and literally, especially the role that Mexico so often plays in these films as a space of refuge and/or transgression; see, for example, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Out of the Past, Gun Crazy (1950) and The Hitch-Hiker (1953).31 Such movies help us appreciate the intertwining at mid century between the transnational (foreign) and the enemy within (domestic). Along with spy movies, westerns and science fiction, films noir from Stranger to Touch of Evil suggest how profoundly the Cold War had come to penetrate American cinema and the American imagination.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 178

30/01/2012 16:24

cold war films

179

Notes 1. Churchill in the Fulton, Missouri speech, also called the ‘Sinews of Peace’ address; also the first important use of the term ‘special relationship’ to describe the relations between the UK and USA. Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963 (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers), vol. VII, 1943–1949, pp. 7285–93. George Kennan in the so-called Long Telegram which initiated the containment of communism policy of the United States – a longer version of the telegram was published as ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs, 25.4 (1947), pp. 566–82. 2. High Noon, directed by Fred Zinnemann. USA: Stanley Kramer Productions, 1952; On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan. USA: Columbia Pictures, 1954. 3. Reign of Terror, directed by Anthony Mann. USA: Walter Wanger Productions, 1949; The Robe, directed by Henry Koster, USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1953; The Ten Commandments, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. USA: Motion Picture Associates, 1956. 4. Because of space limitations, other important Cold War issues such as domesticity, consumerism, mass culture, race and gender relations will only be tangentially treated. 5. The Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer. USA: M. C. Productions, 1962; Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: Columbia, 1964. 6. Hearings regarding the communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 80th Congress, first session 1947, p. 217 (hereafter HUAC Heaings). 7. Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), p. 79; Tender Comrade, directed by Edward Dmytryk. USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1943. 8. Mission to Moscow, directed by Michael Curtiz. USA: Warner Bros., 1943. 9. HUAC Hearings, pp. 10, 39. Rand testimony on pp. 82–90. 10. Confessions of a Nazi Spy, directed by Anatole Litvak. USA: Warner Bros., 1939; The Iron Curtain, directed by William A. Wellman. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1948. 11. Walk East on Beacon!, directed by Alfred L. Werker. USA: Columbia Pictures, 1952. 12. My Son John, directed by Leo McCarey. USA: Rainbow Productions, 1952. 13. I Was a Communist for the FBI, directed by Gordon Douglas. USA: Warner Bros., 1951. 14. The Red Menace, directed by R.G. Springsteen. USA: Republic Pictures, 1949. 15. Big Jim McLain, directed by Edward Ludwig. USA: Warner Bros., 1952. 16. Pickup on South Street, directed by Sam Fuller. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1953. 17. The Steel Helmet, directed by Sam Fuller. USA: Deputy Corporation, 1951. 18. Forty Guns, directed by Sam Fuller. USA: Globe Enterprises, 1957. 19. Fort Apache, 1948; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949; Rio Grande, 1950, directed by John Ford, USA: Argosy Pictures. 20. Red River, directed by Howard Hawks. USA: Charles K. Feldman Group, Monterey Productions, 1948. 21. Bad Day at Black Rock, directed by John Sturges. USA: MGM, 1955. 22. Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1950. 23. The Day The Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1951. 24. The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby. USA: Winchester Pictures, 1951; The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, directed by Eugène Lourié. USA: Jack Dietz Productions, 1953; Them!, directed by Gordon Douglas. USA: Warner Bros., 1954; Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, directed by Nathan Juran. USA: Woolner Brothers Pictures, 1958; The Blob, directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth. USA: Fairview Productions, 1958. 25. The Night the World Exploded, directed by Fred F. Sears. USA: Clover Productions, 1957. 26. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel. USA: Allied Artists, 1956. 27. Invaders from Mars, directed by William C. Menzies. USA: National Pictures, 1953.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 179

30/01/2012 16:24

180

jonathan auerbach

28. Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur. USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1947. 29. Kiss Me Deadly, directed by Robert Aldrich, USA: Parklane Pictures,1955; Touch of Evil, directed by Orson Welles. USA: Universal International Pictures, 1958. 30. Stranger on the Third Floor, directed by Boris Ingster. USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1940. 31. The Postman Always Rings Twice, directed by Tay Garnett. USA: MGM, 1946; Gun Crazy, directed by Joseph H. Lewis. USA: King Brothers Productions, 1950; The Hitch-Hiker, directed by Ida Lupino. USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1953.

Further Reading Biskind, Peter, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). Ceplair, Larry and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–60 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980). Corkin, Stanley, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). Krutnik, Frank, Steve Neale, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield (eds), ‘Un-American’ Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). Maltby, Richard. ‘Made for Each Other: The Melodrama of Hollywood and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1947’, in Philip Davies and Brian Neve (eds), Cinema, Politics and Society in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981). Murray, Lawrence L., ‘The Film Industry Responds to the Cold War, 1945–55: Monsters, Spys [sic], and Subversives’, Jump Cut, 9 (1975), pp. 14–16. O’Connor, John E. and Martin A. Jackson, American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), pp. 121–235. Rogin, Michael, ‘Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies, Representations, 6.1 (Spring 1984), pp. 1–36. Sayre, Nora, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial Press, 1982). Shaw, Tony, Hollywood’s Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 180

30/01/2012 16:24

19

BRITAIN’S SMALL WARS: DOMESTICATING ‘EMERGENCY’ Lee Erwin

A

key question of Britain’s post-1945 ‘small wars’ is their very definition as wars to begin with. The preference of the post-war British state for terms such as ‘terrorism’ or ‘emergency’ rather than ‘war’, designed to refuse recognition to the political aims of anticolonial movements, has resulted in the cultural amnesia suggested in the title of Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper’s Forgotten Wars,1 for instance, and in the introduction to a website ‘dedicated to the men and women who served in these forgotten conflicts’.2 Yet the somewhat paradoxical corollary of this downgrading of anticolonial movements to mere criminality was their simultaneous upgrading into antagonists in a global struggle against communism, in which the battle for ‘hearts and minds’ had become paramount. The literature of these ‘forgotten wars’ (or at least of conflicts forgotten as wars) can as a result be seen as experimenting with various positionalities from which to view these conflicts, as the gaze sometimes turns back onto Britain itself or as colonialist claims to unilateral power and knowledge are replaced by claims of mutual recognition and more egalitarian and even intimate personal experience. Perhaps not surprisingly, literary works dealing with the ‘condition of England’ in relation to its small wars most often refer to the Suez Crisis of 1956. Widely seen as both ‘the last thrash of empire’ and as ‘a complete folly’,3 the crisis has been the subject of a spate of revisionist, Iraq-inflected plays including James Graham’s Eden’s Empire, David Pownall’s Born for War, and Tilly Black’s Sand (all 2006),4 whereas in earlier works the acute humiliation of US opposition to the invasion, and the recasting of the ‘special relationship’ that resulted, is seen most ominously in the increasing dominance of American mass culture. John Osborne’s The Entertainer, for example, portrays the Suez Crisis as the death of both empire and what Osborne called the true ‘folk art’ of the English music hall, as it is supplanted by a degraded American rock and roll; ironically, the key site of cultural authenticity in the play is a spiritual which Archie Rice had heard an African American woman sing years before, and to which he resorts when he learns that his son has been killed in Egypt, suggesting an artefact of a genuine culture that has been lost even to the Americans themselves. The force of Britain’s ‘cultural Fall’, as Glen Creeber puts it, can still be felt nearly forty years later in Dennis Potter’s equally ambivalent 1993 television miniseries Lipstick on Your Collar, in which a moribund but still farcically rapacious colonialism gives way only to an American imperialism enabled in part by pop culture’s capacity for stupefying the young who should be resisting it.5 The same questions concerning with whom Britain is actually at war, and what kind

181

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 181

30/01/2012 16:24

182

lee erwin

of ‘war’ it is, figure in works written from the point of view of the soldiers on the ground as well. Although the protagonist in Alan Sillitoe’s Key to the Door (1961), for example, feels used as cannon fodder for a ‘weary’ empire against the ‘up-and-coming’ Communists in Malaya, and Leslie Thomas’s Virgin Soldiers (1966), with its stock-issue ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandits’, seems to accede to official discourse on the conflict, neither novel hesitates about the terminology of war, suggesting that the requirements of the novel of masculine initiation make their own demands on language. The drag performance troupe of Peter Nichols’s Privates on Parade (1977), in contrast, metaphorises the ‘Emergency’ as a deadly piece of stagecraft in the hands of the hypermasculine Major Flack, whose deployment of the Jungle Jamboree as decoys in his own small theatre of the ‘Third World War’ underlines the classed basis for his vision of an unchanged England. Nonetheless, none of these works sees Malayan rebels as anything but agents of a monolithic Chinese Communism (indeed not only inscrutable but interchangeable in the very casting of Privates on Parade), which intentionally or not works to endorse the dominant British construction of anticolonial movements worldwide.6 The most sustained treatments of Britain’s small wars, however, are novels, often massively long or extended into trilogies, produced by expatriate teachers and journalists ‘in country’ and given a certain credence sometimes even now because of their claims to an intimate, first-hand perspective on conflicts that is not available to those back home. Such immersion may produce, at one extreme, P. H. Newby’s comic, Kafkaesque Something to Answer For (winner of the inaugural Booker Prize in 1968), which, in an inversion of the notion of ‘criminality’, identifies the Eden government’s invasion of Egypt as itself a criminal betrayal of trust and an existential crisis for its frequently dazed protagonist, who must for the first time assume individual responsibility. At the other extreme, American journalist Robert Ruark’s massive, pathologically violent Something of Value (1955), with what Ngugi wa Thiong’o termed its ‘downright racist’ treatment of the so-called Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, claims an intimacy and authenticity that colludes with colonial policy even as it too strives to assert an individualist vision.7 Ruark’s novel, a best-seller in both the US and the UK, spends over four hundred pages establishing the white settler and even more the white hunter (like the American pioneer) as possessing the true, intimate knowledge of Kenya – in this case meaning the knowledge to live on the land and to track and kill its animals – before making it clear that the war against the rebels is essentially just such another hunt.8 The sweeping, even aerial view familiar in Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of ‘imperial eyes’9 is here associated with an impersonal, bureaucratised British military that attempts to control the ‘Emergency’ from above, as in the person of the ‘Game Department bloke’ who surveys the landscape from his aeroplane but is too squeamish to hunt rebels. (Interestingly, in Rachel Seiffert’s Afterwards [2007], in which an ageing man attempts to come to terms with his experiences during the Kenyan ‘Emergency’, what troubles him most is precisely that just such a masterful aerial view from a bomber flying over the Kenyan forest has kept him from seeing what he was actually doing to people on the ground.10) No such squeamishness afflicts Ruark’s protagonist, however, whose view is so close to the ground that ultimately the bodies of dead Kikuyu become just so much excrement, ‘like a cow pasture seen from a low angle’.11 Ruark’s claims to authentic knowledge, though apparently different from those put forth in another widely read novel of the period, Elspeth Huxley’s A Thing to Love (1954), nonetheless similarly underpin a construction of the ‘Mau Mau’ congruent with the official British discourse of the time, as an eruption of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 182

30/01/2012 16:24

britain’s small wars: domesticating ‘emergency’

183

‘instinctive savagery’ and a purely pathological or criminal corruption of traditional Kikuyu culture.12 While it may seem peculiar, moreover, to see Ruark’s final image – of the white hunter Peter, having killed his boyhood playmate Kimani, bearing both Kimani’s son and Kimani’s severed head back to camp – as an example of the liberal emphasis on personal relationships, his novel is only an extreme example of the tendency to reduce the political questions raised by Britain’s late-colonial small wars to the arena of personal relationships, outside of which lie only incomprehensible pathologies. Peter will raise Kimani’s son with his own nephew, reproducing the ideal relationship of headman and Bwana in a way that, though more openly racist, is nonetheless one point on a continuum that also takes in the ‘partnership’ between native and coloniser envisioned by Huxley for Kenya, or by John Slimming in The Pepper Garden (1968) and Noel Barber in Tanamera (1981) for Malaya.13 (Indeed, the 1957 Hollywood film of Something of Value, starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier, pushes even Ruark’s narrative to a more comfortable point along the continuum, reading it as a liberal tragedy of misunderstanding and accidental death and, in another significant variation from the novel, restoring the heterosexual domestic bond of Peter and Holly.14) Though no blockbuster like Something of Value, one of the most widely read of these extended narratives of Britain’s ‘small wars’, even now, and one that depends above all on the kind of domestic plotting that Ruark’s novel inadvertently parodies, is Anthony Burgess’s Malayan trilogy (1956–9). This is perhaps in part because Burgess’s literary reputation is sufficient to keep the trilogy in print and in part because it is set during the Malayan Emergency of 1948–60, a war still often taken as the one resounding, almost redemptive, success of the whole colonial project. It was important for such a project that Malayan Communism be termed ‘not a political doctrine’ at all but mere ‘banditry and lawlessness’, and thus ‘[t]he criminalisation of the insurgency gave birth to a careful vocabulary of suppression, in which terror was neither “war”, “rebellion” nor “insurrection”, and which disallowed any reference to an “enemy”.’ 15 Even more than the negative rhetoric of criminalisation, however, the British sought the cooperation of the Malayan population through policies and propaganda conceived as ‘Winning Hearts and Minds’. It was important that memories of Britain’s expulsion from Malaya by the Japanese in 1942, and the corruption and bungling that followed its return in 1945, be replaced by a triumphal narrative of the restoration of a pro-British Malaya crucial to both the British economy and British prestige, particularly after the ‘loss’ of India.16 Competing narratives, of Britain’s collusion in the construction of a post-Independence political system organised around communal elites, at the expense of the broad-based, non-racial politics that had seemed possible in the immediate post-war years,17 are still in dispute even in Malaysia itself today: witness the concatenation of the banning of Amir Muhammad’s 2006 ‘semimusical road movie documentary’ Lelaki Komunis Terakhir (‘The Last Communist’), about Malayan Communist Party leader Chin Peng (though he never appears in the film), and the broadcast of TV3’s ‘Jungle Green, Khaki Brown’, based on The Malayan Emergency Revisited, 1948–1960: A Pictorial History, that same year.18 By the mid 1950s, the Emergency had reached a phase during which, according to one British official, the society had become completely militarised yet at the same time permeated with ‘humbug’, ‘the tribute (in a British protectorate) that force pays to civilization’.19 By 1954, over half a million people (a seventh of the population), most of them Chinese, had been moved into resettlement areas, later termed ‘New Villages’, with the result

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 183

30/01/2012 16:24

184

lee erwin

that agriculture was disrupted, communities and intercommunal ties were destroyed, and ‘social trust was deeply damaged’.20 What had become a virtual police state existed in a pervasive fog of ‘unreality’ created by the substitution of ‘psychological warfare’ for political reform and the rewriting of the violence of war into a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign only retroactively rewritten as an unqualified and carefully planned success.21 Despite Burgess’s initial ambivalence towards colonial authority – he claimed to have posted an application to the Colonial Office while ‘tight on draught cider’ – he also saw his role as ‘to import the traditional British liberal virtues: tolerant, sceptical, humanistic, dedicated to truth, beauty and justice’,22 and his trilogy (along with his extensive subsequent writings and comments on Malaysia) serves as part of this rewriting. While Sadie Jones’s recent Small Wars (2009), in comparison, figures the damage done by the official pretence that British domestic life and values can survive the brutalities of the ‘emergency’ in Cyprus,23 the domestic plotting of Burgess’s trilogy works the other way around, figuring a ‘love’ that has been ‘atomised’ after the death of the protagonist’s first wife and redemptively dispersed across the entire body politic. Burgess has written that the name of the dead first wife, revealed late in the novel to have been ‘Mal, May, Maya, something like that’, serves as an ‘onomastic foreshadowing of Crabbe’s husband-like love of Malaya’,24 an example of what Gayatri Spivak terms the ‘concept-metaphor woman’25 used instrumentally here both to gender Malaya and to occlude the experiences of actual women in nationalist politics and in the war.26 Thus the picaresque elements of Time for a Tiger (1956), associated with unofficial and even anti-war sentiments, disappear in favour of the domestic focus of The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) and finally the domestic allegory of Beds in the East (1959), which ushers in Merdeka, independence. In the end, though the protagonist, having sunk under the waters of a Malayan river, has seemingly been rendered irrelevant by the twin forces of the newly Americanised information regime borne of the Emergency and the popular culture that accompanies it, his death also asserts the trilogy’s predominant value, the self-sacrificial carrying of the ‘white man’s burden’ that Jenny Sharpe argues defined the British sense of its imperial mission in the century after the Indian Mutiny.27 Time for a Tiger seems still to be seeking a stable perspective on the Emergency, shifting between that of the gigantic, jaundiced police lieutenant Nabby Adams, whose quest for the next bottle of warmish Tiger beer gives the novel its title, and that of schoolteacher Victor Crabbe, bearer of the ‘Western importation’ of logic. The dominant literary mode is at first the picaresque, Nabby’s amoral strivings and his ‘view from below’ serving to satirise the colonial project and even the war itself. The novel seems initially to offer an image of the British presence in Malaya all too recognisable at the time: as Burgess noted in his autobiography, the Palestine Police brought in during the Emergency were ‘a brutal lot’,28 and the temptations Nabby must constantly resist recall post-war corruption serious enough to have given rise to the joke that BMA stood not for British Military Administration but for Black Market Administration.29 Seen in this light Nabby’s gargantuan frame and appetites, as well as his being a deracinated, polyglot figure seen as ‘letting the side down’, might suggest the grotesque body of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque30 and a disordering of British moral and administrative authority. Victor’s appearance in the second chapter, however, introduces a more nearly official perspective, commensurate with his role as a colonial teacher and insistent on just the kind of systematic transformations Nabby throws into question. There is for the first time in the trilogy an authoritative overview of the conflict – the narrator asserts

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 184

30/01/2012 16:24

britain’s small wars: domesticating ‘emergency’

185

bluntly that ‘Lanchap, like most other states [in Malaya], is at war’ – as well as the first statement of the liberal ideology the text will set against its imagination of Communism: ‘human-heartedness’, as it will be called later, attachment to individual human beings, rather than the murderous abstraction the trilogy will identify with Communism even to the moment of Victor’s death. Yet during Victor’s attempt to question the student Shiu Hung he feels a revulsion from the image of himself as a ‘witch-hunting little senator’, and wonders whether it would not be better ‘that the boys should stay up late reading Marx, rather than ingesting the film-myths or breathing heavily over the comic-strips’.31 Liberalism is in crisis here, struggling to reconcile freedom of conscience with its own resort to power, disavowed as an American problem accompanied by an equally degrading American pop culture. While the British programme of hearts and minds would seem to emphasise the individual relationships that might be formed between the British and their Malayan counterparts, comparable to the ‘people-to-people’ initiatives Christina Klein has described as ‘Cold War Orientalism’ in the United States,32 nonetheless, it too was above all a massive exertion of power that also served, ironically, to acknowledge exactly the ideological dimension of the conflict that the language of ‘emergency’ and ‘terrorism’ was meant to occlude. Thus throughout the trilogy the Emergency must be, not ignored, but domesticated, folded into private concerns and rendered politically invisible. Even in Victor’s first appearance, for instance, war and marriage are conflated: ‘Victor Crabbe, as dawn approached, stirred uneasily, his eyes tightly closed, his brow creased. He fended something off with his arms. A centre of culture, Kuala Hantu is also a centre of Communist activity.’ When Victor ‘[wakes] up sweating’, however, we learn that he has been dreaming not of war, but of his first wife, whom ‘he had killed’.33 Juxtaposition (a prophet of Allah according to the epigraph to Beds in the East) here associates the war with Victor’s ‘killing’ of his wife in a car accident. The political history of the Malayan revolution34 is already being structurally translated here into a liberal disquisition on personal responsibility rather than ‘harangues about the Brotherhood of Man’,35 and Victor’s role will be to carry on the campaign for hearts and minds through just such personal connections. With the departure of Nabby Adams the trilogy explicitly enters Somerset Maugham territory,36 developing a colonial narrative of adultery in the tropics that serves further to translate the political into the personal, in terms of commitment and faith, idea and action. The central relationship, however, between the English lawyer Rupert and the Malay widow Normah, is also the first appearance of the domestic-national allegory that will shape the final novel: marriage between Rupert and Normah, that is, rehearses the metaphorical ‘marriage’ Victor will attempt between himself and ‘Malaya’ in Beds in the East, and the legacy (a child in this case) that will belong to Malaya even after the British man has died. But here the allegory raises uneasy questions of motivation and colonial rule: Rupert needs money, and the fact that Normah’s wealth has come from the welltimed killings of her first two husbands, both planters on the verge of abandoning her – and by the Communists, though at her behest – might raise questions about whose wealth it really is, Malayan or British, the very questions that the rhetoric of ‘hearts and minds’ was meant to evade. Thus in an attempt to control their meaning the ‘terrorists’ have not simply disappeared from the text, but have been refigured as bit players and enfolded into the domestic plots themselves, as mere hired assassins used to carry out acts of marital vengeance or convenience. In Time for a Tiger, too, among the methods the gay housekeeper Ibrahim had

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 185

30/01/2012 16:24

186

lee erwin

prayed might take his wife out of the way was that she be ‘killed by the Communists’;37 and even the killing of the headmaster at Durian Estate School that takes Victor to his death upriver in Beds in the East is revealed to be a case of domestic violence: ‘Oh, that. The foreman said he’s been sleeping with his wife and got the Reds to do him in. And now the widow’s sleeping with the foreman’.38 Indeed, the most sustained appearance of the Emergency in the entire trilogy, Victor’s ‘capture’ of ‘thirty dangerous Communist terrorists’ at the climax of The Enemy in the Blanket, decisively transposes political issues into domestic terms, and only the text’s disposing of Fenella (who leaves because Victor cannot fully commit himself to her) enables the loss of control over the Crabbes’ domestic space, the merging of kitchen and jungle, that brings the starving terrorists into the Crabbe household. Crabbe looked round the room at some ten or twelve Chinese, some in ragged uniform, some in old shirts and faded grey trousers. One or two had rifles. ‘That’s a woman’, said Crabbe. ‘Yes, that is Rose. And I am Boo Eng. Ah Wing is the father of my wife. My wife died under the Japanese.’ 39 The glimpse of history here – the sufferings of the ethnic Chinese, especially, under the Japanese, and the sense of betrayal felt by the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army when the British returned and rendered their sacrifices negligible40 – gives way to an inability to find any language at all for political actors: as he responds to Boo Eng’s assumption that he has been the one helping them, Victor can only say, ‘No, no,. . . I didn’t give any help. I wouldn’t. You’re a lot of. . . A lot of. . . ’41 The language Victor needs is found at the end of the chapter, as, freed of both his wife and his own youthful commitment to the ‘false god’ of Communism, he anticipates his greatest exploit in the ‘final story’ he tells the Malays who gather on his veranda: of ‘the man from the far country who tried to help, [. . .] killing the pirates and the bandits and diseases and teaching the final marvel of the word’. The pantun that ends this second novel, then, anticipates both Victor’s death upriver in the final novel and the transmutation into love of the allegory of nation building suggested in his story.42 Although the themes of Merdeka and Malayanisation emerge fully in the final novel of the trilogy, Beds in the East – not least in the fact that the novel opens with the point of view of a Malayan character, and for almost the first time in the trilogy offers interiority and depth to (some) ordinary Malayans – by the same token conflicts among the various ‘races’ in post-war Malaya shape this novel more than either of the others. The assumption that diversity itself ‘naturally’ leads to divisiveness or chaos has been a convention of criticism on the trilogy since its publication; yet this novel, especially, participates in the construction of racial categories, rather than simply reflecting them. The multifarious and interwoven categories into which actual Malayans fit are here reduced to a few discrete groups whose constitutive features, the trilogy’s frequent recourse to stereotypes suggests, are ‘racially’ ingrained; and the fact that ‘a ring that promised marriage’ is offered as an ‘apt symbol’ for Victor’s ‘inter-racial sodality scheme’ suggests that such sodality can only be achieved genetically, and that, as nineteenth-century race theorist Arthur de Gobineau postulated, there is a ‘permanence’ of racial types that can only be altered by ‘a crossing of blood’.43 Thus it is perhaps not surprising that the trilogy seems unaware of both the culture being developed by a new multiracial intelligentsia at the time and the demotic multiracial culture of the immediate post-war period (glimpsed only briefly in Time for a

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 186

30/01/2012 16:24

britain’s small wars: domesticating ‘emergency’

187

Tiger), above all the ‘Worlds’, amusement parks that served as ‘a playground for all ethnic communities and income groups’ and as ‘showgrounds for the new spectacles of mass politics’ before resettlement.44 Though it might seem that Victor’s project ultimately fails, with the fatal discovery that even ‘Mal, May, Maya’ had betrayed him, the novel’s domestic allegory suggests otherwise. His literal and figurative fellow-traveller, the veterinarian Vythilingam, ultimately eschews the jungle and the abstractions of Communism (expressed in his thoughts about the ‘great abstraction’ ‘humanity’ as he listens to Victor going under) for a return to his courtship of Rosemary, who may thus be the real Malayan fiancée Victor’s party was meant for after all. The brief re-eruption of the war into view near the end of the novel, juxtaposed with the party at the end, suggests that if the Major Anstruthers are allowed to leave by the war’s finally successful prosecution, Vythilingam – and thus the renewed liberal ideal of personal commitment – might finally prevail. It is true that the sodality among the ‘Teds’ at the end of the trilogy seems to have rendered Victor irrelevant, given that it is a degraded Americanised popular culture that unites them. Even here, however, Victor has been the teacher: Robert Loo’s turn to composing schlock is inspired by his own urge towards marriage, and when he and Syed Hassan agree over coffee that they must attend to their ‘responsibilities’, they are echoing (and in English: ‘It’s difficult to say these things in Malay [. . .] and in Chinese, too’) what Victor had said to Robert at the beginning of the novel: ‘[E]ven a composer has to have some sense of responsibility.’ 45 Victor is indeed, then, the man who has brought ‘the final marvel of the word’, and is vindicated by a narrative that has after its earlier glimpses of war metaphorised all politics as the personal commitments of the domestic novel. Burgess himself was less coy, claiming that the trilogy offered an expertise on Malaya that both British readers and, especially, American policy makers, should have heeded (and that in his view Sillitoe’s Key to the Door conspicuously lacked).46 It may be that as historians offer a more nuanced picture of conflicts such as the Malayan Emergency, and in the process complicate what is still often seen as a success story taken to justify retroactively the British colonial project, literature opens another front where the battle over hearts and minds is still being fought.

Notes 1. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Lane, 2007). 2. http://www.Britains-SmallWars.com, accessed 25 August 2011. 3. Corelli Barnett, quoted in Paul Reynolds, ‘Suez: End of Empire’, BBC News Online, 24 July 2006, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5199392.stm, accessed 25 August 2011. 4. James Graham, Eden’s Empire (London: Methuen Drama, 2006); Born for War, radio play, written by David Pownall, directed by Martin Jenkins. UK: BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play, 26 October 2006; Sand, radio play, written by Tilly Black, directed by Sara Davies. UK: BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play, 27 October 2006. 5. John Osborne, The Entertainer (London: Faber, 1957); Glen Creeber, Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 115; Lipstick on Your Collar, television serial, written by Dennis Potter, directed by Renny Rye. UK: Channel Four, 1993. 6. Alan Sillitoe, Key to the Door (London: Allen, 1961); Leslie Thomas, The Virgin Soldiers (London: Constable, 1966); Peter Nichols, Privates on Parade, in Plays: Two (London: Methuen Drama, 1991), pp. 101–204.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 187

30/01/2012 16:24

188

lee erwin

7. P. H. Newby, Something to Answer For (London: Faber, 1968); Robert Ruark, Something of Value (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955); Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 16. Ngugi’s own works, of course, offer other perspectives, as do works by M. G. Vassanji, Muthoni Likimani and others. 8. Ngugi notes the same conflation of animal and African in Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. See Writers, pp. 17–18. 9 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 10. Rachel Seiffert, Afterwards (London: Heinemann, 2007). 11. Ruark, p. 460. 12. Elspeth Huxley, A Thing to Love (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: Norton, 2005), pp. 1, 279–84. 13. John Slimming, The Pepper Garden (London: Heinemann, 1968); Noel Barber, Tanamera (London: Hodder, 1981). 14. Something of Value, film, directed by Richard Brooks. USA: Columbia, 1957. 15. Timothy N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 151. 16. Bayly and Harper, pp. 496, 98. 17. Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Cass, 1977), pp. 152–4; Bayly and Harper, pp. 361–71. 18. Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, film, directed by Amir Muhammad (Petaling Jaya, Selangor: Red Films, 2006); Mohd Azzam Mohd Hanif Ghows, The Malayan Emergency Revisited, 1948–1960: A Pictorial History (Kuala Lumpur: AMR and Yayasan Pelajaran Islam, 2006); ‘Jungle Green, Khaki Brown’, TV documentary, produced by Abdul Aziz Hassan. Burgess’s trilogy too is still active in the Malaysian culture scene, analysed as colonialist by Zawiah Yahya (Resisting Colonialist Discourse [Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1994]), ‘restricted’ by the government in 2006, and praised by filmmaker Amir and novelist Preeta Samarasan. (See the various discussions of Burgess on Bibliobibuli’s blog, available at http://thebookaholic.blogspot.com, accessed 1 September 2011.) 19. Victor Purcell, Malaya: Communist or Free? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954), pp. 15–16. 20. Bayly and Harper, pp. 490–1. This description might be contrasted with the ‘new village’ seen at the beginning of Time for a Tiger, which is inaccurately explained as one result of the government’s having been forced to relocate kampong (that is, Malay) populations and shown as being comfortably and timelessly multi-ethnic. Compare this with Han Suyin’s portrayal of the fictional Todak New Village in . . . And the Rain My Drink (London: Cape, 1956). 21. Purcell, p. 8; Bayly and Harper, pp. 526–7. 22. Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 366; quoted in Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005), p. 163. 23. Sadie Jones, Small Wars (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009). 24. Burgess, Little Wilson, pp. 406–7. 25. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 215. 26. For example, see Agnes Khoo, Life as the River Flows: Women in the Malayan Anti-Colonial Struggle (Monmouth: Merlin, 2007); Bayly and Harper, p. 119. It is left to the film version of Ruark’s Something of Value similarly to figure ‘Africa’ as one of the ‘two women’ Peter loves. Barber’s Tanamera tries to claim cross-cultural understanding via the marriage of its English protagonist with the beautiful daughter of (naturally) a Chinese tycoon, but somewhat undermines

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 188

30/01/2012 16:24

britain’s small wars: domesticating ‘emergency’

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

189

that claim by figuring the real evil in the novel, and more or less the entire Malayan revolution, in the near-rape of the narrator’s ‘beautiful blonde white’ sister by ‘ugly yellow-brown’ Communists led by his brother-in-law by adoption (p. 620) – as well as by leaving the combined family empire in the hands of a purely British son. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 7–8. Or as one character puts it, ‘that nasty business in India’ (Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East, in The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy [London: Penguin, 1981], p. 448). Burgess, Little Wilson, p. 389. Bayly and Harper, pp. 101–14. Nabby’s name is of course a play on the Arabic for ‘prophet’, ‘nabi’, identifying his temptations with those of the first Muslim prophet, Adam. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Burgess, Time, pp. 103–5. Another significant ideological move is being carried out here extratextually: since the school at which Burgess actually taught, the Malay College Kuala Kangsar, trained an exclusively Malay student body for their role as the elite of the new nation, his invention of the Chinese presence in the school, necessary for Victor’s first-hand engagement with its imagined ideology, plays an even more important (and unacknowledged) role in rewriting history to suggest that the British fostered multiracial education. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Burgess, Time, p. 40. I use Bayly and Harper’s term. See pp. 407–56. Burgess, Time, p. 40. Anthony Burgess, The Enemy in the Blanket, in The Long Day Wanes, p. 242. The narrator notes: ‘All this had been set out years ago in the stories of a man still well remembered in the East’, ‘Willie Maugham’. See also William Somerset Maugham, Maugham’s Malaysian Stories, selected and with an introduction by Burgess (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational, 1969). Burgess, Time, p. 117. Burgess, Beds, p. 543. Burgess, Enemy, p. 389. Bayly and Harper, pp. 129–30. Burgess, Enemy, p. 389. Burgess, Enemy, pp. 403–4. Arthur de Gobineau, quoted in Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 103. A reductive categorisation of ‘races’ in Malaya was also being consolidated in the colonial census. See Bayly and Harper, p. 332. Bayly and Harper, pp. 116–17, 510–11. Burgess, Beds, p. 435. Burgess, Little Wilson, p. 407; Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now: A Student’s Guide to Contemporary Fiction (London: Faber, 1967), p. 148.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 189

30/01/2012 16:24

20

THE DISAPPEARED AND THE DAMNED: DUPLICITY, COMPLICITY AND REALITY IN THE LITERATURE OF THE PAX AMERICANA Kris Anderson The only chance small countries from the Third World have of evoking a lively international interest is when they decide to shed blood. This is a sad truth, but so it is. Ryszard Kapuscinski Oh Yank, let’s go home. Martha Gellhorn Near the beginning of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), the narrator notes that: It might interest you that just as the US was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.) A smashing military success for the US, and many of the same units and intelligence teams that took part in the ‘democratization’ of Santo Domingo were immediately shipped off to Saigon.1 The speaker’s offhandedness here disguises a pedantry necessary to his narrative: the prehistory and decades-long aftermath of this invasion supplies both the context and plot of the ensuing novel. Díaz is not alone in depicting American military expeditions into its own neighbourhood: his novel belongs to a sizeable and growing corpus of Anglophone writing about US incursions in the Caribbean and Central America.2 Nor is his narrator alone in presupposing ignorance of such conflicts: the invasion of the Dominican Republic was just one of many Cold War-era US ‘interventions’ in Central America, most of which contained similar evocations of Vietnam in rationale, in execution and sometimes in outcome, and all of which are under-represented today in mainstream American culture. Indeed, these conflicts – in Panama, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and others – might as well be collectively archived as ‘minor American wars’, at least in so far as they feature in modern memory. And yet nowhere were ‘big stick’ and ‘dollar’ diplomacy enacted with greater dedication, divisiveness and damage than in America’s ‘backyard’, the Caribbean and Central America. Neighbours to Cuba, these countries were seen as integral fortifications against

190

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 190

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the pax americana

191

communism, and, during the period that became known as the Pax Americana, Cold War America vowed to preserve its dominance in the region as a direct challenge to Moscow. It did so, but arguably only by imperilling the principles that motivated its actions – rights to free speech, fair governance and the removal of terror. The US ‘democratisation’ schemes for Central America required either direct military engagement (as in the case of Panama, Granada and the Dominican Republic), or covert influence, including CIA manipulation, military training, the supplying of arms and/or hegemonic economic investment (as in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cuba during the Bay of Pigs crisis, as well as in other Central and South American nations).3 In all of these operations save Panama,4 the US sided with rightwing partisans, thus allying itself with some of the most brutal and repressive regimes in recent history. The fallout from American interference was broad and lasting: at the hands of US-trained militias or with US-subsidised arms, thousands of civilians were massacred, thousands more disappeared and millions consigned to life under authoritarian governments, all while American political rhetoric hymned democracy and neoliberal values. As scholar Jean Franco summarised, ‘Anticommunism became an alibi for slaughter, torture, and censorship – often in the name of “stability” in opposition to “chaos”.’5 The Pax Americana, then, was nothing of the sort.6 Whether these conflicts can be termed ‘American’ wars is debatable and relative: despite their proximity, the nature of civil war in each country was very different, as was the level and effect of US involvement. But that these conflicts cumulatively sculpted the way in which Americans regarded their own government (and Central Americans regarded American hegemony) is indisputable. ‘There is literally a miasma of madness in [Washington],’ wrote Senator William Fulbright in 1972 of Cold War interventionism. ‘I am at a loss for words to describe the idiocy of what we are doing.’7 No matter how secretive the operations, reports of American-aided atrocities were forced into mainstream media by politicians, activists and artists bent on disclosure – of disappearances and death squads in US-backed Guatemala in the 1960s and 1970s; of the targeting of schools and hospitals by Nicaragua’s CIA-buttressed Contras; of civilian deaths during the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965–6; of State Department-fabricated ‘mass graves’ which helped justify the US invasion of Granada in 1983; of El Mozote village massacre in El Salvador in 1981, in which a US-trained and -armed Salvadoran battalion killed between 700 and 1,000 unarmed civilians and burned the pueblo to the ground. As early as 1966, a New York Times editorial demanded answers: ‘[i]s the government of a proud and honorable people relying too much on the “black” operations, “dirty tricks”, harsh and illicit acts in the “back alleys” of the world?’8 From the 1970s onwards, in the aftermath of Vietnam, answering this question became a seminal preoccupation for American literature, with the most direct responses coming directly from the fields of conflict. As with writings on Vietnam, these front-line works display an urgent need to translate the atrocities of war for those at home in a way that transcends the impersonality of mainstream media reports. More so than previous wars, however, the sense that these were ‘dirty’ wars demanded anger; that they were underreported demanded perseverance. Unlike during Vietnam, most Americans in this period knew no one directly involved in the Central American conflicts: there were few mass deployments of US troops and many of the interventions were covert. (That America’s ‘backyard’ can seem farther away than Saigon is an irony not lost on these authors.) Moreover, the psychological distance from Central American wars was exacerbated by the disjunction between American political spin and actual events. Mexican-American writer

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 191

30/01/2012 16:24

192

kris anderson

Alma Guillermoprieto was one of the journalists who broke the news of the massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador. When her story was published in January 1982, the Reagan administration villainised it as communist propaganda until its accuracy was confirmed. Such accusations, with their acidic aftertaste of Senator McCarthy and HUAC of the 1950s, did not go unchallenged by America’s literati.9 ‘We began to be clear about who did what, and to whom,’ declared writer Margaret Randall. ‘People were not massacred. The army massacred them (or the police, or whoever). Battles did not take place. Named forces waged them, against named victims.’10 Journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn was at the forefront of this battle, declaring in 1986 that: [t]he Contras’ war on Nicaragua’s northern frontier should be called Reagan’s war, though it is organized terror raids, not war. Fomented and paid for by the CIA, evidently very dear to Mr Reagan’s heart, it mainly kills peasants – old men, women, children – and destroys the modest wood shacks that were new kindergartens and clinics.11 Elsewhere, Gellhorn relies on statistics calculated to shock American readers with their complicity: [T]o the end of 1984, U.S. taxes have paid for the murder of 3,954 harmless men and women and 3,346 children, the uprooting of 142,980 people now refugees, the destruction of 137 hopeful modest infant centers, clinics, schools, co-operatives, built by the Sandinistas for the peasants.12 As with the narrator’s aside in Díaz’s Oscar Wao, this didacticism is strategic, a salvo of pointed words against obfuscated actions. Part I of Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us is entitled ‘In Salvador, 1978–1980’ and is dedicated to Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated by a sniper thought to have been authorised by then-rightwing revolutionary, later US-backed leader of El Salvador, Roberto D’Aubisson.13 Similarly, Suzanne Gardinier’s poem ‘To the Tribunal’, from her collection Nicaragua (1993), has a prominent footnote that not only informs the reader of America’s decision to supply illegal arms to the Contras in Nicaragua but also provides a ‘further reading’ list.14 Other works feature similarly instructive addenda, all emphasising US complicity with foreign brutality: even the fictional war-torn Central American country of Tecan in Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise (1981) has a government populated by ‘murderous troglodytes and we put them in’.15 Moreover, in A Flag for Sunrise, the hollowness of America’s primary rationale for war – the global fight against communism – is as blatant as the exceptionalism used in its justification. When discussing Tecan’s imminent coup with the novel’s protagonist Holliwell (a social-anthropologist), CIA operative Captain Zecca dismisses Holliwell’s pacifist concerns brusquely, noting that: [t]he usual shit will go down. You and I, Doc, maybe we know something about the country. But it’s too late. If we don’t back [Tecan’s government] now, we’ll have a Russian submarine base in Puerto Alvarado – maybe a missile base this time. See how that goes over in Dubuque,16 in Congress, in the White House, for Christ’s sake.17 And yet, as Holliwell later learns, America’s reasons for invasion prove insubstantial: their allies are death-squad brutes and the ‘communist’ rebels who threaten Tecan’s stumbling

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 192

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the pax americana

193

autocracy have arranged a pointedly anti-communist manifesto. Once Israel is revealed to be arming both sides of the conflict, America’s them-or-us crusade in Tecan disintegrates into an ideologically bankrupt mess – with real-life analogies that are not difficult to discern. So hopeless is the resulting quagmire that Holliwell questions not only the validity of Tecan’s war, but the possibility of any intercultural understanding: [t]he thought came to Holliwell that he had spent much of his life depending on a few local people, speaking some lingua franca, hovering insect-like about the edge of some complex ancient society which he could never hope to really penetrate.18 Here, Stone makes his parallels with Vietnam explicit: the very fundamentals of interventionism are called into question. Prior to this revelation, much of Holliwell’s quest centres on dowsing ‘truth’ (both personal and political) from a desert of misinformation. This pursuit – dismantling the official euphemisms, clichés and circumlocutions of Cold War politics – is paramount in the literature of these wars. For example, in The Heart That Bleeds, Alma Guillermoprieto notes that even in 1992, the American embassy in Panama still referred to the American invasion as ‘la liberación’ (‘the liberation’).19 And in her essay ‘We Are Not Little Mice’ (1985), Martha Gellhorn recalls another familiar refrain: ‘[i]n his ultra-sincere chocolate voice, President Reagan announces that Nicaragua is “a Communist tyranny”. The Contras, America’s hired killers, are “the true revolutionaries fighting for freedom.. . .The fate of freedom” hangs in the balance, or is at stake, I forget which,’ she recites with a weary cynicism.20 As the progenitor of several ‘interventions’, Reagan comes under particular fire in these writings, presented as the leader whose cowboy lingo and film-star charisma are at odds with the dark consequences of his policies (‘win a big one for democracy’, Reagan urges a Nicaraguan death-squad leader in Elmore Leonard’s 1987 thriller Bandits).21 Moreover, as in Stone’s Tecan, Reagan’s favoured enemy, communism, is itself a slippery thing: when cited by US administrations as a reason for war, ‘communism’ could imply anything from a president’s dwindling popular support to a desire for neo-colonial profit (for Jean Franco, communism can be ‘defined as any movement that hindered capitalist expansions’).22 Gellhorn, for instance, reminds readers that Nicaragua’s Sandinista party won 1984’s freeand-fair election and was emphatically not communist; nevertheless, Reagan remained resolute in championing the brutish and illegitimate Contras in the name of ‘democratisation’ and anti-communism.23 Similarly, June Jordan’s poem ‘Dance: Nicaragua’ concludes with a pointed reminder of Reaganite hypocrisy: invoking founding-father Patrick Henry’s famous ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death!’ speech against British colonialism, Jordan’s poem ends ‘vivir libre / vivir libre / vivir libre / o morir’.24 In Salvador (1983), novelist and essayist Joan Didion picks up this theme, reflecting upon the both manipulable and duplicitous nature of wartime jargon. ‘Language as it is now used in El Salvador’, Didion observes, ‘is the language of advertising, of persuasion, the product being one or another of the soluciones crafted in Washington or Panama or Mexico, which is part of the place’s pervasive obscenity’:25 La solución changed with the market. Pacification, although those places pacified turned out to be in need of repeated pacification, was la solución. The use of the word ‘negotiations’, however abstract that use may have been, was la solución [. . .] The land reform program, grounded as it was in political rather than economic reality, was la solución as symbol.26

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 193

30/01/2012 16:24

194

kris anderson

Beyond la solución and ‘pacification’, other phrases that Didion condemns as hollow are: ‘“improvement”, “perfection” (reforms are never abandoned or ignored, only “perfected” or “improved”)’ and ‘reorganization’.27 That the conservative American political establishment is endorsing language which smacks of five-year plans and re-education regimes does not go unnoticed here: certainly, a central irony in these texts is the thin line between ‘democratisation’ and despotism. But while political spin demanded correcting, its very real consequences deserved exposure. For many writers, the most terrifying verbiage was reserved not for policy plans but for casualty reports, for the victims of these wars – those who were ‘captured’, ‘damnificado’, ‘disappeared’. In El Salvador, Martha Gellhorn writes of death-squad tactics28 being sanitised in local news reports by due-process jargon. ‘“Captured” is a weird form of habeas corpus,’ she observes in ‘Rule by Terror’ (1983): The ‘captured’ are ‘interrogated’, tortured, as people are routinely fingerprinted and photographed in lawful jails [. . .] Though 766 men and women [. . .] were captured in 1982, the men in Mariona prison reported only 280 new arrivals, the women in Ilopango prison reported forty-five newcomers. Habeas corpus does not mean the body will be safe or returned.29 Elsewhere, she recounts the victims of the US invasion of Panama, noting that local terminology is at odds with America’s gospel of ‘liberación’. ‘The Spanish word for totally destitute is damnificado,’ Gellhorn observes. ‘The people who ran from their burning collapsing houses in Chorrillo, with the clothes on their backs, saving their lives and nothing else, were los damnificados de Chorrillo.’30 But worst of all, notes Didion in Salvador, is the term ‘desaparecer, or “disappear” [which is] in Spanish both an intransitive and a transitive verb’ (a flexibility, she adds, soon ‘adopted by those speaking English in El Salvador, as in John Sullivan was disappeared from the Sheraton; the government disappeared the students’).31 The existential as well as physical threat of ‘disappearance’ dominates these literatures: very few victims were ever heard from again. ‘Disappeared is total Kafka’, muses Gellhorn, as is the typical justification for disappearance, ‘subversiveness’ – it, too, is left undefined.32 Like the verb ‘to hump’ in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam story ‘The Things They Carried’, language here is both metaphorical/connotative and literal/denotative: the lexicon of war connotes bureaucracy, impersonality and expediency, but denotes the physical sacrifice of individuals to euphemism. Certainly, these works highlight the perception that, during America’s backyard conflicts, the burgeoning divide between US political rhetoric and on-the-ground casualties reached its widest, thus demanding a particular bluntness from its chroniclers. These are mid-war, rather than retrospective, works, and as such, they seek not only to expose the hypocrisies of wartime political oratory, but to depict with stark and emotive imagery the lives of the people and principles obliterated by America’s playground politics. Joan Didion, for instance, presents quotidian life on the streets of El Salvador, noting the undercurrent of fear in broad daylight and observing, with a darkly zoological squint, that, ‘[v]ultures of course suggest the presence of a body. A knot of children on the street suggests the presence of a body.’33 Others shift from Didion’s bleak realism to the quietly defamiliarising, the poetics of estrangement. June Jordan’s ‘Fourth Poem from Nicaragua Libre: Report from the Frontier’ presents the brutal legacy of US-aided Contras with a disarming delicacy:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 194

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the pax americana

195

torn apart more raggedy than skeletons when the bombs hit leaving a patch of her hair on a piece of her scalp like a bird’s nest in the dark yard still lit by flowers [. . .]34 Jordan’s image is alienating, a jarring, moving contrast between pastoral beauty and the grotesque detritus of modern warfare – a girl, fragmented. Similarly potent is Carolyn Forché’s much-anthologised prose poem ‘The Colonel (May 1978)’, which describes casual barbarity in El Salvador more hoarsely: What you have heard is true. I was in his house [. . .] The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves [. . .] I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said.35 Forché does not balk from the colonel’s challenge: this may not be a subject for the niceties of a traditional verse form, but it is a subject for poetry, and for an American readership. Moreover, the poem’s banal setting – its grocery sack and suburban villa – chafes against its monstrous implication, reminding the reader that this is, by Salvadoran standards, a non-event, a quotidian snapshot of one of America’s more sadistic middlemen. It is Forché’s – and Gellhorn’s, and Didion’s – literary sensibility as well as their outrage that differentiates these writings from traditional reportage. There is a self-consciousness within much of these wars’ literatures, a continual interrogation of the function of art within conflict and amidst a cultural context of suspicion. Accordingly, much of the ‘literariness’ found in these texts is used towards openly political ends: as in ‘The Colonel’ and ‘Nicaragua Libre’ above, defamiliarisation is key, with explicitly aesthetic conceits and overtly personal asides serving as shock tactics, conveying the essential horror of war with an immediacy oppositional to the distancing tactics of political spin. References to literary tradition often function similarly. In Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise, a whiskey-priest whose inaction facilitates death-squads recites Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Blake, thus providing a barren counterpoint to the novel’s parallels with Heart of Darkness (and, by association, with Vietnam). Didion, meanwhile, visits a Salvadoran body dump, a cliff face across which los desaparecidos are regularly strewn. Situating it alongside Shelley, Salvator Rosa and the Grand Tour, she observes it with dark irony: Puerta del Diablo is a ‘view site’ in an older and distinctly literary tradition, nature as lesson, [. . .] a site so romantic and ‘mystical’, so theatrically sacrificial in aspect, that it might be a cosmic parody of nineteenth-century landscape painting. The place presents itself as pathetic fallacy: the sky ‘broods’, the stones ‘weep’, a constant seepage of water weighting the ferns and moss [. . .] Body dumps are seen in El Salvador as a kind of visitors’ must-do, difficult but worth the detour.36 For Didion, Romantic sublimity is now relevant only ironically, as a kind of aesthetic precursor to misery-tourism. Elsewhere, traditional forms themselves break down. Rita Dove’s poem ‘Parsley’ (1983) depicts the 1937 murder, by the Dominican Republic’s then-dictator Raphael Trujillo, of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 195

30/01/2012 16:24

196

kris anderson

20,000 Haitian migrant workers because they could not correctly pronounce the ‘r’ in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley.37 The first part, from the perspective of Trujillo’s Haitian victims, is a mangled villanelle, filled with half-rhymes and broken lines; the second part, through Trujillo’s eyes, is a similarly mutated sestina. For many of these writers, traditional literary forms carry relevance only in their dissolution; accordingly, these works advance only the most defamiliarising or ironic conceits and consequently maintain an ad hoc relation to genre. However, there is a sense that these writings also acknowledge their literariness not only to deconstruct it, but also to defuse suspicion, lest poeticity suggest inauthenticity in the same way that mainstream political rhetoric might imply deceit. Testimony, according to Derrida, ‘always goes hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, lie’.38 The bitter humour, literary allusiveness and overt subjectivity in these works admit this possibility with grim irony, and by doing so solidify these authors’ credibility as reporters of spirit as well as letter. Of course, the pitfalls of testimony are less worrying to those writers less proximate to conflict. While reiterating themes of those writing from the front line, many home front and post-war authors rely more heavily on irony and satire, telescoping out past the details of individual conflicts, past even the catastrophic aftermath of specific wars, to instead focus on domestic truths – namely, on the American political mendacity and cultural censorship that arguably engendered such wars in the first place. This category of war writing treats conflict diffusely, as proof of wider political damnation. Formally adventurous, these are often postmodern texts, democratically blending low and high culture, comedy and horror, conspiratorial truths and paranoid fictions, to create a biting, subversive take on the politics of the Pax Americana. William S. Burroughs’s novel Cities of the Red Night (1981), for instance, scrutinises the contradiction between cultures founded upon Enlightenment reason and their nihilistic fondness for irrational, thanatotic violence. In Cities’ preface, Burroughs’s scholarly narrator details, in nostalgic tones, the seventeenth-century utopian society of ‘Libertatia’.39 Free from slavery and racism, truly equal and democratic, Libertatia is established as an ideal community and as the forefather of the American and French revolutions – save that its proselytising tactics reveal themselves as bloody as those of its real-life descendants. While the book hinges upon ambiguities, non-linearities and paradoxes, and is far from cut and dried in its conclusions, the slippery slope from democratic principles to senseless violence is made obvious, as is the general trend towards global bellicosity. (Whether Burroughs is passing judgement on such violence remains uncertain – it is certainly portrayed as titillating.) The link between Cities’ grim chaos and real-world political events is left largely unspoken, but a clue might come at the novel’s close: as Panama’s natives are armed by Libertatia for a war not of their making, Cities of the Red Night concludes with a character declaiming, ‘[b]etter weapons lead to better and better weapons, until the earth is a grenade with the fuse burning.’40 Lucius Shepard’s Life During Wartime (1987) as well as his prize-winning short story ‘Salvador’ adopt Burroughs’s fascination with modern weaponry and make explicit its function as a symbol of political and ideological decay. With cyberpunk overtones and a science fiction core, Life During Wartime creates a world at once recognisable and apocalyptic. The novel’s hero, David Mingolla, is enrolled in Psicorps, an elite squad trained to combat opposition forces by deploying razor-sharp psychic powers. But despite this

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 196

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the pax americana

197

extraordinary premise, Mingolla’s reaction to his deployment in Panama must echo the naïvety of many actual American soldiers: Panama. Not what he’d expected, nosiree! He hadn’t reached the topless country of white beaches, the tanned coast of movie star tits and coco locos [. . .] No, he’d reached the bloody republic of history, where Colombian pirates raided the coast and screwed their victims’ corpses, where once a band of white sailors had become headhunters and cannibals [. . .] Panama. . . little shiver of three syllables.41 While taking care to ground wartime Panama in wartime reality, Mingolla’s last line also echoes Nabokov’s ‘Lo-lee-ta’: as in Cities of the Red Night, Shepard’s novel often returns to the erotic potential of warfare and to the titillation of technocratic power. That Life During Wartime culminates not only in the nuclear destruction of Panama City but in Mingolla’s one-man rebellion against the bloodthirsty totalitarianism of his fellow Psicorps soldiers, however, suggests a more certain condemnation of real-world events than Burroughs’s circumspection. Perhaps most scathing of all is Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990): his is not a postmodernism that pulls its political punches. David Thoreen writes that Pynchon’s Vineland is an American political parable, a critique of the burgeoning 1980s ‘imperial presidency’ – the increasing imposition of the executive branch on the legislative branch and on human rights in general.42 Certainly, the novel (set pointedly in 1984) radiates anger at the increasing totalitarianism and militarism of American governance as well as at a largely acquiescent population. (Pynchon comments upon this acquiescence in ‘Nearer, My Couch, to Thee’, in which he laments the political repercussions of ‘Sloth’, deeming it ‘a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920’s and 30’s being perhaps Sloth’s finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind.’43) Without question, Vineland’s most potent criticism centres upon Reagan himself. As in Gellhorn and Didion, Pynchon’s characters find Reagan’s cowboy charm manipulative, and his movie-star background dovetails neatly with Vineland’s suggestion that film and television are used to opiate the masses. Although Pynchon’s protagonists are far from reliable narrators, the story’s wider message is recycled through several voices and can be distilled into the following complaint, uttered by a character named Ditzah: it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it – dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity – ‘I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.’44 Another character interprets Reagan’s motives even more malignly: What I just figure is is [sic] he’s a mean mother fucker, that’s a technical term, and a lot of these. . . tend to be spoilers which if there’s somethin’ they can’t have, or they known they’ve already lost, why, they’ll just go try and destroy as much as they can anyway, till it’s over.45 As in Gellhorn, Didion and others, the tenderness between Reagan and the CIA is highlighted here, and the CIA features heavily in many of these works as a panopticonic

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 197

30/01/2012 16:24

198

kris anderson

and utterly corrupt entity – after all, this is post-Dr Strangelove, post-The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Frances Stonor Saunders summarises the CIA’s Cold War tactics bluntly: ‘It spied on tens of thousands of Americans, harassed democratically elected leaders abroad, plotted assassinations, denied these activities to Congress, and in the process, elevated the art of lying to new heights.’46 In Vineland, long after several characters have been hunted, interrogated and imprisoned by acronyms, bureaus, SWAT-teams, blackops, undercover technocratic labs and brain-washing operations, one optimist still protests feebly, ‘“We’re probably just being paranoid. . . It only begins to assume some nationwide pattern here, right? Tell me I’ve been watching too much old footage tonight. Tell me this isn’t what it looks like.”’47 Paranoia is, in fact, the key to the novel as a whole, as it is to Burroughs’s and Shepard’s works as well. Vineland discusses Nixonian cultural repression, particularly the ‘War on Drugs’, but its logical conclusion and magnification is found in Pynchon’s fascist 1980s: There was a weirdness here that Hector recognized, [. . .] like the weeks running up to the Bay of Pigs in ’61. Was Reagan about to invade Nicaragua at last, getting the home front all nailed down, ready to process folks by the tens of thousands into detention, arm local ‘Defense Forces’, fire everybody in the Army and then deputize them in order to get around the Posse Comitatus Act?. . . Could it be that some sillyass national-emergency exercise was finally coming true?48 America’s incursions into Central America, then, have the same point of origin: a militiastyle survivalism, fuelled by alarmist propaganda and a megalomaniacal will to power. To Vineland’s denizens, rebellion against this Hollywood-ised police state comes in acts of creativity, scepticism and individual eccentricity, although the power of art and of political defiance against the ‘man’ is certainly left in doubt. Kurt Vonnegut gave an interview with the Utne Reader in 2003 in which he noted that, [d]uring the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.49 That Pynchon’s collection of rebels consists of burned-out hippies, drugged-up psychopaths and television-addled commandos – in essence, the detritus of 1960s activism – acknowledges the possibility of a similar futility, albeit one complicated by the strength of the novel’s own political critique. However, perhaps the harshest, as well as the most nuanced, critiques of America’s ‘backyard’ wars come from that backyard itself. Latino-American and Caribbean-American writers occupy a prominent space in American arts and letters, and from the 1970s onwards, first- and second-generation Central American and Caribbean immigrants have written urgently and acerbically about their own experiences of Cold War conflicts and, more broadly, about the problems of diaspora – hybrid identities, collective memory, linguistic migrancy, expectations of activism and pilgrimage. Among these writers are Francisco Goldman, Junot Díaz, Arturo Arías, Nelly Rosario, Claribel Alegría, Julia Alvárez, Alma Guillermoprieto and Martín Espada, and it is these more recent, retrospective voices that have kept Central American conflicts relevant to a new generation of American readers. While Didion, Gellhorn and Forché wrote searingly from the front

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 198

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the pax americana

199

lines,50 and while Shepard, Burroughs and Pynchon watched from afar and extrapolated broader political trends, these writers portray not only the physical decimation of their homelands and the depths of American political mendacity, but also the cultural aftermath of years of war, intervention and corruption. Some works, such as Julia Alvárez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), leave it there, using first-hand experience and fictionalised historical events to evoke the horrors of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. But other writers tackle these topics with an arsenal full not only of Central American history but of postmodern experimentalism as well, taking a sceptical eye both towards Latin American literary heritage (particularly the mirages of magical realism) and the efficacy of traditional narrative in depicting trauma and its aftermath. (As the narrator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao notes, ‘[i]t wasn’t like In the Time of the Butterflies, where a kindly Mirabal Sister steps up and befriends the poor scholarship student.’51) What results is often cacophonous, and pointedly so. As with Forché, Pynchon and others, these works resist classification by genre. Guatemalan-American author Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) toys openly with forms ranging from the detective story, to the pilgrim quest, to classic melodrama. One character, Moya, a Guatemalan journalism student at Harvard, deconstructs the various elements of the novel in which he features, noting to the protagonist Roger that their escapades allow: ‘the weaving together of many threads, Rogerio. Because look at all the elements, vos, just the journalistic elements.’ And he listed them: the baby trade, war orphans, the war, [. . .] the police, and the press; a Guatemalan-born U.S. citizen with every opportunity to make a good life in the United States who mysteriously and dramatically returns.52 And yet despite this pot-boiler call-to-arms, the novel’s conclusion makes it apparent that real-life (even when fictionalised) is both messier and more mundane: while Long Night is part exposé and part adventure, most of all it is a requiem for an individual’s idealism and for a shattered Guatemala. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao shares certain traits with Long Night (both are first-person, and span generations and nations), but Díaz plays even more wantonly with readers’ stereotypes of genre, particularly with the difference between writing for Americans and for Dominicans: I know what Negroes53 are going to say. Look, he’s writing Suburban Tropical now. A puta [whore] and she’s not an underage snort-addicted mess? Not believable. Should I go down to the Feria and pick me up a more representative model?. . . But then I’d be lying. I know I’ve thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in the mix but this is supposed to be a true account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. . . This is your chance. If blue pill, continue. If red pill, return to the Matrix.54 The assumption here is that ‘Suburban Tropical’ mode (which may be that of Alvárez’s novel, according to the narrator’s earlier jab) exudes a sanitised exoticism, with the trials of war, poverty and migrancy underplayed for local-colour-loving American audiences. Accordingly, Díaz also often subverts the bleakness of more ‘authentic’ modes, depicting trauma with dark humour, and peppering depictions of unimaginable barbarity with references to which a modern readership can relate. In Oscar Wao, the eponymous hero is an overweight, geeky, virginal Dominican-American fluent in popular (and not-so-popular)

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 199

30/01/2012 16:24

200

kris anderson

culture. As the narrator (his college roommate) observes, Oscar ‘could write Elvish, could speak Chaksoba, [. . .] knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic’: in short, he subverts every stereotype of Latino-American masculinity.55 And yet it is Oscar, whose nerdiness is both sympathetic and familiar, who falls prey to something alien to most American readers: the quotidian thuggery and corruption of the post-Trujillo Dominican Republic. Thus, while some Latino-American treatments of these conflicts employ humour, pop culture and colloquialism to innovative effect, such devices are also often revealed to be not only intercultural identity markers but survival tactics as well – the legacies of violence and trauma are never, in these works, far from the surface. This is apparent in Oscar Wao’s description of an assault by Trujillo’s goons on Oscar’s mother. After listing the key injuries inflicted, the narrator summarises: [a]bout 167 points of damage in total and it was only sheer accident that these motherfuckers didn’t eggshell her cranium. . . Was there time for a rape or two? I suspect there was, but we shall never know because it’s not something she talked about. All that can be said is that it was the end of language, the end of hope.56 Here, unable to envisage the attack itself, the narrator relies instead on the aftermath to appeal to the reader’s imagination. Thus, amidst the nods to Lord of the Rings, El Mariachi and The Fantastic Four, something sinister lurks: for Díaz and others, ‘the end of language’ is also the open breakdown of those allusions and metaphors that make wartime brutality accessible to the uninitiated. Accordingly, many Latino-American works highlight not only the duplicity of political rhetoric – the euphemistic passivity of desaparecidos, damnificados, soluciones; the falsities of interventionist justifications; the complicity between local despots and American interests – but also those moments where intercultural understanding becomes lost in translation. In Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens, the Guatemalan-American narrator sits down at an expatriate bar in Guatemala and is approached, excruciatingly, by the American bartender. ‘Bway-nas no-chays. Coe-moe pway-doe seer-veer-tay?’, she questions. ‘I’ll just have a draft beer, please,’ is his amused response.57 These kinds of quotidian faux pas may seem anodyne individually, but in Goldman’s novel, they are also synecdochal for more ominous intercultural ‘missteps’, such as American support of a corrupt Guatemalan regime. Most of all, language – particularly the defamiliarising effect of Spanish in Anglophone fiction – can also be used to ground the reader in an uglier reality, to dispel the ‘Suburban Tropical’. When émigré Oscar returns to the Dominican Republic and declares himself to be ‘in Heaven’, ‘[h]is cousin Pedro Pablo sucked his teeth with exaggerated disdain. Esto aquí es un maldito infierno’ – this here’s a bloody hell, he retorts.58 Elsewhere, Díaz pushes it yet further: there are stretches of the novel that readers who do not speak Spanish would not understand. Pop-cultural references and dark humour can humanise an otherwise unfathomable situation, but in these works (as in Stone’s Flag) there are also episodes where intercultural communication (and indeed prose description itself) fails to express the real horrors of war and its aftermath. Part of Oscar Wao’s potency, then, comes from Díaz’s willingness to push Anglophone war writing to its breaking point, to see ‘how much of a load can English bear without disintegrating or being so transformed that you can no longer recognise it.’59 Of course, as ever, the emphasis is not merely linguistic but also political. When Díaz reminds his American readership about the tyrannies of Trujillo, it is not merely a human-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 200

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the pax americana

201

ising insight into Oscar’s geeky predilections or an irreverent take on mid-century island history, but also a reminder of culpability for the decades of destruction to follow: Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor [. . .] His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States. . .60 While it is Trujillo that is justifiably vilified here, neither Trujillo’s successors nor their American allies escape condemnation either, even after (as Oscar thinks, with customary fantasy), ‘Reagan and the Evil Empire had ridden off into never-never land.’61 Haunting every character in this novel is the fukú, the all too literal curse placed on the Dominican Republic and its progeny by the American political establishment. As Díaz explains, Trujillo was one of the U.S.’s favorite sons, one of its children. He was created and sustained by the U.S.’s political-military machine. I wanted to write about the demon child of the U.S., the one who was inflicted upon the Dominican Republic.62 Ultimately, it is this same motivation that drives all of these diverse writings: the need to document the monstrous cost of American foreign policy, the desire for the American public to acknowledge the effects of those policies, and the demand for the American government to take responsibility for the abuses that resulted directly or indirectly from Cold War militancy and to avoid such conflicts in the future. These are works with outrage and with activism at their core. Whether fiction, reportage, poetry or polemic, the war writing of the Pax Americana is therefore undeniably moral. Robert Stone makes this explicit, noting in the Mississippi Review that fiction must have a principled point of view: ‘it has to. We can’t help having one. That’s the nature of language because you are always making choices, you are always presenting options. Fiction has an inescapable moral connection.’63 Accordingly, no matter their form or genre, all of these authors call (with varying degrees of subtlety) upon everyday Americans to denounce the ‘harsh and illicit acts’ committed abroad in their names and to challenge a political rhetoric that champions democracy while catalysing repression. For Martha Gellhorn, to write literature that is unabashedly proactive is not only a mode de vie and an aesthetic statement, but also an ethical imperative: she closes her writings on Central American wars with Nadezdha Mandelstam’s mandate that, ‘If you can do nothing else you must scream.’64 It is, notes Gellhorn, ‘weary work but essential. We Americans have to scream our government out of El Salvador and well away from Nicaragua too.’65 That Americans largely failed – despite many popular campaigns – to do either does not go unnoticed by these authors: Díaz, Goldman, Forché and Didion all highlight the ineffectiveness of American opposition (and, by affiliation, much war literature) to halt these wars or ameliorate their aftermaths. Pynchon is, perhaps, most scathing of all. In ‘Nearer, My Couch, to Thee’, he writes that: [f]iction and nonfiction alike are full of characters who fail to do what they should because of the effort involved. How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for choosing good present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we pass them by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life.66 Vineland, then, is a parable wherein America’s Cold War hypocrisies come home to roost. In the ‘scabland garrison state’ that is Vineland’s America, a character recalls the beginning of domestic fascism:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 201

30/01/2012 16:24

202

kris anderson

[b]y morning there were scores of injuries, hundreds of arrests, no reported deaths but a handful of persons unaccounted for. In those days it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would kill its own civilians and then lie about it.67 While most of these works call for Americans to prevent further brutality abroad, Pynchon takes it a step further, implying that if Reagan’s ‘imperial presidency’ were left unchecked, its logical culmination would be in those far-away abstractions – the desaparecidos of America’s ‘backyard’ wars – becoming a backyard reality for mainstream America.

Notes 1. Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, UK edn (London: Faber and Faber, [2007] 2008), p. 4. 2. For the sake of brevity, ‘Central America’ will here refer to both Caribbean islands and isthmian Central America. 3. Gus Martin, Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues (London: Sage Publications, 2003), p. 110. 4. By then the tide of public opinion had discernibly shifted, largely because of the Iran-Contra affair. 5. Jean Franco, The Decline & Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 23. 6. As Martha Gellhorn observes, what it means ‘is that we have not had a war between the Superpowers’. Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: Granta, 1993), p. 389. 7. William Fulbright, ‘In Thrall to Fear’, The New Yorker, 8 January 1972, quoted in Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), p. 370. 8. The New York Times, 27 and 29 April 1966, quoted in Saunders, p. 371. 9. See Joan Didion, ‘Something Horrible in El Salvador’, The New York Review of Books, 14 July 1994; and Alma Guillermoprieto’s collection The Heart that Bleeds (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). 10. Margaret Randall, ‘Reclaiming Voices: Notes on a New Female Practice in Journalism’, Latin American Perspectives, 18.3 (Summer 1991), pp. 103–13 (p. 106). 11. Gellhorn, p. 319. 12. Ibid. p. 337. 13. Carolyn Forché, The Country Between Us (New York: Harper Perennial, 1981), p. 7. See also Romero, film, directed by John Duigan. USA: Paulist Pictures, 1989. 14. Suzanne Gardinier, ‘To the Tribunal’, in The New World (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, [1993] 2000), p. 69. 15. Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (New York: Vintage, [1977] 1992), p. 23. 16. A medium-sized city in Iowa, used here to represent ‘Main Street, USA’ – the American heartland and Every-town. 17. Stone, p. 169. The urgency Zecca invokes is a familiar spectre: a leitmotif in American politics during this period was ‘pre-emptive action’, justified by the assumption that American security was so volatile and endangered that the time required for diplomacy or analysis was too costly. 18. Ibid. p. 166. In Carolyn Forché’s poem ‘Return’, she echoes this scepticism towards true intercultural interaction, equating the plight of the author, full of righteous fury, with the miserytourist: a Salvadoran woman says to her, ‘It is / not your right to feel powerless. Better / people than you were powerless. / You have not returned to your country, / but to a life you never left.’ Carolyn Forché, ‘Return’, in The Country Between Us (New York: Harper, 1982), p. 20. 19. Cited in Didion, ‘Something Horrible’, p. 10. 20. Gellhorn, p. 333.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 202

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the pax americana 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

203

Elmore Leonard, Bandits (New York: Harper Collins, [1987] 2003), pp. 207–8. Franco, p. 11. Gellhorn, p. 320. Which translates as ‘to live free. . . or die’. June Jordan, ‘Dance: Nicaragua’, in Directed by Desire (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), pp. 419–20. Poem originally published in Living Room: New Poems 1980–1984 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985). Joan Didion, Salvador (London: Granta, [1983] 2006), p. 65. Ibid. p. 66. Ibid. p. 64. Internal quotation marks removed for ease of reading. Death squads worked in conjunction with Salvadoran security services to eliminate opponents, leftist rebels and their supporters (alleged or real). Martin, p. 110. Gellhorn, p. 328. Ibid. p. 354. Translation: ‘The damned ones of Chorrillo’. Didion, Salvador, p. 57. Gellhorn, p. 327. Didion, Salvador, p. 19. Jordan, ‘Fourth Poem from Nicaragua Libre: Report from the Frontier’, in Directed by Desire, p. 336. Forché, p. 16. Didion, Salvador, p. 20. Stone’s social-anthropologist also senses the romantic ironies, reflecting that the landscape of Tecan ‘was a memento mori, the view ahead like a dead ocean floor’. Stone, p. 158. Because of substantial US support for the anti-communist Trujillo at the time, the massacre found new relevance in the 1980s as a precursor to and stand-in for current events. Jacques Derrida, ‘Demeure: Fiction and Testimony’, in The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 27. Burroughs’s novella Ghost of Chance reinvokes Libertatia at greater length, apparently as a parable of environmental devastation. The colony of Libertatia, or Libertalia, may or may not have actually existed in some lesser form: there is much dispute, but it was discussed in A General History of the Pyrates by an author who might have been Daniel Defoe writing under a pseudonym. See Kevin Rushby, Hunting Pirate Heaven (London: Constable and Robinson, 2002); David Cordingly (ed.), Pirates: Terror on the High Seas (Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, 1996). William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (New York: Picador, [1981] 2001), p. 332. Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime (New York: Gollancz, [1987] 2006), p. 389. It should be noted that Shepard’s Panama is more a stand-in for other Central American wars rather than representative of America’s invasion of Panama, which began two years after this novel was published. David Thoreen, ‘Thomas Pynchon’s political parable: Parallels between Vineland and “Rip Van Winkle”’, ANQ, 14.3 (Summer 2001), pp. 45–51. Thomas Pynchon, ‘The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee’, The New York Times Book Review, 6 June 1993, available at http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/ pynchon-sloth.html, accessed 11 March 2010. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (London: Vintage, [1990] 2000), p. 265. Ibid. p. 265. Saunders, p. 3. Pynchon, Vineland, p. 264. Ibid. p. 340. Kurt Vonnegut with David Hoppe, ‘Aggressively Unconventional: An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut’, Utne Reader (May/June 2003), p. 34. As noted above, Guillermoprieto also reported from the front lines.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 203

30/01/2012 16:24

204 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

kris anderson

Díaz, p. 83. Francisco Goldman, The Long Night of White Chickens (New York: Grove Press, 1992), p. 239. ‘Negroes’ here simply implies ‘fellow Dominicans’. Díaz, pp. 284–5. Ibid. p. 21. Ibid. p. 147. ‘Buenas noches. ¿Cómo puedo servirte?’ (‘Good evening, how can I help you?’) Goldman, p. 105. Díaz, p. 275. Junot Díaz, with Edward Marriott, ‘The return of the young master: an interview with Junot Díaz’, The Guardian, 10 February 2008, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/ feb/10/culture.fiction, accessed 23 March 2010. Díaz, Oscar Wao, pp. 224–5. Ibid. p. 263. Meghan O’Rourke, ‘Questions for Junot Díaz’, Slate Magazine, 8 April 2008, available at http:// www.slate.com/id/2188494, accessed 16 February 2010. Robert Stone with Allan Vorda, ‘An Interview with Robert Stone’, Mississippi Review, 20.1/2 (1991), pp. 98–109 (p. 107). Gellhorn, p. 332. Ibid. p. 332. Pynchon, ‘The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee’. Pynchon, Vineland, p. 248.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 204

30/01/2012 16:24

21

VIETNAM FICTIONS Mark A. Heberle

I

n the most recent collection of Vietnam War critical essays, Philip Beidler points out that the conflict in Vietnam has produced more books than any other American war.1 Fiction is the largest category of imaginative works, of course; the annotated bibliography of (almost exclusively) American Vietnam War fictions compiled by John Newman in 1996 numbers 666 novels and 312 short stories or story collections. It would be futile to even fully categorise such a vast body of work in 40,000 words, let alone in this chapter, but let me make two broad distinctions at the outset. First, we should separate serious Vietnam War fiction – with its allegiance to historical, political and personal authenticity and imaginative integrity – from popular fiction, with its primary allegiance to entertaining the mass market or specialised niche markets for profit. Within the vast body of serious American fiction, we can also distinguish works whose primary focus is combat in Vietnam from those that are not primarily war stories and are often set elsewhere. For the discussion that follows, I will label the first category ‘Vietnam war stories’ and the second ‘Vietnam stories’. Many of the most successful fictions combine both categories, of course, but the primary subject of ‘war stories’ is the battlefield. At least until the war in Vietnam the usual understanding of British and American war literature seldom went beyond the combat episteme. For Americans and much of the world outside South East Asia itself, however, ‘Vietnam’ has come to mean more than a war and its consequences for combatants and their victims. It is a signifier for the cultural, political, ethical and psychological antecedents and consequences of a catastrophe, seen almost entirely from an American or American-centric point of view, that took place during the Cold War in America and Vietnam and that continues to affect individual Americans and to influence American foreign and military policy. Fictions that explore this larger context often use the Vietnam War to critique American culture and ideology. Stylistically, most Vietnam fictions, and nearly all the war stories, are written in the realist mode, with linear plots, an emphasis on authentic circumstantial detail, and conventionally particularised characterisation and characters. Many, however (including some of the most critically acclaimed works), are absurdist or surreal, non-linear and/or parodic. A related but not symmetrical distinction can be made between what I will call ‘metonymic’ fictions and those that are more radically ‘metaphoric’. Metonymic fictions closely reflect and complement the historical Vietnam experience and are typically realistic. Metaphoric Vietnam works deliberately create an imagined world that stands in place of or transfigures that experience; typically paradigmatic or quasi-allegorical, they are

205

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 205

30/01/2012 16:24

206

mark a. heberle

often metafictional, suggesting that ‘Vietnam’ is a textual creation as much as a historical reality. A few axioms lie behind the brief discussion below of some important works and writers. First and above all, Vietnam remains the most spectacular American military and political failure in history, and the resonance of that painfully lost war affects all serious representations. Thus, it is a truism to say that American soldiers never lost a battle until America lost the war; nonetheless, even the combat narratives present a record of suffering, anomie, degradation and futility unredeemed by the satisfactions of personal heroism, success or endurance; comradeship or fraternal love; or even, in some cases, survival. Second, because American battlefield victories, sacrifices, losses and atrocities were ultimately wasted, existential and ethical traumas and the disfiguring of character pervade American Vietnam fiction as both the residue and the sign of that loss. Third, since the war took a decade and a half to be lost, dates of composition and publication are significant: for example, no combat accounts written after 1975 can fail to be ironic even at their most positive. Fourth, with the exception of some early war stories, redemption if it comes is hard-won and merely personal and involves temporal, geographical and/or moral and ideological separation from the war, and sometimes rejection or at least revaluation of America itself. Three important books of vastly different quality were precursors to the serious American fiction that would follow: The Quiet American (1955), The Ugly American (1958) and The Green Berets (1965).2 The two American books, popular sub-literary treatments of Vietnam, were both influential best-sellers when the Cold War was heating up in South East Asia. Both were written expressly to propagate a fervent anti-communist faith, nearly universal in mid-century America, that was to be absent in the serious fiction to follow. The Green Berets is a metonymic representation of combat operations, while The Ugly American metaphorically deals with American civic and political projects in a mythical South East Asian country. Graham Greene’s seminal novel, written and set in the final years of French Indochina, is likewise strongly political in its focus, presenting a more prescient anti-American perspective. Its central event is the political murder of the very naïve, very idealistic and very destructive American secret agent Alden Pyle by the Viet Minh. Later American writers found in The Quiet American an uncanny anticipation of our political and military failure in Vietnam, a prophetic yet sorrowful condemnation of the very enterprise championed in the two American books. The characters and actions of these three early works are based on real-life originals and actual events and therefore illustrate the uncertain border between fiction and nonfiction of many American Vietnam war narratives. Indeed, many first and/or only war novels are loosely fictionalised retellings of the author’s own experiences. Claiming ‘authenticity’ typically reinforces the notion that the battlefield can only be represented by former combat soldiers. In American Vietnam war fiction, however, that claim often carries with it an implied ideological, political and/or ethical charge emanating from the experiences, if not directly from the voices, of the common soldiers who were sent forth to fight, be wounded and die for America in Vietnam carrying out flawed policies and strategies that were devised or protested against by others who were ignorant of and protected from actual combat conditions and operations. These voices were eventually collected in numerous books of oral histories and testimonies, of which the most representative may be Mark Baker’s Nam (1981), which presents over two hundred longer and shorter excerpts from interviews with anonymous

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 206

30/01/2012 16:24

vietnam fictions

207

combat soldiers and support personnel who had survived the war. Nam is organised into four sections that replicate the normal cycle from being drafted or enlisting, to the year in Vietnam, to returning home: Initiation, Operations, War Stories, The World. Among the most striking testimony that Baker elicits are memories of combat nurses, who confronted unimaginable horrors of suffering and mutilation among the damaged boys and men whom they tried to heal, and whose means of coping included alcohol, drugs and promiscuous sex. To some extent, Baker’s witnesses may have composed their testimony to meet the expectations of their interviewer, a draft-deferred college student and occasional anti-war protestor whose conversations with a Vietnam war veteran roommate in 1972 inspired him to the project that was to become Nam. Although Baker’s witnesses include survivors who supported the war, the stories of nearly all are dark ones: their anger, depression, cynicism and anomie presumably reflect a final judgement upon their experience at the time of the interview. The final dozen testimonies of readjustment are relatively cathartic, however, and Baker brings the volume to a close with a brief reflection by a veteran suspended, like many, between reliving the war and recovering from it: Thinking about Vietnam once in a while, in a crazy kind of way, I wish that just for an hour I could be there. And then be transported back. Maybe just to be there so I’d wish I was back here again.3 Published just before the 1982 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Nam seems to call, unselfconsciously, for the sort of civic catharsis and recognition of shared national tragedy that the black reflecting Wall was to foster. Nothing might seem farther from the artifice of fiction than the testimonies of Nam, yet they illustrate many of its characteristic features: post-traumatic recovery of war experiences years after they had occurred; nearly affectless representation of horror, savagery and grief; absence of political and ideological posturing, patriotic or otherwise; alienation from the self that entered the war but was changed or deranged by it. Baker’s role as a sounding board for the unheard story of the war was enacted more directly in Michael Herr’s brilliant volume of Dispatches, the indispensable American literary treatment of Vietnam for many readers – and to many American Vietnam writers. Travelling as a freelance journalist throughout the war in 1967–8, Herr published four long eyewitness pieces for Esquire between 1968 and 1970, with a fifth post-war reflection, ‘High on War’, that returns to Herr’s experiences in 1967–8 and was published just before the appearance in 1977 of Dispatches, a revised, augmented, final and authoritative account.4 Besides being a critique of the war, Herr’s book is a critique of conventional war journalism – its pretence of objectivity, its detachment and inauthenticity, its indolent reproduction of official viewpoints, its failure to register the perspective of the grunt killers and victims whom Herr found both appalling and pitiable but who told the truest stories. Arranged chronologically, Dispatches deals with the aftermath of the November 1967 bloodbaths around Dak To in the Central Highlands; the beginning of the Tet Offensive in the Mekong Delta in early 1968; the battle for Hue during and after the Offensive in early spring; and the second Tet offensive in Saigon in May. But Herr’s account is non-linear, particularly in the catalogue of violent and ironic epiphanies titled ‘Illumination Rounds’, and his critical political history of the war unconventional. Ultimately, however, he traces it to the ‘secret history’5 of the post- World War II OSS operatives and their CIA successors whose sputtering spook war was reinforced and ultimately replaced by successive waves of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 207

30/01/2012 16:24

208

mark a. heberle

military and political escalation and de-escalation that could never redeem the original mistake or failure of imagination that had already been foreseen: Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Bien Phu. But the first happened in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French and Washington gave it no more substance that if Graham Greene had made it up too.6 Dispatches is not a novel, but like The Quiet American, it presents a writer’s truth that proved to be more just than that of the American Mission and its mythmakers. Herr’s original Esquire articles and the book they became exemplify the American New Journalism of the 1960s as surveyed by John Hellmann (1981), who discusses Norman Mailer as well as Herr. Author of The Naked and the Dead (1949), a massive, classic realist novel of World War II, Mailer produced two very different Vietnam-focused books in the 1960s. The Armies of the Night (1968),7 an account of the anti-war March on the Pentagon on 21 October 1967, in which tens of thousands participated and in which hundreds, including the author, were arrested and later released, won both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. During one of the rallies held the night before the March,8 Mailer nearly read from another just-published novel. Not even included in John Newman’s bibliography of American Vietnam fiction, Why Are We In Vietnam? is one of the earliest fictions of the war and one of the most radically metaphorical, a multiply narrated, sometimes phantasmagorical account of a bear hunt by Texans in Alaska, laced with obscenity.9 Also stylish but more restrained, Armies pays homage to the energy and outrage of the thousands of 1960s campus and citizen anti-war protesters and their pamphlets, resonantly carrying the movement to a literary apotheosis. Far more deliberately than Herr, Mailer is his own chief protagonist, and his subtitle, ‘History as a Novel, The Novel as History’, not only mirrors the complementary two-‘Book’ structure of the book but could serve as a description of the New Journalism. Mailer reinvented both himself and Vietnam in these two works, which extend the war to the political, economic and cultural forces that lay behind it. Such extension is nearly paradigmatic in the next Vietnam National Book Award winner, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers (1974),10 a bleak but haunting story that juxtaposes the South East Asian heroin trade and the darkening of the American soul that was a residue of the war. Only its first fifth is set in Vietnam, where John Converse, a hack journalist, employs Ray Hicks, a former Marine buddy and Vietnam War veteran, to transport a shipment of smack from Vietnam to San Francisco, where Converse’s wife Marge, already a junkie, is waiting to receive it. Converse’s get-rich-quick scheme is intercepted by CIA informants, and the novel, which moves from San Francisco to a former hippie commune in New Mexico, becomes a degrading chase adventure on American soil. Everyone is corrupted or dead by the end. Mailer’s perplexed but largely benign view of the drug counterculture in 1967 has become poisoned in Stone’s novel, published one year after American military withdrawal from South East Asia and one year before the war was lost. Stone’s own year as a freelance correspondent in Saigon in 1971 encourages a reading of Dog Soldiers as both a roman noir thriller and as a moral fable of the corrupt legacy of Vietnam. Unlike the examples of Mailer and Stone and regardless of the reservations of critics like Don Ringnalda and Philip Jason, the great majority of serious American Vietnam fictions are conventional war stories. Perhaps the most critically acclaimed is John Del

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 208

30/01/2012 16:24

vietnam fictions

209

Vecchio’s 13th Valley (1982),11 a massive, complex account of a successful company-sized assault against a North Vietnamese Army headquarters in the remote Khe Ta Lou River Valley painstakingly drawn from the details and official documents of Operation Texas Star, which began on 13 August 1970. Like many Vietnam war stories, The 13th Valley is radically metonymic in two senses: the narrative is a version of an actual operation and the author was involved in that operation. Authentic reproduction of the minute circumstances of jungle fighting, from using radio call letters to fording rivers to stepping around mined areas, is evidently one of Del Vecchio’s most important artistic criteria, and on that score The 13th Valley is a resounding success. Less successful are its excursions into political and military history and philosophy, and protagonists’ intrusive memories of girlfriends and wives. Despite its positive and sympathetic appreciation of the GIs’ mundane heroism, the novel highlights the sense of disaffection and failure typical of American Vietnam war stories. At its end, Del Vecchio makes Alpha Company’s hard-fought victory over the NVA dramatically meaningless: its commander, first sergeant and chief medic, respected and even loved by their comrades, are all killed and their bodies abandoned to the enemy, and Del Vecchio’s chief protagonist, an inexperienced combat ‘cherry’ in chapter 1 (‘Chelini’), has passed beyond his baptism by fire to become a combat-deranged berserker. Like Del Vecchio, Larry Heinemann provides a glossary of military acronyms and grunt colloquialisms for Close Quarters (1977), a tell-tale sign of metonymic war novels and their grounding in combat authenticity.12 The novel is more narrowly autobiographical than Del Vecchio’s, refashioning Heinemann’s one-year tour in Vietnam as a 25th Division armoured infantryman (March 1967–March 1968) through the experiences of Private Philip Dosier, the first-person narrator. Heinemann’s is a realist combat narrative, but far more impressionistic than The 13th Valley, eschewing both the political and documentary supplements of Del Vecchio’s ambitious novel as well as any sense of progress or purpose to the repetitive, enervating and brutal platoon operations, which are accompanied by a repertoire of unfiltered grunt voices, rawly racist, sexist and obscene. Heinemann’s National Book Award-winning Paco’s Story (1986) opens with the damaged returned veteran motif that concluded Close Quarters and extends it to novel length.13 Grittily and grimly realistic in its details, Heinemann’s post- traumatic story is narrated by a figure who represents the collective voice of Paco’s comrades, all of them but Paco killed accidentally by an American artillery barrage after they had gang-raped a teenaged Viet Cong girl. The sometimes surreal narration suggests that Paco’s hideous post-war wounds are psychological as well as physical and that he carries the eradicated platoon with him as he pursues a virtually posthumous life after the war. The annihilation of American combatants is found in Jonathan Rubin’s The Barking Deer (1974) and Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green (1983) as well as in Paco’s Story.14 Heinemann’s catastrophe precedes and generates Paco’s misery, while the cataclysms in the other two novels bring their Vietnam narratives to an end. All three strain credibility, but by exaggerating operational failures to near-apocalyptic dimensions, they present synecdoches for the lost war as a whole. The Barking Deer employs unrelenting verbal irony and sarcasm to register the abysmal failure of a Green Beret detachment who live with and train Montagnard villagers to seek out and destroy the local Viet Cong. A blackly humorous parody of Green Beret counter-insurgency and a paradigm of America’s destructive attempt to ‘save’ Vietnam, the novel skewers American ignorance and incompetence, Vietnamese Communist inhumanity, South Vietnamese corruption and deviousness, and Montagnard naïvety and backwardness. By its end, the village of Buon Yun has been

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 209

30/01/2012 16:24

210

mark a. heberle

burned to the ground during a poorly organised VC attack, the Montagnard strike force has been wiped out to a man by a misdirected American helicopter air strike, and all the Green Berets, as well as the helicopter pilot and the American anti-war journalist whom he has taken on his fatal rescue mission, are dead. A similar catastrophe climaxes the war story in Meditations in Green (which won the Scribner’s Maxwell Perkins Award for best first novel about the American experience) when the American 1069th Military Intelligence base is infiltrated by VC sappers and blown to bits by precisely targeted mortar rounds from the enemy that the Americans were supposed to be searching for and eliminating. Meditations juxtaposes an in-country narrative of American murderousness, bungling and drug-saturated operational and moral collapse, the post-war attempts of the traumatised survivors Griffin and Trips to free themselves from various forms of addiction to Vietnam, and cryptic lists of prescriptions for recovery encouraged by Griffin’s eco-pharmacist, whose name is Arden. Wright’s Shakespearean tracery only scratches the surface of the book’s metafictionality. The most important signifier is the title’s ‘green’, which, like the novel itself, brings together the US Army, the Vietnamese jungle and the unsuccessful attempts to photograph/exfoliate/ penetrate it on foot with Griffin’s post-war attempts to replace machine culture with the natural world, gardening as post-war therapy, and cultivating oblivion by growing psychotropic plants. Serious American Vietnam war fiction, which includes war stories, post-war stories and non-war stories as well as combat narratives and metaphoric metafictions, is thus both voluminous and various. It is also narrow in fundamental ways. Even the serious literature is written largely by and for white heterosexual males who were or might be soldiers. It is marked by narrow and/or sexist subject positions – women figures are almost exclusively objects of desire, much of it degrading – and by domestic and xenophobic racism. Despite notable treatments of Vietnam by women authors (Jayne Anne Phillips, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer), only Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country has achieved canonical status.15 Mason was never in Vietnam, and her novel originated from her interviews with Vietnam veterans, a trajectory that is mirrored by her teenage protagonist Samantha Hughes, whose father was killed in Vietnam when she was in her mother’s womb and whose combat experiences she tries to relive. In addition, her uncle Emmet is one of a number of traumatised veterans that Sam wants to nurse back to health. Her attempts to take on these conventionally gendered roles are unsuccessful, however, and the novel ends movingly and redemptively at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was dedicated while Mason was still working on the novel. Sam Hughes finds her name among the war dead on the Wall, as well as her father’s, replicating Bobbie Mason’s epiphanic visit in 1984, when she found her own name also. The African American experience in Vietnam, notably represented in Wallace Terry’s oral-history volume Bloods,16 was marked initially by exemplary heroism and sacrifice but by increasing disaffection with the war and with America itself after the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the murder that spring of Martin Luther King, who had opposed fighting in Vietnam since 1965. As Shirley Hanshaw has noted, African American Vietnam fiction writers present protagonists who undergo a growth not only in self-awareness but in cultural awareness and larger community responsibility.17 African American fictions are typically focused on the protagonist’s return from Vietnam, reversing the conventional pattern, and the war and its details are far less important, even in retrospective narration, than the present and future of the protagonist and other African Americans.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 210

30/01/2012 16:24

vietnam fictions

211

A. R. Flowers’s De Mojo Blues (1985) provides a good example.18 The novel begins with the return of three handcuffed black combat veterans – Tucept HighJohn, Mike Daniels and Willie Dupont Brown – to Oakland Army Base in 1970, where they are dishonourably discharged on false charges of killing an abusive white officer. Resuming their life in America, each successfully takes on a personally and socially redemptive role. Tucept’s combat experiences in Vietnam, which alternate with his evolving new identity in America, therefore come to be seen by him as meaningless, servile operations in themselves that reinforce his sense of racial injustice and motivate him in the direction of a black solidarity that can transform the world as the novel moves from metonymy and realism to metaphor and fantasy. Because American Vietnam fiction by and about women and African American veterans is centred elsewhere than the war, it challenges the conventional expectations for war stories. Fiction focused on Vietnamese figures, on the other hand, is often stereotypically sexist and racist, treating even friendly Vietnamese with indifference, bewilderment, condescension, contempt or hatred. Such figuration may intend to reflect or critique GI ignorance, resentment and fear or even to purposively undercut official propaganda about American–Vietnamese friendship and shared interests, but it may simply reflect an attitude that the author assumes he shares with his intended audience. Emerging Vietnamese American writers may rewrite this script, but as of now only two Vietnam veteran writers, Robert Olen Butler and Wayne Karlin, have written both extensively as well as sympathetically about the Vietnamese. Butler was a Vietnamese linguist during his tour of duty and Karlin, a Marine helicopter gunner, edits Curbstone Press’s Voices from Vietnam Series of contemporary Vietnamese fiction. Unlike other American fiction writers, therefore, both are well acquainted with Vietnamese culture and literature. Butler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992), a remarkable tour de force of cultural and linguistic ventriloquism, presents fifteen separate narratives by Vietnamese personae who have settled in Louisiana after the Vietnam War.19 Six other novels, from The Alleys of Eden (1981) to The Deep Green Sea (1997), deal with both American and Vietnamese figures from Saigon to Louisiana and New York and back again, affected variously by the war and its aftermath.20 Karlin’s Vietnam fiction falls into the psychological thriller category, presenting dark post-war scenarios that continue the trauma of Vietnam for both Americans and Vietnamese in Karlin’s native Maryland (Lost Armies, 1988; Prisoners, 2000) and in Thailand and Burma (Us, 1993).21 Most of the American novels of the war derive from and substantially reflect their authors’ personal experience, and few first novels have been succeeded by a second. Among the handful of authors who have produced substantial bodies of Vietnam fiction, the most successful and significant is Tim O’Brien, whose stories and novels have won numerous honours, including a National Book Award for Going After Cacciato (1978) and the Society of American Historians’ James Fenimore Cooper Prize for In the Lake of the Woods (1994). These two works, together with his masterpiece, The Things They Carried (1990), have doubtless entered the permanent canon of American fiction.22 All of O’Brien’s works, from his initial combat memoir If I Die in A Combat Zone (1973)to his collective novel July, July (2002),23 are fundamentally Vietnam books, a phenomenon that the author has given up trying to argue against. O’Brien’s power to reshape what happened to him into stories that seem to be truer than actuality has made his ‘Vietnam’ one of the lasting fictional countries in American literature. Ultimately, the foundation of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 211

30/01/2012 16:24

212

mark a. heberle

O’Brien’s literary magic is his moral seriousness: all the novels are serious attempts to work out the implications of his choice to fight in a war that he knew was unjust. John Newman’s comprehensive annotated bibliography covers works written up until 1995. O’Brien’s last novel dates from 2004, however, and serious, significant and enduring works of American Vietnam fiction continue to engage writers and readers more than thirty years after the end of the war. Among the most recent are Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (2007),24 which won the National Book Award, and Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2009).25 Coincidentally, these two recent massive novels demonstrate almost symmetrically the range of American Vietnam fictions. The first, by an award-winning, well-established poet and fiction writer who was not in Vietnam, is a metaphorical non-combat novel of the war grounded in previous texts and political archetypes (the title translates the Hebrew of Exodus, and Apocalypse Now, The Quiet American and The Ugly American are channelled throughout). Marlantes’s is a first book by a much-decorated Marine combat veteran of Vietnam, based on his own experiences in I Corps, a doubly metonymic fictional account of what it was like to fight, to die and to win meaningless battles in Vietnam. Like The 13th Valley, Matterhorn details the mortifying minutiae of combat operations, beginning with a soldier who is medevacked with a leech stuck in his penis and ending with the last of tens of deaths among men whom we are encouraged to both pity and admire. Tree of Smoke is no less realistic in its details, and its chronicle-like chapter titles have the form of a linear narrative of the war and its aftermath, but Johnson’s novel, at its best, is an astringent, quasi-symbolic, metafictional critique of American Cold War demonology. Johnson’s unlikely moral hero is a middle-aged noncombatant, a former missionary and social worker in Vietnam, and one of the few figures in the novel who does not betray someone else. Eight years after the 4 April 1975 Operation Babylift crash in Saigon on which she was one of the children’s attendants, she reflects on that tragedy just before she is to address a Vietnamese orphan care agency in Minneapolis and then silently blesses, in Johnson’s final sentence, both those who had survived Vietnam and those who had not: She sat in the audience thinking – someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone’s soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can’t remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose homes will break sooner or later, people who’ve ruined their health, worshipped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved.26 JFK’s call for Americans in 1960 to ‘bear any burden, pay any price’ helped to generate a dark crusade that would ultimately cost millions of South East Asians and hundreds of thousands of Americans either death or lasting wounds. Like Kathy Jones, as Marlantes’s and Johnson’s books splendidly attest, American fiction is unlikely to get over it.

Notes 1. Philip D. Beidler, ‘Thirty Years After: the Archaeologies’, in Mark Heberle (ed.), Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War Literature, Film, and Art (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 10–27 (p. 25). 2. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (New York: Viking, 1955); William J. Lederer and Eugene

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 212

30/01/2012 16:24

vietnam fictions

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

213

Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: Norton, 1958); Robin Moore, The Green Berets (New York: Crown, 1965). Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: William Morrow, 1981), p. 319. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977) (New York: Vintage International-Random House, 1981). Ibid. p. 50. Ibid. p. 49. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (New York: Penguin/Plume, [1968] 1994). Narrated in Armies, p. 51. Norman Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam? A Novel (New York: Picador, [1967] 1977). Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers: A Novel (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). John Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (New York: Bantam Books, 1982). Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters (New York: Penguin, [1977] 1986). Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story (New York: Penguin, 1986). Jonathan Rubin, The Barking Deer (New York: Avon, 1974); Stephen Wright, Meditations in Green (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983). Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Random House, 1984). Shirley Hanshaw, ‘Refusal to be Can(n)on Fodder: African American Representation of the Vietnam War and Canon Formation’, in Heberle, p. 131. A. R. Flowers, De Mojo Blues (New York: Ballantine, 1985). Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (New York: Henry Holt, 1992). Robert Olen Butler, The Alleys of Eden (New York: Horizon Press, 1981); The Deep Green Sea (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). Wayne Karlin, Lost Armies (New York: Henry Holt, 1988); Us (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); Prisoners (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2000). Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (New York: Dell, 1978); In the Lake of the Woods (New York: Penguin, 1994); The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1990). Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Dell, 1973); July, July (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002). Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007). Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (Berkeley: El León Literary Arts, 2009). Johnson, p. 702.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 213

30/01/2012 16:24

22

‘WILL THERE BE PEACE AGAIN?’: AMERICAN AND VIETNAMESE POETRY ON THE VIETNAM/ AMERICAN WAR Subarno Chattarji

M

ore than thirty years after the fall of Saigon the Vietnam War continues to be written and rewritten in the American imagination. The war that the US lost has spawned an impressive volume of literature, films, memoirs, reportage, journal articles, academic courses and PhD dissertations. There is a distinguished body of writings by American veterans detailing the boredom and horror of combat as well as post-war traumas within a country that shunned the returning veterans. Some veterans returned to Vietnam and have written prose and poetry detailing their experiences. The primacy of Vietnam within American ideological and political contexts is evidenced not only in presidential campaigns (John McCain evocatively drawing on his POW status) but in these writings which participate in the battle over how America wishes to remember the conflict. A growing body of translated works by Vietnamese now joins this memorial debate focusing on the legacy of the war from Vietnamese perspectives. John Balaban was a conscientious objector during the war and went to Vietnam to work for the International Voluntary Services and then as a representative for the Committee of Responsibility to Save War-Injured Children. Balaban returned to Vietnam after the war – a trend followed by many veterans such as W. D. Ehrhart, Tim O’Brien and Bruce Weigl. In his memoir Remembering Heaven’s Face, Balaban perceives a Vietnam that is healing and he sees hope for the future: ‘This was the Vietnam almost obliterated by the war. Everywhere about me – in all this dazzle of Delta life – I can see a happiness and a healing, a realm of heaven, earth, and humankind going on with full creative force.’1 Another returnee veteran, Larry Rottmann, had a similar desire to meet ‘real’ Vietnamese: ‘I wanted to meet these folks. To hold them. Touch them. Smell their life and sweat. I want to know they are alive, especially the children.’2 Indeed, the Vietnam of peace, beauty and happiness had been obliterated by the war and Balaban justly celebrates Vietnamese lives often unperceived by American soldiers. Yet the ‘touchy-feely’ guiltridden desire expressed by Rottmann reflects American desires and pathologies that seem imposed onto the post-war Vietnamese landscape and people. Rottmann reinforces some of the insularity of post-war veteran writings by projecting Vietnam as a space for karmic regeneration, an escape from painful memory and history by performing acts of goodness and penance. While the Vietnam War is often projected in the US as something that happened to

214

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 214

30/01/2012 16:24

poetry on the vietnam/american war

215

America (the idea of victimhood represented in films such as Platoon), there is another world that suffered from the war and its aftermath and Bruce Weigl attempts to inscribe some of those realities in ‘Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag’. The poem stages attempts at mutual understanding: Because this evening Miss Hoang Yen sat down with me in the small tiled room of her family house I am unable to sleep. [. . .] I did not feel strange in the house my country had tried to bomb into dust.3 The empathy coexists with unease. Miss Yen’s recollections in the next few lines about her childhood in Hanoi during President Nixon’s Christmas bombing has the force of personal testimony that disrupts the poet’s easy acceptance of responsibility: ‘[She] told me / how afraid she was of those days and how this fear / had dug inside her like a worm and lives / inside her still, won’t die or go away’.4 Miss Yen’s fear is analogous to the trauma suffered by veterans whereby the war is a continuous living presence. Weigl highlights the hitherto invisible, gives voice to the victim, and, paradoxically, only the victim can offer forgiveness which the returnee veteran seeks: ‘And because she’s stronger, she comforted me, / said I’m not to blame, / the million sorrows alive in her gaze’.5 The poet’s attempt to take on his country’s burden of guilt and moral culpability and the absolution offered – although somewhat sentimental – allows for a coexistence of the ‘million sorrows’ of the Vietnamese, the dead and the frightened. The poetic reconciliation is steeped in the contradictions and pain of the past and its continuance in the present: ‘All night I ached for her and for myself / and nothing I could think or pray / would make it stop [. . .] In small reed boats / the lotus gatherers sailed out / among their resuming white blossoms’.6 The ‘resuming white blossoms’ are emblematic of a pastoral that is often evoked as a counterpoint to the blighting experiences of war, but one wonders whether the traumatic memories of the war can be countered by that evocation. Although the poem articulates the pain of another vulnerable being, that utterance is placed within the context of the veteran-poet’s desire, indeed imperative need, for forgiveness. W. D. Ehrhart in ‘The Distance We Travel’, the title poem of a collection published in 1993, plunges into Vietnamese worlds and seeks forgiveness: ‘In silence he passes among them / nodding agreeably, [. . .] / nodding at what he remembers was here, / wanting to gather the heart of this place / into himself, to make it forgive him’.7 The poet-persona moves as a silent stranger, immersing himself in a world that is strange and vivid, both alien and uncannily familiar. The plea for forgiveness is more baldly expressed than in Weigl and equally urgent. The ‘stranger’s’ walk through a Vietnamese town leads him to two girls playing badminton. He plays with them and is then served a ‘cool drink’ and sits with the girls’ father. To bridge the awkwardness of the moment he shows them a photograph of his daughter, Leela, and the man responds by showing him the scars he suffered at the hands of the Vietcong: The father lifts his shirt to reveal a scar on his chest. ‘VC’, he says, then drops his shirt and lights a cigarette,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 215

30/01/2012 16:24

216

subarno chattarji

offers one to the stranger. Together they smoke the quiet smoke of memory. Seven years the father spent in a camp for prisoners of war [. . .] ‘Li-La’, the father softly says, touching the stranger’s heart with his open hand.8 Ehrhart retrieves historical complexities often overlooked or exaggerated within the US, and the ‘stranger’ offers insights into the aftermath of a civil war, a world of great suffering, endurance and forgiveness. While Balaban, Rottmann, Bruce Weigl, W. D. Ehrhart and many other American veterans attempt to sketch the particularities of Vietnamese existence after the war, their joys, sorrows, anxieties, and the intricate betrayals and horrors of post-1975 Vietnam unified under the Communists are represented by Vietnamese voices which create polyphonic counterpoints to the monophony of American points of view.9 Post-war Vietnam is as complex an entity as it was during the war and there has been a concerted effort since the early 1980s to make Vietnamese representations of the war and its aftermath available to an English-reading audience, primarily in the US. Vietnamese literary representations can be divided into several categories: writings from North Vietnam and those from the South, poems written by communists and anticommunists during and after the war, writings by veterans of the American war and non-veterans, and immigrant writing detailing the challenges, the pain and the hopes of Vietnamese migrants in the US. In all these categories – which are themselves fluid – the one common thread is the American war and its aftermath. Whether explicitly or otherwise, most post-war Vietnamese poetry is political in its avowal or suppression of the war and its aftermath. Before examining some literary themes and concerns, it is instructive to dwell briefly on the politics of publication in so far as it is discernible from editorial introductions and manifestoes. Translation is in itself a political act and the types of poems, stories, novels translated are often determined by the ideological assumptions of the translators and the editors. At one end of the spectrum is what could be defined loosely as the left-liberal editor. The editorial hope here is that literature will lead to understanding and reconciliation. Bruce Weigl writes in his introduction to Poems From Captured Documents: Thanh T. Nguyen [co-translator] and I hope that these translations will serve as a bridge [. . .] and that by making available these intimate and deeply human glimpses from the lives of the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front during the American war, we will encourage and facilitate some kind of reconciliation – if not a political one, then an emotional and psychological one.10 At the opposite end is James Banerian, a translator and editor who despises communism and says as much in his editorial note: Although the Communists have had an important role in the history of modern Vietnam, no Communist writers will be found in this book [Vietnamese Short Stories: An Introduction]. Nearly all of the authors included in these pages are victims of Communist repression; it would be ludicrous and illogical to associate the artificial literature of the persecutors with the sincere expressions of the persecuted. Besides,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 216

30/01/2012 16:24

poetry on the vietnam/american war

217

the Moscow–Hanoi partnership employs its own translators so there is no need for me to help them.11 These two polarities reflect a larger cultural division within the US in its perceptions of the Vietnamese. As Wayne Karlin, Vietnam veteran, novelist, editor and translator writes: There exists among Americans two stereotypes of the Vietnamese [. . .] The first sees the Vietnamese as sadistic and heartless communist robots able to win through sheer cruelty and lack of respect for human life. The second paints the Vietnamese as saintly, simple-yet-wise peasant-or-poet warriors, Third World bodhisattvas who speak in fortune cookies platitudes, super competent soldiers, who in spite of their martial skills are still gentle, just, and politically correct.12 One needs to negotiate these extremes at the same time as avoid the platitudinous desire for healing and reconciliation. The best writings break this stereotype, introducing realities of terror and hopelessness, hope and beauty, sadness and despair in Vietnam during and after the war. The body of translated Vietnamese poetry deals with certain discernible themes including the communist idealisation and love of one’s land, the horrors of war, and experiences as a refugee and exile in the US. While the thematic boundaries are not absolute, they offer a useful mode of categorisation and analysis. The themes are indicative of political affiliations and ideological concerns. At the same time they provide insights into personal and memorial configurations of what the Vietnamese call the American War.

Love of the Land/Country There are innumerable poems on this theme, many of them pro-communist propaganda that equate the landscape with the nation and the Communist Party with the defence of that sacred territory. Thanh Hai’s ‘Song of the Insurrectionists’ and ‘The Villages I have Crossed’ are exemplars of this idea of reluctant warriors who ‘rise in arms to defend / Our fields, markets, and rivers’.13 The poems are obviously propagandist, creating the idea of ‘heroic resistance’ against ‘savage’ enemies. ‘The Villages I have Crossed’ begins with clichés of a pastoral Vietnam that is pounded by war. It is, however, a rare pro-communist poem that acknowledges divisions within: ‘Why did people of the same country hate each other?’14 These fractures disappear of course with the advent of the Party and the village community which as the base for the Communist Party is also its primary recruiting ground. Women in this war-pastoral are patriotic providers of sons or ‘good-natured girls, / Smiling mischievously’.15 This is a world which will be rejuvenated through war: ‘The enemies come. Blood is shed – joy returns to the cassava fields’.16 The enemy here is generic and could refer to the Nationalists, the French or the Americans. To Huu, the doyen of communist poets, in ‘Hue, August ’45’, ‘May Morning’ and ‘Uncle Ho’ expands Thanh Hai’s themes. His poems idealise the Party, life in the Maquis, the country and Ho Chi Minh. His poetry contributes to the rewriting of Vietnamese history from the Party perspective. Pham Tien Duat in ‘The Moon in Circles of Flame’ recreates an idea of heroic unity fashioned through sacrifice. The desired end is the unification of a divided nation (Vietnam was divided into North and South Vietnam after the Geneva Conference in

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 217

30/01/2012 16:24

218

subarno chattarji

1954): ‘Along the road all night I hear the whisper, whisper, / the soil’s veins merging, my country’s two halves joining’.17 The anthropomorphising of the country is a deliberate way of meshing together the Party and the nation, the blood it shed and the rewards it reaped are seemingly normative and outside history. None of these poems or expressions within this typology offers any complex insights into the nature and terrors of that heroic resistance.

The Horrors of War With the poetry of Nguyen Quang Thieu, Trinh Cong Son, Nguyen Duc Mau, Ngo Vinh Long and Xuan Quynh we enter a poetic terrain that is more nuanced and less rhetorical. Thieu’s ‘The Examples’ is about war widows and their travails, and the poem eschews the usual heroic representation of women’s role and sacrifices in the war: ‘they lie in / fear of the sound of termites feasting on those coffins’.18 Thieu dwells repeatedly on the responsibilities of a poet in the remembrance of a terrible war and its aftermath, where the poet is a type of accursed prophet. Trinh Cong Son’s poems and songs dwell on the bitter harvest of generations of war: ‘For twenty years the old man / Drinks joy and pain like bitter wine.’19 ‘When my country is no more at war, / Mothers will search the mountains for their children’s bones’.20 Postwar Vietnam is marked by ‘greening graves of friends’, ‘stake-filled ditches and machete traps’.21 Similarly Xuan Quynh writes of a land which ‘is thick with the pain of remembering’.22 And Nguyen Duc Mau repeats the idea of a nation that has been at war for generations in ‘The Old Soldier’: ‘his whole life has been one long, continual war’.23 Ngo Vinh Long’s ‘Untitled’ dwells on the aftermath and seems to perceive beauty in and through war and its gruesome legacy: ‘On this land / Where each blade of grass is human hair / Each foot of soil is human flesh / Where it rains blood / Hails bones / Life must flower’.24 As in Duat’s poem the landscape is anthropomorphised but unlike Duat there is no sense of a triumphant legacy or of history as a teleological fulfilment of Party doctrine.

Refugee and Exile Poets such as Le Thi Diem Thuy in ‘Shrapnel Shards on Blue Water’ recover Vietnam the country while living in exile in the US. This recovery is for the preservation of the self and history within a culture that has forgotten or rewritten the war and conceives of ‘Vietnam’ only as a war: ‘we are fragmented shards / blown here by a war no one wants to remember / [. . .] with an achingly familiar wound / our survival is dependent upon’.25 The paradox of exilic memory is that is perpetuates pain while retrieving the past. Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s ‘Refugee’ is a very personal expression of the pain and sorrow of exile: ‘facing the threshold of nothingness / you stood speechless living no thing aloud’.26 Unlike many ethnic groups the Vietnamese came to the US as refugees, not as voluntary immigrants, and many poems dwell on the ache of separation from the homeland. Tu-Uyen Nguyen’s ‘Umbilical Cord’ in its title and expression is typical of this desire to keep alive the memory of a country that disappeared with the Communist victory in 1975: ‘Shattered lives, uprooted / From the land [. . .] / / And we are left / To think from memory to memory’.27 The sense of displacement was heightened for many by their sense of exile and having settled in the country that had bombed them. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘Untitled’ captures

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 218

30/01/2012 16:24

poetry on the vietnam/american war

219

a generic sense of dislocation, not only spatially but in psychological terms: ‘I search, / yearning to find a clue / in the ash to my people, / [. . .] words are a poor bandage, / [. . .] for an invisible wound / that stretches with the years’.28 The sense of exile is felt not only by Vietnamese immigrants but also by those who chose to remain in Vietnam. Their memories of war are intertwined with more immediate recollections of post-war failure. Nguyen Duy’s poems embody some of these themes of remembrance and bitterness: ‘the war paths run their crooked lines still inside us’.29 ‘Land of forgiveness. / Why have so many fled their homes [. . .]’ refers to the surge of ‘boat people’ (largely ethnic Chinese refugees who fled Vietnam after 1975) undermining the monolithic triumphal narrative of the Communist government.30 While Duy is aware that separations cause pain and that the revolution failed, he is unwilling to entirely jettison hope for the future: ‘Whatever happens, / the land lives within us always’.31 This is an idea of rootedness central to Vietnamese culture and self-conception related to ancestor worship and the importance of the family. In myriad ways the wars against the French and the Americans, as well as the civil war within, sundered these ties, creating generational traumas and disjunctions that were further complicated by exile and the repressions of the Communist government. Nguyen Chi Thien, imprisoned for twenty-six years by the Communists in their infamous re-education camps, writes poetry which is the antithesis of the patriotic fervour expressed by To Huu. In ‘Out of Indifference’ Thien perceives post-war unification as ‘One block of suffering, one block of hatred! / [. . .] All are crushed the moment the Party surfaces!’32 He also expresses a direct lament for the loss of South Vietnam, a sense of dispossession shared by many of his fellow exiles, and intricately connected to post-war memorialisation of the ‘mother country’. Banerian’s statement about writings by communists reflects a debate within the Vietnamese diaspora about the relative value of writings by Vietnamese in exile and those who stayed. The parameters of this debate were stated in two essays by Nguyen Hung Quoc, ‘Vietnamese Communist Literature (1975–1990)’ and ‘Vietnamese Literature in Exile (1975–1990)’. In his survey of communist literature, Quoc noted the paucity of good writing in post-1975 Vietnam. In his analysis of Vietnamese writings in exile Quoc makes some absolute distinctions. While he acknowledges that the exilic condition is both physical and psychological, he denies the status of exile and exile writers to pro-communists: Living abroad and writing do not make a writer someone in exile: the pro-communist writers who are living abroad are not writers in exile. The feeling of being astray in his own country, in itself, is not enough to make a writer an author in exile.33 Quoc claims that the Vietnamese literature written in exile speaks for all Vietnamese. Some of the best Vietnamese literature written after 1975 in Vietnam is acutely critical of communism, the failure to live up to revolutionary ideals, and the feeling of being an outsider, an exile in one’s own country. Quoc’s criticism of communist literature – as if all writings by Vietnamese in Vietnam were communist propaganda – is a mode of rhetorical legitimisation: by casting the Vietnamese writers who write out of Vietnam as inauthentic, Quoc is establishing the authority of exilic writers and critics to speak for the Vietnamese. The battle here – as in American representations – is for the past and the future envisioning of the war and its legacies. In the case of the Vietnamese diaspora, especially those who fled the former South Vietnam, the battle is also to remember a country that no longer exists, and to speak for a nation outside its borders. For the Vietnamese, whether Northern or Southern, living in Vietnam or in the US, the past is a living presence that animates

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 219

30/01/2012 16:24

220

subarno chattarji

the present. Attitudes towards the past are indicative of one’s position in contemporary realities as well as one’s ideological relation to those pasts. The terrible carnage of the Vietnam War – much of it visited upon the country by the US – followed by the depredations of the Communists and the horrors faced by the ‘boat people’ have left a legacy of division, hatred and seemingly irreconcilable differences. Within these contexts translations of texts in US academia or research institutes such as the Joiner Center cannot be value-neutral nor can they blandly propagate naïve reconciliations. However, the voices from Vietnam and from Vietnamese-Americans are crucial to an understanding of histories related to Vietnam and the US, of the ways in which memory and oral histories reconfigure the past, of exile (within the US and in Vietnam), of hopelessness and the possibilities of the future. As Nguyen Khoa Diem puts it: ‘Poetry must be the lightning rod in the face of the gale’.34 From The Tale of Kieu to the ca dao, poetry occupies a central position in Vietnamese culture and it has played a crucial role in mediating its often turbulent and violent history. The American War is only the most recent episode in a long history of trauma and displacement, and poets in exile as well as at home have responded with moving poetic testaments that not only configure their particular experiences but also join the debate within the United States with respect to the legacy of the conflict.

Notes 1. John Balaban, Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Story of Rescue in Wartime Vietnam (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 321. 2. Larry Rottmann, ‘A Hundred Happy Sparrows: An American Veteran Returns to Vietnam’, Vietnam Generation, 1.1 (Winter 1989), pp. 113–14 (pp. 20–1). 3. Bruce Weigl, ‘Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag’, in What Saves Us (Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books, 1992), p. 13. 4. Ibid. p. 13. 5. Ibid. p. 13. 6. Ibid. p. 14. 7. W. D. Ehrhart, ‘The Distance We Travel’, in Beautiful Wreckage: New & Selected Poems (Easthampton, MA: Adastra Press, 1999), p. 175. 8. Ibid. pp. 176–7. 9. American Vietnam poets are further explored by Adam Piette in Chapter 17, ‘The Fictions of Nuclear War, from Hiroshima to Vietnam’, in this volume. 10. Thanh T. Nguyen and Bruce Weigl (ed. and trans.), Poems From Captured Documents (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. vii. 11. James Banerian (ed. and trans.), Vietnamese Short Stories: An Introduction (Phoenix: Sphinx Publishing, 1986), p. 4. 12. Wayne Karlin (ed.), ‘Introduction’ to Le Minh Khue, The Stars, The Earth, The River, trans. Bac Hoai Tran and Dana Sachs (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1997), p. xviii. 13. Thanh Hai, ‘Song of the Insurrectionists’, in Faithful Comrades: Poems (South Vietnam: ‘Liberation’ Publishing House, 1962), p. 47. 14. Thanh Hai, ‘The Villages I have Crossed’, in Faithful Comrades, p. 56. 15. Ibid. p. 56. 16. Ibid. p. 57. 17. Pham Tien Duat, ‘The Moon in Circles of Flame’, in Phillip Mahony (ed.), From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and its Aftermath (New York: Scribner, 1998), p. 138. 18. Nguyen Quang Thieu, ‘The Examples’, in The Women Carry the River Water: Poems, ed. and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 220

30/01/2012 16:24

poetry on the vietnam/american war

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

221

trans. Martha Collins and Nguyen Quang Thieu with Nguyen Ba Chung (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p. 35. Trinh Cong Son, ‘A Long Day for the Homeland’, in Dan Duffy (ed.), Not a War: American Vietnamese Fiction, Poetry and Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Council on Southeast Asian Studies, 1997), p. 257. Trinh Cong Son, ‘I Will Go See’, in Duffy, p. 261. Ibid. p. 261. Xuan Quynh, ‘The Flame in Childhood’, in Nguyen Ba Chung and Kevin Bowen (eds), Six Vietnamese Poets (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2002), p. 171. Nguyen Duc Mau, ‘The Old Soldier’, in Ba Chung and Bowen, p. 141. Ngo Vinh Long, ‘Untitled’, in Mahony, p. 272. Le Thi Diem Thuy, ‘Shrapnel Shards on Blue Water’, in Duffy, p. 111. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, ‘Refugee’, in Mahony, p. 203. Tu-Uyen Nguyen, ‘Umbilical Cord’, in Mahony, p. 249. Viet Thanh Nguyen, ‘Untitled’, in Andre Lam De Tran and Hai Dai Nguyen (eds), Once Upon a Dream. . . the Vietnamese-American Experience (Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel, 1995), p. 46. Nguyen Duy, ‘The Father’s Bridge’, in Distant Road: Selected Poems, trans. Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1999), p. 67. Nguyen Duy, ‘Our Nation. . . From a Distance’, in Distant Road, p. 127. Ibid. p. 133. Nguyen Chi Thien, ‘Out of Indifference’, in Nguyen Ngoc Bich (ed.), A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, trans. Nguyen Ngoc Bich with Burton Raffel and W. S. Merwin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 194. Nguyen Hung Quoc, ‘Vietnamese Literature in Exile (1975–1990)’, in Nguyen Xuan Thu (ed.), Vietnamese Studies in a Multicultural World (Melbourne: Vietnamese Language and Culture Publications, 1994), p. 146. Nguyen Khoa Diem, ‘You Have No Right to Be Tired’, in Ba Chung and Bowen, p. 93.

Further Reading Hue-Tam Ho Tai (ed.), The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Mahony, Phillip, War and Exile: A Vietnamese Anthology (Springfield, VA: Vietnamese PEN Abroad East Coast USA, 1989). Raskin, Marcus G. and Bernard B. Fall (eds), The Viet-Nam Reader: Articles and Documents on American Foreign Policy and the Viet-Nam Crisis (New York: Random House, 1967).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 221

30/01/2012 16:24

23

POETRY AND THE NORTHERN IRELAND ‘TROUBLES’ Fran Brearton

W

riting to Michael Longley in the spring of 1972, Douglas Dunn observed ‘You are a sort of war poet now, you know, like Seamus.’1 Friend, sometimes mentor, to a number of poets from Northern Ireland – Longley, Heaney, Mahon and Paulin among them – Dunn is fully alert to the difficulties of living and writing through the Troubles, later describing this as ‘an experience against which poetic technique (let alone imagination) had to contend in ways which to most of us are hardly imaginable’.2 But the comment ‘You are a sort of war poet now’ has an element of mischievous knowingness about it too. Dunn is equally sensitive from an early stage to the kinds of media attention given to poets from the North, to the critical tendency to interpret their work predominantly, even exclusively, in a Troubles context, and to the pressure of expectation under which they were (and are) sometimes placed to respond directly and immediately to that context. There is also a suggestion here (in ‘sort of ’) that perspective is important and that the ‘war poet’ label sits uneasily in the context of Northern Ireland, and indeed perhaps sits uneasily on any Irish or British poet after World War Two, the last war in these islands in which conscription affected the nature of combat. It does so partly because of the experiential implication the term ‘war poet’ still carries, whereby a ‘war poet’ is a ‘soldier-poet’, and the ‘war poem’ is still predominantly associated in popular perception with the 1914–18 trench lyric. In that context, the poets who experience a ‘troubled’ Belfast, and yet do so at one remove, are understandably circumspect about the matter. In the 1969 article ‘Strife and the Ulster Poet’, Michael Longley quotes the slogan ‘Malone Road fiddles while the Falls Road burns’. He acknowledges the implied criticism that ‘the still and heartless centre of the hurricane is the civil inactivity of liberals like myself ’;3 but the slogan makes a more obvious point too in relation to the North’s (essentially middle-class, grammar school and university educated) poets. The Troubles in some degree affected the day-to-day lives of everyone in the North of Ireland; the random nature of some (particularly town centre) attacks potentially put everyone at risk (and, increasingly, put at risk civilians in England too). But its ‘war zones’, its most troubled areas, whose names now reverberate internationally – the Falls, the Shankill, Divis flats, Free Derry corner – were and are urban and working class, a world apart from the leafy suburbs of south Belfast. Nor, either, were some of the best-known poets and writers associated with Northern Ireland resident there through the Troubles: Derek Mahon left in the late 1960s (returning in the late 1970s for a brief period); Seamus Heaney left permanently in 1972, as did Tom Paulin (and in Paulin’s case some years before his first collection was

222

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 222

30/01/2012 16:24

poetry and the northern ireland ‘troubles’

223

published). Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson and Medbh McGuckian have all stayed in the North; Paul Muldoon did so until 1986, when he left – via Dingle in County Kerry – for Princeton. Other Irish poets who have addressed the Troubles directly or indirectly in their poetry – Paul Durcan, Eavan Boland – have done so from the perspective of the Republic of Ireland. If the term ‘war poet’ is problematical in its associations, so too is the term ‘war’ to describe the Northern Irish conflict. ‘War’, Maurice Goldring writes, ‘is the great simplifier. [. . .] A barricade has only two sides. There are allies and enemies, victors and vanquished.’4 Yet Northern Ireland’s barricades, literal and psychological, form something of a labyrinth; its two sides are never clear cut. If the conflict began with the civil rights protests of 1968–9, whether it mutated into a religious conflict, a class war, a civil war, a war against external forces, or a combination of all of these remains a controversial question. ‘War’, a term used by Sinn Fein, legitimates militant (ergo, military) activity in a way the term ‘civil unrest’ does not; ‘civil war’ turns the focus controversially away from an Ireland–England axis. The term ‘Troubles’ is euphemistic, inasmuch as it is less politically loaded than ‘war’, yet despite its seeming neutrality, its evocation of an earlier period of conflict in Ireland (the Civil War and Troubles of the early 1920s) might also be seen to raise the political stakes. There are other ambiguities too: front lines are ‘peacelines’; Northern Ireland has had ceasefires, but not treaties (instead, there have been ‘agreements’); battles have not been lost and won, although some political victories have been claimed; war has not given way to peace, since neither has ever been formally declared, but rather there is now an ongoing ‘peace process’. At the time of writing, and in the wake of recent dissident republican attacks in Northern Ireland, its politicians have affirmed, in a curious phrase redolent of an unusual context, that ‘peace will continue’. All of this goes to confirm the extent to which the situation in Northern Ireland, whatever else it may have been, is a war of words and a terminological minefield through which recent documents (such as the Good Friday Agreement) tiptoe with extraordinary care. As Derek Mahon writes in ‘Beyond Howth Head’, ‘Meanwhile, for a word’s sake, the plast- / ic bombs go off around Belfast’.5 The line refers not just to the word of command, but also by implication to sectarian dispute (over the Word of God) and to the possible tensions arising from the misuse or misinterpretation of words: careless talk literally costs lives. There is also a suggestion here as to the potential power of art to affect politics. Yeats famously asks in ‘The Man and the Echo’, reflecting on an earlier period of Irish Troubles: ‘Did words of mine put too great strain / On that woman’s reeling brain? / Could my spoken words have checked / That whereby a house lay wrecked?’6 The question of responsibility therein, although unanswered (at least directly) in the poem, has haunted Irish poets through the twentieth century. In that sense, poetry’s relation to the Troubles is a particularly complex one, a natural obsession with words and the form of words which can be viewed both as conditioned by the circumstances of the poetry’s production and as exemplar of future possibility. The first of these drives the question posed by Seamus Heaney in his 1972 collection, Wintering Out, whose publication coincided with the worst year of the Troubles: ‘What do I say if they wheel out their dead?’7 For the poet whose medium is words, and when, for ‘a word’s sake. . . the bombs go off ’, the Troubles impel a poetry which questions insistently its own responsibility and adequacy. In the second of these (on which more anon), a ‘good poem’, as Mahon once suggested ‘is a paradigm of good politics – of people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level’.8 For all these writers, even those who lived through the Troubles in Belfast, theirs is no

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 223

30/01/2012 16:24

224

fran brearton

simple experiential ‘response’ to violence; the relation between the poetry and the subject of conflict is uniquely complicated by the peculiar circumstances and internal divisions of Northern Ireland itself. The Troubles are, in a sense, embedded in the very medium with which the poet works, and in the expression of his or her own subjectivity. Asked at a poetry reading in Belfast in March 2004 about the writer’s responsibility towards the Troubles, Heaney observed that those Troubles were not ‘out there’; they were ‘in here’, an aspect of the self. Although Northern Ireland’s poets are not writing from the front line in the manner of other war poets, there is a sense in which the front line is everywhere, carried internally. The war zone is also the home front; the Troubles are inscribed in the fabric of everyday life and society through the 1970s and 1980s in ways often intangible but nevertheless compelling. So if Northern Ireland’s poets resist a too easy association with the poets of earlier conflicts, reluctant to seem to claim for themselves the suffering of an Owen or a Rosenberg, it is nevertheless unsurprising that they are drawn to those poets as important precursors. While the Troubles do not bear direct comparison, in terms of scale or death toll, with other wars, the conflict still poses questions and problems for writers not dissimilar to those faced by Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Thomas or Douglas in the World Wars, as well as by Yeats in the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War. In 1915, Edward Thomas, pondering the aesthetics of war poetry as well as the case for his own enlistment in the army, pursues, as Edna Longley puts it, ‘an argument. . . on two fronts’ as well as ‘subtextually quarrelling with himself ’ in the poem ‘This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong’: ‘I hate not Germans, nor grow hot / With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers’.9 Pleasing newspapers (or not) is an issue pertinent to Northern Ireland’s poets too – even more so perhaps since the fame of the First World War’s soldierpoets has engendered expectations in the wars that have followed about the role of poet as truth-teller and first-hand witness. At the onset of World War Two, in ‘Where are the War Poets?’, C. Day Lewis complained bitterly that ‘They who in folly or mere greed / Enslaved religion, markets, laws / Borrow our language now and bid / Us to speak up in freedom’s cause’.10 The cry for the war poets may be driven at different points in history by different impulses – either for the poet to tell the ‘truth of war’ or for the poet to voice the nation’s patriotic feeling – but both work on the premise that in wartime the poet (presumably a peacetime luxury) must earn his or her keep by responding to external events and by writing a ‘public’ poetry. Michael Longley notes in the introduction to Causeway (1971) that ‘charges similar to those drummed up by the popular dailies during the last war: “Where are the war poets?”’ resurfaced with the onset of the Troubles, and offers a caution about such expectations that revisits and revises Owen’s famous draft preface to his poems: Too many critics seem to expect a harvest of paintings, poems, plays and novels to drop from the twisted branches of civil discord. They fail to realise that the artist needs time in which to allow the raw material of experience to settle to an imaginative depth where he can transform it and possibly even suggest solutions to current and very urgent problems by reframing them according to the dictates of his particular discipline. He is not some sort of super-journalist commenting with unfaltering spontaneity on events immediately after they have happened. Rather, as Wilfred Owen stated over fifty years ago, it is the artist’s duty to warn, to be tuned in before anyone else to the implications of a situation.11 Owen’s draft preface makes it clear that he will not meet extra-poetic expectations – to write, for instance, about ‘deeds, or lands. . . glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion. . .’.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 224

30/01/2012 16:24

poetry and the northern ireland ‘troubles’

225

In that sense, his claim ‘Above all I am not concerned with Poetry’ may be misleading, since from another point of view, his desire to protect the integrity of his work against the popular sentiment of the time suggests he was concerned with little else.12 As Edward Thomas noted, in wartime, ‘The demand is for the crude, for what everybody is saying or thinking.’13 Longley is attuned not so much to Owen’s now famous (unfinished) pronouncements about poetry, but to his aesthetic as manifest in the poetry itself, to Owen’s capacity to say and think beyond the immediacy of the moment, even when Owen’s particular moment in history had the potential to overwhelm the individual voice. For Heaney the pressure of expectation has been particularly, although not uniquely, acute. I have argued elsewhere that Heaney’s early poetry is steeped in Owen-esque imagery, and that with the onset of the Troubles, this gives way to an insistent aesthetic questioning more subtly reminiscent of the First World War poets.14 And unlike Owen, whose fame is posthumous, Heaney’s self-questioning has been accompanied by an unusual level of media scrutiny. Like others in the North, he has been subject to some pressure to act as spokesman for a community (perhaps more so than poets from a Protestant background). ‘The role’, he says, was available and to a certain extent inevitable, but the question was – and remains – to what extent the role of spokesman can or should be exercised in poetry. The visiting journalists were pressing for interviews and we all did our share of opining and explaining.15 In 1940, and in the context of war, Cyril Connolly described poetry as ‘the most natural national form of self-expression’. The claim is highly questionable, but the comment says something about the expectations in times of crisis for a poetry written for the people, the voicing of a collective consciousness and experience. The irony, perhaps, if Auden is to be believed, is that ‘the serious poetry of any given moment is always at odds with the conscious ideas of the majority.’16 Edna Longley suggests that Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ is the ‘inevitable ancestor’ of Ulster poetry since 1968.17 The conflict in Yeats’s aesthetic between poet and man of action, between the individual voice with its insistent ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’ of ‘Meditations’, and the collective pronouncement of ‘The Statues’ – ‘We Irish. . .’ – foreshadows a poetry in Northern Ireland that both seeks to articulate a cultural condition, to speak for the experience of Northern Ireland, and to find its own ‘proper dark’, to preserve its own imaginative integrity – a poetry borne out of tension and conflict. Heaney’s ‘No Man’s Land’, the second poem in the sequence ‘A Northern Hoard’, returns to First World War imagery in order to encapsulate a struggle between individual desire and communal responsibility: ‘I deserted, shut out / their wounds’ fierce awning, [. . .] Must I crawl back now [. . .] between / shred-hung wire and thorn [. . .]?’ This speaker will not fight for a cause, yet cannot help but return to the scene of battle. The poem is torn between the need to speak and the inadequacy of words (‘what lumpy dead?’); it is also haunted by the fear that to say and do nothing is to be complicit in covering up what a properly questioning and responsible poetry should seek to expose: ‘Why do I unceasingly / arrive late to condone / infected sutures / and ill-knit bone?’18 In ‘No Man’s Land’, Heaney argues the need for the poet to go beneath the surface, not to accept what seems, at face value, to have healed over. And if this persona is sometimes a deserter, he also acknowledges the ‘smeared doorstep’ as his own. It is precisely that kind of beneath-thesurface probing that characterises Michael Longley’s ‘Casualty’, written around the same

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 225

30/01/2012 16:24

226

fran brearton

time (1971), which describes the decomposition and devouring of an animal carcass – ‘A probing of the orifices, / Bitings down through the skin [. . .] the bad air released / In a ceremonious wounding’.19 ‘Casualty’ is not in any obvious sense a ‘Troubles poem’ and yet its sinister elements reverberate in a wider political context. The artist, as Longley puts it in Causeway, is both ‘diagnostician and physician’ of a society and culture20 – and here also with an unsettling forensic skill. If the ‘ceremonious wounding’ of ‘Casualty’ has about it some dignity in the animal kingdom, the elegy ‘Wounds’ makes its point through the absence of rhyme or reason in death. It is a poem which commemorates Longley’s father (a ‘belated casualty’ of the Great War), as well as several victims of the Troubles (the three young Scottish soldiers murdered in 1971, the bus conductor Sydney Agnew in 1972, and more obliquely 9-yearold Patrick Rooney killed by a tracer bullet as he lay in bed in the family flat in Divis Tower in 1969). Here, as elsewhere in Longley’s oeuvre, the Great War protest-elegy is reinvented in the context of Northern Ireland: the poem does not console (although it understands Owen’s ‘pity’) in any religious sense; rather, its ceremonious interring of bodies and commemorative objects (‘I bury beside him / Three teenage soldiers [. . .] A packet of Woodbines I throw in, / A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus / Paralysed as heavy guns put out / The night-light in a nursery for ever’) is also a disinterring of painful memories, a recognition of open wounds. That those wounds are also self-inflicted engenders the poem’s ‘bewilderment’. Atrocity enters the private domestic space of the home; the intimacy of the killing is part of its trauma: the bus conductor is ‘shot through the head / By a shivering boy who wandered in / Before they could turn the television down / Or tidy away the supper dishes. / To the children, to a bewildered wife, / I think “Sorry Missus” was what he said’.21 The ‘adequacy’ of the response to violence here lies in the poem’s recognition of its own inadequacy. The same is true of another seminal Troubles poem, Heaney’s own ‘Casualty’, the elegy for Louis O’Neill killed in Derry during the Bloody Sunday funeral curfews in 1972. If ‘No Man’s Land’ is literally a poem of questions, then questioning (self-accusatory as well as interrogative) more generally is at the heart of Heaney’s aesthetic through the 1970s, culminating in the 1979 volume Field Work. ‘Casualty’ is a poem which sets out, as Heaney later puts it, to explore ‘one big uncertainty [. . .] a dilemma that many people in the North were then experiencing very acutely, stretched as they often were between the impulse to maintain political solidarity and their experience of a spiritual condition of complete solitude’.22 The poem expresses it more starkly perhaps: ‘How culpable was he / That last night when he broke / Our tribe’s complicity?’ If ‘Our tribe’ suggests one answer to that question, the choice of ‘complicity’ suggests another. In the end, the poem refuses any easy answers; rather, it finds an answer of sorts in the insistent self-questioning that puts the elegist rather than the subject of elegy in the dock: ‘Dawn-sniffing revenant, / Plodder through midnight rain, / Question me again’.23 From different angles, and invoking different cultural histories, both Longley’s ‘Wounds’ and Heaney’s ‘Casualty’ offer a form of resistance to reductive ideological certainties – Yeats’s ‘Hearts [. . .] Enchanted to a stone’ – and a Joycean non serviam in terms of the kind of political commitment the age demanded. The form of that resistance, for Longley, Mahon, Heaney, and for the generation – Muldoon, McGuckian and Carson – who have followed is inherently formalist in style. ‘Casualty’, as Heaney observes, was ‘a new kind of poem’ for him, a ‘plotted shape’.24 Against the arbitrariness of being blown to bits in a bar it invokes ‘a rhythm / Working

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 226

30/01/2012 16:24

poetry and the northern ireland ‘troubles’

227

you, slow mile by mile, / Into your proper haunt’. Mahon, although with a greater ‘metaphysical unease’,25 also plays out the Yeatsian struggle between poet and man of action, formal control against revolutionary freefall, in ‘Rage for Order’: ‘Somewhere beyond / The scorched gable end / And the burnt-out / Buses there is a poet indulging his / Wretched rage for order’.26 In this first published version of the poem, while the poet is displaced by the revolutionary who ‘make[s] history’, the poem closes with an admission that the man of action will eventually need the poet’s ‘Germinal ironies’. Mahon takes his title from Stevens’s ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, in which ‘Blessed rage for order’ is ‘The maker’s rage to order words’.27 This is also the desire MacNeice, in the context of World War Two, attributed to his own generation and to Yeats before them, writers who ‘opposed to the contemporary chaos a code of values, a belief in system, and – behind their utterances of warning – a belief in life, in the dignity, courage and stamina of the human animal’. Auden and Spender, he argues, ‘returned to the old arrogant principle – which was Yeats’s too – that it is the poet’s job to make sense of the world [. . .] to put shape on it’.28 Yet if Northern Irish poets responding to the early years of the Troubles incline towards ‘closed’ rather than ‘open’ form, it is the fact of the poems’ openness, and openendedness in another way within those formal structures (‘Question me again’) which is key to their success: form is not an autocratic imposition of order; rather, the ‘values’ encoded are those of flexibility, subtlety and the containment of a necessary uncertainty. The intense lyric poem or the lyric sequence as a response to conflict owes an obvious debt to the poets of the Great War (as well as to Yeats) who compressed into lyric form the intensity that might be seen, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, as ‘the violence from within that protects us from a violence without [. . .] the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality’.29 Northern Irish poets have this in common with the ‘literary’ Great War too – theirs is a concentrated flowering of poetic talent coterminous with violence. As one newspaper review headlined it: ‘Poetry: the other Northern Ireland ferment’. That there is a link between the poetic renaissance and the Troubles seems historically not in doubt: as Mahon observes, the ‘poetry and the “troubles” had a common source; the same energy gave rise to both’.30 Yet the nature of that link is more problematical, and for Northern Ireland’s poets, as for all poets who write in response to or out of war, it brings with it the inevitable guilt that poetic capital is made out of human suffering. The 1960s, Michael Longley observes, ‘began quietly’ for him in Dublin, and ‘ended tumultuously in Belfast’.31 This is both the Yeatsian ‘tumult’ of an earlier civil war (‘And I, my wits astray / Because of all that senseless tumult’32), an essentially destructive phenomenon, and it is also, more positively, the tumultuous excitement of the cultural energy and creative drive felt by young writers in the North in the late 1960s. As the twentieth century’s World Wars projected some writers into a new vision and idiom – in a sense, one might argue, ‘made’ them as poets33 – it is also possible to argue that the unique problems posed by the politics and violence of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s are implicated in the emergence of a generation of poets who are now of international reputation. The situation is not so much Yeats’s ‘Great hatred, little room / Maimed us at the start’;34 rather, the Yeatsian ‘boiling pot’ of ‘Easter 1916’ was in the North a slow pressure cooker that unleashed creative as well as violent energy, political vision as well as sectarian bigotry, a new language to counter an old one. That a war of words is implicated in the very fabric of the poetry written in Northern Ireland is something pursued to its logical conclusion by Ciaran Carson in the early 1980s, whose grammar is also a metaphorical arsenal, a ‘fusillade of question-marks’.35

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 227

30/01/2012 16:24

228

fran brearton

If this suggests a symbiotic and perhaps potentially destructive relationship between the Troubles and the poetry, it also carries a more positive implication. Put simply, if language is part of the problem in Northern Ireland, it is also part of the solution. Mahon’s formulation of a ‘good poem’ and ‘good politics’ quoted earlier (‘people talking to each other, with honest subtlety’), places dialogue as central to his definition. In Michael Longley’s 1973 ‘Letters’ sequence, after the ‘Blood on the kerbstones’ and ‘The pity, terror.. . .What comes next / Is a lacuna in the text, // Only blots of ink conceding / Death or blackout as a reading’.36 The ink blots are also the metaphorical black hole where violence causes the pen (and the words) to falter, meaning to disappear. (In 1994, Heaney described the quarter century of the Troubles as ‘a terrible black hole’, time lost, an abnormality from which society began to emerge with the ceasefires.37) Nevertheless the sequence as a whole also offers poetry as a mode of resistance, the sounding of a voice: poetry, a tongue at play With lip and tooth, is here to stay, To exercise in metaphor Our knockings at the basement door, A ramrod mounted to invade The vulva, Hades’ palisade, The Gates of Horn and Ivory Or the Walls of Londonderry.38 The insistent letter-writing motif of Longley’s poetry in the early 1970s implicitly urges dialogue not discord in the quest for a language with an ‘honest subtlety’, one that holds also the promise of a non-violent future. The same may be said of Heaney’s ‘The Other Side’, from the same period, whose neighbourly possibility of ‘talk’ crosses political and sectarian divides as well as Frostian fences: ‘Should I slip away, I wonder, / or go up and touch his shoulder / and talk about the weather // or the price of grass-seed?’39 As Edna Longley observes, while the poem ‘does not minimise difference, its cultural vision [. . .] spans two languages to create a third’.40 In 1971, Longley notes that a ‘causeway’ (the title of his anthology of the arts in Ulster) may be defined as ‘a path of stepping stones’. It is, he suggests, ‘a fair description of the role played by the arts in any society [. . .] but especially in a troubled community like our own’. Art, he insists, is a ‘normal human activity’, and ‘[t]he more normal it appears in the eyes of the artist and his audience, the more potent a force it becomes.’ In Ulster, where ‘a cultural apartheid [is] sustained to their mutual impoverishment by both communities’ the artist is ‘uniquely qualified to demonstrate how both our cultures can define themselves by a profound and patient scrutiny of each other’.41 Almost forty years later, Heaney in Stepping Stones makes a similar (retrospective) claim. He notes that ‘the poets didn’t meet like a war cabinet’ to discuss the issues raised by the Troubles, but observes that: all of us probably had some notion that a good poem was ‘a paradigm of good politics’, a site of energy and tension and possibility, a truth-telling arena but not a killing field. And without being explicit about it, either to ourselves or to one another, we probably felt that if we as poets couldn’t do something transformative or creative with all that we were a part of, then it was a poor lookout for everybody. In the end, I believe what was envisaged and almost set up by the Good Friday Agreement was

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 228

30/01/2012 16:24

poetry and the northern ireland ‘troubles’

229

prefigured in what I call our subtleties and tolerances – allowances for different traditions and affiliations.42 It is not that poetry carries specific political messages; rather, these poets suggest that poetry’s responsibilities in relation to language and form, its precision of observation and expression, are not without a political effect. At the very least, poetry is, in Auden’s phrase, ‘A way of happening’.43 By making that suggestion, with however many reservations, poets in Northern Ireland are implicated to an unusual degree in one of the great debates of twentieth-century poetry and criticism: in Robert Graves’s formulation, ‘What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?’44 The compulsion to articulate a response to that question, whether or not it is asked directly, is symptomatic of the peculiar pressure of external (wartime) circumstances, as it is also for precursors such as Keith Douglas, W. H. Auden, Wilfred Owen and W. B. Yeats. Creativity goes hand in hand with, perhaps even is driven by, an anxiety and self-questioning that (like the sometimes troubled peace process itself) shows no signs, in Northern Irish poetry, of ending.

Notes 1. Douglas Dunn, letter to Michael Longley, 15 June 1972. Collection 744, Michael Longley Papers, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta. 2. Douglas Dunn, ‘The Poetry of the Troubles’, in Michael Longley, review of Selected Poems 1963–1980, Times Literary Supplement, 31 July 1981, p. 886. 3. Michael Longley, ‘Strife and the Ulster Poet’, Hibernia, 33.21 (7 November 1969), p. 11. 4. Maurice Goldring, ‘On Top of That’, Fortnight, 259 (February 1988), p. 25. 5. Derek Mahon, ‘Beyond Howth Head’, in Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 36. 6. W. B.Yeats, ‘The Man and the Echo’, in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 393. 7. Seamus Heaney, ‘A Northern Hoard’, in Wintering Out (London: Faber, 1972), p. 41. 8. Derek Mahon, ‘Poetry in Northern Ireland’, Twentieth Century Studies, 4 (November 1970), p. 93. 9. Edward Thomas, ‘This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong’, in The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna Longley (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2008), pp. 104, 263. 10. C. Day Lewis, ‘Where are the War Poets?’, in Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape; Hogarth Press, 1954), p. 228. 11. Michael Longley (ed.), ‘Introduction’ to Causeway: the Arts in Ulster (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971), p. 8. 12. Wilfrid Owen, ‘Preface’ to The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), p. 192. 13. Edward Thomas, ‘War Poetry’, in A Language Not to be Betrayed: Selected Prose, ed. Edna Longley (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), p. 132. 14. See Fran Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 15. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 2008), p. 122. 16. W. H. Auden, quoted in Tim Kendall, Modern English War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 2. 17. Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986), p. 186. 18. Seamus Heaney, ‘No Man’s Land’, in Wintering Out, p. 40. 19. Michael Longley, ‘Casualty’, in An Exploded View (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), p. 28. 20. Longley, Causeway, p. 8. 21. Michael Longley, ‘Wounds’, in An Exploded View, pp. 40–1. 22. Heaney, Stepping Stones, p. 215.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 229

30/01/2012 16:24

230

fran brearton

23. Seamus Heaney, ‘Casualty’, in Field Work (London: Faber, 1979), pp. 23–4. 24. Heaney, Stepping Stones, p. 215. 25. In his introduction to The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry, Mahon refers to ‘the metaphysical unease in which all poetry of lasting value has its source’ (London: Sphere Books, 1972), p. 12. 26. Derek Mahon, ‘Rage for Order’, in Lives, p. 22. 27. Wallace Stevens, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1955), p. 130. 28. Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Faber, [1941] 1967), pp. 120–1, 191. 29. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London: Faber, 1960), p. 36 30. Derek Mahon, ‘An Interview by Terence Brown’, Poetry Ireland Review, 14 (Autumn 1985) pp. 12–13. 31. Michael Longley, ‘A Boat on the River’, in Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry, ed. Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan (Dublin: Poetry Ireland, 1999), p. 137. 32. W. B. Yeats, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, in Collected Poems, p. 231. 33. Sassoon, Owen and Rosenberg in the Great War, and Keith Douglas in World War Two, are brought to mind here. Even more notable is the case of Edward Thomas, whose poetry was unleashed relatively late in his writing career by the First World War, in the few months before he was killed in action. 34. W. B. Yeats, ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’, in Collected Poems, p. 288. 35. Ciaran Carson, ‘Belfast Confetti’, in The Ballad of HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery, 1999), p. 23. 36. Michael Longley, ‘To Three Irish Poets’, in An Exploded View, p. 32. 37. Seamus Heaney, ‘Cessation 1994’, in Finders Keepers (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2002), p. 48. 38. Seamus Heaney, ‘To James Simmons’, in Finders Keepers, p. 35. 39. Seamus Heaney, ‘The Other Side’, in Wintering Out, p. 36. 40. Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars, p. 201. 41. Longley, Causeway, p. 9. 42. Heaney, Stepping Stones, pp. 122–3. 43. W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B.Yeats’, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 242. 44. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber, 1948), p. 11.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 230

30/01/2012 16:24

24

THE LITERATURE OF THE FALKLANDS/MALVINAS WAR Jon Begley

I

n spite of attempts to confer worldwide significance upon events in the South Atlantic during the spring and summer of 1982,1 the Falklands/Malvinas war remains defined by British and Argentine self-image; a bounded territorial dispute conditioned by domestic political concerns and publicly communicated through discourses of martial patriotism. For both participants, possession of the islands became synonymous with a retrieval of public dignity and international prestige: a rediscovery of the innate national ‘greatness’ that had been obscured and denigrated by the recessionary gloom of the 1970s. Initially, these myths of restoration were facilitated by the blankness of the islands themselves,2 as official and media sources projected the ‘radiance of [an] essentialised world’3 upon their barren and unscripted terrain. In Argentina, Las Malvinas was envisioned as a fallen Eden, a virginal space despoiled by the avaricious claims of a piratical and protestant nation; while in Britain, the rudimentary lives of the Falkland islanders came to embody a distilled tradition of pre-industrial Englishness, dishonourably interrupted by the hysterical machismo of a ‘tinpot’ Latin dictatorship. Although such jingoistic oppositions were tempered by the onset of hostilities, particularly following the sinking of the General Belgrano and HMS Sheffield, the mythic and heroic readings that preceded and shaped the crisis were not, unlike those that framed the Vietnam War, comprehensively dismantled by the disorder and viscera of active combat. Instead, these elemental templates were shielded during the war by official secrecy, media restrictions and editorial self-censorship, before being cauterised in Argentina by expedient public purges, and reconfigured in Britain to support a politicised narrative of national renewal. In both cases, the predominance and enclosure of sanctioned formulations incited unofficial, dissident readings that retrospectively tried to demystify and dismantle the conflict’s mythic substructures. In the aftermath of victory and defeat, these discursive battles for ‘moral and cultural sovereignty’4 translated patriotic idealism into political allegiance, cementing the war as a public fulcrum for antithetical narratives of national identity and ideological authority. These domestic exchanges of ‘myth’ and ‘countermyth’ also formed the dominant framework for literary representations of the conflict,5 dividing works that corroborate or enact official explications from those that aim to deconstruct the fables of patriotic discourse. In Britain, these artistic oppositions were clearly delineated by the ideological fault lines of the Thatcher era whereas in Argentina, public disclosure of official disinformation fuelled a prolonged and bitter inquest into the operations of the military junta and their clandestine ‘dirty war’. In the broader context of twentieth-century war writing, this focus

231

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 231

30/01/2012 16:24

232

jon begley

upon the political and discursive significance of the Falklands/Malvinas war is also symptomatic of a conflict that dramatically reversed previous advances in the media’s access to theatres of combat. For writers and observers in Britain, the Falklands conflict was the ‘worst reported war since the Crimean’,6 geographically sequestered and officially edited to foreclose any empirical basis for public disenchantment or artistic dissent. Moreover, Falklands/Malvinas literature displays few indications of the ‘sense making’ demanded by other modern conflicts7 – because, in spite of some notable technological advancements, the crisis replicated the traditional phases of colonial (re)possession, evoking sentimental echoes of a maritime past and recycling tactics pioneered during the Second World War.8 However, while imaginative access to military events was limited by distance and precedent, the extraordinary domestic impact of the crisis in Argentina and Britain compelled many writers to re-examine the potency of warfare as a focus for collective belonging. In an age of global economics and cultural dispersal, the Falklands/Malvinas war witnessed a reinvigoration of residual discourses of martial and religious patriotism, unwittingly laying bare the archetypal myths and mechanics of popular nationalism. For over twenty-five years, writers and commentators have revisited this undiluted essentialism to explain the elemental appeal and contest the ideological ramifications of an event that momentarily exposed, and imperilled, the founding mythologies of national identity. In Britain, the parameters of an ‘official’ Falklands discourse were laid down by an extraordinary parliamentary session that saw accusations of Whitehall negligence quickly subsumed by Churchillian demands for moral, military and national redress.9 On the diplomatic front, these demands were translated into the language of international law and justified as a principled defence of the islanders’ democratic right to political selfdetermination against a flagrant act of territorial aggression. However, in the public arena, this rationale was swelled by a self-righteous hyper-nationalism that rapidly effaced Britain’s long-standing indifference to the region by promoting and celebrating markers of cultural and geographical continuity. As one newspaper editorial famously proclaimed: ‘We Are All Falklanders Now’.10 This idealised island bond was also used to substantiate a transcendent and resolute national ‘spirit’ that conjoined the historic exploits of Drake, Wellington and Nelson with the ‘common cause’ of anti-fascism during the Second World War.11 In popular discourse, this nostalgic evocation of sacred military myths transformed the endeavours of the task force into an emblematic ‘rescue-quest’12 to recover the nation’s ‘ancestral virtues’13 and restore Britain to its ‘destined position of moral preeminence within the world community’.14 The literary impact of this mythic recovery is evident in Jack Higgins’s Exocet (1983),15 an espionage thriller that construes the Falklands crisis as an opportunity, for character and nation, to escape the ignoble stasis of the Cold War and rediscover the heroic purpose of conventional warfare. Higgins utilises the intertwined paths of an SAS officer and Argentinian pilot to uphold a chivalric code of martial and national honour while simultaneously justifying the ruthless professionalism of a distant military campaign (allegorically represented by the recapture of an obscure French island-base). Exocet culminates with an image of moral and military resurgence as Britain reverts to the status of an imperious eagle (in the guise of a Sea Harrier) that gallantly releases its disempowered adversary at the instant of military victory. Yet in spite of this overt patriotism, Higgins’s exposition of the conflict also reveals the early instability of official explanations by countermanding the moral polarities of domestic jingoism with an East–West binary of Cold War subterfuge.16 Furthermore, Higgins pays no heed to parliamentary debate or prime ministerial leadership, reserving his full attention and praise

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 232

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the falklands/malvinas war

233

for the undemonstrative professionalism of Britain’s counter-intelligence establishment. For Higgins, the national ‘greatness’ that was restored during the Falklands War did not reflect the energising politics of Thatcherism, rather it confirmed the enduring influence of an ancient culture of loyalty and noblesse oblige embedded within the pillars of monarchy, military and Whitehall tradition. Following the conflict, the precise terms of this mythic recovery were consolidated, and ideologically interpolated, as the war became politically and electorally significant for both advocates and opponents of Thatcherism. One literary product of this partisanship was Ian Curteis’s The Falklands Play (1987), a television drama that was commissioned and then controversially cancelled by the BBC amidst bitter accusations of political bias and disloyalty. On one level, Curteis’s drama is a meticulous, retrospective defence of the motives and decisions of the British War Cabinet, consciously designed to rebut public allegations of warmongering and political expediency. More fundamentally, it operates as a ‘fable of moral antagonism’17 that pits the egocentric designs of an incompetent and often inebriated Argentinian junta against the sober deliberations of the British Cabinet and the naïve exertions of America’s shuttle diplomacy. More explicitly than Exocet, The Falklands Play contextualises the crisis as a decisive juncture within a grand national narrative, separating Britain’s historic commitment to ‘civilised freedom’ from the ‘quiet death’ of post-imperial retraction.18 Unlike Exocet, however, this imperial honour is not preserved by ancient guardians, but galvanised by the political and moral certitude of Margaret Thatcher. Afforded the last, and most authoritative, word in every dramatic battle, Curteis’s prime minister becomes an embodiment of the unspoken will of the people: a steadfast Britannia who triumphs over both the dictators of ‘comic opera land’19 and the wavering ‘wets’ of the Foreign Office. In the absence of ambiguity and dissent, Curteis’s drama effectively conflates British resolve with Thatcher’s political leadership, transforming military victory into a vindication of her instinctive patriotism and combative personality. More broadly, this vindication illustrates the extent to which the Falklands crisis ‘made sense’ of a political project that had previously been tolerated as an economic necessity rather than embraced as a progressive ideology. In addition to justifying the anti-consensual rhetoric of Thatcher’s authoritarian populism,20 the war also provided a symbolic means of reconciling Thatcherism’s contradictory agendas of conservative nationalism and economic modernisation.21 This political appropriation was crystallised by Thatcher’s 1982 Cheltenham address, a speech that calculatingly adopted the discursive tropes of mythic recovery to energise a new phase of market reforms and managerial dynamism, rousing the ‘spirit of the South Atlantic – the real spirit of Britain’22 against the internal enemies of trade unionism and welfare-state corporatism. Although journalistic and literary opposition to the conflict made little headway against the censorious patriotism that accompanied the war itself, counter-mythic readings became more prominent and more vociferous as military success acquired greater political and electoral currency. Many early examples, such as Raymond Briggs’s The Tin Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984),23 critiqued the war from an internationalist-pacifist position, indicting the political regimes of both countries for their narcissistic attachment to displays of militaristic nationalism. Yet as the decade progressed, censure became increasingly focused upon the figure of the prime minister as critics and satirists ridiculed ‘Maggie’s War’ in an attempt to disarm Thatcherism’s potent narrative of national and ideological ascent. A notable example of this trend is Steven Berkoff ’s Sink the Belgrano! (1986),24 an agitprop verse drama that juxtaposes the formality

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 233

30/01/2012 16:24

234

jon begley

of official discourse with a savage form of low diction,25 paring away the iconography of the ‘Iron Lady’ to reveal the true depravity of a hectoring and vengeful ‘Maggot Scratcher’. For Berkoff, the Cabinet’s decision to sink the Belgrano was more than a cynical act of warmongering: it was symptomatic of a new right-wing consciousness that held ‘an abnormal disregard for human life and values, plus an overwhelming and religious belief in the sanctity of the marketplace’.26 Fearful of popular political hegemony, satires such as Sink the Belgrano! and the television series Spitting Image went beyond allegations of expediency by conveying the war as an organised expression of the most pernicious elements of Thatcherism: an amalgam of its electoral cynicism, entrepreneurial individualism, ‘imperial atavism’27 and racial exclusivity.28 However, while these grotesque representations successfully punctured the hubris of official attempts to preserve a sanitised war, their ideological vehemence precluded any meaningful consideration of the factors that had originally mobilised public support. In Sink the Belgrano!, for example, Berkoff accentuates his political diatribe by mitigating the domestic brutality and territorial ambitions of the junta, disregarding the external endorsements of Parliament and the United Nations, and reducing popular patriotism to state-stimulated xenophobia. In the end, these oppositional satires offer only ‘inverted images’29 of the public figure celebrated in The Falklands Play, with both myth and countermyth acceding to the hyperbolic tribalism that dominated, and often distorted, accounts of the Falklands crisis during the apex of Thatcherism. An alternative mode of literary dissent was provided by works that interrogated the Falklands crisis, not as an expression of political ideology, but as an illumination of the contemporary ‘state-of-the-nation’. These expansive diagnoses countermand the ‘indivisible national whole’30 of mythic restoration by critically mapping an alternate Britain riven by economic inequality and social disharmony. In The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), for example, Ian McEwan employs Britain’s ‘affair of the heart’31 in the South Atlantic to expose the malleability of national and historical identifications, tracing how public discourses of ‘who we thought we were [and] who we wanted to be’32 are assembled and refashioned by dominant commercial and political interests. McEwan’s flawed cast of journalists, publishers, academics and broadcasters gradually generate an expansive indictment of the intellectual acquiescence and historical myopia that facilitated and protected the mythic allure of authoritarian nationalism. While this critical failure is epitomised by the protagonist’s self-serving revision of the Suez crisis, it also extends to the callous and unethical individualism of his metropolitan clique of aspiring media professionals. In a brilliant denouement involving footage from a Conservative party conference, The Ploughman’s Lunch aligns political populism with private acts of emotional betrayal, underscoring the moral corruption and social disaffiliation that McEwan espies behind Thatcherism’s free-market meritocracy. Fortuitously, the Falklands conflict also became the subject of two ‘state-of-the-nation’ travel narratives, Jonathan Raban’s Coasting (1986) and Paul Theroux’s Kingdom by the Sea (1983),33 based on circumnavigations of the British coastline (by boat and on foot, respectively) during the summer of 1982. In both accounts, familiar suppositions about the public’s response to war, whether explicated as instinctive patriotism or programmed jingoism, are supplanted by a national patchwork of regional communities, provincially separated from official culture and locally preoccupied by the ramifications of deindustrialisation. However, while Theroux’s observational style restricts his examination to the most tangible examples of regional differentiation, Raban’s amalgamation of nautical, autobiographical and documentary discourses offers a nuanced dissection of the public mythologies and private investments of national belong-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 234

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the falklands/malvinas war

235

ing. Crucially, Raban escapes the reductive anti-patriotism of left-oriented critiques by contemplating the jingoistic excesses of popular nationalism alongside his own affiliations, both literary and ancestral, to the historical referents and martial traditions at the core of British identity. Raban may decry this inheritance as ‘patriotic dystrophy’,34 but his engagement with the nostalgic allure of the Falklands conflict draws an important distinction between the political nationalism of Thatcher, and the ‘collective daydream’35 of a nation desperate to assuage a humiliation borne of decline.36 Within this framework, widespread public support for the war did not constitute an expression of political assent, but derived from an imaginative ‘falling back’ into an idealised and immutable national past untainted by the radical insecurities of a discontinuous historical present.37 However, as Raban’s continuing journey reveals, the consolations of this collective daydream were transitory and unidirectional, directed backwards towards a utopian mythology that could neither answer, nor account for, the accelerating discord of the miners’ strike and the widening disparities of Thatcher’s ‘enterprise culture’. The poetry and battle-memoirs of British combatants effect a more traditional countermythic function by disrupting domestic celebrations of heroism with visceral portrayals of modern warfare. Yet, with some notable exceptions,38 combat veterans express broad support for the political rationale and strategic objectives of the war, reserving their indignation for the media projections and official omissions that overlaid specific military actions with jubilant narratives of national ascendency. As a consequence, combatant literature is dominated by compact narratives of physical and psychological immersion that deliberately undermine sanitised abstractions of the war by reinscribing the terrifying immediacy and absurd singularity of combat experience. This process of reinscription is epitomised by Vince Bramley’s Forward into Hell (2006) and Ken Lukowiak’s A Soldier’s Song (1993),39 two parallel accounts of the British advance to Port Stanley that transpose the celebrated iconography of the ‘yomp’40 into disordered narratives of combat fatigue and brute survival across a desolate and distinctively anti-pastoral landscape. Such battle accounts also challenge the ‘kith and kin’ patriotism that underscored military intervention by exposing the soldiers’ personal and professional indifference towards the insular, and occasionally unappreciative, ‘kelper’ population. More generally, combatant testimonies display an almost customary modern rejection of the warrior archetype, deflating myths of heroic individualism with narratives of non-participation, such as Philip Williams’s Summer Soldier (1990);41 corrective accounts of renowned actions, such as the death of Colonel ‘H’ Jones in A Soldier’s Song; and countervailing depictions of the regimental ‘family-atwar’ with its communal culture of gallows humour, petty insubordination and fierce interservice rivalry. Beyond the battlefield, these autobiographical memoirs also carry critical resonance as depictions of the war’s personal aftermath, undercutting heroic narratives of regeneration (publicly embodied by the rehabilitation of the badly burned soldier Simon Weston) with their unfolding accounts of addiction, social alienation, familial dissolution and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Frequently, these private ordeals also function as parables of institutional neglect, connecting specific failures of support and medical care, as in Robert Lawrence’s When the Fighting is Over (1998)42 (adapted for television as Tumbledown), with the political and public betrayal of a military ethos once lauded as a model for national renewal.43 In the end, what is fascinating about these extrications from chivalric myth44 is their underlying ambivalence towards the valorisation of the military achievements of the Falklands War. As retrospective testimonies of loss and trauma, combatant texts instinctively adopt an anti-war viewpoint, criticising the unseemly euphoria

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 235

30/01/2012 16:24

236

jon begley

of domestic celebrations and refuting the moral and political legitimacy of warfare. Yet as campaign memoirs, they remain bound to the narrative momentum and regimental honour of a decisive military victory, implicitly recuperating the conflict as the ultimate endorsement of a personal and collective code of elite training, professional service and hyper-masculinity. In many respects, this ambivalence can be read as the inevitable product of an unusually sequential and conclusive military campaign that, beyond all its political ramifications, rehabilitated the international reputation of the British armed forces following the extended withdrawal of decolonisation and recent controversies in Northern Ireland. In contrast to British evocations of martial tradition, Argentina’s founding myth of recovery was derived from a Catholic Nationalist ideology that justified recapture of the islands as the restitution of sacred territory lost to the British during the nation’s infancy. Symbolically, this reunification promised an end to the political violence and external interference that had long prevented the nation from fulfilling its destiny as La Gran Argentina and becoming the pre-eminent military and cultural power in South America.45 In political speeches and patriotic poetry, the reoccupation of Las Malvinas was presented as a religious mission to rescue the despoiled and martyred isles from the decadent clutches of colonial rule and restore them to Argentina’s founding communion of family, church and state.46 Such patriotic myths were directly challenged by Jorge Luis Borges in his poem ‘Juan López and John Ward’, an eerily dispassionate critique of the arbitrary ‘rights’, ‘grievances’ and ‘anniversaries’47 that entrench national antipathies and eclipse the humanistic transactions of literary and cultural identification. However, Borges’s universal lament was not attuned to the public celebrations that greeted military recapture, nor did it anticipate the angry disbelief that followed in the wake of Argentina’s catastrophic and unanticipated defeat. In spite of an expeditious political purge, public discontent towards the military junta intensified as allegations of incompetence, cowardice and disciplinary cruelty were corroborated by the testimonies of los chicos de la guerra (the boys of war): the generation of idealistic young conscripts who had come to epitomise the sanctity and bravery of recapture. Beginning with Daniel Kon’s interviews in Los chicos de la guerra (1983),48 these eyewitness accounts played a central role in exposing the scope of official misinformation and publicly discrediting the military’s long-standing reputation as guardians of national dignity. Indeed, for opponents of the regime, the maltreatment of los chicos marked a continuation of the repressive tactics and extrajudicial punishments that had secured the dominance of the military during the ‘dirty war’ of the 1970s. This political parallel is evident in Rodolfo Fogwill’s Malvinas Requiem (2007),49 a surrealistic narrative that depicts los chicos as a subterranean community of blind, burrowing ‘dillos’ who have extended their de facto abandonment by the army into a condition of non-compliant hibernation. Crucially, Fogwill’s minimalist style extends this figurative blindness into an allegory of state suppression and disinformation, condensing the paranoia of Argentina’s regimented society50 into the fearful speculations and historical folklore of its provincial conscripts. The anti-heroic stasis of Malvinas Requiem is finally broken by the dillos’ fatal entombment, but their ‘disappearance’ from official history is countermanded by the introduction of an unnamed scribe who records and preserves their communal existence for an impending process of excavation and moral settlement. In actuality, this process was initiated as part of Argentina’s democratic reconstruction, but official investigations into the covert operations of the junta frequently faltered, rekindling political and imaginative inquests into the undisclosed conduct and cultural legacies of the war. A relatively

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 236

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the falklands/malvinas war

237

positive chronicle of reconstruction appears in Colm Toibín’s The Story of the Night (1996),51 a coming-of-age narrative that propels its Anglo-Argentinian protagonist from a pre-war ‘twilight’ of alienating secrecy and sexual inhibition into the liberating clamour of economic modernisation and electoral democracy. While this transition is shadowed by remnants of military rule and the corrupting pressures of geo-political interference, Toibín’s allegory of self and nation is undeniably directed towards maturation and selfdetermination, retrospectively positioning the Malvinas war as an irrevocable moment of cultural closure and political redefinition. Argentina’s democratic bearing is less assured, however, in Tristán Bauer’s Blessed by Fire (2005),52 a naturalistic docudrama that revisits the traumas of los chicos to expose a public culture of amnesia and denial that continues to obscure military defeat and safeguard contemporary political corruption. From the outset, Bauer’s film frames the reminiscences of its central veteran/journalist with scenes of popular political protest, underscoring the importance of cultural and historical memory for a nation still acclimatised to self-deception and authoritarian rule. In the end, The Story of the Night and Blessed by Fire are only two artistic contributions to a multifaceted and protracted investigation into Argentina’s recent military-political past, and it is this contested history that ensures the war’s continuing public resonance as an event that inaugurated a radical, and as yet unfinished, reformulation of the nation’s cultural and constitutional identity. The contemporary resonance of the Malvinas war in Argentina is, however, in stark contrast to the diminishing significance of the Falklands War within British culture. In one recent reassessment, the war was described as the ‘the mad aunt nobody talks about, a position it shares with the Prime Minister of the time’.53 As this implies, the cultural impact of the ‘Falklands Factor’ proved inseparable from the instinctive nationalism of its political figurehead, and public interest in the electoral and ideological repercussions of the conflict gradually petered out following Thatcher’s removal from office. In the absence of this defining political framework, the war itself has become ‘enclosed, separate, unreal, without consequence’;54 publicly celebrated as a military and logistical achievement, but figuratively displaced from progressive narratives of national and multicultural identity. Indeed, this detachment from contemporary culture has resulted in a discursive fortification of the conflict’s nostalgic iconography, the sealing of its storybook patriotism into an emblematic montage that is regularly recalled, with either pride or distaste, to illustrate the elemental passions of a bygone decade. This concentrated nostalgia is unintentionally revealed in two recent works, Tim Binding’s Anthem (2003) and Rowland White’s Vulcan 604 (2007),55 that ostensibly set out to commemorate the war’s profound restorative impact. In both books, the Falklands crisis instigates a rediscovery of British virtues and national pride, symbolically encapsulated in Anthem by the melodramatic recovery of a lost child (now Falklands veteran) and practically demonstrated in Vulcan 604 through the mechanical reactivation of a near obsolete aircraft. However, these commemorations are conceptually and intertextually dependent upon the retreating military achievements of the Second World War, a retrogressive orientation that ironically serves to highlight the historical and material distance between the Falklands conflict and Britain’s present post-industrial and post-imperial condition. A more contemporary appraisal of the conflict’s nostalgic resonance appears in three recent coming-of-age narratives, Shane Meadows’s This Is England (2007), David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006) and Gregory Burke’s The Straits (2003).56 This younger generation of writers, largely unhindered by the ideological baggage of the Thatcher decade, revisit their childhood experiences

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 237

30/01/2012 16:24

238

jon begley

of the war by refracting national proceedings through the idiomatic perspectives and rites of adolescence. In each case, official and public celebrations of military power and patriotic loyalty draw impressionable protagonists towards inhumane and violent modes of xenophobic belonging. In essence, these texts adopt the Falklands crisis as an object lesson in the illusions and allure of nationalist politics, an approach clearly informed by contemporary discussions of nationhood in the wake of globalisation, devolution and the postcolonial deconstruction of racial and ethnic essentialism. Through the immersion and moral growth of their protagonists, these narratives implicitly argue for a more rational and tolerant model of British identity, structurally positioning the Falklands crisis as an expression of immaturity within the recent life cycle of a progressive multicultural nation. In most respects, these narrative warnings demonstrate a retrospective assurance that the imperial nostalgia that surrounded the war was a transitory and retrograde experience from which character and nation have judiciously emerged. However, in spite of the bounded quality of their adolescent summers, these works also contain an intrinsic recognition that such intense articulations of national and historical belonging have not been expunged, but remain a powerful, dormant, cultural energy within a country that is still in the process of securing the foundations of its own ‘post-imperial adulthood’.57

Notes 1. Most commonly, the conflict has been read as an international act of moral deterrence during the Cold War (Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years [London: HarperCollins, 1993], p. 173) or a strategic defence of valuable oil reserves (Jo Henderson, ‘The Falklands: National Identity and the Experience of War’, in T. Howard and J. Stokes (eds), The Representation of Military Conflict on the British Stage and Television since 1945 [Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996], pp. 192–203 [p. 193]). 2. Jonathan Raban, Coasting (London: Picador, 1986), p. 113. 3. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), p. 168. 4. Kevin Foster, Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (London: Pluto, 1999), p. 6. 5. David Monaghan, The Falklands War: Myth and Countermyth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. xiv. 6. Julian Barnes, ‘The Worst Reported War since the Crimean’, The Guardian, 25 February 2002, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2002/feb/25/broadcasting.falklands, accessed 4 September 2008. 7. Nigel Leigh, ‘A Limited Engagement: Falklands Fictions and the English Novel’, in James Aulich (ed.), Framing the Falklands War: Nationhood, Culture and Identity (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), p. 126. 8. Foster, p. 39. 9. Anthony Barnett, Iron Britannia: Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War (London: Allison and Busby, 1982), p. 46. 10. ‘We Are All Falklanders Now’, The Times, 5 April 1982, p. 8. 11. Foster, p. 25. 12. Laura Linford Williams, Malvinas Myths, Falklands Fictions: Cultural Responses to War from Both Sides of the Atlantic, PhD Thesis (Tallahassee, FL: The Florida State University, 2005), p. 38. 13. Robert Ecclestall, ‘Party Ideology and National Decline’, in R. English and M. Kenny (eds), Rethinking British Decline (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 155–83. 14. Monaghan, p. 8. 15. Jack Higgins, Exocet (Swindon: Book Club Associates, 1983).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 238

30/01/2012 16:24

the literature of the falklands/malvinas war 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

239

Leigh, p. 122. Foster, p. 142. Ian Curteis, The Falklands Play (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 113. Ibid. p. 60. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988), p. 143. Wright, p. 185. Barnett, p. 153. Raymond Briggs, The Tin Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984). Steven Berkoff, Sink the Belgrano! and Massage (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). Monaghan, p. 61. Steven Berkoff, Steven Berkoff: Plays One (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 145. E. P. Thompson, Zero Option (London: Merlin Press, 1982), p. 192. Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 51. Monaghan, p. 61. Henderson, p. 194. Ian McEwan, A Move Abroad: or Shall We Die? and The Ploughman’s Lunch (London: Picador, 1989), p. 29. Ibid. p. 29. Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). Raban, p. 115. Ibid. p. 187. Eric Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing 1977–1988 (London: Verso, 1989), p. 53. Wright, p. 167. A compelling account of personal opposition is provided by the correspondence of Lieutenant David Tinker, an officer on HMS Glamorgan who comes to view the Falklands conflict as ‘the most pointless of wars ever fought by Britain’ (A Message from the Falklands: The Life and Gallant Death of David Tinker, Lieut. R.N. [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983], p. 197). Vince Bramley, Forward Into Hell (London: John Blake Publishing, 2006); Ken Lukowiak, A Soldier’s Song (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993). Even this term is a source of dispute for Bramley and Lukowiak because Royal Marines ‘yomp’ but Paratroopers ‘tab’ (tactical advance to battle). Philip Williams with M. S. Power, Summer Soldier (London: Bloomsbury, 1990). John Lawrence and Robert Lawrence, When the Fighting Is Over: A Personal Story of the Battle for Tumbledown Mountain and its Aftermath (London: Bloomsbury, 1988). This public betrayal also features in Vince Bramley’s Two Sides of Hell (London: Bloomsbury, 1994) and Martin Stellman’s film For Queen and Country. UK: Working Title Pictures, 1989. Foster, p. 114. Williams, p. 34. Ibid. p. 42. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Juan López and John Ward’, trans. R. Terragno, The Times, 18 September 1982, p. 6. Daniel Kon, Los Chicos de la Guerra (Sevenoaks: New English Library, 1983). Rodolfo Fogwill, Malvinas Requiem, trans. N. Caistor and A. Hopkinson (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007). Jimmy Burns, The Land that Lost its Heroes: How Argentina Lost the Falklands War (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), p. 81. Colm Toibín, The Story of the Night (London: Picador, 1996).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 239

30/01/2012 16:24

240

jon begley

52. Blessed by Fire, film, directed by Tristán Bauer. UK: Soda Pictures, 2005. 53. Mark Lawson, ‘Our Own Vietnam’, The Guardian, 25 February 2002, available at http://www. guardian.co.uk/media/2002/feb/25/broadcasting.falklands1, accessed 18 November 2008. 54. Barnes. 55. Tim Binding, Anthem (London: Picador, 2003); Rowland White, Vulcan 604 (London: Corgi, 2007). 56. This Is England, film, directed by Shane Meadows. UK: Optimum Releasing, 2007; David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006); Gregory Burke, The Straits (London: Faber and Faber, 2003). 57. Alan Brownjohn, quoted in Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson (eds), Authors Take Sides on the Falklands (London: Cecil Woolf, 1982).

Further Reading Aulich, James (ed.), Framing the Falklands War: Nationhood, Culture and Identity (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992). Barnett, Anthony, Iron Britannia: Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War (London: Allison and Busby, 1982). Burns, Jimmy, The Land that Lost its Heroes: How Argentina Lost the Falklands War (London: Bloomsbury, 1987). Foster, Kevin, Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (London: Pluto, 1999). Monaghan, David, The Falklands War: Myth and Countermyth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Williams, Laura Linford, Malvinas Myths, Falklands Fictions: Cultural Responses to War from Both Sides of the Atlantic, PhD Thesis (Tallahassee, FL: The Florida State University, 2005). Wright, Patrick, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 240

30/01/2012 16:24

25

‘AN UNEVEN KILLING FIELD’: BRITISH LITERATURE AND THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA Andrew Hammond

T

hroughout the 1990s, the former Yugoslavia was engulfed by a series of military conflicts. The economic meltdown of the latter stages of the Cold War, which caused widespread poverty and competition between the constituent republics for government funding, soon led to a rise in ethnic nationalism.1 This was fuelled by Presidents Slobodan Miloševic´ of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, who viewed the disintegration of Yugoslavia as an opportunity for territorial expansion, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The commencement of full-scale fighting was initiated by the Croatian and Slovenian declarations of independence in 1991. After a brief skirmish in Slovenia in the summer of that year, the hostilities centred on northern and eastern Croatia from 1991 to 1995 and on Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, the latter promoted and partly funded by Belgrade and Zagreb. The so-called ‘wars of Yugoslav succession’ were rekindled a few years later in Kosovo, where, after Miloševic´’s attempts to suppress Albanian dissent via ethnic cleansing, military intervention by NATO returned the region to uneasy peace. Tragically, Serbian and Croatian irredentism had by this time produced the worst carnage in Europe since the 1940s. In Croatia and Bosnia, almost 200,000 people had died, up to 250,000 people had fled abroad and almost a million had lost their homes.2 Although the figures for the Kosovo conflict remain in dispute, evidence suggests that, from January to June 1999, over 850,000 Albanians were expelled from the province and between 2,000 and 7,000 were killed.3 The statistics do little to capture the horrifying extent of rape, torture, trauma, destitution and environmental catastrophe. For understanding the British literary treatment of the crises, the domestic history of the region is less significant than the response of the international community, which formed ten long years of vacillation and incompetence. This is typified by the early months of the war in Bosnia, when the rapid westward advance of Serbian forces, directed by Radovan Karadžic´ and Ratko Mladic´ and barely resisted by an ill-equipped alliance of Bosnian Croats and Muslims, drew from Western leaders only the most inept attempts at diplomatic arbitration. In the worst of these, EU negotiators David Owen and Cyrus Vance advocated in January 1993 the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina into ethnic ‘cantons’, a proposal that included designating as Croatian several areas which were Muslim-dominated. Sensing international approval, the Bosnian Croats duly severed their alliance with the Muslims and pushed eastward into the allocated zones, further imperilling the Bosniaks loyal to the Sarajevan government. Yet despite its evident failings, the emphasis on mediation over military intervention was retained by EU and US

241

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 241

30/01/2012 16:24

242

andrew hammond

leaders for a further two years. As the Cambridge historian Brendon Simms argues, the choice was spearheaded by the British Conservative government, whose apparent opposition to any measure that might restrain the Serbs marked ‘Britain’s unfinest hour since 1938’.4 Amongst other flawed policies, Britain resisted the imposition of a ‘no-fly zone’ designed to check Serbian offensives, opposed the use of armed intervention to assist the passage of aid to Muslim enclaves and refused to establish an embassy in Sarajevo for two years after Bosnian independence had been recognised. Britain also blocked any attempt to lift a UN arms embargo on the region which clearly advantaged the wellarmed Serbs and also contravened Article 51 of the UN Charter that entitles sovereign nations the right to self-defence. Infamously, the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, argued that ending the embargo would ‘remove any incentive from the Bosnian Muslims to go to the negotiating table’ and would create a ‘level killing field’.5 Apart from bullying the victims of genocide, such statements seemed to imply – in Mark Almond’s words – that the British government ‘preferred an uneven killing field’.6 It was shortly after that Margaret Thatcher, an advocate of intervention, told Hurd that he ‘would make Neville Chamberlain look like a warmonger’.7 In the political discourse of the period, the government justified abandoning the Bosnian Muslims not by informed argument, but by a set of tired axioms – about ‘civil wars’, ‘tribal chaos’, ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ – that suggested moral equivalence between the ‘warring factions’. During his time as an EU negotiator, for example, Lord Carrington claimed that the Bosnian ethnicities were ‘all as bad as each other’ and that ‘[e]verybody is to blame for what is happening’.8 A similar effect was produced by constantly sourcing the conflict in ‘impersonal and inevitable forces beyond anyone’s control’ (John Major) and in ‘a culture of violence within a crossroads civilization’ (David Owen).9 The unity and vigour of Whitehall rhetoric led many to suspect that Britain’s real strategy for regional stability was the facilitation of Serbian and Croatian victory. The policy of non-intervention was relinquished after the massacre at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, when the Serbs slaughtered some 7,000 Muslims and the doctrine of moral equivalence no longer satisfied British public opinion. Despite Major’s twaddle about ‘forces beyond anyone’s control’, NATO air strikes on the Bosnian Serb army brought the war to a swift conclusion. Alongside continuing injustice in Croatia, which was soon being described as ‘the most ethnically cleansed of all Balkan states’,10 it was now the escalation of tensions in Kosovo that caused international concern. The success of air strikes in Bosnia encouraged a more robust response to Belgrade’s mistreatment of ethnic Albanians, with the New Labour government quickly endorsing NATO sorties against economic and military targets in Kosovo and Serbia. The success of the operation paved the way for the overthrow and arrest of Miloševic´, who began trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal in 2001. As Simms points out, the terms of his indictment exposed the fallacy of British foreign policy in the early 1990s. In contrast to the doctrine of equal culpability, the tribunal was unequivocal in calling Miloševic´ to account for genocide and crimes against humanity. Contradicting British notions of ‘civil war’ and chaotic ‘tribal hatreds’, the tribunal also emphasised that ‘a state of international armed conflict and partial occupation [had] existed in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ and that this occupation had planned a clinically efficient ‘removal of the majority of non-Serbs’.11 Such claims were prefigured by a report on the Srebrenica massacre produced in November 1999 by Kofi Annan, the General Secretary of the UN. As well as placing the burden of guilt on Miloševic´’s Serbia, Annan condemned the ‘prism of “amoral equivalency”’ which

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 242

30/01/2012 16:24

british literature and the former yugoslavia

243

the international community used to justify inaction, berated its ‘tendency to assume that the parties were equally responsible’ and denounced its preference for ineffectual mediatory processes which ‘amounted to appeasement’.12 The report works not only as a wholesale condemnation of Hurd’s foreign office, but also as an insightful critique of the representational patterns found within most British literature on the conflict. After the unexpected ending of the Cold War, and the subsequent announcement of an ‘end of history’, the evidence offered by the former Yugoslavia that history was continuing apace made it a compulsive topic of intellectual debate. The fascination that British writers felt towards such atrocities occurring in their lifetime, as well as on their doorstep, is seen in the excitable comparisons they drew to earlier twentieth-century wars. Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, the trench warfare of the First World War and the holocaust of the Second World War were all drawn upon for analogies. At times, the heated arguments were less about the ‘Balkan Wars’ than about the conflicts they most resembled. When Tariq Ali wrote that Miloševic´’s crackdown on the Kosovan Albanians recalled Western counter-insurgency in South East Asia, Fergal Keane angrily responded ‘that Stalin’s vast population clearances in the Caucasus or his actions against the Cossacks would be a more appropriate comparison’.13 This tendency for writers to respond to the genocide by impassioned debate, rather than by action, has inspired another historical analogy, this time from academic quarters. For Chris Agee, ‘Bosnia was the Spanish Civil War of our time’, marking ‘a clash between the open and the closed society’ and between the ideals of ‘pluralism and democracy [. . .] and the dark cult of chauvinism’. ‘But unlike Spain’, Agee continues: Bosnia never quite became a cause célèbre for artists and intellectuals abroad, apart from a small minority, having failed somehow to muster a critical mass of ethical imagination. Notwithstanding the important role of [. . .] some dedicated journalists, why were there so few outside writers on the ground, why so little sense of a galvanised and firsthand solidarity? Where were the Hemingways and Dos Passos, the Pazs and Koestlers and Spenders, the Orwells and Audens, and Malraux and Weils?14 The question is reiterated by Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Meštrovic´ in This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (1996), one of the finest discussions of the topic. Like Agee, their starting point is the manner in which the International Brigades in Spain saw no essential difference between the espousing of libertarian principles and the bearing of arms to defend them. In the 1990s, however, the daily bombardment of information about genocide in Europe was met with a cynicism, detachment and deconstruction of all ideological positions – both those of perpetrators and victims – as plural fictions lacking validity or depth. ‘In the age of postmodernism’, Cushman and Meštrovic´ write, ‘moral vocabularies are contingent and not final’ and the Western intellectual ‘revels in relativism, the questioning of the possibility of facts, and the celebration of ambivalence’.15 Ironically, the intellectuals’ relativism is not dissimilar to the equivalence of guilt expounded by politicians, who also found little to endorse amidst the region’s petty nationalisms and ethnic tribalisms. Cushman and Meštrovic´ locate further commonality by arguing that the very real terrors of the war in Bosnia were so often relegated to the realm of spectacle. For the international community, genuine participation was exchanged for ‘the business of war-watching’ via a network of ‘United Nations monitors, European Community observers, [. . .] Helsinki Watch watchers, Amnesty International observers’, while for a television-watching public the daily broadcasts from the front lines

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 243

30/01/2012 16:24

244

andrew hammond

offered simulated, hyper-real images of violence enjoyed for that voyeuristic ‘frisson of pleasure that is difficult to own up to’.16 The turn towards voyeurism and relativism is evident throughout British fiction on the former Yugoslavia. Here, authors have failed to locate either virtue or integrity in any of the so-called ‘warring factions’, preferring to exclude them from the normal currents of European identity. The protagonist of Gerald Seymour’s The Heart of Danger (1995), during a train journey from Austria to Slovenia, is certain that he is ‘traversing the no man’s land between the civility of old Europe and the barbarity of new Europe’.17 The inhabitants of this ‘lost forgotten corner of pretend civilisation’ are uniquely and universally depraved: as a character puts it, ‘“[t]hey’re animals, all of them, not a peck of difference between the lot of them”’.18 Similarly, Pat Barker’s Double Vision (2003) conflates the Muslim- and Serb-held sectors of war-torn Sarajevo when the protagonist labels the entire town ‘a crime scene’, a place where ‘crime and war shade into each other’ and where ‘revolutionary, freedom-fighter, terrorist, murderer’ are words with one meaning.19 While Barker’s and Seymour’s narratives indicate at least a measure of Serbian culpability for the slaughter in Bosnia, Hurd used the short story format to reiterate the governmental line, the narrator of ‘Warrior’ (1999) claiming that this was not ‘a war of right against wrong’ but ‘a mess in which politicians and generals in all these communities destroyed their own country’.20 Such statements of ‘amoral equivalency’, in Annan’s phrase, were often repeated formally in Balkanist novels. In Barbara Taylor Bradford’s Where You Belong (2000), the photographer-heroine stumbles upon a vicious battle between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army ‘in some obscure village in the Balkans’, but after several panic-stricken hours still ‘wasn’t sure who was who’, leaving the reader equally uncertain about the cause of the crisis.21 Other novels that use Kosovo as a narrative backdrop are even vaguer on detail. For Stewart Ross in Only a Matter of Time (2001), ‘[t]here was no black and white in Kosovo any more, just a dirty grey fog of lies’, and for Sarah May, whose The Internationals (2003) is set in Macedonia, the conflict stems from ‘a violent lawlessness barely perceptible to the average western civilian’.22 By far the most important literary response to events has come in the realm of nonfiction, much of which is written by servicemen, journalists and humanitarians who gained first-hand experience of the fighting. As the memoirs of UN personnel exemplify, a large percentage of this work draws directly on the elisions and obfuscations of British political discourse. When Colonel Bob Stewart argues that ‘Bosnia is undergoing a classic civil war, fought by civilians against civilians’, and asserts that ‘nobody knows why the Balkans have chosen self-destruction as the primary means of forward progress’, he repeats his political masters’ refusal to locate and censure the perpetrators of genocide.23 At times, the doctrine of moral equivalence has been pursued with a bigotry and ethnic intolerance indistinguishable from racism. For Major Vaughan Kent-Payne, the ‘brutal Slav’ character of the Serbs, Croats and Muslims places them in opposition to Western Europeans: ‘[m] entally, they were poles apart from us and treated each other with a brutality that bordered on the bestial.’24 For General Michael Rose, a commander in the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, these ‘savages’ may like to consider themselves European, but ‘after the way they had slaughtered each other it would take them at least 500 years to achieve that status.’25 Rose’s failure to distinguish between combatant and civilian, victim and aggressor, is taken to absurd extremes in his claim that Bosniak soldiers, in choosing to defend their territory, were doing as much to prolong the conflict and to compound the suffering of the Muslims as the Serbian aggressors. On commencing his tour of duty in 1994, he decides that

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 244

30/01/2012 16:24

british literature and the former yugoslavia

245

[his] first task would be to tell President Izetbegovic [the president of BosniaHerzegovina] that this grim strategy of inflicting such horrors on his people would never succeed and that I would do all in my power to prevent the UN from becoming engaged in a war in Bosnia as a combatant.26 Naturally, the political administrations in Belgrade and Zagreb gained tremendous confidence from such verbal attacks on the Sarajevan government, as they also did from the impartiality which UN forces on the ground were obliged to show by the terms of their mandate. As remarkable as it may seem, Rose, Stewart and Kent-Payne are not abashed to record their neutrality in the face of Serbian aggression, which included the kidnapping of peacekeepers, the shelling of humanitarian convoys and the impounding of humanitarian aid. A more detailed example is Larry Hollingworth’s record of two years’ service as UNHCR Chief of Operations in Bosnia, a role that included distributing aid within the largely Muslim enclaves of Žepa, Goražde and Srebrenica. While Hollingworth sympathises with the besieged populations (whose miseries included exposure, semi-starvation and constant bombardment), he dutifully hands over to the Serbian besiegers equal consignments of food, petrol and medicine to those of the besieged, despite their attacks on the enclaves being judged illegal by international law. ‘We were the most powerful organisation in the world’, he rages after one such handover, ‘and yet we allowed ourselves to operate under conditions imposed by madmen and bandits’.27 Unfortunately, the major thrust of Hollingworth’s anger is directed not at the Serbian forces which hamper and plunder his conveys, but at Muslim civilians, officials and politicians whose ongoing criticisms of UN peacekeeping operations finally exasperate him. Indeed, there are moments when Hollingworth seems to veer towards Serbophilia.28 He describes the commanders of Serbian units as ‘decent and [. . .] honourable’, he admits to ‘enjoying’ the company of Radovan Karadžic´ (who is currently standing trial for genocide) and he employs the epithet ‘charming’ for the Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavšic´ (who is serving an eleven-year sentence for war crimes).29 The memoirs of Hollingworth and others also include plenty of ‘local colour’ that is confusing, if not impenetrable, for the non-specialist. When Stewart’s reconnaissance team stumbles upon a wrecked and burning village in north-east Bosnia, he is less than informative about the perpetrators: ‘We presumed we had just seen “ethnic cleansing” in the raw’, Stewart writes, ‘but were not sure who was being “cleansed”.’30 In Letters from a Nobody (1995), the British private John Haggerty similarly describes people ‘trying to kill each other’ and mentions ‘the way that they “ethnically cleanse” an area’, yet rarely explains who is killing whom or which faction is doing the ‘ethnic cleansing’.31 The UN mandate for peacekeeping in Bosnia also limited the military engagement of soldiers like Stewart and Haggerty to self-defence (a restriction which undermined any illusion of action that the mission might otherwise have created). For BBC correspondent Martin Bell, the ‘blue helmets’ were consequently as much spectators to the suffering as British reporters. Echoing Cushman and Meštrovic´, Bell’s In Harm’s Way (1995) raises the question of whether Western personnel were ‘not all battlefield voyeurs of one sort or another, making a living out of other people’s troubles’ while failing to commit to any action that might have ‘brought peace a moment closer’.32 On the one hand, Bell is adamant that ‘[g]ood journalism is the journalism of attachment’ and is categorical that the Serbs ‘started this war; they killed and they burned and they ethnically cleansed; and the greater part of responsibility for it will always be theirs’.33 On the other hand, his

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 245

30/01/2012 16:24

246

andrew hammond

memoir is haunted by the fear that the British media offered ‘a partisan account, as if we were taking sides with the beleaguered Muslims’, and emphasises that this was ‘a civil war’ which, after the Croats had reneged on their military alliance with the Muslims, ‘became more complex, harder to reckon on a moral compass, and somehow shaded in grey’.34 This disinclination to take sides is forcibly repeated by many of Bell’s co-reporters. The Daily Telegraph’s Alec Russell blames events on a ‘Balkan barbarism’ and an undifferentiated ‘Balkan mindset’, and the BBC’s John Simpson, who ‘didn’t like the place at all’, ‘found each of the population groups – Serbs, Croats and Muslims – equally unattractive’.35 Inexplicably, Simpson even argues that British reportage of the war was anti-Serbian and therefore guilty of ‘partiality and bias’.36 He not only fails to offer evidence for the claim, but also overlooks the fact that the editorial policies of British broadsheets, in Simms’s words, ‘remained [. . .] in the grip of Whitehall “spin”’, with even left-leaning papers like The Guardian and The Observer arguing for the lack of British strategic interest in the region and the futility of Western military intervention.37 An even clearer repudiation of Simpson’s claim is suggested by Eve-Ann Prentice’s One Woman’s War (2000). Recounting her time in Bosnia and Kosovo as a senior correspondent for The Times, the memoir is determined to play down the Serbian involvement in war crimes and genocide. On pre-war visits to Belgrade, we are told, Prentice found the Serbs friendly, vibrant, life-affirming and not at all the people that ‘the world [. . .] believed were mass rapists and murderers’, an experience which taught her ‘the importance of questioning perceived wisdom’.38 Although this sounds admirable, in practice such ‘questioning’ amounts to a deconstructive trickery by which any reported Serbian atrocity is treated as a fallacious construction of Western discourse. Misrepresenting popular perceptions of the war, she denounces the West’s view of ‘the Bosnian conflict as essentially black against white, bad Serbs against good Muslims’ and laments the way that ‘the international perception of Serbs as warmongers [. . .] was revived by the West to galvanise public opinion when the Kosovo crisis erupted.’39 With regard to media coverage of the deaths caused by the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, she complains of commentators not only ‘blaming the Serbs without proof ’ but also ‘demonising them’.40 Just as Prentice brushes over the bombardments, death camps and expulsions that characterised Serbian military policy in Bosnia, so her sections on Kosovo tend to downplay the sufferings of the Kosovan Albanians by focusing on the KLA reprisals and the NATO bombings of Belgrade. The refugees entering Albania and Macedonia may be telling ‘a waiting world of mass killings’, she writes dismissively, ‘[b]ut no one really knew what was happening on the inside’.41 With her own trips into Kosovo being conducted under Serbian escort, it is no surprise to discover that the majority of her interviewees are Serbian soldiers and civilians. The sense of victimhood one gains from their testimonies is augmented by the many acts of kindness which they show the author. In one scene, Prentice and her crew find themselves under NATO bombardment near the eastern Kosovan town of Prizren, and are obliged to take refuge in a roadside culvert. Convinced that her final hour has come, she amazed to hear the banging of a car door and footfalls brushing through the undergrowth and moving towards us. [Suddenly] there were two seemingly enormous Yugoslav Army soldiers, beaming and stretching their hands out towards us. Effortlessly, one of them scooped me from our hiding place and enfolded me in his arms. I felt like a lost child who had just found her father.42

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 246

30/01/2012 16:24

british literature and the former yugoslavia

247

It was not unusual for a Western journalist to receive assistance from local people, nor for that journalist to have ‘felt very close to those who had helped me’.43 The problem is that the carefully constructed portrait of a paternalistic Serbian military collapses once Prentice’s text makes reference – as indeed it must – to the systematic deportation of tens of thousands of Albanians that occurred during ‘the Serbian reign of terror’.44 As soon as such atrocities are acknowledged, One Woman’s War ironically collapses all distinction between Albanian and Serbian malfeasance, producing a typically relativistic portrait of collective guilt. Apart from the writings produced by journalists and servicemen, there are very few British travel books that address the former Yugoslavia. The texts published by Jan Morris, Simon Winchester, Peter Morgan and Natascha Scott-Stokes during or shortly after the hostilities are interesting for the way that, as with British novels, they comply with the dominant political discourse on the region, despite their authors holding no apparent institutional loyalty. For example, Morris views the war in Bosnia as ‘a spiteful sort of destructiveness’, conducted ‘by groups of civilians expressing their true emotions’ in a manner that reminds her ‘of those indiscriminate [. . .] ethnic-religious-hereditary conflicts of the Middle Ages’.45 Similarly, Scott-Stokes claims that ‘[a]ll are guilty’ and, when considering ‘the ancient history of violence in this country’, argues that ‘no side is innocent of unspeakable atrocities.’46 The intellectual laziness of these travelogues is perhaps best illustrated by Winchester’s The Fracture Zone (1999), an account of a tour around the western and southern Balkans in 1999. After being asked by a British newspaper to report on the Kosovan refugee crisis, Winchester makes his way to the Kosovo–Macedonian border and is appalled by the suffering he witnesses there. He is particularly shocked at ‘the evident Europeanness’ of refugees ‘who could very well, from the simple fact of their appearance, be cousins or friends or acquaintances’.47 It is the kind of response that has caused consternation amongst humanitarian organisations, which frequently locate in the West’s intervention in Kosovo (and non-intervention in, say, Rwanda, Somalia and the Sudan) an ethnocentric privileging of white Europeans in crisis.48 Yet Winchester’s shock does not prevent him from descending into the usual Balkanist stereotypes. While touring the wider region, his stated aim is to discover why there should be ‘this dire inevitability about the Balkans being so fractious and unsettled a corner of the world’.49 He finds the answer, bizarrely, in the prehistoric collision in the peninsula between the tectonic plates of Europe and Asia which, in producing an erratic, fractured geography, also produced ‘the fractured behaviour of those who [. . .] live upon it’.50 As he goes on, The ranges of hills had unexpectedly steep faces and deep and curiously isolated valleys, rivers that twisted and turned in corkscrew patterns, defiles that became dangerous cul-de-sacs, hidden and unexpected plains, eternally defensible hilltops and seemingly bottomless canyons [. . .] One might say that anyone who inhabited such a place for a long time would probably evolve into something that varied substantially, for good or for ill, from whatever is the human norm.51 In one neat formulation, Winchester elucidates the whole history of conflict, nationalism and ethnic division in the Balkans. The kind of deterministic pseudo-ethnology favoured by Winchester, and by so many politicians, diplomats, servicemen, journalists, novelists and travel writers, crystallises the extraordinary disinformation that has circulated over the last twenty years. The rare dissenting voices – Ed Vulliamy, Janine de Giovanni, James Pettifer, Zoë Brân, Tony White, Jeremy Bowen – have not managed to challenge

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 247

30/01/2012 16:24

248

andrew hammond

this broad consensus. Indeed, with so many informed, intelligent memoirs and histories now emerging in translation from the region’s own authors, it is difficult to see why British commentary should detain an English-language readership.52 The complicity that fiction and travel writing have had with political discourse does not necessarily entail their authors’ conscious collaboration with national strategy. One suspects that their fondness for citing ‘ancient hatreds’ and ‘tribal conflicts’ has emerged, rather, from the inherent drama that they bring to a fictional or autobiographical text. It may also have emerged from a suspicion that a full, detailed account of the real causes of conflict would bewilder, and therefore lose, their readers, although there is nothing inherently mystifying about wars of territorial conquest.53 Nevertheless, their failure to distance themselves from political rhetoric helped to legitimise political and military decision making. Despite the manifold weaknesses of British policy in the Balkans, there was little public opposition either to the Conservative policy of non-intervention in Bosnia or to New Labour interventionism in Kosovo. To compound the issue, the British discourse on the conflicts quickly became a framework for representing the whole of south-east Europe in the post-Cold War era, despite the fact that ‘life in the Balkans’, as Mark Mazower points out, ‘was no more violent than elsewhere’.54 The countries of Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, each of which has come under the gradual sway of the European Union, have all been constructed via the motifs of savagery, backwardness, irrationality and selfdestructive violence. For the region as a whole, the West’s ‘prism of “amoral equivalency”’ looks set to be a lasting legacy of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Notes 1. See Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1995), p. 15. 2. R. J. Crampton, The Balkans since the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002), p. 268. 3. Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 310; Roland Dannreuther, ‘War in Kosovo: History, Development and Aftermath’, in Mary Buckley and Sally N. Cummings (eds), Kosovo: Perceptions of War and Its Aftermath (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), pp. 12–29 (p. 26). 4. Brendon Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, new edn (London: Penguin, [2001] 2002), p. 2. 5. Douglas Hurd, quoted in Simms, pp. 80, 86. 6. Mark Almond, Europe’s Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London: Mandarin, 1994), p. 321. 7. Margaret Thatcher, quoted in Simms, p. 50. 8. Lord Carrington, quoted in Simms, pp. 17, 19. 9. John Major, quoted in Mark Mazower, The Balkans (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), p. 128; David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, new edn (London: Indigo, [1995] 1996), p. 3. 10. Brendan O’Shea, Crisis at Bihac: Bosnia’s Bloody Battlefield (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), p. 231. See also John R. Lampe, Balkans into Southeastern Europe: A Century of War and Transition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 271; and Slavenka Drakulic´, They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague (London: Abacus, 2004), pp. 9–17, 23–45. 11. International War Crimes Tribunal, quoted in Simms, p. x. A number of historians had already stated this in the 1990s. For example, Norman Cigar argued that ‘the genocide [. . .] was implemented in a deliberate and systematic manner as part of a broader strategy intended to achieve a well-defined, concrete, political objective, namely, the creation of an expanded, ethnically

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 248

30/01/2012 16:24

british literature and the former yugoslavia

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

249

pure Greater Serbia’ (Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ [College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995], p. 4). Kofi Annan, quoted in Simms, p. 1. Fergal Keane, quoted in Tom Gallagher, The Balkans in the New Millennium: In the Shadow of War and Peace (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 75. Chris Agee, ‘Introduction’ to Agee (ed.), Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p. 27. Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Meštrovic´, ‘Introduction’ to Cushman and Meštrovic´ (eds), This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), p. 11. Stjepan Meštrovic´, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 79; Vesna Goldsworthy, ‘Invention and In(ter)vention: The Rhetoric of Balkanization’, in Dušan I. Bjelic´ and Obrad Savic´ (eds), Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002), p. 30. Gerald Seymour, The Heart of Danger (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 84. Ibid. pp. 315, 68. Pat Barker, Double Vision (London: Penguin, [2003] 2004), p. 53. Sally Trench’s preamble to Fran’s War (1999), a children’s story set in Bosnia, introduces the conflict to readers via the familiar clichés of collective ‘tribal prejudices’ and ‘ancient blood feuds’, while one of Louis de Bernières’s narrators in A Partisan’s Daughter (2008) finds Yugoslavia ‘possessed and tormented by history’, a condition that ‘takes the logic and humanity out of their souls’ (Trench, ‘Introduction’ to Trench, Fran’s War [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999], p. 7; de Bernières, A Partisan’s Daughter [London: Harvill Secker, 2008], p. 34). Douglas Hurd, ‘Warrior’, in Ten Minutes to Turn the Devil (London: Little, Brown, 1999), p. 145. Barbara Taylor Bradford, Where You Belong (London: HarperCollins, [2000] 2001), pp. 13, 17. Stewart Ross, Only a Matter of Time: A Story from Kosovo (London: Hodder Wayland, 2001), p. 12; Sarah May, The Internationals (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), p. 143. Amongst British novelists, Tim Sebastian is unique in imagining the spread of full-scale war to Macedonia, but typical in viewing the Balkans as ‘a great web, sewn together by centuries of hatred and nationalism – and now torn apart by unbelievable brutality’ (Sebastian, War Dance [London: Orion, 1996], p. 165). Bob Stewart, Broken Lives: A Personal View of the Bosnian Conflict (London: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 319, 321. Vaughan Kent-Payne, Bosnia Warriors: Living on the Front Line (London: Robert Hale, 1998), p. 353. Michael Rose, Fighting for Peace: Bosnia 1994 (London: Harvill Press, 1998), p. 72. Ibid. p. 18. Larry Hollingworth, Merry Christmas, Mr Larry (London: Heinemann, 1996), p. 57. This was not unusual for British military records: see Simms, pp. 177–80; and James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (London: Hurst, 1997), p. 174. Hollingworth, pp. 118, 29, 36. Stewart, p. 52. John Haggerty, Letters from a Nobody (London: Minerva, 1995), pp. 36, 81. The same confusion is found in writings by British volunteer combatants and aid workers, such as Sally Becker’s The Angel of Mostar (London: Hutchinson, 1994); Keith Cory-Jones’s War Dogs (London: Century, 1996); and Anthony Loyd’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So (London: Anchor, 1999). For example, Loyd claims that ‘right and wrong’ did exist in the Bosnian conflict, but also reveals a maddening tendency to ‘blame [. . .] all sides equally’ (pp. 111, 20). Martin Bell, In Harm’s Way (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995), p. 253.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 249

30/01/2012 16:24

250

andrew hammond

33. Ibid. pp. 127–8, 114. 34. Ibid. pp. 129, 151, 151. 35. Alec Russell, Prejudice and Plum Brandy: Tales of a Balkan Stringer (London: Michael Joseph, 1993), pp. 178, 174; John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People (London: Pan, 1999), p. 450. These sentiments recur in the supposedly more restrained realm of historical studies. Misha Glenny peppers his texts with such essentialising phrases as ‘Balkan vortex’, ‘Balkan mentality’ and ‘absurdist Balkan nightmare’, while John Keegan refers to the war in Bosnia as ‘a struggle reminiscent of nothing so much as the “territorial displacement” anthropologists identify as the underlying logic of much “primitive” warfare in tribal society’ (Glenny, The Balkans 1804– 1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers [London: Granta Books, 1999], p. 659; Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, 3rd edn [London: Penguin, (1992) 1996], pp. 238, 99; Keegan, A History of Warfare [London: Hutchinson, 1993], pp. 55–6). 36. Simpson, p. 450. 37. Simms, p. 301. In a 2006 autobiography, Jeremy Bowen is unusual in remaining openly supportive of the Bosnian Muslims, lamenting that Western reportage ‘created at times a false equality’ between the ‘warring factions’ and claiming that reporters ‘should have been harder on the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs [who] were responsible for the majority of the war crimes that were committed’ (Bowen, War Stories [London: Pocket Books, 2007], pp. 150, 151). 38. Eve-Ann Prentice, One Woman’s War (London: Duckbacks, [2000] 2001), p. 67. 39. Ibid. pp. 70, 92. 40. bid. p. 87. As Cushman and Meštrovic´ point out, the Serbs also ‘complained that they have been demonized in the press (as if it takes the press to make demons out of those who have committed genocide)’ (Cushman and Meštrovic´, ‘Introduction’, p. 14). Prentice fails to explain why the West that supposedly believed ‘that Socialist Serbs were bad’ spent three and a half years avoiding intervention in Bosnia (Prentice, p. 95). 41. Prentice, p. 114. 42. Ibid. pp. 21–2. 43. Ibid. p. 38. 44. Ibid. p. 30. 45. Jan Morris, Fifty Years of Europe: An Album (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 130, 130, 129. 46 . Natascha Scott-Stokes, The Amber Trail: A Journey of Discovery by Bicycle from the Baltic Sea to the Aegean (London: Phoenix, 1994), pp. 155, 148, 155. 47. Simon Winchester, The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans (London: Viking, 1999), p. 29. 48. For example, Tony Vaux deplores the way in which the average Kosovan refugee received fifty times the assistance given to African refugees during the 1990s, including three meals a day, hot showers and laundry facilities (see Vaux, The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War [London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan Publications, 2001], pp. 209, 30). 49. Winchester, p. 26. 50. Ibid. p. 60. 51. Ibid. pp. 61–2. 52. For example, a brief list of translated memoirs of the war in Bosnia may include Zlatko Dizdarevic´’s Sarajevo: A War Journal (New York: Fromm International, 1993); Rezak Hukanovic´’s The Tenth Circle of Hell (London: Little, Brown, 1997); and Elma Softic´’s Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights (Toronto: Key Porter, 1995). 53. See Branka Magaš, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-Up 1980–92 (London and New York: Verso, 1993), p. 349; Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War (London: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 4; and Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia’s Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition (1993) (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 248–9. 54. Mazower, p. 128.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 250

30/01/2012 16:24

26

SACRIFICE AND THE SUBLIME SINCE 11 SEPTEMBER 2001 Alex Houen

I

I

n the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks many literary writers felt compelled to respond to the events, though much of what they wrote was about not knowing how to respond.1 To address the attacks’ terrifying reality through imagined, fictional worlds seemed an affront to that reality. As the New York novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz wrote: ‘We will do what is needed; we will write the next sentence. Only not yet, not here on the bleak brink of November.’2 Since then, there has been a steady release of September 11 novels and films, though many people have felt that such portrayals have been insensitive for coming too soon in the events’ wake. Inevitably, 2006, the year of the attacks’ fifth anniversary, abounded with controversy over the ethics of commemorating the attacks through representations. In particular, two graphic September 11 films released that year, Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, ensured that debates about depicting the attacks remained widespread.3 Greengrass’s docudrama provoked particularly heated responses even before it was released. With audience members walking out of cinemas when trailers for the film were first shown, there were calls for the film’s production company, Universal Pictures, not to release it at all.4 Mindful of such sensitivities, both directors went to considerable lengths to demonstrate that they were aware of the need to tread carefully, and to consult people who had been directly affected in the attacks or who had lost loved ones in them. Both Stone and Greengrass had a number of real-life people play themselves in the films. Paramount, the company that produced World Trade Center, even employed a Manhattan liaison officer to keep the local community amenable: ‘What we’ve heard mostly’, she reported, ‘is just to be real.’5 If both films ultimately honour that injunction, it is because they figure what was real about the events as something that surpasses the limits of experience. That is to say, they turn realism towards the sublime. The same holds for recent September 11 novels like Paul West’s The Immensity of the Here and Now: a Novel of 9.11 (2003), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). Just as Irish Republican and then Anarchist terrorism in the late nineteenth century impelled novelists to renegotiate the sublime with the terror tale, so such writers of September 11 novels have exposed the sublime to new questioning.6 Consider, for example, these statements made by Don DeLillo in his December 2001 article, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’:

251

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 251

30/01/2012 16:24

252

alex houen

The events of September 11 were covered unstintingly. There was no confusion of roles on TV. The raw event was one thing, the coverage another. The event dominated the medium. It was bright and totalizing and some of us said it was unreal. When we say a thing is unreal, we mean it is too real, a phenomenon so unaccountable and yet so bound to the power of objective fact that we can’t tilt it to the slant of our perceptions.7 A ‘raw event’, ‘thing’ or ‘phenomenon’ so ‘unaccountable’ that ‘we can’t tilt it to the slant of our perceptions’ – this is precisely the kind of overpowering experience that Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant ascribe to the sublime. The mediation of television is obviously a complicating factor here, as DeLillo suggests, but he does so only to assert that television essentially played a passive role: ‘The event dominated the medium.’ DeLillo’s point is a fair one in so far as the ‘live’ ‘coverage’ on television networks was unable to give a clear account of what was happening as it happened. But it is also true that the inability of the news media to map or account for the attacks until some time after they occurred became part of what was terrifying about them. This was exacerbated by the fact that the media’s losing-of-the-plot was symptomatic of the inability of emergency services and government agencies to map and coordinate a networked response on the day. Contrary to what DeLillo implies, then, the overwhelming sublimity of the event’s ‘objective fact’ was compounded by being caught up in a kind of technological sublime evidenced in the scrambling of various agencies’ ability to communicate and make judgements. This technological sublime pertains to two strands of thinking about what constitutes a ‘postmodern’ sublime. On one hand, the inability to grasp an event as it happens relates to Jean-François Lyotard’s statement that a sublime event is one that ‘happens as a question mark, “before” happening as a question. It happens is rather “in the first place” is it happening, is this it, is it possible?’8 In other words, a sublime event raises questions about one’s powers of comprehension before one can pose questions about it. This is not to say that such sublimity has only recently emerged. Rather, Lyotard suggests that in contemporary culture there is such a preponderance of hybridity and eclecticism that events and modes of understanding are becoming less dependent on fixed forms and structures. And if sublimity pertains to a scrambled experience of amorphous events and objects, then sublimity and the postmodern must be viewed as increasingly synonymous. A properly postmodern aesthetics, for Lyotard, is therefore one that retains a foothold in the sublime: The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable.9 On the other hand, Fredric Jameson has argued that what theorists like Lyotard have called the ‘postmodernist “sublime”’ is actually the symptom of a ‘global’, capitalist-fuelled ‘hyperspace’ which renders individual subjects incapable of mapping cognitively the way in which their lives are caught up in various intertwining networks – financial, communicational and bureaucratic.10 Whereas for Kant the sublime arises from being confronted by a natural object or vista that provokes a dizzying sense of infinitude, Jameson’s notion of the postmodern sublime involves a subject being confronted by infinitely complicated networks. So while the postmodern sublime for Lyotard can be positive in freeing objects and experience from fixed forms, for Jameson the ‘free play’ of the postmodern sublime is anything but free, for it is all too overdetermined by the networked fusion of late capitalism.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 252

30/01/2012 16:24

sacrifice and the sublime since

11

september

2001

253

Neither of these positions is wholly adequate to the kind of sublime that ramified through networks in response to the September 11 attacks. Jameson is right in suggesting that a perspective like Lyotard’s does not account for how the sublimity of contemporary events is mediated by networks that are designed (ideally) to replace any question of ‘is it happening?’ with formulations, predictions and instant redactions. Yet Jameson’s view that sublimity is in fact the experience of a hegemonic global ‘hyperspace’ also needs adjusting. As I have suggested, if there was anything sublime about September 11, it was not a matter of realising the hegemony of hyperspace so much as its networked breakdown in the face of the events. What both Jameson and Lyotard cannot account for adequately is the degree to which the sublime’s dynamic can be modulated by historical context. Lyotard glosses over the powers of networked mediation, while Jameson fails to acknowledge how the stability of ‘late-capitalist’ hyperspace remains susceptible to socio-political upheavals – indeed, I would argue, alongside Michael Bibby, that it was the Vietnam War and US military–industrial complex that were largely responsible for laying the groundwork of what Jameson characterises as global postmodernism.11 In this chapter, then, I shall argue that the dynamics of the postmodern sublime need to be rethought in terms of current contexts of terror and war. This does not amount to questioning how such contexts are reducible to aesthetic representations. For Burke and Kant the sublime is inseparable from a complex series of exchanges; it registers transferences between objects and experience, feeling and judgement, terror and security. I want to argue that with the contemporary sublime, what is increasingly at stake in such exchanges is a logic and economy of sacrifice. Before considering this in terms of September 11 and the war on terror, though, we need briefly to reconsider how sacrifice was intrinsic to the sublime of Burke and Kant.

II In Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), the sublime involves an encounter with a ‘formless object’ or landscape of ‘rude nature’, the experience of which brings a terrifying sense of infinitude.12 As what is sensed exceeds the limits of experience, it sends the subject’s mental faculties into crisis: the imagination’s ability to present the object as a form of experience is overpowered; so, too, is the understanding’s ability to fit the experience to a concept.13 At this point, Kant adduces what he calls a ‘subreption’ whereby the seeming infinitude of the object is converted into the subject’s own rational infinitude.14 He affirms that it is not in fact the object that is infinite; rather, the object provokes an ‘intuition’ of infinitude.15 In other words, it is not the object that is sublime, it is the intuition.16 And as this intuition stretches both the imagination and understanding to breaking point, the two faculties are forced to call on the higher faculty of reason for help. Only reason’s ideas are capable of grasping the intuition of infinitude because reason’s ideas are themselves supposedly ‘infinite’.17 By comprehending this intuition through reason, what seemed to be an external infinite threat is absorbed and defused by the subject’s own rational powers. The experience of the sublime is thus ultimately ‘purposive’ (zweckmäßig) for the individual because it brings the various faculties into accord while ‘awakening’ reason’s ideas.18 And once reason is experienced as transcending any condition of sensible experience, it can be upheld as ‘unconditioned’ and ‘supersensible’.19 As both a quasidivine faculty and the highest realm of judgement, the recognition of reason’s power also entails feelings of ‘respect’ (Achtung) for reason’s ‘moral law’: ‘it is a law (of reason) for us and part of our vocation to estimate everything great that nature contains as an object

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 253

30/01/2012 16:24

254

alex houen

of the senses for us as small in comparison with ideas of reason.’20 Kant thus effectively outlines his own cognitive war against terror: terrifying nature must be converted into personal rational security, just as suffering (the faculties’ initial discord) is converted into hard-won ‘pleasure’.21 But not without some sacrifices along the way. Kant himself suggests that it is only when the imagination is pushed beyond its limits that an individual can grasp the power of reason’s infinitude and moral law: The object of a pure and unconditioned intellectual satisfaction is [reason’s] moral law in all its power [. . .] and this power makes itself aesthetically knowable only through sacrifices [Aufopferungen] (which also reveal in us an unfathomable depth of this supersensible faculty together with its consequences reaching beyond what can be seen).22 In having to face the mortal finitude of its experience, the imagination is effectively forced to sacrifice itself in the name of reason’s ‘supersensible’ powers. Yet Kant also maintains that because reason’s ideas are supersensible and infinite, they must themselves remain irreducible to any form or object of experience.23 Just as the terrifying object of nature forced the imagination to produce a ‘negative presentation’ of infinitude (a sense of what cannot be sensed), so reason’s transcendent ideas also become accessible for the subject only as negative presentations – only as an intuition of what lies ‘beyond what can be seen’. And while Kant himself does not waver with his faith in reason’s transcendence, I would argue that his reasoning can lead us to conclude that the transcendence of reason and its moral law only exist as negative presentations; as ‘aesthetic ideas’ of the imagination.24 That is to say, reason’s transcendence is a chimera. The imagination’s sacrifice is not actually ‘purposive’ for reason’s omnipotence; rather, it is constitutive of reason’s transcendence as a fantasy. Once we accept that reason’s transcendence is a fantasy, one of the imagination’s aesthetic ideas, then the dynamics of the Kantian sublime take on a very different aspect. We can no longer claim reason to be infinite or ‘unconditioned’; rather, its godly powers loom as a supreme fiction, the effect of sacrificial conversions. Moreover, if an individual is unable to call on reason’s ‘supersensible’ powers to cancel the effects of terrifying objects, then the individual remains susceptible to those objects and terrors. In other words, far from converting terror into pleasure the sublime remains rooted in trauma. This revised version of the sublime is closer to Burke’s acknowledgement in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) that in some instances the sublime can overpower the subject’s mind, at which point, he argues, ‘far from being produced by them [the sublime] anticipates our reasonings and hurries us on by an irresistible force.’25 Burke thus recognises that the sublime remains dangerous because its affective power is derived from external forces.26 He even asserts that if the force of the sublime is too strong, it can produce an obsessive derangement in individuals. That is why, for Burke, sublimity is beneficial to an individual only if it is ‘modified as not to be actually noxious’.27 Unable to seek refuge in one’s own supersensible realm, individuals have to look outside themselves for such security and power. Technologised networks are one possibility in contemporary culture, aimed as they are at ordering things, events and experience into supposedly rational systems. The irony here is what Jameson and others have pointed out: the networks have become so complex and entwined that individuals are incapable of comprehending the ways in which they are caught up in them. There is, of course,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 254

30/01/2012 16:24

sacrifice and the sublime since

11

september

2001

255

another source of mighty rationality: God. But with God we face a similar conundrum as with Kant’s rational ideas. That God must remain transcendent means that he cannot be reduced to any experience or representation – so, for Kant, God’s commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image [. . .] of that which is in heaven’ is quintessentially sublime.28 God’s transcendence, like that of reason, can only be divined as a negative presentation – an intuition of what goes beyond the senses. Sacrifices offer another form of intimacy with the divine, particularly those that result in death, for as Georges Bataille argued, ‘In a sense the corpse is the most complete affirmation of the spirit.’29 Why? Because the attempt to incorporate death’s possibility, as Martin Heidegger averred, is the closest the living come to attaining infinitude; to establishing our limits and believing that we have put them behind us.30 As with Kant’s ideas, then, sacrifice does not simply ‘awaken’ a sense of divine transcendence; it makes the holy (sacrum facere) by turning death into a divine sign of what lies ‘beyond what can be seen’. If testifying to God’s power calls for sacrificial conversions, then this involves converting both death into selfhood and selfhood into God all in one blow. Two imagined beacons of supersensible reason, then: technologised networks and God. An opposition between the two is what numerous commentators have declared to be at stake in the September 11 attacks and the ‘war on terror’. DeLillo himself suggests as much with the article he wrote just after the attacks: It was America that drew their fury [. . .] It was the thrust of our technology. It was our perceived godlessness. But whatever great skeins of technology lie ahead [. . .] the future has yielded, for now, to medieval expedience, to the old slow furies of cut-throat religion.31 Such a clear-cut cultural contrast has, however, proved to be questionable. A survey of the extent to which the Bush administration repeatedly lauded the ‘sacrifices’ of its soldiers in fighting terror suggests that the administration has had its own recourse to ‘furies of cut-throat religion’ no less than al Qaeda’s militancy has involved embracing technology. Indeed, I would argue that both groups like al Qaeda and the nation states fighting against them have variously fused militancy, networked technology and transcendence (whether religious or idealist) into opposing socio-political compounds. And if these compounds are ultimately far from rational – mired as they are in furies and passions – they are nevertheless defended on all sides of the war on terror for being socio-political raisons d’être.32 Thus the shahid or so-called ‘suicide bomber’ converts the death of self and others into a testament of transcendent faith, which is then networked and consumed – through videos, images, texts and the Internet – by and for the shahid’s community. In this way, the giving of life founds an indebtedness of the community to sacrifice as something that gives life to that community’s ‘sacred’ values.33 Speaking on Veterans’ Day (11 November) in 2005, for example, President George W. Bush acknowledged this when stating that the ‘sacrifice’ of veterans ‘creates a debt that America can never fully repay’.34 Of course, it is important to realise that a suicide bomber’s sacrifice is not identical to that of a US soldier dying in battle. Indeed, the war against terror could better be described as a war about sacrifice – over whose notion and practice of sacrifice is more powerful and just. But it is also true that the rise in opposed forms of sacrificial militancy has led to mimetic exchanges occurring; thus the US government’s indefinite detention of suspected terrorists has been mimicked by Islamist militants when they have dressed their hostages in the same orange jumpsuits worn by inmates in the camps of Guantánamo Bay. Opposed forms of sacrifice thus

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 255

30/01/2012 16:24

256

alex houen

engender a wider sacrificial economy that also causes death, technology, the media and God to become increasingly imbricated. And if, as I have argued, the sublime is open to the changing dynamics of war and terror, then it must present new insights into the sacrificial exchanges that currently abound. A grasp of the contemporary sublime requires us to relate two things, then: a revised critique of judgement and a revised critique of violence and terror. For the rest of this chapter I shall outline some ways of linking those critiques by examining filmic and fictional engagement with September 11. Because of restrictions of space I shall largely limit myself to discussion of two examples: Greengrass’s United 93 and DeLillo’s Falling Man.

III Unlike Stone’s World Trade Center, Greengrass avoids turning the sublime into a comforting subreption or overcoming of terror. In a climactic scene of Stone’s film, one of the two main PAPD protagonists who has been trapped in the Ground Zero rubble senses himself close to death and subsequently has a vision of Christ bearing a bottle of water. The vision is thus a ‘negative presentation’ – an intuition of what lies ‘beyond what can be seen’ – though the irony is that this transcendence is presented through special effects and an emotive soundtrack. Nevertheless, it restores McLoughlin’s faith in his religion and helps him see the camaraderie he shares with Jimeno (also trapped) and his own family. It also helps the film to assert that the terror of September 11 was effectively purposive for those attacked, for after shots of McLoughlin and Jimeno being rescued and carried into the light the film concludes with sequences of their happy family life and a voice-over reasserting solidarity: ’9/11 showed what humans were capable of. They’re evil, sure, but it also brought out the goodness.’ While Stone’s film relies on a deus ex machina (a special-effects Christ) to help salvage this view, Greengrass instead presents us with ghosts in the machine. United 93 centres around the eponymous hijacked flight that crashed to the ground in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers tried to wrest control of the plane from its hostage-takers. The film is meticulous in following the course of the flight, which is largely viewed from the perspective of the various traffic control centres and government agencies that were desperately trying to coordinate a response. In order to do this accurately, Greengrass drew extensively on The 9-11 Commission Report (2004) which reads as an extended litany of networked communication breakdowns. In particular, the Report states that there was ‘a lack of comprehensive coordination’ between the agencies, and that the sheer volume of information being relayed meant that ‘transmissions overlapped and often became indecipherable.’35 Such problems are depicted relentlessly in Greengrass’s film. As it dawns on the various agencies that they are dealing with simultaneous terrorist attacks, the film cross-cuts from agency to agency with increasing rapidity, and this is made all the more disorienting by the progressively jerky shots from the hand-held cameras that Greengrass employed. As each scene is overloaded with background cross-talk, the swarms of information and dialogue become increasingly difficult for both the film’s ‘real-life’ characters and its viewers to follow. As The 9-11 Commission Report documented, once planes began diverting from flight paths the air traffic controllers struggled to identify which radar blip signified which plane.36 Consequently, even after American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into one of the WTC towers, flight trackers were for some time under the impression that the plane had diverted course to Washington, DC. The problem was not just one

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 256

30/01/2012 16:24

sacrifice and the sublime since

11

september

2001

257

of interpreting the data; the technology itself had meltdowns: ‘I can see our tracker’s gone ghost on me,’ comments the Federal Aviation Authority chief, Ben Sliney, in the film when a radar screen stops functioning. Unlike Stone’s film, then, in United 93 the terrorist plot is not figured as ultimately awakening higher rational judgement, vision or spirituality. Instead, it is shown to have triggered something like a networked nervous breakdown, and the editing and camera techniques that Greengrass adopts are highly effective in depicting the shock and panic of the real-life characters, and in transmitting those affects filmically to the audience (it certainly induced a panic attack in the person with whom I saw the film!). With no higher government authority – let alone supersensible reason – available to comprehend events or coordinate a response, the terror of the attacks is shown to have doubled as the communication breakdown of the various agencies. In this respect, Greengrass’s film diverges from the kind of Kantian sublime that Stone invests in and instead presents a technological sublime that lies somewhere between the two visions of sublimity theorised by Jameson and Lyotard. The attacks’ terror is thus partly linked to how what is happening is relayed through the networked ‘hyperspace’ that Jameson discusses. Yet it’s precisely the ensuing networked breakdown which ensures that Lyotard’s notion of sublime indeterminacy – ‘is it happening?’ – is applicable both to the attacks and their mediation. While Stone’s film places cinematic technology at the service of transcendent vision, then, Greengrass uses hand-held cameras and a rapid cross-cutting of scenes to emphasise how communications technology played a part in agencies losing the plot. Such inability to convert terror into transcendent reason clearly entails crises of judgement. For Kant, the recourse to reason’s supposedly ‘supersensible’ realm means that one is able to detach oneself from feelings of terror and thereby make a clear, unaffected judgement. Sublime ‘subreption’ facilitates a state of reflective impartiality.37 But if an individual is unable to make that subreption, then (as Burke suggests) that individual’s reasoning remains subject to terror. In that instance the person’s judgement on terror can remain a symptom of terror, a continuation of it. Indeed, I would argue that this is what was at play in many of the legal and political judgements made in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Rather than terrorism eliciting a moral law of reason, the terrifying experience was taken to be a reason for dispensing with law in order to fight terror more effectively.38 This position was immediately set out by no less than the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, on 12 September when justifying US military attacks on Afghanistan as the first stage of the ‘war on terror’: ‘The American people had a clear understanding that this is war. That’s the way you see it. You can’t see it any other way, whether legally that is correct or not.’39 Such a judgement was less the product of detached, rational reflection than of incensed reflex response. According to Powell, the way the US public purportedly perceived the situation became, implicitly, a moral imperative that supervened the rule of law. Thus, if there were any doubt about how an aesthetics of judgement can become implicated in legal and political judgements, Powell himself was quick to establish the connection. Where Kant drew reason’s infinitude and moral law from a sublime subreption, Powell drew reasons to go to war by a subreption of international law. Novelists like Jonathan Safran Foer, Paul West and Don DeLillo have been very good in exploring how September 11 engendered judgements as symptoms of the events. DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), for example, does this partly by examining more closely what he had asserted in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’; namely, that September 11

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 257

30/01/2012 16:24

258

alex houen

amounted to ‘a phenomenon so unaccountable [. . .] we can’t tilt it to the slant of our perceptions.’ As with Lyotard’s definition of the sublime event, DeLillo’s novel repeatedly figures experiences of September 11 as questioning characters’ powers of perception before they are able to grasp what is taking place. Regarding the experience of main character Keith Neudecker, who was in one of the towers on the day, the narrator states: ‘These were moments he’d lost as they were happening and he had to stop walking in order to stop seeing them.’40 Such moments require a disorienting syntax to register both the indefinite and analeptic nature of their absorption; thus we are given the following description of Keith witnessing one of the people who fell from the tower: ‘Something went past the window, then he saw it.’41 Like Greengrass, then, DeLillo follows Lyotard’s line on the ‘postmodern’ sublime in putting forward ‘the unpresentable in presentation itself ’. Not only does he perform this occasionally at the level of syntax, he also presents it with the montaged structure of the narrative which frequently cuts between different times and characters. For Lyotard, as we have seen, denying ‘the solace of good forms’ is also one way in which the postmodern sublime rejects a ‘consensus of taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable’. Similarly, Falling Man’s narrative and syntactic contortions militate against a sense that people’s experiences of September 11 assumed a homogeneous form. For Kant, it is beauty which is experienced by an individual according to common ‘taste’ and a sensus communis; the sublime, in contrast, forces an individual to establish her or his own powers of judgement as a personal accord of faculties.42 In DeLillo’s novel, the sublime nature of September 11 similarly forces characters to confront limits of their understanding, but this frequently results in unresolved discords between perception and rationality. For Keith’s estranged wife, Lianne, for example, the terrors of September 11 continue to prey on her, as when increasingly incensed reactions to Elena, her neighbour, who plays loud ‘Islamic’ music. Finding it incomprehensible that Elena could be so insensitive, Lianne remonstrates with her and ends up hitting her: ‘It was totally crazy. I could hear myself speaking. My voice was like it was coming from somebody else.’43 The attacks’ sublimity thus becomes ‘purposive’ not of a unity of mind but of irrational derangement; thus DeLillo presents his own novelistic critique of judgement. By questioning the commonality and clarity of judgement on September 11, he casts doubt on the kind of consensus that Colin Powell and others so readily asserted. This issue of judging terror brings us back to the importance of grasping the sublime as something that can offer insights into current sacrificial exchange. As I have argued, the strength of a film like United 93 is that it rejects the sacrificial subreption of the Kantian sublime whereby the terror is converted into reason’s transcendence. Similarly, for all its investment in sublimity DeLillo’s novel provides a pointedly cynical view of sacrificial exchange. By the end of the novel Keith remains trapped in the trauma of September 11 and is effectively subsisting in those spaces of suspended animation that are casinos: He folded six more hands, then went all-in. Make them bleed. Make them spill their precious losers’ blood. These were the days after and now the years, a thousand heaving dreams, the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness.44 There are allusions here to Dante’s Divine Comedy – the ‘thousand heaving dreams’ echoes Dante’s ‘thousand longings’ in Canto XXXI of the Purgatorio, while ‘the trapped man’

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 258

30/01/2012 16:24

sacrifice and the sublime since

11

september

2001

259

and ‘fixed limbs’ are appositely redolent of the Simoniacs trapped upside down in holes in Canto XIX of the Inferno. The implication is that Keith is stuck in one hell of a limbo; unable to live with Lianne or to leave her, unable to forget his traumas or to remember them fully, he vacillates between betting his life away and regaining it by stripping others of their livelihood. Rather than offering a means of overcoming his limbo, the reality is that gambling sustains a form of sublimated sacrifice as vicious cycle. In stark contrast, Stone’s World Trade Center invests heavily in an overt sublimity of sacrificial conversion, one that bleeds heavily into political vision. The intimation of God that ex-marine Dave Karnes draws from Ground Zero is thus linked to his acuity of political insight: ‘I don’t know if you guys know it yet, but this country’s at war’ – a perception which, as I have argued, Colin Powell was quick to uphold as a moral imperative. I would like to close here by suggesting that my attempt to relate a critique of judgement to a critique of terror could be developed further by reconsidering Kant’s Critique of Judgement in relation to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921). Consider for example, this passage from the latter concerning police violence: It is lawmaking, because its characteristic function is not the promulgation of laws but the assertion of legal claims for any decree, and law-preserving, because it is at the disposal of these ends. The ‘law’ of the police really marks the point at which the state, whether from impotence or because of the immanent connections within any legal system, can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain. Therefore, the police intervene ‘for security reasons’ in countless cases where no clear legal situation exists [. . .] [Their] power is formless, like its nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states.45 I argued earlier that in Kant’s account of the sublime reason’s transcendence is established as an effect of sacrificial conversion. Faced by a formless object or event for which there seems no precedent of cognitive judgement, the imagination sacrifices the object and itself to produce a ‘negative presentation’ of the object as an intuition of infinitude. This violating intuition is then converted into a sense of reason’s transcendent moral law. Similarly, in the above passage Benjamin suggests that the police use violence in situations where it is unclear how established law and precedent relates to a particular situation. In the same blow, then, violence both establishes law and upholds that law as the right to use violence in such situations.46 As Benjamin argues in relation to military violence: ‘There is a lawmaking character inherent in all such violence.’47 That is to say, violence does not simply punish in the name of established legal judgement, it also establishes the right of judgement through violence. Such sacrificial conversions (of means to ends, of violence to judgement) are clearly not limited to the police, nor suicide bombers, nor the military. Rather, the intimacy of terror, sacrifice and judgement has become a pressing matter for increasing numbers of people – the fervent debate about how to represent the September 11 attacks is just one indication of that. The danger is that undergoing terror and sacrifice becomes a basis for bringing people together and for investing in further sacrifices. That is all the more reason, I would argue, to have films and fiction explore sublimity in order to gain some purchase on the current prevalence of terror and sacrifice. For as I have recalled, the sublime is a rejection of ready-made taste and consensus; it forces individuals to exercise their own judgement by making them aware of just how susceptible to events we all remain.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 259

30/01/2012 16:24

260

alex houen

Notes 1. For a discussion of a range of the literary responses, see my article ‘Novel Spaces and Taking Places in the Wake of September 11’, Studies in the Novel, 36 (Fall 2004), pp. 419–37. 2. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, ‘Near November’, in Ulrich Baer (ed.), 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 260–2 (p. 262). 3. World Trade Center, film, directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Paramount Pictures, 2006; United 93, film, directed by Paul Greengrass. USA: Universal Pictures, 2006. 4. Sharon Waxman, ‘Universal Will Not Pull “United 93” Trailer, Despite Criticism’, New York Times, 4 April 2006, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/movies/04flig.html?_r=1 &scp=1&sq=united+93&st=nyt&oref=slogin, accessed 31 August 2011. 5. John Marshall Mantel, ‘Oliver Stone Shoots Sept. 11 Movie in New York’, USA Today, 2 November 2005, available at http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2005-11-02-stonefilming-new-york_x.htm, accessed 31 August 2011. 6. For a fuller discussion of how terrorism and the sublime are entwined in late nineteenth-century fiction, see my Terrorism and Modern Literature: from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ‘Introduction’ and ch. 1. 7. Don DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, Guardian Unlimited, 22 December 2001, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4324579,00.html, accessed 31 August 2011. 8. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, in Thomas Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 244–56 (p. 245; Lyotard’s emphases). 9. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’, trans. Régis Durand, in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 81; Lyotard’s emphases. 10. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 49. 11. See Michael Bibby, ‘The Post-Vietnam Condition’, in Bibby (ed.), The Vietnam War and Postmodernity (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 143–71 (pp. 148, 154). 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Gruyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1790] 2000), pp. 128–9. 13. Ibid. pp. 129–30. 14. Ibid. pp. 140–1. 15. Ibid. p. 138. 16. Ibid. p. 147. 17. Ibid. pp. 141, 145. 18. Ibid. pp. 130, 142, 143. 19. Ibid. p. 153. 20. Ibid. p. 141. 21. Ibid. p. 143. 22. Ibid. p. 153. 23. Ibid. p. 156. 24. Gilles Deleuze argues similarly in Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 57. 25. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1757] 1998), p. 53. 26. See ibid. pp. 59, 62. 27. Ibid. p. 123.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 260

30/01/2012 16:24

sacrifice and the sublime since

11

september

2001

261

28. Kant, p. 156. 29. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, [1973] 1989), p. 40. 30. See in particular Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, [1926] 1990), pp. 279–311. 31. DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’. 32. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see my ‘Sacrificial Militancy and the War on Terror’, in Stephen Morton and Elleke Boehmer (eds), Terror and the Postcolonial (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). 33. President George W. Bush has also linked ‘sacrifice’ and ‘sacred freedoms’ on numerous occasions; see, for example ‘President’s Radio Address’, 24 May 2008, available at http://www. whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080524.html, accessed 20 November 2008. 34. ‘President Commemorates Veterans’ Day’, 11 November 2005, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051111-1.html, accessed 20 November 2008. 35. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 321, 301. 36. Ibid. pp. 25–7. 37. See Kant, pp. 49, 153, 154. 38. For a fuller discussion of legal issues connecting sovereignty, the war on terror, and detention camps like those on Guantánamo Bay, see my ‘Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker’, in Stephen Bygrave and Stephen Morton (eds), Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 63–87. 39. Colin Powell, ‘Interview by ABC News’, 12 September 2001, available at http://www. ifapray.org/archive/ARCHIVE_TERRORISM/Interview%20With%20Secretary%20of%20 State%20Powell%20-%20ABC%20News%20-%20September%2012,%202001.html, accessed 6 September 2011. 40. Don DeLillo, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2007), p. 243. 41. DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 242. 42. Kant, pp. 128–30. 43. DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 124. 44. Ibid. p. 230. 45. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913– 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1921] 2004), p. 243. 46. For an excellent reconsideration of this performativity of violence, see Judith Butler’s ‘Critique, Coercion and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”’, in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds), Political Theologies: Public Relations in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 201–19. 47. Ibid. p. 240, my emphasis.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 261

30/01/2012 16:24

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 262

30/01/2012 16:24

Mark Rawlinson

Part II Introduction: Bodies, Behaviour, Cultures

INTRODUCTION: BODIES, BEHAVIOUR, CULTURES

What gods were to the ancients at war, ideas are to us.1

S

imone Weil’s response to the fall of France was articulated in an essay on Homer, ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’. She argued that the poem’s hero, its subject and centre, was ‘the x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing’. The Iliad was a mirror, not a historical document, because, as the disaster of 1940 insisted, that x, ‘force,’ had not been overcome by civilisation or progress. Force – and here the reading of The Iliad was most acutely oriented to the present, – was not to be understood solely as the violence which causes the death of individuals. Force was ‘the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is alive’.2 The technological determinist view of war appears to reduce conflict to the effects of things on human beings – the more efficient the machines, the more humans are killed and maimed, the more remote the machine’s performance, the fewer are the ‘friendly’ casualties that will be recognised as a cost of war. Weil’s thinking, which is developed in the several projects of Klaus Theweleit, Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, is that ‘violence is just as external to its employer as to its victim.’3 Slavoj Žižek has argued that to sustain radical thinking about violence it is advisable to ‘ignore [violence’s] traumatic aspects’, as well as to elude the cliché that violence is always spontaneous. Only then may it be thought that ‘verbal violence is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence.’4 Judith Butler’s speculation about the ‘frames of recognition’ on which ‘livable’ life is contingent leads her to propose comparable discursive foundations for war, ‘“frames” of war – the ways of selectively carving up experience as essential to the conduct of war’.5 War is not out there, to be encountered as a frontier of knowledge, it is encoded in our culture and our behaviour, from legal definitions of states of war to high-street fashion based on military clothing. War literature’s characteristic version of anagnorisis, its canonical story of lost illusions, is a plaint about how poorly culture has prepared the modern, often civilian, soldier for battle. This allegation has had modest impact on the survival, reproduction and metamorphosis of the ‘old lie’ (from Wilfred Owen’s version of Horace in ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ to the contemporary ‘no-fly zone’ over Libya), even though the renewal of the rhetoric of woundingly visceral, anti-bellicose battlefield description became a significant field of cultural production and latterly public education in the twentieth century. As the historian Brian Harrison observes of Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands Task Force:

265

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 265

30/01/2012 16:24

266

mark rawlinson

the army, like the police, was recruited from volunteers whose professionalism gained from specialization. Their intellectual calibre and skill with the media were increasingly apparent: they were among the few late twentieth-century British institutions undamaged by irreverent criticism.6 The myths and symbols of military prowess have survived the age of total war, in part through the refashioning of war (‘humanitarian intervention’) but also through the renewal of diffuse cultural vehicles of militarism. In war literature’s drive to unveil war’s occluded core, the ethical and aesthetic impulse to tell the truth about war’s impacts on flesh may well be less articulate about cultural framings which transform somatic violence into legitimate or meaningful social acts: as Edward Upward’s heterodox communist poet Alan Sebrill notes, ‘thinking of physical horrors would not help him to realise emotionally the true or the whole vileness of war.’7 The laying bare of the broken body, which continues into this century to be viewed in official circles as a disloyal or dissident gesture, enacts a reversal of military history, as if the victim of violence can only be done justice in the social space of premodern conflict, represented by the trope of monomachy, ‘the clash between two warriors’.8 The seminal nineteenth-century theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz, even as he created a new strategic paradigm, resorted to personifying military-political force in the era of popular war as a pair of grappling wrestlers, a figure echoed in the way poems like Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ or Keith Douglas’s ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ ‘single’ and couple persons to define them against the aggregate of modern war’s mobilised masses of human things. This paring away to some notion of war’s essential content always risks underplaying the significance of the forms in which war is administered and perceived: ‘appearances are not necessarily simply false or illusory [. . .] the appearances are part and parcel of reality itself.’9 Another mid-century investigation of the persistence of violence, Quincy Wright’s synoptic Study of War, gathered the findings of an interdisciplinary research project ‘initiated in the hopeful atmosphere of Locarno [1925] and completed in the midst of general war’.10 The work’s form, diagnosing the historical relativity of conflict and prescribing social and political controls on war in the present, confirms the argument that while ‘[w]ar appears to be as old as mankind [. . .] peace is a modern invention’.11 Wright’s preface marks the 1941 anniversary of the 1918 Armistice, but by the time the book appeared war had been made even more ‘general’ by the attack on Pearl Harbor. For Wright, war is general in senses beyond the geographical; as Henry James might have said, war’s relations stop nowhere. The writings of Marx are as germane to the shape of war in the mid century as the inventions of the Wright brothers. For Quincy Wright, ‘war is more about words than about things’: In the modern situation far more conceptual construction is necessary to make war appear essential to the survival of anything important. War, therefore, rests, in modern civilisation, upon an elaborate ideological construction maintained through education in a system of language, law, symbols, and ideals. The explanation and interpretation of these systems are often as remote from the actual sequence of events as are the primitive explanations of war in terms of the requirements of magic, ritual, or revenge. War in the modern period does not grow out of a situation but out of a highly artificial interpretation of a situation. Since war is more about words than about things, other manipulations of words and symbols might better serve to meet

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 266

30/01/2012 16:24

part ii introduction: bodies, behaviour, cultures

267

the cultural and personality problems for which it offers an increasingly inadequate and expensive solution.12 What Weil and Wright captured in the early 1940s, at a moment when war against Hitler had revalued the cultural legacy of the Great War, and the arguments of interwar peace initiatives, was that a significant and largely invisible part of the war effort was discursive. The essays commissioned for this section of the Companion – Bodies, Behaviour, Cultures – are intended to make visible the connection between the fate of flesh and both the conceptual and embodied dimensions of popular militarism (everyday practices which work to normalise the military in schemes of moral and political values) and a modern culture of military elegy. Collectivised remembrance takes on newly significant forms in the twentieth century, from the architectonic (a new spatial and material representation of the numberless but enumerated fallen in the war cemeteries of northern France) through to state-synchronised rituals of anniversary observance. As David Goldie argues, material landscape was inscribed with loss through the interaction between elegiac pastoral representations of war and the reproduction of national identity through motifs of rural southern England. The struggle and negotiation of the American memory of Vietnam in the execution of the twin Washington monuments, and in their subsequent interpretation in the conduct of visitors down the years, provides, in Jane Creighton’s memorial essay, a different example of the deliberate and contingent steps by which the meanings of battle are woven into a world in which bellicose forms of harm are remote, and civil forms of harm repressed or unrecognised. In each case, memorial acts, and memorial readings of them, hallow and protest military violence. Other essays in this section reveal the cultural articulation and the psychic formation of the senses of belonging and adversarial otherness which provide an ideological underpinning to the dangers and other costs which the people bear in time of war. Petra Rau’s survey of the construction of the Nazi enemy in British literary fiction is at once an update on the Francophobia that dominated domestic representations of foreign relations in nineteenth-century England and a test of how far critical narratives can unravel or countermand the greyer shades of the political expedience in whose service melodramatic images of friend and foe are elaborated. Mark W. Van Wienen’s essay reorients these perspectives in observing the persistence of race as a dimension of US wars and of US military cultures across the century. The frontiers which twentieth-century war armoured, and which the twentieth-century security state closed off, generate corresponding border-crossing identities, whether defined in legal, existential or cultural terms. In essays by Sissy Helff and Celia Kingsbury, the figure of the refugee and the spy are contextualised and interpreted in their modern guises. The relations of the person and the state are further configured in discussions of the therapeutic cultures which arose in twentieth-century societies as they confronted the psychological impacts of war which registered as psychic conflicts threatening both military efficiency and civilian morale. Jessica Meacham and Martin Halliwell provide contrasting accounts of regimes of therapy in Britain and the US, from the Great War to Korea, which nevertheless converge in the identification of emergent concepts of a continuum between the effects of war on combatant and civilian populations. Placing imaginative writing about war in the contexts of the social, political and psychological concepts which relay war’s meanings beyond the battlefield raises again the question of the efficacy of writing about, and in this century, in liberal cultures, against

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 267

30/01/2012 16:24

268

mark rawlinson

war. Ian Patterson’s consideration of pacifism in literature tests our assumptions about the difference writing can make morally and ideologically: his observation that ‘the most powerful anti-war writing is not always, or overtly, or avowedly, or even implicitly pacifist in its attitude to war’ reminds us of the porosity of the categories by which we aspire to bring war to book, or to order, and that the discursive relays which articulate the meanings and the experience of war, even where they are locally hegemonic, generate endless contradiction.

Notes 1. Lionel Trilling, ‘The Sense of the Past’, in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 183. 2. Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, Chicago Review, 18.2 (1956), pp. 6–7. 3. Ibid. p. 17. 4. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2008), pp. 3, 57. 5. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 26. 6. Brian Harrison, Finding a Role?: The United Kingdon 1970–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 42. 7. Edward Upward, In the Thirties, in The Spiral Ascent (London: William Heinemann, 1977), p. 141. 8. Kate McLoughlin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 78. 9. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho, Marx’s Capital, 4th edn (London: Pluto, 2004), p. 4. 10. Quincy Wright, A Study of War, 2 vols (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1942), vol. 1, p. viii. 11. The jurist Sir Henry Maine, quoted in Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (London: Profile, 2000), p. 1. 12. Quincy Wright, A Study of War, 2 vols (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1942), vol. 2, p. 1291.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 268

30/01/2012 16:24

27

WAR MEMORIALS David Goldie

I

n the mid 1920s H. V. Morton began a series of articles in the Daily Express in which he wrote about his travels through the British countryside. The book that resulted, In Search of England (1927), quickly became one of the mid twentieth century’s best-sellers, going through twenty-three editions in its first ten years and selling a third of a million copies by 1964. By this time Morton had sold almost three million copies of his books, marking him out as ‘the most popular travel writer in Britain’ in the period.1 In Search of England arguably owed its popular success to Morton’s reassuring account of the continuing existence of a timeless rural England, a place of gentle natural beauty and understated folk wisdom that offered both a refuge from the onrush of modernity and a safe, sane place from which its excesses might be viewed and placed in perspective. It operates, in other words, in a tradition of consolatory countryside literature that has its roots in Romanticism and its more recent flowering in the writing of George Borrow and Richard Jefferies. What sets it slightly apart from this tradition, however, and makes it more than merely a series of impressions of the English countryside, is hinted at in its title – its sense of quest. Just as T. S. Eliot had employed the pattern of a quest to give shape to his journey into modern despair in The Waste Land (1922), Morton uses the idea to give both a rationale and a narrative structure to his more consoling journey into Englishness. The book begins, not in England but in Jerusalem during the First World War: it is here, while serving as a soldier, that Morton has the vision of England that will compel his post-war journey. The England he envisions is a familiar, reassuring one of thatched cottages, sleepy villages and quaint bridges, described in an ecstatic manner reminiscent of the exilic idylls of Robert Browning’s ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ and Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. It is implicitly the landscape of a ‘home’ for whose values he has served, and for which he suffers the inconvenience of temporary exile.2 In imagining it he has, significantly, ‘the only religious moment I experienced in Jerusalem’.3 At the far end of this narrative arc is another sacred site, a church containing the tomb of a Norman knight in Warwickshire, the geographical and symbolic heart of England. The honeyed style is typical Morton: The little church was full of corn sheaves. Apples, picked for their size and colour, washed and polished, stood in a line against the altar rails. Above the empty pew of the absent squire, barley nodded its gold beard. The church smelt of ripe corn and fruit. Some one, I wonder if consciously, or just by chance, had placed a posy of

269

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 269

30/01/2012 16:24

270

david goldie

flowers in the stiff, stone hands of Sir Gervais. He lay there with his thin, mailed toes to the vaulting, his sword at his side and in his hands this offering from his own land to warm his heart in a Norman heaven [. . .] The church emptied. The noon sun fell in bright spears of colour over the old Jocelyns; beyond the porch was a picture of harvest set in a Norman frame. The rich earth had borne its children, and over the fields was that same smile which a man sees only on the face of a woman when she looks down to the child at her breast. I went out into the churchyard where the green stones nodded together, and I took up a handful of earth and felt it crumble and run through my fingers, thinking that as long as one English field lies against another there is something left in the world for a man to love. ‘Well,’ smiled the vicar, as he walked towards me between the yew trees, ‘that, I am afraid, is all we have to show here.’ ‘You have England,’ I said.4 The reasons why Morton might want to end his search for the essence of England at a rural tomb are worth considering. Perhaps he is simply returning us to a common trope of Englishness, typified in Thomas Gray and the Graveyard school of eighteenth-century English poetry, that reminds us we are only temporary custodians of a landscape held in trust for future generations: returning us to the social contract that Edmund Burke defined as the ‘partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’.5 But it is arguable that Morton has more recent deaths on his mind, also. This is partly suggested by his earlier references in other works to the dead of the recent war. His description of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior from his The Spell of London of the previous year, for example, employs a similar stock of images and emphases and places a dead body at England’s symbolic heart: Westminster Abbey [. . .] I stood there recently beside our Unknown Warrior, who lies not only at the heart of London, but also at the heart of England, here in magic earth, in this sacred soil, so warm in love, so safe in honour. No noise of traffic disturbs his sleep, no unkind wind whistles over him – no solitude of night. Instead, the silence of a mighty church, a silence as deep and lovely as though he were lying in some green country graveyard steeped in peace, above him a twilight in which the stored centuries seem to whisper happily of good things done for England.6 What reminds one most particularly of the recent war in the final scene of In Search of England, however, is Morton’s artful use of a series of motifs characteristic of Rupert Brooke. When Morton describes a ‘rich earth’ which has ‘borne its children’, there is a clear echo of the nurturing, maternal countryside of Brooke’s best-known war sonnet ‘The Soldier’, with its similarly ‘rich earth’ concealing the ‘dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware’. Similarly, when Morton reaches for the words to describe the peace attained by the knight he adapts Brooke’s distinctive and celebrated formulation of ‘hearts at peace, under an English heaven’ to describe his own soldier warming ‘his heart in a Norman heaven’. The reasons why Morton might use Brooke in this way – and his work offers many other reminders of Brooke’s wartime poetry – are perhaps not hard to find.7 Brooke’s celebrated example, advertised in wartime by the likes of Winston Churchill, Dean Inge and Edward

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 270

30/01/2012 16:24

war memorials

271

Marsh, meant that his work had become, as one commentator has put it, ‘a kind of repository of English holiness’.8 This was the result not only of his wartime sonnets, but also prose pieces like ‘An Unusual Young Man’ (1914) in which his autobiographical narrator has a vision similar to the one which Morton later experienced in Jerusalem: the ‘full flood of “England”’ sweeping over him in an impression that ‘if he’d ever been sentimental enough to use the word, he’d have called “holiness”’.9 Brooke’s death, in apparent fulfilment of the pledges of his ‘Soldier’ sonnet, sealed the warrant of this reverent attitude: crystallising the idea of a nation reconsecrated through the act of sacrifice and figuring him as a kind of noble crusader buried deep in the nation’s mindscape. When Morton talks of loving the countryside and ensuring its preservation as ‘sacred duties’, and implies that these values are guaranteed by the memory of the dead embedded in that landscape, he is, then, drawing on Brooke.10 But he is also drawing on a much wider cultural reconfiguration of the countryside in the First World War. Two elements of this in particular are worth consideration. The first, sponsored by extensive propaganda in both literature and popular culture, was that the war was being fought not so much for the British political state as for a national spirit embodied in the British countryside. This was a rhetorical strategy, but it seems often to have been deeply felt at a personal level. Denis Winter, for example, quotes one soldier describing what he is fighting for as simply ‘English fields, lanes, trees, good days in England, all that is synonymous with liberty’.11 Edward Thomas was equally clear in his own mind that his service was made for the sake of the land. When he was asked why he had enlisted, his gesture was the same as Morton’s at the close of In Search of England. He stooped down, picked up a handful of the English earth and crumbled it between his fingers. ‘Literally, for this,’ he is said to have answered.12 It is worth remembering here that in the First World War the English countryside was never – as it was in the Napoleonic Wars before, or the Second World War after – seriously threatened with invasion. Such justifications, then, could have little real basis. What they attested to instead was a powerful symbolic reading of the English countryside that had attained a new force with war. The second circumstance that facilitated Morton’s associations of sacredness and death in the landscape was the revival during the war of pastoral elegy. Pastoral elegy represents landscape as a form of memorial. It is a way of remembering the dead through their links with a known, shared countryside, and was, as Paul Fussell has shown, an important means for soldier-poets to commemorate their dead comrades.13 But it was also important – perhaps more important – for non-combatants. Crucial to this was the decision of the Imperial War Graves Commission to forbid repatriation of the bodies of the war dead. Bereaved relatives, wives and friends had no body over which they might grieve and no accessible burial plot on which their mourning might be focused. As a consequence much poetry of remembrance, especially by women, sought a generalised consolation in the landscape through which the dead had ranged in life.14 Vera Brittain’s initial response to the deaths of her brother and fiancé, as it is recounted in Testament of Youth (1933), is both very moving and quite typical in this regard. Brittain’s immediate impulse in her grief was to walk the countryside above Oxford, and, eventually, to write the pastoral elegy, ‘Boar’s Hill, October 1919’, a poem which resonates with the brooding presence of the dead ‘who always delighted to roam / Over the Hill where so often together we trod’.15 Beatrix Brice made such associations the basis of a poem, ‘To the Vanguard’, printed in The Times and popularised as a Christmas card in 1916. Here the landscape itself was seen as continuous and sufficient

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 271

30/01/2012 16:24

272

david goldie

reminder of the army’s efforts: ‘Oh, little mighty Force, your way is ours, / This land inviolate your monument’.16 British war poetry did not always promote such ideas. Some significant poems interrogated the assumptions of a consolatory nature poetry – among them the work of Charles Hamilton Sorley, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen – but Brooke’s poetry, and pastoral elegy more widely, helped legitimate a discourse in which, as Cairns Craig has put it, ‘England was recreated between 1914 and 1918 as the site of a rural holiness.’17 This was manifested literally in the rural idioms of memorialisation: in the self-consciously English vernacular styling of British cemeteries on the Western Front as well as the many rural and garden memorials across the native landscape. ‘The English countryside became’, as one commentator has put it, ‘a memorial to the dead’ as many parks and open spaces were acquired in remembrance.18 Walkers arriving on the top of Great Gable in the Lake District were now met at the summit by a memorial plaque informing them that the whole mountain had been bought and dedicated to the memory of members of The Fell and Rock Climbing Club killed in the war. Such memorialisation was actively encouraged by the National Trust, which suggested that: no more fitting form of memorial could be found to commemorate those who had fallen in the war than to dedicate to their memory some open space, some hilltop commanding beautiful views, some waterfall or sea-cliff, which could be enjoyed for all time by those who survived.19 In this way, the Trust acquired much of the Lake District landscape around Great Gable, including Scafell Pike, Great End and a large part of Scafell. These notions of a memorial landscape were never very far from consciousness in written accounts of the countryside after the war. One such is A. G. Macdonell’s, England Their England (1933), a broadly comic, Wodehousian novel often celebrated for its humorous account of a rural cricket match. But it is also a book with a serious core. Like In Search of England, it begins in wartime – at Passchendaele where its Scots hero Donald Cameron pledges himself to discovering the secrets of Englishness – and ends in a post-war historical countryside ripe with memento mori. Cameron’s search for the essential England concludes, after many comic adventures, in the landscape above Winchester Cathedral. Having wandered ‘among the memorials to long-dead English soldiers’ in the Cathedral, he finds himself sitting by the ancient remains of ‘a circular trench which the Britons had dug as a defence against the Legions’. Here, ‘presided over by the creator, the inheritor, the ancestor, and the descendant of it all, the green and kindly land of England’, he realises that the nation’s essential character has now, finally been revealed to him.20 He dozes and a vision appears – strongly reminiscent of Edward Thomas’s wartime poem ‘Roads’ – of a dream road running from the north to the Channel coast along which are walking the English dead, the citizen soldiers, ancient and modern, who have laid down their lives for the land. Cameron discovers, like Morton before him, the end of his quest for the national character in a landscape inspirited and valorised by the dead. Several other post-war novels employ a similar emphasis in spiritualising the landscape and figuring their protagonists as supplicants seeking the blessings of the dead who inhabit it. In Wilfrid Ewart’s Way of Revelation (1921) a former soldier, Adrian Knoyle, is rescued from bohemian enervation when he pledges himself to a life of rustic domesticity with the aptly named Faith, the fiancée of his best friend who has been killed in the war. The book concludes – like Macdonell’s – in a landscape bearing subtle remembrances of war. The

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 272

30/01/2012 16:24

war memorials

273

pair sit, facing ‘the low opposite ramparts of the plain’, against which ‘a line of poplars rose like a rank of soldiers’, on the earthwork of an ancient Citadel. This is the countryside that will become their home, not only on account of its great natural beauty but also because of its pressing reminders of the war dead: ‘This place is wonderfully solemn and beautiful,’ she said. ‘I shall often come up here and look down at our home and listen to the wind sighing through those old fir-trees. Whenever I hear that I think of the voices of people one has known and who have gone from us.’ His response was to take her hand. ‘I feel they are very near to us now, Adrian [. . .]’21 The popular nerve touched by his book was squeezed again by Francis Brett Young in another popular work, Portrait of Clare (1927), which similarly rises to an ecstatic rural conclusion that conflates natural with national values in an elevated quasi-religious prose: This is my religion, Clare, and I thank God for it. Humbly, I assure you, in spite of all the pride I have in it. The earth that bore me and all my forebears. Its own beauty; the courage, the patience, the goodwill, the piety of the men who have lived in it. When I think of England that is what I mean [. . .] That shadow – yes, only a ripple, North of Cotswold – is Edgehill: Shakespeare was born beneath it. And even today [. . .] there’s Elgar, Housman, Masefield. Small names but greatly English, whatever else they may be [. . .]22 Works of a more literary nature might avoid such rather Brooke-like excesses of naturespiritualism, but a range of novels as different as Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy and Neil M. Gunn’s Highland River (1937), have a similar underpinning in their representations of former soldiers returning from the war to a consoling countryside in which they might properly remember the dead. The natural extension of these ideas of a sacred national landscape is that one can no longer travel innocently through this countryside. The accumulated weight of the historical dead who have consecrated this landscape, augmented substantially by the recent war, mean that to travel through it is to enact a pilgrimage. This is what John Buchan’s Richard Hannay discovers in Mr Standfast (1919). The Scots-South African Hannay undergoes a similar experience to Brooke’s ‘Unusual Young Man’ and the heroes of Macdonell’s and Ewart’s novels, discovering in the historical English landscape the war’s spiritual significance: In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what I had been fighting for, what we were all fighting for. It was peace, deep and holy and ancient [. . .] I understood what a precious thing this little England was, how old and kindly and comforting, how wholly worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us.23 What drives this idea home, is that Buchan plainly models his novel on The Pilgrim’s Progress: a common source, as George Parfitt has suggested, for literary narratives of the First World War.24 The Pilgrim’s Progress is the key to the cyphers used by Hannay within the novel’s action, but also furnishes a pattern for the novel’s narrative. The journey Hannay takes towards both foiling the Germans and finding a home in the post-war Cotswold countryside is the same as Christian’s journey to the Celestial City. His immediate end is a

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 273

30/01/2012 16:24

274

david goldie

place in the English countryside, figured as a Land of Beulah, in which he can meditate on the wartime sacrifice of his comrade Peter Pienaar – the Mr Standfast of the book’s title. The 1920s and 1930s saw a proliferation of writing of all kinds about the British countryside. Some of this was, as David Matless has shown, radical and progressive in its attempts to create a modern, planned rural economy.25 Some of it was broadly socialist, working in the tradition of William Morris and Robert Blatchford to reclaim the rural for social collectivity and ensure free access to the countryside. But most of it, especially in its more popular manifestations, was conservative and nostalgic, and seemed to be motivated less by reviving the fortunes of country dwellers than preserving a picturesque, traditional countryside against the encroachments of the urban and suburban masses. Key thinkers in political Conservatism developed a nostalgic idea of what Patrick Wright has called ‘Deep England’ to counter the realities of strike and slump; many, among them Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, employing, as Frans Coetzee has put it, ‘recycled paeans to rustic simplicity’ to establish theirs as the party of country and patriotism.26 In his 1909 survey of the national scene, The Condition of England, C. F. G. Masterman argued sensibly on demographic evidence that ‘no one to-day would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling populations of the countryside the spirit of an “England” four-fifths of whose people have now crowded into the cities.’27 That this was exactly what popular writing was doing little more than a decade later suggests that there had been some fundamental alteration in the way the countryside was viewed. This was apparent in the post-war travelogue and country novel. It could be seen too in the establishment of new literary journals like the London Mercury, which in 1919 dedicated itself to encouraging a ‘poetry of the English landscape and especially the English landscape as a historical thing’.28 Patrick Abercrombie, similarly sought both a national and historical justification for his preservationism, when in establishing the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England, he suggested that ‘the greatest historical monument that we possess, the most essential thing which is England, is the countryside.’29 The rediscovery of the painting of John Constable had a similar emphasis. Previously neglected, his moody skies and overwhelming landscapes were now seen as the archetypal representations of Englishness.30 In music, too, Ralph Vaughan Williams helped ensure with his war works The Lark Ascending (1914–20) and Pastoral Symphony (1916–21) that the rural vernacular was placed at the centre of an English music consciously seeking to create ‘national monuments’.31 This notion of historical continuity was evidently a way of resisting the realities of industrial slump in the cities and the seemingly irresistible spread of the clutter of ribbon developments, bypasses, pylons, tea rooms, and all the other signs of commercial modernity that threatened to swamp the countryside. But what arguably gave that solemn historical sense its validity was the memory of war in that landscape, a memory jogged explicitly by the literature of the First World War and implicitly by the travel writing and rural novels afterwards: the journeys into the English spirit of H. V. Morton, the seriosentimental comedy of A. G. Macdonell, and the reverent travel guides such as Batsford’s ‘Pilgrim’s Library’ series, in which the English countryside was trodden on as though it were consecrated ground. The speaker of Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Aftermath’ had exhorted the reader to ‘[l]ook up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.’32 It would appear that for the many former soldiers and others who travelled in the English countryside after the war, such an injunction was superfluous: the dead could never be forgotten and the landscape was their constant reminder.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 274

30/01/2012 16:24

war memorials

275

Notes 1. C. P. Perry, ‘In Search of H. V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy’, Twentieth Century British History, 10.4 (1999), pp. 431–56 (p. 433). 2. For the significance of such ideas of the countryside as ‘home’ for the exiled imperialist, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: The Hogarth Press, 1993), pp. 281–2. 3. H. V. Morton, In Search of England (London: Methuen, 1927), p. 3. 4. Ibid. pp. 279–80. 5. Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1790] 1968), pp. 194–5. 6. H. V. Morton, The Spell of London (London; Methuen, 1926), p. 15. 7. For example, in a later book Morton would write about what he describes as ‘the Soul of Scotland’, the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle, imagining ‘the presence of those 100,000 lads who lie in soil which is for ever Scotland’, thereby neatly tying up Brooke with Scotland’s greatest war book, Ian Hay’s The First Hundred Thousand (1915) (Morton, In Search of Scotland [London: Methuen, 1929], pp. 54, 52). 8. Geoffrey Matthews, quoted in Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 67. 9. Rupert Brooke, ‘An Unusual Young Man’, New Statesman, 29 August 1914; reprinted in Christopher Hassall (ed.), The Prose of Rupert Brooke (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1956), pp. 195–200 (p. 199). 10. Morton, In Search of England, p. viii. 11. Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Allen Lane, 1978), p. 32. 12. Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 154. 13. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 231–69. 14. For examples, see Catherine W. Reilly (ed.), Scars Upon my Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London: Virago, 1981). 15. Vera Brittain, ‘Boar’s Hill, October 1919’, in Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 (London: Virago, [1933] 1978), pp. 484–6. 16. Beatrix Brice, ‘To the Vanguard’, in Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (eds), Poetry of the Great War: An Anthology (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 112. 17. Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), p. 131. 18. Carolyn Dakers, The Countryside at War 1914–1918 (London: Constable, 1987), p. 17. 19. National Trust, quoted in Robin Fedden, The Continuing Purpose: A History of the National Trust (London: Longmans, 1968), p. 18. 20. A. G. Macdonell, England Their England (London: World Books, [1933] 1941), pp. 297–8. 21. Wilfrid Ewart, Way of Revelation: A Novel of Five Years (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, [1921] 1986), pp. 532–3. 22. Francis Brett Young, Portrait of Clare (1927), quoted in Glen Cavaliero, The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 89. 23. John Buchan, Mr Standfast (London: Nelson, [1919] 1923), pp. 23–4. 24. George Parfitt, Fiction of the First World War (London: Faber, 1988), pp. 12–25. 25. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), pp. 25–100. 26. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 81–7; Frans Coetzee, For Party or Country: Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 162. 27. C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909), p. 12. According to the 1911 Census, less than 22 per cent of the British population now lived in rural areas.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 275

30/01/2012 16:24

276

david goldie

28. ‘Editorial Notes’, London Mercury, I.1 (November 1919) p. 2; I.3 (January 1920), p. 260. 29. Patrick Abercrombie, The Preservation of Rural England (1926), quoted in Philip Lowe, ‘The Rural Idyll Defended: From Preservation to Conservation’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.), The Rural Idyll (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 121. 30. See Herbert Cornish, The Constable Country (London: Heath Cranton, 1932); and Peter Bishop, An Archetypal Constable: National Identity and the Geography of Nostalgia (London: Athlone, 1995), pp. 115–77. 31. Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music (Oxford, 1934), p. 10, quoted in George Revill, ‘The Lark Ascending: Monument to a Radical Pastoral’, Landscape Research, 16.2 (Summer 1991), pp. 25–30. 32. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Aftermath’, in Siegfried Sassoon: The War Poems, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 133.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 276

30/01/2012 16:24

28

UNSETTLED MEMORY: A MEDITATION ON CONTESTED GROUND Jane Creighton Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.1

S

omething about a field, flat ground, rolling hills at some distance, a lone figure walking away, head down, in contemplation. There is an elegiac feel, but also a lack of specificity – the figure is cloaked somehow, a silhouette. It is not possible to decide particulars. Woman? Man? African? Asian? Caucasian? Nineteenth century? Twenty-first? Or is it just the most basic human form, a crossing shadow, the self blanked out in the service of melancholy, something lost that does not want naming, because to name it is to begin to narrate a boundary, to say that was then and this is now and these are the people, these are who we have lost, or who have been killed, one by one and in groups. Count them. Prioritise. Honour. Exclude. That figure is somewhere close to the first image that comes, if I am asked to look back toward an era in my personal US landscape – the 1980s – when much was being said about the process of healing the wounds of the Vietnam War. Accumulating years, my graduate education – no doubt these have something to do with the image’s detached quality, the way I can more easily look back not only over the more than half century I have lived, but also back beyond this lifetime, and fit the Vietnam Era into larger landscapes marked by wars and the histories of wars. In this mood I might nod my head toward the preserved beauty of certain places once drenched in blood – the battlefield of Chickamauga, for instance, where I spent an early summer day some years ago walking and thinking about Ambrose Bierce writing the Civil War story of the deaf and mute, patriotic boy who understood nothing about the mutilated men who dragged themselves into the lostness of his forest, a story the dead-on, understated ferocity of which anticipated the work of some Vietnam veterans writing about their war. Against those green meadows, a slight breeze feathered the trees and I could just faintly imagine the pounding obliteration of artillery shells shot from somewhere unseen, or the close-up, eyeball to eyeball terror of pitched battle minus the cinematic unities, as if I could make sense of what war veterans and civilian survivors across the last century and into this one say over and over, when it is possible to find words, that what is sensible hardly survives. The shadow figure, after all, is an absence drifting in an aftermath, what is left in the waves after the ship goes down, after the grass returns, after the trees grow, age and fall, after the sun rises and sets across two or three generations toward the last commemorators

277

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 277

30/01/2012 16:24

278

jane creighton

Figure 2: Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC, designed by Maya Lin; photograph by Wendy Watriss who might have remembered what someone who was there had said and done. The site, what and wherever it is, must begin to speak to the careful conservators, the archaeologists and historians who make some sense of the artefacts left behind. We might read what they do, build their studies into the way we read this world, and yet still do as I sometimes do, which is to go out of focus, shudder at the relentless, ongoing violence that in my life mostly has taken place elsewhere, and lift a hand to acknowledge the respectful solemnity of my detachment, aloft in the shadow’s confines. In part, this writing is about negotiating the uses of that detachment and its limits. It is about how I, like other US citizens who live much of our lives at some distance away from significant conflict, might step away from that mesmerising remove and understand to what extent we are implicated, that is, made by, served by, responsible for and vulnerable to the shape of wars half a world away – a question surely as alive now in the first decade of the ‘war on terror’ as it was during America’s war in Vietnam. This writing is also about specific ground, and the thinking that ground provokes over time. The piece of earth Maya Lin opened up for the black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been much written about. Those walls were built, as Elizabeth Hess observed in her 1983 appraisal of the memorial, ‘into a rise in the landscape with only their inscribed sides visible’, thus marking early critical recognition of the memorial’s qualities as an embedded text.2 Its readers enter, walking a path guided by many things – the walkway itself of course, intimately placed so that as one descends the text rises overhead and yet remains close, always readable, much of it well within arm’s length, available to the fingertips, a tactility that becomes the felt edge of reading. Then there is the circumstances, the weather, the time of year, rain on melting snow some grey, late-November morning with

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 278

30/01/2012 16:24

a meditation on contested ground

279

few people or a bright afternoon in May amid throngs, and whether the memorial is the primary destination or but one of a series of stops in a tour of monuments and museums. What one brings to that reading will vary from day to day as well as across generations. The dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington in 1982 and the subsequent years of its popularity marked a period of recognition for Vietnam veterans, some of whom expressed the sense that they were being heard by their country and embraced for the first time after having been sent to fight a divisive, deeply unpopular war and having returned to the neglect and scorn of a country that had mostly moved on. Others were not so sure, either of the embrace or of their interest in receiving it, but saw in Maya Lin’s wall something different from the bromides of public reconciliation.3 I have not been to the memorial since the late ’80s, 1987 probably, some five years after its dedication, twelve years after the fall of Saigon, three years before Desert Storm, fourteen years before September 11 and the war in Afghanistan, and sixteen years before the invasion of Iraq, a list of events that seems bound to diminish its resonance as succeeding generations of US war veterans come back to a complicated home front. Yet I have a vivid sense of it as a physical place easily summoned out of those years. I spent a lot of time there. In 1987 I had a reason to do so beyond the interests of a citizen thinking about her country’s foreign policy, though I knew no one on the wall – a question that arose often enough among the ad hoc community of strangers circulating through the site. I was there as a poet and writer of a personal essay about the memorial produced during an earlier residency at the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), which had won me the role of literature curator for War and Memory in the Aftermath of Vietnam, WPA’s multi-genre, three-month exhibition put up in the winter of 1987.4 When I first went to the memorial in 1985 my head was full of Central America, the US-backed contra war in Nicaragua, the faces and voices of the family I had stayed with in Managua – sisters, brothers, children and their extraordinary grandmother who had survived years of the Somoza dictatorship and its overthrow, only to see many more years of fighting and betrayals. Others quickly joined them during the time I spent gazing at those names of people I did not know. They arrived as argumentative, raucous or sweet fragments of speech, among them, certainly, the recent voices of veterans I knew protesting the war in Central America, angry, sardonic, steadfast – and stricken, from time to time, with grief. But I heard other things, pieces from further back, high-school classmates, fates unknown; my bewildering college boyfriend who had been a medic; an aunt whose son (my cousin) had done two tours, furious with my adamant, nineteen-year-old self for pounding her table – at which I had just eaten heartily – to denounce the war; the first feminists I ever saw who frightened and thrilled me by shouting down William Kunstler at a 1969 rally over chauvinism in the anti-war movement; my lovely, lost parents, whose deaths from natural causes never felt fully separate from the times in which they occurred. That is to say, I brought what a reader is capable of bringing – attentiveness, experience, varieties of knowledge, a range of associations and a desire to enter the text and follow where it leads. To think of the memorial as an open book goes beyond the easy application of metaphor. The controversy over the funerary aspects of the design that took place before and during the building of the memorial was a continuation, in part, of ideological arguments over how the war is represented in US history. Was it lost, or was it – under the circumstances of Nixon’s Vietnamisation of the war and the US withdrawal of troops – simply over, essentially disappeared from public consciousness as the country moved on

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 279

30/01/2012 16:24

280

jane creighton

to the Watergate scandal? Was the sacrifice of over 58,000 Americans to be represented by what many called ‘the black gash of shame’ commemorating a lost war, its combatants betrayed by their government?5 Were veterans not entitled to a monument that would honour the sacrifice and heroism of all who served, rather than one that mourned endlessly for the dead? The placement of Frederick Hart’s realist sculpture of the three GIs in a grove near the west wall provided a compromise to arguments that, as much as anything else, seemed wrung out of an unanswerable grief.6 In an interview from that period, Lin said of it, ‘Three men standing there before the world – it’s trite. It’s a generalization, a simplification. Hart gives you an image – he’s illustrating a book.’7 The open book, that is, of her design. Lin’s dismissal here is understandable, given not only the aesthetic principles involved, but also how much criticism her design, as well as her youth, ethnicity and gender, took from various quarters. But the consequent, ongoing, dialectic visible between statue and wall, or illustration and book, tells us something useful about the impossibility of having the final word on the subject of this war, or any war. If this truth seems so obvious that it hardly need be said, it is worth remembering our amnesiac tendency, at least in American cultural representation, to be a populace surprised by ongoing consequences associated with past practices, our innocence derailed. I have found the sculpture compelling in its way, the handsome solemnity of the three figures not triumphant but instead intent in their gaze toward some middle distance, weary but ready, always, to engage and protect. They are idealised with period accuracy, as are the figures of nurses aiding a wounded soldier in the sculpture by Glenna Goodacre that joined them on the site in 1993, and they are all caught in an idealised moment. Unlike the staged, victorious raising of the flag in the Iwo Jima monument across the Potomac River, however, these two moments sculpted out of the Vietnam War experience represent an acknowledgement of ongoing vulnerability. They might be attacked at any time, more wounded coming in. The moment is frozen, a textual illustration, as Lin suggested, punctuated by a kind of certainty with which the figures inhabit their meaning. I can do little else but accept what they give me. But the openness of Lin’s walls and the constant reading they engender make the experience of the memorial something else, something that reaches beyond the arguments of the era that produced it. Thinking about this, I return to some writing from 1987 stuck in a file just to the left of where I am sitting, a thwarted essay, its pages adrift. I have not looked at it for some years, but I remember the effort, sounds and voices, a few of the figures caged in those pages. I remember the attempt to document an immersion, several days I spent at and around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial over the course of two patriotic holidays, trying to understand what happens after the sorrow and beauty of the design has sunk in, after a citizen has descended into its centre, seen her reflection in the names, recognised the permeable border between the dead and the living that we tend to think of only on special occasions, crossing then back and forth over the moment when the reflected self goes out of focus and the names assert themselves to be read, to be uttered. King D. Washington. Lilburn Stowe. There is the young girl with white-blonde hair who places a picture of herself at panel 16 on the west wall. A gift, a tribute. She wears a pretty dress, her shoes polished and buckled over lacy socks. Around her, clumps of adults. She makes an unbalanced kid-step backward and considers. The taps on her shoes scrape the stone blocks set into the walkway. She steps forward and crouches, fussing with the picture. She tries to set it just so. Upright against the wall? Or flat inside the pristine gutter? If she lays it flat the wall reflects

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 280

30/01/2012 16:24

a meditation on contested ground

281

it. It is a studio shot, wallet-sized. In it, she is posed against a blue-black background, smiling and tilting her head, her gaze slightly upward. She does not smile now. Concentrating, she places the picture flat, face out, so that it meets its reflection crown to crown. What is visible is the essential blondeness. You might notice, without thinking about it much, a placid, feminine innocence. Unmarked, barely distinct features. Her opposite might be the red-faced vet with freezer-blue eyes, part of a group that has been sitting under a tree near the ‘Last Firebase’ vigil, the POW/MIA booth that in various forms has hung on in and around the memorial for over twenty years. What I remember most has something to do with an uneasy navigation of gender in that place. They have been drinking beer, all of them in fatigues and combat boots, among them a Vietnamese veteran of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. They wrestle with one another, giddy with the stories that ripple through them, lifting arms and voices and subsiding through the glances they cast outside their circle, eyeing the terrain. In one of those quieter moments the red-faced vet rises up and marches over to a young woman who has been handing out leaflets on behalf of those Americans who, the leaflets say, have been left behind in the jungles of Vietnam to rot in bamboo cages. She has been too shy, too tentative and self-effacing. ‘You gotta step in front of ’em like this,’ he says, grabbing the leaflets from her and cutting into the flow of visitors. He gets into the face of a man in a suit, but the man evades him, drawing curses. He turns then, thrusting himself into a stream of elderly, diffident women, some of whom take what he offers delicately in their hands. He plunges on. The two of them, the young girl and the fierce vet, represent two positions in a complicated field of operations. The positions in this instance, as in many others, are fiercely gendered – her girlishness pushing against his grizzled masculinity. But the fundamental demarcation is the line between civilians and soldiers, the burning question being how anyone on either side of that line might articulate responses adequate to the gaping losses the memorial represents. I recognise her desire to do it right, offering up what she has in order to honour, most likely, a relative she could not have known. She perhaps thinks, as I used to think when I was her age, that goodness, pretty ways, and the right words discovered and said would be enough to assuage whatever pain there was. From his point of view, she is among the protected, and she will never really be able to speak across that border to the experience that owns him, and that he, in turn, uses to lay claim to the memorial as the last, true province of those who fought. This particular culture of Vietnam veterans at the Wall gained its own anthropologist, whose book about the site and its history, The Last Firebase, instructs the visitor about the best ways to approach and experience it.8 I can see myself then, standing on the knoll overlooking it all – the girl, the vet, the sculptures in the trees, the ongoing arguments riffling around one or more booths where literature is handed out and buttons and T-shirts are sold – wondering how anyone could presume to dictate the way this site should be experienced. As if one could command the proper respect, the proper healing, the proper emotion, the proper understanding, as if, somehow, this experience were perfectible. Does that mean if you do it wrong, you need to go back and try again? But a third figure I remember – the quiet, pipe-smoking veteran wearing new camouflage that did not fit him well – teaches something else. In the brief conversation I had with him, he seemed uneasy with all that. Yes, he wore the clothes. ‘Part of what keeps us all together,’ he said. Yet, he stood apart. And thereafter, whenever I saw him throughout the day, he was moving along the wall, apparently, methodically, reading each name one by one, all of them.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 281

30/01/2012 16:24

282

jane creighton

Figure 3: Vietnam Veterans Memorial; photograph by Wendy Watriss I return, then, to the names, as well as to the spaces between them that shine in the rich darkness of the granite even as they reflect the image of any person who moves along that page. The names, after all, are remarkable, both substantive of a very long list but also each its own, engraved in large, readable type so that one might savour them, saying each: Paul J. Lively. Donald W. Keep. The primary relationship between reader and text suggests a most intimate arrangement, an active, alert attention that, at its most engaged, does away with surrounding distractions. Reading the text of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial requires a certain kind of detachment, a letting go of what you thought you knew and a giving over to the moment of reading, to the life that might be imagined for each name read. In ways that a public monument in the US has not quite done before, the memorial makes possible an explicit, public acknowledgement of what Judith Butler calls ‘grievable’ lives. In her meditation on mourning and violence in post-9/11 America, Judith Butler speaks of the necessary transformative power of mourning not just for individuals, but for the sense of a political community larger than what might be identified as one’s own kind. ‘Loss’, she says at one point, ‘has made a tenuous “we” of us all.’9 The names on the wall so evenly paced fully carry the sense of each and the sense of all, the sense of what might be possible if a public understands that the process of moving on does not, and ought not to, suspend openness to the ways we are changed by what we have lost. It is the spaces between, then, that are left, where the unnamed live – the several million South East Asian casualties of the American War in Vietnam, veterans who died years later by suicide, or otherwise as a consequence of their injuries or Agent Orange. Those spaces expand when one begins to calculate the new generations of American wars and their casualties, the current, high rate of suicides among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans in the US, and the ongoing loss of life in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 282

30/01/2012 16:24

a meditation on contested ground

283

Figure 4: Vietnam Veterans Memorial; photograph by Wendy Watriss associated with a contemporary war on terror that, among all the other things that it does, echoes and revises our approach to Vietnam even as it breaks new ground. My reading of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial takes me to these edges, where the effort to recognise those who are not named alongside those who are becomes, in itself, the gift of the text. Claiming them as part of what has been lost to us changes, in powerful ways, who we understand ourselves to be. ‘We are not separate identities in the struggle for recognition’, Butler writes, ‘but are already involved in a reciprocal exchange, an exchange that dislocates us from our positions, our subject-positions, and allows us to see that community itself requires the recognition that we are all, in different ways, striving for recognition.’10 I rely on Butler’s call for a recognition, essentially, of our global interdependency across myriad differences as another way of saying, perhaps, that the intent reader is unmade and remade not only by reading the text, but by seeing her or his own desires among all the others in it. Something of that I experienced recently, as many do, while living for an academic year in Poland. Before visiting Auschwitz, Majdanek, Belzec, Stuthoff, among other places, I knew to some extent what I was in for. What I could not know beforehand was the knowledge pulled from my own body moving in the presence of mounds of hair shorn from the heads of women whose names could not be known, or those great piles of shoes, combs, brushes, all the intimate, anonymous traces of bodies whose absences seemed to flame around my skin. This was a confirmation of a palpable truth – that the tenuous ‘we’ cannot grow weary of this loss, these losses, the unspeakable horrors infiltrating the silences of the great expanse of Birkenau, horrors made possible by general assent to the ideology that the lives of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists and Slavs, among others, were to varying

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 283

30/01/2012 16:24

284

jane creighton

degrees expendable and unworthy of grief. Of course, most of us know this. We are weary of knowing this. We shudder, perhaps, go out of focus. Forget the possibility of others laying claim to the names of those lost in Gaza, Darfur, Fallujah, or those US veterans who do not often make it into public consciousness who are laid up in Veterans Administration hospitals waiting for treatment of physical and mental trauma. The uses of a memorial? To mourn, to argue, to observe, to think about where, who, what we are in relation to others. What I wrote about this in 1987, remembering myself somewhere on a bench overlooking the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, still applies: A chubby kid and his father walk by me. They are both wearing fresh army camouflage and ribbons signifying their identification with the Live POW committee. The kid sports a button that says, ‘Never Again.’ That guy will never send his kid to war until all the POWs are brought back home. Maybe then he’ll send him. These are my fellow citizens. I am as responsible as they for what has been allowed to occur, for what will happen. We’re alive. Still here.11

Notes 1. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 115. 2. Elizabeth Hess, ‘A Tale of Two Memorials’, Art in America (April 1983), pp. 121–7 (p. 122). 3. An architect and sculptor, Maya Lin has designed some of the most significant works of public art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, among them the Civil Rights Memorial (Montgomery, Alabama, 1989), the Women’s Table (Yale University, 1993) and Storm King Wave Table (Storm King Art Center, 2007–8). She was a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale in 1981 when her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was selected out of 1,420 entrants in a national design competition sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. 4. The essay, ‘My Home in the Country’, appears in Reese Williams (ed.), Unwinding the Vietnam War: Writing and Art from War toward Peace (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1987), pp. 49–67. This anthology was published in concert with the exhibition. 5. The phrase originates in Vietnam veteran Tom Carhart’s testimony before the United States Fine Arts Commission in 1981 challenging the selection of Lin’s design. See Carhart’s subsequent article in the New York Times, ‘Insulting Vietnam Vets’, 24 October 1981. 6. A useful presentation of this controversy can be found both in Elizabeth Hess’s article on the four-year battle over the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial published in Art and America in April 1983, and in subsequent letters to the editor in the November 1983 issue, from Frederick Hart and others. See Hess, ‘A Tale of Two Memorials’, Art in America (April 1983), pp. 121–7; and ‘More on Viet Memorial Controversy’, Art in America (November 1983), pp. 5, 7. 7. Maya Lin, quoted in Hess, ‘Two Memorials’, p. 123. 8. See Lydia Fish, The Last Firebase: A Guide to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane, 1987). 9. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 20. 10. Ibid. p. 44. 11. ‘My Home in the Country’, p. 67.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 284

30/01/2012 16:24

29

WAR, POLICING AND SURVEILLANCE: PAT BARKER AND THE SECRET STATE Jessica Meacham

P

at Barker’s First World War trilogy is widely acknowledged as an important contribution to literature about the period. In 1991, Regeneration, Barker’s fifth novel, was an immediate critical success, quickly followed by The Eye in the Door, winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road, which took the Booker Prize two years later.1 A recent collection of essays on Barker edited by Sharon Monteith et al. gives an indication of the range of criticism her work has inspired. Much of it reads the Regeneration trilogy and focuses on Barker’s representations of trauma, the body and the war as a crisis of masculinity.2 These representations can be usefully understood by exposing the texts’ preoccupations with surveillance. The Eye in the Door, through its explicit documentation of an increasingly oppressive political climate, dramatises the rising hysteria of the domestic political, social and cultural situation during the latter half of the war. Regeneration and The Ghost Road thematically foreshadow and recall the central work’s preoccupation with surveillance through representations of army psychiatry, hospitals, barracks and military camps. Barker institutionalises her characters to strong effect: in Regeneration because, historically, Craiglockhart Hospital was the setting for the initial meeting between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen but later, in The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, because her institutions act as staging grounds for the tension between state and citizen, patient and doctor, civilian and soldier that she convincingly reimagines with the aid of a range of literary and historical sources. The Regeneration trilogy has an important precursor in the 1989 short novel The Man Who Wasn’t There, which itself marked a departure from Barker’s earlier work.3 Her first three novels, published by Virago in the 1980s, focused on the lives of working-class women from the north-east of England. The Man Who Wasn’t There follows Colin Harper, an adolescent whose struggle for self-realisation in the absence of a father and in the traumatic context of post-Second World War Britain is dramatised through a striking, although perhaps not wholly successful, narrative device. The prose is intercut with a screenplay that represents Colin’s imaginative impulses to recreate himself in the context of the war; so the screenplay, comprising dialogue and italicised stage directions, is visually distinct from the main body of the narrative just as the action of the ‘film’ is a fantastic reinterpretation of the ‘real’ events of the main narrative. The screenplay represents Colin’s imaginative respite from real life; he becomes the ‘director’ of his own film, a participator in the war that ‘he was born into but couldn’t remember’.4 At the same time, the neurotic impulses behind this reimagining – that is, Colin’s grief over the loss of his father,

285

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 285

30/01/2012 16:24

286

jessica meacham

his struggles with his mother and authority figures at school, the ego-reinforcing ideals of heroism and masculinity that his ideas about the war represent – make the screenplay more than a schoolboy’s imaginary game; it also represents a psychologically acute enactment of fantasy and trauma. The idea that war and the memory of war act as sources of imaginative retelling is the central theme of the Regeneration trilogy, prefigured in this novel by close attention to the visual image, the ‘relics’ of the war that Colin ‘saw around him everywhere’ in photographs and war films playing at the Gaumont Cinema.5 These ‘relics’ have a counterpoint in the textual sources for Barker’s later trilogy: her use of archive material, including the manuscripts and letters of Sassoon and Owen and the unpublished papers of Dr W. H. R. Rivers, together with the intertextual patchwork formed by the influence on her work of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and Robert Graves, among others, forms a complex, composite text that enacts a hermeneutic process between contemporary readers and cultural commemoration of the war. The Eye in the Door, in this context, represents a response to historical scholarship that has emphasised the increasingly authoritative measures taken by the British government in the latter half of the war. In Barker’s novel, Billy Prior, a significant minor character in Regeneration, becomes the central figure, a conduit for narrative experiment in both psychological and social trauma. Working class but grammar school educated (like Barker herself), Prior’s job as an espionage officer for the Ministry of Munitions brings him into direct contact with the conscientious objectors, dissidents and union activists of his childhood. Barker uses the historical case of Alice Wheeler as a basis for her rendition of the plight of her character Beattie Roper, imprisoned for her alleged role in a plan to poison Lloyd George; this narrative arc, in turn, is contrasted with the increased anxiety around homosexuality occasioned by the war, developed around the controversial production in 1917 of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé and the resultant libel trial known as the Pemberton Billing case.6 Prior’s lover, Charles Manning, is a victim of anonymous harassment before his attendance at the performance of Salomé; his friendship with Robert Ross (Wilde’s literary executor) and his relationship with Prior draws the narrative into an overtly class-conscious representation of homosexual relationships during the period. The literary references are always central to the narrative. The Ministry of Munitions is represented as corrupt, with the agent responsible for Beattie Roper’s conviction revealed as a liar through his ignorance of the death of Walt Whitman. The queer, disruptive influence of Wilde and Whitman becomes embodied in Prior, who moves between two social worlds, occupying different roles in each. His experiences of acts of dissidence – his own and other people’s – are often simultaneously political, social and sexual: surveillance is multifaceted, underpinning representations of self-censorship, textual surveillance, harassment and psychological scrutiny. In 1985 and 1986, Nicholas Hiley published two essays on counter-espionage in Britain before and during the First World War that offer an introduction to the now widely accepted narrative that links the development of the modern-day MI5 with both the popular press and the work of ‘invasion novelists’, perhaps most significantly William Le Queux (1864–1927).7 Le Queux’s 1909 novel The Spies of the Kaiser was serialised in the Weekly News with a £10 prize, a considerable sum, offered to readers who had their own spy stories to submit. These stories were passed on to the security services for inclusion on their register of suspicious occurrences. The symbiotic relationship between Le Queux and MO5, the section of the War Office with responsibility for counter-espionage at that

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 286

30/01/2012 16:24

pat barker and the secret state

287

time, was symptomatic of a department that demonstrated little concern for the accuracy or reliability of the intelligence it received, often from members of the public. In Hiley’s assessment, ‘it was no longer possible to tell where fact ended and fantasy began.’8 An earlier invasion novel, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) caused a similar impact after its publication: Recent research in German naval archives has revealed that plans for the invasion of Britain were first drafted in 1896. These plans differed in detail, but not in substance, from [. . .] The Riddle of the Sands [. . .] A secret guide to the German army produced by the War Office in 1912 praised ‘the brilliant imagination of the author of The Riddle of the Sands’.9 The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selbourne, ‘was sufficiently impressed by The Riddle of the Sands to call for a detailed report on whether its invasion plan was feasible. [The Naval Intelligence Division] eventually convinced him it was not.’10 MO5 has evolved into the organisation known as MI5 today, and Hiley muses on the relationship between intelligence-gathering and fiction in his introduction to a recent edition of The Spies of the Kaiser: ‘Some may think it fitting that MI5 had its origins in the pages of a novel, [. . .] for much of the subsequent history of that unit has seen the blending of truth and rumour into a heady cocktail of rumour and allegation.’11 Whether it is ‘fitting’ or profoundly unsettling to meditate on the role that fiction, speculation and the popular press played in the formation of MI5, it is beyond question that the relationship between them forms a key part of the literary representations and critical interpretations of the quasi-police state that was perceived by many to be in place in the UK by 1916. Hiley is scathing about the various failures of politicians to halt the spread of hysteria, misinformation and public anxiety, in large part generated by their civil servants, about an imaginary threat of German invasion; but in particular he is concerned about the shift in scope of the counter-espionage effort during the war. It morphed from a small operation designed to investigate German agents into ‘a vast intelligence-gathering network, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds each year and collecting information on virtually anyone opposed to government policy’.12 Christopher Andrew’s description of the ‘spy mania’ of the period quotes Basil Anderson, then head of the Criminal Investigation Department: ‘[it] assumed a virulent epidemic form accompanied by delusions which defied treatment.’13 The government collected a massive amount of information on citizens during the course of the war, via informants, spies and postal surveillance, and there was an increasing trend for harassment of pacifist and left-wing pressure groups by the Security Service and Special Branch under the guise of counter-espionage.14 The ‘delusion’ of the increasingly frantic – and repressive – counter-espionage effort was part of a wider national trauma occasioned by the war, articulated in Barker’s work through a sophisticated narrative structure that has Billy Prior at its centre. Barker links the increasing surveillance of dissidents (Beattie Roper, mother-figure for Prior in his youth, and his childhood friend Mac, now a union leader) and ‘degenerates’ in the experiences of homosexuals like Charles Manning, through Prior’s perspective. The state perception that these groups, and others like them, were damaging to the war effort is made explicit in a conversation between Prior and his superior at the Ministry of Munitions where the latter refers to an ‘unholy alliance of socialists, sodomites and shop stewards’ that are ‘bringing the country to its knees’.15 While the Regeneration trilogy is not in any conventional sense a work of espionage

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 287

30/01/2012 16:24

288

jessica meacham

fiction, nevertheless the main thrust of the narrative is concerned with a search for information; hidden psychic truth as a route into the trauma of ‘shell shock’ and the consequent anxieties around masculinity caused by vast numbers of men suffering from what had previously been known as ‘hysteria’. Elaine Showalter has shown that the ‘cult of manliness’ and the ‘heroic visions and masculinist fantasies’ of the Victorian ideal were fundamentally undermined by the shell-shock ‘epidemic’.16 It is the effect on the body of the trauma of war that forms the basis of many of the cases of hysteria and neurasthenia in Barker’s texts: ‘in the end, moral and political truths have to be proved on the body because this mass of nerve and muscle and blood is what we are.’17 The ‘truths’ represented through paralysis, mutism, vomiting, insomnia, memory loss and anxiety attacks, in Barker’s treatment, are intimately connected to negotiation between the self and the state, between private and national crisis. Regeneration opens with a transcript of Siegfried Sassoon’s Declaration, the statement he made announcing his refusal to continue fighting in July 1917. The statement was printed in The Times and read out in the House of Commons and eventually led to Sassoon’s admission to Craiglockhart and treatment by W. H. R. Rivers. In this reading, Rivers’s role as a psychoanalyst becomes part of the surveillance culture of the war; his treatment acts as an analytical ‘eye’ that scrutinises his patients’ trauma, inset into a narrative that insinuates that scrutiny into the national, collective trauma of the period. Trauma is the mark of an event that is unknowable as it is being experienced; it disrupts chronology, interrupts narrative flow and resists closure. For Barker, trauma and surveillance are linked through a variety of structural, figurative and thematic preoccupations that reflect, to some extent, the changing critical and theoretical response to surveillance technology and the role of surveillance in political and representational life. The Foucauldian panopticon, a structural arrangement of ‘political technology’ that situates power ‘not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes’,18 is important to this reading, but so too is the work of Paul Virilio, in his extension of the panopticon ‘to an extraterrestrial level of discipline and control’, a ‘micro-analysis of how new technologies of oversight and organizations of control [. . .] have made the crossover into civilian and political sectors to create a global administration of fear’.19 The most literal form of ‘oversight’, aviation and aerial photography, had its major military debut in the First World War; for Bernd Hüppauf, ‘this war had also conquered the third dimension, turning Daedalus’s dream of escaping from the labyrinth into the nightmare of a complete system of surveillance and threat.’20 The Eye in the Door enacts these processes throughout the text: Barker represents the institutions and systems of state control – both physically, in the description of material conditions, and systematically, as oppressive and threatening – and her most effective narrative tactic for doing so is through attention to the body. Corporeality, in this reading, is the site of the marks of surveillance-trauma. The Eye in the Door takes its title from the painted eye surrounding the peephole in the door of Beattie Roper’s cell; her experience in prison, where her periods of hunger strike and her increased susceptibility to influenza have left her physically weakened, has a marked physical effect: ‘It was possible in this position to see how emaciated she was, how waxy the skin.’21 The relentless physical consequences of dissent are apparent in this description of Prior’s former friend Mac, imprisoned for conscientious objection: ‘He was stripped and put in a cell with a stone floor and no glass in the window’; ‘Mac looked [. . .] as people do look who’ve had repeated disagreements with detention camp guards.’22 The prison in the novel looks, to Prior’s appalled gaze:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 288

30/01/2012 16:24

pat barker and the secret state

289

like a pit. The high walls were ringed with three tiers of iron landings, studded by iron doors, linked by iron staircases. In the centre of the pit sat a wardress who, simply by looking up, could observe every door.23 The effacement of prisoners, their status as non-citizens, is suggested in the description of the inmates wearing ‘identical grey smocks that [. . .] blended with the iron grey of the landings, so that the women looked like columns of moving metal’.24 The women are dehumanised to such an extent by their incarceration that they have been figuratively absorbed into the fabric of the building. Once they return to their cells, the empty landings remind Prior explicitly of the trenches: ‘No Man’s Land seen through a periscope, an apparently empty landscape which in fact held thousands of men. That misleading emptiness had always struck him as uncanny.’25 The narrative echoes the reading of the war that Sandra M. Gilbert has described as ‘the construction of anonymous, dehumanised man [. . .] helplessly entrenched on the edge of No Man’s Land’, seeing that space as a ‘symbol for the state, whose nihilistic machinery he was powerless to control or protest’.26 The treatment suffered by pacifists and conscientious objectors was a product of the government’s effort to control morale. Peter Holquist has pointed out the British government arrived at a state of total surveillance later in the war than the other European powers, ‘due less to some innate liberalism than to the fact that universal conscription was introduced only in the course of the war; morale, both at home and in the ranks, becomes a far greater concern for a citizen army’.27 The ‘citizen army’ brought military discipline to bear as a controlling force on a far greater proportion of the population than it had previously. In his 1922 work Kangaroo, D. H. Lawrence offers a fictionalised account of the surveillance and harassment that he and his wife Frieda (Richard and Harriet Somers in the novel) underwent in Cornwall during the period. The Somers were: watched and listened to, spied on, by men lying behind the low stone fences [. . .] A whole intense life of spying going on all the time. Harriet could not hang out a towel on a bush, or carry out the slops, [. . .] without her every movement being followed by invisible eyes.28 For Lawrence, the government are ‘stay at home bullies’ overseeing and colluding in a collapse of the national character. The ‘Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo that contains this episode was long taken as a flaw in the novel, an unexpected and unsuccessful digression, but a recent editor, Macdonald Daly, has shown that ‘The Nightmare’ stands as a reworking of painful authorial memory: it is ‘the primal scene at the root of a neurosis, the discovering of a past trauma’.29 The experience of recollection, for Somers, is a physical one: ‘Memory of all this came upon him so violently, in the Australian night, that he trembled helplessly under the shock of it.’30 The corporeality of trauma is an echo of the bodily violation that frequently causes it; in the case of Somers, the examination that forms part of the military medical procedure is an apotheosis of violation, both physical and derived from scrutiny: Somers bent forward, lower, and realised that the puppy was standing aloof behind him to look into his anus [. . .] Never again. Never would he be touched again. – And because they had handled his private parts, and looked into them, their eyes should burst and their hands should wither and their hearts should rot.31 The shame of exposure is echoed in The Eye in the Door: when Prior visits Mac in prison, he is naked: ‘“One of the main weapons, that, [. . .] Marching you about the place naked

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 289

30/01/2012 16:24

290

jessica meacham

[. . .] The arsehole plays a major part in breaking people down, did you know that?’32 If the ‘Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo is a traumatic textual event, awkwardly situated within the novel as a whole, then Barker’s trilogy operates through a reverse narrative logic: her structure is smooth and deftly plotted, her sites of trauma acknowledged as such explicitly in the text. Mac’s response to his deprivations is a knowing, politically conscious one that emphasises the war even as he refuses to take part in the fighting (‘their main weapons’). The focus in both of these examples on the anus offers a striking example of the extent of state control over the body, one that suggests a blurring of the boundary between internal and external also found in the representations of war wounds in the Regeneration trilogy. The breakdown of bodily integrity, or perhaps rather the illusion of bodily integrity, can be read as symptomatic of a state increasingly concerned with its own boundaries. In this reading the increasingly oppressive treatment of homosexuals during the period (‘the number of custodial sentences is rising’33) becomes conflated with fears of German invasion and spies as part of the heightened climate of scrutiny, suspicion and surveillance. Prior and Manning’s sexual relationship is structured around these themes from its inception. Their initial meeting in The Eye in the Door is characterised by the play of light and shade: Prior, seated ‘under the trees’, watches a couple ‘silhouetted against the sunset’ – and Manning’s initial approach, ‘“Got a light?”’, opens the way for their encounter. Later on in the novel, and in a different park, Prior is conscious that ‘Young men who linger in the park at dusk can expect to be stared at.’34 The language reflects on homosexuality as a liminal, twilight zone of shadowy encounters, simultaneously and paradoxically both public and hidden. Manning’s reaction to being the recipient of anonymous copies of the ’47,000’ and ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ articles imagines precisely Foucauldian self-surveillance and the internalisation of the constraints of visibility, where Foucault argues the object of the gaze ‘assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection’.35 Manning decides that to back out of attending the controversial performance of Salomé ‘would simply reveal the extent of his fear to to to. . . to whoever was watching’.36 He counsels himself to be rational: ‘He mustn’t fall into the trap of overestimating what they knew. At the moment he was doing their job for them.’37 The scrutiny that Manning brings to his plan is the paranoid aspect of self-surveillance that inscribes the internalised, apparently spontaneous play of power relations in the deviant or delinquent (homosexual) subject. The Pemberton Billing trial itself is perfectly situated at an intersection of national anxiety, in what Jodie Medd has described as a ‘wartime crisis of reading and representation’,38 where, in her argument, national anxieties became focused on an accusation of lesbianism as an expression of the unknowable and unspeakable. Medd argues ‘[t]hat the unimaginable experiences of war at the front found an analogue in Billing’s trial is graphically suggested by the press’s juxtaposition of photographs and reports from the trial alongside maps of the battles at the front.’39 A similar claim might be made for Barker’s text, which presents the trial in the context of the socio-sexual and neurasthenic traumas of her characters; Barker incorporates the contemporary newspaper reports that sparked the case into the narrative, drawing attention to the fervid homophobia and xenophobia of the popular press. The language of the articles demonstrates conclusively how the secret world of espionage holds imaginative sway: German agents have ‘infested this country for the past twenty years’; using a ‘perfect system’ of ‘insidious arguments’ to propagate ‘evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia’.40 ‘The first 47,000’

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 290

30/01/2012 16:24

pat barker and the secret state

291

situates homosexuality as a German ‘disease’ (‘such a lasciviousness as only German minds could conceive and only German bodies execute’; ‘this nauseating disease so skilfully spread by Potsdam’41), conflating xenophobia and homophobia in a sensationalist narrative reminiscent of William Le Queux’s The Spies of the Kaiser. The article was reproduced in other periodicals, along with ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’, which was usually relieved of its headline in the reprint. The spread of the articles and their impact on public opinion is articulated by Rivers in Barker’s text: he refers to the trial as ‘a farrago of muck-raking nonsense’, an ‘orgy of irrational prejudice taking place at the Old Bailey’.42 Critic Dennis Brown also refers to ‘the preposterous Pemberton Billing affair, with its nonsense about “the 47,000” and “The Cult of the Clitoris”’.43 The trial does seem preposterous now, but in its role as a site for dispute over language and meaning it is indicative of the same slippage of representation found in the earlier relationships between William Le Queux, Erskine Childers and the War Office and MO5. The libel trial of 1918 rested on the disputed implications of a range of connotative and associative signifiers for transgressive sexuality, a fact that Barker’s texts both resist and uphold. In addition to accusing Allan of lesbianism, the article that purports to know the names of the ‘First 47,000’ is concerned to demonstrate that the infiltration has reached ‘The World of High Politics’, implicating ‘wives of men in supreme position’ and ‘members of the peerage’.44 The article constructs a paranoid conspiracy around the German ‘system’ of entrapment in a way that emphasises the possibilities for blackmail, disgrace and public censure as a result of ‘open’ homosexual activity. The reactions to both the invasion novels of the early part of the century and the Pemberton Billing trial articulate instances of national anxiety. In an unpublished paper written shortly after the war, Rivers commented in some depth on his belief that the UK was experiencing a traumatic after-effect of a long period of fear and uncertainty: For the last five years we have all been living under the shadow of a great danger [. . .] It was the danger of the destruction of the social framework in which each one of us has his appointed place which acted as the stimulus to reawaken tendencies connected with the instinct for self-preservation. Moreover, now that the danger from external enemies is over there are large numbers of our own people in whom the alteration in the internal social order which is evidently approaching is keeping their danger instincts in a state of tension while the fatigue and strain which few have escaped during the war is at the same time giving these aroused instinctive tendencies a wider scope than would otherwise be open to them. Since this re-awakening of the danger-instincts affects nearly every member of the population [. . .] it is producing a state which may be regarded as a universal neuro-psychosis which explains much that is now happening in human society.45 He offers caveats about the differences between a nation and individual, suggesting that the greater complexity of the former means that the symptoms of any neurosis should be not be expected to match exactly those of the individual, but nevertheless concludes that ‘our national state shows every sign of becoming one comparable with the anxiety-neurosis of the individual.’ That the diagnosis of anxiety-neurosis, which might equally be called hysteria or ‘shell shock’ is caused not just by the threat from ‘external enemies’ but also by the ‘alteration in the internal social order’ suggests that Rivers, despite his characteristically measured tone, is fully aware that the social and political upheavals of the domestic experience of the war have had a traumatic impact on the national consciousness. It is this

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 291

30/01/2012 16:24

292

jessica meacham

trauma that Barker seeks to address in The Eye in the Door, through her representations of the domestic conflict between state and citizen: ‘I was attacking what seemed to me the most awful feature of their situation, which is the eye. The constant surveillance [. . .] “Eye” was stabbing myself in the “I”.’46

Notes 1. Pat Barker, Regeneration (London: Penguin, 1991); The Eye in the Door (London: Penguin, 1993); and The Ghost Road (London: Penguin, 1995). 2. Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahem Yousaf and Ronald Paul (eds), Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005). 3. Pat Barker, The Man Who Wasn’t There (London: Penguin, 1989). 4. Ibid. p. 32. 5. Ibid. p. 32. 6. The complex history of the case is presented by Barker as follows: ‘In January 1918 the Imperialist (later the Vigilante), a newspaper owned and edited by the MP Noel Pemberton Billing, carried an article entitled ‘The First 47,000 [homosexuals]’ [. . .] In April this was followed by a short paragraph entitled ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ [which] suggested that the list of subscribers to a private performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome might contain many names of the 47,000. Maud Allan, who was to dance the part of Salome, sued Pemberton Billing, since the paragraph clearly implied she was a lesbian. The trial was presided over by Lord Justice Darling [. . .] Having been indentified early in the proceedings as one of the 47,000, Darling lost control of the court [. . .] Pemberton Billing won the case and was carried shoulder-high through the crowd that had gathered outside the Old Bailey.’ (‘Author’s Note’ to The Eye in the Door, pp. 278–80.) 7. Nicholas Hiley, ‘The Failure of British Counter-Espionage against Germany, 1907–1914’, The Historical Journal, 28.4 (December 1985), pp. 835–62; and ‘Counter-Espionage and Security in Great Britain during the First World War’, The English Historical Review, 101.400 (July 1986), pp. 635–70. 8. Nicholas Hiley, ‘Introduction’ to William Le Queux, The Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England (New York: Frank Cass, 1996), p. xvii. 9. David Trotter, ‘Introduction’ to Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1995), p. xiv; originally quoted in Nicholas Hiley, ‘Decoding German Spies: British Spy Fiction 1908–1918’, in Wesley K. Wark (ed.), Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence (London: Frank Cass, 1991), p. 59. 10. Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: the Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 37 11. Hiley, ‘Introduction’, p. xxx. 12. Hiley, ‘Counter-Espionage and Security’, p. 660. 13. Basil Anderson, quoted in Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 53. 14. Hiley shows that counter-espionage during the war became ‘not [. . .] an organisation for trapping enemy agents, but [. . .] a huge, decentralised system for gathering all information of possible use in “the repression of enemy activities outside the area of operations”, which was soon expanded to contain information-gathering on any perceived dissident group – including pacifists, union activists, suffragettes and Irish nationalists’ (‘Counter-Espionage and Security’, pp. 649–50). 15. Barker, The Eye in the Door, pp. 47–8. 16. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1890–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), pp. 169, 178. Showalter shows that the war placed men in an atmos-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 292

30/01/2012 16:24

pat barker and the secret state

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

293

phere that was ‘intensely, if unconsciously homoerotic’; she points out that ‘a number of the best known shell-shock cases [. . .] were also homosexual’ and that for many heterosexual men the war ‘induced more general but intense anxieties about masculinity’, in particular ‘fears of acting effeminate.’ Barker, The Eye in the Door, p. 112. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 202. James der Derian, ‘Introduction’ to der Derian (ed.), The Paul Virilio Reader (Oxford: Blackwells, 1988), p. 10. Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation’, New German Critique, 59, Special Issue on Ernst Junger (Spring–Summer 1993), pp. 41–76 (p. 55). Barker, The Eye in the Door, p. 33. Ibid. pp. 36, 262. Ibid. p. 29. Ibid. p. 29. Ibid. p. 30. Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women and the Great War’, Signs, 8 (1983), p. 423. Peter Holquist, ‘“Information is the Alpha and Omega of our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context’, The Journal of Modern History 69.3 (September 1997), pp. 415–50 (p. 440). D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (London: William Heinemann, [1923] 1970), p. 231. Macdonald Daly, in his introduction to the 1997 Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition of the novel, edited by Bruce Steele. Lawrence, p. 258. Ibid. p. 255. Barker, The Eye in the Door, p. 262. Ibid. p. 204. Ibid. p. 128. Foucault, pp. 202–3. Barker, The Eye in the Door, p. 23. Ibid. p. 25. Jodie Medd, ‘“The Cult of the Clitoris”: Anatomy of a National Scandal’, Modernism/Modernity, 1.9 (January 2002), pp. 21–49 (p. 25). Ibid. p. 48. Barker, The Eye in the Door, pp. 152–3. Ibid. pp. 152, 154. Ibid. pp. 151, 160. Dennis Brown, ‘The Regeneration Trilogy: Total War, Masculinities, Anthropology, and the Talking Cure’, in Monteith et al., pp. 187–202 (p. 192). Barker, The Eye in the Door, p. 154. W. H. R. Rivers, unpublished paper, in file RIVERS 12004, Cambridge University Library. Barker, The Eye in the Door, p. 75.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 293

30/01/2012 16:24

American Psychiatry, second World War and Korean War

30

AMERICAN PSYCHIATRY, WORLD WAR II AND THE KOREAN WAR Martin Halliwell

I

n 1948 the Chief Consultant in Neuropsychiatry to the Surgeon General of the US Army, William Menninger, published his major work Psychiatry in a Troubled World, as an attempt to understand why so many US soldiers suffered from ‘combat fatigue’ in World War II. There had been no battles fought on American soil and although the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was surprising and deadly (2,350 American lives were lost, most of them recruits) this did not explain the number of armed forces casualties over the next four years. Menninger described psychiatry as shifting ‘from the rear seat in the third balcony’ in the 1930s ‘to finally arrive in the front row at the show’ by the mid 1940s as a major force in American culture. This was evidenced by the growing column inches in popular magazines on well-being and mental health, Hollywood’s love affair with psychoanalysis, and the psychological turn of post-war literature which concerned novelist Norman Mailer and sociologist C. Wright Mills in that it turned the readers’ eyes inwards rather than outwards to view social and political realities.1 This chapter will discuss shifts in the status and ideology of American psychiatry between the US phase of World War II (1941–5) and the Korean War (1950–3) within the context of military combat, demobilisation and rehabilitation, and will draw on examples from literature and film to indicate how psychiatric concerns were treated in the cultural sphere. The 1940s marked a success story for the psychiatric profession, but although the number of registered psychiatrists grew dramatically during and after World War II they struggled to account for the number of neuropsychiatric complaints. According to Menninger nearly 400,000 soldiers were discharged for this reason: nearly 40 per cent of all discharges. Not only was this the largest category by 17 per cent, but close to two million recruits (38.2 per cent) had been rejected at induction for neuropsychiatric reasons.2 These statistics might reflect strict categories of recruitment (even though in many cases induction tests were shorter than the recommended 15 minutes), but Menninger argued that reactions to war gave rise to a wide range of physical and psychological symptoms, often including a violent pounding of the heart; hyper-arousal; a sinking feeling in the stomach; and periods of sickness and trembling. William Menninger was one of three psychiatrists, along with his father and elder brother Karl, who ran the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, which grew out of the Menninger Clinic and Sanitarium founded in 1919 as a training and care centre situated in the heart of the Midwest. Not only did the Foundation represent the nation’s most distinctive contribution to mid-century psychiatry, but it played an important role

294

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 294

30/01/2012 16:24

american psychiatry, second world war and korean war

295

in national defence, running a seminar series in June 1941 on selective service (following the 1940 Selective Service Act which marked the first peacetime conscription in the US), how to identify ‘psychoneurotic’, ‘psychopathic’ and ‘feebleminded’ recruits, and the importance of psychiatry for civilians during wartime.3 Although Joanna Bourke argues persuasively that psychiatry was bound up with military ‘regulation, surveillance and management’ during World War II, William Menninger continued to argue for its therapeutic function during wartime.4 Indeed, for the Menningers psychiatry should have a socially progressive function, leading them to develop a training centre, school and hospital in response to concerns over an inadequately equipped health-care system. Following Karl Menninger’s visit to meet Freud in Vienna in 1934 they took in a number of émigré analysts, before becoming the most westerly psychoanalytic training centre in the United States in 1942. The Menninger Foundation aimed to address a national inadequacy in the understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders, but the family was particularly concerned about stress reactions to combat. The government was slower to react to the growing list of war casualties. President Roosevelt was mindful not to let the World War II veteran turn into the ‘forgotten man’ of the previous war (as illustrated in the popular 1930s song ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’), but it was not until the Truman administration that the dire national provision for mental illness was addressed, prompted by Albert Deutsch’s report The Shame of the States (1948) where many badly run state hospitals were represented as ‘snake pits’. By way of a federal response, Truman established the National Institute of Mental Health in 1948 and invested in urban mental hygiene institutions in key American cities. Menninger was particularly concerned about psychiatric classification. He proposed some refined diagnostic categories in 1943, lobbied President Truman to take mental health seriously in 1948, and directed the wholesale revision of psychiatric nomenclature in the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) in 1952, with a particular focus on illnesses arising from combat. One term that Menninger was keen to replace was ‘shell shock’ which had gone out of favour after World War I, mainly because it was difficult to trace the aetiology of shell shock unless it could be linked to shrapnel or bullet wounds to the head or the nervous system. Instead, the terms ‘combat fatigue’ and ‘battle exhaustion’ were widely used in the 1940s, suggesting that a period of rest, care and recuperation at a remove from the combat zone was needed for full recovery. It was not until the third edition of DSM in 1980 that war trauma was properly codified; instead DSM-I included the category of ‘gross stress reactions’ which are usually resolved when the individual is removed from intensely stressful situations, and rarely linked to long-term psychopathology.5 As early as 1942 clinicians noted that ‘combat fatigue’ and ‘war neurosis’ may ‘apply to all kinds of psychiatric conditions which are common to peace time as well’.6 One study of chronic war neuroses by the Menninger psychiatrist Robert P. Knight proposed that, apart from ‘a relatively small group of traumatic war neuroses, initiated by specific terrifying experiences’, the war made manifest a host of neuroses that could be traced back to childhood.7 Other studies of aggression suggested that wartime experiences might trigger latent neuroses or produce fresh neuroses linked to aggressive modes of combat. Menninger agreed with Knight that while the first-hand witnessing of death or mutilation might precipitate a psychotic condition, it could just as easily trigger a childhood or primitive emotion. In his drive to push psychoanalysis towards psychiatry Menninger was wary of following Freud’s emphasis on the repressed libido, and was also acutely aware that

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 295

30/01/2012 16:24

296

martin halliwell

a shortage of psychiatrists during World War II meant that it was not always possible to spend a long time with a single patient to ascertain whether war was the primary cause of, or a precipitating factor in, his condition. US troops were better educated than in World War I (recruiting from high-school graduates had grown from 4 to 27.6 per cent, and those who had undergone college training had risen from 5 to 11.2 per cent); they possessed more self-confidence than the previous generation, and were better able to learn new skills. But Menninger worried about the Army’s rigid emphasis on ‘fitness for combat’ and its rhetoric of the ‘effective soldier’; these terms dealt only with function and behaviour rather than taking into account the whole individual and his interaction with others. Menninger was not the only public figure concerned with the inability of many soldiers to come to terms with combat or to be able to reintegrate into civilian society during or after the war. The military publication Men Under Stress (1945) closely linked practical and therapeutic techniques to stressful war experiences,8 and later books, such as Columbia University economics professor Eli Ginzberg’s Breakdown and Recovery (1959), dealt directly with physical and mental problems. Ginzberg had worked with Truman on military personnel during the war and his book was a product of the Conservation of Human Resources Project established by General Eisenhower in 1950 to ‘uncover the causes of the major deficiencies in the nation’s human resources that World War II revealed’.9 Ginzberg challenged accounts of ‘internal’ psychic forces by attending closely to environmental factors which precipitate an individual’s breakdown and recovery.10 Nonetheless, Ginzberg’s seventy-nine case studies lean towards a straightforward moral lesson: ‘while every man has his weakness he also has strengths. Even if the soldier breaks down, a loving family can help him recover, as can a sympathetic government and a growing economy.’11 Whatever therapeutic worth a veteran might attach to this homily, it clearly brushes over a host of related psychological and social issues. Ginzberg’s book suggests recovery is an expectation in most cases, but Menninger noted that combat fatigue comes in many forms and the latency of symptoms meant that aggression or trauma might remain undetected for some time. The Menningers, among others, thought that feelings of aggression did not simply vanish at the end of the war, but needed careful management to prevent disruptive and destructive impulses taking hold. This was one of the reasons that many World War II veterans were both respected for their service to the nation and feared for being a potential disruption in post-war society.12 The British publication Aggression and Population (1946) proposed that aggression is often stimulated by either material need or rivalry.13 The author James Dawson focused on new war technology – ‘the aeroplane, the atom and other bombs, the mine and torpedo, quick-firing and ever more powerful artillery, the machine-gun [. . .] the rocket, even poison gas’ – implying that the destructive consequences of aggressive acts (particularly by warmongering nations like Germany and Japan) were more profound than ever and dwarfed the endeavours of the ‘common man’ who returned from war in the mid 1940s ‘utterly lost, as only one of so many’ in a mass post-industrial society.14 The fears of being hemmed in and isolated from family and community were key factors in individuals lashing out violently, as do the combatants in Norman Mailer’s 1948 World War II novel The Naked and the Dead (which depicts aggression, racism and anti-Semitism as typical behaviour amongst American troops stationed in the Pacific), or turning aggression inwards as fictionalised in the suicide of the young World War II veteran Seymour Glass in J. D. Salinger’s widely read New Yorker short story ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ (1948).15 There were many studies of aggression in the late 1940s. In 1949 Anna Freud, for exam-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 296

30/01/2012 16:24

american psychiatry, second world war and korean war

297

ple, wrote about aggressive children,16 and two books by the German-born psychoanalyst Karen Horney – The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) and Neurosis and Human Growth (1950) – revealed that aggression was a neurotic mode of ‘moving against’ others. Horney, like the Menningers, chose not to follow the Freudian line on libidinal repression, noting that aggression is sometimes displayed in outwardly provocative behaviour, but at other times turns in on itself. Horney saw the ‘neurotic personality’ revealing itself either through aggressive acts (‘a propensity to be aggressive, domineering, over-exacting, to boss, cheat or find fault’) or submission (‘an attitude of easily feeling cheated, dominated, scolded, imposed on or humiliated’) – which in 1950 she linked explicitly to fear and psychological warfare.17 Aggressive behaviour is normally displayed towards another person, but fantasies of domination, dreams of revenge and violent language (including racism in The Naked and the Dead and anti-Semitism in Arthur Laurents’s 1945 wartime play Home of the Brave) sometimes substitute for an object of aggression. If frustration is often the root cause, then any situation which prevents closure risks exploding outwards in sadistic behaviour such as the hate-killing of a Jew in the demobilisation film Crossfire (1947), or turning inwards as demonstrated by Salinger’s ostensibly outward-going character Seymour Glass, who masks his internal suffering of war trauma only to turn on himself in the final paragraph to fire ‘a bullet through his right temple’.18 Salinger’s story offered a stark meditation on the wages of war, but in the decade following World War II American culture was filled with reintegration narratives, and the returning war veteran quickly became a stock character, from the box-office success of William Wyler’s 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives (in which three soldiers return home from war all suffering from versions of combat fatigue, one a paraplegic) to Sloan Wilson’s iconic post-war novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955). In Wilson’s novel, for example, the protagonist Tom Rath manages to partition off his war experiences (when he was a US paratrooper stationed in Italy) from his fairly comfortable post-war life in the Connecticut suburbs. Tom Rath’s status as a typical post-war case is emphasised by his clipped name, even though his surname hides muted emotion which links to a rare act of untrammelled aggression at the beginning of the novel when he throws a vase against his living-room wall, leaving behind a crack in ‘the shape of a question mark’ – an act of aggression echoed in the opening of Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, in which Frank Wheeler is another uncomfortable veteran in suburbia hiding a latent aggressive streak.19 Rath dismisses this crack as simply ‘annoying’ rather than a clue to his unsettled condition. He thinks of himself as a successful adjuster, but the various compartments of his life soon start to clash with each other when a new career path and suburban home life are disturbed with a reminder of his wartime affair with an Italian woman who, unbeknown to him, has had his child. Themes of destruction (memories of the seventeen men he killed in Italy) and natality (the secret war baby) weave through the novel in which disturbing war memories hover in the background; although Rath’s combat experience is a decade old, in his mind it is still at close range. Nevertheless, expectancy of complete recovery from combat trauma formed the critical consensus in the late 1940s and early 1950s, leading soldiers to be kept close to the combat zone in military field hospitals, as recommended by Colonel Albert Glass of the US Army Medical Corps. These techniques were refined in the Korean War: clearing stations four miles from the combat zone were used for minor surgery; helicopters were used to move wounded soldiers to mobile Army surgical hospitals (MASH units) based ten miles from the front; and hospital ships were based around Japan, ensuring that soldiers could swiftly

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 297

30/01/2012 16:24

298

martin halliwell

reintegrate into their troop. Glass noted fewer psychological breakdowns in Korea, partly because recruitment screening processes were more rigorous, but also because ‘brief respite from battle’ was more important than searching for ‘magical routines, drugs, or psychological explanations of the past and present’.20 A reassuring and effective physician was much more important in military medicine than delving into a soldier’s ‘remote past [to] explain the present breakdown’.21 Despite the poor conditions of Korean hospitals, harsh winters and an outbreak of haemorrhagic fever in June 1951, the Korean War was a success on the medical front, particularly for American soldiers with physical wounds. Of those treated for injuries only 23 soldiers out of every 1,000 died, even more impressive as there were fewer medical personnel in Korea than in World War II. Better protective clothing and body armour, studies of wounds and frostbite, and equality of pay and conditions for women in the Army Nurse Corps were all major medical achievements. The physician Howard Rusk, writing for the New York Times in 1953, considered these achievements to be remarkable given the difficult environment, dire sanitation, extremes of temperature and ‘hordes of refugees who jammed the roads and formed a mobile source of infection’.22 The Surgeon General cited six reasons for medical success: (1) availability of penicillin and antibiotics; (2) blood supplies; (3) mobility of the sixty-bed MASH units; (4) specialist Army training programmes that began in 1946; (5) rapid evacuation of the wounded via specially adapted helicopters; and (6) well-equipped hospitals in Japan where patients could be quickly taken. These successes, however, need to be set against the demoralising experience of the Korean War – an experience which Mailer had prefigured in The Naked and the Dead in terms of a hostile Pacific environment, disillusionment with military action, existential fears and the collapse of a strong war narrative. The series of bloody skirmishes over three years around the 39th Parallel, as the South Koreans and allied troops tried to push back the southern advance of the North Koreans and Chinese, meant that it was hard to sustain a convincing narrative of progress to keep up morale amongst troops. Such a weak narrative arc is a major reason why there are relatively few strong war stories about the Korean War: it lacked the triumphalism of World War II and, although it prefigured the Vietnam War in many ways, media coverage was scarcer and did not provoke the anti-war protests of the mid 1960s. Wrangles between General MacArthur and President Truman about military strategy suggested that no one quite knew who was running the Korean campaign (at least from an American perspective), apart from ensuring that it was a limited war to prevent communism spreading throughout South East Asia. The fact that it was an alien environment for nearly all the allied soldiers and that very few knew the local language meant it was tougher than the medical success story attests. Rather than stories of aggression amongst US troops emerging from Korea, New York Times reporter George Barrett noted that many of the soldiers acted mechanically, with ‘an almost robot-like disinterest about [them] that is in disturbing contrast to the assertive individualism of the World War II soldier’.23 This mood of bewilderment and indifference, particularly amongst the youngest soldiers (the average age was in the early twenties), tallies with William Childress’s depiction of the Korean soldier in his retrospective poem ‘The Long March’ (1972), where soldiers ‘dumbly follow / leaders whose careers / hung on victory’.24 Korea was not an atomic war, but reports that the government was developing biological weaponry – there is little evidence that this was ever used in combat, even though some Koreans suffered from respiratory anthrax – reveals a direct link from the atom

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 298

30/01/2012 16:24

american psychiatry, second world war and korean war

299

bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and the military breakout of June 1950. In The United States and Biological Warfare (1998), Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman consider documents declassified in the 1990s which substantiate their claim that biological weaponry was being explored by the Truman government before the Korean War. Information about biological weaponry was ‘bought’ from the Japanese in exchange for immunity from war crimes prosecution, providing a deadly arsenal that might be used if war broke out with the Soviet Union. Not only were secret experiments practised prior to Korea, but the US military were preparing to use biological weapons in December 1951, only for the experiments to cease in 1953 when it became clear they could not be delivered effectively. Endicott and Hagerman argue that ‘the U.S. government lied to both Congress and the American public when it said that the American biological warfare program was purely defensive and for retaliation only.’25 The evidence was based not just on Chinese reports, but on British and Canadian declassified documents which made connections between ‘the presidential office, the Department of Defense [. . .] the military services and the medical, scientific, academic, and corporate communities’.26 According to this data, the Chemical Corps of the US Army headed the tests, including the use of poisonous gases and napalm (70,000 gallons of which were supplied each day in Korea), but also experimenting with biological weaponry such as bacteria, toxins, fungi, viruses and parasites (some causing anthrax, smallpox, undulant fever and bubonic plague), and their delivery in the form of cluster bombs, leaflet bombs, aerosols and guided missiles. One general in the Chemical Corps claimed, in January 1952, that this was ‘public health and preventive medicine in reverse’, leading to death rather than life but in the name of a greater good.27 This and other statements and documents support Endicott and Hagerman’s study, with other destroyed, lost or still declassified information potentially confirming their thesis. But, whatever the reality of such biological experimentation, it has been proven that the Office of Strategic Services (later to be incorporated into the CIA) experimented with mind control during World War II, along with other Axis and Allied countries involved in the war, testing the use of marijuana, mescalin and LSD as truth drugs, as well as the debilitating effects of electroshock treatment. The Nuremberg Code was established in 1948 to ensure that involuntary participation in the medical tests that had been carried out in Nazi concentration camps would never again happen. Although the Department of Defense agreed in 1953 that medical tests on patients should be done on a voluntary basis, the CIA had been developing widespread experiments since 1949, not always using volunteers. If the Korean War was a conventional conflict of bodies on the surface, the fact that both the US and China were carrying out their own forms of psychological warfare places it clearly within the context of the Cold War. The University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, Tulane University and McGill University all took part in experiments (linked to the CIA at McGill) with drugs, sensory isolation, shock treatments, hypnosis, narcotherapy and, in some instances, ‘brainwashing’ – as the journalist Edward Hunter called it in 1950.28 Primarily linked with Chinese and Soviet practices, the rhetoric of brainwashing quickly became part of Cold War culture. Articles started to appear not long after the end of the war which suggested that, under the leadership of the Psychological Warfare Division, psychiatry was being used ‘perversely to produce drastic changes in men’s fundamental attitudes and beliefs’; in the words of Major Henry Segal, chief of the neuropsychiatric evaluation team in the Army Medical Corps in the Korean Communication Zone: ‘psychiatric principles and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 299

30/01/2012 16:24

300

martin halliwell

techniques were being utilized [. . .] destructively in a deliberate, coldly calculated, highly systematized attempt to produce a state of mental aberration detrimental to the individual concerned and of value only to the Communists.’29 The US investment in psychological warfare was based on evidence that brainwashing techniques had been carried out on US POWs. Although it was extremely difficult to work out what was a ‘typical account’ of the prison camp experience, a variety of reports from the 1,400 POWs suggested that emotional isolation, political indoctrination and social-psychological manipulation (with bribes over status and privileges) went hand in hand.30 Segal surveyed reports of sixty-eight US repatriates taken to the Evacuation Hospital in Seoul, noting that amongst the former POWs ‘talk was shallow, often vague, and with definite lack of content’; they had ‘large memory gaps’; they appeared ‘suspended in time’; they were ‘incapable of forming decisions’; they displayed ‘little if any spontaneous talk of home, family, or future’.31 Despite these symptoms Segal concluded that any attempts to indoctrinate allied soldiers were ‘quite ineffective since relatively few of our prisoners were actually “converted to Communism”’, but measured ‘in terms of confusion, unceasing anxiety, fear, needless death, defection, disloyalty, changed attitudes and beliefs, poor discipline, poor morale, poor esprit, and doubts as to America’s role, their efforts were highly successful’.32 One columnist in the New York Times even noted that the POWs were claiming that the US troops had used germ warfare against the North Koreans but that many felt ‘it was all right for us to do that in a war’, especially with the suspicion that the Chinese were chemically inducing mental disorders.33 This cauldron of military, political and psychiatric ideas gave rise to the myth of the Cold War assassin, made famous by Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate in which a brainwashed and indoctrinated American soldier returns from Korea as a communist agent. Prior to his psychiatric studies in Hiroshima, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton also went to Korea and Hong Kong to examine these reports of brainwashing amongst repatriated soldiers. Lifton’s first article on the subject, ‘Home by Ship’, was published six months before Segal’s survey, in April 1954.34 He was convinced that mind-control experiments had been practised on American POWs, and he later linked mind control to what he describes as the ‘totalism’ of the post-war world, which connected warfare to ‘many less extreme activities’ prevalent in post-war America such as advertising, restrictions on classroom teaching material and other forms of social control.35 Lifton noted that press coverage of brainwashing was often unhelpful, ‘sensationalist in tone, distorted because of inadequate knowledge, or obscured by strong emotions which the concept of brainwashing seems to arouse in everyone’.36 Lifton found in South East Asia a complex web of ideas and ideologies amongst those held captive in POW camps, but also those attending communist colleges that ‘taught’ revolutionary ideas. Lifton interviewed American, European and Chinese subjects, but found in his Western subjects a disconnection on returning home, a sense of unrest, forms of repetition compulsion and a sense of mourning that something had been lost when they left China. Like many demobilised World War II veterans, returning home proved difficult especially for those that had been in South East Asia for a long time, forced to confront ‘archaic parts of themselves [. . .] long denied, repressed, or modified beyond easy recognition’.37 Although there are other arguments to suggest that Western POWs in Korea behaved no differently from other POWs, with initial disorientation and blankness of response wearing off after repatriation, Lori Bogle and other critics point to the twenty-one Americans (as well as one British and over three hundred South Korean) prisoners who decided to

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 300

30/01/2012 16:24

american psychiatry, second world war and korean war

301

stay in Communist China after being released. Eisenhower dismissed this as a symptom of inadequate preparation for the war and encouraged the military to be more active in raising patriotism at home by pressing home a Code of Conduct in 1955.38 But one of Lifton’s conclusions was that ‘the control of human communication’ was central to the success of thought reform. This kind of ‘milieu control’ can be brought about through coercion, but at its most successful it convinces individuals that they are acting autonomously – as is the case for the ex-POW Sergeant Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate. The result is that milieu control disrupts the ‘balance between self and the outside world’, resulting in ‘a profound threat to [the individual’s] personal autonomy’.39 Lifton warned that ‘total exposure’ means that individuals lose their inner defence against the milieu, leading them to confuse truths and untruths, blur legitimate authority with indoctrination and, in extreme cases, become a cipher devoid of meaningful responses. Just as the responses to the development of the A-bomb gave way to profound questions about the role of science in American society in the late 1940s and 1950s, so a consideration of biological and psychological warfare in the Korean War led to similar concerns. William Menninger emerged from World War II with a defence of ‘psychiatry in a troubled world’ as a socially progressive and enlightened set of ideas and practices, but only five years later, at the end of the Korean War, psychiatry and psychoanalysis had become deeply tangled in new ideological hostilities. It was the ‘deification’ of science, the ‘expectation that science will supply a complete and absolutely accurate mechanistic theory of a closed and totally predicable universe’, that worried Robert Jay Lifton, Robert Oppenheimer, Norman Mailer and other intellectuals and writers during the Cold War.40 The Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry was arguing in 1966 that the ‘budgets, organisations, and technology that can destroy mankind can also produce the most constructive achievements in world history’, but the fact that the White House, Pentagon, US Army and government agencies were increasingly mistrusted during the Cold War was exacerbated by two trends: first, that the therapeutic practices of medicine and psychiatry were caught up in the same ideological net and, second, that the Cold War gave rise to dangerous ethical issues which strained against the Nuremberg Code and brought warfare experiments into proximity with those carried out under fascism and communism.41 At a time when American political theorist Harold Lasswell was calling for ‘a proper balance between national security and individual freedom’, the covert nature of top-secret mind-control projects was justified in the name of national defence, but blurred the lines between ethical medical experimentation and counter-espionage.42

Notes 1. William Menninger, Psychiatry in a Troubled World: Yesterday’s War and Today’s Challenge (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. vii. 2. Ibid. p. 591. 3. See Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 5.5 (September 1941). 4. Joanna Bourke, ‘Disciplining the Emotions: Fear, Psychiatry and the Second World War’, in Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison and Steve Sturdy (eds), War, Medicine and Modernity (Stroud: Sutton Press, 1998), p. 225. 5. See J. Douglas Bremner, ‘Acute and Chronic Responses to Psychological Trauma: Where Do We Go From Here?’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 156 (March 1999), pp. 349–51. The clinical category of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) did not appear until the third edition

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 301

30/01/2012 16:24

302

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

martin halliwell

of DSM in 1980, stimulated by the long-term psychological problems experienced by many Vietnam War veterans. Robert P. Knight, ‘The Successful Treatment of a Case of Chronic “War Neurosis” by the Psychoanalytic Method’, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 6.5 (September 1942), pp. 153–64 (p. 153). Ibid. p. 153. See Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel, Men Under Stress (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1945). Eli Ginzberg, Breakdown and Recovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. xiii. Ibid. p. 269. Ibid. p. 275. See David A. Gerber, ‘Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in The Best Years of Our Lives’, American Quarterly, 46.4 (December 1994), pp. 545–74. James Dawson, Aggression and Population (London: Rockliff, 1946), p. 10. Ibid. pp. 54, 71. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Random House, 1948); J. D. Salinger, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, The New Yorker, 31 January 1948, pp. 21–5. See Anna Freud, ‘Notes on Aggression’, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 13.5 (September 1949), pp. 143–51. Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, [1937] 1947), p. 39; and Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization (New York: Norton, [1950] 1991), p. 206. Salinger, p. 25. Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (London: Penguin, [1955] 2005), p. 2. Albert J. Glass, ‘Principles of Combat Psychiatry’, Military Medicine, 117.1 (1955), p. 33. See also Harold M. Voth, ‘Pychiatric Screening in the Armed Forces’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 110.10 (April 1954), pp. 748–53. Glass, p. 33. Howard A. Rusk, ‘Drama of Medicine at Front a Highlight of War in Korea’, New York Times, 23 August 1953, p. 10. George Barrett, ‘Portrait of the Korean Veteran’, New York Times, 9 August 1952, Sunday Magazine, p. 12. William Childress, ‘The Long March’, in W. D. Ehrhart and Philip K. Jason (eds), Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of the Korean War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), p. 167. Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. ix. Ibid. p. x. William M. Creasy, ‘Biological Warfare’, Armed Forces Chemical Journal, 5 (January 1952), pp. 16–18. See Harvey M. Weinstein, Psychiatry and the CIA: Victims of Mind Control (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1990), pp. xviii, 132. Henry A. Segal, ‘Initial Psychiatric Findings of Recently Repatriated Prisoners of War’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 111.5 (November 1954), p. 358. See Edgar H. Schein, ‘The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War: A Study of Attempted “Brainwashing”’, Psychiatry, 19 (1956), pp. 149–72. Segal, pp. 359–60. Ibid. p. 363. Murray Illson, ‘Reds’ Psychiatry for P.O.W.’s Bared’, New York Times, 8 May 1954, p. 5. Robert Jay Lifton, ‘Home By Ship: Reaction Patterns of American Prisoners of War Repatriated from North Korea’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 110.10 (April 1954), pp. 732–9.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 302

30/01/2012 16:24

american psychiatry, second world war and korean war

303

35. Editorial, ‘“Brainwashing” and the Teaching Process’, Human Organization, 13.4 (Winter 1955), p. 3. 36. Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 5. 37. Ibid. p. 228. 38. See Lori Lyn Bogle, The Pentagon’s Battle for the American Mind: The Early Cold War (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), pp. 119–26. 39. Lifton, p. 421. 40. Ibid. p. 458. 41. Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Psychiatry and Public Affairs (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), p. 398. 42. Harold D. Lasswell, National Security and Individual Freedom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), p. 1.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 303

30/01/2012 16:24

31

PACIFISTS AND CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS Ian Patterson

Unlike the warfare of guns and tanks, the warfare of ideas cannot be conducted from the rear.1

H

istorians of pacifism have distinguished several different kinds and degrees of hostility to war, from an outright conviction that all forms of violence are always and at all times morally wrong to tactical positions of opposition to particular wars on specific or limited grounds.2 Historians of literature have been less attentive to these nuances, for several reasons. First, because a great deal of the writing that more or less programmatically expressed a pacifist attitude, of whatever sort, is simply not very good and not very interesting; as Jack Common put it in The Adelphi in 1936, pacifism ‘suffers from many of the defects of Temperance [. . .] The harping on one virtue is always suspect.’3 Second, because there is no reliable method of gauging the effect of such writing, much of which exists within, and reflects, an ideological moment in which a substantial readership was receptive to such ideas. Furthermore, the most powerful anti-war writing is not always, or overtly, or avowedly, or even implicitly pacifist in its attitude to war. As the experience of many writers at the outbreak of the First World War demonstrated, it was quite possible to be convinced of the futility and enormity of war and still to be persuaded of its specific necessity. H. G. Wells is a good example: in The World Set Free, which was published early in 1914, he showed very dramatically the appalling consequences of war conducted with nuclear bombs, and the novel helped to swell the numbers of people who were declaring themselves pacifists and internationalists. As a result, his endorsement of the war a few months later struck many people on the left as a betrayal, a prime example of the trahison des clercs. And post-war novels by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington and Frederic Manning, or memoirs by Robert Graves or Edmund Blunden, may have encouraged pacifism without endorsing it. Conversely, a writer may be a pacifist without this impacting in any clear way on his or her writing, as in the poems of Basil Bunting or Julian Bell. Yet while writers of the First World War like Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, the ground of whose reputation is more moral than literary, continue to be overrated, little attention has been paid to those (non-Bloomsbury) writers who stood out against war. Although pacifism has a much longer history, it was in the years immediately before 1914 that it became a widely held political or moral creed. For the first twelve months of the war Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, attempted to maintain the long British tradi-

304

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 304

30/01/2012 16:24

pacifists and conscientious objectors

305

tion of volunteer armies, despite serious opposition from the right.4 With Liberal and trade union support, Asquith held out against conscription until 27 January 1916; consequently neither the army nor the civil authorities were adequately prepared to implement it, a difficulty exacerbated by ambiguities in the drafting of the grounds on which exemption from military service might be granted.5 Introducing legislation that so directly affected men’s lives and liberty caused unrest, but once the bill had become law, the only choice was between supporting it and complying with its provisions as part of a broader support for the war in general, and illegal opposition to it, and conscientious objection to military service on the part of individuals who were sufficiently strongly motivated to sustain the obloquy that course entailed. The press and parliament were frequently vitriolic in their condemnations of pacifism, as were the local tribunals.6 Mrs Henry Hobhouse published a chilling catalogue of the persecution and maltreatment (and in some cases death) suffered by COs.7 State repression intensified in the first months of 1916 and the tentacles of censorship began to extend into areas of artistic production for the first time, and police and army officers ‘became the agents of state censorship and controllers of the arts’.8 The most active organisers of dissent and opposition were the No-Conscription Fellowship (N-CF), the National Council Against Conscription (which changed its name to the National Council for Civil Liberties when the Military Service Act became law) and the Union of Democratic Control (UDC). Lytton Strachey and his brother James were both involved with the N-CF and the NCAC (and Vanessa Bell volunteered to do office work for the NCCL in 1916). Articles, pamphlets and speeches by Bertrand Russell, in November 1916 ‘the ablest and most unpopular figure in contemporary England’ according to The Nation, were a major focus of pacifist argument and provoked others, from Lloyd George to T. E. Hulme, into denunciations of him.9 There is a very good fictionalised account of Russell’s involvement in a sequence of three novels by Gilbert Cannan. At the end of the first, Pugs and Peacocks, he adds a note, explaining that the novel is ‘the first of a series dealing with the chaos revealed by the War of 1914 and the Peace of 1919, not from any political or sociological point of view, but to discover the light thrown upon human nature by abnormal events and conditions’.10 The ‘pugs and peacocks’ of the novel’s title were familiar features of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s home, Garsington Manor, a centre of pacifist discussion and refuge for Bloomsbury Conscientious Objectors (COs) working on the land which, thinly disguised, provides one of the novel’s settings. The post-war progress of Melian Stokes, the Russell figure, is followed in the two subsequent novels.11 The 1922 Sembal also provides an account of the eponymous central character’s encounters with the law, the tribunals and prison (and ways to avoid it), and a version of Stokes’s (Russell’s) speech before his Tribunal: ‘I plead guilty,’ Melian had said, ‘to an offence committed in defence of reason, sanity and a kind of patriotism for which there is at present no hearing. I desired to obtain a hearing for that patriotism, and in being brought to this place I have succeeded. I believe war to be in all circumstances an obscene outrage, and I do not consider myself bound by the restrictions imposed by war. In my view the guilt of those who brought on this war is long since merged in the guilt of those who for so many years prosecuted it [. . .] I believe that my country owes its first loyalty not to itself but to those nobler activities and achievements of the human mind which are not bounded by national frontiers of national egoism. I have acted in that belief knowing it is shared by very few.’12

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 305

30/01/2012 16:24

306

ian patterson

In April 1916, Cannan had become secretary of the National Council Against Conscription, whose members included his friend the actor and dramatist Miles Malleson (portrayed as Chinnery in Cannan’s novel, Time and Eternity) and the novelist Mary Butts, whose anti-war story ‘Speed the Plough’ titled her first book;13 Constance Malleson (the actress Colette O’Niel) worked for the N-CF.14 Cannan did not last long as secretary, however, nor as an agricultural worker, after his own Tribunal; he suffered a nervous breakdown at the end of 1916. His reputation as a novelist suffered, too, because of his political subject matter; Hugh Walpole, for example, describing his readership as ‘cranks’.15 From early in the war, local magistrates and other legal authorities were active in seizing, prosecuting, and destroying books and pamphlets they did not approve of, which made publishers wary of prosecution and reluctant to publish books or pamphlets critical of the war. In the summer of 1915, the Lord Mayor of London ordered the seizure and destruction of Clive Bell’s pamphlet Peace at Once, which Bell had published at his own expense after it had been rejected by The Nation. All Methuen’s copies of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow were destroyed in December 1915, ostensibly for obscenity but in reality in an attempt to discredit his outspoken denunciation of war.16 With the intensification of censorship from 1916, prosecutions increased. Miles Malleson’s plays were one target. Malleson had enlisted at the outbreak of the war, but was invalided home from Malta at the end of that year and discharged the following month. He became an active campaigner against militarism and conscription, and in 1917 the National Labour Press published Second Thoughts, in which he set out at some length the reasons for his refusal to rejoin the army. In 1916 Hendersons had published his eloquent essay Cranks and Commonsense, with an introduction by Philip Morrell, MP; a volume containing two of his plays, D Company, written while he was still in the army in 1914; and Black ’Ell, written in 1916, which was seized and destroyed almost at once. Not all areas of the country acted in concert: Fenner Brockway’s one-act play The Devil’s Business, attacking the arms trade, was seized in London but openly on sale in Manchester. His next play, The Recruit, could not be published until its author was released in 1919. On its front cover it bore the proud slogan ‘Written in Prison’, and on the title page the following explanatory paragraph: This Play was written in April, 1918, whilst the author was serving a sentence of two years’ hard labour in Walton Prison, Liverpool, for resisting Conscription. Prisoners are not permitted writing materials, and the original copy was written on small scraps of paper with fragments of lead, and was conveyed outside by a fellow-prisoner on his discharge, through a clever ruse which defeated the usual search. The author has now been liberated, and it is possible to publish the Play.17 Douglas Goldring found no publisher willing to take on his anti-war novel The Fortune which finally appeared in Dublin in 1917. And Stanley Unwin, a committed pacifist (though not an absolutist) and the publisher of Bertrand Russell and of Mrs Hobhouse’s ‘I Appeal unto Caesar’, declined to publish A. T. Fitzroy’s (the pseudonym of Rose Allatini) Despised and Rejected, although on the stated grounds of its indecency rather than its pacifism. It was eventually put out by the fringe publisher C. W. Daniel. In 1916, Daniel had refused to pay a fine for publishing the pacifist pamphlet ‘A Knock-out Blow’, and had served a term in prison. He was imprisoned again for three months early in 1919 for publishing Allatini’s novel. Despised and Rejected was a socialist pacifist novel, featuring anarchists and Irish revolutionaries, with gay and lesbian central characters, and although prosecuted as ‘likely to prejudice the recruiting of persons to serve in His Majesty’s Forces,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 306

30/01/2012 16:24

pacifists and conscientious objectors

307

and their training and discipline’, the book’s ‘morally unhealthy’ content played a part in the judgment.18 The novel is a powerful one, of considerably more than documentary interest. The central (gay) male character, Dennis Blackwood, a composer, refuses to enlist because he cannot bear the idea ‘of being sent out [. . .] deliberately to maim and shatter the bodies of men as young as himself, the bodies of men as young as Alan’;19 the nature of war and militarism is intimately bound up with normative ideas of masculinity (in the novel ‘pacifism is a cause adopted by homosexuals, Jews, socialists, internationalists and artists’),20 and these are subject to searching and lively analysis, as are related ideas of femininity and family, especially through the central character Antoinette, who herself is gay. Given the associations between patriotism, masculinity, combat and courage, those who refused to fight tended to be seen as less than men; even where non-pacifist writers created a sympathetic conscientious objector, as John Buchan did in the figure of Launcelot Wake in Mr Standfast (1919), the portrait tends to be complicated by assumptions about manliness. Earlier in the war, Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others put together a persuasive and effective picture of the complex attitudes of people (women more than men, but both are dealt with) experiencing the effects of war for the first time. It is an elegant novel, the narrative of which concludes on New Year’s Eve, as 1915 ‘slipped away into darkness, like a broken ship drifting on bitter tides on to a waste shore’.21 The central character is Alix Sandomir, an art student in her mid twenties, whose mother is a celebrated campaigner on social issues such as women’s suffrage, women’s trade unions, eugenics and, most importantly now, Permanent Peace. This always unusual lady [. . .] was attending a peace conference in New York [. . .] She was called by some a Pacificist, by more a Pacifist, by others a Pro-German, by most a member of the Union of Democratic Control, which she was not.22 An unusual feature of the novel is its sharply focused presentation of the effects of war on ordinary moral life. Pondering this question after the death of her younger brother, Alix had heard and read plenty of views on the psychological effects of war [. . .] but she did not remember that even the most penetrating (or pessimistic) had laid enough emphasis on the mental and moral collapse that shook the foundations of life for some people.23 When Alix, who has always previously stood apart from organisations, does finally go to a meeting at which her mother is to be one of the speakers, she experiences something of an epiphany. Underneath the sectional interests and the badly phrased resolutions, she senses – in three pages of rhetorically powerful and sustained prose – a common feeling about war: ‘We all loathe this horror – how should any one not loathe it? We all want to stop it occurring again and WE have thought of a way which we believe may work. This is it. . .’ That was sense. That was what was wanted [. . .] But [. . .] it was madness, to talk as if people differed in aim and desire, not merely in method. For there was one desire every one had in these days, beneath, through and above a thousand others [. . .] They wanted peace.24 In this, the novel reflects the importance of women’s growing opposition to the war, both active and implicit, based on notions of motherhood as well as suffragism and pacifism.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 307

30/01/2012 16:24

308

ian patterson

For socialist feminists and socialist pacifists, war and political freedom were intertwined, but for everybody war, in its essential masculinity, foregrounded gender roles, and further problematised resistance to it. The ideal was still capable of producing nobility and selfsacrifice, but for a corrupt and pointless cause. War’s capacity to destroy the foundations of a morally civilised world, central to Goldring’s and Macaulay’s work, is also the explicit theme of Vernon Lee’s extraordinary Satan the Waster (1920) developed from her 1915 ‘present-day morality’, The Ballet of the Nations.25 Very shortly after the introduction of conscription came the Easter Rising in Dublin. The combination of sexual politics, pacifism and Ireland’s independence in Rose Allatini’s novel is central to Goldring’s work, too. Invalided out of the army, Goldring, like Malleson, became increasingly critical of the war, and by the end of 1915 was a convinced socialist pacifist and ostracised by most of his old social circle. ‘It would be impossible to convey to readers of a younger generation, even to those who are prominent “Peace time” pacifists, what it was like to belong to the minority from 1915 onwards.’26 Early in 1916, he met other socialist pacifists, including Miles Malleson and the group who gathered at his flat off Russell Square, which included Gilbert Cannan, Eva Gore-Booth, Mary Butts and John Rodker. His fourth novel The Fortune was designed to ‘hold up a mirror’ to his times, and is partly a fictionalised documentary chronicle of his personal experience of the war. Having refused to do work of national importance, as his CO Tribunal ordered, he escaped to Dublin (Southern Ireland was exempt from the provisions of the Military Service Act, a decision which aroused anger and resentment among ‘patriots’ in the English press, especially after Easter 1916, and increased convergence between those opposed to the war and those who supported the Irish struggle, like Eva Gore-Booth). There he wrote both Dublin: Explorations and Reflections, in which he attempted to give English readers an objective account of events in Ireland and to communicate to the Irish the sympathy of at least some English people for the struggle for self-determination; and The Fortune, in which the twin strands of conscientious objection and the Irish question act as focal points for his argument against war.27 In structure and prose style the novel is conventional. Its power comes from its ability to explore the contradictions between individual moral integrity and an immoral world, within an authorial belief that society should be conducted, and conduct itself, in accordance with liberal-socialist ethical principles, and the novel makes free use of satire and sentiment to depict the consequences of institutional and individual hypocrisy. T. S. Eliot called it ‘unquestionably a brilliant novel’.28 A climax is reached when James, a central figure, returns voluntarily from Ireland to claim exemption before a Tribunal. He is rejected, and the protagonist, Harold, whose experiences in the army have turned him against the war, decides to give evidence on his behalf. Harold finds that ‘the desire for truth, the loathing of lies, was more than ever an obsession with him [. . .] A pall of lies lay like a fog over the whole nation,’29 and he spends a morning at the Appeal Tribunal, increasingly horrified at the maliciousness and stupidity of those supposedly dispensing justice, as a series of distressing vignettes (taken from real cases) unfolds. James is denied exemption, Harold’s speech, and James’s, being entirely ignored by the Tribunes; James returns to Ireland, having done his duty by his friends, and having expected no other outcome. Harold, though, still in the army, is dispatched to Dublin, arriving on Good Friday 1916, and getting caught up (voluntarily, but needlessly) in the fighting on Easter Monday. Dismayed by the viciousness, brutality and ignorant prejudice of his fellow officers and soldiers, he expresses sympathy for the rebels and is shot by his own men. The

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 308

30/01/2012 16:24

pacifists and conscientious objectors

309

novel received few sales and predictably little recognition outside sympathetic circles. A New York edition was published in 1919, and a German translation appeared in Zürich in 1920, but it was not until it was republished in England in 1931 with an introduction by Aldous Huxley that it was at all widely read. None of these novels treats the experience of the CO at first hand, however. For a full treatment of the various ignominies, problems and contradictions of conscientious objection we need to turn to one of the few major modernist works still awaiting full recognition, John Rodker’s semi-fictional Memoirs of Other Fronts, published anonymously by Putnam in 1932. The finished book had its origins in an unpublished poem, written 1916–17, called ‘A C.O.’s Biography’;30 the experience was written up at greater length in prose,31 and finally revised and incorporated into this much longer work. Written as a first-person narrative, Memoirs covers the period from 1916 to 1928 in three sections, interwoven rather than chronological, with the earliest section, ‘Part II – A C.O.’s War 1914–1925’ – set between the other two. Drawing on the insights he gained from his psychoanalysis, it recasts autobiographical incident as a complex narrative in which personal experience is never separable from its contexts. It is a war novel, but one that takes as its starting point what the dust-jacket blurb describes as ‘the war of a personality against itself and against society’s invasion of that self ’, and it presents and anatomises resistance on three fronts: social, national and domestic; the section dealing with his time as a CO is much the longest. Unlike the works discussed so far it benefits from hindsight and reflection, and is closer to revisionist accounts of the war like Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero; the narrative of his experiences as a CO is harrowingly self-aware. Discussing the distance he experienced between knowledge of the war and what he felt about it, he finds fear at the heart of it, ‘a passion of fear, terror of being involved, and anger with it. So I think now this refusal to think then, shows how frightened I was.’ His own determination to cling to life was a form of ‘survival of the fittest’ while ‘those who let themselves be killed [. . .] had [. . .] a maladjustment, organ deficiency, somewhere.’32 The novel extends this into the post-war world, positioning the family as the root of aggression, and arguing that pacifism was simply ‘a new way of living that life again, apotheosis of blood, of guts, of every heroic martial virtue. . . And yes, we love it, we love the gaping abdomens that spill out their intestines, the bloody waste of limbs, all the destruction.’33 Rodker was denied CO status, sent to Aldershot, where he refused to obey orders or wear uniform, and after a while managed to escape. He was captured ten months later, went on hunger strike, was detained in a mental hospital, court-martialled, imprisoned as a deserter in Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs, and finally sent to Dartmoor, which as ‘the Princetown Work Centre’ housed over a thousand COs doing ‘Work of National Importance’, which meant hard labour, digging roads on the moor. Early in 1918, he slipped away from a work party, and escaped to London, where he stayed for the rest of the war. The novel is particularly acute, at this point, on his sense of himself: A new war will come and I shall be a pacifist again and hate myself for it and the rest will be protecting their mothers and their sisters from themselves, for after all, in another aspect, this was what Germany stood for, and hate everything round them because of it but not perhaps themselves; and some because of their fellow men, power driven herds, will go because they feel they have no right to stay out, that their own death must be the ransom for another’s death, so they too join the crazy rush.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 309

30/01/2012 16:24

310

ian patterson

They know better, like Graves, Sassoon; they want peace but lend themselves to war, because others are in a war they think they do not want. And all heroes, every one, of course. How not be, once one began, with manhood, to live in that dark world of ‘no-man’s land’, here, now and everywhere around us. And there, in that most manly place, we wait for the missile that once and for all will put us out of our misery, send us into the white calm of everlasting death. . . Because I have always wanted to make more than to destroy, or that is how I see myself, I preferred for then to be turned into a woman, shut in a close cell, with sewing, or in the workshops picking oakum, kept shut up in revenge because I would not take their risks, as women were till lately shut up in revenge. . . Some C.O.s went mad, some died of forcible feeding, some gave way and were soldiers and that must have been hell too, but as I say, except for moments, that cell was what I most wanted. And again, because that was how I was, and I meant as much as I could to go on being so, I lived in peace and content with the woman I wanted to live with (though perhaps not so much at peace and content as if I had more truly been exercising what was masculine in me, I mean dealing out war, death and destruction).34 The novel has resisted incorporation into the canon for obvious reasons, but also for less obvious ones: resistance is its subject matter, and the processes of its writing unmask a reader’s complicity with almost any existing attitude. Despite the sometimes intensely moving self-analysis, we are made alert to moments of special pleading, self-justification or self-delusion. It is impossible to consider the protagonist heroic without reconsidering the uses the term was and is put to. We have to think against it, and against other too easily accepted habits of description. Memoirs of Other Fronts stands out against contemporary attitudes to gender, responsibility, aggression, categorisation, politics and domesticity, and it resists attempts to keep war and peace in separate spheres. It is perhaps the most achieved of all pacifist writings. Other pacifist writers were imprisoned, but few wrote directly about the experience, then or later: the Glasgow writer Edward Gaitens’s 1948 novel Dance of the Apprentices35 ends with an eloquent chapter describing the life in prison of an absolutist CO, one of the central characters, which rings true, but the poet Basil Bunting, for example, who worked with Fenner Brockway on his post-war investigation of prison conditions, never wrote about his time in gaol. For most of the 1920s, overtly pacifist literature was invisible. The Great War had been fought to put an end to war. But as war memoirs and novels proliferated towards the end of that decade, revealing more about the nature of modern warfare, and as the political situation worsened, giving rise to genuine fears of a second world war, active opposition to war grew rapidly: in the 1930s ‘pacifism owed more to the bomber than to Passchendaele.’36 Growing fear of aerial attack, of bombs, germ canisters and gas dropped on civilian populations, provoked new anxieties; peace conferences were convened; hopes were raised that the League of Nations might outlaw war, or that socialism, led by the Soviet Union, might bring peace to the world. By 1933 or 1934 pacifism was becoming a fully fledged popular movement, attracting figures like the journalist Beverley Nichols, whose Cry Havoc! went through eleven impressions between 1933 and 1935, and the children’s writer and humourist, A. A. Milne. The anxieties of the time also found expression in much of the imaginative writing of the 1930s, notably in pacifist novels such as Sarah Campion’s Thirty Million Gas Masks but also in films, plays, journalism, propaganda and poetry.37 John Middleton Murry’s magazine The Adelphi, founded in

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 310

30/01/2012 16:24

pacifists and conscientious objectors

311

1923, became whole-heartedly supportive of pacifism after 1936, under the influence of Max Plowman (whose own anti-war novel had been pseudonymously published in 1928). A widespread anti-war attitude had by that point developed which encompassed all shades of pacifist and anti-militarist opinion. It was best symbolised perhaps in the short-lived but startling success of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), founded in 1936, among the sponsors of which were the writers Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, A. A. Milne, Beverley Nichols, Ellen Wilkinson, Vera Brittain, Osbert Sitwell, Aldous Huxley, ‘Susan Miles’ (Mrs Ursula Roberts) and Siegfried Sassoon.38 Rose Macaulay’s voice, raised from time to time in moderate defence of rational civilisation and against the ‘sinister suicide pact’ of war,39 was typical of the many who saw resistance to war as the only way to maintain a civilised society. In Jacob’s Room (1922), Virginia Woolf had already shown the absurdity and waste inherent in a civilisation based on warfare; in Three Guineas (1937), she developed an argument that persuasively linked war and patriarchy, arguing that ‘the impulses that lead to war are rooted in the male psyche or in the way men are brought up’,40 something which some critics have suggested is a theme present in all her novels.41 The role played by writers as writers in the peace movements of the 1930s was never a clear one. Direct intervention in the form of novels or poetry was not easy to achieve, although one can find sympathetic treatment of conscientious objectors in popular novels such as A. J. Cronin’s sentimental, melodramatic but effective account of a son’s appearance at a tribunal chaired by his bullying father in The Stars Look Down (1935), or in the less successful Swings and Roundabouts by J. Mills Witham (1937), in which a young pacifist is imprisoned during the First World War. In the years after the war, ‘he had idealised the promise of peace and a world healed, and the treaties had all-but destroyed him [. . .] now he supposed he was an anti-militarist.’42 Storm Jameson and Ethel Mannin were used to exploring political positions in novels, although one of Jameson’s which dealt with the problems raised for pacifism by the Spanish Civil War appeared pseudonymously.43 Vera Brittain’s retrospective account of the PPU in Born 1925 is one of the few novels to try to vindicate the absolutist position, which she held vociferously throughout the war.44 The best-known writers allowed their names to be used to attract supporters, spoke at public meetings and drafted articles for Peace News and other periodicals. The serious writer most visibly involved in the movement was Aldous Huxley, who drafted pamphlets, edited an Encyclopaedia of Pacifism, wrote articles, and spoke at meetings all over the country.45 His 1936 novel Eyeless in Gaza, with its ambitious non-chronological narrative, sets out to show the development of a pacifist consciousness, but the arguments he advances in Ends and Means (1937) reveal a disenchantment with political processes and an increasing interest in small-scale communitarian solutions of the sort propounded by Propter in After Many A Summer (1939), the novel he published after his 1937 move to California.46 Others held similar views. W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Benjamin Britten followed Huxley to the US. Middleton Murry’s Christian pacifism had led him to found a community in Essex (slightly satirically portrayed in E. C. Large’s Asleep in the Afternoon47). The young poet Ronald Duncan, fired by his enthusiasm for Ghandi and non-violence, left propaganda (his pamphlet The Complete Pacifist included commendatory comments from Sylvia Townsend Warner and Gerald Heard) for pacifist farming in Devon,48 though not before collaborating with his friend Benjamin Britten on a ‘Pacifist March’ to be performed at a memorial concert for Dick Sheppard which never, in the end, took place.49 Not surprisingly, there were numerous, often incompatible views among pacifists on how to prevent war. The absolute refusal to do anything to facilitate the conduct of war,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 311

30/01/2012 16:24

312

ian patterson

which was the basis of the Peace Pledge, came under increasing pressure as the decade wore on. Despite the foundation of the PPU, 1936 proved to be a turning point in the fortunes of the pacifist movement. ‘The threefold international crisis [Abyssinia, the Rhineland and Spain] was a major watershed [. . .] The illusion of non-military sanctions collapsed.’50 Many formerly absolute pacifists lost faith in the prospect of peaceful international regulation, especially as they watched the Civil War unfold in Spain; former pacifists like David Garnett, E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf supported the war against Hitler.51 But as political or collective pacifism lost many of its adherents, individual pacifism continued. E. C. Large argued for weapons such as ‘reason and ridicule’ to make it more difficult to stampede men into dying for a lie [. . .] By association with others he can do not more but less, for the opportunity of the pacifist is that by himself he may work with subtlety, unheralded by any label on his sleeve.52 Storm Jameson was typical of many former supporters of the PPU in moderating her belief to allow support for resisting Hitler;53 a widespread retreat from complete pacifism was summed up by A. A. Milne, qualifying the position he had taken in Peace with Honour in his 1940 pamphlet, War with Honour: ‘If anybody reads Peace with Honour now, he must read it with that one word “HITLER” scrawled across every page.’54 By September 1939 many of the former stalwarts of the peace movement had shifted their position, recognising that nothing short of force was likely to prevent the defeat of democracy by Nazism and fascism. One exception was the communist and surrealist poet Roger Roughton, editor of the magazine Contemporary Poetry and Prose, whose pacifism led him first to Dublin and then, in 1941, to suicide. Those who remained committed tended to be either Christian pacifists like Vera Brittain or non-violent anarchists, who saw, or claimed to see, little to distinguish the British state from the German. ‘Its inspiration was a conception not of morally just behaviour, but of individual liberation from unjust restraints.’55 Among the anarchists was a relatively high percentage of young poets. Writing in 1943, Alex Comfort claimed that ‘of the hundred odd younger poets in England now, about half, including Nicholas Moore, Robert Greacen, Peter Wells, Derek Savage and many others, are explicitly pacifist and have refused military service.’56 The claim was contained in an article written partly in response to an accusation by George Orwell in his ‘London Letter’ in the Partisan Review that English pacifists did not ‘have the intellectual courage to think their thoughts down to the roots’ and recognise that pacifism was ‘objectively pro-Fascist’.57 George Woodcock, who edited ‘the little anti-war paper NOW’58 which was singled out by Orwell, saw the justice of some of Orwell’s comments, and encouraged by Julian Symons, who was also a CO, moved to exclude the right-wing contributors who had appeared in early issues. Six months earlier, Orwell had attacked Alex Comfort’s novel No Such Liberty for ‘putting forward the “message” of pacifism’ while failing to see that ‘in so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis.’59 The controversy that followed in the pages of Partisan Review revealed a variety of reasons for pacifism, from Savage’s rejection of the ‘unreality’ of the war to Comfort’s claim to be ‘salvaging English artistic culture’.60 Many of the writers, like Francis King, the poet Bob Cobbing or the Scottish writer Fred Urquhart, were assigned work as gardeners or agricultural labourers, under the direction of local War Agricultural Committees, work which could be both exhausting and rewarding, although those close to Cambridge at least, like Moore, Savage and Woodcock, benefited from an interestingly mixed intellectual community in the evenings.61 The most eloquent and unromanticised account of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 312

30/01/2012 16:24

pacifists and conscientious objectors

313

wartime farm work, despite its retrospective nature, is Edward Blishen’s 1972 memoir, A Cack-Handed War.62 Not all those who registered as conscientious objectors worked on the land. Some noncombatant pacifists who had no objection to supporting the war as long as they did not have to take life themselves worked in dangerous occupations, as bomb disposal experts, or as unarmed medics parachuted into the field alongside combatant soldiers. The adventures of COs in the Paratroop Medical Service: belong to a category of experience somewhere between the grim and the absurd, too equivocal to find the slightest echo in the glorious pages of battle annals, and too unlikely to find their way into novels. I record one or two, not only because I was a conchie myself, but because I like to think that pacifists in battle were a sign of the civilizing of warfare, one of the most charming and endearing paradoxes of the British conception of total war.63 Additionally, as the war grew more serious and the issues appeared more polarised, after the fall of France, the Blitz and the end of the Nazi–Soviet pact, a number of COs abandoned their objection and joined up, as the poet Julian Symons did in 1942 (and as Edwin Morgan had done in 1940 before he even made it to his tribunal, deciding to join the RAMC instead). As Nicholas Monsarrat recalled: It took me months to realise that pacifism was now not enough and that even if I were the bravest stretcher-bearer alive – if I caught the falling bombs with my bare hands – that would never win the war. For once it broke out, once we were fighting, pacifists were out-of-date and wholly ineffective: one had to accept the thwarting of one’s ideals and concentrate on the only thing that would give them another chance some time in the future – winning the struggle.64 Being a CO in the Second World War was not so difficult as in the first; the tribunals were more understanding and the issues on the whole more personal, and as the war continued, pacifism lost much of its purchase. Although the total of objectors, at almost 60,000, was nearly four times that of the Great War, their public impact was considerably more muted. By the end of the war, only 0.2 per cent of new conscripts were seeking exemption, and some earlier objectors had abandoned their pacifism.65 For Frances Partridge, who kept a diary throughout the war in which she described the day-to-day life of her pacifist Bloomsbury household in Berkshire, the end of the war was in some sense an aesthetic experience. ‘The fields, Downs and woods look peaceful now, seen with eyes that know the murder and destruction have stopped.’66 From a less parochial viewpoint, the aftermath of war, ushering in the Cold War and the era of the nuclear bomb, looked less comforting, but there was little writing specifically focused on these questions. The actor and writer Terence Greenidge published Four Plays for Pacifists in 1955, one of which had been performed in wartime, in May 1940; but already they looked and felt dated.67 Some men, including the writer and critic Raymond Williams, who had served in the Second World War, refused to be recalled for the Korean War. The contradictions in Britain’s imperial role were exacerbated by its military role in Malaya, Suez, Kenya and Cyprus, and the growth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament fuelled a new peace movement, but the abandonment in 1960 of National Service brought an

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 313

30/01/2012 16:24

314

ian patterson

end to Conscientious Objection. Pacifism became once more an expression of anti-war opinion, linked more or less to political crises. Poets like Adrian Mitchell and Christopher Logue produced powerful and articulate satire in opposition to the Vietnam War; more recent writers have published eloquent and imaginative poems exploring our complicity in the British and American military presence in the Middle East. But it was really only in the years between 1914 and 1945 that literature was extensively concerned with the moral, religious and political questions of pacifism. As John Rodker put it, as he reconsidered his war resistance in 1935, I cannot honestly say [. . .] that I think pacifism a panacea for anything. It is a part, and a necessary part, of the institution of war. That institution is part and parcel of the human psyche, at least to date. The pacifist is fighting too, but on another front.68

Notes 1. Douglas Goldring, ‘Mr. Wells and the War’, in Reputations: Essays in Criticism (London: Chapman and Hall, 1920), p. 98. 2. Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 1–8. 3. Jack Common, ‘The Military Necessity of Pacifism’, The Adelphi, 11.5 (February 1936), p. 295. 4. R. J. Q. Adams and Philip P. Poirier, The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–18 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987). 5. John Rae, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military Service 1916–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 33–52. 6. See Thomas C. Kennedy, ‘Public Opinion and the Conscientious Objector, 1915–1919’, Journal of British Studies, 12 (May 1973), pp. 105–19; and Julian Bell, We Did Not Fight. 1914–18 Experiences of War-Resisters (London: Cobden Sanderson, 1935). 7. Mrs Henry Hobhouse, ‘I Appeal Unto Caesar’: The Case of the Conscientious Objector (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1917). See David Boulton, Objection Overruled (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967). 8. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined. The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), pp. 146ff. 9. Cf. Jo Vellacott, Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). 10. Gilbert Cannan, Pugs and Peacocks (London: Hutchinson, 1921), p. 288. 11. Gilbert Cannan, Sembal (London: Hutchinson, 1922); and The House of Prophecy (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1924). 12. Cannan, Sembal, p. 204. 13. Mary Butts, Speed the Plough (London: Chapman and Hall, 1923). 14. There is a good account of this anti-war milieu in Constance Malleson, After Ten Years: A Personal Record (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931), pp. 89–128. 15. Hugh Walpole, quoted in Frank Swinnerton, Figures in the Foreground: Literary Reminiscences 1917–40 (London: Hutchinson, 1963), p. 74. 16. Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence: The Man and his Work. The Formative Years: 1885–1919 (London: Heinemann, 1972), pp. 235–42. 17. Fenner Brockway, The Recruit. A Play in One Act (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1919), p. 1. 18. Jonathan Cutbill, ‘Introduction’ to A. T. Fitzroy [Rose Allatini], Despised and Rejected (London: GMP Publishers, 1988). 19. A. T. Fitzroy [Rose Allatini], Despised and Rejected (London: C.W. Daniel, 1918), p. 150.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 314

30/01/2012 16:24

pacifists and conscientious objectors

315

20. Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 156. 21. Rose Macaulay, Non-Combatants and Others (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916), p. 305. 22. Ibid. p. 21. 23. Ibid. p. 203. 24. Ibid. pp. 262–3. 25. Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy (London: John Lane, 1920). See Ouditt, pp. 131–68; Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 112–18; and Grace Brockington, ‘Performing Pacifism: the Battle between Artist and Author in The Ballet of the Nations’, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Vernon Lee: Decadents, Ethics, Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 143–59. 26. Douglas Goldring, Odd Man Out: The Autobiography of a ‘Propaganda Novelist’ (London: Chapman and Hall, 1935), p. 141. 27. Douglas Goldring, Dublin: Explorations and Reflections by an Englishman (Dublin: Maunsel, 1917); and The Fortune (Dublin: Maunsel, 1917). 28. T. S. Eliot, unsigned review, The Egoist, 5.1 (January 1918), p. 10. 29. Goldring, The Fortune, p. 301. 30. John Rodker, ‘A C.O.’s Biography’, in John Rodker: Poems & Adolphe 1920, ed. Andrew Crozier (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), pp. 115–22. 31. John Rodker [Published anonymously], Memoirs of Other Fronts (London: Putnam, [1926] 1932). 32. Ibid. pp. 193–4. 33. Ibid. p. 195. 34. Ibid. pp. 197–9. 35. Edward Gaitens, Dance of the Apprentices (Edinburgh: Canongate, [1948] 1990). 36. Ceadel, p. 60. 37. See Ian Patterson, Guernica and Total War (London: Profile, 2007), pp. 74–139. 38. Ceadel, pp. 222–4. 39. Rose Macaulay, Let Us Honour Peace (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1937), p. 15. 40. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1937). See Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 299. 41. See Mark Hussey (ed.), Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991). 42. J. Mills Witham, Swings and Roundabouts (London: Duckworth, 1937), pp. 312–16. 43. Storm Jameson [as James Hill], No Victory for the Soldier (New York: Doubleday Doran, 1938). 44. Vera Brittain, Born 1925. A Novel of Youth (London: Macmillan, 1949). 45. Aldous Huxley (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Pacifism (London: Chatto and Windus, for the Peace Pledge Union, 1937). See David Bradshaw, ‘The Flight from Gaza: Aldous Huxley’s Involvement with the “Peace Pledge Union” in the Context of his Overall Intellectual Development’, in Bernfried Nagel (ed.), Now More Than Ever: Proceedings of the Aldous Huxley Centenary Conference, Münster 1994 (Frankfurt, London, New York: Peter Lang, 1995), pp. 9–27. 46. Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer (London: Chatto and Windus, 1939). 47. E. C. Large, Asleep in the Afternoon (London: Hyphen Press, [1938] 2008). 48. Ronald Duncan, The Complete Pacifist (London: Boriswood, 1937). See also Journal of a Husbandman (London: Faber, 1944); and All Men Are Islands. An Autobiography (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964). 49. Duncan, All Men Are Islands, pp. 130–1. 50. Ceadel, p. 193. 51. Zwerdling, p. 288.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 315

30/01/2012 16:24

316

ian patterson

52. E. C. Large, God’s Amateur. The Writings of E. C. Large, ed. Stuart Bailey and Robin Kinross (London: Hyphen Press, 2008), p. 47. 53. Martin Gilbert, ‘Pacifist Attitudes to Nazi Germany, 1936–1945’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27 (1992), pp. 493–511 (p. 497). 54. A. A. Milne, War With Honour (London: Macmillan, 1940), p. 12. Referring to Peace with Honour: An Enquiry into the War Convention, 4th, enlarged edn (London: Methuen, 1935). 55. Ceadel, p. 229. 56. Alex Comfort, ‘English Poetry and the War’, Partisan Review, X.2 (March–April 1943), pp. 191–5 (p. 193). 57. George Orwell, All Propaganda Is Lies: 1941–1942, ed. Peter Davison, assisted by Ian Angus and Sheila Davison (London: Secker and Warburg, 2001), p. 110. 58. George Woodcock, Letter to the Past: An Autobiography (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1982), p. 251. 59. Orwell, p. 40. 60. Orwell, pp. 392–400. See also Adam Piette Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 187–8. 61. Woodcock, pp. 233–6; Francis King, Yesterday Came Suddenly (London: Constable 1993), pp. 64–76. 62. Edward Blishen, A Cack-Handed War (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972). 63. James Byrom [James Guy Bramwell], The Unfinished Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 168. 64. Nicholas Monsarrat, My Brother Denys; Being the Monsarrat Story (London: Chariot Books, [1948] 1952), p. 165. 65. Ceadel, p. 301. 66. Frances Partridge, A Pacifist’s War (1978) (London: Robin Clark, 1983), p. 214. 67. Terence Greenidge, Four Plays for Pacifists (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1955). 68. Rodker ‘Twenty Years After’, in Bell, pp. 283–91 (p. 285).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 316

30/01/2012 16:24

The Representation of Refugees in Koestler and Phillips

32

THE REPRESENTATION OF REFUGEES IN ARTHUR KOESTLER’S ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE AND CARYL PHILLIPS’S A DISTANT SHORE Sissy Helff

T

he British, Hungarian-born, Jewish author and journalist Arthur Koestler wrote Arrival and Departure in the years 1942–3 only shortly after the ‘Wannsee Conference’ was held in Berlin by senior officers of the Nazi German regime in which they openly discussed what was then termed ‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. Koestler, who worked as an editor of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag,1 had left Germany in the early 1930s in order to travel to Russia to fight for his communist ideals. It was on this journey that he eventually became a secret member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), since the increasingly fascist-leaning Germany had become more and more alien to him.2 This journey, however, was not supposed to be his last. In 1936 and 1937 he repeatedly visited Spain on behalf of the Third International, again on undercover missions. On his second journey to Spain he was imprisoned under sentence of death,3 but was later exchanged for another prisoner. He returned to France where he resigned from the Communist Party and continued working as a journalist. After the outbreak of the Second World War Koestler was considered an ‘undesirable alien’ by French authorities and detained for several months4 until his release before the German invasion. He entered England illegally in 1940 and was once again imprisoned for several months until his case was fully examined. In Arrival and Departure, which was Koestler’s first novel in English, he seeks to account for his traumatic memories of the Spanish Civil War and his imprisonment as well as the horrifying deportation stories of continental European Jews and the death of many of his Party comrades and friends.5 The story is set in 1941 in a country called ‘Neutralia’ which, as Koestler himself states, represents the then politically neutral Portugal.6 While the book is deeply concerned, as Koestler remarks, with the human conflict between morality and expediency and its impact on European history,7 it is especially Koestler’s unique talent of describing geographies of flight from warfare and its persecutory economy and the spectacle of refugees clinging to ‘bare life’ which leaves a lasting impression on the reader. The biographer David Cesarini contextualises Koestler’s dark narrative as follows: [Koestler] was one of the few who grasped the scale of the tragedy being enacted across the English Channel. It was against this background that he began [to] work on Arrival and Departure (1943). In November 1942 Koestler met Jan Karski, an

317

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 317

30/01/2012 16:24

318

sissy helff

envoy for the Polish underground who conveyed to the West an eyewitness account of conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and the deportation of Jews to the death camps. Unlike many others, Koestler was easily convinced that Karski was telling the truth. The appalling information about the Nazi extermination programme is etched into Arrival and Departure.8 Koestler’s plot can be summarised as follows: the young, disillusioned Eastern European revolutionary Peter Slavek arrives, without papers, in a country called Neutralia, deeply traumatised and almost starved as a stowaway9 on a ship with the Italian name Speranza, which translates as ‘hope’. He plans to return to the fight against the fascists.10 Yet, he soon learns that his plans will not come true as the British prefer seeing him continuing the journey to America than allowing ‘a stranger’ from a ‘non-friendly country’ to fight in their war. It is only then that the young man realises that he and the exiles are tied to a similar fate. His outsider status is spatially reflected in a coffeehouse scene in which the protagonist makes his first brief encounters with other European refugees: He [Peter] reached a large, open square with a fountain in the middle. It was surrounded by cafés, and the pavement in front of them was packed with tables and cane chairs, protected from the sun by bright canvas awnings. Most of the tables were occupied by men, the swarthy natives of Neutralia, with butterfly-ties and padded shoulders, sipping coffee from tiny cups; [. . .] [s]ome of the tables were occupied by mixed groups of men and women, but those were obviously foreigners, exiles in transit from countries overrun by the war. They talked in low voices with little nervous ticks in their faces, putting their hands together over the table like crows in a thunderstorm.11 It is the strangely nervous and slightly desperate Casablanca atmosphere hanging over this episode which makes the reader understand that in Koestler’s fictional world hopes of freedom and dreams of justice are bound to pieces of paper. All of the displaced spend their time waiting for new chances, which may or may not materialise in the form of a visa. Thus it is a little surprising that later in the same chapter the protagonist gets to know his future love Odette, who, stranded in the city for more than three months, is also waiting for her American visa to arrive. Yet, despite the many similarities Peter shares with the other refugees, he does not see his future in a far-away country. While he accepts Odette’s decision to leave for the United States, it turns out that to him leaving for the ‘new world’ is no option. Peter’s ultimate perspective is an opportunity of serving the Allies. Thus Peter eventually decides against undertaking a passage to the States which could hold out the prospect of a reunification with Odette but instead boards an aircraft which transports him back into the war, as a secret agent of Britain. While Arrival and Departure is commonly not considered Koestler’s strongest literary work, the novel’s controlling metaphors of the refugees as ‘naked men’ and Europe as uncannily transformed by fascist warfare guaranteed and still guarantees the political novel its place within the English literary canon, as Malcolm Bradbury has stated in his study of the modern novel.12 The plot and structure of Arrival and Departure echo a distinctively European narrative tradition by bringing into play freshly coined words such as ‘autostrades’ on the one hand as well as intertextual references to well-known works, as for instance Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), on the other. Such creative, textual choreography characterises Koestler once again as a restless mind

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 318

30/01/2012 16:24

the representation of refugees in koestler and phillips

319

at home in many European languages and places. Koestler’s project is thus deeply rooted in the European concept that endorses both a reflexive methodological cosmopolitanism as defined by Ulrich Beck,13 and a critical humanitarianism based on radical cosmopolitanism, as theorised by Derrida and others.14 Important to Koestler’s venture, however, is the renunciation of any political ideology. In his famous essay about Koestler, George Orwell rightly observed that his friend at that time was not able to sketch a picture of a peaceful European future: As an ultimate objective [Koestler] believes in the Earthly Paradise, the Sun State which the gladiators set out to establish, and which has haunted the imagination of Socialists, Anarchists and religious heretics for hundreds of years. But his intelligence tells him that the Earthly paradise is receding into the far distance and that what is actually ahead of us is bloodshed, tyranny and privation.15 Koestler’s dark and pessimistic outlook might well explain why the writer put such strong emphasis on imagining translocations, for which Koestler also uses the term ‘transit colony’ in the novel,16 as the only ‘real’ places of post-war European belonging in Arrival and Departure. They [the refugees] were all escaping from the past and striving for some safe shore of the future; the present in which they lived was a no-man’s-land between the two. It was perhaps this which gave them their ghost-like, unreal appearance. They had travelled through a dozen countries of Europe and never looked out of the window. Their eyes turned inward, it was like a holiday excursion of the blind.17 In the previous passage Koestler’s omniscient narrator throws harrowing words into our faces. The darkness and terror in the writer’s words only unfold after we start realising that cosmopolitanism in the wartime 1940s also implied an almost hopeless clinging to bare life, a forced withdrawal from life and, if lucky, an escape into an insecure postwar future. This emotional and political darkness is also reflected on the level of sexual relationships; thus the novel is full of abusive and dishonest relationships, as though infected by wartime and persecutory experience. Peter engages in neither a real friendship, nor a fulfilling love relationship, a situation emphasised in a scene in which Peter talks to his lover Odette about their previously shared sexual experience in general and the dismantling moment of getting undressed and facing the partner’s total nudity in particular: Do you know what a shock it is to see the woman one is in love with for the first time undressed? One is suddenly confronted with the familiar face attached to a body which is a stranger, to which one hasn’t been introduced. And seen in this context of her nudity even the face changes and looks at you bewilderingly transformed: ‘You thought you knew me? This is the truth, you fool.’ But the most confusing thing is that a body is so impersonal.18 Neither Odette nor the political neutral host country Neutralia provides a retreat for the troubled character and his war-traumatised memories and dreams. No matter how intensely Peter seeks to seclude himself in order to find piece with his situation19 the estrangement from his own self, the beloved and from wartime Europe violently emerges in different guises over and over again and hence dominates the narrative. Thus the following shop-window scene might be read as a spatial iteration of Peter’s mindset:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 319

30/01/2012 16:24

320

sissy helff

Peter stood motionless in front of the window. It belonged to a tobacconist’s shop which also sold newspapers, lottery, tickets, and cheap stationery, and as a sideline, had apparently let its window for their propaganda. From the bottom of the window, across three feet of space in depth, stretched a relief map of the Continent. Over it was the inscription: THE NEW EUROPE – A HAPPY FAMILY OF NATIONS. The relief was tidy and appetizing to look at. Long, straight, glossy autostrades20 radiated from its north-eastern centre [. . .] The population of each country as well as its produce, its crops, cattle, coal [. . .] were marked by appropriate little toy figures and symbols; also each country’s proportional claim to colonies, raw materials, and export markets, based on the ample statistical material [. . .] High Finance and World Revolution, both allied to the Accursed Race, pulling the strings behind the scenes, pitting the nations against one another, sharing the profits with a diabolical grin. . .21 Peter’s felt ambivalence towards homelessness and belonging comes alive in these words. What is dramatised in both scenes is the monumentally felt concern of having only limited control of personal and world affairs. As Koestler pointed out elsewhere, such forms of wartime heteronomy and subjection may first produce desperation and potentially lead to various forms of self-denial and self-abandonment in the long run. Hannah Arendt tackles these phenomena, although in a somewhat enhanced form, by emphasising the importance of human rights. Her phrase ‘the right to have rights’ from her celebrated book The Origins of Totalitarianism22 became a slogan within human rights discourse and served as starting point in many discussions on hospitality and refugee selfhood: Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which are rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to a community into which one is born is no more a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice, or when one is placed in a situation where, unless he commits a crime, his treatment by others does not depend on what he does or does not. This extremity, and nothing else, is the situation of people deprived of human rights. They are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion. . . We become aware of the existence of a right to have rights [. . .] and the right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerge who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.23 Referring to pogroms as well as more recent forms of ethnic or politically motivated persecution Arendt highlights the importance of ‘a right to have rights’ as an antidote to totalitarian systems, or as Seyla Benhabib so profoundly wrote, ‘the totalitarian disregard for human life and the eventual treatment of human beings as superfluous entities’.24 In their search for a better future or even their mere survival, displaced people accept the total absence of the right to belong. They might share the experience of Koestler’s refugees having travelled through countries and crossed continents without looking outside the window. The stateless, Seyla Benhabib rightly notes in line with Arendt, ‘need their individual republics to be citizens at all’.25 What Benhabib, Arendt and Koestler so vividly illuminate, then, is the ultimate non-belonging of many stateless people in connection with an absence of ‘the right of political inclusion’.26 This thought obviously implied and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 320

30/01/2012 16:24

the representation of refugees in koestler and phillips

321

expressed the political and emotional need for the creation of Israel, a state of the Jewish Diaspora: Anti-Semitism, imperialism and totalitarianism have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity, while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.27 The core of Koestler’s literary project, therefore, documents the cosmopolitan condition of the 1940s under wartime and persecutory pressures on human rights, as well as demonstrating Koestler’s own political stance, his methodological cosmopolitanism. Like Arthur Koestler, the British author Caryl Phillips illuminates the bleak histories of Holocaust, fascism and genocide in his work. Yet, while Koestler was mainly concerned with a ‘white’ European history of oppression, Phillips adds to this heavy perspective a Black Atlantic imaginary rooted in the memory of slavery. Phillips successfully employs a narrativisation of multifaceted oppression, discrimination and racism in order to draw attention to the past and present grievances of the situation of the socially disadvantaged – these are figured as a kind of wartime of post-fascist ideology. Hence he vividly plays with a reimagination of the horrors of past wars against ethnic groups and registers their continuing operation in current political formations. In Higher Ground (1989) and The Nature of Blood (1997), for instance, Phillips creates what Barbara Smith refers to as complex chronicles of oppression.28 The continuing significance of these discourses is presented as a memorial stone set against war and fascism as well as a form of memory work, as Paul Gilroy has observed: I watched the library footage of the camps and realized both the enormity of the crime that was being perpetrated, and the precariousness of my own position in Europe. The many adolescent thoughts that worried my head can be reduced to one line: ‘If white people could do that to white people, then what the hell would they do to me?’29 A more recent fictionalisation of the numbing effect of wartime oppression on individuals and the theme of ‘non-belonging’ can be found in Caryl Phillips’s semi-fictional book Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007) as well as in his celebrated novel A Distant Shore (2003).30 The latter is set in the 1990s following Solomon’s journey from an unnamed African country via a French refugee camp31 to his final destination, a small northern English village called Weston. Interestingly enough, while throughout the journey places remain mostly unnamed and thus somewhat unreal, Solomon’s final destination, the small English village Weston, emerges very clearly and is set off against all former locations. So the reader may wonder, what is so special about this sleepy little place? Weston seems so important because it sets the main theme of the book: self-isolation. According to other critics, the sleepy village struggles to define itself, being too deeply enmeshed in what Paul Gilroy has called ‘postimperial melancholia’ created as a direct result of the Second World War and its costs,32 a condition deriving from a nation’s reluctance ‘to face, never mind actually mourn, the profound changes in circumstances and mood that followed the end of Empire and consequent loss of imperial prestige’.33 Change seems to be metonymic with decline thus causing threat. Hence it is here that stagnation and social isolation climaxes, not only in the case of the black stranger Solomon but also with respect to the second

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 321

30/01/2012 16:24

322

sissy helff

narrator-protagonist Dorothy, a white middle-aged, retired school teacher. After the breakup of her marriage, Dorothy embarks on a number of perfunctory affairs only to feel even more alone and isolated. When she eventually falls in love with a much younger colleague her life seems to change for the better, but it soon becomes clear that her new love is built on dreams only. The affair turns into solitary self-destruction when Dorothy starts stalking the man. The young teacher reports Dorothy’s attempted stalking; consequently Dorothy is suspended and asked to retire. This is when the two loners, Dorothy and Solomon, meet and eventually fall in love. Although Solomon has gained ‘legal status’ in the meantime34 this fact will not protect him from being insulted and eventually murdered by neo-Nazis – a direct replay of the wartime persecutions that haunt post-imperial Britain. When police officers inform Dorothy about Solomon’s death, she has a nervous breakdown and is sent to an asylum, another form of translocation: The unit, as they like to call it [. . .] is supposed to be a place that’s different from out here. A retreat. Somewhere where you can lick your wounds and gather some strength before going back to the world. A place where you can learn to remember, and therefore understand life. But what use is that now? They say they’re protecting us. In here, time doesn’t matter. At night they allow me to leave the curtains open and I watch the shadows of the trees making strange shapes against my wall [. . .] My heart remains a desert, but I tried. I had a feeling that Solomon understood me. This is not my home, and until they accept this, then I will be as purposefully silent as a bird in flight.35 Akin to Koestler’s Neutralia, Phillips’s asylum presents the qualities of a translocation; both places provide temporary shelter from the war against the fascist enemy but do not offer permanent spaces to settle down – they generate refugee mentalities; wartime refugee mentalities, indeed. Like Koestler’s Peter, neither Solomon nor Dorothy is finally free to move around in Britain, which has become, in its racism, a space haunted by the war that stripped it of its status. The state has custody of its ostensibly ‘crazy’ citizen and thus is allowed to claim an individual state of exception only to justify, to quote Agamben, ‘juridical procedures and developments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime’.36 It is then that Dorothy turns into a ‘naked woman’ whose existence resembles ‘life exposed to death’, as though replaying again the transformation into wartime refugee.37 The novel’s intertwined plotlines demonstrate that Phillips, like Derrida, deeply doubts the modern state’s protective power as well as all vaguely made cosmopolitan promises of liberty and equality. Derrida writes: Whenever the State is neither the foremost author of, nor the foremost guarantor against the violence which forces refugees or exiles to flee, it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace, whether or not it has a religious or nationalist alibi.38 By introducing Weston’s small village community as a testing ground, Phillips highlights the still existing, though often invisible boundaries within British war-shaped culture. In the same way as discourses of ethnicity and race were more and more written into the narrative of English identity, the discourses were inextricably linked with social segregation and societal exclusion. Social factors like ethnicity and age turned and might still turn people into strangers in everyday life. Phillips’s creative exploration of these shifting

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 322

30/01/2012 16:24

the representation of refugees in koestler and phillips

323

social landscapes reflects on the new frontiers of British identity. These frontiers signify, on a more abstract level, various thresholds or invisible translocations of British post-war identity – and, the novel implies, those translocations depend on the traumatising effect of the Second World War on the idea of national belonging. Accordingly, Dorothy opens the novel with the following remark: ‘England has changed. These days it’s difficult to tell who’s from around here and who’s not. Who belongs and who is a stranger. It doesn’t feel right.’39 The gist of these very first few sentences is repeated like a mantra over and over again throughout the novel, sometimes with reference to age, sometimes with reference to legal status, sometimes with reference to ethnicity and race. No doubt, Phillips shares Gikandi’s assessment of still existing racism in English culture, as Dorothy’s reflections reveal:40 Mum and Dad [. . .] disliked coloureds. Dad told me that he regarded coloureds as a challenge to our English identity. He believed that the Welsh were full of sentimental stupidity, that the Scots were helplessly mean and mopish and they should keep to their own side of Hadrian’s Wall, and that the Irish were violent, Catholic drunks. For him, being English was more important than being British, and being English meant no coloureds.41 With this differentiation, Phillips takes up Robin Cohen’s notion of Britishness and its internal frontiers and different concepts of active participation in the British body politic.42 He links the construction of those frontiers and participatory concepts to the war and the deep fascism engendered across Europe by wartime ideology. In this respect Phillips’s book excavates internal frontiers of Britishness by highlighting practices of social exclusion and taking Hannah Arendt’s claim for a man’s ‘right to have rights’ even further by demonstrating that neither a legal status nor British citizenship necessarily entails or could be considered a byword for membership and political inclusion.

Conclusion Koestler’s idea of a European cosmopolitan condition is limited. His methodological cosmopolitanism presents his own approach to the Second World War and the Nazi regime. In his novel the trope of ‘naked man’ is paramount and places and spaces emerge only as translocations. Koestler, thus, depicts many arriving and departing cosmopolitans but neither a place nor an intellectual space for them to settle in permanently. In contrast to Koestler, Phillips the author found a place to settle in: post-war Britain. Yet, this observation asks for an explanation; especially when we consider that neither Solomon nor Dorothy manages to establish a place for themselves outside their own four walls. This theme of encapsulation is also repeated in the novel’s overall structure. To Phillips, it seems, what really matters is the national project through which a new British identity might be actively negotiated in new spaces and cultural negotiations that are really post-war. In a way one could even say that Phillips’s methodological cosmopolitanism gets close to a methodological nationalism. This, however, does not mean that Phillips shut his eyes to difficult debates dealing with global humanitarian problems. Again the trope of ‘naked men’ plays an important role in circumscribing the limits of the nation state’s sovereignty as well as in excavating the thresholds within a cosmopolitan condition, that is able to go beyond the haunting figure of the wartime refugee. The selected books, I therefore argue, do not invest in fictionalising a cosmopolitan age. What both

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 323

30/01/2012 16:24

324

sissy helff

authors equally seek to show, however, is the high speed and scary ease with which ‘legal men’ may be turned into ‘naked men’ in times of fascism as well as in an age of post-war democracy.

Notes 1. David Cesarini, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: Heinemann, 1998), pp. 69–70. 2. Koestler revisits his journey in his autobiography The Invisible Writing (London: Vintage, [1954] 2005). The book offers a telling account of his former euphoric blindness towards communism and the Party; for an analysis of his disillusionment, see my article ‘From Euphoria to Disillusionment: Representations of Communism and the Soviet Union in Arthur Koestler’s The Invisible Writing (1954)’, in Sissy Helff, Barbara Korte and Ulrike Pirker (eds), Facing the East in the West (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 111–22. 3. Arthur Koestler, The Spanish Testament (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937). 4. Koestler, The Invisible Writing, p. 509. 5. Koestler, Arrival and Departure (London: Vintage, 1999), pp. 190–2. 6. Ibid. p. 192. 7. Ibid. p. 190. 8. Cesarini, p. 89. 9. Recent literary and cultural criticism intensively focuses on migration and diaspora as phenomena of high modernity. In this context the figure of the migrant, transmigrant and the refugee moves increasingly into our attention. Yet very surprisingly the itinerant figure of the stowaway has received only little critical scrutiny. For an essay on the policing of stowaways by sea, see William Walters, ‘Bordering the Sea: Shipping Industries and the Policing of Stowaways’, Borderland e-journal, 9.3 (2008), pp. 1–25. 10. Koestler, Arrival and Departure, p. 15. Peter Slavek’s fictional story, as Koestler writes, is modelled on the life story of the Hungarian poet Endre Havas, a friend of Koestler’s, whom the latter met in London during the war. Havas was disillusioned by the Communist Party but decided to rejoin it during the Battle of Stalingrad. Thus he went back to Hungary in order to fight fascism. In 1949 he was accused of being a spy and sent to prison where he eventually died (Arrival and Departure, p. 191). 11. Ibid. p. 16. 12. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993), pp. 234–6. 13. Ulrich Beck, ‘Cosmopolitanization without Cosmopolitans: On the Distinction between Normative and Empirical-analytical Cosmopolitanism in Philosophy and Social Sciences’, in Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (eds), Communicating in the Third Space (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 11–25. 14. See for example Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006); Anthony Kwame Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Norton, 2007); Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, [2001] 2004); Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007). 15. George Orwell, ‘Arthur Koestler’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (London: Penguin, 1994), vol. III [As I Please, 1943–1945], pp. 268–77 (p. 276). 16. Koestler, Arrival and Departure, p. 38. 17. Ibid. p. 37. 18. Ibid. p. 57.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 324

30/01/2012 16:24

the representation of refugees in koestler and phillips

325

19. In the third part of the novel entitled ‘Past’, Peter is even treated with psychotherapy by another émigré character called Sonia in order to overcome his trauma. 20. Koestler’s invented word ‘autostrades’ is reminiscent of the Italian word autostrada, meaning ‘motorway’. The coined word characterises Koestler once more as a restless mind at home in many places in Europe. 21. Koestler, Arrival and Departure, pp. 26–7; original emphasis. 22. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, [1951] 1968). 23. Ibid. p. 177. 24. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 50. 25. Ibid. p. 39. 26. See Frank I. Michelman, ‘Parsing: “A Right to have Rights”’, Constellations, 3.2 (1996): pp. 200–8. 27. Arendt, p. ix. 28. Barbara Smith, ‘The Past has Fled’, New York Times, 24 September 1989, p. 27. 29. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 66–7. 30. Caryl Phillips, Foreigners: Three English Lives (London: Harvill Secker, 2007); and A Distant Shore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 31. In his article ‘“The Other is the Neighbour”: The limits of dignity in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 44.4 (2008), pp. 403–13, David Farrier suggests that Phillips’s camp is ‘almost certainly based on the Red Cross Refugee camp at Sangatte, given that Phillips smuggled himself into Sangatte in 2001 to write an article for the Guardian’ (p. 411). 32. Gilroy, p. 90. See also Farrier’s argument in ‘“The Other is the Neighbour”’, p. 404. 33. Gilroy, p. 98. 34. Phillips, Distant Shore, p. 258. 35. Ibid. p. 277. 36. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 171. 37. Phillips, Distant Shore, p. 88. 38. Derrida, p. 8. 39. Phillips, Distant Shore, p. 3. 40. In this context Simon Gikandi’s astute observation of the distinctiveness of British ethnic discourse is important: ‘Only with the influx of migrants from the former British colonies after World War II did racial questions became matters of domestic concern in Britain. In fact, not until the Notting Hill riots of 1959 was race recognized as a central issue in the discourse of Englishness. Even then, it took another 10 years for Enoch Powell to demonize the migrant subject as the primary threat to British identity. And it was not until 1979, with the election of Margaret Thatcher as a prime minister, that issues of migration and race became inseparable from the narrative of Englishness.’ (Simon Gikandi, ‘Race and Cosmopolitanism’, American Literary History, 14.3 [Fall 2002], pp. 593–615 [pp. 594–5].) 41. Phillips, Distant Shore, p. 37. 42. Robin Cohen, Frontiers of Identity: The British and the Others (London: Longman, and New York: Addison Wesley, 1994).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 325

30/01/2012 16:24

33

‘THESE ROOMS / RUN INTO EACH OTHER LIKE TUNNELS / LEADING TO THE UNDERWORLD’: RACE IN WAR LITERATURE Mark W. Van Wienen

W

riting in 1914, W. E. B. Du Bois tempered sympathy for the victims of the Great War with knowledge of their nations’ brutality toward darker-skinned people in their colonies. In The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People which he edited, Du Bois observed that even Belgium, overrun by the German military machine in Europe, had in Africa ‘been as pitiless and grasping as Germany and in strict justice deserves every pang she is suffering after her unspeakable atrocities in the Congo’.1 Nevertheless, darker-skinned soldiers from both British and French colonies served courageously in the European theatre from the very beginning of the Great War and again in World War II. When in 1918 Du Bois shifted his stance, urging black Americans to ‘Close Ranks’ with whites, the editorial merely reflected the point of view of most black Americans, who saw support for their nation’s war effort as a patriotic duty and an opportunity to prove their equality. Indeed, the possibility that criticism of racism in wartime might be productively combined with celebration of black military heroism was shown by Du Bois’s investigative journalism of the black experience in the Great War. His ‘Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War’, published in The Crisis in 1919, offered kudos to the African American regiments’ units who had shown valour in combat and simultaneously excoriated the racism of the US armed services, which had advised their French allies not to treat American blacks on terms of equality with whites.2 The imbalance observed by Du Bois, between the loyalty of citizens of colour in time of war and their second-class citizenship in war and peace alike, has been remarked upon in American and Commonwealth literature beginning from the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Du Bois’s more sweeping assertion that European ideas about race, linked to colonialism, ran through the fabric of modern war in all its monstrosity also deserves more than a passing glance. Conceptions of race as involving broadly classifiable sub-groups of humanity, each having its own history and distinctive, readily identifiable group characteristics, are unquestionably tied to European colonisation and American slavery. Particularly when the notion of superior and inferior races was bolstered in the late nineteenth century by the quasi-science of eugenics, race became a flexible and dangerous weapon in the arsenal of national militarisation, appearing in propaganda and popular slang directed against the ‘Hun’, ‘Jap’ and ‘Gook’ as well as in the Nazi campaign

326

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 326

30/01/2012 16:24

race in war literature

327

to exterminate the Jewish people. Although race solidarity has been critical in movements to fight racist prejudice as well as in trends encouraging such prejudice, the race concept has proven destructive time and again, even as it has evolved from a biological to a cultural notion, and nowhere more clearly than in the literature of war. In the verse of Rudyard Kipling, the volatile structure of colonial exploitation and its relation with racism is condensed. The infamous ‘White Man’s Burden’, first published during the Boer War, asserts the inevitability of colonial resistance but sees this very resistance as the clearest sign of the racial superiority of the English coloniser, who gets to ‘reap his old reward: / The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard – [. . . ].’3 In Kipling’s poetry, the good person of colour is the one who serves his racial betters gladly, as the loyal Indian water-bearer, ‘Gunga Din’. Dark-skinned women are viewed favourably to the extent they oblige the desires of white men, a source of ribald amusement in several poems. ‘The Ladies’ might possibly be seen as breaking down racial divisions by the speaker’s familiarity with women of all shades: ‘the things you will learn from the Yellow an’ Brown, / They’ll ’elp you a lot with the White.’4 But its use of colonial women’s bodies as a training ground for relations with white women spells out a clearly racist hierarchy – even if the poem does not also employ stereotypes of women of colour as variously promiscuous or subservient in order to give edge to its misogyny. Early in the twentieth century as well as later, war literature protesting racial inequality and colonisation, like literature acquiescing to it, was written by whites as well as by people of colour. William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., son of the famous abolitionist, as well as William Vaughn Moody wrote poems heaping shame upon the British and American ‘Anglo-Saxon Christians’ for their colonial schemes in the Sudan, South Africa and the Philippines.5 Among the most subtle and effective poems attending to racism in World War I is Karle Wilson Baker’s ‘Unser Gott’, which in 1914 reflects a certain American smugness about the European nations’ conflicting claims of divine sanction yet, in a selfreflexive moment, doubts that white Americans are ready to recognise divine blessing upon Anglo- and African American alike.6 A number of African American poets joined Du Bois in pushing back against American racism during the Great War. Lucian Watkins, who served in the Philippines as well as in France, was perhaps the first published African American soldier-poet. Although not self-conscious about the implications of helping to put down the Filipino insurrection, Watkins did note the home front ramifications of lynch law as contradictory to American proclamations regarding ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ in Europe.7 Other blacks were even less restrained in their protest. In race riots that swept through US cities in 1919, black Americans – including recently demobilised servicemen – began to fight back where formerly they had suffered passively. The new spirit was captured by the transplanted Jamaican Claude McKay, whose anthem of black militancy, ‘If We Must Die’, amounted to a direct application of esprit de corps to the embattled blacks in post-war America. Whether in the colonies or in home front race relations, little changed in the ensuing decades as the British Commonwealth and the United States prepared for and fought World War II. Fascism was recognised by some as a unique threat to racial minorities and people of colour. Langston Hughes doubted, though, whether the Western liberal democracies were truly committed to opposing either fascism or racism. In a series of poems written while travelling as a journalist in Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Hughes adopted the persona of a black Alabamian serving in the international brigades. When ‘Johnny’ meets a dying Moorish soldier, representing one of thousands employed

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 327

30/01/2012 16:24

328

mark w. van wienen

by Generalissimo Franco’s army, he views the man as pathetically deluded. But the Moor’s story is simultaneously revelatory about why Britain and the United States remained neutral in the conflict. Britain, Johnny notes, also has colonies in Africa, and ‘I guess that’s why old England / And I reckon Italy, too, / Is afraid to let a workers’ Spain / Be too good to me and you –’.8 The full national mobilisation demanded by World War II may render it fitting that one of the most sustained poetic engagements with the war was by an African American female civilian, Gwendolyn Brooks. Brooks’s twelve-sonnet sequence, Gay Chaps at the Bar, based in part on the poet’s correspondence with her brother serving in the army, explores the range of African American military experience. Some of the poems affirm the utter colour-blindness of wartime experience, as ‘Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity. . .’ asserts the individuality of each soldier – even in death – that altogether resists the blanket categories of racial difference. ‘Piano After War’ anticipates the post-war experience of survivor guilt. ‘The White Troops had Their Orders but the Negroes Looked Like Men’ records and resists the racist attitudes of the segregated US military. Not only racial tensions but the uncertainties of a world shattered by total war, and about to be immersed in the Cold War, work subtly even through the concluding lines of the sequence, anticipating the soldiers’ return: For even if we come out standing up How shall we smile, congratulate: and how Settle in chairs? Listen, listen. The step Of iron feet again. And again wild.9 Literature of the Holocaust, discussed elsewhere in this volume, relates as well to a discussion of race, racism and war literature. In US literature, responses to the internment of Japanese-American citizens must also be mentioned. The internment was benign compared with the Nazis’ final solution, yet it was a grave violation of civil rights and indicates a pattern of white American indifference toward the peoples of Asia that shaped the conflicts to come in Korea and Indochina as well as the conduct of the Pacific war, including the atomic bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The haiku first published in internment camp newspapers testify both to the humanity of the Japanese-American internees, their courage in facing injustice, and the subtle indignities of life during years under military guard. Other literary expressions of the internment experience include Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar (1973) and Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976), which draw upon Houston’s and Yamada’s first-hand experience as young girls in the camps. Yet another critical perspective on World War II, race and racism is offered by the Trinidadian-born historian and political activist C. L. R. James. One line of James’s analysis continued the critiques of home front racism and colonialism articulated by Du Bois in response to World War I. Living in the United States in 1940 (and throughout the war), James scoffed at government appeals to black citizens in preparation for yet another ‘war for democracy’.10 As for British and American appeals against the racist and expansionist agendas of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, James wonders where such commitment to anti-racism and anti-colonialism had been when in 1935 Mussolini had seized Ethiopia, the last independent African nation. In 1941, moreover, James neither followed the changed Soviet line when the Nazi–Soviet pact was shattered by Operation Barbarossa (as other socialists were doing) nor offered his support for black mobilisation

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 328

30/01/2012 16:24

race in war literature

329

(as Du Bois had during World War I). He sought instead to articulate a new Marxist position looking beyond the ideologies of all principal players in the conflict. Describing the political economies both of East and West as defined by ‘rationalisation’ that stressed bureaucratic authority and travestied genuine democracy, James charted a path for mass democracy in Africa and other colonised regions of the world.11 Particularly he attacked the notion that Great Britain and other colonisers had the best interests of its colonial subjects at heart, and that democratic self-government would be instituted as a matter of course when colonials had been civilised according to European standards. ‘The only settled policy of Her Majesty’s government,’ James countered, ‘has been to get out where to stay any longer is impossible.’12 James’s work compels recognition of the ways that the forces and ideals unleashed by World War II rippled outward through the colonised world for decades. Viewed positively, racial and nationalist identities catalysed during the war led to independence movements that were successful, sooner or later, throughout much of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. In the 1950s, harried out of the United States for his pro-Soviet sympathies, W. E. B. Du Bois embraced the new African states as the fulfilment of a dream. When in the 1960s, near the end of his life, Du Bois renounced his US citizenship and emigrated to Ghana, he was fêted by Kwame Nkrumah as the intellectual father of Pan-Africanism. Du Bois reciprocated by hailing Nkrumah as Africa’s political saviour. Du Bois did not live to observe the difficulties that lay ahead for African self-government: single-party states, cronyism and corruption, protracted civil wars, and intractable problems of poverty and disease. James did. For the most part James, like Du Bois, stood by Nkrumah. Yet he asserted that Nkrumah and other African leaders had failed on at least one critical point, in their inability to synthesise traditional African communal values and Western-style modernisation.13 In effect, their philosophy remained colonised even as their governments were nominally independent. From the critical perspective articulated by James, the repercussions of colonialism continue to be felt throughout the so-called developing world. Indeed, given that the former colonial powers, Russia and the United States have continued to exert their leverage there, the hierarchical relations initiated under colonisation have largely remained in place to this day. Thus Africa’s many challenges, including the recent and terrible civil wars in Rwanda, the Republic of Congo and elsewhere, represent an ongoing legacy of colonisation. Of course, the wars in Korea and Vietnam were also the direct descendants of racially inflected colonialist ventures, whether Japan’s colonisation of Korea or France’s of Vietnam. The poem ‘Commentary’, by Korean War naval officer Keith Wilson, suggests that racial difference, coded in skin colour, prevents Americans from caring about the war’s high casualties. Speaking of high civilian casualties, the poem’s speaker observes that ‘The women, their admittedly / brown faces frozen in the agony / of steel buried in their stomachs’ are ‘not piled high enough’ to get the attention of US civilians in their living rooms ‘with TV, soft / chairs & the hiss / of opened beer’.14 Some texts from the Korean War challenge racial categories by their unmistakably cultural understanding between Americans and South Koreans. And surely, when ally and enemy were distinguishable only on political and ideological grounds, not ethnicity or race or scarcely even culture, does not this go some distance toward demonstrating the utter arbitrariness of race? Vern Sneider’s short story ‘A Long Way from Home’ describes the friendship of an American soldier with a fresh recruit, trained hastily and integrated into a US unit as a replacement. At first it is cultural misunderstanding that predominates:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 329

30/01/2012 16:24

330

mark w. van wienen

for instance, because the Americans have difficulty with Korean names, the replacements are all given new names – Irish names. But Kim Won Il, alias ‘Patrick Tobin’, gradually befriends his assigned American mentor, and when green American troops supply the next batch of replacements, it is Kim and other Koreans who help to initiate them.15 If the story gestures to America’s cultural imperialism and its history of enforced assimilation, the rapidity of Kim’s adoption of American manners also asserts no essential difference whatsoever between soldiers of the East and the West. This kind of effort is carried over and intensified in Vietnam War literature. Larry Rottman’s ‘Thi Bong Dzu’ adopts the perspective of a Viet Cong child-soldier, with the effect not merely of humanising the enemy but also of rendering strange the American soldier. In a destabilising inversion of the customary Western procedure, Rottman’s narrator-protagonist demonises the American invader in terms of racial difference. Thi has heard his father speak of the Americans as ‘“Bastards! Murderers! Animals!”’ and picks up especially on the bestial characterisation, describing them as ‘hairy strangers’ and wondering ‘why only monkeys and U.S. soldiers dared defy’ the afternoon sun.16 The strategy of challenging racial difference not merely by empathising with Vietnamese perspectives but by inhabiting their consciousness reaches its apotheosis in Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, each of which is focalised through a different Vietnamese persona. Some of the more optimistic of the stories feature relationships between Vietnamese women and American men. ‘Letters from My Father’ is about an Amerasian daughter long separated from her father, who nevertheless reconnects with him through letters written to her and on her behalf, including a letter of protest in which he accuses the US government of racism: ‘“If this were a goddamn white woman, a Russian ballet dancer and her daughter, you people would have them on a plane in twenty-four hours.”’17 But if Butler’s collection points toward post-racial understanding, it describes also how intractable cultural difference can become. Most disturbing is the lead story, ‘Open Arms’, in which a VC political operative, once a true believer in the North’s egalitarian ideology, has defected to the South after his wife and children are killed in a Viet Cong reprisal massacre. Assigned to work with an Australian unit, Thâp comes to trust the Australians and their American allies. But then, one night, they trick him into watching pornographic movies with them, making cruel sport of what they perceive as his prudery as well as tormenting him over the loss of his wife. The partial inversion of Rudyard Kipling’s representation of gender and race relations hardly makes the poem less invidious. That here the bodies of white women are the subject of exploitation rather than women of colour does not make them any less misogynist. And that the Canadian officers and soldiers cannot – or will not –comprehend the sensibility of their Vietnamese comrade suggests they are divided by a chasm as evil and unbridgeable as any defined by racial categories. The only suggestion that such a chasm can, in fact, be crossed is that the Vietnamese narrator of the story (who manifestly understands Thâp’s disillusionment and outrage) is after all the fictive creation of a white American ex-serviceman, Butler. Significantly, works by minority American authors tend to offer fewer moments of cultural transcendence. One of a handful of war novels by African American authors, Walter Dean Myers’s Fallen Angels is classified as young adult fiction, but the book handles adroitly the familiar story of a soldier’s coming-of-age from the perspective of a young black man from Harlem. Sometimes military camaraderie brings together the soldiers, who represent the range of US multicultural diversity. Just as often it drives them apart. Particularly

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 330

30/01/2012 16:24

race in war literature

331

when the story’s black sergeant returns home and is replaced with a white officer whose decisions seem tainted by race prejudice, the black soldiers band together for self-defence. Moreover, the novel’s black characters are aware of the parallels between anti-black and anti-Vietnamese prejudices, one character noting that when an openly racist white soldier says ‘gooks’ it sounds like ‘nigger’.18 In the end, though, Fallen Angels indicates only limited advance in breaking down racial barriers. It asserts blackness as a cultural rather than a racial identity, in so far as the Italian- and Jewish-American characters affiliate themselves with the African American faction, but the fact that this self-protective group must exist in the first place points to an ongoing pattern of racism in the ranks. That racism complicated relationships both among US soldiers and between Americans and Vietnamese is central to Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry collection Dien Cai Dau. Several poems testify to the effectiveness of communist propaganda focused on American racism. At the same time, ‘The One-Legged Stool’, a prose poem that records the stream-ofconsciousness of a black POW, offers a speaker who refuses to believe that white soldiers also in the prison have turned on him, and who finds commonality between his VC jailor and Southern racists: ‘With your eyes pressed against the face-window, you’re like a white moon over Stone Mountain.’19 In counterpoint to Butler’s fiction, Komunyakaa’s work sees relationships between Western men (both black and white) and non-Western women as being no more likely to challenge cultural-racial barriers than to build them up to unscalable heights. Just as strongly as Butler’s ‘Letters from My Father’ affirms the identity of an Anglo-Asian daughter, Komunyakaa’s ‘Dui Boi, Dust of Life’ champions an Afro-Asian son. But this poem sidesteps black–white tensions, which become the focal point of ‘Tu Du Street’, about a Saigon district of bars and brothels: There’s more than a nation inside us, as black & white soldiers touch the same lovers minutes apart, tasting each other’s breath, without knowing these rooms run into each other like tunnels leading to the underworld.20 The allusion to the literal tunnels used by the Viet Cong turns the poem’s closing image back toward the interconnections between Vietnamese and American identities, referenced earlier when the speaker observes that ‘we fought the brothers of these women / we hold now in our arms’. In either case, the fact that the hostile separations between men can be mediated only through the bodies of exploited women – and that the connecting tunnels run through hell – signifies the persistence of destructive, multiple racial divisions in time of war toward the end of the twentieth century as well as at its beginning.

Notes For their expertise in Korean and Vietnam War literature, I acknowledge gratefully the assistance of Larry Johannessen, Northern Illinois University, and W. D. Ehrhart, the Haverford School, Haverford, Pennsylvania. 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘World War and the Color Line’, Crisis (November 1914), p. 29.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 331

30/01/2012 16:24

332

mark w. van wienen

2. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War’, Crisis (June 1919), pp. 63–87. 3. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, in The Five Nations (London: Methuen, 1900), p. 81. 4. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ladies’, in The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 11, Verses, 1889–1896 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), p. 329. 5. William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., ‘[The Anglo-Saxon Christians, with Gatling gun and sword!]’, in Mark W. Van Wienen (ed.), Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 42; William Vaughn Moody, ‘An Ode in Time of Hesitation’, in Poems and Poetic Dramas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), vol. 1, pp. 15–25. 6. Karle Wilson Baker, ‘Unser Gott’, in Van Wienen, pp. 62–3. 7. Lucian Watkins, ‘The Negro Soldiers of America: What We Are Fighting For’, in Van Wienen, pp. 221–2. 8. Langston Hughes, ‘Letter from Spain’, in Collected Works, vol. 1, Poems: 1921–1940, ed. Arnold Rampersad (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), p. 253. 9. Gwendolyn Brooks, Gay Chaps at the Bar, in Selected Poems (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 29. 10. C. L. R. James, ‘Why Negroes Should Oppose the War’, in Fighting Racism in World War II, ed. Fred Stanton (New York: Monad, 1980), p. 29. 11. C. L. R. James, with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, State Capitalism and World Revolution (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), pp. 126, 130. 12. C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1977), p. 34. 13. Ibid. pp. 184–5. 14. Keith Wilson, ‘Commentary’, in W. D. Ehrhart and Philip K. Jason (eds), Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of the Korean War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), p. 201. 15. Vern Sneider, ‘A Long Way from Home’, in Ehrhart and Jason, p. 17. 16. Larry Rottman, ‘Thi Bong Dzu’, in H. Bruce Franklin (ed.), The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems (Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1996), pp. 20, 22. 17. Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), p. 72. 18. Walter Dean Myers, Fallen Angels (New York: Scholastic, 1988), p. 54. 19. Yusef Komunyakaa, ‘The One-Legged Stool’, in Dien Cai Dau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), p. 42. 20. Yusef Komunyakaa, ‘Tu Du Street’, in Dien Cai Dau, p. 29.

Further Reading Chinn, Sarah E., Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (London: Continuum, 2000). de Cristoforo, Violet Kazue (ed.), May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Haiku (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1997). Ebbatson, Roger, An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Franklin, H. Bruce, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Metres, Philip, Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront Since 1941 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007). Redding, Arthur, Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 332

30/01/2012 16:24

race in war literature

333

Rice, Laura, ‘African Conscripts/European Conflicts: Race, Memory, and the Lessons of War’, in Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 45–77. Van Wienen, Mark W., Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Whalan, Mark, The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi (eds), Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 333

30/01/2012 16:24

Espionage and Literature from the First World War

34

A SPY UNDER EVERY BED: ESPIONAGE AND POPULAR LITERATURE FROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR Celia M. Kingsbury

H

istorical data indicates that German spies operated in the United States and Great Britain during the First World War. Yet laws such as The Espionage Act and The Sedition Act in the US and the UK’s Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), as well as organisations such as the British MI5, were used to gather information on protest groups and individual citizens who posed no threat to either British or American national security. Linked to the massive propaganda campaign in the First World War, the fear of spies bordered on paranoia in the public consciousness and became a prevalent theme in popular war literature. Historian John Keegan suggests that actual spying is often ‘prone to delay and defect’.1 In the time necessary for a scout to cross enemy lines, gather information and return with it, the enemy’s position may have changed.2 Spy fiction, Keegan argues, ‘deeply affected popular attitudes to intelligence work’.3 While the glamour associated with espionage marked the profession as one worthy of admiration, or loathing, Keegan insists that ‘it is notable that very few even of the most celebrated spy stories actually establish a connection between the spy’s activities and the purpose for which he presumably risks his life in the field.’4 That is, while we fear and revere spies, in the real world of war they seem to have little impact. Phillip Knightley concurs with Keegan that First World War intelligence was limited and that the ‘individual agent’ was the least effective. Knightley argues that stories of infamous spies such as Mata Hari ‘are indeed legends, romantic nonsense that thrives in the intellectual twilight of the intelligence world, folk tales on which new recruits are nurtured and trained’.5 Though James Bond’s exploits may be etched into our public consciousness, he is largely a myth. Real intelligence work, such as the interception and breaking of codes, accomplished by sitting for hours behind a desk, is not the stuff of fiction or film. By the end of 1914, the British navy had, inadvertently, seized all three of Germany’s code books and used them successfully to decipher German telegraph messages.6 Undoubtedly the mystique of the spy was reinforced through the stories of actual individuals who were accused of and in some cases executed for spying. Among the most famous and still often alluded to cases is that of Edith Cavell. Historical ‘reality’ became the stuff of propaganda and eventually enhanced or paralleled the plots of popular fiction and films. Edith Cavell is perhaps the most celebrated martyr of the First World War. A

334

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 334

30/01/2012 16:24

espionage and literature from the first world war

335

highly trained nurse, Cavell established, in 1907, a nursing school in Belgium, the École Belge d’Infirmières Diplômées, which became known as the Berkendael Institute. When Germany occupied Belgium in 1914, all British staff were given the opportunity to return to England. Cavell remained, and her choice led to her subsequent death. On 5 August 1915, Cavell was arrested for helping French and British soldiers escape from occupied Belgium. Cavell never denied her role in the escape plots, and she was shot at dawn on 11 October 1915. Before Cavell was shot, American diplomat Hugh Gibson tried to appeal directly to the Kaiser to stay her execution, but his request to seek Wilhelm’s intervention was denied. According to Martin Gilbert, the Kaiser was ‘greatly displeased’ at his subalterns for failing to pass on Gibson’s request.7 Outrage at Cavell’s execution was virtually universal and ultimately became a recruiting tool in the US. Technically, Cavell was not what would be considered a spy in the traditional sense, yet she did belong to a large underground group that provided, among other things, forged documents and civilian clothing for soldiers trying to escape into Holland or France. In 1928, the silent film and simultaneously released novel Dawn revived the issue of Cavell, although the nations involved were supposedly trying to make peace. Captain Reginald Berkeley, who authored both the ‘film play’, as he calls it, and the novel, bills Dawn as ‘A Biographical Novel of Edith Cavell’. In a lengthy ‘Footnote to History’ that precedes the novel, Berkeley summarises Cavell’s trial and execution, then goes on to explain to his readers that he has changed the names of all the characters involved except Cavell’s and that he is ‘reconstructing the story as [he] think[s] it may have happened’.8 Drawing Cavell into underground activities immediately, Berkeley places before the nurse the dilemma of saving the son of her grocer Madame Rappard. Just escaped from a German camp after killing a sentry, Jacques has the unfortunate luck of returning to his mother at the same time as a German officer enters looking to billet troops. With little thought, Cavell agrees to hide the escaped soldier in her hospital. Cavell quickly takes on the characteristics of the spy as she gives him civilian clothes and burns his uniform after first cutting off the metal buttons so the old man who cleans out the furnace will not find them. After Jacques is safely smuggled out of Belgium on a barge, Cavell remembers his words, ‘there are hundreds like me. . . living like animals – in the fields.’9 Thus begins Cavell’s fictional career of smuggling soldiers out of occupied Belgium. Berkeley, of course, depicts Cavell as a saint, in one passage declaring, ‘Miss Cavell, in forty-five years packed with endeavor, had found no time for love, as men understand it, or for mating. Spiritually she had made herself a mother to the sick and helpless, and more recently to the fugitives.’10 The fugitives unfortunately lead Cavell to her death, in reality and in fiction. To one detail regarding her death Berkeley is faithful, to another perhaps not. On the eve of her execution when visited by a chaplain, Cavell declares ‘Everyone has been very kind to me here [. . .] I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone.’11 These ‘last words’, which Berkeley accurately reports, became a sort of battle cry as Cavell grew in importance as a propaganda figure. In some propaganda, Cavell’s generosity toward her executioners is excised, leaving only the phrase ‘Patriotism is not enough.’ In the 1939 remake of the film Dawn, Nurse Edith Cavell, a talking version, the words are also accurately portrayed, but they are delivered in a voiceover as a congregation sings ‘Abide With Me’ at her memorial service in England after the war. The second detail (most likely apocryphal) employed by Berkeley is of a German Private Rammler who refuses to serve on the firing squad and is shot for insubordination. Rammler cannot see the justice in shooting Cavell, a detail which at once absolves the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 335

30/01/2012 16:24

336

celia m. kingsbury

average German soldier and further vilifies the German court that tried Cavell. Berkeley’s novel and both films glorify Cavell’s martyrdom, as does her statue, which still stands near Trafalgar Square as a reminder of her service to the nursing profession and to the state. Nevertheless her activities parallel the actions of fictional spies and underground activists. When Cavell hides Jacques Rappard, she cleverly rigs the basement of the hospital so that the door to an old wine cellar, and escape, are concealed behind a linen press. Lechmere Worrall and J. E. Harold Terry’s The White Feather established spy paranoia as a subject for drama and novels in the early days of the war. The play opened on 10 December 1914 under the name The Man Who Stayed at Home, but the work was also ‘novelised’ and published under the title The White Feather in 1915, and it is to this text that we shall refer. The play ran for almost two years at the Royalty in London and was also performed in major cities in the United States under both titles. Billed as a spy thriller and also as a comedy, the play focuses on Christopher Brent, who, at the outset of the work, pretends to be a buffoon in order to hide his role as a British spy whose mission is to thwart a German plot to blow up British troop ships in the harbour near the resort where Christopher and his fiancée, along with her father, are vacationing. Christopher’s apparent lack of patriotism and his feigned stupidity earn him a white feather from an avidly patriotic neighbour, who actually helps Christopher conceal his identity from the German spies at the inn, one of whom is its proprietor, Mrs Sanderson. Through a convoluted plot involving a Marconi hidden in the fireplace and carrier pigeons, both meant to signal a German submarine lurking in the waters off the coast, Christopher outs the spies –including Charles Sanderson, the innkeeper’s son, who is a mole working for the British Admiralty – and the evil Fräulein Schroeder, who takes cyanide when she is caught. Christopher’s spy comrade is a South African ‘widow’ Miriam Lee, who gets Christopher in trouble with his fiancée, which further helps provide Christopher cover. Miriam pretends to collaborate with the German spies but instead leads them to the police. In spite of playing dumb, Christopher ultimately turns out to be the dashing, duty-bound hero who, with the help of his sidekick, has foiled a plot to kill British soldiers en route to the front lines and removed a mole from the Admiralty.12 Not entirely Bond-like, Christopher is still, by the end of the work, a man to be admired and envied. He gets the girl and earns the respect of all the male characters. By initially sacrificing his self-respect, even in front of his fiancée, Christopher is the perfect fictional spy because he contradicts the historical notion that individual spies had little actual effect in the course of the war. In addition, the slightly seductive Miriam Lee reinforces the stereotype that female spies are either saints or prostitutes. Near the end of the play, Miriam offers sisterly council to Christopher’s fiancée, but she retains the hard edge necessary for a career in the secret service. Because The White Feather was so popular, audiences and readers must have known the basic plot early on, but continued to see the play and read the book to reassure themselves that British spies were superior to German spies and would help clinch the war effort. In the US, spies found their way into fiction intended for adolescent girls. Among the most popular of these novels, the Ruth Fielding series included three books set during the First World War, and each of the three involves spies, all of whom are captured or thwarted by the brave and independent heroine.13 We encounter the first spy, Mrs Mantel, who appears in the unlikely location of a Methodist Ladies’ Aid meeting in the small town of Cheslow near Ruth’s home. Mrs Mantel is spreading malicious gossip about the Red Cross which Ruth has gone to the meeting to promote. Ruth next finds Mrs Mantel actu-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 336

30/01/2012 16:24

espionage and literature from the first world war

337

ally working for the Red Cross at the state headquarters where she is embezzling money. Ruth’s duties keep her close to Mrs Mantel, even after Ruth is sent to France in the second novel, and it is there Ruth catches her. Jose, a Mexican and one of Mrs Mantel’s associates at the state Red Cross headquarters, also reappears in the second novel. Jose’s presence establishes the existence of a sinister spy ring that reveals its presence in small-town America as well as near the front lines in France. Ruth’s vigilance and spunk allow her to catch the spies and even at one point to cross over behind German lines to act as a spy herself, all without her girlfriends’ knowledge. Perhaps the most widely read of First World War spy novelists is John Buchan. Two novels published during the war, The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, and the third, Mr Standfast,14 published immediately following the war, trace the activities of the sometimes reluctant spy Richard Hannay. A civilian at the beginning of the first novel, Hannay joins the British Army as a Captain when the war begins and finishes as a Major General. Cunning, but also coincidentally lucky, Hannay is indeed a precursor of the James Bond figure with one exception. Hannay is not a womaniser, and in fact, until Hannay falls in love in Mr Standfast, the only prominent female character is Greenmantle’s evil German, Hilda von Einem. Fearless, trustworthy, and a loyal patriot and gentleman, Hannay only resents his espionage assignments because they take him away from the front lines. Buchan sees to it that Hannay’s voice is consistent and sympathetic and his escapades are rousing page-turners. Even John Keegan, whose words about the value of the spy in the field we have acknowledged, pays tribute to Buchan and Richard Hannay when he calls Hannay’s character ‘one of the triumphs of The Thirty-Nine Steps’.15 The novels still sell, and The Thirty-Nine Steps has been made into a number of films. The 1935 Alfred Hitchcock version is set between the wars and deviates significantly from Buchan’s plot, adding characters and changing the meaning of the ‘steps’, although in tone, the film does capture Buchan’s intent – an international spy ring is thwarted, at least for the time being. A later version, filmed in 1978 and directed by Don Sharp, spawned two TV miniseries in the US, and a BBC version of the novel aired at the end of 2008. Hannay’s popularity is well deserved, although most of the films cannot resist adding a love interest where Buchan has none. David Stafford, speaking of the novels as ‘a popular archive of British history’, attests to their popularity, not only among adolescents who found in Richard Hannay a role model, but among adults as well.16 Stafford also reminds readers that Buchan himself had a distinguished career in intelligence. In 1917, he became Director of the Department of Information and undoubtedly used some of his experience there as background for his novels.17 At the beginning of the 1915 novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay has just returned to England after making his ‘pile’ as he calls it, in South Africa, ‘not one of the big ones, but good enough for me’,18 and he is bored senseless. One evening Hannay is approached by his upstairs neighbour Franklin P. Scudder who draws Hannay into an intricate plot to expose a group of anarchists who, if they achieve their goals, will undoubtedly start a war. Hannay admires the American Scudder and hides him until he returns one night to find Scudder with a knife in his back. Hannay realises he will be suspected of murder, and, in the first of many disguises in the three novels, escapes his apartment building in the clothes of the milkman. Hannay means to go to Scotland, lie low for a few weeks and then return to finish what Scudder has started, to prevent the assassination of Constantine Karolides in London on 15 June. Thus begins a series of adventures for Hannay including various disguises, captures and escapes. Hannay is invigorated by the action and no

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 337

30/01/2012 16:24

338

celia m. kingsbury

longer regrets returning to London; he is also, although he does not know it, embarking on a career as a respected British spy. Police and evildoers alike pursue Hannay through Scotland as he tries to decode a black book Scudder has secreted in Hannay’s tobacco jar before his murder. Through a series of coincidences, including blowing up some outbuildings where he is being held captive, Hannay finally links up with Sir Walter Bullivant of the Foreign Office. Sir Walter becomes Hannay’s friend and the instigator of his missions in all three novels. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, the steps are just that, steps leading to the sea where a group called The Black Stone intends to smuggle information out of England after having succeeded in the assassination of Karolides. Of course, as history indicates, none of Hannay’s escapades can prevent the start of the war, a detail that perhaps underscores John Keegan’s assertion that ultimately spies did not change the course of war. Still, the novel serves as a reminder that the German threat is always lurking in the most innocentappearing characters and that all of Hannay’s cunning and bravery is required to stave off that threat. At the beginning of Greenmantle, now Major Richard Hannay is convalescing after the Battle of Loos with his friend and colleague Sandy Arbuthnot when a telegram arrives from Sir Walter Bullivant. Sir Walter has another mission for Hannay, this time on the Eastern Front. The only ‘clue’ Sir Walter can provide is a slip of paper taken from a dying agent, Harry Bullivant, Sir Walter’s son. On the slip of paper are three words: ‘Kasredin, cancer, and v. I’.19 The words have to do with an Islamic prophesy of a ‘star rising in the West’. The Germans, of course, plan to use the prophesy to gain control of Turkey and the rest of the Middle East, and it is up to Hannay and his cohorts to stop them. In Greenmantle, readers are first introduced to the American John Blenkiron and the South African Peter Pienaar, who also reappear in the third novel. Blenkiron, like John Buchan, suffers from a duodenal ulcer and can eat only boiled fish and drink boiled milk. But Blenkiron is a master of deception, an admirable spy who travels the world as a neutral American, fed up with the war and open for dissent. The dyspeptic Blenkiron can kill Germans when he needs to, and in the third novel, Mr Standfast, he does. Peter Pienaar, a guide and old hunting friend of Hannay’s when Hannay was a mining engineer in South Africa, is skilled at role playing and just about everything else a spy needs to be skilled at. Blenkiron, Sandy and Hannay are to travel by separate routes and arrive in Constantinople in two months. Blenkiron will be travelling as himself, Sandy eventually posing as a Turk, and Hannay as the South African Boer, Cornelius Brandt, who is something of a troublemaker. In this disguise, Hannay/Brandt meets up with Peter, who catches on to the disguise and joins the mission without blinking. The plot of Greenmantle is far more complex than that of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Brandt arrives in Constantinople pursued by Germans and cannot shake them even in other disguises. The Germans, however, never guess his true identity. It is the wily Blenkiron who meets up with the villain of the piece, Hilda von Einem, the v. I of the clues. Sandy, posing as the leader of a band of Turkish minstrels, also becomes one of her minions, perhaps her lover. Von Einem is involved in a convoluted plot to take over the Middle East, which, if successful, will seriously damage the Allies’ chances for victory. The novel concludes at the battle of Erzerum after a number of adventures including a chase on the rooftops of that city. At every step, Hannay remains the capable spy, the loyal comrade and the willing patriot. During his first meeting with von Einem, Hannay remarks that she looks ‘like some destroying fury of a Norse legend. At that moment I think I first really feared her; before I had half hated and half admired.’20 At their last confrontation, when von Einem tells Hannay that she

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 338

30/01/2012 16:24

espionage and literature from the first world war

339

will have him hanged, he declares, ‘Never in my life had I been so pleased. I had got my revenge at last. This woman had singled me out above the others as an object of her wrath and I almost loved her for it.’21 Hannay’s hatred for von Einem seems to suggest not only his anti-German feelings, but perhaps a general distrust of women as well. In spite of Hilda von Einem, Hannay has fallen in love by the end of chapter 1 of Mr Standfast. Mary Lamington, whom Hannay has seen working as a VAD in a hospital, is Hannay’s contact as the novel opens. Stunning and brave at once, Mary seems to have a tacit understanding that she and Hannay will eventually marry. Hannay has risen to the rank of Brigadier General and does not want the assignment, which for a time requires he do nothing but travel and keep his ears open. In spite of Hannay’s reservations, Mr Standfast becomes the most complex of the three war novels, relying on Pilgrim’s Progress for much of its imagery, but at the same time reflecting a darkness not quite present in the other novels. The character Ivery, an alias for the German Graf von Schwabing, should have been executed at the end of The Thirty-Nine Steps, but somehow escapes. Ivery remains a formidable and evil opponent for Hannay until the end. Actually published in 1919, Mr Standfast concludes before the war ends and leaves readers a touch saddened by the deaths of two major characters. Reflecting perhaps the growing frustration toward the war, the novel nevertheless portrays Hannay as the same gentleman spy, this time with his true love as his fellow spy and, interestingly enough, as his equal. The presence of Mrs Mantel at the Methodist Ladies’ Aid meeting echoes the notion that German spies were indeed everywhere. They owned inns on the British coast and worked for the British Admiralty. By 1918, the perceived threat of spies was so great, the US Espionage Act was used to arrest protestors such as Rose Stokes, who declared that ‘no government which is for the profiteers can be for the people, and I am for the people.’22 Propaganda campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic fed the public fear that spies and saboteurs were literally around every corner, under every bed. Popular literature also reflected and fed into those fears that only a hero such as Christopher Brent or a heroine such as Ruth Fielding could save the day, substantiating historical arguments that spies as we know them exist primarily in our imaginations.

Notes 1. John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (Toronto: Key Porter, 2003), p. 25. 2. Ibid. p. 21. 3. Ibid. p. 1. 4. Ibid. p. 2. 5. Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession (London: Pimlico, 2003), pp. 45–6. 6. Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–1918 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), p. 3. 7. Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 202. 8. Reginald Berkeley, Dawn: A Biographical Novel of Edith Cavell (London: Sears, 1928), p. xxxviii. 9. Ibid. p. 31. 10. Ibid. p. 95. 11. Ibid. p. 213. 12. Lechmere Worrall and J. E. Harold Terry, The White Feather (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1915). 13. Alice B. Emerson, Ruth Fielding at the War Front (New York: Cupples and Leon, 1918); Ruth

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 339

30/01/2012 16:24

340

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

celia m. kingsbury

Fielding in the Red Cross (New York: Cupples and Leon, 1919); Ruth Fielding Homeward Bound (New York: Cupples and Leon, 1919). John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (London: William Blackwood and Sons, [1915] 1927); Greenmantle (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1916); Mr Standfast: An Enthralling Present Day Romance (Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919). John Keegan, ‘The Self-made Scot’, The New Criterion, 23.2 (October 2004), pp. 38–42 (p. 41). David Stafford, ‘John Buchan’s Tales of Espionage: A Popular Archive of British History’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire, 18.1 (April 1983), pp. 1–21 (pp. 1–2). Ibid. pp. 6–7. Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, p. 10. Buchan, Greenmantle, p. 21. Ibid. p. 228. Ibid. p. 326. ‘Rose Pastor Stokes Is Arrested Again’, The New York Times, 24 March 1918, p. 16.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 340

30/01/2012 16:24

35

REFLECTIONS ON THE ENEMY: FROM EVIL NAZIS TO GOOD GERMANS Petra Rau

I

n 1944 the Foreign Office in London issued a booklet entitled Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany which was meant to prepare troops bound for the continent for meeting ‘a strange people in a strange, enemy country’.1 The Instructions repeatedly warned the British soldier of the dangers of misplaced empathy and fraternisation. The booklet also packaged military conquest as the moral victory over German mentality, prone to belligerence, authoritarianism and sentimentality. In accordance with Allied policy, it grounded the Germans’ collective responsibility for the war in their deeply flawed national character which had ‘worsened a good deal under Nazi influence’.2 Having caused two World Wars, something seemed fundamentally wrong with this truculent people. Much writing about Germany during and after the war, whether political, journalistic or literary, was therefore preoccupied with fascism not as a genocidal ideology or a historical vicissitude, but with Nazism as a political symptom of a national psychopathology. The conflation of ‘Germans’ and ‘Nazis’ in the identity of the enemy was the result of ‘Vansittartism’, after Lord Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Advisor to the British Government, who also coined the term ‘collective guilt’.3 This definition of enmity through national character also helped to sanction specific wartime military strategies such as carpet bombing. It also provided a rationale for a range of Allied policies for the post-war settlement, from the Morgenthau Plan to denazification procedures: peace was meant to be tough.4 Given these attitudes amongst Allied policy makers, it is perhaps surprising that in British writing of the Second World War, ‘the enemy’ is rather underrepresented: the fiction of Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, and much of the poetry written about the various theatres of war, seem less concerned with Nazis or Germans than with the way the war tested loyalties and destabilised identity. In fact, there was considerable discomfort in parts of the British population about the largescale bombing campaign inflicted on German cities in order to destroy enemy morale and hamper the German war effort. As Mass Observation found, particularly those who had experienced bombing did not wish to see it inflicted on others: ‘nearly one person in four expresses feelings of uneasiness or revulsion’ about area bombardment.5 Pacifists like the writer and journalist Vera Brittain, who indicted area bombing as a vindictive and disproportionate measure in Seed of Chaos (1944), written after the firebombing of Hamburg, also noted that this uneasiness became apparent in the way in which public acclamation of RAF pilots during the defensive Battle of Britain had not been transferred to the pilots in Bomber Command who now flew nightly raids over Germany.6 The names given to

341

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 341

30/01/2012 16:24

342

petra rau

some of the campaigns – ‘Operation Gomorrah’ (Hamburg), ‘Operation Thunderclap’ (Dresden) or ‘Operation Chastise’ (the Ruhr valley dams) – certainly indicate the War Cabinet’s belief that retaliation was a legitimate means to boost morale on the home front. When Allied troops entered Germany in 1944 they could hardly be less prepared for what they would find: the unprecedented scale of destruction, the humanitarian disaster caused by mass migration and expulsion, and the unspeakable conditions in the concentration camps where inmates died by the hundreds every day. Well intentioned as it might have been, the Instructions booklet with its insistence on essential difference and emotional detachment was symptomatic of how ignorant both military strategists and ordinary soldiers were of the task ahead. To get a better sense of the confrontation with the enemy we have to turn to war reportage, travel writing and journalism. The sheer number of accounts is a testament to the bewildering complexity of what war and Nazism had created. Thus Alan Moorehead, war correspondent for the London Daily Express, on his first contact with Germans after crossing the Rhine: It was the beginning of an immensely complicated relationship between ourselves and the defeated, a story that kept changing its plot, so that the farther you went on with it the more it altered its direction and was full of loose ends and contradictions leading nowhere. As soon as you discovered evil and malice in one place you were immediately confronted with kindness and genuine innocence in another, and there was every nuance of these extremes and every kind of character from the villain to the fool. And all this, no matter where you went or what you did, was placed against the unending tragedy and physical ruin of the country.7 Despite Moorehead’s attempt at differentiation and his insistence on ‘the downright childishness’ of collective guilt, he could only find nuances of Manichean extremes rather than a broad spectrum of human behaviour.8 However, he astutely diagnosed the political uses of the notion of evil in justifying war, particularly after the liberation of the camps in the West: ‘a proof that [we] were engaged against evil’.9 For Moorehead, the real enemy was indifference to the fate of others, whether concentration camp victims in Germany and Poland or starving masses in Bengal. The Germans, on the other hand, stubbornly rejected the view of military defeat as a moral verdict; many felt that civilian suffering through carpet bombing, mass expulsions, dehousing and starvation somehow neutralised the crimes of Nazism. An important compassionate voice against Allied charges of sentimental self-pity was the Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz who pointed to the fate of the German opposition in What Buchenwald Really Means (1945). In Darkest Germany (1947) was his fierce, illustrated critique of conditions in the British sector. Like Stephen Spender in European Witness (1946), Gollancz found that colonial attitudes rather than a fundamental knowledge of the reality of life under Nazism appeared to inform much British occupation policy.10 Ample photographic evidence of defeated Germany was not just a record of the crimes of Nazism; it was also a scornful document of ‘the face of the enemy’ and how that enemy was made to see himself by Allied occupation forces, for instance in the way in which residents of towns next to camps were marched past mass graves.11 In this way, photojournalism became a powerful form of war writing, with Margaret Bourke-White’s Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly (1945) and Lee Miller’s reports for Vogue as some of the most memorable verbal and visual texts from the period.12

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 342

30/01/2012 16:24

reflections on the enemy

343

Allied policy stipulated that the Germans should come to terms with their collective and individual culpabilities and not be allowed to simply blame the Nazi leadership as so many did in their first encounters with the Allies: ‘No one is a Nazi. No one ever was’, commented the US war correspondent Martha Gellhorn sarcastically in April 1945.13 For Gellhorn, ‘probably the most melancholy experience of all’, because the most representative in 1946, was the encounter with a young German Panzer grenadier who completely failed to see the culpability of the German people or the Nazi leadership.14 Denazification programmes based on questionnaires were meant to remove from office Nazi functionaries and assist political and moral re-education. Stephen Spender, writing of his travels through Germany in 1945, struggled to make sense of what he saw of the Germans and of the Allied occupation alike. Many British officers, more pragmatic than their US counterparts, seemed largely uninterested in denazification, found it inappropriate and ungallant to ‘take sides’ in another country’s politics, or, conversely, found collective guilt an easier and less resource-intensive way to deal with the former enemy.15 Denazification also got in the way of economic recovery and running an efficient occupation government whose success depended on German cooperation. Hannah Arendt dismissed denazification for different reasons: it failed to understand the nature of totalitarianism which had left even ‘Good Germans’ morally confused.16 According to the Anglo-Irish writer James Stern, who together with W. H. Auden spent much of his time in 1945 interviewing a cross-section of Germans for the US Gallup organisation, denazification was hardly going to root out Nazism; its poisonous influence over hearts and minds had lasted too long. Alluding to this in the title of his scrupulously balanced travel book The Hidden Damage (1947), he argued that ‘the feeling of guilt among Germans is so colossal that they simply cannot face it, much less give it expression.’17 Precisely because of the scale of this hidden damage; because of the colossal repression that would shape post-war Germany’s emotional nonengagement with its fascist past for decades, the Germans remained a dangerous people.18 These verdicts encapsulate some of the ambivalent attitudes towards a confused and confusing Germany that we find in so much early post-war writing. Doris Lessing ironises this ambivalence as dangerous political naïvety in her chilling short story ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ (1957), about two Britons attempting to holiday in Germany six years after the war.19 That ‘post-war’ should not be confused with ‘post-Nazism’, was an uncomfortable notion in the 1950s when Germany had become a politically expedient ally against the threat of communism. Alongside Wolfgang Koeppen’s novels about post-war Germany, Lessing’s story is one of the most astute fictional assessments of the deep hold Nazism continued to exercise on the German psyche. However, there is considerably less ambivalence towards the Germans in literature about the war crimes tribunals. Stephen Spender’s observations on the Belsen trials clearly indicate the Germans’ unwillingness, shortly after the war, to believe that the crimes of Nazism were anything other than the victors’ propaganda. For the international community, the Nuremberg Trial reinstated both the rule of law and individual responsibility at the highest level of government, whereas for many Germans the indictment of the Nazi leadership exonerated a populace who had only been ‘following orders’. Nonetheless, in her commentary on the trial of Hans Baab, ‘The Terror of Frankfurt Jews’, Kay Boyle found that the juridical process counteracted cynicism and offered ordinary Germans ‘the testimony of simple, honest Germans like themselves, who had nothing to gain by telling a lie’.20 As Rebecca West argued in ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens’, her report on Nuremberg:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 343

30/01/2012 16:24

344

petra rau

It was not only that common sense could predict that if the Nazis were allowed to go free the Germans would not have believed in the genuineness of the Allies’ expressed disapproval of them, and that the good Germans would have been cast down in spirit, while the bad Germans would have wondered how long they need wait for the fun and jobbery to start again.21 Note how West carefully distinguishes here between ‘Nazis’ and ‘Germans’, between ‘good’ Germans and ‘bad’ Germans. Her eloquent reports are haunted by the trial’s failure to provide any psychological insight: ‘We were going to hang eleven of these eighteen men, and imprison the other seven for ten, fifteen, twenty years, or for life; but we had no idea why they had done what they did.’22 West’s metaphor for the specific German mentality that had enabled Nazism is such an astute and thoroughgoing indictment of national character that it completely undermines her efforts to keep Nazis and Germans as separate categories. A one-legged man singularly dedicated to growing enormous cyclamens in a greenhouse in Nuremberg becomes ‘a nightmare figure’, embodying both the moral compartmentalisation that had enabled the horrors of Nazism and (when West returned to Germany to report on the economic miracle and the Berlin blockade) the failure of the Allied occupation to be an ‘enlightening experience’ for the Germans.23 Then as now, the Germans’ ability to work tirelessly and dutifully in the pursuit of an idea – growing cyclamens, recovering productivity, becoming a great nation, exterminating a race – is never counterbalanced by a controlling sense of moral circumspection or ‘faith’ that would bind, shape or direct wealth and power. Rather, the German soul was so rooted in myth and fantasy, so given over to the world of Grimm’s fairy tales that it found a perfect release for infantile impulses in the quasi-religious ideology of Nazism: Germans ‘surrender to fantasy too elemental and wild, which had let loose the forces of madness and death’.24 West’s analysis echoes others’ verdicts on the German character, such as the Instructions’ denial of a ‘well-balanced mind’; Spender’s assessment of the Germans as arrested in adolescence; and the US intelligence officer Saul Padover’s blunt ‘there may be something quite wrong with the Germans.’25 For many of these writers, Germany remained a frightening place. Much of Rebecca West’s argument about German guilt and German character anticipated Arendt’s analysis in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961).26 Arendt keenly observed that the trial was not just part of judiciary process (his guilt seemed well established) but served the larger educational and commemorative agendas of Holocaust memory in Israel. Eichmann’s trial was about the function of law to support cultural identity and cultural memory. Similarly, many of West’s observations in ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens’ about the specific nature of the German–Allied relationship pointed to the ideological uses of German guilt in the construction of post-war identities for both the Germans and the Allies. It is a sign of her perspicacity that many of these issues have resurfaced in recent historiographical and literary discourses: the fate of the millions of expellees from former German territories in the East; the conflict between denazification and reconstruction; the plight of civilians during and after war; the political and moral remit of military occupation. Similarly, the clear moral positions and collective identities underlined by Allied epithets for the war – ‘the just war’ (USA), ‘the great patriotic war’ (USSR), ‘the people’s war’ (UK) – have been questioned in the light of newly available archive material, new genocides, morally murkier conflicts and more indistinct definitions of enmity, not least because the Second World War remains such a frequent moral and military reference point for subsequent conflicts.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 344

30/01/2012 16:24

reflections on the enemy

345

Eichmann in Jerusalem did not just introduce the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ into common parlance. It suggested in the ordinariness of one of the leading Nazi functionaries the perfect ordinariness, dutifulness and meticulousness of the hundreds of thousands of lower- and middle-ranking bureaucrats similarly engaged in the many tasks contributing to modern, industrialised genocide and criminal warfare. Rather than the SA thug or the fanatical ideologue, it is the correct policeman, the disinterested engineer and the officious administrator which deserved the attention of genocide researchers. If Arendt’s report influenced the seminal Holocaust studies of Zygmunt Bauman and Christopher Browning, it did not erode the (by far less radical) expectations of a phenomenology of specifically German monstrosity as ordinariness, whether collective (Goldhagen) or singular (Littell).27 The lucrative historiographical focus on Nazi leaders had certainly helped to construct Nazism as a floating signifier of evil in popular culture. In the 1970s it re-emerged in film and literature as a cultural erotics of absolute power which could not help but echo fascist aesthetics even when deployed ironically.28 That evil Nazis had a firm place in the libidinal landscape of democratic cultures, from classic war films to highbrow literature, from art house cinema to gay pornography disturbed intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault and Saul Friedlander. The most disconcerting symptom of the normalisation of Nazism in contemporary culture is perhaps the trope of the ‘good Nazi’ in popular fiction – Bernie Gunther in Philip Kerr’s novels or Xavier March in Robert Harris’s Fatherland – because this figure enacts a naïve democratic fantasy that is not too dissimilar to the exculpatory mechanism offered by Heinrich Himmler to the ordinary men of the Einsatzgruppen engaged in mass murder: to wear a Nazi uniform and remain ‘decent’.29 More interesting than the clichéd evil Nazi and the paradoxical ‘good Nazi’ is the representation of the ordinary or the ‘good German’ in recent war writing. It does not offer a new phenomenology of Nazism but is an important instrument in probing Allied myths of the Second World War. Reconstructing the enemy directs the focus to the way in which these myths supported now increasingly obsolete post-war constructions of identity that justified the cost of war. Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung (2007) revolves around the troubled friendship between the Anglo-Jewish intellectual Elya Mendel and the Prussian officer Axel von Gottberg, who becomes a member of the Stauffenberg group of aristocrats and officers plotting to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944.30 Loosely modelled on the relationship between Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott zu Solz, the novel pitches personal friendship and individual vanities against national and ethnic loyalties at a time when they seem incommensurable. While Hollywood blockbusters such as Valkyrie (2009) reduce the complex historical Stauffenberg to an action hero, Cartwright is careful to temper any simplistic presentation of a heroic ‘good German’ with a goodly dose of nationalist sentiment of the traditional Prussian kind and mystical visions of German renewal fed by Nietzschean musings on German character as obscure, shrouded and opaque. Von Gottberg is merely a good Nazi – at best a good Prussian – and Cartwright does well to remind us of what that still means: militarism, racism and nationalism. Peter Ho Davies’s The Welsh Girl (2005) radically challenges the myth of ‘the people’s war’ by focusing on the regional frictions the war amplified rather than assuaged; the catalyst for this conflict is a German POW camp in rural Wales.31 For the novel’s Welsh community the war is predominantly an ‘English’ war reverberating with the colonial tensions of ethnic differences: both the English barracks and the German camp disrupt the rural community. The novel’s title also alludes to the derogatory uses of the adjective ‘Welsh’

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 345

30/01/2012 16:24

346

petra rau

as synonymous with deceitful and unreliable, implying that colonialism necessitates such behaviour. The Welsh heroine’s encounters with an Englishman who sexually assaults her and an escaped German POW with whom she shares a moment of bucolic bliss reverse popular myths of good and evil. In the public version of her subsequent pregnancy, the child’s father is the local postmistress’s son, who is missing in action. The unborn child becomes an objective correlative for the origins of cultural memory and popular myth in the need for a more digestible version of ‘reality’ as opposed to the complexity of truth. Historical truth in all its differentiation is also a rather undesirable commodity in Joseph Kanon’s novel The Good German (2001) which takes its neo-noir cue from Orson Welles’s The Third Man and the many pulp novels set in the rubble of post-war Germany, such as Mario Puzo’s The Dark Arena (1953) or James McGovern’s Fräulein (1957).32 Set in the wasteland of bombed Berlin during the Potsdam conference, Kanon’s detective plot probes the nature of moral integrity in wartime. The ‘real’ good German (or righteous gentile) is a policeman who for years supported his Jewish wife after she had been forced into hiding. His obscure fate is contrasted with the official exoneration of a German rocket scientist whose work depended on the exploitation of slave labour. Kanon’s novel is an indictment of the strategic failures of denazification which conveniently ‘cleared’ of potential war crimes and ideological involvement those Germans who proved useful to the Allies in the arms race that soon blossomed into the Cold War: rocket scientists, chemical engineers, intelligence officers and immunologists.33 Perhaps the most radical challenge to the conventional representation of the Nazi enemy is A. L. Kennedy’s novel Day (2007).34 The novel charts its protagonist’s experiences as an RAF rear gunner, a POW in Germany, a bookseller and, eventually, an extra in a war film about British POWs in a German camp – Kennedy’s swipe at the popular mythmaking of films such as The Dambusters and The Great Escape that turn war into a heroic ‘story’. On set in Germany, Alfred Day meets a nameless ‘Good German’, a former POW captured in North Africa who chose to stay in Yorkshire after he lost all his family in the 1943 firestorm on Hamburg. For the gunner and his crew, Operation Gomorrah was ‘trip twenty-six’ and, two days later, trip twenty-seven. (He only sees the scale of devastation in Germany on his daytime flight home from the set.) While Day feels deeply guilty about the raids he flew (‘our ruination’), it is only in the ‘phoney’ representation of war in film that he can face his painful memories.35 The tentative, poignant conversation between the former RAF gunner and the ‘Good German’ highlights the cost of war, the inconceivable damage it has done on all sides not just to bricks and mortar, but to hearts and minds. Day is part of the ongoing debate in Germany and Britain about area bombardment during the Second World War, and it manages an astonishingly deft tightrope walk between an indictment of this strategy and empathy for the men who flew those dangerous missions. Indeed Day never discloses his wartime role in the awkward chat with the Good German, but the scene gradually reverses the conventional roles of enmity and guilt when it closes with the revelation that the Good German’s family was from Hamburg. This is a novel about ordinary soldiers at war (not Browning’s ordinary men engaged in genocide) and therefore Kennedy can credibly maintain a stance that places responsibility for war at the door of policy makers without giving up the notion of individual guilt. But like Richard Bausch in his ironically named novel Peace (2008),36 Kennedy maintains that war makes a mockery of the civilian distinction between killers and soldiers, friends and foes. Increasingly, the enemy is no longer just continental fascism in the guise of the fanatical Nazi or the German-in-uniform. It is also the kind of insular society and the political

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 346

30/01/2012 16:24

reflections on the enemy

347

complacency that turns a blind eye to Nazism when it is in the national interest to do so; that is deaf to the pleas of Jewish refugees and exiles; and that in its rigid social structures, its wartime policies and its imperialist doctrines can make it hard to distinguish between liberal democracy and totalitarianism. It is a ‘conchie’ who has the last word on ‘the law’ about enemies in Day, and who concisely sums up the propagandistic construction of difference that is part of military power politics: whoever crawls to the top of the heap will always think the rest of us are scum. That’s the only law. So people like you go off and die and people like me go off and get burned and all of us get bombed, because they think bombing will scare us and make us give up. But it doesn’t. They bomb us and we don’t give up. They have us bomb other people and the other people don’t give up. Because people aren’t scum. And we’ve nowhere to go. We can’t give up. All the fuckers in charge, they don’t understand.37 Kennedy’s conscientious objector indicts war as an inevitable result of power politics in which citizens of whatever nationality, both civilian and military, are written off as so much collateral damage. At a time when wars have no clear enemies, spectacularly opaque remits, no limit of any kind, least of all in civil liberties or Geneva conventions – such as in ‘the war on terror’ – it is the ongoing readiness of ‘the fuckers in charge’ to use armed conflict as a means to pursue political aims which is the real enemy.

Notes 1. Foreign Office, Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany (Oxford: Bodleian Library/ University of Oxford, [1944] 2007), p. 8. 2. Ibid. p. 12. 3. See Aaron Goldman, ‘Germans and Nazis: The Controversy over “Vansittartism” in Britain during the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 14.1 (1979), pp. 155–91. 4. A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), pp. 156–71; Perry Biddiscombe, The Denazification of Germany (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), pp. 27–35. 5. Vera Brittain, One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War (London: Continuum, [1944] 2005), p. 164. 6. Ibid. p. 165. 7. Alan Moorehead, Eclipse (London: Granta, [1945] 2000), p. 219. 8. Ibid. p. 218. 9. Ibid. p. 259. 10. Victor Gollancz, What Buchenwald Really Means (London: Gollancz, 1945) and In Darkest Germany (London: Gollancz, 1947); Stephen Spender, European Witness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946). See Douglas Botting, Ruins of the Reich (London: Methuen, [1985] 2005), pp. 240–79. 11. Martin Caiger-Smith, The Face of the Enemy: British Photographers in Germany 1944–1952 (Berlin: Nishen, 1988). 12. Margaret Bourke-White, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946); Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: Granta, [1959] 1998). 13. Gellhorn, p. 176. 14. Ibid. p. 230. 15. Spender, pp. 73, 163. 16. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Aftermath of Nazi Rule’, Commentary, 10.4 (1951), pp. 342–53 (pp. 346–8).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 347

30/01/2012 16:24

348

petra rau

17. James Stern, The Hidden Damage (London: Chelsea Press, [1947] 1990), p. 129. 18. For a classic reading of collective repression in post-war Germany see Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn. Principles of Collective Behaviour, trans. Beverly A. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, [1967] 1975). For an example of a Good German as an emotionally haunted and inquiring German disrupting a barrier of silence about the genocidal Nazi past, see the novella ‘Micha’ in Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room (London: Vintage, 2001). 19. Doris Lessing, ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’, in Collected Stories (London: Grafton, 1978), vol. 1. 20. Kay Boyle, The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Post-War Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), p. 59. 21. Rebecca West, A Train of Powder (London: Virago, [1955] 1984), p. 17. 22. Ibid. p. 64. 23. Ibid. p. 150. 24. Ibid. p. 151. 25. Saul Padover, Psychologist in Germany (London: Phoenix House, 1946), p. 96; Foreign Office, p. 30; Spender, p. 39. 26. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1965] 1994). See also Lyndsey Stonebridge’s chapter on Arendt in this volume. 27. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009). 28. See Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1982] 1993), p. 78 29. Himmler’s speech to senior SS officers in Poznan, 4 October 1943. 30. Justin Cartwright, The Song Before It Is Sung (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). 31. Peter Ho Davies, The Welsh Girl (London: Sceptre, 2007). 32. Joseph Kanon, The Good German (London: Sphere, 2001); Mario Puzo, The Dark Arena (New York: Random House, 1953); James McGovern, Fräulein (London: Harborough, 1957). 33. See John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). 34. A. L. Kennedy, Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007). 35. Ibid. p. 237. 36. Richard Bausch, Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). 37. Kennedy, Day, p. 275.

Further Reading Bernières, Louis de, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (London: Minerva, 1995). Binding, Tim, Island Madness (London: Picador, 1998). Deighton, Len, Winter: A Berlin Family 1899–1945 (London: Grafton, 1988). Edric, Robert, Peacetime (London: Black Swan, 2002). Gibbs, Sir Philip, Thine Enemy (London: Hutchinson, 1949). Hynes, Samuel (ed.), Reporting World War II, 1938–1946 (New York: Library of America, 2001). King, Francis, Punishments (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989). Lodge, David, Out of the Shelter (London: Macmillan, 1970). Shaughenessy, Alfred, Dearest Enemy (Padstow: Tabb House, 1991). Thorpe, Adam, The Rules of Perspective (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 348

30/01/2012 16:24

Part III Introduction: Technology

Mark Rawlinson

INTRODUCTION: TECHNOLOGY

We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our achievements turn against us, making politics more random, and wars more bestial.1

H

‘

ostile contention by means of armed forces’: war and technology are yoked in the concept of arms (‘outfit for war, things used in fighting’).2 In modernity, the armed forces are an instrument of the nation state; their highly trained personnel are divided amongst services which correspond with the elemental regions of earth, water and air but which are invariably symbolised by the latest machines: tanks and armoured personnel carriers; carriers and submarines; planes and helicopters. ‘The power of this war machine’, writes Patrick Wright in Tank, ‘is inseparable from its potency as an idea and image.’3 Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941) imagines the youngest of these services as the template for a cybernetic (fascist) politics – the machine’s usurpation of the aviator’s skill stands for the disenchantment of warfare and the totalisation of socio-political control. Technology – the mechanical arts and applied science – has been a differential in warfare from the earliest historical conflicts. Contentions over the historicity of the Iliad are concerned with the Homeric poet’s anachronistic description of Bronze-age weapons and armour – for instance tower-shaped or circular shields – which represent different stages in the competitive development of the materials and tactics of warfare. The Face of Battle (1976), John Keegan’s comparison of the tactical-technological systems in practice at Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, was innovative in its critique of ‘the rhetoric of battle history’ and its testing of mythic representations of warfare against the mechanics of battle.4 But there is a now long-standing tradition that the conditions and scale of twentiethcentury warfare reflect a step change in military technology. This perceptual convention is apparently reinforced by the citation of long-nineteenth-century precursors to modern warfare, such as Napoleonic logistics, American Civil War rail transportation, Crimean War artillery and Boer War concentration camps. And, notwithstanding the writings of Tolstoy (the reports from Crimea in Sebastopol Sketches as well as War and Peace) or Zola (La Débâcle), the influential idea of the twentieth-century ‘discovery’ or unveiling of the horror and irrationality of war serves rhetorically to confirm this model of the

351

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 351

30/01/2012 16:24

352

mark rawlinson

technological dehumanisation of armed struggle. It would not be misleading to describe twentieth-century war writing as an iconography and mythology of military technology, notwithstanding its oft-declared purpose of enunciating a personal, phenomenological perspective on battle. In the modern era, we believe, military technology, abetted by industrial economies, turned Ivanhoe into The Jungle, tournament into shambles or meat factory. According to the most elegiac strand of this tradition, this occurred as late as 1916. Of the many problems with such accounts, the chief of them is a technological determinism in which mechanical innovation shapes social and cultural formations. The Great War poet Robert Nichols, writing an anticipatory text of the next war, plugged a pessimistic version of this march of progress into the mind of Europe. He imagined a direct psychic effect (decades before Eisenhower pathologised technological fetishism with the phrase ‘military–industrial complex’) of the innovation and production of weaponry: ‘Modern war is throughout so brutally mechanical and material organisation so important that the mere piling up of huge stocks of ammunition awakens combative energy.’5 It is a truism that an important multiplier in the mathematics of modern militarised death is a technical (and bureaucratic) delivery system: field artillery, the bomber, gas, nuclear bombs and missiles. But it is important to note that beyond the first world’s mechanised conflicts and arms-race stand-offs, it is small arms and bladed weapons, alongside the effects of socio-economic breakdown such as starvation and disease, which are among the leading proximal causes of war mortality. The Nazi death-camp system, which is for Zygmunt Bauman the limit case of techno-bureaucratic rationalisation, is atypical of the century’s most massive pogroms in its embrace of technical modernity – the cases of Stalin, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s Year Zero remind us that inhumanity is not the product of the hegemony of technicians and technocrats.6 The representation of war technology tells us much about the way our culture frames war as morally, personally and historically significant experience. Paul Fussell’s account of World War II – not a ‘literary war’ (The Great War and Modern Memory) but one to be measured by ‘understanding and behaviour’, that is socially reproducible concepts and embodiments of a political abstraction – opens with a critique of the war’s PR. The new Jeep, as ‘cute as Bambi’, is the poster technology which promises a transformation of warfare.7 The Disneyfication of World War II began with Dumbo (1940) at the end of which the eponymous flying elephant promotes the fatuous cause of ‘Dumbombers for defence’; it ended with the naming of the two Pipe-Lines-Under-The Ocean (PLUTO) designed for the supply of the forces in Northern Europe Bambi and Dumbo. Armies are often said to fight the last war, trapped in tactical obsolescence by conservatism in custom and imagination, though the historiography of the Great War in Britain – from Liddell Hart to Niall Ferguson – an exhibition of ideologically driven uses of the past, suggests that this is a political and not a historical judgement. The complement to the sclerosis of military institutions is the awful sublimity of new weapon systems. While the belatedness of the staff seems to be a simple correlative of the march of the machines, the particular power of the literature and culture of war, its capacity to shock us and to inoculate us against shocks, lies in its looking backwards and forwards, its movements between elegy and apocalypse. George Sand perceived the Franco-Prussian war in terms which might have derived from the writings of Marx and Engels. The clash of nations was the passing of a class and the triumph of a new economy:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 352

30/01/2012 16:24

part iii introduction: technology

353

This war is particularly brutal, without soul, without discernment, without heart. It is an exchange of projectiles in greater or lesser number, of greater or lesser range, which paralyses worth, nullifies the soldier’s awareness and will. No heroes any more, just bullets.8 The form which Sand ascribed to this revolution remained both resonant and useful throughout the next century: in 2001 the military historian Michael Howard would deploy it to describe the contribution that Prussian victory made to 1914–18: ‘war [. . .] ceased to be a romantic adventure and became a positivist science.’9 Again, of 1916, ‘[a] war of flesh was going to become a war of steel, of weaponry and machinery, science and technology.’10 One can be forgiven for detecting in the reproducibility of this trope of military revolution something akin to Northrop Frye’s cycle of literary modes exemplified by a sequence in which ‘each work is “romantic” compared to its successors and “realistic” compared to its predecessors.’11 Fredric Jameson reminds us that the vision of technology as apocalypse contains within it a potential for redemption: technology is a ‘slippery category’ to the extent that while it turns the warrior into a prole it can also raise industrial man to the status of an artist hero. Technology [. . .] as alienated and reified human labor and energy, is always a slippery category, moving back and forth between allegory and external (or proto-natural) doom yet sometimes also celebrated as the triumph of human inventiveness and an expression of human action (or its prosthetic extension) [. . .] technology is truly the apotheosis of a properly modernist teleology, a direct line from the slingshot to the megaton bomb, as Theodor W. Adorno put it.12 The view of war as the crucible of invention domesticates the fascist belief in armed struggle as the normal environment of social development. Winston Churchill’s rhetorical projection of a militarised nadir, in his 1946 ‘iron curtain’ speech – ‘the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science’ – belies his wartime commitment to mechanical innovation.13 The ‘backroom boys’ may remain anonymous, but the homely code names of their crafty creations – from Tank to Window (a radar-jamming device) – are legendary. Under the description of a contest for scientific intelligence, war becomes an adventure again, a source of ‘entertainment’ as well as of opportunities for peacetime social and industrial exploitation.14 The advent of the latest (and possibly last weapons) signifies the double bind of man’s self-subjugation and self-transcendence (personified by the figure of the atom scientist, a guilty artificer). This ironic view of technological progress – a race to destroy the species – is a mark of how far we have come. The twentieth century’s unprecedented wars have added little to John Ruskin’s vision of military modernity, but his reference to the ‘savage[ry]’ of progress was intended to elicit a Conradian shock of kinship from his audience, not resignation. If you have to take away masses of men from all industrial employment,—to feed them by the labour of others,—to provide them with destructive machines, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you have to ravage the country which you attack,—to destroy for a score of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbours;—and if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and leave the living creatures countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to starve and parch,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 353

30/01/2012 16:24

354

mark rawlinson

through days of torture, down into clots of clay—what book of accounts shall record the cost of your work [. . .] That, I say, is modern war,—scientific war,—chemical and mechanic war, —how much worse than the savage’s poisoned arrow.15 But what Alexander Herzen feared as technology’s amplification of tyranny – ‘Genghis Khan with the telegraph’ as Tolstoy records it in The Kingdom of God is Within You – is countered by the romance of scientific war and the fantasy of casualty-less offence.16 The former arcs from H. G. Wells to Star Wars and beyond, and is increasingly difficult to separate from the rhetoric of political and military strategy. The latter is witnessed by the descendants of Warner’s fly-by-wire pilotless planes, drones flown over Afghanistan from installations in Nevada; military training via computer simulation is a growing dimension of a massive games industry, but the battlefield itself has been reconfigured to minimise first-world casualties and ensure legible images. The smart bombs and target imaging which headlined during the West’s military actions in the Balkans and Iraq constitute a closed-circuit affirmation of the technological fix which has become ‘the American culture of war’.17 In the post-war era, technologies of representation have taken centre stage in the depiction and theorisation of war, from Francis Ford Coppola’s Wagnerisation of the Americans in South East Asia (Apocalypse Now is the Vietnam War film as Gesammtkunstwerk) to Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of George Bush Snr’s Gulf War as an informational conflict in which the warriors were media pundits. Paul Virilio’s essay on war and cinema, in which he contends that ‘the history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception’ is ultimately bedazzled by the show (Great War slang for battle): ‘[o]ne could go on for ever listing the technological weapons, the panoply of light-war, the aesthetic of the electronic battlefield, the military use of space whose conquest was ultimately the conquest of the image [. . .]’.18 The essays commissioned for this section tackle the cultural registration of the inventiveness of modern harming across the services and across the century. David Pascoe’s brief but pregnant history of the aeroplane shows us exactly how the twentieth century’s ‘theatres of war’ have been overlaid by the symbolic and metaphoric potency of ever faster, bigger payload marques of fighter and bomber. Jonathan Rayner and Hamish Mathison respectively account for the literary forms determined by the impact of surface and submarine naval vessels on the experience of mariners and on strategy. Nicholas Monserrat’s serial writings on submarine hunters exemplify how the romance of the machinery of war yields potent social and symbolic capital, and relegates war’s human costs, in the figure of the indivisibility of the ship and crew. Submarine plots in contemporary fiction perform a more complete vanishing act, and one which is at once more complete and more sinister, whereby the unseen threat of the sub stands for the unforeseen eruptions of terror in a world in which security is precarious. Santanu Das provides an eloquent account of the cultural ramifications of the new ‘frightfulness’ of chlorine gas and its transformation of the sensuous coordinates of battlefield art. Weapons and weapon-delivery technology is only one dimension of the machinery of war which registers in and shapes the writing of war in the twentieth century. A panoply of inventions abetted competition to bring order to tactical perceptions of the battlefield, or to sow disorder in the enemy’s battlefield intelligence. Modern weapons correlate with new technologies of communication and surveillance, and these in turn impacted on the way the battlefield has been represented. In her essay, Jane Lewty explores the intersec-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 354

30/01/2012 16:24

part iii introduction: technology

355

tions of telephony and spiritualism, versions of long-distance communication that shaped the way the Great War was fought and the way in which it was borne. Comparably highorder transactions between military technology and civilian culture are tracked in essays by John Armitage and Mark Rawlinson which scope war in the visual spectrum, from the perspectives of Virilio’s idea of the ‘sight machine’ and of military concealment and deception. With ramifications in the culture of the cinema and of decor and fashion, the look of war in the twentieth century is a realm of material production which links the prosecution and the representation of war, to the extent that they converge in manifold ways, from reconnaissance to propaganda. The technology of modern war is not only the proximate cause of war’s horror, it is the signifier of war’s normalisation, or, put another way, of society’s militarisation.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber, 1961), p. 6. Oxford English Dictionary. Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (London: Faber, 2000), p. 2. John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 36. Robert Nichols, Anthology of War Poetry 1914–1918 (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1943), p. 46. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (London: Polity, 1989). Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 3. George Sand, quoted in Christopher Coker, The Future of War: The Re-Enchantment of War in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 4. Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (London: Profile, 2001), p. 52. William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice of the Somme (London: Abacus, 2010), p. 29. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 49. Fredric Jameson, ‘War and Representation’, PMLA, 124.5 (October 2009), p. 1534. David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011), p. 149. R. V. Jones, Most Secret War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), pp. 3, 533. John Ruskin, ‘War’, in The Crown of Wild Olive, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 38 vols (London: George Allen, 1905), vol. 18, p. 472. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, trans. Contance Garnett (1894), Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub4602/pg4602.html, ch. 8. See Adrian R. Lewis, The American Culture of War: The History of U.S. Military Force from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2007). Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, [1984] 1989), pp. 7, 88.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 355

30/01/2012 16:24

36

CAMOUFLAGE AND THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF WARFARE Mark Rawlinson

When scarlet and pipeclay were abandoned for khaki, there were some who trembled for the future of war. But then, finding how elegant the new tunic was, how closely it clipped the waist, how voluptuously, with the lateral bustles of the pockets, it exaggerated the hips; when they realized the brilliant potential of breeches and top-boots, they were reassured. Abolish these military elegances, standardize a uniform of sack-cloth and mackintosh, you will very soon find that. . .1 Camouflaged soldiers bring into being a most curious amalgam of the allegedly utilitarian and the unacknowledged exotic.2

A

t the beginning of the twentieth century the pictorial conventions of the battle painting were challenged first by drab uniforms and then by camouflage. The look of war had changed, for tactical and strategic ends. Camouflage (schemes of disguise and deception first named as such during the First World War) was a technological response to developments in the range and accuracy of ordnance (longer-range small arms and the aerial direction of artillery). As is suggested by the cultural impact of the dazzle painting of military and merchant shipping (a making-strange, in Russian Formalist terminology, intended to impede the aiming of torpedoes with optical rangefinders), camouflage may be said to begin and end in the aesthetic. Peter Forbes has even argued that early camouflage is ‘to our eyes, more successful artistically than as concealment’.3 Though it looks like a judgement of the efficacy of camouflage as a response to more effective weaponry, this remark is also a clue to some of the ways we have adapted our perceptions of war in the face of evidence that it is an unredeemable negation of humanity. We have become accustomed to take pleasure in the new styles of what, despite the vaunted purpose of camouflage uniforms, is a new species of military spectacle. Moreover, testing the function of military concealment (the reduction of losses to enemy action) is made more difficult by aesthetic apprehensions and wishful thinking. The performance of camouflage devices in combat environments does not in any case lend itself to scientific evaluation. The case for dazzle painting, in which British and US authorities made significant investments, remained unproven ‘on material grounds’, but the practice nevertheless was claimed to have ‘increased morale’ and it was reprised in the Second World War.4 Developments in techniques and policy were shaped less by objective assessment than by

356

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 356

30/01/2012 16:24

camouflage and the re-enchantment of warfare

357

the long-running contest between rival proponents of artistic and of scientific expertise in the design and execution of military deception (such as the dispute between the academic zoologist J. G. Kerr and the painter Norman Wilkinson over the ‘invention’ of dazzle). The rivalry in the interwar period between naturalists and artists, jostling to influence military strategy and procurement, anticipates the ideological polarities of the post-war Snow–Leavis debate over the Two Cultures. This chapter, however, reflects not on the institutional determinants of the adoption of camouflage schemes but on the literary traces of technologies and cultures of perceptual illusion in the field of war. It contends that the act of drawing attention to or making a spectacle of camouflage may expose again what has often been supposed to be made invisible and immune from harm (the thing or person camouflaged). That is, the aesthetic apperception of camouflage contains not only the possibility of a further detour from hurt but also an unveiling of the precariousness of the human subject which is typically concealed by the concepts and symbols of military force. Moreover, this unveiling points up the analogies between the camoufleur’s deceptions and the illusions which war writing has long proposed to be an essence of war, as the politically and psychologically necessary complement to war’s destructiveness. Familiar examples are the illusions of gloire and of war’s sublimity revealed in the military careers of Tolstoy’s Nicholas Rostov or Stendhal’s Fabrizio del Dongo. Camouflage is itself a synecdoche for the difficulty of making things out in war, of war’s fogginess, ‘the great uncertainty of all data in War’ as well as pointing to war’s political (deceptive) character.5 But it is significant that the technology of camouflage redescribes and redeems the fog of war as an example of military design and ingenuity. Renoir fils’s celebrated anti-war film, La Grande Illusion (1937), opens with an enigma of aerial photographic interpretation (the development in targeting which drove developments in camouflage): what, the protagonists debate, is that grey smudge beneath a feature which is itself variously read as a road or canal or railway?: ‘It was a foggy day.’6 The mission to resolve this problem of identification is the pretext for the film’s celebrated narrative about the confraternity of antagonists in a prisoner-of-war camp. Even greater amplitude in the handling of camouflage as a trope is to be found in the memoirs of the stage magician and self-styled magus of deception in the Second World War, Jasper Maskelyne. Here, the camoufleur’s manipulation of perception (‘war-magic’) and Hitler’s rhetoric are pitted against each other in a duel for possession of the German ‘audience’.7 Maskelyne’s equation of camouflage with stage illusion is a deliberate turning away from ‘folly, waste, brutality, cynicism’ to re-enchant war as a contest of tactical and technical invention: camouflage is ‘magic to hypnotize, transform and generally bewitch Hitler [. . .] and the [. . .] dupes his verbosity persuaded’.8 Surveying how writing registers the changing look of war in the modern era leads to contemplation of the representational and epistemological conventions which undergird a folk ontology of war as an illusory realm.9 Writing in 1984, Paul Virilio described the terminal development of the strategic logic of camouflage in what was then a permanent Cold War: ‘if what is perceived is already lost [because targeted with a ballistic nuclear missile], it becomes necessary to invest in concealment what used to be invested in simple exploitation of one’s forces.’10 The convergence of this rationalisation with what we might call a myth or fantasy of invisibility (the psychic investment in camouflage) is countered by artistic renditions of camouflage which restore its visibility, its play on the physics and habits of perception, and its adjacency to the repertoires of redescription which makes war’s core activity of hurting people less visible.11

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 357

30/01/2012 16:24

358

mark rawlinson

A resonant example of this disruption of the wishful thinking which the play of camouflage reintroduces into the field of war (literally a re-enchantment of a mechanised realm of dehumanisation) is Geoffrey Matthews’s poem ‘Modern Deceit’. Written in 1943, when the future literary scholar was a young British serviceman, the poem ostensibly describes a military installation, lingering over its deceitful appearances. In contrast to the hegemonic iconography of the Great War, in which as Samuel Hynes has argued, ‘natural beauty and natural benevolence have withdrawn from the ravaged scene’, nature-as-camouflage hides the threats of the war machine: ‘the cattle are sham, / The nesting boxes are a guard against gas’.12 At first, the apparent naturalisation of the surfaces of military materiel performs a tactical prolongation of perception (the reader in the same position as the notional enemy), but then, in a wholly surprising way these effects are revealed to be overdetermined, and a possible cover or veil for contradictions in popular participation in war. Matthews’s first five quatrains strip away deception at ground level in what is an aesthetic appreciation of the patterns of various pastoral transformations of the military machine: Sometimes at dawn the stilted fur-foot Lysanders, Stiff dragonflies, whirr down to plummet a message Into the dew (gay rags flying like a shot mallard Or a shuttlecock), and the resonant fighters drum White in the blue, or an enormous bomber lugs its belly Monstrously overhead, showing the charcoal underside Borrowed from a butterfly, and the wee guns like cats’ whiskers Pricking the crystal tail.13 Even the bomber, the military vehicle least amenable to metaphoric or associative redemption, is here held in poise with the butterfly (not breaking it), with its own expensive delicacy behind it to bookend with the butterfly’s antennae. But it is more difficult to apprehend what is disguised by the ruddy pallor of soldiering, namely the ‘city white’ of the civilian lurking inside the conscript serviceman. None of us are quite what we seem. In modern deceit it is fruitless even to guess Which traitor among the blank troops and nippled officers Will mob the enemy at the last moment, or refuse to shoot, Or cap his bayonet with a bell of fuchsia.14 The trajectory of the human element in this vision of the disciplined mass is radically unknowable, not because morale is precarious, but because motives are hidden beneath the ‘blank’ of uniform and drilled deportment. The last line can now look like a relay between David Jones’s sacramental treatment of the flora of the battlefield in his long modernist poem about the Somme campaign, In Parenthesis (1937), and iconic images of anti-Vietnam War protests. The future association helps us understand the note of defeatism or disloyalty in Matthews’s lines; in his ‘bell of fuchsia’ the civic fracture symbolised (in a widely reproduced photograph of a 1967 Pentagon march) by the casually dressed young man placing a carnation in the rifle muzzle of a helmeted National Guardsman, is already internalised as the unpredictableness of the individual within and beneath the carapace of the uniform. In the twentieth century, a regime of camouflage succeeds military display in the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 358

30/01/2012 16:24

camouflage and the re-enchantment of warfare

359

reproduction of bellicist ideals. But because camouflage’s promise of ‘preserv[ing] flesh’ is coupled with developments in the effectiveness of technologies which destroy flesh, displaying and hence undoing the mystique of disguise and deception is an act with a potential political significance, even though this may be further veiled by aesthetic perception.15 We should also note that the spectacular is already designed into practices of military illusionism in the visible spectrum. Camouflage schemes frequently derive from graphic and architectonic devices or biological adaptations which are themselves sources of wonderment (from trompe l’oeil to the examples of protective or Batesian mimicry which are favourite exhibits in instruction on Darwinian evolution). This is not to rule out a reciprocal relationship. In the case of the memoirs of the marine zoologist Alister Hardy, ‘applying the principles of animal colouration to the arts of war’ is presented as a source of insight into ‘how surprisingly creative’ is natural selection.16 Nevertheless, representing camouflage can have the effect of staging its particular contribution to the displacement of the wounded body from images of military power or rationality. In her long poem of 1951, ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’, a vertiginous and kaleidoscopic refraction of the colours of war, Lynette Roberts is disguised by her National Registration number even before her person is hidden by military garb: XEBO 7011 camouflaged in naval oilskin In all the gorgeous shades of Hades, – 17 Roberts displays camouflage like Matthews, in this case as a spectacle which countermands the logic of citizenship captured in the resonant maxim which Virilio uses as epigraph to his study of the logistics of perception – ‘War is the art of embellishing Death.’ This is concealment turned inside out: oilskin is literally and metaphorically canvas treated with oil, an additional skin and a painting, emblematically displaying ‘the shades of Hades’. Roberts’s citation of ‘camouflage’ has the opposite effect to the opening sentence of James Jones’s novel The Thin Red Line (1962), which silently substitutes a cosmic agency for a military or political one: The two transports had sneaked up from the south in the first graying flush of dawn, their cumbersome mass cutting smoothly through the water whose still greater mass bore them silently, themselves as gray as the dawn which camouflaged them.18 Camouflage here is not a technological intervention but nature’s beneficence to the soon-to-be-killed, bearing them up and covering their approach. Terence Malick’s 1998 film, the second to be made of Jones’s novel of the US war in the Pacific, apparently juxtaposes the global logistical networks of modern armies and an edenic indigenous space (a prototype of the encounters in his The New World). But in its cinematographic and auditory treatment of vegetation, the film closes this distance. War and nature, the ‘green machine’ (nickname for the US Marines, who took part in the battle for Guadalcanal) and the greenery, are elements in an ecology which is at once catastrophic (a hallmark of the representation of the war in Vietnam, which is echoed in Malick’s visualisation of the Second World War) and symbiotic and recuperative. Michael Chion writes of the hourlong mise en scène of the attack on Hill 210 that the shots are at the level of ‘the human being in the grass’, a cinematic mixing up of scales which makes soldiers ‘smaller than the plants’ like the children they once were.19 Camouflage, even where it is not repositioned as an effect of nature, in excess of any tactical confirmation of immunity from harm, sutures the military and biological in a compact of adaptive ingenuity, a re-enchantment of the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 359

30/01/2012 16:24

360

mark rawlinson

fallen realm of industrial warfare. The mock amphibious landing by a gang of the children of ‘Chillingbourne’ in Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) – a ludic anticipation of Operation Overlord – is repelled by kids camouflaged with halos of foliage. On another level of signification, the film’s propagandistic burden – a programmatic boosting of Anglo-American shared heritage and cooperation – is transcended by the narrative of pilgrimage and its resolution on ‘miracles’ which redeem war’s losses.20 The translations between war and nature which camouflage performed from 1915 onwards (with scrim-netting, paint, decoy trees and screens) were simultaneously being deployed as an element in the new poetry of war, a poetry of negative pastoral in which natural forces were personified as militant. Wilfred Owen’s ‘wire [. . .] brambles’ in the poem ‘Exposure’ play on a metaphorical slippage between the organic and the mechanical which had earlier underpinned the patenting and marketing of barbed wire for stock rearing in the 1860s: ‘ronces artificielles’, ‘steel. . . thorn’.21 The industrialisation of war is reflected not only in the ravaging of landscapes but in a perception that the landscape (no-man’s-land) threatens man – no man’s land. Nature’s unnaturalness is both a psychic effect of war and tactical expedience: The gun emplacements are camouflaged with greenery against air reconnaissance, and it all looks like a military version of that Jewish festival where they build little huts outdoors. These leafy bowers would look peaceful and cheerful if they didn’t have guns inside them.22 This conditional is typical of Remarque’s narrator, the disillusioned former schoolboy Paul Baümer, whose account of being a soldier on the Western Front debunks every promise about war’s ennobling character made by his teacher Kantorek. Remarque’s narrative is a relentless stripping bare of illusion, so it is unsurprising that camouflage is registered as one trick amongst many. In the Australian Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We, a similarly false landscape suggests a painting of grainstacks by Millet or Monet. But the exposure of the military illusion is more ponderous, less cynical than that which Remarque performs via Baümer’s narration, befitting Bourne’s more sanguine endurance of the fate politics has cast for him: There was visible evidence on every side that the local farmers had reaped a bountiful harvest. Bourne, carrying messages between Collincamps and Courcelles, had noticed three haystacks in a picturesque group standing a little way back from the road. Then, one night, he saw a very faint gleam of light coming from inside one of them. It was a lucid explanation of the apparent fertility of the countryside. Monster guns, too, were secreted somehow in the courtyards of houses in the village itself. The Hun had his suspicions, and would explore the possibilities of the situation, rather too frequently, with high explosive.23 Faux-pastoral becomes the source of a vortex of substitutions, climaxing in the blanket euphemism ‘possibilities of the situation’ and the curious locution ‘high explosive’, where the ‘high’ designates greater force (compared with gunpowder) but does little to suggest the what that gets exploded with its connotations of ‘emotional exaltation’.24 But when camouflage and the fantasy of immunity are taken out of this tableau, and placed in immediate proximity to targetable, vulnerable bodies, we hear the dominant tone of Manning’s novel. This comes much closer than contemporary officer-authored memoirs to registering the alternation of complaint and commitment that underwrote mass military service

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 360

30/01/2012 16:24

camouflage and the re-enchantment of warfare

361

in the Great War. In the execution of an assault, when British artillery is shooting over advancing British infantry, the logic of camouflage, and hence the rationality of war, is seen to be undone: ‘What can you expect?’ said Bourne, pointing to the bright yellow material sewn on his haversack. ‘We are decked out in all the colours of the rainbow, and then marched over the whole countryside in order to advertise the show. Anyone can see we are in war-paint. We are put into khaki, so as to be more or less invisible; and then rigged up in colours, so that we can be seen. It’s genius.’25 Manning’s words are as carefully chosen here, where he is breaking the illusion, as they are in the previous passage where he is mimicking an illusion. In their opposition, ‘advertise’ and ‘invisible’ register the paradox of camouflage in the soldier’s perplexity at his expendability being made so explicit, but it resonates too with aesthetic apperceptions and with latter-day Western propaganda about war-without-casualties. Camouflage, like the literature of war itself, depends on the play of distance for its capacity to straddle the realms of art and violence. The hegemonic war writing of the twentieth century is a literature of participatory witness, a close-up on the fog of war for an armchair audience with an undiminished appetite for the pathos and the glamour of technological advances in the military’s capacity for violence. Camouflage in practice may have the effect of confusing observers at a specific distance (the altitude a reconnaissance plane or a bomber assumes to evade anti-aircraft fire, the range at which a U-boat stalks a convoy) but from closer up what you see is not the illusion but the device laid bare, the visible means to a supposedly visibility-suppressing effect. Manning’s representation of the absurdity of being so well disguised from your own gunners that you have to be displayed to the enemy is calculated to render thinkable again the assertion of the soldier’s body against the calculus of the plan of attack, with its numerical aggregation and elisions of persons, durations and harms. The development of technologies which made the soldier’s body more precarious – rifling, aerial spotting, submarine torpedoes – necessitated the military appropriation of the skills and devices of hunters, set designers, natural historians and painters. The heroic phase of largely civilian advocates of camouflage lasted in Britain until late in the Second World War. By 1944, the administration of camouflage methods and camouflage conduct (for instance, the primer for the Home Guard written by the surrealist artist Roland Penrose which talked of the suppression of ‘dangerous symptoms’ not ‘in tone’ with the environment)26 was in the hands of military officers, not lay experts. The latter had nevertheless contributed significantly to the myth of camouflage as a scene of war’s re-enchantment. The painter Julian Trevelyan’s memoirs describe the opportunism and fantasy behind the ‘perfunctory ritual’ of painting buildings in early Second World War Britain, a privateenterprise ‘industrial camouflage’ which had little to do with function, everything to do with display (like advertising on construction site screens in contemporary cities): People seemed to feel that the green stripes were a charm that somehow bought them immunity from the unknown hazards of war, like the paper strips on the windows it made them feel that they had done their bit, had invested in their small piece of twentieth-century magic. In those days it was easy to sell any kind of camouflage.27 A recent history of the role of the British art schools in the Second World War reproduces the tone of chivalric revival (a match for Churchill’s ‘few’ of the Battle of Britain and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 361

30/01/2012 16:24

362

mark rawlinson

other emblems of an elite, pre-industrial and pre-popular warfare) in its summary of the contributions of civilians to military camouflage: it united trickery and shrewdness with skill, elegance and often humour to create illusions which were astonishing in their audacity. The ingenuity of these concepts played a crucial part in assisting the Allied forces to win the Second World War.28 While more measured than Maskelyne’s concept of ‘war magic’, this is a characterisation of military deception which nevertheless rests on a regret that war fails on so many occasions to be skilful, elegant or audacious. This phenomenon is encapsulated by the story of the ‘wooden bomb’, which is at once an emblem of dummy warfare (by which term I designate the tendency to employ redescriptions which make it as if war were about something other than rupturing human bodies) and an example of the kind of ‘meme’ or widely replicated image or concept which helps explain the convergence of myriad examples of writing about war on a finite rhetorical and ideological repertoire. Deceptions in preparation for the second battle of El Alamein (Operation Bertram) – Montgomery’s 1942 offensive out of Egypt against the armies of Rommel – hold pride of place in histories of disguise and deception: the director of camouflage, Geoffrey Barkas, quotes Churchill addressing the House of Commons on the ‘complete tactical surprise’ which enabled Montgomery to ‘purchase victory at a lower price in blood’.29 The key to tricking German Intelligence about the disposition of British and Commonwealth forces was the use of disguises (for example, frames and drapes that made tanks throw shadows that suggested lorries) and decoys, including make-believe airfields and railheads with cosmetic bomb damage. But it is as if the scale of production to achieve an illusory order of battle (in the minds of enemy Intelligence) requires a compensating myth. Industrial deception verges on bad sportsmanship. Churchill’s assertion that ‘it is perfectly justifiable to deceive the enemy even if at the same time your own people are for a while misled’, seems, curiously, to be less concerned with allaying fears about home propaganda than doubts about jus in bello.30 As a contemporary handbook on camouflage put it: ‘Guerilla warfare is not a system which appeals to the Englishman, with his inherent sense of fair and above-board play.’31 One way of deflecting the implication of underhand dealings with the enemy was to make deception an open secret (though not one shared with the populace). Maskelyne describes the cat-and-mouse contest over a decoy airfield screening an RAF station in ‘Arabia’, and the work to create illusions of damage to sustain the effectiveness of the decoy after an air raid. Failure is revealed when the camoufleurs return: ‘They had dropped a lot of wooden dummy bombs on our dummy airfield [. . .] I heard afterwards that the raid was led by Air Marshall Balbo, the Italian racing pilot whom most of the R.A.F. liked.’32 Trevelyan, writing less than a decade later, turns the story from aviators’ sporting contest couched in ironic understatement into an aesthetic compliment delivered by dummy wooden bomb. Stephen Sykes had created ‘one of camouflage’s showpieces in the desert’, a dummy railhead: No living man is there; but dummy men are grubbing in dummy swill-troughs, and dummy lorries are unloading dummy tanks, while a dummy engine puffs dummy smoke into the eyes of the enemy.33 The self-conscious pictorial exorbitance of this description, cancelling its own authority through the theatricality and pathos of its detail, nevertheless reproduces a myth of military conflict as arch playfulness. The power of this myth, which we might assay in terms

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 362

30/01/2012 16:24

camouflage and the re-enchantment of warfare

363

of the model of evolutionary fitness of literary devices proposed by Franco Moretti in his studies of the geographies of the Novel, is witnessed by the replication of the dummy wooden bomb story, which now has a monograph dedicated to it.34 Wooden bombs existed – they were used in aircrew training – but irrespective of whether the kind of incident reported by Maskelyne or Trevelyan ever occurred, the significance of the story is its capacity to act as a vehicle for what might have seemed a vestigial ideology of war. Roland Penrose, addressing sceptical Home Guard servicemen, insisted that camouflage was ‘no mystery and no joke’, but we have seen that camouflage imports magic and play into writing about warfare in proportion to its re-enchantment of military affairs with ingenuity and the aesthetic.35 Edward Said tells a second-hand anecdote about the US Secretary of State for Defense (presumably Robert McNamara) ordering B52 strikes on North Vietnam with a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on his desk. The story is ‘implausible’, and supposedly less powerful than the later widely cited image of the cultivated Nazi, but it nevertheless speaks to ‘what obtains’, that you can ‘read classy fiction as well as kill and maim because the cultural world is available for that particular kind of camouflaging’. What is camouflaged here is the idea that the unnamed McNamara is a ‘cold-blooded imperialist murderer’.36 Said is not cited here as an example of the way that camouflage as concept and as visual languages was disseminated beyond the military (non-military replication of the camouflage aesthetic was evident from the outset, and was markedly accelerated after the widespread adoption of camouflaged uniforms by Cold War armed forces, in particular by the fashion industry). But his verbal noun, camouflaging, provides us with a further context for the meanings arising from technologies of concealment. Military appropriation of cultural/aesthetic techniques to effect concealment does more than provide a metaphor for the camouflaging done by the ‘cultural world’; from the outset, it contributed to the concealment of war’s character beneath a mask of rationality. Moreover, technologies for ‘preserv[ing] flesh’, once associated with additional functions of redescription, were aligned with the evasions Said identifies in social and political practices for concealing agency in the destruction of flesh. But we should be wary of resolving the elements of play and the aesthetic in military concealment into the kind of melodramatic clarity which is sometimes yielded by a hermeneutics of suspicion. The meanings of camouflage are labile, their slipperiness tempting the commentator into caricature. In Jarhead (2003), Anthony Swofford’s memoir of Desert Shield (the Second Gulf War after Iran–Iraq, and George Bush Snr’s war), protective clothing is at once secreted behind acronyms and an advertisement. The MOPP suits which are designed to prevent skin contamination are one war too late, ‘in jungle camouflage’ so, against Saudia Arabia’s desert landscape ‘we look like a moveable forest, something from a Monty Python skit’.37 A buried allusion to Shakespeare’s camouflage-as-retribution motif (‘Birnam forest come to Dunsinane’) is another layer of irony with which Swofford simultaneously makes a spectacle out of the military and camouflages his own experience beneath the diagnosis of snafu. Ten years on, in George Bush Jnr’s Third Gulf War, the meaning of a camouflage is changed to prosecute a supposedly different kind of war: the Marines planned to wear green camouflage uniforms and black Marine boots for their initial forty-five days of patrolling, instead of the tan desert uniform worn by American soldiers in Iraq. ‘The green uniforms will be one very visible difference and symbolically represent that break between the old and the new’.38

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 363

30/01/2012 16:24

364

mark rawlinson

The extravagant image of uniform as covenant reprises the history of military camouflage in the twentieth century, during which time it was quickly transformed from a species of metonymy into metaphor, or, if you like, from a kind of realism (blending in to the milieu) to a new kind of bellicose poetry (standing up). Dave Eggers’s What is the What?, is an example of a new kind of war writing in the West, a war writing which is about children, which is about how war does not have to be World War Three to be global, and which complicates further the relationship between writer and witness (Eggers is writing/signing the ‘Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng’). Camouflage, tellingly, is the constant in this non-TV world at war, because of the trade in surplus military equipment, because of the ubiquity of camouflage (particularly DPM, disruptive pattern material) as a personal and national symbol of military force, and because the mystery in all its phallic promise is undiminished: His hat bore a camouflage pattern, like the uniform of the soldier Mawein. But this man’s camouflage was superior: it blended perfectly into the landscape, its tans and greys.39

Notes 1. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1921] 1955), p. 42 (ellipsis in original). 2. Michael Taussig, ‘Zoology, Magic and Surrealism in the War on Terror’, Critical Inquiry, 34, supplement (Winter Supplement 2008), p. 115. 3. Peter Forbes, Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 105. 4. Forbes, p. 96; David Williams, Naval Camouflage 1914–1945: A Complete Visual Reference (Rochester: Chatham Publishing, 2001). 5. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. J. J. Graham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1832] 1986), p. 189. 6. La Grande Illusion, film, directed by Jean Renoir. France: Optimum Releasing, 1937, 4’00. 7. Jasper Maskelyne, Magic-Top Secret (London: Stanley Paul, 1949), pp. 43, 21. 8. Ibid. pp. 144–5. 9. See Kate McLoughlin, ‘Adynaton: A War Topos’, Peer English, 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 15–24. 10. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, [1984] 1989), p. 4; original emphasis. 11. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford, 1987); and Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 12. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), p. 201; Geoffrey Matthews, ‘Modern Deceit’, in War Poems, ed. Arnold Rattenbury (Reading: Whiteknights Press, 1989), p. 73. 13. Matthews, p. 73. 14. Ibid. p. 73. 15. The paradoxical notion of military activity to ‘preserve flesh’ is to be found in William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme (London: Abacus, 2010), p. 98. 16. Alister Hardy, The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and its Relation to the Spirit of Man (London: Collins, 1965), pp. 125–6. 17. Lynette Roberts, ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’, in Collected Poems, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), p. 54. 18. James Jones, The Thin Red Line (London: Collins, [1962] 1963), p. 11. 19. Michael Chion, The Thin Red Line (London: BFI, 2004), pp. 38–9.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 364

30/01/2012 16:24

camouflage and the re-enchantment of warfare

365

20. Ian Christie, ‘“History is Now and England”: A Canterbury Tale in its Contexts’, in Ian Christie and Andrew Moor (eds), The Cinema of Michael Powell (London: BFI, 2005), p. 77. 21. Wilfred Owen, ‘Exposure’, in Complete Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 162; Alan Krell, The Devil’s Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire (London: Reaktion, 2002), pp. 13, 15. 22. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 37. 23. Frederic Manning, Her Privates We (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), p. 180. 24. Oxford English Dictionary. 25. Manning, p. 178. 26. Roland Penrose, Home Guard Manual of Camouflage (London: Routledge, 1941), pp. 4, 33. 27. Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days (Aldershot: Scholar Press, [1957] 1996), p. 113. 28. Quoted in Henrietta Goodden, Camouflage and Art: Design for Deception in World War II (London: Unicorn Press, 2007), p. 162. 29. Geoffrey Barkas, The Camouflage Story (London: Cassell, 1952), p. 215. 30. Winston Churchill, quoted in Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914–1945 (London: Faber, 2008), p. 527. 31. Norman Demuth, Harrying the Hun: A Handbook of Scouting, Stalking and Camouflage (London: John Crowther, 1941), p. 25. 32. Maskelyne, p. 79. 33. Trevelyan, pp. 158–9. 34. Pierre-Antoine Courouble, The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs (Toulon: Les Presses du Midi, 2009). 35. Penrose, p. 102. 36. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 2–3. 37. Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (London: Scribner, 2003), p. 18. 38. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007), p. 315. 39. Dave Eggers, What is the What? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), p. 184.

Further Reading Behrens, Roy R., Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (Cedar Falls, IA: Bobolink Books, 2009). Blechman, Hardy, Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopedia of Camouflage (Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2004). Forbes, Peter, Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Hartcup, Guy, Camouflage: A History of Concealment and Deception in War (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1979).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 365

30/01/2012 16:24

37

WARPLANE David Pascoe

Air Powers

I

n the summer of 1943, Winston Churchill travelled to Quebec to take part in Quadrant, the fourth wartime meeting between the prime minister and President Roosevelt. Among the topics under discussion were the Italian Campaign, the War in the Pacific and, most urgently, the status of the strategic bombing offensive against Germany whose objectives, as they subsequently minuted to the absent Stalin, were simply ‘to destroy the German air combat strength, to dislocate the German military, industrial, and economic system, and to prepare the way for a cross channel invasion’.1 After dinner one evening during the visit, the leaders watched a cartoon, Victory Through Air Power, recently completed by Walt Disney Studios, a print of which had been specially dispatched to the conference. According to one of the film’s directors, Disney claimed that Churchill, having heard of the film’s subject matter, had arranged a screening for his American hosts so as to commend to the Roosevelt administration the policy of long-range strategic bombing, a policy which, over the previous two decades the British leader had consistently promoted, and which he had practised as soon as he became PM. For, on 11 May 1940, only the second night of Churchill’s Premiership, eighteen RAF Armstrong-Whitworth ‘Whitley’ night bombers took off for Germany. The dark camouflage and hard-edged shape of this type meant it was known among aircrew and aficionados as the ‘Flying Coffin’. ‘I never see a Whitley low overhead without a thought of how the boches must cower and scurry at the approach of that baleful shade’, observed the war artist, Paul Nash.2 For whereas these bombers had hitherto carried leaflets, and scattered them nightly over Germany – ‘free toilet paper for the duration of the war’, observed Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris – the Whitleys, ‘black as vermin [. . .] carrying harm in their wombs that ache to be rid of death’, now delivered high explosives from their bellies.3 A campaign against military targets, munitions works, aeroplane factories, oil refineries and canals proceeded through the next eighteen months; industrial-strength warfare. But in early 1942, after heavy losses and limited success, the Air Ministry issued a directive that operations ‘should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of industrial workers’.4 Precision bombing would be redirected towards the ‘Area’, a euphemism for the densely populated centres of German cities. Harris responded immediately by fire-raiding the medieval towns of Lübeck and Rostock on the Baltic coast, an incendiary strategy which would lead directly to the devastation of Hamburg

366

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 366

30/01/2012 16:24

warplane

367

in late July 1943, barely a month before the Quadrant conference. In one night, Bomber Command, assisted by the USAF, dropped 9,000 tonnes of combustible ordnance on the largely timbered Hanseatic city to create the first of the war’s firestorms, and suffocate and incinerate 40,000 civilians.5 Disney’s movie had brought to screen, though not necessarily to book, the alarmist ideas of Alexander De Seversky, a Russian émigré who had established an eponymous aircraft company in the late 1930s, before being ousted from the board for his lack of business nous. Thereafter the firm was renamed Republic Aviation and thrived on military contracts.6 Published a few months after Pearl Harbor, Victory Through Air Power declared the imminence of further surprise attacks on US territory by ‘invading aerial giants’, and ‘locust swarms of giant airplanes’, wreaking a destruction that was ‘systematic, scientific – the planned wrecking of a great nation’. Apocalypse then; and the only future was in the skies: ‘Every American – man, woman, and child – must be an airman in his heart.’7 Most of Disney’s movie depicts Seversky talking straight to camera, his lecturing interspersed with some animated sequences illustrating his theories.8 However, the opening of the film consisted of an eleven-minute cartoon sequence, later released in its own right, depicting the ‘History of Aviation’ from that day at Kitty Hawk in December 1903 when a pair of bicycle engineers, the Wright brothers, launched their flimsy contraption along the sand into the air, right up to 1942, when work on the film was begun. Disney’s artists showed how, just over a decade after its invention, the aeroplane, quickly developed by the Wrights for military applications, flew directly into war zones all over the world. As soon as Fokker invented the Stangensteuerung, that lethal synchronising device which enabled a machine gun to fire through the arc of the propeller without striking its blades, the flying machine became ‘a formidable weapon’, and then, by the early 1940s, ‘a devastating force’, the power it contained illustrated by animations of a large RAF bomber fleet passing across the frame en route to Germany. The destructiveness of these flying machines was reinforced by the depiction, in lurid reds and orange, piercing through clouds of black smoke, of the bombing of Cologne, which had taken place the previous summer; the first ‘Thousand Bomber Raid’. The film’s narrator intones: ‘In one single night, the bomb load dropped on Cologne was twenty times greater than the total amount used in the last War by the United States.’ Any levity this account of aviation might have had in its opening moments, in its depiction of those magnificent young men, Pierre and Fritz, archetypes of early European fliers, was now dropped. Disney’s history could no longer conceal aviation’s fundamental motive force: powered flight had only ever been driven by military operations, and the way to the stars lay in defence procurement. Sir Walter Raleigh, Merton Professor of English Literature, and the author of the standard history of the RAF during the Great War, observed: the history of the war in the air is inseparable from the history of the development of the art of flying [. . .] The necessities of war compelled and quickened invention. When a nation is fighting for its life, money and energy are expended without check, and it may be doubted whether in the whole history of mankind any art in its infant stage has been so magnificently supported and advanced by war as the art of flying was supported and advanced by the greatest war of all.9 And even though the Great War had ended, the training runs for future conflicts would continue, aircraft flying higher, faster and further, into the realms of what was regarded as technically impossible and morally unthinkable only a few years earlier. In

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 367

30/01/2012 16:24

368

david pascoe

the immediate aftermath of the next war, such views remained unchanged. Similarly, the novelist Nigel Balchin, in the official HMSO account of British aircraft production 1935–45, observes: It is rather a bitter reflection on the world of the last thirty years that so far the aeroplane, one of the greatest scientific achievements of modern times, has found greater and more far-reaching uses in war than it has in peace. The aeroplane has revolutionized war.10 Indeed, it might justly be said that the Sopwith Camel in the skies above Flanders; the Junkers Ju-87 ‘Stuka’ over the cities of Catalonia and the plains of Poland and northern France; the Lincolnshire-based ‘Lancasters’ diving across the North Sea, homing in on the Ruhrgebiet, at night; the B-29 ‘Superfortress’ serene above the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the MIG-15 ‘Fagot’ straddling the 38th parallel which divided the Koreas; the B-52 ‘Stratofortress’ high in the superchill of Cold War, its belly swollen with thermonuclear deliverance, or then serene over Indochina, laying down a carpet of bombs; the ‘Sea Harrier’ hovering over the Falklands’ rocky outcrops; and the A10 ‘Warthog’ strafing depleted uranium into Iraqi convoys on the road to Basra, have, in each case, defined the theatre of war: ‘the clean war, the war in the air’, as Howard Nemerov so coolly puts it.11

High Flights In his dazzling account of War and Cinema, the French philosopher Paul Virilio was struck by the fact that, immediately prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, aviation ‘was becoming one way, or perhaps even the ultimate way, of seeing’; in effect, the Air Force emerged out of the art of reconnaissance.12 Or as Cecil Lewis termed it, ‘artillery observation, dawdling up and down the lines while Archie [contemporary pilots’ slang for an antiaircraft battery] took pot-shots at you’.13 That perception of leisured military flight altered at the moment that the eye of the pilot and the viewfinder of his machine gun converged; from that point onwards, as Lewis explained, the flier became part of the mechanics of ‘good flying’: Single combat, a duel with another machine, was, performance apart, a question of good flying. Two machines so engaged would circle, each trying to turn inside the other and so bring his guns into play. Ability to sustain such tight vertical turns is the crucial test of a fighting pilot. Once the balance of the controls is lost, the machine will slip, lose height, and the enemy will rush in. Then, by all the rules of the game, you are a dead man.14 And, naturally, ‘the game’ would be over. Here is the paradox: this machine, whose manoeuvrability interfered with blood flow as nothing before, demanded of the pilot (as Lewis admitted) both a cool head for heights and a colder heart than the next airman: in all air fighting (and indeed in every branch of aerial warfare) there is an essential in which it differs from the war on the ground: its absolute cold-bloodedness. You cannot lose your temper with an aeroplane. You cannot ‘see red’, as a man in a bayonet fight. You certainly cannot resort to ‘Dutch’ courage. Any of these may fog your judgement – and that spells death.15

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 368

30/01/2012 16:24

warplane

369

W. B. Yeats had touched on this unnerving drive, this will to power, when he described an Irish Airman, Major Robert Gregory, foreseeing his own demise: Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult of the clouds.16 The aeroplane, in this case a Sopwith Camel, fabricated out of wood, wire and canvas, amounted to a vehicle powered by ‘impulse of delight’, carrying the pilot into the turbulent clouds of unknowing. As it happened, Gregory died in tumult on a reconnaissance flight in Italy in early 1918; according to the official account, he was ‘last seen at 2,000 feet, before [he] went into a spin and crashed’ near Padua, before the budding 36-year-old artist could draw on his memories to paint the clouds.17 For only in retrospect were writers ever free to explain the thrill of it all; and even then, their powers of description were waning and wanting. Take Roald Dahl, his 6ft 6 in. crammed into a cockpit of a Hawker Hurricane, finding it hard to depict his experience in the skies over Athens in 1941: I don’t think any fighter pilot has ever managed to convey what it is like to be up there in a long-lasting dog-fight. You are in a small metal cockpit where just about everything is made of riveted aluminium. There is a plexiglass hood over your head and a sloping bullet-proof windscreen in front of you. Your right hand is on the stick and your right thumb is on the brass firing-button on the top loop of the stick. Your left hand is on the throttle and your two feet are on the rudder-bar. Your body is attached by shoulder-straps and belt to the parachute you are sitting on, and a second pair of shoulder-straps and a belt are holding you rigidly in the cockpit. You can turn your head and you can move your arms and legs, but the rest of your body is strapped so tightly into the tiny cockpit that you cannot move. Between your face and the windscreen, the round orange-red circle of the reflector-sight glows brightly.18 Dahl seeks to ground his account of being lighter than air by stressing the solidity of the materials which embrace him – aluminium, plexiglass, bullet-proof glass, brass and so on – and render him immobile. He attempts to draw in his readership, but few could regard being hopelessly outnumbered in a dog-fight as ‘the most breathless and, in a way, the most exhilarating time I have ever had’. Perhaps because pilots needed to be cold-hearted, and often suffered breathlessness, the moments of sublimity tended mainly towards the technical: The shock of seeing bits coming off one’s aircraft; the smell of the beast when one climbs in; the acrid stink of cordite fumes as the cannons rattle; the feeling one has on a D/R [dead reckoning] cross-country when no familiar landmark has been recognised for quite some time; the relief as one flies out of a sticky front into fine weather and blue skies; the horrid hope that the recalcitrant port engine will really refuse to start and leave one to return to the mess; the pleasure of doing a really good, clean roll, barrelled just enough for you to retain the seat beneath, instead of above you; the grim silliness of the earth as it appears from twenty thousand; the sudden realization that the stick no longer operates the ailerons. . . oh millions of things will be remembered by those who really want to remember.19

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 369

30/01/2012 16:24

370

david pascoe

In 1944, Flight, the journal of aviation record, published a ‘Literary Interlude’ in which an anonymous correspondent wondered aloud if any really outstanding pilot, operational, or otherwise, is ever likely to have the sort of temperament and self-searching capabilities which will allow him to write an equally outstanding book [. . .] Flying, particularly with these present-day lethal devices, takes it out of one in a peculiar and inexplicable way, so that it is almost impossible to settle down afterwards to such pursuits as reading and writing.20 Such peculiar inexplicability most famously emerged from the cockpit of John Magee’s supercharged Spitfire in 1941, as he flew a high-altitude sortie and was struck by the inspiration of a poem, a single line which promised ‘To touch the face of God’. Once back on the ground, he wrote a letter to his parents, and remarked, ‘I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.’ On the back of the letter, he copied out the famous sonnet, ‘High Flight’, which the great American man of letters, Archibald MacLeish, would hail as the first poem of the Second World War: Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long delirious, burning blue, I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew – And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.21 This is easy and graceful, indeed, carrying echoes of Hopkins’s sonnet ‘God’s Grandeur’, not least in the rhyme of ‘trod / God’; and ‘wings / things’, and perhaps even of the soaring energies of ‘The Windhover’ too. But clearly, there were other phrases, more local, flying around in Magee’s cockpit that day; and perhaps a slim volume of poetry as well, since the very same cadence that concludes ‘High Flight’ also rounds off ‘The Blind Man Flies’, a poem by Cuthbert Hicks: ‘For I have danced the streets of heaven, /And touched the face of God.’22 The lines had been published three years earlier in a volume which had been compiled by Rupert de la Bère along with M. Savage, E. A. Johnston and P. A. Major, three flight cadets at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire. The anthology also featured ‘New World’ by G. W. M. Dunn, which contains the phrases ‘on laughter-silvered wings’; ‘the lifting mind’; and ‘the shouting of the air’, which Magee streamlines into ‘the shouting wind’. The sonnet’s pacifying penultimate line, ‘The high untrespassed sanctity of space’, recalls, and trespasses on ‘Across the unpierced sanctity of space’, which appears in the same volume in a poem by C. A. F. B. entitled ‘Dominion over Air’.23 Magee’s dominion only lasted another three months. In December 1941, he was killed

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 370

30/01/2012 16:24

warplane

371

when the aircraft he was flying collided with an Airspeed Oxford trainer at low altitude over Cranwell. Before he had time to deploy his parachute, he fell to his death in a Lincolnshire field, and according to a fellow flier who witnessed the accident, the wreckage of the plane ‘looked like a bird with a broken wing’.24 That bird, of course, was the most famous warplane of all, the Supermarine Spitfire. From the perspective of a new millennium, its uniqueness might only seem to be a matter of design: ‘small clean fuselage / slim curved wings / a perfect compromise / with all the qualities / required of a fighter / it’s British Bauhaus this plane.’25 And as Richard Hillary recalled, before Fighter Command pilots took control of a Spitfire for the first time, ‘the trim deceptive frailty of their lines fascinated us [. . .] The dull grey-brown of the camouflage could not conceal the clear-cut beauty, the wicked simplicity of their lines.’ Once inside the low cockpit, Hillary immediately noticed how small was his field of vision; still more restricted than Dahl’s would have been in the Hurricane. In fact, the only thing to catch his eye was ‘the white enamel undercarriage handle: “Like a lavatory plug,” I thought.’26 Sixty years later, Tom Paulin yanks on it, and grounds a flight of fancy: every Spitfire has a white enamel undercarriage plug exactly like a lavatory plug the sight of it always pulls the rug out from under me as I see us dropping through the state’s drains which by a commodious recirculation turns us up and back as heroes young men against the high stretched blue sky of Kent or Lincolnshire.27 Which is to say that this particular aircraft became part of an unbroken streamline, merging into the pre-war ‘airy plumeflight’ of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), to forge a nation the myth of ‘the Few’: the heroic pilots of eastern England.28 And for Hillary, the Spitfire was a time machine too, returning its pilot to an ideal for living and dying: For in a Spitfire we’re back to war as it ought to be – if you can talk about war as it ought to be. Back to individual combat, to self-reliance, total responsibility for one’s own fate. One either kills or is killed; and it’s damned exciting. . . it’s individual, and it’s disinterested. I shan’t get maimed: either I shall get killed or I shall get a few pleasant putty medals and enjoy being stared at in a night club.29 This was a fate tempted; for this Oxford Blue now sporting RAF blue serge would be decorated, and would be stared at, but primarily because he was so horrifically maimed, his face and hands melted away by flames ripped from his Merlin engine by Messerschmitt cannon. He would then endure two years of skin grafts and plastic surgery, of reluctant membership of Archibald McIndoe’s ‘Guinea Pig Club’, and of convalescence at the East Grinstead hospital, which gave him ample time to compose his famous memoir, The Last Enemy, and to petition the RAF to take him back into active service flying the Bristol Blenheim.30 Of the Blenheim fighter-bomber, there were two variants, the short- and long-nose; and of the former, Nash wrote:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 371

30/01/2012 16:24

372

david pascoe

the short-nose Blenheim is, naturally enigmatical. You might say it has no face – which is true, in a sense, and also terrifying – but I would prefer to say it wears a mask, or that behind a mask it is growing a face which, when at last it appears, may eclipse that of all others for its dire beauty.31 Nash’s curious description, with its fixation on facelessness, of masks and of regrowth evokes those techniques of plastic surgery, which grafted new faces onto disfigured airmen. In comparison, the long-nosed Blenheim ‘has, literally, no end of a face. Of all planes it possesses most facial features. For instance, it shows clearly a mouth, two wide nostrils, a beaked nose and at least one glaring eyeball’:32 once again, in the endlessness of face is the same plasticity of form seen in Nash’s pre-war art, but also in East Grinstead where Hillary made plans to save face by taking to the air again. Yet in the cockpit once more, his injuries meant that he could not operate the flight controls of the heavy twin-engined Blenheim on which he was training; he was unable to release the plane’s heavy undercarriage; and often he could not even strap himself into his seat. More serious still, taxiing the aircraft in the winter chills chapped the skin off his burned hands, his lidless eyes sometimes misread the altimeter, the dead reckoning required for visual flight gave him splitting headaches, and thin air at higher altitude made him sick. The title of his memoir alludes to the Pauline certainty that ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’; but it would take him first, in the early hours of 8 January 1943. Carrying out a training flight in the dark. Hillary and his observer were killed when their Blenheim crashed in flames on the Scottish Borders.33

Faceless Heroes If the fighter created the opportunity for personality, the bomber aspired to facelessness. As Churchill and Roosevelt watched the climax of Disney’s film, they would have witnessed some dazzling animated sequences: a group of faceless airmen scrambling their intercontinental bombers from an airfield in the Far East. They take off under a darkened sky in pouring rain, their landing gear splashing through puddles; the destination is Japan, where the sun rises. Now airmen are seen using navigational instruments, the streets of a city pass beneath the bombsight, and the ordnance is dropped, dramatic explosions which ensue destroying industrial buildings and machinery. But, as James Agee commented, even in close views of the interiors of levelled factories, ‘there were no suffering or dying civilians under all those proud promises of bombs’. That preposition is lethally understating.34 Graeme Coster has plausibly observed that ‘In all the writing about aviation there are more memoirs by erstwhile Lancaster pilots, or Flying Fortress navigators or Halifax bomb-aimers than any other kind of reminiscence or history’, largely, one supposes, because there were more bomber personnel. Their memoirs were written to commemorate people who were faceless, anonymous, lost to the air, over 55,000 of whom were lost on RAF Bomber Command missions just doing their job.35 ‘What airmen do is disappear, and in their absence they leave a challenge to those who would tell their story’, suggests Daniel Swift, who has written so eloquently of these lost airmen (one of whom was his grandfather) and the lives they left behind at the airfield.36 That sense of endless loss emerged at the time, in the first stanza of ‘Lincolnshire Bomber Station’, written by Henry Treece in autumn 1943, when he was on operations as an Intelligence Officer with a squadron of Lancasters:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 372

30/01/2012 16:24

warplane

373

Across the road the homesick Romans made The ground-mist thickens to a milky shroud; Through flat, damp fields call sheep, mourning their dead In cracked and timeless voices, unutterably sad, Suffering for all the world, in Lincolnshire.37 Treece’s poignant phrase ‘Suffering for all the world’ is both whimsical and formal; we are being asked to imagine the sheep of this relentlessly flat county, ever mourning the lambs to the slaughter. For ‘Bomber County’, above all, was a place of suffering, not just because the crews, flying blindly into winds of war, flocking over flak, wore thick woollen sweaters and heavy jackets crafted out of sheepskin as a means of surviving the high-altitude chill, as their cracked and timeless voices were heard over the radio for the last time. This is all in the air; but at this point in the war, everything was in the air, the hopes of an entire people, even if the chances of survival in the bomb run were as finely tuned as the morality was balanced. For despite the tremendous loss suffered by Bomber Command, there has long been a need to justify airmen’s actions in the face of trenchant criticisms of the strategic bombing offensive. For the primary purpose of such a crew was not to engage an enemy in direct combat – notwithstanding the flak and the swarming fighters defending the Fatherland – but rather to deliver a lethal bomb load on cities and, inevitably, on non-combatants. Max Hastings observes that ‘the remoteness of the bombing rendered tolerable in the eyes of Western political leaders and military commanders, not to mention their aircrew, actions which would have seemed repugnant and probably unbearable had the allies confronted the consequence at close quarters.’38 As Richard Eberhart puts it: You would think the fury of aerial bombardment Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces. History, even, does not know what is meant.39 One would think that, and one should think that; but history is ignorant of the full import of aerial bombardment, partly because, at the time, the action and the technology was presented as rationally, and as neutrally, as possible, not least because in its massive scale and inordinate losses the bombing offensive was akin to the attrition and carnage that had been seen in the Flanders trenches almost thirty years earlier. A bomber crew was a mere cog in an immense machine that spanned half the globe, a machine that scooped men up and hurtled them into the air with all the finesse of a catapult smashing boulders against the stone walls of an enemy castle.40 The most famous Boeing bombers drew on this architectonic myth, each type a castle in the air: the B-17, a ‘Flying Fortress’; the B-29 a ‘Superfortress’; and, almost beyond the clouds, the B-52 is a ‘Stratofortress’. In Disney’s film, the prototype of one such long-range bomber, built as a means to defend America’s homeland, is presented in close-up technical detail, an animated blueprint, its numerous gun turrets swivelling and firing, each seemingly with a mind of its own. (It was just such an ‘air-fire’ project that occupied Norbert Wiener, and would give rise to the science of cybernetics.41) Within, the large crew managed the great war machine, each airman having specific and narrowly defined tasks to perform: bomb-aimers, engineers,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 373

30/01/2012 16:24

374

david pascoe

navigators, radio operators and, of course, the gunners. For them, there was no safety in numbers; those revolving turrets, plexiglass spheres, set into the bellies or tails of bombers and containing two 0.50 calibre machine guns, operated by a slight man, doubled up, and assailed by fighter canons firing explosive shells. The vulnerability is sketched hauntingly, and horrifyingly, in Randall Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’: From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.42 Despite such individual messes, the loss of some mother’s son, aerial warfare was now a group activity; a matter of teamwork rather than individualism. In his propagandistic Bombs Away (1942), an account of the intensive training that precedes a successful bombing mission, John Steinbeck claimed: This is the kind of organization that Americans above all others are best capable of maintaining. The bomber team is truly a democratic organization. No single man can give all the orders to make a bomber effective. The effectiveness of its mission rests on the initiative and judgement of each one of its members.43 After the war, just as the size and speed of the bombers grew exponentially, so did an aircrew’s responsibilities and competences. Take the B-52, that massive jet bomber commissioned in the early 1950s to carry Strategic Air Command’s thermonuclear weapons, and deliver them to crack of doom.44 Confronted by its huge size, its eight turbojet engines belching plumes of smoke, the novelist Peter George nevertheless felt that, ‘aesthetically the exterior shape of the aeroplane was pleasing. The swept wings gave an impression of arrow swiftness; the shining body, of brightness and cleanness; the eight great engines, of power and pure functional efficiency.’45 Within, as Don DeLillo shows, the six-man crew kept their stations, if not always their dignity: In the cockpit the pilot and copilot hacked their watches for the second time. The crewmen at their separate stations went through the standard hundred-headed procedure, the gunner floating alone in the tail turret at the end of a crawlway, the EW [Electronic Warfare] officer shoehorned into a cubicle at the rear of the upper deck, and down in the squat black hole Louis Bakey let a yawn come rolling out and looked at the panels, switches and monitors that encased him in a more or less total monopoly of avionic jargon and he half nudged the navigator pressed in next to him. ‘First we bomb them.’ ‘Then we fuck them,’ said the navigator.46 Throughout SAC, the B-52 was known by the acronym ‘BUFF ’. In other words, a ‘Big Ugly Flying Fucker’, an aeroplane fuelled by the sexual energy of the men within its fuselage, and directed, in the first place, towards the women so graphically depicted on its surface: Whatever the bluntness of the acronym, there was nothing ugly about the nose art that adorned the area of the fuselage just aft of the cockpit windows. A tall young

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 374

30/01/2012 16:24

warplane

375

leggy blond, a cheerleader type in a skimpy skirt and halter with hands on hips and feet apart and a dare-me look on her face, she wants to be sexy but isn’t sure she knows how, very girl-next-doorish. And her name painted in script just above the line of mission symbols that numbered thirty-eight. Long Tall Sally.47 Kubrick’s film adaptation of George’s novel, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, takes these sexual matters further. The opening sequence shows ‘fornicating machines’ as a B-52 is refuelled by a skytanker, the great boom ready to pump kerosene nuzzling and then penetrating the smooth surface of the Stratofortress. Inside, the crew fiddle with the contents of the emergency ration packs – chewing gum, lipsticks, nylons, condoms – and flick through the latest issue of Playboy; even the inside of the door of the safe, in which the nuclear attack codes are secured, is decorated with images of Hefner’s bunnies, in bikinis, more or less. And, in the aircraft’s belly, safe and insulated, sit the two bombs, ready to be delivered to mother Russia: the one is labelled, forwardly, ‘Hi There’; the other, more apologetic, carries the beginning, ‘Dear John’, for the end of our world. Yet despite its continued success in SAC, by the early 1960s, owing to advances in Soviet air defence technology, the B-52’s role in nuclear warfare was taken over by the ICBM programme; and ironically, the Stratofortress achieved greater notoriety for a combat role for which it was never designed: the high-altitude carpet bombing of guerrilla positions in several South East Asian countries, commanded first by Johnson and then accelerated by Nixon on his gaining the Presidency in 1968. In an eight-year period, over 6.3 million tons of bombs fell on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; thirty years earlier just over a third of that amount had defeated the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire. In the words of June Jordan: ‘shit tore forth / pouring from the B-52 bowels loose over Hanoi and the skin / and the agonized the blown limbs the blinded eyes the / silence of the children dead on the street’.48 Their work finished, the war unwinnable, B-52s then scudded out of Vietnam, but in the following decade, looking for a kind of war with the Soviet Union that would never happen after the commencement of perestroika, hundreds were decommissioned and parked in desert airstrips. In Underworld, a conceptual artist called Klara Sax formerly known for her work with urban junk is now, in 1992, spray-painting some several hundred B-52s, including ‘Long Tall Sally’, to create an installation in the sand, another sign that the era of the strategic bomber was over. Not entirely, as it happened, for, about that time, the ‘BUFF ’ returned to action on new fronts worlds away from the Cold War, cheaply crushing Iraqi infrastructures in response to Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait. And then, in the new millennium, when ‘surgical strikes’ and ‘smart bombs’ had failed to dislodge Osama bin Laden from the Tora Bora cave complex, B-52s were called in to pulverise the mountains with heavy metal and napalm, dropped from castles in the air, as the aircrew count down: ‘“Three, two, one.” Then the world lights up. A glow enters the body that’s like the touch of God [. . .] There’s whole skeletons dancing in the flash.’49

The Aesthetics of Disappearance The bombers flashed over the City on a bright Tuesday in mid September, one after the other. Twin-aisled, wide-bodied Boeings both, American and United, silver and dark blue, they delivered their cargoes into the heart of the world. Twenty minutes earlier, America,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 375

30/01/2012 16:24

376

david pascoe

in its Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern time zones, tuned in as ever to its breakfast shows, and at first thought the breaking news was nothing more or less serious than the most bizarre air crash the nation had seen since a B-25, lost in fog, crashed into the Empire State Building. Now, in 2001, an American Airlines 767, en route to LA had, by some means or other, succeeded in burying itself in the north tower of the World Trade Center, at about the hundredth storey. Twenty minutes later, as a second, darker 767 approached the still intact southerly skyscraper, the world now watching on television clearly saw the potential terrors that air transport contained; a twin-engined, wide-bodied Boeing airliner – an object familiar from business meetings and Thanksgiving travel, and made by a trusted firm whose corporate slogan at the time was ‘Bringing People Together’ – was now a bomber. Tanked up for a long flight from Boston to Los Angeles, the second plane spooled up its turbofans as it passed the Statue of Liberty and, at full thrust, a couple of hundred metres above Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, banked left as it lined up for its final approach to the unscathed tower. The Boeing now seemed less an example of America’s industrial expertise than an object wholly military, striking at the WTC with the force of a tactical nuclear device. The edifice of glass and steel was 50 metres deep. It took roughly six-tenths of a second for the jet, travelling at more than 400 knots, to disappear inside; for the inferno to fall out of the other side of the building, into the blue; and for America to have a sense of the air power residing in seemingly innocent civilian technology. Over the previous two decades, much of the US defence budget had been spent on such arcane and exotic ‘Stealth’ designs as the F-117 ‘Nighthawk’ or the B-2 ‘Spirit’, designed to be invisible to radar, to fly long missions to perform ‘surgical strikes’ on targets (to stretch the jargon still further) while inflicting the minimum of ‘collateral damage’. During the first Gulf War, ‘Desert Storm’, such ‘smart bombs’ televised their own ‘precision guided’ trajectories into ventilation ducts or through the doors of Iraqi installations, and never before had air war merged so fully with its own representation as a film, or better, a video game. However, it seems that until the attacks of September 11 the Pentagon planners had not realised that the skies of America were already full of potential stealth bombers, aircraft primed and ready to wreak mass destruction at the heart of the metropolis. Nicholson Baker has plausibly suggested that, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Cold War had moved from ‘the upper atmosphere of spy photography to the wind tunnel, and aerodynamic drag has effectively replaced the Soviet Union as the infinitely resourceful enemy’.50 There is some truth in this, but to be precise, aerodynamic considerations did not set the agenda that shaped the aircraft that fight the skies now; instead, the advent of lightweight digital computers, and the realisation that they could be connected to electrical control circuits, drove the development of aircraft that can now fly over gravity’s rainbow. Flight has always depended on the manipulation of infinitely variable forces, like thrust, pitch, yaw, elevation, speed, flow, each of which affects the movement of air over the wings. Over the last thirty years, as aircraft have become ever more complex, such manipulation has been rendered into code for the improvement of flight control, resulting in the construction of aircraft that are aerodynamically unstable, but fantastically agile. Paul Virilio observed in 1984: ‘We are now witnessing the merge of telematics and aerodynamics, to the point where we could call the plane teledynamic, instead of supersonic or hypersonic, since the speed of information is closer to that of light than that of sound.’51 Such ‘teledynamic’ machines as the F-22 Raptor make frequent appearances in the military fictions (and video games) of ‘Tom Clancy’, where their capabilities are characterised more fully than those of their human counterparts.52

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 376

30/01/2012 16:24

warplane

377

If the military pilot has now become little more than a systems analyst in a G suit, then, presciently, Roland Barthes had intimated this in the late 1950s when he reported the ‘Jet-man’ as belonging to ‘a new race in aviation, nearer to the robot than to the hero’. His conception, derived from images of military test pilots who were pushing flight far beyond the speed of sound, was an early representation of a technologically mediated subject, whose velocity allows him to blur and then disappear: ‘the extravagance of his vocation precisely consisted in overtaking motion, in going faster than speed.’53 In the face of such technological sublimity, the myth of the aviator loses any human qualities that might have remained; the flier becomes part of a machine, subservient to a servomechanism, as the autopilot takes over, and the human factor is removed from the feedback loop. The apotheosis is Craig Thomas’s Firefox, where the fictional Soviet fighter bomber, the MiG-31, boasts various advanced capabilities: stealth technology which makes it completely undetectable to radar, a top speed of Mach 5 or more, a range of 3,000 miles and a weapons system controlled by the thought impulses of the pilot, rendering the gap between perception of a target and its destruction now infinitesimal. However, from the perspective of this novel, at least, where Mitchell Gant – the agent tasked with stealing the jet from a Russian air base and flying it back to the West for ‘reverse engineering’ – is a Vietnam veteran who suffers from flashbacks, such ‘teledynamic’ systems might be fundamentally flawed by the very presence of a human factor. Indeed, after such fictions, it is but a short step to remove the pilot entirely from the warplane of the future. Ours is perhaps the last generation to see manned combat aircraft, since fly-by-wire machines now have the capacity to fight more effectively (and costeffectively) than any human. Already, much of the air war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been fought in dark rooms, by virtual pilots flying drones, insulated from the consequences of their actions and from the risk of harm. In May 2010, Boeing announced its first fullsize unmanned stealth bomber, the ‘Phantom Ray’, a concept prefigured, it seemed, by the lethal ‘HK-Drone’ in Terminator 3, and its name announcing both the natural inspiration of its design and its ghostly operation.54 The manufacturer claims that it might be used for ‘Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; suppression of enemy air defenses; electronic attack and autonomous aerial refueling – the possibilities are nearly endless.’55 A century ago, similarly ambitious claims were being made for the Wrights’ Flier; but, with the rise of virtual machines, the only possibility now is that the pilot disappear from his aircraft into the ether.

Notes 1. The Quebec Conference, Avalon Project, available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/q004. asp#2, accessed 18 January 2011. 2. Paul Nash, ‘The Personality of Planes’, in Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings (London: Faber, 1949), p. 250. He proceeded to the following description of the Whitley: ‘it is a queer birdlike creature reminding me of a dove! Look at its head and lovely birdlike wings. As it sails through the low clouds at sunset, it might be the dove returning to the Ark on Mount Ararat. But it is more than this. If it is a dove, it is a dove of death.’ 3. Arthur Harris, cited in Robin Neillands, The Bomber War: The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany (New York: Overlook Press, 2001), p. 39. C. Day Lewis, ‘Bombers’, in Overtures to Death and Other Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938). 4. Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany (London: Naval and Military Press, 1961), vol. 4, pp. 143–8.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 377

30/01/2012 16:24

378

david pascoe

5. See Keith Lowe, Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943 (London: Penguin, 2007). 6. See Warren M. Bodie, Republic’s P-47 Thunderbolt: From Seversky to Victory (Hiawassee, GA: Widewing, 1994). 7. Alexander De Seversky, Victory Through Air Power (London and New York: Hutchinson, 1942), pp. 11, 101. 8. For the background to the film, and the critical reaction, see Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), pp. 273–5; and Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 234–7. 9. Sir Walter Raleigh, The War in the Air, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1922), vol. 1, p. 10. 10. Nigel Balchin [uncredited], The Aircraft Builders (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 9. 11. Howard Nemerov, ‘The War in the Air’, in Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961– 1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 129. 12. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, [1984] 1989), p. 17. 13. Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising (London: P. Davies, 1936) p. 107. 14. Ibid. p. 117. 15. Ibid. p. 117. 16. W. B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard Finneran, rev. 2nd edn (New York: Scribner, 1991), p. 135. 17. See Edward D. Pickering, ‘The Artist’s Tragic Flight: Yeats’s Portrayal of Major Robert Gregory’, Journal of Modern Literature, 32.2 (Winter 2009), pp. 80–99. On the military background, see Adrian Smith, ‘Major Robert Gregory, and the Irish Air Aces of 1917–18’, History Ireland, 9.4 (Winter 2001), pp. 12–19. 18. Roald Dahl, Going Solo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 150. 19. Indicator [pseudonym], ‘Literary Interlude’, Flight, 13 April 1944, pp. 394–5. 20. Ibid. p. 395. 21. John Magee, ‘High Flight’, in John Magee, The Pilot Poet, ed. Stephen Garnett (Cheltenham: This England Books, 1989), p. 84. 22. Cuthbert Hicks, ‘The Blind Man Flies’, in Rupert de la Bère, M. Savage, E. A. Johnston and P. A. Major (eds), Icarus: An Anthology of the Poetry of Flight (London: Macmillan, 1938), p. 45. 23. For a fuller account of these borrowings, see Tony French, ‘Magee: The Plagiarist Poet?’, Pilot (March, 1997), p. 90. 24. Patrick Murphy, ‘Lines Composed in a Spitfire’, Church Times, 12 September 2008, p. 8. 25. Tom Paulin, ‘Battle of Britain’, in The Invasion Handbook (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 182. 26. Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 76. 27. Paulin, p. 187. 28. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), pp. 1, 119. 29. Hillary, p. 15. 30. For a full account of the work at East Grinstead, see Emily Mayhew, The Reconstruction of Warriors: Archibald McIndoe, The Royal Air Force and the Guinea Pig Club (Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2010). 31. Nash, p. 253. 32. Ibid. p. 253. 33. The quotation is from St Paul (1 Cor. 15: 26). The best modern account of Hillary’s rise and fall is David Ross, Richard Hillary: The Definitive Biography of a Battle of Britain Fighter Pilot and Author of The Last Enemy (London: Grub Street, 2003). 34. James Agee’s review in The Nation, 3 July 1943 also describes the ‘sexless sexiness’ of this ‘machine-eat-machine’ view of the air war (see Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments [New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958], pp. 43–4).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 378

30/01/2012 16:24

warplane

379

35. Graeme Coster, The Wild Blue Yonder (London: Picador, 1997), p. xiv. 36. Daniel Swift, Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010), p. 41. 37. Henry Treece, ‘Lincolnshire Bomber Station’, first published in Henry Treece and John Pudney, Air Force Poetry (London: John Lane, 1944), p. 80. 38. Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944–45 (London: Macmillan, 2004), p. 308. 39. Richard Eberhart, ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’, in Jon Stallworthy (ed.), The Oxford Book of War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 275. 40. Stephen Budiansky, Air Power: The Men, Machines, and Ideas that Revolutionized War, From Kitty Hawk to Gulf War II (London: Viking, 2004), p. 309. 41. See P. Masani and R. S. Phillips, ‘Anti-aircraft Fire Control and the Emergence of Cybernetics’, in Norbert Wiener: Collected Works with Commentaries, ed. P. Masani, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), vol. 4, pp. 141–79. 42. Randall Jarrell, ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’, in The Complete Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 144. 43. John Steinbeck, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (New York: Viking, 1942), p. 27. 44. For a good general history of US policies towards bombing, see H. Bruce Franklin, ‘“Peace is Our Profession”: The Bombers Take Over’, in Dominick Pisano (ed.), The Airplane in American Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 333–56. The standard account is Michael Brown, Flying Blind: The Politics of the U.S. Strategic Bomber Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 45. Peter George, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1963] 1988), p. 31. 46. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1998), p. 607. 47. Ibid. p. 607. 48. June Jordan, ‘To My Sister, Ethel Ennis, Who Sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Second Inauguration of Richard Milhaus Nixon’, in Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry (New York: Random House, 1977). 49. DeLillo, p. 613. 50. Nicholson Baker, ‘Model Aircraft’, in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 27–35 (p. 33). 51. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (1984) (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 108. 52. Debt of Honor (1994) features a lengthy and enthralling mission by F-22s against advanced Boeing E-767 AWACS aircraft that were being operated hostilely by Japan, Though he is an author in his own right, ‘Tom Clancy’ is also a franchise for movie scripts, series of non-fiction books on military subjects and video games. For instance, Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X is an arcadestyle flight simulator, first published in 2009. 53. Roland Barthes, ‘The Jet-man’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladon, 1972), pp. 71–3 (p. 71). 54. Terminator Wiki website, http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/HK-Drone, accessed 19 January 2011. 55. Boeing website, http://www.boeing.com/Features/2010/05/bds_feat_phantomRay_05_10_10. html, accessed 19 January 2011.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 379

30/01/2012 16:24

38

MONSARRAT’S CORVETTES AND THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC Jonathan Rayner

Each man knew that the public reputation, the corvette label, was a reflection of something which, when isolated at sea, always confronted him with a mixture of triumph and horror, which was a stark and continuous challenge.1

N

icholas Monsarrat authored the definitive British account of the Battle of the Atlantic, based on his experience as a junior officer serving aboard Royal Navy escort ships. ‘Before the Curtain’, the prologue to Monsarrat’s novel The Cruel Sea, itemises the essential elements of the succeeding ‘long and true’ story, as ‘one ocean, two ships, and about a hundred and fifty men’. The men are the heroes of the story, the ships are the heroines and the only villain is ‘the cruel sea itself ’.2 Simplicity and gravitas here establish Monsarrat’s narrative as an elemental, universal story of ships and the sea, yet also as a closed, exclusive yet revelatory account of the naval war, which might otherwise remain the preserve of those who endured it. By the time of The Cruel Sea’s publication, the convoy war which Monsarrat depicted was also closed, having concluded in victory six years earlier. The first audiences for the novel and the film adaptation were familiar with the events of the recently ended conflict. However, the novel’s and film’s function as summation and epitome of the Battle of the Atlantic in the immediate post-war period was predicated on wartime books and films, to which Monsarrat contributed and from which his novel can be seen to draw. All the narrative incident and personal content of The Cruel Sea – such as the corvette crew undergoing rigorous ‘working up’ exercises before joining the convoys, Monsarrat and his fictional surrogate Lockhart taking sole command of the ship for the first time, the corvette rescuing survivors from a torpedoed fellow escort and accompanying the worst convoy of the war to Gibraltar – had an earlier print life in the form of Monsarrat’s non-fictional writings on his wartime service, Three Corvettes, and a subsequent non-fictional clarification in It Was Cruel.3 This chapter seeks to explore the connections and contrasts between Monsarrat’s wartime and post-war treatments of the convoy war, between his writings and the films adapted from them, and between Monsarrat’s works and contemporary accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic. His journalistic record of the anti-submarine war must be compared with his retrospective, novelistic re-rendering of the same events in The Cruel Sea, and with relevant narrative and documentary films made during and after the war, in order to assess the representativeness and influence of Monsarrat’s depiction. If Monsarrat’s visu-

380

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 380

30/01/2012 16:24

monsarrat’s corvettes and the battle of the atlantic

381

alisation of the corvettes’ war (documented in Three Corvettes, defined in The Cruel Sea and propagated by the film adaptation) has come to exemplify the longest and most crucial campaign of Britain’s war, then the sources and substance of this popularly accepted history, as personified in the heroic men, doomed ships and villainous sea, require scrutiny and synthesis.

The Ships Although two ships navigate the pages of The Cruel Sea, and Monsarrat serves on several through Three Corvettes, the emblematic vessel in his war writing is the ship which occupies most of the novel’s length: the fictional ‘Flower’ class corvette HMS Compass Rose. Within the Battle of the Atlantic, the corvettes stand apart from the Royal Navy-manned destroyers modified for escort work, because of their construction in civilian yards and their largely volunteer crews. Ordered in large numbers before the outbreak of war to overcome a shortage of escort ships, the corvettes were built to mercantile standards and not designed for the long-distance convoy duties they were forced to assume.4 Following the sinking of Compass Rose, a new ship (HMS Saltash) takes up the fight against the U-boats, yet the character of the corvette, the nature of her role and the fact of her loss pervade the remainder of the novel. The ‘animal howling’ of the sailors trapped below decks, which assails Captain Ericson from the voice-pipes when Compass Rose is torpedoed, torments him again in the film of The Cruel Sea the first time he stands on Saltash’s bridge.5 The affinity in suffering (originated in the novel and magnified in the film) this episode suggests does more than simply connect the death of the sailors and that of their ship, or the symbolic pain of the captain and his command. It confirms the indivisibility of the ship, the crew and the country they defend as casualties of the war, who are afflicted, traumatised and occasionally destroyed in and by their duty. When Compass Rose first leaves the yard where she was built and proceeds to sea, she is acknowledged, welcomed by and inducted into the fleet ranged across the Clyde.6 The same community absorbs and understands the facts of her sinking, in an unspoken empathy. Between her initiation and loss, Compass Rose is both subjected and witness to ‘the dangers of the sea and the violence of the enemy’.7 In ‘H.M. Corvette’, the first instalment of wartime reportage, Monsarrat professes his affiliation with and pride in the ships in convoy which his corvette escorts: ‘the convoy as a whole [. . .] takes the eye and the imagination. Making its steady and determined way, having limitless reserves of power and nerve to call on, it is, somehow, such a good thing to belong to.’8 The implied relationship between Merchant and Navy sailors is both strained and cemented by the experience of the convoys, since they are seen to share national, professional and familial links: Captain Ericson learns that his son’s ship travelling in their convoy has been torpedoed, and signals the rescue ships to find out if he is among the survivors.9 A similar representation of serious but containable danger, and the reassurance of the convoys’ safety, is found in the documentary film Corvettes, made for the Ministry of Information in 1941. Here the corvettes’ role is described as ‘many hours with nothing happening at all, and when it does, nothing decisive to show for it, except for the one vital fact: the convoy gets through’. Yet even this official depiction admits some veiled truths, which are similarly guarded and grudgingly released in Monsarrat’s accounts. The film’s voice-over concedes that, despite the corvettes’ seaworthiness, ‘life aboard can be

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 381

30/01/2012 16:24

382

jonathan rayner

remarkably uncomfortable’ in ‘dirty weather’. The sight of wooden wreckage, obviously from a U-boat’s victim, provokes troubling speculation: ‘if that empty raft could speak, it would have a story to tell, perhaps of a tragedy, perhaps of a nick-of-time rescue.’ Finally, even though the film’s convoy is seen to survive air and submarine attacks, a chastening parallel to the attrition of convoys in 1941 is symbolised by the failure of the crew’s efforts at ‘foster-mothering’ to save more than one of three orphaned kittens aboard. The early-war optimism of Monsarrat’s non-fictional account, though altered gradually by subsequent, harsher experiences, is eventually reversed by the descriptions of disastrous and gruesome episodes from the convoy war in The Cruel Sea. Where, in ‘H.M. Corvette’, the author fantasises about the drowned crew still within the wreck of a French ship, and only calls upon his readers to ‘imagine being on the bridge of a tanker’ or ‘imagine being a stoker’, he presents in detail an inexorable escalation of recalled horrors in The Cruel Sea.10 From the monotony of convoy duty, the memories of the worst episodes are extracted and described as a series of unspecifiable ‘times’. These events are linked to specific characters, yet are known to all through the crew’s communal experience, and are revealed to readers to both telescope and magnify six years’ convoys into six horrific vignettes: the ‘times’ of the Dead Helmsman, the Bombed Ship, the Captain’s Meeting, the Burnt Man, the Skeletons and the Burning Tanker.11 These emblematic incidents, coming immediately after the description of Compass Rose sinking a U-boat, rob that victory of any lasting success. Instead, these graded, dreadful ‘times’ connect with the recollection of ‘the worst convoy of all’ (in which their sister corvette is sunk and Ericson orders a depth-charge attack which kills survivors awaiting rescue), and look forward to the dispassionately categorised fates of Compass Rose’s crew when she too is torpedoed.12 Although Ericson and Lockhart survive to prosecute the second half of the war in closer partnership and with greater success in their second ship, they carry the experiential cargo of Compass Rose with them, inscribing failure, loss, pity and death as the more memorable aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic, despite and perhaps because of their providing the impetus and experience which guarantee eventual victory.

The Men In The Cruel Sea, the men of HMS Compass Rose are largely representative of the corvette community engaged in the convoy war. Captain Ericson is a Royal Naval Reservist (RNR, former Royal Navy and ex-merchant navy), the junior officers Lockhart and Ferraby are Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR, amateur volunteers), and the crew is composed of long-serving regular Navy veterans and ‘hostilities only’ recruits. Inducted like the crews that manned them into the Navy as a stop-gap solution, the ‘Flowers’ symbolise the wartime mobilisation of the British population, and embody the heroic efforts of what is presented as an expert crew fashioned from volunteers, an unprepared but determined, zealous but not jingoistic citizenry. Presciently, Lockhart asserts that, with RNVR officers accounting for a growing proportion of naval manpower (especially in escort forces) as the war progresses, they must eventually overcome the prejudice of the regular Navy and be granted commands.13 As the war progresses, Monsarrat shows the men of the corvettes cohering as a group, but also distinguishing themselves from the other ships and ships’ companies engaged in convoy duty. By 1941, the Battle of the Atlantic was ‘becoming a private war’ for sailors aboard the escorts, but even within this elite corvette crews stand apart:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 382

30/01/2012 16:24

monsarrat’s corvettes and the battle of the atlantic

383

The men who sailed in corvettes, the smallest ships loose in the wild Atlantic at this desperate stage [. . .] whatever the ship, they were the same kind of people – amateurs who had graduated to a professional skill and toughness. When Ericson looked round his wardroom, he saw in theory a journalist, a barrister, a bank-clerk, and a junior accountant; but these labels now were meaningless – they were simply his officers, the young men who ran his ship and who had adapted themselves to this new life.14 The endurance of hardship and catalogue of defeat experienced in the first half of the novel are shown to be the necessary formative influences which fashion a unified warship’s crew from these disparate individuals. Yet the impetus of the war also has a negative effect on both Lockhart and Ericson: as they harden into professionals, they become increasingly distanced from their experience and behaviour as civilians. Ericson, the former merchant navy captain, depth-charges survivors in the sea because he is convinced that a U-boat is hiding beneath them, and the sympathy of three captains rescued from lost ships cannot soothe or absolve him.15 The rhythmic montage of the depth-charging sequence in the film of The Cruel Sea asserts the inexorable, mechanical impetus of the war itself, to ‘poison’ the ocean and transform the men fighting upon it. Later in the war, as Ericson and Lockhart act more harshly towards those around them (and each other), they realise and concur that the war is no longer the ‘family sort of job’ it was aboard Compass Rose. Prolonged exposure to their enemies (the sea and the U-boats concealed within it) means that for both men there is now ‘no margin for humanity left’.16

The Enemy The status of the sea as the villain of Monsarrat’s narrative subsumes or hides the other dangers and adversaries which emerge for the ships and men: the German U-boats that threaten their convoys, and the women connected to the men through family, marriage and love. ‘Before the Curtain’ notes the existence of women relevant to the men if not always the story (‘at least a hundred and fifty women, loving them, or tied to them, or glad to see the last of them as they go to war’), whereas the film’s opening voice-over, which adapts Monsarrat’s prologue, omits the women but asserts that war has made the sea ‘more cruel’ than simple nature. The exclusion of women from the film’s prologue anticipates its admission of only a positive female influence upon the narrative and Lockhart, in the form of Wren officer Julie Hallam. That other female representations inhabit the novel of The Cruel Sea, and that Julie’s role within it is also more complex and problematic, underlines the ambiguity with which women are invested in Monsarrat’s fiction, as they become linked metaphorically with the ships and the sea as well as the men. The initial isolation of the sea as the only villain distracts from the antagonistic status of the U-boats. The invisibility of the U-boat (both when submerged or attacking on the surface at night) renders the corvettes powerless to defend the merchant ships or to counter-attack. The activity of the corvettes and their crews becomes limited to the unheroic (or perhaps unconventionally heroic) tasks of witnessing the horrors of ships exploding, burning and sinking without warning, and then attempting to rescue the survivors. This reinforces the civilian aura of the corvette, as the survivors share the over-crowded spaces with the warship’s own ex-merchant navy sailors. Compass Rose picks up the handful of men who survive the sinking of her sister-corvette Sorrel, before she too is sunk and her own crew need to be rescued.17 Similarly, the small number of survivors from another

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 383

30/01/2012 16:24

384

jonathan rayner

torpedoed corvette, seen on the deck of a rescuing destroyer in the opening of the wartime propaganda feature Corvette K-225 (1943), resemble merchant navy survivors because they have lost their uniforms with their ship.18 Compass Rose also picks up German survivors, from the U-boat she sinks, but this sudden revelation of an enemy ship and crew is far from satisfying. The appearance of the surfacing U-boat ‘was odd, and infinitely disgusting [. . .] like seeing some criminal, who had outraged honour and society [. . .] taking his ease at one’s own fireside’, and the German prisoners are ‘strangers [. . .] people from another and infinitely abhorrent world’.19 Taking the Germans prisoner affects Ericson profoundly: There was something totally wrong in having them on board. One lost strength and virtue through the mere association. Prisoners are a mistake, he thought crudely: we should have used them for target practice in the water, we should have steamed away and left them whining.20 This unspoken and unrealised thought, suggesting war crimes of which the U-boats were commonly accused, is attributed to the tainting presence of the U-boat prisoners, but perhaps initiates Ericson’s transformation, via Compass Rose’s sinking, into an uncompromising (successful) escort commander. Throughout the narrative, Lockhart struggles with the conundrum of loving attachments, which provide support and offer solace and purpose, but, like the presence of the enemy, jeopardise resilience and resolve: One man might need the tenderness of a love affair or a happy married life to dilute the ordeal of war: it might, indeed, be the only thing which would keep him going and make his war-time life endurable. Another might be only devitalised or distracted by any break in the hard routine, and would be compelled to sign on for a sort of monastic dedication, if he were to be of any use in war at all.21 The novel features a range of heterosexual relationships to prompt and confirm Lockhart’s conviction, but these are laden with ironies. Lockhart tries to maintain his belief in committed solitude until the conclusion of the war, but this proves impossible when he meets Julie. The most positive marriage, Sub-Lieutenant Ferraby’s, cannot halt his mental collapse under the strain of convoy duty.22 The protracted tale of Seaman Gregg’s faithless wife and child of suspect parentage works to validate Lockhart’s views: Gregg’s situation disheartens Captain Ericson, who appears to share the outlook of his second-in-command.23 Ericson’s contact with his own wife becomes an ‘unsettling contrast with what must be his true habit of life’.24 When the Captain recounts his meeting with Lieutenant Morell’s widow, Lockhart blames ‘the war’ for her infidelity and the waste of a good man, but Ericson refutes her relevance, insisting that to link her husband’s death to her at all would ‘poison the whole thing’.25 The culpability of ‘the war’ itself (which Ericson also blames for his order to depthcharge the survivors) seems to excuse the sea for the atrocities occurring on it. However, the sea is a co-conspirator in the death of Compass Rose (the torpedo which hits her while at full speed leaves her ‘mortally torn by the sea as well as by the violence of the enemy’), and intervenes vindictively to rob Lockhart of Julie Hallam (who drowns in an accident while Lockhart is at sea).26 To Lockhart her loss is a painful repetition of Compass Rose’s sinking, and provokes comparison with the Wrens drowned during the war’s ‘worst convoy’ to Gibraltar. In these most crucial losses, the human and elemental enemies become merged in their malicious capacity to bereave Lockhart and Ericson. The

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 384

30/01/2012 16:24

monsarrat’s corvettes and the battle of the atlantic

385

enforced connection between the traumatic loss of the ship, the death of the Wrens which epitomises the corvette’s inadequacy, and the arbitrary death of Julie Hallam when peace beckons and she is pregnant with Lockhart’s child, finally vindicates the sea’s elevation as the villain of the narrative, and encapsulates the ‘longest love’ for sailors that the sea embodies, inspires and betrays until it becomes the ‘longest hate’.27

Conclusion We are comfortably familiar with the idea that realistic war novels challenge traditional concepts of the heroic. We are perhaps reluctant to acknowledge that they may also challenge our conventional rejection of it.28 The depiction of corvettes in Monsarrat’s writings and contemporary films stresses the strains of convoy warfare, the physical and mental endurance required of the sailors engaged in it, and the communal, national nature of the task which inducts civilians into the Navy and its traditions in order to protect the country at large. The admission of the corvettes’ failings (their inadequacies in the Atlantic, and their helplessness against U-boats in the early part of the war) have, ironically, become part of the myth of the Battle of the Atlantic, and of the stoical endurance of the ships, crews and the country itself in a conscious, repeated, heroic understatement of the significance and achievement of the convoy war. Desperation and the possibility of defeat are not fully acknowledged in the wartime writing: the descriptions and accounts of the most horrific events implied in wartime writings become fully realised as revelations in the post-war novel, only for the film adaptation to engage in a further retrospective self-censorship (avoiding the representation of the ‘times’ and sparing Julie Hallam). While both the novel and post-war film cannot deny the eventual victory, they eschew optimism and never exhibit the triumphalism sometimes perceived in post-war British war films.29 The final defeat of the U-boats is recorded by Lockhart’s and Ericson’s understated exchanges on Saltash’s bridge, as the German Navy surrenders, and their duty and war are completed with ‘Ring Off Main Engines’. This apparent absence of fulfilment or purpose for Monsarrat’s characters once the war ends finds fuller, darker exploration in The Ship That Died of Shame in which patriotism, love, self-respect and self-interest are again seen in conflict in the lives of directionless demobbed sailors.30 The ending of the war re-emphasises the close association of Britishness and amateurishness which define the corvettes and their crews of volunteers and reservists. The narrativisation of the corvettes’ role encompasses the mobilisation of civilians and the adaptation of a civilian ship design to provide a stop-gap in war, and a model for national unity and amateur improvisation which vindicates victory in the Atlantic as a communal achievement. After ‘three years of cruel weather, cruel dangers, cruel sights to remember’, Ericson sees in his proficient crew the validation of national adages and proof of a patriotic predisposition to a life of duty at sea: The sea in their blood, he thought [. . .] meant that you could pour Englishmen – any Englishmen – into a ship, and they made that ship work and fight as if they had been doing it all their lives, catching up, overtaking, and leaving behind the professionals of any other nation.31 Similarly, when he takes sole command for the first time, Lockhart feel that he is doing no more than ‘turning another page of a book’ that he ‘knew by heart already’.32

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 385

30/01/2012 16:24

386

jonathan rayner

This affirmation of a merged national-naval identity recurs within another example of Monsarrat’s heroic understatement, when a group of post-war yachtsmen deny their participation in the Dunkirk evacuation, while the narrator insists that in spirit at least, ‘every Englishman was at Dunkirk.’ The absorption and recognition of the RNVR within the Navy in war, and the veneration of the inadequate corvettes in the Navy’s and nation’s struggle, produces an instinctive acceptance of duty in Monsarrat’s depictions which celebrates commitment in adversity ahead of success in victory. In It Was Cruel, Monsarrat describes the last night of the war, and his temptation to leave his headquarters post to view the crowds of revellers. On the roof of Admiralty Arch he encounters a ‘legend’, Admiral of the Fleet Andrew Cunningham, who both gazes at and resembles the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square. Chastened and inspired by his example, and ignoring the arrival of peace, Monsarrat returns ‘to duty forthwith’.33

Notes 1. Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea (London: Penguin, [1951] 2002), p. 153. 2. Ibid. p. 10. 3. Nicholas Monsarrat, Three Corvettes (London: Cassell, 2000). Writings serialised and published individually between 1942 and 1944; published together in 1945. It Was Cruel serialised in 1970. 4. Of over 260 ‘Flowers’ completed, slightly under half were built in Canadian rather than British shipyards, roughly a quarter were operated by the Royal Canadian Navy, and more than twenty joined or were transferred to five other Allied navies (uboat.net website, http://www.uboat.net/ allies/warships/class.html?ID=42, accessed 1 October 2008). 5. Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, p. 279. 6. Ibid. p. 43. 7. Ibid. pp. 310–11. 8. Monsarrat, Three Corvettes, p. 35. 9. Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, pp. 253–4. 10. Monsarrat, Three Corvettes, pp. 25, 56. 11. Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, pp. 244–62. Similar ‘times’ are recounted in less explicit terms in ‘H.M. Corvette’ (Monsarrat, Three Corvettes, pp. 62–3). 12. Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, pp. 191–210. 13. Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, p. 18. Monsarrat remarks on RN/RNR prejudices against RNVR officers when he is offered his own command (Monsarrat, Three Corvettes, pp. 129–30). 14. Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, pp. 152–3. 15. Ibid. pp. 210–12. 16. Ibid. pp. 355–7. 17. Ibid. pp. 195–9. 18. Although an American production, Corvette K-225 champions the ships and men of the Royal Canadian Navy who, the voice-over tells us, ‘have made the name “corvette” a by-word for endurance and sacrifice’. 19. Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, pp. 235–7. 20. Ibid. p. 241. 21. Ibid. p. 265. 22. Ibid. pp. 104–6, 143, 268–9. 23. Ibid. pp. 128–38, 262–4. 24. Ibid. p. 100. 25. Ibid. p. 303.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 386

30/01/2012 16:24

monsarrat’s corvettes and the battle of the atlantic

387

26. Ibid. pp. 279, 419. 27. Monsarrat, Three Corvettes, pp. 3–6. 28. Andrew Rutherford, ‘Realism and the Heroic: Some Reflections on War Novels’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 12, Heroes and the Heroic Special Number (1982), pp. 194–207 (p. 206). 29. Clive Coultass, ‘British Feature Films and the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 19.1 (1984), pp. 7–22 (p. 10). 30. Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea, pp. 305–40. 31. Ibid. p. 275. 32. Ibid. p. 144. 33. Monsarrat, Three Corvettes, p. 205.

Further Reading Aldgate, Anthony and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999). Higson, Andrew, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). –– (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996). Jarrett, Thomas D., ‘The Talent of Nicholas Monsarrat’, The English Journal, 45.4 (1956), pp. 173–80. Mackillop, Ian and Neil Sinyard, British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Murphy, Robert, British Cinema and the Second World War (London: Continuum, 2000). Ramsden, John, ‘Refocusing “The People’s War”: British Films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33.1 (1998), pp. 35–63. Rayner, D. A., Escort (London: William Kimber, 1955). Robertson, Terence, Walker RN (London: Pan Books, 1958). Taylor, Philip M. (ed.), Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 387

30/01/2012 16:24

39

SUBMARINE NOVELS ‘AFTER HISTORY’ Hamish Mathison

S

ince the fall of the Berlin Wall, novels which place a submarine at the centre of their plotting have feared increasingly the possession of undersea power by states or organisations not known to deploy such weaponry during the twentieth century. Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October (1984) was the last significant book to use the submarine as a familiar with a clearly defined maleficium in the Cold War.1 The continuing generic influence of Clancy’s subtle and engaging text should not be underestimated, yet it trades upon terms that were to become anachronistic within ten years of first publication, or at least reductive: ‘I think we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. Don’t you?’ posited the author in an early interview.2 Over a generation later there are, indubitably, still ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in the submarine novel. However, the nature of their credentials has changed. No longer are submarines seen as the means to prosecute a strategic fight between a good nation and an evil empire, between left and right. Since the early 1990s, the submarine as an agent of change has proven to be something of a turncoat. At best it can still deliver legitimate strategic power from deep waters; more commonly it fights short tactical engagements in deniable or illegal actions with little clear strategic purpose or effect. More worryingly, the novelistic submarine, since Clancy’s paean to the wellordered homosocial community aboard the American 688 (Los Angeles) class of nuclearpowered attack submarine, has become as capable of hosting a mutiny, being hijacked by terrorists or sold to nefarious organisations as it is (or was) capable of turning the tide of a strategic conflict worked out in the North Atlantic.3 That change in seascape is worth noting: while the Soviet Union and the United States of America of course maintained a significant undersea presence in all potential theatres of salty conflict throughout the Cold War, and while the Pacific theatre featured often, it was the North Atlantic with its fragile shipping lanes, NATO reinforcement routes and tenuous lines of communication that most captured the imagination. The GIUK (GreenlandIceland-UK) gap laced with sonar listening posts, the infrastructure of bases, docks and manufactories (Faslane, Coulport, Brest, Kings Bay, Groton, Polyarny, Severomorsk) that ringed the North Atlantic: these locations offered the most charged boundaries to novels of submarine warfare.4 By the 1990s, the loci of conflict had begun to change: increasingly, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, inland waters, the East China seas, even the distant South Atlantic and Antarctic Oceans came to offer a more fragmented backdrop to submarine action. These changes, in the stability of the central trope (the submarine itself), the settings, plots and the outcomes of such novels are many and are complicated. In what

388

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 388

30/01/2012 16:24

submarine novels ‘after history’

389

follows, with The Hunt for Red October as a datum, the shifting fortunes of the post-Cold War submarine novel will be mapped. Submarines once were used to order the balance of power between established bluewater navies (USA, UK, France, Russia).5 Real-world political exigency has proven problematic, however. As William F. Ryan notes, in one of the earlier 1990s treatments of the ‘techno-thriller’ as genre: One of the problems confronting writers in this genre is collaring a plausible villain. Cessation of the Cold War has all but eliminated the Red Army, the KGB, and other Russian golems. The [first] Gulf War didn’t last long enough to suit the television networks, let alone the quick-book publishers. ‘The terrorists are the only plausible villains around right now who are obvious,’ [Steven] Coonts said.6 While post-Cold War security agencies of all flavours have proven themselves quite capable of supplying plausible villains, there is no doubt that the status of the Atlanticrim navies are not as assured as once they were. This is made explicit in Robin White’s 2006 novel Hunters in the Sea, as we see in the following exchange between Commander Steadman, CO of the Portland ‘the newest and final Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine in the fleet’ and his immediate superior in the sixth (Mediterranean) fleet, the risk-averse Captain Fountain: ‘I have a good understanding of what she’s for, Captain.’ ‘Do you? Submarines are expensive and some folks think they’re not good for much now that the Soviets are gone.’ ‘They’ve changed their flag. They’re not gone.’ ‘Even more reason to keep our hulls safe and functional for more than a few weeks at a time, wouldn’t you say?’ ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said a third voice from behind them, ‘but I heard someone say that a harbour is a safe enough place for a ship, but that wasn’t what ships are for.’7 While the Soviets may have ‘changed their flag’ (there are two connected plot strands: the hunt for an ex-Soviet militarised virus aboard a tramp steamer is paralleled with the threat from a Russian Akula-class attack submarine), it is not a nation state that calls this submarine and its crew out from the safety of the harbour, but rather the threat of a terrorist’s possession of a militarised virus. Naval vessels are built for conflict, and in a curious teleology that conflict must be found somehow – ‘someone’ knows that while you may best build a peace by preparing for war, the mere presence of an arsenal (or harbour) full of weaponry does rather demand its use. After all, the use value of an attack submarine comes in attack: and there is a significant difference between ‘attack’ boats such as the Los Angeles class and the status of boats that bear strategic nuclear missiles (the US Ohio class of ‘Boomers’ or Britain’s Vanguard class, which carry the Trident missile). The use of a Trident-bearing boat’s munitions signifies the end of the world as we know it, and the concomitant failure of whatever military strategy or political values that led to its use. The ‘attack’ or ‘hunter killer’ submarine on the other hand is a potent tactical weapon, and its use does not presume mutually assured destruction and its employment in harm’s way is ‘what ships [sic] are for’. There is a nostalgia within Robin White’s text for the days when submarines duelled on the high seas (in fiction, at least) and pursuit by and then of the Russian Akula is a secondary narrative weapon in White’s armoury. The Portland is better understood as

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 389

30/01/2012 16:24

390

hamish mathison

contained and restrained by its mission: it is locked into the Eastern Mediterranean, pursuing a tramp steamer crewed by the (horribly) dying, stuffed to the gunwales with actionhungry Navy SEALS. The submarine facilitates the activities of American special forces. Delivered after the ‘war on terror’ and the second Gulf War, the novel treats with some sophistication the problematic interface between the ‘regular’ Navy and its special forces. The operation’s decisions are made not by Steadman, but by Lieutenant Jameson, a Navy SEAL with a licence (‘Presidential Order 2005–22: On Enemy Combatants and the Use of Lethal Force’) that comes, feels Steadman, from a distinctly problematic place: Here was a hunting license that appointed Jameson judge, jury and executioner. ‘This turns the whole world into one big free-fire zone, doesn’t it?’ ‘It acknowledges the fact that it already is one. And it puts war back in the hands of warriors.’ ‘I’m not worried about warriors fighting wars,’ said Steadman. ‘I don’t much care for the idea of them starting them, though.’ ‘With terrorists, waiting for the chain of command to respond is suicide. This fight has to take place on the dark side of the law, commander. Otherwise, we’ll be sweeping up bodies back home.’ ‘The dark side means what exactly?’ ‘The American people will forgive us if we go too far defending them. They won’t forgive us if we fail.’8 Fear of failure is what takes the Portland out of harbour in the post-Soviet world. Where Clancy’s Jack Ryan sailed for patriotism and the American way against the evil empire, here the Portland, a 688-class icon of that earlier conflict, is employed to keep (almost literally) the lid on a toxic situation: [Steadman] thought of the men who’d hoped to unleash a cataclysmic virus on the world. This was no ‘clash of civilizations’, no struggle between competing religions. This was a war against pure, unadulterated evil.9 As in the real world, imagining ‘evil’ as a target for American power without a nation state to pin it onto is a slippery business: in representative terms, it is a reductive one. By 2006, the submarine fights ‘war’ in metaphor alone, as the text itself acknowledges: ‘You don’t need a submarine to stop an old freighter.’ ‘You do if you want to keep her under covert surveillance 24/7. Or if you want to find out where she’s going without them knowing we’re watching. A satellite can only take a snapshot. What happens in between passes? No one knows. And an airplane will give away the game. If they know we’re onto them what’s to keep them from running the ship up on the nearest beach and cracking open a few vials? A submarine with a team of special operators is the only platform that can carry it off.’10 The Portland is a Cold War weapon drawn down to the role of a tactical bus for the special forces aboard (and to be fair to White, much excitement is therein generated). It is the most capable attack submarine ever built, it is the last in its class, the mould was broken upon its launch. Yet also, and precisely and concomitantly, the Portland is a reminder only of the way things used to be. The Portland is an embodied echo of the old certainties. It does not signify hope for the future, it does not suggest ways in which (to borrow from Clancy) ‘we’ can keep up with or surpass ‘them’. A foster child of silence or slow time, it

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 390

30/01/2012 16:24

submarine novels ‘after history’

391

reminds us, oddly, of how belated the West’s response must be – primed as it is for bluewater encounters – when faced with a tramp steamer bearing an attaché case full of neurotoxin. The Portland really is the last of the class, its anachronism shocking. If Hunters in the Sea reimagines the Cold War’s attack submarine as an agent in the war on terror, and evinces an anxious nostalgia for older certainties as it does so, there is also a substantial and growing body of work that finds the submarine itself to be complicit in attacks upon Western cultural and economic hegemony. On the one hand, forced to find villains beyond the ex-Soviet Union, authors can turn to established nation states whose politics have taken a turn for the worse. An example of this would be Michael DiMercurio’s work with Japan and then China. Over a number of texts, DiMercurio takes the technologically advanced nation of Japan as a potential aggressor in the Pacific: in Japanese industry he finds a rival to American submarine technology. Piranha: Firing Point (1999) combines Japanese advanced submarine technology with a near-future imagining of a China divided into ‘White’ and ‘Red’: the crux of the book involves the ‘Red’ Chinese hijack of advanced Japanese submarines, advanced enough effortlessly to defeat the American naval forces in the Pacific that seek to support by amphibious assault the pro-democratic forces of ‘White’ China. The daring ‘Red’ naval Commander Chu HuaFeng makes his case thus to the party Chairman: The last time you saw me I was requesting funding for the submersible you have just seen succeed in hijacking a submerged under-way nuclear submarine [. . .] I propose to deploy the Red Dagger and the other submersible units and take command of the Rising Sun submarines. Once we have captured them, we will station ourselves in the East China Sea, where we will keep the West from assisting the Whites.11 Chu’s plan nearly works, and twelve 688-class boats are rapidly lost to the technologically advanced, but captured and re-crewed, Japanese submarines. What is interesting here is not so much the near-future enemies, nor the imagining of future technology (placing the submarine novel in a continuum with science fiction, a trait found even in Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, it is no accident that the 688-class of boat should take such a hammering).12 What is significant is the insecurity of the submarine itself. The attraction of the SSBN, for example, is that it cannot be detected, its ballistic missiles guaranteeing a viable first or retaliatory strike in the event of a nuclear war. While what we see here are nuclear attack boats rather than SSBNs, the idea that a naval fleet submarine can be the subject of a hijack strips away much of the implicit stability and security – the utter reliability in the event of conflict – that the submarine offers the nation state. The piratical ‘Red’ Chinese flip the balance of power in the eastern Pacific and East China Seas not by developing and deploying submarine power in a legitimate (that is, discoverable) way, but by hijack, by piracy and by short-circuiting the essence of the nuclear submarine’s meaning: its secrecy, reliability and inviolability. Thus in DiMercurio’s novel a nation with only brown-water capability suddenly becomes one with blue-water power, and the inversion of the undersea world order brings the text to life. DiMercurio’s text is not alone in imagining the submarine as capable of hijack, and the plot device is mirrored in Patrick Robinson’s H.M.S. Unseen (1999). There, HMS Unseen is hijacked by a terrorist while in the process of being sold to the Brazilians. Retrofitted with an anti-aircraft missile system, it is used to destroy transatlantic flights. The theft of the Unseen (designed to patrol the GIUK gap and counter Soviet submarine incursions into the Atlantic) neatly inverts its intended role. Far from providing for British

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 391

30/01/2012 16:24

392

hamish mathison

and NATO security in the Atlantic, the submarine becomes a weapon that facilitates transatlantic outrage. The project is sponsored by Iran: a nation with only the slightest of brown-water capability is able to project power (through the lens of international jihadist terrorism) in the heart of what should be NATO’s backyard (the Atlantic). As mentioned above, the Atlantic was long held to be the site of nuclear security for the West, the place where SSBN patrols, SSN protection and a raft of military infrastructure and the latest technology thwarted the evil empire. Robinson, in one of his better novels, very neatly inverts the key tropes of Cold War naval security, and at its heart lies the submarine: no longer defending a realm but rather wreaking destruction upon the civilians whose country fashioned it. A saving grace for DiMercurio’s and Robinson’s submarines in the two texts above is that they are operated (albeit piratically) in the deep waters they were designed for. Novelistically, this is increasingly uncommon: Hunters in the Sea is one example of the novelistic submarine constrained by its targets, and increasingly the weapon is used not to project power globally, not to fight naval battles, but to operate in a littoral role.13 Increasingly, attack submarines deliver short-range weaponry onto land targets or they deliver special forces. In that shift away from the envisioning of submarines as weapons of naval battle and reimagining them as vehicles for the delivery of limited power from sea to land, recent submarine fiction reinvests submarines as weapons of terror. Where the horror of the Nazi U-boat threat was aimed at civilians (the blockade of the UK in the opening years of the Second World War) and there was terror in the Cold War SSBN’s ability to erase life as we know it from just above the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the awfulness of conflict was framed by the nation state, as suggested above. More recently, non-governmental and paragovernmental forces are imagined to terrorise directly – to inflict atrocities upon – civilian populations by means of submarine action. Offering the submarine to terrorist organisations and to governments ideologically opposed to Western values and the cultural and economic hegemony of the US in particular has become a recurrent trope within the genre. A key metaphor for this article is the littoral spaces across which the submarine novel now operates. The submarine serves to metaphorise the unseen forces at work in an increasingly unstable world order, one that exists ‘after the history’ of great-power geopolitics and one recently defined by a ‘war on terror’ and an ‘axis of evil’. Single submarines sponsored by rogue or failing states and operated by terrorist organisations close the gap in naval power that existed between Occident and Orient; their power crosses the border between sea and land: military force is projected against civilian targets. Terrorism, rather than legally sanctioned naval warfare, serves as the paradigm of conflict in the contemporary submarine novel. These increasingly are weapons of the littoral, projecting force from sea to land rather than engaged in blue-water warfare: their ultimate targets are the West’s civilian infrastructure, populations and economies. This is seen particularly clearly in Patrick Robinson’s later novels, where assaults are planned on the West’s populace, economy and culture. In Barracuda 945 (2003) Ravi Rashood, jihadist and novice submariner, puts his case for terrorism’s use of a submarine to senior Iranian clerics thus: We have to cause the USA to grow totally exasperated with us, fed up with the inconvenience, tired of endless rebuilding, and above all, fed up with the cost. No killing, no mass murder, just attack after attack on high-tech systems, machinery and institutions. Not people, because that makes them angry and dangerous. Things, gentlemen, things. And everything unattributable.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 392

30/01/2012 16:24

submarine novels ‘after history’

393

That’s the only way. Stretch ’em, stretch ’em far and wide. Stretch their resources until they break. Make them think they have to protect this, guard that, send aircraft carriers here, submarines there, troops somewhere else. Make them think the only way they can retain their global empire and trade routes is to guard the whole damn world from attack.14 The submarine as terrorist smart-weapon offers this kind of novel writing a powerful metaphor for the instability of contemporary global politics and serves to trope the fearfulness of Occidental citizens who depend on the sea and its coastline for the transport and process of key commodities: We will start by crippling the new west-coast electricity supply right from the source, at the refinery in Prince William Sound. Hit the storage tanks, then the actual refinery, then the pipeline itself, then the pipeline underwater along the Washington State coast, maybe three times, then the new refinery they’re building in Gray’s Harbor [sic], then the main power station which serves the two cities.15 Following the attacks, a couple of pages are spent dealing with the financial consequences: ‘The oil business teetered on the brink of a major crisis [. . .] Rumors swept the tiered trading pits that crude was going to eighty dollars, and the crowd seemed to sense the coming onslaught of Californian black-outs, dry-outs and cut-outs.’16 The undoubtedly dire but rather limp and bloodless consequences of terrorism are corrected by Robinson in the novel’s sequel: Scimitar SL-2 (2004). There Rashood’s plan is to launch a nuclear-tipped Cruise missile into a volcano (Cumbre Vieja) in the Canary Islands. This will trigger a landslide and subsequent mega-tsunami that will flatten the East Coast of the US with the massive loss of life that Rashood had sought to avoid in Barracuda 945. The detailing of America’s priorities in response to the crisis in the later text is revealing: the first effect will still be economic. Threatened by the tsunami, the NYSE has to relocate: ‘The sudden closure of the main world market, possibly for several weeks, would likely have catastrophic effects.’17 What Scimitar SL-2 does that Barracuda 945 does not is to work through how an initially littoral and subsequently trans-oceanic attack upon the Occident may have consequences beyond the political. The terrorist act – pitting an artificially retributive planet Earth against the forces of American geopolitical power – has a direct, if literally tertiary, consequence: the need to remove works of art from coastal cities for safe keeping. Redolent of twentieth-century narratives surrounding the evacuation of art treasures from cities in the path of war, after the evacuation of the Eastern seaboard’s populace, its prisoners and the relocation of the world’s major financial institutions, the national art treasures of the US must be moved too: ‘The third and biggest issue, after the evacuation of big business, was the removal of the city’s art treasures’.18 Ravi Rashood may have dreamt of big business’s fear-induced collective ‘evacuation’ in the face of significant losses and a bear market, but business most certainly comes before pleasure (or here, culture). With the West threatened with Islamic extremism, Robinson reaches for an extended case study: For days now, a great convoy of military trucks had been evacuating the building [the Met], designated by the US a National Historical Landmark. Already they had removed 36,000 treasures of Ancient Egypt, from dynastic and pre-dynastic times. Everything was on its way to a US Air Force base in upstate New York where it would be guarded 24/7 by upwards of 300 Military personnel.19

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 393

30/01/2012 16:24

394

hamish mathison

Ravi Rashood would no doubt be relieved that the US was capable, in its cultural foresight, of preventing his attack upon the economic base of the West becoming a massive act of oriental, cultural, self-harm. Having pointed to some of the Western treasures saved, Robinson thoughtfully points out their real value, one established not in superstructural but in base terms: The Met’s collection of drawings alone, by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Dürer, Rubens and Goya, were worth enough money on the world market to operate the annual budgets of every African country south of the Blue Nile.20 Such grandiloquence would be shocking were it not for the fact that it, almost accidentally, speaks to deeply held contemporary fears surrounding the justifications the Occidental military’s response to the jihadist Orient. There is a historical depth to the East’s culture, as we shall see in closing, which transcends Western ‘drawings’. Meanwhile, Rashood’s submarine, once the symbol of absolute great-power world order, has been reduced to threatening the mountain tops of Spanish holiday resorts in order potentially to flood the Met and consequently endanger the ‘absolutely priceless, life-sized, enthroned, limestone sculpture of Queen Hatshepsut who ruled during the fabled 18th Dynasty (1570–1342 bc) [and which] was transported in an Air Force truck all of its own’.21 Across millennia, beyond, across and outside history we find an Eastern Queen who is protected by a Western military in response to an Eastern threat to Western power enacted using the Eastern appropriation of Western technology. The speed at which this cultural ambiguity works is facilitated by the absolute imprecision of the novel’s central trope: the nuclear submarine. Drawing upon and amending a substantial and frequently moving heritage of twentieth-century fiction and non-fiction about undersea warfare, the contemporary submarine novel imagines the boat as a potential agent of terror in a world after, or perhaps more precisely without, history. The rules, values, places and outcomes of conflict and political gaming are newly unseen, as the submarine itself has ever been. No longer is it an avatar of order: the submarine is becoming an icon of, as we see in the case of Hatshepsut, transhistorical fear and cultural instability.

Notes 1. Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October (New York: Berkley Books, 1984). Other Cold War era submarine novels include: Wolfgang Frank, The Sea Wolves (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955); Alistair MacLean, Ice Station Zebra (London: Collins, 1963); Craig Thomas, Sea Leopard (London: Michael Joseph, 1981). 2. Tom Clancy, quoted in Patrick Anderson, ‘King of the Techno-Thriller’, New York Times, 1 May 1988, available at http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/01/magazine/king-of-the-technothriller.html?pagewanted=5, accessed 3 August 2010. 3. The well-placed acronym is one of the genre’s staple markers of authenticity, and a complicated nomenclature invites the reader to participate in arcane and minute distinctions between types of technology, particularly types of boat. In what follows, the terms ‘attack submarine’, ‘hunter killer’, ‘fleet submarine’ and ‘SSN’ (Ship Submersible Nuclear) are used interchangeably to designate a submarine that does not carry strategic nuclear missiles. ‘Boomer’, ‘Bomber’, ‘ballistic submarine’ and ‘SSBN’ (Ship Submersible Ballistic Nuclear) indicate boats carrying strategic nuclear weaponry. All navies have their own acronyms, nomenclature and nicknames: for the novelist it is, ahem, a minefield.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 394

30/01/2012 16:24

submarine novels ‘after history’

395

4. The GIUK gap is a recurrent feature of the Cold War and post-Cold War submarine novel. In effect, it is an imaginary line drawn between continental Europe and America that intersects with the GIUK landmasses. Across these narrowed points in the ocean all Soviet (now Russian) submarines must pass if they want access to the Atlantic Ocean proper: it was and is laced with sophisticated detection equipment designed to alert NATO to the presence of Soviet (Russian) submarines moving to and from their bases on the Kola peninsula. 5. Broadly, a blue-water navy is one that can project force globally; a brown-water (or more recently ‘green-water’) navy is oriented to fight limited engagements along its coastline. 6. William F. Ryan, ‘The Genesis of the Techno-Thriller’, The Virginia Quarterly Review, 69.1 (Winter 1993), pp. 24–40 (p. 34). Steven Coonts is a contemporary of Tom Clancy, best known for novels of aerial combat. 7. Robin White, Hunters in the Sea (London: Orion Books, 2006), pp. 18, 463. The last of the 62 Los Angeles-class submarines to be built was the USS Cheyenne (1996–). It is no surprise to encounter a Los Angeles boat, twenty-two years after Clancy’s Cold War treatment. The Los Angeles class may have been a product of the Cold War, but still forms the backbone of America’s submarine fleet and, due in no small part to Clancy’s treatment (and the later filmic rendition of the same), is the nuclear attack boat against which others, certainly in the world of the submarine novel, are benchmarked. White’s placement of the action substantially aboard such a boat is a literary nod to a lineage of Los Angeles-suffused submarine fiction. Steadman’s opponent, the Akula-class Gepard, is (unlike the Portland) a boat in actual Russian naval active service. 8. White, pp. 139–40. 9. Ibid. p. 462. 10. Ibid. p. 138. 11. Michael DiMercurio, Piranha: Firing Point (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), pp. 22–3. 12. The ‘techno thriller’, and that part of the genre which involves submarines, has long flirted with science fiction, as many commentators have noted. For Clancy’s Jack Ryan, the interest in facilitating the defection of Marko Ramius and the officers aboard the Red October is a propulsion unit which does away with the need for a propeller and thus cavitation, making the SSBN harder to detect and therefore a more capable weapon of nuclear first strike in the Cold War’s North Atlantic battlefield. 13. The definitions of ‘littoral’ in terms of naval force-projection are many and nuanced: here, reductively, the term is used to indicate the delivery of naval power (weapons and people) from a naval asset in an inshore position, across the coastline, onto the land. An SSBN delivers weaponry from sea to land too, but from deep ocean trans-atmospherically to the heart of a continent. 14. Patrick Robinson, Barracuda 945 (2003; London: Arrow Books, 2004), p. 165. 15. Ibid. p. 170. 16. Ibid. p. 416. 17. Patrick Robinson, Scimitar SL-2 (London: Arrow Books, [2004] 2005), p. 503. 18. Redolent from at least the Second World War’s fear of the bomber through to the nuclear age’s somewhat aspirational plans for the preservation of national treasures in the event of World War Three – and perhaps remembering more recently the baleful accounts of the ransacking of Iraqi museums (Robinson, Scimitar SL-2, p. 504). 19. Robinson, Scimitar SL-2, p. 505. 20. Ibid. p. 507. 21. Ibid. p. 505.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 395

30/01/2012 16:24

40

‘AN ECSTASY OF FUMBLING’: GAS WARFARE, 1914–18 AND THE USES OF AFFECT Santanu Das

T

he 22nd of April 1915 was by common consent a glorious spring day at Ypres. From mid afternoon a gentle wind was up, blowing from the German trenches in the north towards the village of Langemarck where some French and Algerian troops had just arrived. Around 5 p.m., three rockets flamed into the sky; a few minutes later, two greenish-yellow clouds, tugged by the winds, floated towards the Allied lines. Within minutes, the French and Algerian soldiers were engulfed in it, ‘guttering, choking, drowning’; those who ran away were pursued by the chlorine cloud, produced from 6,000 gas cylinders behind the German lines.1 Gas had been used before in the war in limited amounts. The French had used tear gas in August 1914, and the Germans used gas, though unsuccessfully, against the Russians at Bolimov in January 1915. But it was the widespread use of chlorine by Germany during Second Ypres in April 1915 that sealed its place in the imagination of the time. The introduction of gas marks a turning point not just in the history of the First World War but of warfare more generally, as well as in its contemporary and future imaginings. April 1915 saw the first widespread and effective use of a weapon of mass destruction against an unprepared enemy; in Eliot’s ‘cruellest month’, mixing science and horror, chemical warfare began. How was this new instrument of ‘frightfulness’, as it was widely known, understood, imagined and represented at the time? Of all the modern technologies of killing, gas was the most abhorrent to any kind of narrative or conceptual assimilation. The tank, a British invention deployed in September 1916, was soon woven into a fantasy of some pre-historic ‘monster, cased in steel, spitting fire’,2 but not gas. By poisoning the very air on which life depended and gradually, painfully corroding the body from within, it tested the limits of understanding and caused a breach in imagination: visceral reflexes – horror and panic – seemed the only response possible. Reporting the gas attacks of April 1915, The Times described its victims: ‘Their faces, arms, hands were of a shiny grey-black colour [. . .] with mouths open and lead-glazed eyes, all swaying slightly backwards and forwards trying to get breath.’3 Here, I briefly explore how gas warfare affected the cultural and artistic imagination of the time and the different meanings and associations it accretes across different genres – Allied propaganda, trench and nursing memoirs, and finally war art. If questions about the relation between aesthetics and politics habitually loom over war literature and art, a brief investigation of two iconic pieces of ‘gas art’ – John Singer Sargent’s Gassed and Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ – shows how they touch upon the raw nerve of such debates.

396

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 396

30/01/2012 16:24

gas warfare,

1914–18

and the uses of affect

397

The gas cloud of April 1915 seemed to have sprung out of nowhere, without history. In 1914 chlorine and carbon disulphide were becoming industrial commodities ‘but militarily they were an unknown element’.4 Gas as a military weapon occasionally figures in late nineteenth-century art and literature. For example, in La Guerre au vingtieme siècle by the French caricaturist Alfred Robida, the French retaliate with gas shells and du vitriol dans l’atmosphere (‘corrosive dew’) and in The War of Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells, ‘black smoke’ issues out of a rocket-launcher, but such imaginings were rare.5After the first two gas attacks, on the French and the Canadians in April 1915, the Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane visited the front on April 27 at the request of Lord Kitchener and recommended as protection the use of cloth wetted with any liquid available, most often urine. This was mainly the protection the Allies had in the next three gas attacks on 1, 6 and 10 May. But anti-gas technology speedily took over. In June 1915, 2,500,000 ‘Hypo Helmets’ with flannel chemically protected against chlorine were distributed, followed by the P Helmets and small box-respirators (SBR).6 However, they were not always foolproof. In April 1916, chlorine gas of such concentration was used against the British 16th Division that the helmet was, as the Official History recorded, of ‘insufficient protection’: there were 1,260 gas casualties of whom 338 died.7 Meanwhile, the Allies started retaliating with gas and on 25 September 1915, there was grotesque replay in the German lines of what happened to the French on 22 April. Over the next three years, both sides would regularly use gas, usually through ‘gas shells’, and by November 1918, sixty-three different kinds of gas had been used. Each damaged the body differently. Chlorine caused immediate respiratory irritation and uncontrollable vomiting; phosgene could kill people as long as forty-eight hours after exposure as victims coughed up pints of yellowish fluid; mustard gas caused savage blisters on the skin, temporary blindness and could potentially burn the respiratory system. An estimated 113,000 tons of chemical were used in the war. At least 1.3 million people were wounded by gas, of whom 91,000 died.8 Apologists for gas would later use such statistics to argue that it was a more ‘humane’ weapon, wounding more people than it killed. In Britain, in 1920, 19,000 men were drawing disability pension because of war gassing; long-term effects included tuberculosis, pulmonary fibrosis, recurring laryngitis and anaemia, among others. Fred Cayley, a survivor of phosgene attack, noted in 1980 that he had been seeing a doctor every week since 1917.9 In Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), some young officers discuss the new weapon: Thomas said: It’s damnable. It’s not soldiering to use stuff like that, even if the German did start it. It’s dirty, and it’ll bring us bad luck. We’re sure to bungle it. Take those new gas-companies – I mean accessory-companies – their very look makes me tremble. . . Of course they’ll bungle it.10 And they do, we are told a few pages later. And, with the wind blowing in the wrong direction, Thomas is killed. The next day, as the soldiers transport the gas cylinders, they note, ‘This was worse than carrying the dead; the cylinders were [. . .] heavy and hateful.’ Graves’s careful selection of adjectives – ‘damnable [. . .] dirty [. . .] heavy and hateful’ – shows how the use of gas violated the soldiers’ sense of their profession; even in the morally topsy-turvy world of the war, it trespassed the limits of the acceptable. Invisible, indiscriminate, wreaking damage from within, it was ‘dirty’. It also provoked a psychological crisis. As Eric Leed and Paul Fussell have explored, in the trenches of the First World

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 397

30/01/2012 16:24

398

santanu das

Figure 5: Louis Raemaekers, The Gas Fiend (1916) War, the absence of agency on part of the individual soldier was a source of trauma: in a world of mechanised destruction, soldiers instead realised that they were little more than helpless, vulnerable animals.11 Gas warfare pushed this sense of an anonymous, impersonal enemy to its extreme: it deprived the soldier of the last illusion of heroism, resistance or survival; asphyxiation was the ultimate symbol of complete passivity and vulnerability. The April 1915 gas attacks had huge propaganda value for the Allies, and though the latter would also use gas, it was regularly portrayed as a ‘German opprobrium’.12 After all, it was Fritz Haber, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, who invented chlorine gas, and during the war, Germany produced and used gas most extensively. Allied press seized upon its use as the ultimate moral outrage, the irrefutable illustration of ‘Hun’ barbarity, and nowhere perhaps was it more powerfully employed than in anti-German war cartoons. Thus, Bert Thomas’s ‘Those Terrible Tanks’, published in London Opinion of 30 September 1916, depicts the Kaiser speaking to his bearded ‘Professor of Frightfulness’ beside a German cabinet of monstrosities: drawers are labelled ‘zeppelin murders’, ‘child murders’ and ‘Belgian atrocities’.13 The pride of place belongs to a canister of ‘Liquid Fire’ and a cylinder of ‘Poison Gas’. Similarly, in the Australian artist Norman Lindsay’s war cartoon ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, published on 1 July 1915, helmeted German soldiers, with babies spiked on their spears, are borne aloft by fumes issuing from a cylinder marked ‘Poisonous Gas’.14 The most powerful cartoons came from the famous Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers. He came to London and became an international celebrity, fleeing his native Holland after his anti-German cartoons in the Dutch newspaper Telegraaf made Germany place a value of 12,000 guilders on his head. Wellington House milked the story, Herbert Asquith visited his exhibition in London and Raemaekers was soon recruited for propaganda purposes for the Allied side. The Times as well as the British government

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 398

30/01/2012 16:24

gas warfare,

1914–18

and the uses of affect

399

Figure 6: Louis Raemaekers, Slow Asphyxiation (1916) feverishly promoted his work, organising hugely successful exhibitions and in 1916, Caxton published Raemaekers’ Cartoons to wide publicity.15 Raemaekers’s two most successful drawings on the subject are The Gas Fiend and Slow Asphyxiation.16 The Gas Fiend depicts a tired, young, soldier, asleep with a comrade by his side, both being enveloped by gas hissing out of the mouth of a huge, coiled serpent, complete with menacing eyes and bared fangs. The symbolism is simple but powerful: the line of trees and the sun in the background lend a cosmic magnitude to this elemental drama between Satan/gas fiend and the sleeping Christ/soldier. Equally striking is the realism and the foregrounding of the limp body of the sleeping, unsuspecting soldier: his lack of affect results in an excess of affect, or panic, from the spectator. By evoking the soldier’s utter defencelessness against this silent, invisible enemy rather than trying to portray it as merely a German atrocity, Raemaekers makes his moral critique highly charged. Slow Asphyxiation depicts the next stage, as it were. A man lies in the hospital bed writhing in agony, while a second victim clutches at his throat, trying to breathe.17 Interestingly, Raemaekers puts in two other figures as witnesses: the distraught Red Cross nurse, covering her eyes in horror and the medical official with his hands neatly folded in resignation. If The Gas Fiend depicts the constant threat of gas in the trenches, Slow Asphyxiation brings it into the civilian zone of the hospital and, through its two silent onlookers, not just inscribes spectator response but dramatises the relationship between trauma and witnessing. Apart from the soldiers, gas was not experienced directly by people. Civilians read about reports of its use and ghastly effects, but a number of people working in casualty stations and hospitals – including women – witnessed the aftermath and victims of such attacks. How did the real-life equivalent of Raemaekers’s nurse actually feel and articulate her experience? Nursing memoirs by women who volunteered to work in the war hospitals form one of the most powerful genres of war writing and their description of gas victims

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 399

30/01/2012 16:24

400

santanu das

– the extremity of suffering – often form the tortured core of such accounts. Consider the following account from Mary Britnieva who served as a Red Cross nurse in the Eastern Front, where the Germans used gas to devastating effect: They lay on their backs mostly, their upturned faces terribly swollen and livid – some almost blue – choking and coughing, their bloodshot eyes protruding, unable to utter a word, yet fully conscious, only their eyes and their occasional spasmodic, feeble movements proclaiming the supreme agony that they were enduring. . . We felt utterly helpless, there was no remedy, we were powerless. A few sentences later, Britnieva writes, as if in traumatic repetition: ‘The realization of our helplessness was almost unbearable.’18 The extremity of the suffering causes a corresponding crisis in witnessing. As I have argued elsewhere, the trauma in the nurses’ memoirs lies not in their repeated exposure to wounds or even in differences in gender but in the anguished realisation of ‘the impotence of sympathy’:19 in the awareness of the incommensurability and absoluteness of physical pain, and their resultant sense of helplessness. While the soldier owns the experience he describes, the nurse can only bear testimony to another’s pain, and the ‘supreme agony’ of the gas victims pushes such testimony to an ‘almost unbearable’ point. Vera Brittain similarly writes about ‘the poor things all burnt and blistered. . . all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath.’20 The helplessness is translated into a sense of haplessness on part of the nurse-narrator, and in turn, of the civilian reader: we wince, we shudder, the body responding to what the mind cannot process. Can such spectacles which test the very limits of empathy and bring about an ontological crisis be evolved into self-conscious processes of artistic and literary creation? Two of the best-known pieces of war art – Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ (1917–18) and John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1919) – not only depict gas attacks but were based on real-life memories. They have an important testimonial function, but an investigation of their formal qualities, especially when considered alongside the other kinds of testimony we have been discussing, raise difficult questions about the relationship between traumatic witnessing, aesthetics, and the politics of representation. Neither work is a transparent envelope of trench life, as is often thought. Moreover, they are strikingly different, registering perhaps the difference between a celebrated 62-year-old civilian-painter and a 24-year-old shell-shocked soldier-poet. Sargent was commissioned to do a large painting for the Hall of Remembrance to depict the collaboration of British and American forces. To find a suitable subject, Sargent, with his friend Henry Tonks, travelled to France in July 1918. After having spent some time as Earl Haig’s guest, he joined the Guards Division under General Fielding near Arras. In a letter to Evan Charteris on 11 September 1918, he complained that ‘the more dramatic the situation the more it becomes an empty landscape’ but soon he goes on to describe a particular night-scene: ‘a harrowing sight, a field full of gassed and blindfolded men’. The scene was the aftermath of a mustard gas attack. Henry Tonks adds: ‘Gassed cases kept coming in, led along in parties of about six just as Sargent has depicted them, by an orderly. They sat or lay down on the grass, there must have been several hundred’. Later, during a week in the hospital, Sargent was further exposed to ‘the chokings and coughing of gassed men, which was a nightmare’.21 Yet, such horrors are almost wholly absent in the painting. Instead, ten tall, blond, blindfolded men move across the twenty-foot-long canvas with strange gravitas, as in a sculpted frieze, each touching the man in front; the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 400

30/01/2012 16:24

gas warfare,

1914–18

and the uses of affect

401

Figure 7: John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum sense of touch defines space and guides the rhythm of the movement, as if invisible eyes have opened at the tip of the fingers. Others lie on the ground in a world of sensuous contact and homosocial camaraderie. The use of light is striking. The soldiers are bathed in a surreal yellowish-greenish glow which comes from no particular source: the spectacle of blindness is portrayed through the drama of chiaroscuro. If the painting is a homage to Pieter Brueghel’s ‘Parable of the Blind’ (1568), it is as distant from Brueghel’s vision as it is from the reality of a gas attack. Commenting on the ‘line of golden-haired Apollos’, E. M. Forster wrote: No one complained, no one looked lousy or overtired, and the aeroplanes overhead struck the necessary note of the majesty of England. It was all that a great war picture should be [. . .] Lady Cowdray and the Hon. Mrs Langman as they looked over the twenty feet of canvas that divided them, were still able to say, ‘How touching,’ instead of ‘How obscene.’22 With his characteristic acuity, Forster prises open the lid on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Compared with works on similar theme, such as William Roberts’s post-impressionistic The Gas Chamber (1918), with its distorted perspectives capturing the sense of panic among the soldiers, or Eric Kennington’s more intimate Gassed and Wounded (1918) with its depiction of pink flesh and gasping mouths, one realises the degree of idealisation and aestheticisation in Sargent’s painting. Do they suggest the political and artistic limits of a conventional, society painter trying to depict industrial violence or is such limitation inherent in officially sanctioned, commemorative war art? But Sargent’s painting remains deeply affective. The row upon row of blindfolded men creates a certain tragic intensity, even if restrained; there is no denying the fact that something awful has happened to these young men. The strangely scattered, unearthly light creates an effect of numbed serenity and timelessness, as if the soldiers were replaying one of their traumatic dreams. Sargent’s grasp over the phenomenological reality of the trenches is acute, as he dramatises the disjunction between our optical sense of space and the soldiers’ tactile perception. The third soldier raises his foot far higher than is needed as he tries to negotiate the duckboard: blindness is inscribed powerfully at a point where touch is anticipated as collision but is actually absent. For Woolf, this ‘over-emphasis’ was the ‘final scratch of the surgeon’s knife’.23 By removing the ‘obscenity’ and assimilating it into a tragic vision,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 401

30/01/2012 16:24

402

santanu das

Sargent’s commemorative piece may be politically regressive, but it is emotionally acute and reparative. Sargent’s deeply humanistic painting allows the war-bereaved, traumatised generation to bestow meaning and value on unprecedented loss and grief, like the genre of war elegy. Such a gesture closely resonates with the powerful return to conventional modes of mourning in post-war Europe.24 But at the same time, it raises questions about the function of war art: should it be exclusively harnessed to a political mission or should it provide aesthetic appeasement as well, and, if so, at what political cost? Wilfred Owen famously said that ‘I am not concerned with Poetry’ and ‘My subject is War and the pity of War’.25 Indeed, in ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, he describes the gas attack in all its unrelieved detail: Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . . [. . .] In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. [. . .] If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, – My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.26 If, to appreciate Sargent’s painting, we have to literally move away to take in the four layers of bodies – more than fifty men in all – Owen plunges us into the ‘thick’ of experience not just at the narrative, but at the sonic level. Even in the first stanza, the Sassoonlike rhymes (‘sacks/backs’, ‘sludge/trudge’) are interwoven with a more intimate sound pattern that evokes the body in pain. This is achieved through the sound of vowels (knock-kneed, haunting, distant, cursed, our, lost, blood-shod, went, even, outstripped) which culminates in the noises of the retching body in the final lines. Gas corrodes the body from within. The testimony of the gas attack moves similarly from visual impressions to visceral processes; from sounds produced between the body and the world – fumbling, stumbling, flound’ring, drowning – to sounds within the body: guttering, choking, gargling. Sound plays a central role in a poem that climaxes on a macabre contrast between tongues: the lacerated tongue of the soldier and the grand polysyllabic sound of the Latin phrase as the two meanings of ‘lingua’ (in Latin, it means both tongue and language) are set against each other. Sassoon, reading the manuscript, put a question mark beside ‘ecstasy’; indeed, the word has mystified generations of critics. How can a gas attack produce ‘ecstasy’? After the first split-second moment of utter panic – evoked through spondaic acceleration and the monosyllabic exclamations – is there a momentary ‘ecstasy’ at the hope of survival as the gas masks are fitted on? Or is ‘ecstasy’ used to suggest the frenzied, nervous energy of the moment, a state of bodily extremity where terror and exhilaration are fused and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 402

30/01/2012 16:24

gas warfare,

1914–18

and the uses of affect

403

confused, a psychosomatic variation on what Edmund Burke called the ‘sublime’, relived retrospectively from the security of the hospital bed? In one of his letters, Owen describes the ‘extraordinary exultation’ of going over the top, and seeing the ground ‘all crawling and wormy with wounded bodies’, feeling ‘no horror at all but only immense exultation at having got through the Barrage’.27 On 19 January 1917, Owen wrote to his mother how, while scouting, he ‘got overtaken by GAS’.28 Coming from the Greek word ekstasis literally meaning ‘a standing outside of oneself ’ (ek – out of, stasis – a position, a standing), the word can also suggest a similar retrospective release of energy in the act of writing – the temporal gap and change of roles from victim to witness/survivor evoked through the medial pause and the intervening dash – as Owen relives the moment at Craiglockhart in October 1917. Yet, in a poem that explores the complicity of language in violence – the dangers of Horace’s ‘sweet’ phrase29 – the word ‘ecstasy’ may bear, at an unconscious level, traces of the perverse narrative impulse itself: poetic language, asked to describe violence, touches itself instead through alliteration (‘s’, ‘l’, ‘f ’), echo (ecstasy/clumsy/misty) and the rhyming peal of the extra foot (‘fumbling’, ‘stumbling’, ‘drowning’), replacing real-life horror with linguistic jouissance. Owen, while criticising the ‘sweetness’ of a particular poetic tradition, seems to be trapped in the ‘sweetness’ of the lyric form himself. Contrary to his credo, poetry seems to have the upper hand over politics. This lyric excess, resulting from Owen’s immersion in the decadent aesthetic, is particularly distressing when the subject of the poem has literally lost his tongue. One is reminded of Sargent’s use of light to depict the blinded soldiers. But unlike Sargent, Owen is also grimly realistic – and thus perhaps more disturbing – for the palpable music is shaken off the back of morbid physical details – yell, gutter, choke, writhe, gargle, frothcorrupted – and reaches its grotesque climax in the visceral intimacy of ‘lung [. . .] cancer [. . .] sore [. . .] tongue’. The words are graphically acute; but ‘vile incurable sores on innocent tongues’ is also a rewriting of Keats’s ‘palate fine’, as Owen finally marks his distance from his beloved poet. In his poetry, Owen regularly weaves linguistic-tactile fantasies around similar macabre details, drawing us into moments we would otherwise flinch from: moments when limbs are sliced off (‘limbs knife-skewed’, ‘shaved us with his scythe’), the flesh is ripped apart (‘shatter of flying muscles’, ‘Ripped from my own back / In scarlet shreds’) or the mouth starts bleeding (‘I saw his round mouth’s crimson deepen as it fell’). A visceral thrill as well as an acute physical empathy constitutes the body in pain in his poetry, cutting deeper than just a homoerotic aestheticisation of violence or surrender to the pleasure principle of verse. In ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, the poetic centre soon moves from the victim to the witness. The ultimate testimony of the gas attack is placed not in the act of perception, but in the realm of the unconscious (‘in all my dreams’): ‘helpless’, that repeated word in Mary Britnieva’s account, returns, bringing in its wake traumatic neurosis (‘smothering dreams’). Read in this light, the compulsive rhyme of the gerundive ‘-ing’ suggests the eternal now of the trauma victim who, as Freud noted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), is forced to relive the past experience as perpetual present. For both Sargent and Owen, the gas attack brings out concerns specific to their art – the eye and the tongue. In spite of their differences, both exhibit a certain artistic jouisssance, a formal excess that not only defies attempts to align them with a set political or moral agenda but creates a distinct frisson. Yet paradoxically, it is this fine excess which, while being politically problematic, makes these works powerful in the public imagination and an important influence on anti-war protest. In a final, grim piece of irony, in 1918 – as Sargent visited the Front to get inspiration for Gassed and Owen started revising his ‘gas

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 403

30/01/2012 16:24

404

santanu das

poem’ at Ripon – a far more momentous event was about to take place. On 14 October, just a month before the Armistice, the British launched their final mustard gas attack against the Germans in the Belgian village of Werwick. Among the victims, temporarily blinded and smarting under the ignominy, was a twenty-nine-year-old corporal who would inaugurate a far more chilling chapter in the use of gas in world history; his name was Adolf Hitler.

Notes 1. See Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare (London: Arrow, 2002) for a brief but excellent account of gas warfare. Also see John Terraine, White Heat: The New Warfare 1914–1918 (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1982), pp. 155–61; L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 2. See Trudi Tate’s exploration of the tank in Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 120–46; also Patrick Wright’s Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (London: Faber and Faber, 2001). 3. The Times, quoted in Harris and Paxman, p. 6. 4. Haber, p. 17. 5. Ibid. p. 17. 6. Terraine, p. 158; Harris and Paxman, pp. 8, 17. 7. Terraine, p. 160. 8. Harris and Paxman, p. 35. I have drawn upon this book for the casualty figures, killed or wounded in gas attacks, and for details about the long-term effects of gas poisoning (pp. 32, 34). 9. Mentioned in Harris and Paxman, p. 36. 10. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1929] 1960), p. 151. 11. Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 12. The phrase was used by Dr Lee Lewis, ‘Why not Gas Warfare?’, Science News Letter, 4 November 1939, p. 298. 13. Bert Thomas, ‘Those Terrible Tanks’, reproduced in Bert Thomas and Wilton Williams, One Hundred Cartoons, from London Opinion (London: London Opinion, 1919), p. 97. I am grateful to Elizabeth Robertson for this reference, as well as the next one to Norman Lindsay’s war cartoon. 14. Norman Lindsay, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, in War Cartoons, 1914–1918, ed. Peter Fullerton (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), p. 45. 15. See Tony Allen, The Cartoons of Louis Raemaekers 1914–1918 (London: Holgate, 1999). 16. Louis Raemaekers, The Gas Fiend and Slow Asphyxiation, in The Caxton Edition of Raemaeker’s Cartoons (London: Caxton Publishing, 1916), no page number. 17. Louis Raemaekers, The Great War: A Neutral’s Indictment (London: Fine Art Society, 1916–19). 18. Mary Britnieva, One Woman’s Story (London: Arthur Barker, 1934), pp. 35–6. 19. See Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 175–203. 20. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Virago, [1933] 1999), p. xx. 21. Henry Tonks, quoted in Evan Charteris, John Sargent (London: William Heinemann, 1927), p. 214. See also Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde and the Great War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 219–22. 22. E. M. Forster, ‘Me, Them and You’, in Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold, 1936), pp. 39–40. 23. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Royal Academy’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), vol. 3, pp. 92–3.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 404

30/01/2012 16:24

gas warfare,

1914–18

and the uses of affect

405

24. See Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 25. Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’ to The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), p. 192. 26. Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, in Stallworthy, p. 117. For a detailed exploration of Owen, see Das, pp. 137–72. 27. Wilfred Owen to Colin Owen, 14 May 1917, Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 458. 28. Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters, p. 428. 29. Ibid. p. 500.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 405

30/01/2012 16:24

41

PAUL VIRILIO AS TWENTIETHCENTURY MILITARY STRATEGIST: WAR, CINEMA AND THE LOGISTICS OF PERCEPTION John Armitage

C

an Paul Virilio be regarded as a key figure in the development of twentiethcentury military strategy? Born in Paris in 1932, Virilio is a French philosopher who concentrates on questions of military strategy and the organisation of military space. During the 1950s and 1960s he conducted architectural and photographic research on the Atlantic Wall, the system of military bunkers built by Hitler’s Third Reich during World War II along the west coast of France to repel any Allied invasion. In 1963, with the architect Claude Parent, Virilio established the Architecture Principe group, becoming the chief author of military-architectural essays for the group’s journal until 1968. He was nominated professor at the École Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA) in Paris in 1969 and published Bunker Archeology in 1975.1 Virilio was Director of the ESA from 1975 and in 1989 was appointed programme director of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. He retired to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France in 1997. Though renowned as a philosopher and cultural theorist, Virilio has also written at length on the topics of war and cinema. His philosophical investigations, above all his interest in the concept of the logistics of perception, also comprise significant contributions to critical, military and film theory and practice. Twentieth-century military strategy is considered here as military strategy from World War I (1914–18) to the Kosovo War (1998–9) in a diversity of forms, inclusive of offensive thinking, defensive capabilities, strategic military exercises and armed vision. For Virilio, the European and American history of war since World War I has been characterised by a series of technological advances, such as the machine gun, which have shaped culture and representations. Artillery systems, poison gas, the tank, the telephone and radio telegraphy are examples of such technological advances in the military field. The synchronisation of machine guns and cameras, secured to aircraft during World War I, for instance, can be regarded as an important technological advance in relation to military and cinematic activity and even to military and film theory from World War I onwards. Such technological advances, such as the ability to perform aerial reconnaissance, have commanded considerable military authority, so much so that, today, the military has developed them into military spy satellites and space weapons – that is, a lethal visual technology. Consequently, twentieth-century military strategists and filmmakers had to reconcile themselves to the fact that the technologies of warfare and cinema had

406

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 406

30/01/2012 16:24

paul virilio as twentieth-century military strategist

407

acquired a deadly inter-reliance. It is in opposition to the disappearance of direct vision in combat and the substitution of hand-to-hand fighting by the fatal sound and light show of modern warfare that Virilio’s analysis of twentieth-century military strategy is directed. His purpose is to advocate direct vision in every region of military-cinematic discourse to counter the military–industrial state’s devotion to various allegedly improved technological advances in which obliteration and perception combine. Virilio’s twentieth-century military strategy is thus a defence of direct vision. Virilio’s conception of the conjunction of war and cinema encapsulates this dedication to direct vision. The conjunction of war and cinema is symptomatic of the crisis of contemporary culture: symptomatic because modern culture exhibits a particularly technologised understanding of military history and weaponry, photography and cinematography. Certainly, for Virilio, the study of the conjunction illuminates existing accounts of specific military campaigns and films and allows us to critically analyse, in parallel, the cultural ideas of contemporary military strategists and film directors, together with the technological beliefs about war, weaponry, and the history of cinema of photographers and filmmakers from Edward Steichen and Samuel Fuller to Abel Gance and Stanley Kubrick. The principal aim of Virilio’s work is to persuade us to consider more intensely the combined histories, architectures and popular cultures of war and cinema, allied to a critique of what we might call ‘nineteenth-century military strategy and ways of seeing’; that is, Virilio’s is a critical analysis of how, by the late twentieth century, Clausewitz-styled strategies offer inadequate accounts of military ways of seeing, considered always to be ‘material’.2 And so, one of the crucial weaknesses of those strategists charged with contemporary militarised technological advances for Virilio is that they are not more readily amenable to the flexible line of attack that is depicted in The Art of War, Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese military strategy and way of seeing.3 Indeed, many contemporary military strategists continue to maintain not only that they are equipped to bring about definitive military and political victories but also that, following Clausewitz’s hypothesis of a dialectic of moral and physical factors inevitably unfolding through human warfare, ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means.’4 The twentieth-century study of the conjunction of war and cinema for Virilio therefore emphasises the deficiencies of nineteenth-century military strategy and ways of seeing and of the importance of direct vision. Virilio demonstrates an almost fanatical interest in the concept of the logistics of perception, especially in his War and Cinema – a topic which is an important development from modernist visual culture as defined in, for example, Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing (1943).5 Expanding Huxley’s writings, and other twentieth-century theorists of conflict, cinema and the organisation of perception, such as Walter Benjamin, Virilio considers the logistics of perception as an expression of ‘the sight machine’ or ‘the systematic use of cinema techniques in the conflicts of the twentieth-century’.6 He thus regards war and cinema as the intersection of the sight machine. That is, the military developed technologies of perception at a distance through mechanical forms of targeting at the same time as cinema developed its own perception at a distance through the machine-camera. Virilio’s approach is rooted in ‘the strategic and tactical necessities of cartography’, which can be observed ‘in the line from the emergence of military photography in the American Civil War to today’s video surveillance of the battlefield’: this is what is at issue for Virilio in ‘the intensive use of film sequences in aerial reconnaissance’ that ‘was already developing during the First World War’.7 For Huxley, according to Virilio, the logistics of perception constituted that which made ‘the body disappear into a momentary agglomeration of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 407

30/01/2012 16:24

408

john armitage

sense-data’, that alternating field ‘between the production of luminous impressions and that pure fascination which dispels perceptual awareness and induces hypnosis or similar pathological conditions’.8 Consequently, nineteenth-century vision machines such as Étienne-Jules Marey’s ‘magnetoscope’ or twentieth-century conceptions of overexposure are, for Virilio, both indicators of the emerging sight machine: they are the technologised creators of ‘images, so full of thoughts and arrière pensées’ that even today they remain ‘one of the best remedies there are against the dark’.9 Yet Huxley’s identification of the body vanishing into a transitory, confused and jumbled mass of ‘sense-data’ through the fluctuating domain that is cinema was also a possible supply of information, especially given the general staffs’ wish to frequently renew its ‘picture of reality’, to understand the territory around it that was not only continually being upturned by artillery but also subsequently devoid of any ‘topographical references crucial to the organization of battle’.10 Benjamin especially has had a substantial influence on contemporary critical, military, film and cultural theory, inspiring an entire ‘postmodern’ tradition of theorists in twentieth-century Europe and America. Postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard made much use of Benjamin’s theories, with Baudrillard’s accounts of the logistics of perception – of ‘The Tactile and the Digital’ for instance in his Symbolic Exchange and Death – drawing openly on Benjamin’s 1936 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ essay for ideas concerning the ‘test function’ of the ‘technical apparatus’ of cinema: ‘Contemplation is impossible’, Baudrillard writes, because ‘images fragment perception into successive sequences and stimuli to which the only response is an instantaneous yes or no – reaction time is maximally reduced. The film no longer allows you to contemplate it, it interrogates you directly.’11 Benjamin had argued that, when faced by the creative presentation of the cinema actor, spectators were hit with a feeling merely of the cine-camera; exactly what Baudrillard’s spectators feel when they are exposed, for example in Apocalypse Now, to their Francis Ford Coppola-directed journey through the all-American-made Vietnam War (as portrayed in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, for instance).12 ‘Immoderation’, ‘excess of means’ and the ‘same monstrous candor’ force Baudrillard’s spectators to become conscious of their and the Americans’ ‘success’ and their ‘war as entrenchment, as technological and psychedelic fantasy’ in the broad scheme of ‘war as a succession of special effects’. The war becomes film ‘even before being filmed’, for Baudrillard, as the ‘war abolishes itself in its technological test, and for Americans it was primarily that: a test site, a gigantic territory in which to test their arms, their methods, their power’.13The logistics and modern technologies of perception, as exemplified by the cine-camera and other forms of spectacles, comprise indirect sighting devices for both Huxley and Benjamin. However, Huxley was more personally animated by this than Benjamin, for, as Huxley explains in The Art of Seeing of 1943, in the context of a discussion of Dr William Bates’s technique for improved vision, at sixteen he had had an aggressive attack of keratitis punctata, affecting the eye’s cornea, which left him almost totally blind for eighteen months and caused lasting damage to his eyesight. Huxley survived with the help of powerful spectacles even though reading was difficult. Nevertheless, Huxley doubted the medical profession’s philosophical mission regarding faulty eyesight: the use of spectacles to assist human vision. Huxley problematised the then up-to-date conception of the medical remedy of imperfections of sight. Huxley argued that ‘something is radically wrong with the current methods of treatment’ that assume ‘defects in the organs of seeing are incurable, and can only be palliated by mechanical neutralization of symptoms’.14 For Virilio, too, the logistics and modern technologies of perception govern problem-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 408

30/01/2012 16:24

paul virilio as twentieth-century military strategist

409

atic indirect sighting devices, which are first and foremost militarised and destructive machines that we must understand as anticipating ‘a symptomatic shift in target-location and a growing derealization of military engagement’.15 Virilio’s account of twentiethcentury military strategy underscores the role of armed and devastating technologised indirect sighting devices: the industrialisation of warfare since World War I and the representation of its events surpasses ‘the presentation of facts’; in other words, images began to replace objects in the same way that speed began to replace space. In fact, Virilio argues that, eventually, ‘a conflict of strategic and political interpretation’ resulted, with ‘radio and then radar completing the picture’.16 In defining militarised indirect sighting devices, then, Virilio’s account of twentieth-century military strategy exposes ‘a veritable logistics of military perception’, where the ‘supply of images’ became ‘the equivalent of an ammunition supply’, with World War I constructing ‘a new “weapons system” out of combat vehicle and camera’.17 Virilio’s texts on war and cinema are far reaching, and designed to contest Clausewitz’s writings on war. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light is a compilation of Virilio’s articles focusing on the Gulf War (1990–1) as the final industrial and the first postmodern information war; a war that also confirms for Virilio Clausewitz’s work on war as out of date.18 ‘Since the development of nuclear deterrence’, Virilio writes, ‘the Clausewitzian form is obsolete: mass war is no longer the continuation of politics by other means, it is a major historical accident.’19 And once more in interview: ‘According to Clausewitz,’ Virilio remarks, ‘“War is the pursuit of politics by other means”. Henceforth, “The (full scale) accident is the prolongation of (total) war by other means.”’20 Nuclear deterrence is ‘the very excess of the means employed’ in contemporary mass war since it ‘engages the great powers’. Virilio claims of the major historical accident that was the Gulf War that it is ‘at once means of mass destruction and means of mass communication’.21 In short, the military outcome of the Gulf War can be envisioned as the work of the sight machine. Virilio goes on to criticise the ‘materiality’ of Clausewitz’s work on war, which, he argues, served a world where ‘SUBSTANCE was absolutely necessary and the ACCIDENT relative and contingent’.22 But, to function in the technologically advanced ‘immaterial wars of tomorrow’, Virilio suggests, we shall have to undertake a ‘strategic reversal’ as ‘the accident will become ABSOLUTE (ecologically) and SUBSTANCE (all substances) RELATIVE and CONTINGENT.’23 ‘We are likely,’ Virilio goes on, ‘to witness the surpassing of military war by a catastrophic endemic of a civil war approaching global scale, as was previously the case in the twentieth-century with military war between the great nations.’24 Even so, Clausewitz’s work on war is held by Virilio to be a stimulus to considering the immaterial wars of tomorrow, to critically analysing the ‘logic of extremes’, which, for Virilio, has a touch of the ‘very worst’ about it.25 What Virilio’s critique does, as in his Strategy of Deception, which castigates the duplicity of the United States and its allies during the Kosovo War (1998–9), is to make an incisive condemnation of war as cinema on top of his criticism of the bombing and the perpetration of military strategy.26 Locating the Kosovo War in historical and cultural context, Virilio concentrates, as he does in War and Cinema, on people’s sense of derealisation by highly developed military and mediated technological advances that, for example, prevented ‘public opinion from being [. . .] committed to NATO’s surrealistic war against Serbia’ (the Kosovo War as a mélange of ‘irrational’ representations and events, of misinformation by the media and the Internet, or ‘just propaganda’, for instance).27 For Virilio, Clausewitz’s ‘materiality’ thus inhibits us from understanding postmodern information warfare as exactly that, thwarting the urge

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 409

30/01/2012 16:24

410

john armitage

to understand ‘the guidance of missiles using “electronic warfare” techniques’ and ‘the remote guidance of confusion’ that lies far beyond nineteenth-century military strategy and ways of seeing. Confronted by the inadequacies of Clausewitz, who would clearly be unable to understand the ‘chaos of opinion’ which accompanied the ‘chaos of destruction on the ground’ in Kosovo, Virilio asks, how are we to comprehend this cultural state of affairs? He argues that, given such levels of disbelief and unawareness of anything remotely close to the truth in a world dominated by war as cinema, contemporary critics must speak out against the proliferation of militarised technological advances and try to appreciate and to demonstrate how any present-day knowledge of warfare ‘radically undermines the classical psychological doctrines – and even the old Clausewitzian theories – of warfare’. Virilio’s critique of the US and its allies in the Kosovo War thus recognises the significance of the new militarised indirect sighting devices, of the new orbital geopolitics and the new chronological intensity of images and information: This is an ‘aero-orbital’ war, which has to pay political heed now not only to the representation of events but also to the roundness of the terrestrial globe, and also to the temporal compression of the image data used to conduct the fighting.28 Yet one military strategist above all is admired by Virilio for his capacity to critically analyse military strategy and ways of seeing and, astonishingly, the conjunction of war and cinema. Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese text, The Art of War, is declared to portray military strategy and ways of seeing truthfully without the aid or defence of contemporary militarised technological advances. Sun Tzu’s famous military maxims ‘speed is the essence of war’ and ‘weapons are tools of ill-omen’ from The Art of War provide the foundation of Virilio’s critique of how, by the end of the twentieth century, Clausewitz’s nineteenth-century military strategy and ways of seeing offered a defective explanation of twentieth-century warfare during the ostensibly unending and increasingly immaterial ‘state of emergency’.29 Sun Tzu is then for Virilio a military strategist whose maxim ‘military force is based upon deception’ cuts through the fog of war and becomes, for example, the title of chapter 1 of Virilio’s War and Cinema.30 And, lastly, in ‘The Kosovo W@r Did Take Place’, Virilio presents us with the contemporary landscape of war, one that, despite the prevalence of militarised technological advances of every kind, illustrates that, for him, ‘it is Clausewitz who is outdated, not Sun Tzu. Today, it is the accident and not wars that are the continuation of politics by other means!’31 As a result, for Virilio, one of the vital flaws of the strategists controlling postmodern militarised technological advances is that they are not by choice open to the ‘fluid approach’ that is described in Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese military strategy and ways of seeing. As Virilio remarks, his: is a post-Clausewitzian concept. This is due to the fact that Sun Tzu has a much more fluid approach to the question of war. It is also a very interesting approach and reflects the profound Chinese way of thinking more generally. For example, the Chinese often describe power in terms of water. And water cannot be stopped from flowing. Thus the Chinese do not compare war with fire since fire can be stopped. But what has happened to war today? In the old days, there were two armies at war. One army lost the war and the other won. There were rules. Victory or defeat was a given. Each was definitive. But, nowadays, there is never a victory. Everyone loses. There is no definitive result. And this is why Sun Tzu’s writings are still relevant.32

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 410

30/01/2012 16:24

paul virilio as twentieth-century military strategist

411

For Virilio, Sun Tzu’s proleptically post-Clausewitzian idea of military strategy and ways of seeing manages to break with the limiting result of two thousand years of militarised technological advances. Sun Tzu’s ancient military strategy does not, therefore, communicate a feeling of technologically determined or ultimate military and political conquest but a sense of the fluidity of the future of war to us. The future of war is nothing to do with Clausewitz’s dialectical theory of moral and physical factors inexorably progressing through human conflict or his deduction that war is the continuation of politics by other means and everything to do with ancient methodologies that explain the power of the conjunction of war and cinema as relentlessly militarised information flows. The future of the conjunction of war and cinema for Virilio is thus less about the imperfections of nineteenth-century military strategy and ways of seeing and more about comprehending the significance of direct vision in war, of military routs and triumphs not as law-bound or definitive but as never-ending and catastrophic for everybody. While it is apparent that Virilio can be considered a vital figure in the development of twentieth-century military strategy, it is also essential to conclude that, for him, the key indicator of critical, military and cinematic value is his discovery of the sight machine. The study of the synchronisation of machine guns and cameras, fixed to aircraft from World War I onwards, though, is not understood by Virilio as in some way superior to studying twentieth-century military strategy per se. Rather, the examination of the synchronisation of machine guns and cameras, Virilio argues in War and Cinema, ultimately demonstrates that, following World War II, the military was finally equipped to expand its ‘strategy of global vision’, of ‘spy-satellites, drones, and other video-missiles’ as well as to construct ‘a new type of headquarters’.33 In nineteenth-century warfare, of course, before the invention of photography and cinematography, the sight machine was nonexistent, whereas in twentieth-century warfare, we came to understand that spy satellites, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, camera-laden Cruise missiles, and new types of headquarters are founded on the fantasies of the ‘central electronic-warfare administration – such as the so-called “3Ci” (control, command, communication, intelligence) in place in each major power’ – and that the sight machine, now fully operational with the real-time data of the world at war, is, seemingly of ‘necessity’, to be with us forever.34 The existence of the postWorld War II military strategy of global vision helps us to distinguish between nineteenthand twentieth-century military strategies and ways of seeing. However, equally significant for Virilio is that: alongside the army’s ‘film department’ responsible for directing propaganda to the civilian population, a military ‘images department’ has sprung up to take charge of all tactical and strategic representations of warfare for the soldier, the tank or aircraft pilot, and above all the senior officer who engages combat forces.35 Neither the synchronisation of machine guns and cameras nor twentieth-century military strategy can, therefore, be fully appreciated without a consideration of the increasingly logistical use of images and simulated representations in warfare. Yet the study of the synchronisation of machine guns and cameras and twentieth-century military strategy in the end directs us not to armed missions but to the radical shift that was the introduction of nuclear deterrence after 1945, a shift which, notwithstanding later twentieth-century disarmament plans, even now promises an uncertain future for us all. Nonetheless, in his War and Cinema, Desert Screen and Strategy of Deception, Virilio critically judged us to be in an era where the whole idea of militarised technological advance was, for him at least, questionable.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 411

30/01/2012 16:24

412

john armitage

Certainly, by the time of the Kosovo War, Virilio’s logistics of military perception was more philosophically, militarily and cinematically relevant than ever before as Cruise missiles, fully equipped with high-resolution cameras, were already being primed for the Iraq War.

Notes 1. Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, trans. G. Collins (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, [1975] 1994). 2. Carl von Clausewitz, Clausewitz On War, trans. M. Howard and P. Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 3. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1993). 4. Clausewitz, p. 69. 5. Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943); Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, [1984] 1989). 6. Virilio, War and Cinema, p. 1. 7. Ibid. p. 1. 8. Ibid. p. 10. 9. Ibid. p. 10. 10. Ibid. p. 1. 11. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I. H. Grant (London: Sage, 1993), pp. 63–4; and Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217–51. 12. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Apocalypse Now’, in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1984), pp. 59–60. 13. Ibid. p. 59. 14. Huxley, pp. 1–2. 15. Virilio, War and Cinema, p. 1. 16. Ibid. p. 1. 17. Ibid. p. 1. 18. Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. M. Degener (London: Continuum, 2002). 19. Ibid. p. 52. 20. Ibid. p. 137. 21. Ibid. p. 52. 22. Ibid. p. 137. 23. Ibid. pp. 137–8. 24. Ibid. p. 138. 25. Nicholas Zurbrugg, ‘Not Words But Visions!’, in John Armitage (ed.), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 154–63. 26. Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 2000). 27. Ibid. p. 49. 28. Ibid. p. 49. 29. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. M. Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), pp. 133–51. 30. Virilio, War and Cinema, p. 5. 31. ‘The Kosovo W@r Did Take Place’, in John Armitage (ed.), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 167–98; original emphasis. 32. Ibid. p. 188; original emphasis. 33. Virilio, War and Cinema, p. 1. 34. Ibid. pp. 1–2. 35. Ibid. p. 2.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 412

30/01/2012 16:24

Radio, Poetry and the Séance in the first World War

42

WORD ELECTRIC, SO FINITE: RADIO, POETRY AND THE SÉANCE IN WORLD WAR I Jane Lewty I

I

n 1914, the following lines from the poem ‘Thou Shalt Scatter Us like Chaff ’ appeared in the pages of Punch: . . . red devastation Still shall urge by land and sea Every proud advancing nation, While Marconi’s installation Rules the skies of Germany.1

Years earlier, the author of an article in Popular Science Monthly (1899) had written about the unbounded possibilities of wireless. His quest begins in the physics laboratory of Harvard University, where antiquated pieces of apparatus are collected, ‘dead mechanisms born to new uses and a great future’.2 He likens a Hertzian transformer to a skeleton. Two lengths of wire placed together constitute what was known as a Ruhmkorf coil, with batteries attached to its inner section. The resulting electric charge, galvanised by the positioning of the outer coil, reminds him of the internal circuitry of the human body, agitated by ‘the nerve system, the local battery [making] a signal in the brain’.3 Here, we are given the image of a man-machine, fragmented and immobile. In World War I, the body’s ability to kill and wound, to operate as a mass unit and yet to be individually mutilated, was a site of discourse for both public and private communication systems. As Jeffrey Sconce points out, radio may have orchestrated, reported and kept vigil over the spectacle of trench warfare, but the medium also became ‘implicated in another void of modernity’, the barren expanses of what came to be called ‘No-Man’s Land’ where souls ‘along the Siegfried line had evaporated into the flowing ether, perhaps to be retrieved by wireless or perhaps to wander forever’.4 Without question, the Great War had become the ‘simultaneous drama of the age of simultaneity’,5 in so far as the synchronised movements of bombardments and offensives had never been deployed in such a manner. In terms of radio technology, the concept of ‘broadcasting’ had just begun to take hold. Companies such as British Marconi (1897) and Telefunken (1903) were established. In 1911, the first wireless communication between North America and Europe was achieved after Kaiser Wilhelm II dispatched Telefunken engineers to West Sayville, New York to erect three 600-ft (180-m) radio towers linking

413

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 413

30/01/2012 16:24

414

jane lewty

in to Nauen in Berlin. Meanwhile, amateur radio enthusiasts were fashioning their own short-wave devices with equipment bought from radio magazines. Although there were no commercial stations, the sinking of the Titanic on 15 April 1912, brought attention to the capacity of the medium, owing to the batch of distress calls sent through the ship’s fourwire antenna 250 feet above sea level. However, any individual attempt to emulate this milestone in telecommunications was abruptly terminated. On 2 August 1914, the London Gazette issued a special notice that it had become ‘expedient for the public service that His Majesty’s Government should have control over the transmission of messages by wireless telegraphy’.6 Five days prior to the actual declaration of war, wireless telegraphy had performed its first national service. Further to the suspension of civilian radio activities, it was decreed on 3 August that all wireless apparatus on merchant vessels in the waters of the United Kingdom be dismantled and reformatted to future wartime requirements. The general public was asked to cooperate and be willing to give ‘information of any wireless station which may be observed to be kept up in contravention of [. . .] orders’.7 For the time being, radio was a mechanism of war. By 1915, Germany had seventeen government wireless stations, Austria-Hungary, four; France, eighteen; Russia, twenty-eight; and England, forty-seven. As explained in a magazine article of the time, ‘Directing the War by Wireless’: hundreds of miles of roaring battle line, hostile warships roving the remotest wastes of the sea, aeroplanes and Zeppelins soaring high above the earth, even the stealthy submarines, lurking in the depths for victims, are subservient to the invisible hand of the wireless.8 But could it be trusted? The article continues: What more common heading do we find in the Press than ‘German Wireless Lies,’ or ‘More Wireless Mendacity’? We have even noticed in heavy block type the heading, ‘Wireless Blasphemy!. . . But inasmuch as this magnificent instrument, like all other instruments equally potent for good or evil, is frequently wielded by the wicked, the messages transmitted on their initiative embody the characteristics of the senders’ immoral nature.9 It was reported that during the famed altercation in the Falkland Islands (December 1914), the radio operator at Port Stanley said that: [a]ll the Germans pressed their keys, making indescribable noises by altering their spark frequencies rapidly. It has never been my lot to receive through such a jingle before, and I trust never again. Our signalling continued without interruption despite their efforts, although for about two hours pandemonium reigned in the ether.10 It is crucial to note that, in addition to the centralised image of radio, the image of ‘localised’ wireless telegraphy had changed from the innocuous crystal-set owner, alone in a room awaiting signals from anywhere, to a signaller in the trenches relaying information back to his Company or a switchboard operator with an equally specific task. Every move made by British, French or German fleets was the result of a radio order from the respective war office. Britain directed the manoeuvres of her fleets from the Marconi station at Carnarvon, Wales; Germany, from Nauen; and France, from Paris. Except for one hour each day, Carnarvon transmitted the orders of the British Admiralty to the various ships in a complex secret code, changed daily as was the wavelength. The

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 414

30/01/2012 16:24

radio, poetry and the séance in the first world war

415

900-ft Eiffel Tower station at Paris retrieved information from all sections of the war zone within 3,000 miles, often hearing ten messages simultaneously. A function of the Eiffel Tower plant was to transmit news to the soldiers in the trenches. Formerly on the battlefield, men had to reel out hundreds of yards of cable to establish telephone communication between a captured enemy trench and the first-line reserve. Instead, the radio operator now collected his box of 18 by 19 in containing Leyden jar condenser, aerial coil, silicon detector, variable capacity phone condenser of 1,000 ohms and ground mat of wire gauze with dimensions of 8 by 3 ft. All this equipment was carried on the back. Another piece in Popular Science Monthly, ‘Wireless in the Trenches’ (1917) contained the following vignette about a Lieutenant L.: He was adjusting one of the stays of his aerial pole which had been disturbed by the falling of a shell close by. As he was doing so, over came a second shell, known to the Tommies as a ‘whizz-bang’, which gave him a direct hit, tearing his arm clean away, except for a stump of 4 inches. He looked at it calmly for a couple of seconds. ‘Well, that’s a ticket for blighty’, he exclaimed then, and fainted.11 In the history of wireless technology there is debate as to who transmitted the first short-range signal. Oliver Lodge demonstrated electric induction during a Royal Institute Lecture in 1894, whereas Marconi’s aerial, first deployed in his Bath–Salisbury tests of 1897, improved the performance of the new technology. A letter to the Listener in 1932 recalls the experiments of a D. E. Hughes who created a conductor out of zinc and wire filings in 1879, only to have his invention upgraded by Edward Branly to include a glass tube for induction. This device was forever established as the ‘Branly coherer’. Though it was Marconi who captured the public’s imagination with his equipment of balloons and calico kites decorated with tinfoil, it is said that portable receivers were demonstrated in more domestic settings, namely, a Ladies’ Conversazione at the Royal Society in London. Hugh Aitken, in Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio, points out that we must learn to think of radio as born not on the barren heath of Salisbury Plain, but rather ‘amid [. . .] teacups and genteel chatter’ of the Victorian drawing room.12 A widespread interest in the occult had emerged at the turn of the twentieth century; chiefly spiritualism, with related pastimes such as crystal gazing, numerology, mesmerism and fortune telling. The parallels between the corresponding upsurge of spiritualism and communications technologies, specifically the phonograph and radio, have been well documented. Scholars such as Janet Oppenheim, with The Other World (1985), Jenny Hazelgrove, with Spiritualism and British Society Between the Wars (2000), Helen Sword, with Ghostwriting Modernism (2002), Jeffrey Sconce, with Haunted Media (2000), and Jay Winter, with Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1998) assess the ways in which certain authors responded to the paradoxes of the new age.13 Just as the invention of the Morse code alphabet in 1837 inspired table rapping, it was the commercial distinction of radio, the constant improving of its capacities and its multifaceted use in wartime which contributed to its appropriation by the séance. It was understood that radio could collapse time and space to a mere instant. Essentially, it throws speech, arrests the voice from a dark vacuum into which it dropped, never to be retrieved otherwise. Its noises are acoustically independent; there is no sound like another. As Hugh Kenner points out in The Mechanic Muse (1987), the first interaction with a radio would have been no less mystifying than the appearance of a ghost in Hamlet.14 If that premise is to be considered, then wireless was indeed paranormal. The words of the dead could be perceived as invisible wave forms sent

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 415

30/01/2012 16:24

416

jane lewty

through, and from, an afterlife that was now equated with the etheric expanse, invisible but ever present.

II As a means of regulation, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in 1882 in order to prove the authenticity of spiritualist encounters in an academic sense, rather than simply relaying the fantastical nature of the event. F. W. H. Myers, its most noteworthy spokesperson, considered that it was ‘the business of science to [. . .] take a wider purview and include more of the totality of things’.15 The movement was largely contained in quasiintellectual circles, given that the exclusive British debating clubs became a forum for its discussion. Amongst the luminaries was William Crookes, whose essay, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’ (1892) was and still is thought to be the founding statement on the principles of radio technology. His argument for ‘mutual receptivity’ and movements within the ether prompted a surge in primitive wireless inventions and gave a vocabulary to supernatural investigations.16 Just as trumpets had been used to amplify ghostly whisperings in the late 1800s, their horns mimicking the ‘ear’ of the phonograph, the introduction of wires was a defining moment in the practice of spiritualism and its techniques. There are many recorded cases: for example, the medium Hester Dowden aka Hester Travers Smith claimed that her ‘control’, the entity that facilitates between the medium and the spirit world, blocked other voices, deploying otherworldly machinery very similar to that of a radio set.17 Spirits were said to dominate attempts at mediation, and thus the séance inevitably became a site for dropped calls and misunderstandings. This problem had existed in radio dialogue from its very inception: How do I know my message is apprehended and understood? Is this received sound a viable substitute for the person I want to talk with? If the voice is salvaged by something/someone else (an intervening medium), then surely it could be mutated, misheard or absorbed into the traffic of frequencies. Given their reputations and temperament, scientists were encouraged by the SPR to participate in séances and appease the extremists in both camps. Following Crookes’s announcement that electric discharges resembled the unseen reverberations felt in the séance chamber, the connection was verified. For example, the celebrated occultist Daniel Dunglass Home was encased in a helix of insulated copper wire and then shocked with an electric current in order to prove the veracity of his trance. Mediums were often wired to a galvanometer to ensure that while the room was in chaos with its furniture wildly careening and unseen instruments playing, the index remained steady. By applying these uncertified notions of physics to another indefinite phenomenon, Crookes attempted to rationalise spiritualism, but only succeeded in embellishing the séance with more paraphernalia. As noted by Helen Sword, the caprice of spiritualism, with its improbabilities, serves to highlight ‘the fragility and tenuousness of all human discourse’,18 yet fraudsters were all too eager to use technology for profit. Trance mediumship was perfected by a device secreted elsewhere in the darkened chamber; eerie sounds from the afterlife could be achieved through playback and static. The plot of a detective story by L. Du Garde Peach, The Radio Wraith (1923) centred on this recreational pursuit, not without some irony. A character offers to play ‘ghost’, appearing in absentia (that is, through a wireless loudspeaker placed under the séance trumpet), thus exposing the medium as a charlatan, and eventually as the murderer. Shattered by the death of his wife in 1916, William Crookes began to attend séances uncritically, and seemed to chase the idea of an electro-psychic force with less rigour. ‘I

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 416

30/01/2012 16:24

radio, poetry and the séance in the first world war

417

have had hundreds of communications professing to come from dead friends,’ he wrote, ‘but whenever I try to get proof that they are really the individuals they profess to be, they break down.’19 Naturally, each participant in a séance sought a message unique to them, usually invigorated by grief. With all natural modes of contact, touch, smell, sight dictated by paranormal rules, the experience was subject to personal interpretation. Concurrently, Sir Oliver Lodge, president of the SPR in 1901–2 was also reconciling his scientific research with a staunch belief in life after death. While radio science progressed, such as Marconi’s exploration of radar, Lodge still regarded the space between transmitter and receiver as a vague effluvium where isolated fragments could coexist, whether they be the latitude and longitude of naval vessels, or the voice of a lost soul searching for a conduit. He would soon be able to provide evidence, after a cluster of disturbing events surrounding the death of his youngest son, Raymond. During a séance on 8 August 1915, the medium Alta Leonora Piper relayed what become known as the ‘Faunus message’ through a control named ‘Richard Hodgeson’. The reference was Horace’s Ode II, xvii, whereby the poet narrowly escapes from a falling tree. In retrospect, after understanding the message to be a portent of doom, Lodge writes that the timing of the letter received from Piper corresponded with notification that Raymond had been killed in Flanders. His report of the experience and its aftermath, the book Raymond: Or Life After Death (1916), became Lodge’s outlet for mourning.20 Similar reports were in wide circulation, bearing titles that gave credence to the use of occult practices rather than religion in order to address grief: Gone West: Being The Experience of Our Soldiers and Others after Death as Seen and Told by the Author (J. S. M. Ward, 1917), War Letters from the Living Dead Man (Elsa Barker, 1915), The Visions of Mons and Ypres (John Garnier, 1919), Six Million Men Killed in the Great War: Messages from the Dead to the Living (F. T. A. Davies, 1921) and Psychical Phenomena and the War (Hereward Carrington, 1918). Owing to the emotive nature of these underresearched publications, a spiritualist tract written by a pioneer of wireless may have been a solace to many bereaved families. In Raymond, Lodge’s correlation of psychic ritual and electricity is played out to its full extent; chiefly, the electric waves of vibration coursing through air at a sitting, and the portrayal of ether ‘or region in which communication is more akin to telepathy’.21 Death, according to Lodge, is the cessation of that controlling influence over matter and energy [. . .] severance of abstract principle from concrete residue [. . .] Death therefore may be called a dissociation [. . .] he has passed on, passed through the body and gone, as Browning said in ‘Abt Vogler’.22 He added that departed ‘vital entities’ may be communicated with ‘through intervention of an electric charge’. Unsurprisingly, the conversations were full of stoppages, inaccuracies and misunderstandings. Once contacted, Raymond must channel through ‘Feda’, the control/communicator and several different mediums. After one session, he says, I didn’t like it much. I didn’t use his tongue, I used his larynx without his tongue and without his lips [. . .] and that’s why tones of the medium’s voice come in, and why it’s often coloured by the medium.23 Drawing upon our knowledge of popular ventriloquism, this idea is not hard to imagine; a grotesque semi-possession where language emits not from unseen impulses in the room, but from a supine body. The modulations of voice are altered; the ‘feel’ of Raymond’s

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 417

30/01/2012 16:24

418

jane lewty

speech is gone. The sitters are encouraged to think that he is not silent, merely diminished, and retrievable by a mighty filtering and amplification process. As a result, the data (so necessary for psychic research) is subverted. Raymond often asks, ‘Did the voice sound like mine?’24 Like every broadcaster, Raymond is aware that throwing one’s voice means that you can never be received in the manner, or at the pitch, you hope for. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, who, in a rather macabre radio broadcast of 1927, objected to his own gramophone recordings: slow it down until you hear an amiable old man with a rather pleasant Irish voice. . . that is me . . . all the other people you hear at different speeds are imposters, sham Shaws, phantoms who never existed.25 Acknowledging this problem, Lodge wrote that, ‘we have not as yet the privilege of getting in touch with the complete personality of the departed; we see through a glass darkly, not face-to-face. . . but we do catch glimpses of a real surviving personality.’26 Lodge may have wished his son to resemble an electric signal, veering astray but always in range. On one occasion, Raymond recalls his visit to a higher plane where he contracts into a tiny atom, flowing down ‘a river of electricity or force, going all ways at once’.27 Such a notion was not uncommon; the poet Edward Carpenter, another advocate of life after death with the postulates of science, had described the human body as composed of ‘soul fragments (or “psychomeres”) with negative and positive charges’.28 Understandably, a feature of séances in World War I was the recombination of the body, or the assertion that physical defects no longer mattered in the next world. The circumstances of death – bayonet, gas attack, the collapse in a water-filled trench – were far too vividly rendered in the individual and collective imagination. Only 152 issues of official newsreel were released, and so first-hand accounts became the most reliable source of information. Injured men from decimated battalions returned home with the story of their last attack; a letter written by a missing soldier just minutes before he went over the top was received weeks later. As a result, the agonies of a son or husband could be assuaged by the medium, telling the sitter that, as in the case of Raymond, ‘when anybody’s blown to pieces, it takes some time for the spirit body to [. . .] gather itself all in and be complete.’29 Shattered limbs are mended, and, as Raymond claims, ‘no-one bleeds here [. . .] I have no curiosity about my body now. It’s like an old coat.’30 To add extra reassurance, there is a ‘Voice, a Spirit, a He who doesn’t come and mingle freely, who speaks soul-to-soul to a thousand [spirits] at once’. This statement maintains the first rule of spiritualist literature; the medium Annie Besant claimed that the ‘wraith’ occasionally seen after death is merely an etheric double of the physical body, while the astral/mental body separates itself via particles and force into the ‘heaven-world’ to live ‘wholly in thought and emotion’.31 Hester Travers Smith notes that her dead soldiers experience a period of darkness, no more than ten days, before emerging into a new life protected by a divine influence. One young corporal, lost at Gallipoli, begs the medium to tell his mother that her grief keeps him ‘in the miasma of desire that shrouds the earth’32 and thus unable to ascend to a higher sphere. Hereward Carrington in Psychical Phenomena and the War (1918) relays the following statement, via the pen of an autonomist, Mrs E.: Suddenly sight was born to me; my eyes became open. I saw the spiritual world dawn on the actual, like the blossoming of a flower. Nothing I could say would make any of you comprehend the wonder of that revelation which will be yours in time.33

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 418

30/01/2012 16:24

radio, poetry and the séance in the first world war

419

In a later text of 1927, The Blue Room, Being the Absorbing Story of the Development of Voice-To-Voice Communication in Broad Light with Souls Who Have Passed into the Great Beyond, the author, Clive Chapman, records conversations with ‘a unique concert party’ of boisterous World War I aviators. The control, known as ‘Betty’ explains that bodies over there are dazzling, bright and electric. Zeppelins hum pleasantly like ‘big silvery fish going at lightning speed’, and a ‘soldier soul’ who died in agony sings Cantique de Noel.34 During the mass slaughter in Europe, much of spiritualism’s power was its ability to diminish the sheer facts of death: pain, putrefaction and ultimately, loss. The need to rely upon some kind of transformative power was still in evidence in 1921, when Thomas Alva Edison prepared to record the final seconds of his dying body. He fully believed that a person contained ‘life units’ which drifted from the corpse to recombine elsewhere and then communicate. The New York Times (23 January 1921) appealed to Edison on the behalf of many: ‘Mothers, sisters, wives and sweethearts who have lost their beloved in the war, find their souls hungering for them [. . .] People everywhere are anxiously awaiting word from you.’35 His final words, as he gracefully sank into unconsciousness, were, ‘It is very beautiful over there.’

III In the introduction to Phantasms of the Living, F. W. H. Myers announced that he might repel readers by ‘lying in wait to catch the last impulse of the dying’36 and seeking ‘the conditions of telepathic impulses on the hither side of the dividing line, in the closing passage of life’.37 Myers held an interest in those borderline cases who underwent a traumatic death, first in their ability to transmit strongly as they died, then to defer contact for a while, and finally to reappear as a phantasm.38 This moment of expiration, hovering between the hellish present and unknowable oblivion recurs in poetry of World War I. Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘The Death Bed’ describes impaired vision and hearing; silence is ‘aqueous like floating rays of amber light’, and brief snatches of memory flicker: ‘Water-calm, sliding green above the weir [. . .] shaken hues of summer; drifting down’. The pain of his wound ends the soldier’s reverie, and the poet turns to the reader, no doubt invoking a private vigil but also a call to the anti-war movement: ‘Light many lamps and gather round his bed. / Lend him your eyes, warm blood and will to live. / Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet’.39 But the guns are the final sound; the soldier is not saved by prayer or invocation. The speaker of Herbert Read’s ‘Meditation of a Dying German Officer’ feels his ‘thoughts / rebound in a tenement whose doors / are shut’. Death ‘has no deeper horror / than diminishing sound – ears that strain / for the melody of action, hear / only the empty silence of retreating life’. He strains towards the ‘humming nerve’ of battle, and hopes to ‘on its widening wave / lapse into eternity’. There is no music of the spheres, just a ‘void of Nothing – how still and tenuous’.40 Another of Read’s poems, ‘Dialogue Between the Body and Soul of the Murdered Girl’, inspired by sufferings of the French civilians, is quite literally an interplay between astral and physical bodies. Unlike many poems of its era, the poem gestures toward spiritualist doctrine, as the soul urges the body to resist anger and ascend, saying: ‘I hover round your fameless features / barred from Heaven by light electric’. The body argues that its mauled remains are for France rather than God whose face is not love but hate. In turn, the soul tells the body that: ‘A bright mantle fell across your bleeding limbs. / Your face averted shone with sacred fire. / So be content’.41 Not so in the purgatorial world of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 419

30/01/2012 16:24

420

jane lewty

Wilfred Owen’s poetry which often has ‘no memory of the salient’; it is a place where dead adversaries meet, where bodies unnaturally contort and decay. Is it that we are dying? Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires glozed [. . .] Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,– We turn back to our dying.42 Alan Seeger’s ‘Rendezvous with Death’ and ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrae give voice to the fated or the already slain.43 A signaller claws a ‘last message from his ghostly enemy’ before turning stone-like in Edmund Blunden’s ‘Third Ypres’.44 Others ask if they are dead or merely stunned. The speaker of Charles Hamilton Sorley’s ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead’ walks among massacred battalions, where no one is recognisable.45 As seen in Raymond, the dead are identified and given a voice, pulled through the vocal chords of a medium whose own mouth would twist in the grimace of death. Isaac Rosenberg, killed on night patrol on the Somme in 1918, focuses intently on the lack of distinction between a corpse and the life-in-death he believes can only accompany such a violent end: Here is one not long dead; His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands To reach the living word the far wheels said [. . .] There is no consistent imagining of an afterlife; the shards of flesh and skin lie atop each other in broad daylight but ‘none saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass / Or stood aside for the half-used life to pass’. Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their soul’s sack Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.46 The rhetoric of the séance, which often depicted the act of dying as a light-saturated moment of ascension, could not be further from the language used by poets to whom death was the transformation of matter into another state of matter. In Sassoon’s ‘CounterAttack’, men ‘face-downward, in the sucking mud, / Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled’.47 Elsewhere, in the substantive yet ethereal, multi-vocal world of David Jones’s In Parenthesis, bodies hang on barbed wire like ‘rag-merchants’ stock’,48 tearing themselves away to die in pieces. The field-dressings are as ‘futile as frantic seaman’s shift bunged to stoved bulwark, so soon the darking flood percolates’.49 Soldiers are viewed as ‘creaturely’, louse-like, as decaying meat, occasionally ‘shovelled just into surface soil like dog – with perhaps an Our Father said if it was extra quiet’.50 An ‘anaesthetist’s over-dose for gaped viscera’51 is the embalming fluid; the men dissolve into the pits and runnels of their battlefield, ‘[A]ll to the drabness of uncreation sunk’.52 As Jane Goldman has shown: ‘There is no final dumping ground of the dead, as The Waste Land [. . .] seems to teach: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden / Has it begun to sprout?”’53 In a discussion of John Rodker’s work, Goldman suggests that the isolate pieces of flesh are better depicted in his piece, ‘War Museum – Royal College of Surgeons’ (1930), where ‘six feet of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 420

30/01/2012 16:24

radio, poetry and the séance in the first world war

421

small bowel’ and ‘shotaway faces’ are pickled in brine. The reality of revivification is seen in Owen’s ‘Disabled’ where survival after a half-death in the trenches ends with the body fragmented, its missing arms and legs substituted by the same materials (steel, glass, wire) that took them. David Jones frequently observes this paradox: Give them glass eyes to see and synthetic spare parts to walk in the Triumphs, without anyone feeling awkward and O, O, O, it’s a lovely war with poppies on the up-platform for a perpetual memorial of his body.54 The collaged poem-novel In Parenthesis was named so, in the words of the author because it was written in ‘a kind of space between – I don’t know between quite what [. . .] because for us amateur soldiers [. . .] the war itself was a parenthesis – how glad we were to step outside its brackets at the end of 18.’55 However, emerging from the war, as though it were some hideously communal trance, was for many not a liberating experience but one of suspension and playback. Herbert Read’s ‘Meditation of the Waking English Officer’, written in 1933, not only depicts the wavering state of near-death so common to war poetry, but aptly describes shell shock, the residue of trench warfare: the infinite is all and I, a finite speck, so essence even of the life that falls like dew from the spirit breathed on the fine edge of matter, perhaps only that edge a ridge between eternal death and life eternal a moment of time, temporal The universe swaying between Nothing and Being and life faltering between a clock’s tick between a pendulum’s coming and going.56 In his poem of the same name, Ivor Gurney writes of the ‘strange hells’ created in the mind saturated by scenes of war.57 His speaker of ‘The Silent One’ who ‘died on the wires and hung there, one of two’58 encases himself among other wires, unbroken. The repetition of the word ‘wires’ is enough to suppose a double meaning; the brutal barbed fences protecting the dugout, but also the landlines (telegraph wires) made of metal casing that transmitted from the front line via radio waves, not to mention the coils and paraphernalia that Gurney, as a signaller, was to carry and operate. After the war, one symptom of his mental illness was that radio messages from a hostile force, either doctors or the wartime enemy, were infiltrating his mind. This level of paranoia is not so dissimilar to that of Ezra Pound, another wartime radio operator, one with a different and less noble intention. After being arrested for treason in 1945, Pound complained to his psychiatrists that he was harried by voices, arguably due to his immersion in a practice where one’s own dispatches are sent into a vast unknowable space, a no-man’s-land with no guarantee of reply. Septimus Smith in Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) oscillates in a vacuum he cannot navigate. His shell shock has facets of Cotard’s syndrome (or negations delusion), a neuropsychiatric disorder where the sufferer believes himself to be a walking corpse, rotting and yet fully sentient. The synapses of the brain are connected in such a way as to

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 421

30/01/2012 16:24

422

jane lewty

disconnect the recognition of self and the attendant (correct) emotion. Grandiosity and hallucinations are common, as is the desire to self-harm. In Septimus’s world, dogs morph into men, he sees his own words fall ‘like shavings from a plane’,59 he receives messages from the dead, he feels himself dead. Like Wilfred Owen’s hallucinatory ‘The Show’ where Death shows him a worm with ‘the feet of many men, / And the fresh-severed head of it, my head’,60 Septimus sees his body ‘macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock.’61 His suicide prompts Clarissa Dalloway to see death as the ultimate attempt to communicate, as people cannot access life’s centre: ‘rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.’62 Woolf ’s third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922) is, in many ways, about aspects of communication breakdown; how the unsaid is meant to be somehow apprehended and absorbed, how words sent to a certain destination (a person, a place) are never uttered accurately, that is, in the manner they were first envisaged. Jacob’s Room works to define its main character through the perception of others, how ‘something is always impelling one to hum vibrating [. . .] endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all’.63 The war encroaches slowly upon the text until we see warships poised in the North Sea to be scuttled, and an army weaving its way across a cornfield while tiny figures splinter away. The whole air is ‘tremendous with breathing; elastic with filaments’64 as nerve-worn individuals and the unsteady world wait for news: Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires of the Admiralty shivered with some faraway communication. A voice kept remarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag [. . .]65 The statue of the naval hero, perched high over Trafalgar Square, looked down on the roofs of the government building, which actively picked up information and issued orders. As aforementioned, ships could openly communicate via radio telegraphy, as seen in Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘Wireless’ (1902). Marconi’s experiments are taking place at Poole, several miles from a more localised experiment in paranormal communications. Wireless induction is recreated in an apothecary after dark, during which Mr Shaynor, the pharmacist, channels Keats and sinks into a trance, summarily writing lines from ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’. These spectral utterances are hindered by two battleships moored in the Channel, neither of which can read each other’s signals as they are being intercepted by the wireless device in the apothecary’s. By underscoring the parallel between acoustic technology and spiritualism, Kipling weaves a pre-emptive tale for the era; pointing out that any kind of cryptic message exists in a purgatory.66 Jacob Flanders, long dead, is a ghost in a room whose chair creaks imperceptibly. Leaves at the window suddenly flare up in previously tranquil air. On the battlefield, men who live in David Jones’s interstices wait for messages that drift from bay to bay, hold their breath ‘as for no thing other’.67 It is Ivor Gurney and Septimus Smith who most exemplify Sconce’s image of the spectral figures haunting the Western Front; on patrol, waiting for a call from either side, from anywhere, in order to collect their severed selves. In the regulated space of a psychic’s chamber, with all its modern electric embellishments and the utilisation of the idea of wireless communication, the dead were able to speak. To survive meant a Miltonic ‘strange hell’ more akin to an interiorised purgatory, where the splintering of mental faculties rendered the body machinic rather than emotive. To hear a radio voice when no one else can means that you are the ideal, the only, recipient. A receiving device with antennae, a battery, a circuit and an electric charge. The poetry of World

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 422

30/01/2012 16:24

radio, poetry and the séance in the first world war

423

War I speaks from this place of heightened sense perception. It is a verifiable transmission, a factual field report. Read in tandem with spiritualist documents of the era, the work of Owen, Jones and others refutes any occult belief in easeful death.

Notes 1. ‘Thou Shalt Scatter Us like Chaff ’, Punch, 147, 23 September 1914. 2. John Trowbridge, ‘Wireless Telegraphy’, Popular Science Monthly, 56 (November 1899), pp. 59–72 (p. 59). 3. Ibid. p. 70. 4. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 75. 5. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 312. 6. H. J. B. Ward, ‘Wireless Waves in the World’s War’, Yearbook of Wireless Technology (London: Published for the Marconi Press Agency by the St. Catherine Press, 1916), pp. 625–44 (p. 625). 7. Ibid. p. 625. 8. George F. Worts, ‘Directing the War by Wireless’, Popular Mechanics (May 1915), pp. 647–50 (p. 647). 9. Ibid. p. 647. 10. Ward, p. 633; original emphasis. 11. Capt. A. P. Corcoran, ‘Wireless in the Trenches’, Popular Science Monthly (May 1917), pp. 795–9 (p. 796). 12. Hugh Aitken, Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio (New York: Wiley, 1976), p. 120. 13. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Jenny Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British Society Between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 14. Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 15. F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival After Bodily Death (London: Longmans, Green, 1903), vol. 1, p. 217. 16. William Crookes, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 51 (1 January–1 June 1892), pp. 173–81. 17. Hester Travers Smith, Voices From the Void: Six Years’ Experience in Automatic Communications (London: William Rider, 1919), p. 15. 18. Sword, p. 17. 19. M. R. Barrington and K. M. Goldney (eds), Crookes and the Spirit World (London: Souvenir Press, 1972), p. 237. 20. Oliver Lodge, Raymond: or Life After Death (London: Methuen, 1916). 21. Lodge, p. 59. 22. Ibid. pp. 197–201. 23. Ibid. p. 177. 24. Ibid. p. 173. 25. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Spoken English and Broken English’ (1927). Held at BBC Listening Archives: Writers and Poets: Historic Recordings. CD 1. Cat. No. 342. 26. Lodge, p. 118. 27. Ibid. p. 184.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 423

30/01/2012 16:24

424

jane lewty

28. Edward Carpenter, The Drama of Love and Death: A Study of Human Evolution and Transfiguration (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924), p. 202. 29. Lodge, p. 112. 30. Ibid. pp. 137, 139. 31. Annie Besant, The Riddle of Life and How Theosophy Answers It (Bradford: Percy Lund, Humphries, 1918), pp. 15–17. 32. Travers Smith, p. 40. 33. Hereward Carrington, Psychical Phenomena and the War (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1918), p. 241. 34. Clive Chapman and ‘G. A. W.’, The Blue Room, Being the Absorbing Story of the Development of Voice-To-Voice Communication in Broad Light with Souls Who Have Passed into the Great Beyond (London: Psychic Book Club, 1927), pp. 64–5, 67. 35. New York Times, 23 January 1921, quoted in Wyn Wachhorst, Thomas Edison: An American Myth (Boston: MIT Press, 1981), p. 140. 36. Myers, p. xx. 37. Ibid. p. 223. 38. Ibid. p. vii. 39. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘The Death Bed’, in Jon Silkin (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 122–3. 40. Herbert Read, ‘Meditation of a Dying German Officer’, in Silkin, pp. 147–51. 41. Herbert Read, ‘Dialogue Between the Body and Soul of a Murdered Girl’, in Silkin, p. 55. 42. Wilfred Owen, ‘Exposure’, in Silkin, p. 76. 43. Alan Seeger, ‘Rendezvous with Death’, in Silkin, p. 82; John McCrae, ‘In Flanders Fields’, in Silkin, p. 81. 44. Edmund Blunden, ‘Third Ypres’, in Silkin, p. 103. 45. Charles Hamilton Sorley, ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead’, in Silkin, pp. 86–7. 46. Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, in Silkin, pp. 206–8. 47. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Counter-Attack’, in Silkin, p. 129. 48. David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), p. 106. 49. Ibid. p. 174. 50. Ibid. pp. 97, 149. 51. Ibid. p. 173. 52. Blunden, p. 110. 53. Jane Goldman, Modernism 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 129. 54. Jones, p. 176. 55. Ibid. p. xv. 56. Herbert Read, ‘Meditation of the Waking English Officer’, in Silkin, pp. 57–8. 57. Ivor Gurney, ‘Strange Hells’, in Silkin, p. 114. 58. Ivor Gurney, ‘The Silent One’, in Silkin, p. 112. 59. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin Books, [1925] 1992), p. 76. 60. Wilfred Owen, ‘The Show’, in Silkin, p. 184. 61. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 74. 62. Ibid. p. 201. 63. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (London: Penguin Books, [1922] 1965), p. 69. 64. Ibid. p. 155. 65. Ibid. p. 163. 66. Rudyard Kipling, ‘Wireless’, in Traffics and Discoveries (London: Macmillan, 1904). 67. Jones, p. 99.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 424

30/01/2012 16:24

Adam Piette

Part IV Introduction: Spaces

INTRODUCTION: SPACES

W

arfare is very obviously spatiotemporal; less obviously, it could be said to structure geopolitical spaces even outside the space-time of war zones. This is the case both because political borders are often traced and redefined by acts of war and the treaties that ensue; and also because nation states, in their war planning and defence strategies, must continually act as if their own borders were fluid, as though their own territories were future theatres of war and as though their neighbouring states were potential enemies. As Clausewitz wrote, the nation is only a nation if it is always in potentia a theatre of war: If we wait for the enemy, within our own theatre of War, however near the border the decision takes place, still this theatre of War is entered by the enemy, which must entail a sacrifice on our part, whereas, had we made the attack, this disadvantage would have fallen on the enemy.1

This is not paranoia, but the manner in which nation states must always be shadowed by the fictions generated by their own internal security state systems. If the nation state has a security state double of itself as theatre of war, then the twentieth century has seen those geopolitical war-fictional spaces develop in complexity as the national security state expanded, first in imperial mode with the British during the First World War, then in American form after the Second World War. The World Wars boosted and generated national security state consciousness in the principle superpower of the time, in both cases as a total war effort necessity when faced with ruthless military regimes. By facing enemies as formidable as the Central Powers in 1914, Hitler’s Germany and para-fascist Japan in the Second World War, these security states took on some of the complexion of their opponents, the war-inflected imagining of geopolitical territory acquiring an internal ruthless logic. The story which the articles in this section sketch out, from the idea of war as sponsored by trench warfare, through the concentration camp nightmare, through the extreme war zones of the Second World War, to the idea of the city as always already bomb-targeted, through to the importance of the dream of a standing army within homefront spaces, is of a developing and expanding infection of the politics of space by militarisation. The endgame of this process, its terminus ad quem, is the permanent war economy as instanced by Cold War America: spooling off from the massive total war effort of the Second World War, and artificially boosted by the expansion of the Manhattan Project into the extraordinary military–industrial complex of the post-war years, the United

427

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 427

30/01/2012 16:24

428

adam piette

States became a national security state like no other. Armed with the species-destructive Bomb, faced with fanatical enemies in the form of Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China, given global sovereignty by the collapse of rival empires in the West, and deciding to act as defender of world freedom to generate and defend neo-imperial interests of its own, the US spawned a permanent war economy that has as permanently deformed the idea of geopolitical spaces. To take as one example: the South-West of the United States, its desert backyard, the huge expanses of land wrested from Mexico in the country’s first colonial conflict, and site of a dream of America as rugged, canyon and cowboy territory. The stories traditionally associated with the South-West look to the desert for the solace of wilderness, an innocent mindscape, the blessings of the purity of empty space. These Anglo literary clichés about the Sonora desert, the canyons, the rocky world of the malpais preserve in aspic a screen memory of a peaceable world without guilt, flattering the conscience of the Anglo communities with the fictions of Zane Grey, Mary Austin’s translations, Charles Lumnis’s ethnography. The arts of peace were found in the South-West zone, through Willa Cather’s dream of pre-pueblo cliff dweller culture in The Professor’s House, or Leslie Silko’s recreation of Navajo oral tales in Storyteller. The dream of the South-West is the ideal America as frontier/pioneer West; its free spaces objective correlative to national manifest destiny. Yet, as John Beck has brilliantly shown in his Dirty Wars, it is this very same space that witnessed the birth of the national security state’s Empire of the Sun, first as the site of the epic explosion of the A-bomb at Trinity Sands, then as site of the gigantic warfare state generated by the Cold War.2 The federal government annexed enormous swathes of the region (thirty million acres between 1940 and the late 1950s) to create the awesome Southwest Defense Complex, a network of labs, bases, ranges and airspaces ‘stretching from West Texas through New Mexico and Arizona to Southern California and up into Nevada and Utah’.3 Top secret, structured internally with the secret metropolis hierarchies of the Manhattan Project, the Complex is the American West’s open secret, according to Beck. It exists as vast blank spaces on maps, as a visible blankness at the heart of the American superstate, announcing its secretiveness as a screen that erases its own traces. Beck tracks the Southwest Defense Complex through its oblique representation in literary texts such as Bradford Morrow’s Los Alamos novels, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Cormac McCarthy, William Hauptman, Don DeLillo’s Underworld. The Complex, from its iconic status as nuclear blastzone through to the fabulous sums spent on the bases and test sites, symbolises the self-concealing absent-presence of the security state as permanent war economy. The Complex surreptitiously commands enormous budgets, acts as focus of ‘biopolitical governmentality’ through the mystique of its simple existence as defence system, and helps elaborate federally sponsored illegalities and menace through its very invisibility too, the unknowable sublime of a secretly militarised landscape. It is no more than fitfully ironic, then, that the wars the United States has waged in recent years have been desert wars, counterparts to the Southwest Defense Complex in their iconography of arid emptiness, concealed materiel, mirages of menace, camouflaged underground, zone of targets, bombardment, lethal stealth and drone. The security state mirage-double of itself as theatre of war is materialised not only in the Complex and its military–industrial web, but also in the Middle Eastern counterparts to the South-Western Gunbelt, the militarised bases and blank spots on maps of the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan. Experimental geographer, Trevor Paglen, in his book Blank Spots on the Map, seeks to

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 428

30/01/2012 16:24

part iv introduction: spaces

429

cast some light on the Pentagon’s secret world in an attempt to map the extent of the permanent war economy that has established itself within the heartland of the United States.4 The book charts some of the coordinates of the ‘black world’ of intelligence, R & D, covert imprisonment and surveillance, not only in terms of its global presences ‘from secret prisons in dusty Afghan hinterlands to ice-encrusted radomes near the North Pole, and from remote eavesdropping stations in the Australian outback to makeshift camps and dirt landing strips in South America’,5 but also to give an account of the vast ‘economy of secret dollars’, the four million people employed within the States alone working on classified projects (more than double the number working for the federal government). Using telescopes designed to gaze at stars and black holes, Paglen takes hazy, shimmering photographs of the secret bases from forty, fifty miles away, recording not only their mirage phantom status within the political field, but also demonstrating the comparable black hole status of this covert economy of between thirty and sixty billion dollars. Blank Spots on the Map is predominantly a Southwest Defense Complex book, stealing snapshots of classified installations from Vegas, through the Mojave desert, to Alamogordo and the Mexican border, tracking the war economy to its blank spots along the Gunbelt. Yet the book opens in Kabul, in another desert, the theatre of war of the campaigns in Afghanistan, with visible military presence: Kabul itself is occupied by a gaggle of American military units, private military contractors, European troops from the International Security Forces, United Nations development outfits, and other assorted nongovernmental organizations, but their trappings fade away as our cab drives northeast past the airport toward the back road to Bagram. Once we’re outside town, houses give way to sprawling junkyards erected Mad Max-style on the Afghan plains. Guard towers protect the compounds’ precious scrap metal and junk.6 Travelling out from the militarised zone, Paglen discovers a more anarchic warrior code in the warlord economy, as though infected by the militarised Kabul. But the Mad Max zone also harbours the United States war machine, in its secret ‘black’ form. Paglen and his crew spot an Afghan goatherd in front of one of the compounds, but he is wearing a KBR baseball hat (the construction firm Kellog Brown and Root that was once a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton). The cap announces the real objective of Paglen’s ten-mile drive out of town: And there it is in the distance. The top of the crumbling old brick factory once known as the Hecht-hochtief, which found new purpose as one of the first black sites of the war on terror’s geography. A secret prison called the Salt Pit.7 The Salt Pit was a temporary facility erected on the invasion for prisoners of Special Forces; but remained open long after, eventually expanded into an ‘entire complex spanning dozens of acres and surrounded by high brick walls and a barbed wire fence’.8 It was now being used to hold scores of CIA ‘ghost’ prisoners from all over the world subject to the evil system of kidnap and covert torture: the extraordinary rendition programme. The Pentagon’s secret world, its four million classified employees, its blank spots in the South-West, are the flip side to the militarisation of space across the world effected by the permanent war economy secretly fuelling globalisation. Los Alamos and Alamogordo, the air bases, the secret projects, the spy systems and classified research institutions, the whole occult covert war zones of the Gunbelt, find their mapped counterparts in the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 429

30/01/2012 16:24

430

adam piette

Kabuls and black site satellites that surround them in the wars in the deserts. The black world that has ‘sculpted the United States’, for Paglen, is the economy as war-driven, as black budget underpinning the economy of significant areas of the world. It creates what Paglen calls ‘secret geographies’, creates ‘blank spots in the law’, turning history itself ‘into state secret’.9 War literature, as John Beck has shown, should also be seen to include texts which engage with this startling fact: that the spaces we live in are shadowed by war as black economy, everywhere we turn. Beck quotes Rebecca Solnit – whose activist chronicle, Savage Dreams, tells the story of protests against the Nevada nuclear sites, linking it to the history of Indian removal – her sudden realisation ‘that I’d been living in a war zone my whole life without noticing the wars, since they didn’t match any of the categories in which I’d been instructed’.10 From Kabul to the war zone next door, the spatialisation of war is the visible-invisible consequence of the permanent war economy that structures so much of our geopolitics: our familiar spaces may have been sculpted by the war complex at the edge of our vision.

Notes 1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. J. J. Graham (Lawrence, KS: Digireads, 2008), p. 262. 2. John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 3. Ibid. p. 30. 4. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (London: Penguin, 2009). 5. Ibid. p. 4. 6. Ibid. p. 2. 7. Ibid. p. 2. 8. Ibid. p. 3. 9. Ibid. p. 275. 10. Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams, quoted in Beck, p. 230.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 430

30/01/2012 16:24

43

THE TRENCHES Allyson Booth

P

aul Fussell estimates that during the Great War, British soldiers occupied 6,000 miles of trenches where 7,000 men were killed every day.1 No-man’s-land was worse, of course: that was where soldiers were fully exposed and where, on 1 July 1916, 19,000 British soldiers were killed and 35,000 wounded in a single day.2 Historian Hew Strachan reminds us that ‘the war would have been far more horrific if there had been no trenches. They protected flesh and blood from the worst effects of the firepower revolution of the late nineteenth century.’3 Still, in one of the best-known war songs, trenches are the dreaded geography, the place from which troops lustily express their wish to defect: I want to go home, I want to go home, I don’t want to go in the trenches no more, Where whizz-bangs and shrapnel they whistle and roar. Take me over the sea Where the Alleyman can’t get at me. Oh my, I don’t want to die, I want to go home.4 The trenches are where there are whizz-bangs (shells) and shrapnel; they are where the Alleyman (German, from the French Allemand) can get at you. In this song, the trenches are the zone where the killing happens. Despite the notoriety of the song and the centrality of the trenches to our imaginative map of the Great War terrain, many of the most famous poems to emerge from the conflict slide over the trenches to settle instead on other landscapes. Both Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ and the less literary but wildly popular ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrae, for example, bypass trenches and make straight for cemeteries instead. The speaker of Brooke’s famous opening lines –‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’5 – stands in the present moment, alive and unhurt, but his whole attention is fixed on a future in which he is already underground, while the dead soldiers who speak McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ are buried from the beginning: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row, / That mark our place’.6 Neither Brooke nor McCrae shies away from the idea of having died in a war, but both reflexively move beyond the dying itself. They seem to be more comfortable with graves

431

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 431

30/01/2012 16:24

432

allyson booth

than with trenches, perhaps because only after death can one give instructions on what to think (Brooke’s speaker charges us to ‘think only this of me’) or what to do next (‘Take up our quarrel with the foe’, McCrae’s dead soldiers urge). Julian Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’ lavishes attention on a lush natural landscape that is not identifiable as having anything to do with war. ‘The naked earth is warm with Spring,’ it begins, ‘And with green grass and bursting trees / Leans to the sun’s gaze glorying, / And quivers in the sunny breeze’.7 The speaker declares that trees are friends to a soldier, that constellations ‘Hold him in their high comradeship’, and that horses keep him company while he waits for the battle to start. Although ‘in the air Death moans and sings’, no one dies in this poem and the soldier is notable mostly for his privileged relationship to a benevolent natural world. Meanwhile, in ‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death’, Alan Seeger evokes peculiarly ahistorical war landscapes. His speaker imagines three locations where the fatal rendezvous might take place – ‘At some disputed barricade’, ‘On some scarred slope of battered hill’ or ‘At midnight in some flaming town’8 – but each of these sites suggests a war of movement and aggression. The defensive immobility for which the Great War became notorious is ignored. Seeger makes no mention of trenches. Rupert Brooke had scant combat experience and died on a troopship en route to Gallipoli when a mosquito bite developed into a blood infection. For the others, though, the trenches would have been familiar ground. McCrae served as a surgeon in France, Grenfell died after being badly wounded at Ypres, and Seeger was killed on the Somme. Their reluctance, in their poems, to approach the trenches may have been motivated by patriotism, political persuasion, temperament, the pressure of national expectation or a desire to comfort those at home. Their decisions about what to tell and how to tell it may also have been shaped by the audience for which each understood himself to be writing and by the possible occasions that might arise for reading his work. This chapter concerns itself mostly with poets who pay explicit attention to the trenches, but poems by Brooke, McCrae, Grenfell, Seeger and many others like them constitute an important context for the less uplifting, more disturbing work of writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Richard Aldington. I would argue that the great difference between poets who acknowledge the trenches and those who choose not to is that those who attend to the trenches are more willing to lay bare the psychic and imaginative processes of their experience. Nobody wants to look at war, but trench poets – those who exhibit to us the local details of that environment – admit that they do not want to look at war. They do it first by looking and then by talking about the fact that they look away. They record what they see when they look and tell what they turn to when they look away. Poets like Brooke, McCrae, Grenfell and Seeger begin by looking away. They gaze beyond the trenches to some other landscape that is more gracious and consolatory. They never admit, though, that that is what they are doing. The gazing beyond, or turning aside, goes unmentioned. This unacknowledged averting of eyes results in decorous poems that are fit for public consumption in ways that poems about the trenches are not. Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ was recited from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral in a 1915 Easter Sunday sermon.9 In 1921, McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ inspired the first Poppy Day, an event that still persists as an annual fundraising event for the Royal British Legion.10 Poems that speak movingly about the meaning of a grave or about young men on the brink of battle are more suitable for such purposes than ones that begin by noting how a ‘Trench stinks of shallow buried dead’ and end when ‘a bullet tears through the tired brain’ of a soldier.11 On occasions that

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 432

30/01/2012 16:24

the trenches

433

honour or mourn, before audiences of veterans or the families of dead soldiers, a poem in which a speaker pledges that he shall not fail his rendezvous with death is infinitely more appropriate than one rooted in trenches where combatants might, for example, confess that ‘We cringe in holes’.12 A trench poem called ‘Youth in Arms IV: Carrion’13 undoubtedly tells a truth about war but that truth is almost by definition discourteous, if not vulgar. What happened in the trenches was often vulgar, and to write about it required a willingness to violate standards of propriety. Whether or not poets mentioned the trenches in their poems, on the Western Front, for much of the war, ‘The main business of the soldier was to exercise self-control while being shelled.’ 14 The space in which this business was carried out varied widely, but ideal trenches were 6–8 ft deep, 4–5 ft wide and floored with planks called duckboards. Sandbags piled above the ground at the front (parapet) and back (parados) of a trench gave further protection;15 holes scooped out of trench walls provided rough shelter in which ‘one or at most two men could sleep without much comfort’.16 Trenches were not dug in straight lines but crenellated like the battlements of a castle. Firebays were the sections (12–15 ft long) that projected forward, and traverses (6–8 ft long) projected backward. This pattern of right angles ensured that the damage inflicted by incoming shells or shrapnel had a limited scope and also prevented an attacker, should he manage to invade a trench, from firing down the length of it.17 From the air, it would be possible to see three parallel lines of these crenellated trenches. The forward one, closest to the enemy line, was the firing (or fire) trench; projecting forward from it were the most advanced positions known as ‘saps’ – holes in no-man’s-land that accommodated two or three men and were connected to the firing trench by narrow ditches. Used at night as listening posts, saps often began as shell craters that one side or the other would link to their line of trenches. Farther back was the support (or cover) trench and behind that was a reserve trench. Perpendicular to and connecting these three lines was a series of zigzagging communication trenches. Soldiers rotated from behind the lines to the firing and then support trenches on shifts of four to seven days.18 In theory, trenches were an organised and understandable system. Many had names – Piccadilly, Haymarket, Jacob’s Ladder, Krab Krawl, Stuff Trench19 – and signs giving directions and warnings were everywhere. Even so, on the ground, they were a bewildering and intricate landscape impossible to map in one’s head. Part of the problem was that trenches were in a perpetual state of alteration. Advances or retreats could change the position of the front line so that firing trenches no longer constituted the most forward position or rear trenches were no longer in the rear. Shells destroyed continuity and interconnections so that trenches had to be repaired or reconfigured; flooding made them uninhabitable and forced troops to relocate.20 This constant flux also meant that when you returned to a place with which you had once been familiar, it might be completely unrecognisable.21 Navigating the trenches was a strenuous undertaking. In areas with a high water table, trenches were often too shallow, so soldiers had to move through them bent double. Duckboards ‘tended to slip under your feet in the dark, so that the loose end rose and hit you violently on the head’.22 Mud was a problem in the marshy terrain of Flanders – you might step in it over your waders or find that it stuck to your boots in ten-pound clumps.23 There were shells, bullets and grenades, of course, and if you occupied trenches cut from chalk, as many Americans did, the splinters from a shell might dislodge chunks of the trench wall that then became deadly, ricocheting shrapnel.24

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 433

30/01/2012 16:24

434

allyson booth

Siegfried Sassoon, the soldier-poet who keeps his focus most clearly trained on the trenches, captures their mixture of inelegance and danger in ‘A Working Party’: Three hours ago he blundered up the trench, Sliding and poising, groping with his boots; Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk. [. . .] rifle-shots Would split and crack and sing along the night, And shells came calmly through the drizzling air To burst with hollow bang below the hill.25 Sassoon and others who attend to the details of the trenches and give stark accounts of what happens there remind us that men who died in the war did not move cleanly from recruiting station to grave. In between, they lived in ditches while people tried to kill them, and poets like Sassoon put before us that gruelling blend of discomfort and peril. We hear about ‘a shirt verminously busy’ with lice,26 about ‘Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime’ that ‘Kept slush waist-high’,27 and about ‘huge rats / Swollen with feeding upon men’s flesh’.28 A man looking for his friend walks ‘stooping to the ground. / For should I raise my head, / Death watched to spring’.29 In ‘Endless lanes sunken in the clay’, soldiers ‘stumble, cursing, on the slippery duck-boards’.30 Men deepening a captured trench discover that ‘The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs / High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps / And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud, / Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled’.31 These poems put the details of the trenches squarely before us. Even when war poems are explicitly located in the trenches, however, they display an imaginative impulse to escape the present moment and the present circumstances, and one of the most persistent gestures of trench poems is that of the imagination flinging itself out of these underground spaces. Soldiers look up at the sky, the clouds, the moon, the constellations. They notice poppies, hear larks, think about home: What’s going on in London? Did the cow die? They make plans for after the war, indulge in memories – in short, exhibit a tendency to dwell on anything other than the present moment and the landscape in which they are installed. Even Sassoon, despite his unblinking attention to the miserable details of the trenches, charts over and over an imaginative impulse of departure. His sonnet ‘Dreamers’ addresses this impulse directly, though its opening statement seems to suggest otherwise: ‘Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land, / Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows’. This pronouncement does not emanate from any particular speaker but carries with it the weight of confident declaration. The idea of being a citizen in ‘death’s grey land’ suggests that soldiers live in a place where dying is understood to be an obligation of adulthood. There is no tragedy associated with the idea; citizenship is customary, so presumably dying is simply what grown-ups in this country do. In the next clause about how soldiers draw ‘no dividend from time’s to-morrows’, combatants’ disinvestment in the future is expressed in an equally matter-of-fact way, as if a banker were outlining financial terms stipulating that it is the business of the soldier to forgo plans for post-war civilian life. It is not long, however, before the poem moves from metaphorical citizenship to literal conditions, and the moment that happens, we see the imagination bolt. Shifting from

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 434

30/01/2012 16:24

the trenches

435

third to first person and identifying himself not as a citizen in the land of death but as a fellow inhabitant of the trenches, the speaker records in a single sentence both physical immobility and inner motion: I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats, And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain, Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats, And mocked by hopeless longing to regain Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats, And going to the office in the train.32 The list he provides begins with sports, holidays and movies – leisure activities that could be associated with childhood. To dream of spats, though, is to dream of the details of male civilian adulthood (spats are gaiters covering the tops of shoes; they are fastened under the foot with a strap), while to dream of ‘going to the office in a train’ is to fantasise not about play but about work. Having begun the poem with an explicit declaration about the degree to which soldiers consent to their inevitable death and relinquish their thoughts of the future, Sassoon concludes with an implicit counter-assertion about soldiers’ ‘hopeless longing’ to resume the most mundane routines of civilian men. They do, in fact, wish for a ‘dividend from time’s to-morrows’. Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ and McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ assume that death is followed by burial. For them, the idea of a dead soldier leads naturally to the idea of a grave, whether that means a humble ‘corner of a foreign field’ or an imagined cemetery where crosses are lined up ‘row on row’. In the more explicit literature of the trenches, though, dead soldiers are rarely found in graves. They are hanging on barbed wire or mistaken for men who are sleeping. They have stiffened in various postures in no-man’s-land, been blown to bits by a shell or used to shore up the walls of a dugout. Here, death is neither an allegorical rendezvous nor something that occurred a while back but rather the sudden interruption of a person doing his job or eating his breakfast. A young man is piling sandbags on the parapet, but ‘as he dropped his head the instant split / His startled life with lead, and all went out’.33 Soldiers are eating breakfast and talking about sports. The speaker proposes a bet on the outcome of a football game. ‘Ginger raised his head / And cursed, and took the bet; and dropt back dead’.34 The series of conjunctions – ‘And cursed, and took the bet; and dropt back dead’ – documents the tick of moment following moment, demonstrating that you can lift your head and swear and accept a bet and die all in the course of a single sentence. In these two poems, Sassoon’s ‘A Working Party’ and Wilfrid Gibson’s ‘Breakfast’, there is no movement beyond death. The poem ends when the soldier dies. If, in poems like Sassoon’s and Gibson’s, the concern is simply to report how death happens, in other trench poems energy is directed toward the project of imagining one’s own death. Robert Graves does this repeatedly in ‘It’s a Queer Time’,35 which describes the suddenness of death in the trenches as a strange collapse of both chronology and the distance between civilian and front-line spaces. ‘It’s hard to know if you’re alive or dead’, the poem begins, ‘When steel and fire go roaring through your head’. The poem describes three situations in which ‘you’ appear to suffer fatal wounds. In the first, you are killing Germans, ‘mowing heaps down half in fun’ when something hits you in the chest, and ‘off you go. . . / To Treasure Island’. In the second, ‘You’re charging madly’ during an attack, when you fall and find yourself wearing a sailor suit’ and ‘digging tunnels through the hay / In the Big Barn’. In the third, you’re ‘dozing safe in your dug-out’ when it collapses and you

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 435

30/01/2012 16:24

436

allyson booth

see ‘Elsie [. . .] tripping gaily down the trench’, getting her pinafore dirty: ‘Funny! because she died ten years ago! / It’s a queer time’. Here, the trenches become a dream landscape where memory (the barn) and imagination (Treasure Island) blend with ditch, parapet and dugout. Death can transform a man into a child or resurrect someone who has been dead for ten years. In the poem’s last stanza, sliding chronologies and overlapping spaces are translated into conventional Christian terms, and the queerness of the time is expressed as a problem of speed: death happens too fast. ‘Even good Christians,’ the speaker asserts, ‘don’t like passing straight / From Tipperary or their Hymn of Hate / To Alleluiah-chanting, and the chime / Of golden harps’. Here, the spatial move is a startling one across no-man’s-land, from English trenches to German ones: ‘Tipperary’ was a popular British war song and the ‘Hymn of Hate’ was a popular German war song. Both Brits and Germans, the speaker suggests, find disconcerting the abrupt moves from life to death that happen in the trenches. The speaker thus reminds readers that, in many cases, ‘Fritz’ and ‘Tommy’ – the nicknames for prototypical German and English soldiers – shared a religion and a God. The speaker also makes clear that both English and German soldiers are headed from the trenches straight to heaven. There, we can only assume that the causes for which each side understands itself to be fighting dissolve as the singers of ‘Tipperary’ and the ‘Hymn of Hate’ join together in ‘Alleluiah-chanting’. Graves’s poem thus suggests that to concentrate on the trenches is to witness belligerence subsiding. Soldiers who document the trenches recount the instinct to escape, but when they are finally allowed to leave the trenches behind, the instinct to escape persists. Sassoon documents this unfortunate inability to stay in the present moment in a poem about being behind the lines: ‘The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still, / And I remember things I’d best forget. / For now we’ve marched to a green, trenchless land / Twelve miles from battering guns’.36 This speaker would just as soon forget the ‘rank stench’ of dead bodies; forgetting them seems appropriate in a green district twelve miles from the trenches. But the impulse to flee the present seems to have become so habitual that an understandable desire to be anywhere other than the trenches now renders impossible the occupation of a ‘trenchless land’. The imagination, trained to ignore the here, desperate to escape the now, has become recalcitrant, a state of affairs that fails to improve even after the war has ended. The mind that refused to stay in the trenches now refuses to stay out of them, as the speaker in Richard Aldington’s ‘In the Library’ reports. While trying to concentrate on Greek poems, he encounters ‘a strange void in my brain’. What he is reading ‘escape[s]’ him, and he finds himself ‘out again on the muddy / trench-boards, wearily trudging along / those chalky ditches, under the rain, / under the shells’.37 Perhaps the only consolation for such veterans is their attentiveness to the acts of kindness and occasional beauties that sometimes illuminated the trenches. Hence, a gruff sentry warning him to keep his head down prompts the speaker of Edmund Blunden’s ‘The Watchers’ to wonder: ‘when / Will kindness have such power again?’ 38 Ivor Gurney’s ‘First Time In’ tells of inexperienced troops who have heard frightening stories of the front line but are brought, their first night, to a Welsh colony Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in To low huts candle-lit, shaded close by slitten

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 436

30/01/2012 16:24

the trenches

437

Oilsheets, and there the boys gave us kind welcome, So that we looked out as from the edge of home. The songs the Welsh soldiers sang to them that night were ‘never more beautiful than here under the guns’ noise’.39 Even Richard Aldington’s ‘Soliloquy II’ depends on the tension between his conviction that corpses are always loathsome and an experience to the contrary. ‘The dead men are not always carrion’, he admits upon finding, in a shattered trench, ‘A dead English soldier, / His head bloodily bandaged / And his closed left hand touching the earth’. This sight is, the speaker states, ‘More beautiful than one can tell’.40

Notes 1. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 37, 41. 2. Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916 (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 244. 3. Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Viking, 2003), p. 164. 4. John Brophy and Eric Partridge (eds), ‘I Don’t Want to Die’, in Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914–1918 (London: Eric Partridge and Scholartis Press, 1930), p. 60. 5. Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’ in Jon Silkin (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 81–2. 6. John McCrae, ‘In Flanders Fields’, in Silkin, p. 85. 7. Julian Grenfell, ‘Into Battle’, in George Walter (ed.), In Flanders Fields: Poetry of the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), pp. 101–2. 8. Alan Seeger, ‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death’, in Walter, p. 105. 9. By Dean Inge. See ‘Easter Sermons. The Primate on the Nation’s Duty’, The Times, 5 April 1915, p. 8. 10. ‘History of the Poppy Appeal’, The Royal British Legion Website, available at http://www. britishlegion.org.uk/about-us/history-of-the-poppy-appeal, accessed 5 September 2011. 11. Robert Graves, ‘Through the Periscope’, in Poems about War (New York: Moyer Bell, 1988), p. 50. 12. Wilfred Owen, ‘Exposure’, in Walter, pp. 55–7. 13. Harold Monro, ‘Youth in Arms IV: Carrion’, in Walter, pp. 149–50. 14. Fussell, p. 46. 15. Ibid. pp. 41–2. 16. John Brophy and Eric Partridge, ‘Dug-Out’, in Songs and Slang, p. 119. 17. Stephen Bull, ‘The Early Years of the War’, in Gary Sheffield (ed.), War on the Western Front (Oxford: Osprey Publishing 2007), p. 190. 18. Stephen Bull, ‘The Somme and Beyond’, in Sheffield, p. 220; Fussell, p. 41; John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), pp. 15–16. 19. Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (London: Richard Cobden-Sanderson, 1928), pp. 166, 88, 185, 119. 20. Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 78; John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf-Random House, 1999), p. 177. 21. See Blunden, Undertones, pp. 231–2. 22. John Brophy and Eric Partridge, ‘Duckboard’, in Songs and Slang, p. 118. 23. Martin Pegler, ‘British Tommy’, in Sheffield, p. 110. 24. Thomas A. Hoff, ‘US Doughboy’, in Sheffield, p. 158. 25. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘A Working Party’, in Silkin, pp. 123–4.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 437

30/01/2012 16:24

438

allyson booth

26. Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Louse Hunting’, in Walter, p. 68. 27. Wilfred Owen, ‘The Sentry’, in Silkin, pp. 208–9. 28. Richard Aldington, ‘Living Sepulchres’, in An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington, ed. Michael Copp (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), p. 73. 29. W. S. S. Lyon, ‘I Tracked a Dead Man Down a Trench’, in Walter, pp. 110–11. 30. Frederic Manning, ‘The Trenches’ in George Herbert Clarke (ed.), A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914–1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), pp. 170–1. 31. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Counter-Attack’, in The War Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), pp. 105–6. 32. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Dreamers’, in The War Poems, p. 88. 33. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘A Working Party’, in Silkin, pp. 123–4. 34. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, ‘Breakfast’, in Poems: 1904–1917 (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. 406. 35. Graves, ‘It’s a Queer Time’, in Poems about War, pp. 23–4. 36. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘The Rank Stench of those Bodies Haunts Me Still’, in Silkin, pp. 124–6. 37. Richard Aldington, ‘In the Library’, in An Imagist at War, pp. 152–3. 38. Edmund Blunden, ‘The Watchers’, in Edmund Blunden, The Poems of Edmund Blunden, 1914– 1930 (New York: Harper, 1930), p. 193. 39. Ivor Gurney, ‘First Time In’, in Walter, pp. 46–7. 40. Richard Aldington, ‘Soliloquy II’, in Walter, p. 151.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 438

30/01/2012 16:24

44

LITERATURE OF THE CAMPS IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR Sue Vice

T

his topic raises two initial questions: first, what the relationship is between genocide and war in general, and specifically in this chapter, what the relationship is between the genocidal murder of Jews, Gypsies and others, and the conduct of the Second World War.1 The second question concerns the ways in which this European genocide, and the univers concentrationnaire, in David Rousset’s phrase, which enabled it, has been represented in British and American literature. I will address these questions in turn. The context for genocide is almost invariably that of a war, and genocide itself may be seen as a form of warfare. Yet the exact link between the Nazis’ military and exterminatory activities has long been the subject of historiographical controversy. While the war provided important turning points in terms of Nazi racial strategy, it was a racial war from the outset. The intertwinement of war strategy and genocide meant that, despite their post-war protestations of innocence, the Wehrmacht (the German army) as well as the SS was central to the perpetration of genocide. The June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis was the war’s most significant turning point of this kind, since it offered the opportunity to mask genocidal murder as military necessity in order to combat Bolshevism: the extermination of the Jews and the execution of partisans ‘blended together’.2 Although concentration camps had existed since 1933, the establishment of the extermination camps, in which impersonal industrial-style gassing replaced the less efficient mass shooting that had been used in the Soviet Union, took place in 1941 and 1942. There are very few survivor accounts of any of these extermination camps apart from Auschwitz-Birkenau which was also a slave-labour camp, and has come to stand, in the manner of a synecdoche, not only for all the camps but for the Holocaust itself. In relation to the second question, British and American literature of the Holocaust and the camps takes various forms. It includes testimonies given by soldiers who liberated the camps on the Western Front; these include British accounts of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen,3 and American ones of Dachau and Buchenwald.4 There are also examples of English-language testimonies by survivors who made their homes in the UK or the US after the war, although such accounts of the camps are relatively rare in comparison with more abundant European ones. Nicholas Hammer’s Sacred Games (1995) and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s Inherit the Truth (1996) are British examples of testimonies about surviving Auschwitz; American ones include Isabella Leitner’s Fragments of Isabella (1978) and Samuel Pisar’s Of Blood and Hope (1980).5 There is, by contrast, a considerable body

439

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 439

30/01/2012 16:24

440

sue vice

of fictional Holocaust literature in English, mostly by non-survivors. Significant examples include works by Martin Amis, Geoffrey Hill and Diane Samuels in Britain; William Styron and Cynthia Ozick in the US; and Anne Michaels in Canada. In some cases this is not Holocaust literature per se but that which draws upon camp imagery for local effect. A famous example is Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ (1962), in which the poem’s speaker imagines the German language to be so corrupt that it resembles ‘an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen’.6 The camps that the speaker mentions are appropriate to her standpoint, that of an American subject viewing with disgust European atrocities: they are those liberated by the Allies, rather than the death camps such as Chelmno and Treblinka which the Nazis themselves destroyed during the war. In this chapter, I will examine two texts which represent the Nazi camp system using the words of survivors and witnesses, but, as in ‘Daddy’, in both cases the camp universe is mediated by a second-generation American narrator. In this way the texts symbolise and enact the distance between past and present, Europe and the US. The texts in question are Art Spiegelman’s two-volume graphic novel Maus (1986, 1991) in which Art, the son, recounts the experiences of his father Vladek during the war;7 and Charles Reznikoff ’s long poem Holocaust (1975),8 in which the experiences of the Jews during the war are told. The role of the narrator in each case appears very different: in Spiegelman’s Maus the narrator is also a character, and the text’s subtitle, A Survivor’s Tale, leaves deliberately ambiguous whether it is the father Vladek or his son Art who has ‘survived’. In Reznikoff ’s Holocaust, by contrast, the speaker seems to assume a distant or simply editorial function, and does not appear in personified form. However, as I will argue, this distinction between narratorial modes seems more extreme than it actually is, since the speaker in Holocaust does make apparent his voice and his moral judgements, while in Maus Art makes efforts to impart historical and documentary elements to a ‘tale’ which is based on memory. This suggests that the gap between the wartime camps and the American present is chillingly narrower than at first appears. Maus begins in the American post-war era with an episode from Art’s childhood. It introduces the animal allegory of the novel, in which Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs and Americans as dogs. Much of the rest of the text either represents the past by itself, as Vladek relates it to Art, or places the present literally alongside it by means of juxtaposing the panels of the graphic novel. However, this episode, situated epigrammatically before the contents page, is set in 1958 in Rego Park, New York. Art is only a character here and not personified as a narrator. We see the ten-year-old Art deserted by his friends when his roller skate falls off, and tearfully relating the story to his father. Far from comforting the child in a conventional way, the father addresses his son thus: ‘Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week. . . THEN you could see what it is, friends!’9 The episode shows both the aptness of the subtitle for the first part of the graphic novel, My Father Bleeds History. It also shows how that history is passed on to the second generation so that the subtitle to the second part, And Here My Troubles Began, does indeed refer doubly to father and son. Yet it is not just the transmission of an individual past which is introduced here, nor even that of a generation or a people, but of a newly tainted way of viewing human experience and history. This is conveyed by the backwards zoom of the perspective in the final panels of this episode, such that we move from a close-up on Vladek’s face to a long shot of him and the little Art, as if retreating from the personal. Vladek’s words further implicate the reader by invoking the behaviour of victims rather than perpetrators.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 440

30/01/2012 16:24

literature of the camps in the second world war

441

The camps in Maus thus appear in two representational forms. The first is in the mise en scène of the graphic novel, where we see not only a bird’s-eye view of the AuschwitzBirkenau complex but also the detail of barracks, workshops (despite Art’s claim to hate drawing machinery), shower-rooms, crematoria and, in a startling comic-book transcription of one of the ‘Sonderkommando photographs’ from August 1944, the burning of bodies on pyres. At the war’s end Vladek is sent on a death march to Dachau, and here too we are shown the camp infirmary and barracks. The second way of representing the camps is by means of the portrait of Vladek himself. It seems both too glib, and too deterministic, to see the post-war Vladek as suffering from what the psychologist Leo Eitinger identified in the early 1960s as a ‘concentration camp syndrome’ afflicting survivors. From the list of the syndrome’s varied symptoms, including insomnia, personality changes, memory disturbances, flashbacks, hallucinations and psychosomatic ailments, Vladek seems simply to suffer from a chronic depressive state and anxiety. However, in the world of the text Vladek does in a more symbolic way embody the past. His habits relating to food, wastage, self-sufficiency and parsimony all seem to be versions of skills that saw him through a desperate time and now have little use. Art draws attention to this mismatch when his father refuses to throw food away: ‘Then just SAVE the damn Special K in case Hitler ever comes back!’10 On the other hand, as Vladek’s second wife Mala says, ‘ALL our friends went through the camps! NOBODY is like him!’11 Although Art is careful to point out that Vladek’s survival was due to luck, along with his ability to be ‘present-minded and resourceful’, the pre-war episodes of Maus use ironic foreshadowing in emphasising, for instance, Vladek’s ability to speak English, his penchant for order and his love for his wife Anja. These are traits which later, perhaps unexpectedly, prove crucial to his survival. Indeed, as Vladek relates the romantic story of meeting Anja, he reveals that he took English lessons because ‘I always dreamed of going to America’, a phrase he repeats to a fellow prisoner in the very different setting of Dachau; the reader can register the irony of the circumstances in which Vladek eventually achieved his wish, as a displaced person after the war. Surprising links of this kind between the camps in 1940s Poland and life in America in the 1970s and 1980s appear throughout Maus. These take different forms. Art provides visual corroboration and recreations of Vladek’s story in his drawings, allowing the different layers of time to seep, or indeed bleed, into one another.12 For instance, during a car journey Vladek tells Art about the public hanging of members of the resistance at Auschwitz. In one shared frame we see the feet of these young women dangling horribly above the car, showing that the past literally hangs over the present. Vladek himself confuses past and present, to different effect at various moments. His description of being ordered during the war to clean up a stable within an hour, and being deprived of food as a result of failing in this almost Augean task, devolves into a petty argument with Art in the present when the latter allows his cigarette ash to fall onto the carpet. ‘You want it should be like a stable HERE?’ demands Vladek.13 The cigarette itself forges a link between then and now. The smoke and ashes produced by Art’s habit are constantly visible as he records Vladek’s story, culminating in the drawing of a cigarette packet on the original edition’s back flap – the brand is called ‘Cremo’ and the packet shows a pair of smoking chimneys. Vladek observes sternly that he has never smoked, and so in the camp could use cigarettes for barter. Cigarettes not only visually replicate the text’s recurrent image of a smoking crematorium chimney, which signifies Vladek’s status as an eyewitness, but also symbolise

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 441

30/01/2012 16:24

442

sue vice

the conflict between the obsessively clean-living father and the son who became an artist so he could succeed in a different arena. This is as much a temporal as an Oedipal battle, as if the past and present – represented in this case by the chimney versus the cigarette – are jostling for supremacy. In another example, Vladek in the present rushes to finish his story about the wartime liquidation of the Srodula ghetto as he and Art approach the Rego Park bank. This has the effect that Vladek’s utterance – ‘It was NOWHERE we had to hide’ – is answered with unwitting irony by the bank clerk, who offers his assistance in the present: ‘Can I help you, Mr Spiegelman?’14 At the end of Vladek’s life and the end of the text, the past appears to win out. In the text’s final panel Vladek, lying ill in bed, asks Art to turn off his tape recorder but calls him ‘Richieu’, the name of the son he lost during the war: ‘I’m tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now.’15 It is not only as if Vladek’s dead son Richieu still haunts the present and the mise en scène – his photograph on the bedroom wall is visible in this sequence – but as if Vladek’s ‘real’ life ended with the war, before Art’s birth. Once more, the juxtaposition of an ineradicable past with the present emphasises their irreconcilability in a wider sense than the personal. Art has made public his quest to find out the details of his father’s history, so that the ‘transgenerational haunting’, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s phrase, to which Art is subject – after Vladek’s death he describes his father’s ‘ghost’ as ‘hanging over’ him – takes place for the reader as well.16 Charles Reznikoff ’s long poem Holocaust is equally about being ‘haunted’ by the past, and also employs the device of relating the details of the Holocaust and the camps from the viewpoint of an American narrator who was not an eyewitness to those events. This time the American narrator is not immediately obvious, and its presence explicitly denied by critics such as Marie Syrkin, who claims Reznikoff meant that ‘the bare facts, selected by him, would speak for themselves’,17 and by the blurb for Holocaust, which states that, ‘The poet does not interpret or explain. He does not philosophize or editorialize.’ These comments arise from an initial impression of Reznikoff ’s poem, as well as a confusion of the poet with the poem’s speaker – a confusion which registers the close fit between speaker and author in this poem. Holocaust consists of quotations from the United States Government publication of transcripts from the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–9, and records of the Adolf Eichmann trial of 1961, which have been cut, edited and set in verse form. As a self-styled Objectivist poet, Reznikoff had developed this ‘documentary’ technique in his two-volume poem Testimony: The United States (1965, 1968) which consisted of nineteenth-century American legal records styled into free verse. The blurb for Holocaust rightly observes that neither Reznikoff nor the poem’s speaker ‘editorializes’, in the sense that the project’s basis on reworked ‘cut-ups’ is never explicitly explained or introduced within the body of the text. However, Reznikoff does crucially acknowledge the sources on which ‘all that follows’, as he puts it in the text’s preliminary pages, depends, setting the scene for reading the text. From this acknowledgement and other factors internal to the poem, the reader does gain a strong sense of the kind of editorial decisions made and thus of an implicit editor-narrator. This is clear from the very fact that prose has been turned into the free-verse form Reznikoff called ‘recitative’, the term used to describe those musical passages in operas which use the rhythm of the speaking voice. Indeed, the reader gains the unmistakable impression not of the testifiers’ voices but of the poem’s speaker’s voice, which represents the former. Sometimes the speaker achieves what seems to be his goal, that is, the deadpan reportage of atrocity without commentary, such as the following about conditions at an unnamed camp:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 442

30/01/2012 16:24

literature of the camps in the second world war

443

While this was going on a band was playing.18 However, omitting moral judgement often proves an impossible project and the apparently documentary representation cannot help but imply censure: They were almost skeletons: did not care about anything and could hardly speak.19 Sometimes it is precisely the lack of explicit commentary that constitutes such a judgement, as shown in Reznikoff ’s reliance throughout on paratactic constructions without causal conjunctions: and the Ukrainians had pliers in their hands and pulled out the gold teeth of the dead and took off the gold rings [. . .]20 The repetition of ‘and’ has the quality of Biblical anaphora,21 imparting a lamenting and almost liturgical rhythm to the lines, while also implying that the truth is so terrible it needs no embellishment. Yet of course ‘the truth’ has been thoroughly aestheticised, and throughout Holocaust the literally double-voiced relation between the reporting and reported voices continues the laying bare of the presence of the speaker-narrator. The latter is clearly responsible for the judgement implied by the appearance of exclamation marks, for instance in a description of the uses to which women’s shorn hair were put: ‘nothing lost or wasted!’22 The exclamation mark does double duty here, as its irony depends on its signalling the use of free direct discourse. The only direct, first-person utterances in Holocaust are those of the perpetrators, for instance in the whole of the first stanza from the section entitled ‘Research’, which begins, ‘We are the civilized – / Aryans’; and ends, ‘Heil Hitler!’23 The irony and even black humour of the speaker’s editorial and aesthetic choices here give an extra dimension to the poem, partly because the stanza draws upon the recognisable genre, well known from Robert Browning’s poetry, of dramatic monologue which exposes self-delusion. As the Nazis’ ideological delusions are something of a straw target, it is the aesthetic mode of representing their words that is important here, as it is in relation to the experiences of the Nazis’ victims. The orchestration at work is made clear when there is a shift in voices, as for instance in the opening of the section entitled ‘Work Camps’, which represents Nazi discourse using parodic mimicry: The state is to get hold of those who never had – or no longer have – the right to live in the state, and the state must turn their strength while it lasts to the good of the state.24 This free indirect discourse, which seems unlikely, due to its stiff repetitions, to be close to a verbatim version of either a defendant’s testimony or any of the official war documents that Reznikoff drew upon, turns in the second stanza into free direct discourse: Get as much work as possible from the young and strong in concentration camps. . . Heil Hitler!25

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 443

30/01/2012 16:24

444

sue vice

Simply quoting this kind of utterance is enough to parody it, yet once more this impression is a carefully crafted one: we are not reading the exact words of any individual. As we see in the above examples, with the exception of two stanzas quoting perpetrators directly, in Holocaust first-person trial testimony has been turned into anonymous third-person narrative. As well as presenting the Holocaust from a communal rather than a personal perspective, this technique makes it hard to distinguish survivors from those who did not survive, whose deaths are also narrated in the third person. Alongside the many individuals in Holocaust who are shot and killed, there are some individuals who survive, including a ‘young lad’ present at the liquidation of the Chelmno death-camp: As the lad was lying there he heard the noise of bullets whizzing past – and he, too, was shot.26 The effect of this description is to wrongfoot the reader, in a way possible only through third-person narration, and we soon read with surprise, ‘In a few minutes after the lad was shot, / he came to’.27 The choice of this episode shows the interest of the poem’s speakereditor in people whose brushes with death were so close that their survival almost gives them the status of revenants. In this way Holocaust resembles Claude Lanzmann’s analogously titled film Shoah (1985),28 which also focuses on the Jewish experience in the world of the death camps, excluding non-Jewish victims as well as Jews who survived in hiding. Shoah opens with Simon Srebnik, one of only two survivors from Chelmno, who is clearly the same ‘young lad’ whose testimony Reznikoff quotes. From the text which prefaces Shoah we learn that, ‘Simon Srebnik was among those executed. But the bullet missed his vital brain centres’, drawing on exactly the quality of return from death which Reznikoff ’s poem also values. The reliance of Holocaust on horrifying graphic detail, such that it is arduous to read, also makes clear the choices made by its particular kind of speaker-editor. This is a reader of court transcripts who has decided to focus on and usually to decontextualise the local detail of what Primo Levi called the era’s ‘useless cruelty’ rather than to offer any overview or analysis. We might ask whether Reznikoff ’s withholding of the definite article from the title of his poem deliberately generalises the historical remit of his concern; these atrocities, in Milton Hindus’s argument,29 could almost have taken place in ancient times. Reznikoff ’s innovation in Holocaust is not just his ambitious, if uneven, ‘documentary’ technique, nor the use of intractable-seeming court transcripts transmuted into literary form. The dramatist Peter Weiss also used trial transcripts, those of the 1963–5 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, for literary purposes. In his 1965 play The Investigation (Die Ermittlung) the trial material is edited into the form of the speeches of anonymous witnesses, of whom he notes, as Reznikoff might also have said of his poem: ‘Personal experience must be steeped in anonymity [. . .] The nine witnesses sum up what hundreds expressed.’30 Yet the differences between Weiss’s practice and Reznikoff ’s are significant. The narratives of Holocaust plays and films are often constructed as trials – for instance, Jim Allen’s Perdition (1987) and Robert Shaw’s 1968 play The Man in the Glass Booth, later a film (Arthur Hiller, 1975) – and Weiss has retained this dramatic, adversarial structure for his play. Reznikoff, on the other hand, has stripped away the trial format in order to highlight the testifying voices, which are at the heart of his poetry. Weiss was close to the events of the Holocaust, as a German with a father of Jewish origin who spent the war years in Sweden. While Weiss attended the Frankfurt trials and wrote The Investigation in his

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 444

30/01/2012 16:24

literature of the camps in the second world war

445

native German, Reznikoff relied upon English translations of the multilingual transcripts from Nuremberg and the Eichmann trials. Thus Reznikoff ’s work is distinctive both for its distance from events and for the challenge it mounts to poetic form. Reznikoff has defamiliarised the medium of poetry by using it to express material which is recalcitrant in form and content. The decorously numbered sections and stanzas of Holocaust contrast with the offences they express, just as the rhythm of free verse has been made to accommodate atrocity, as we see in some lines from ‘Research’: A number of Jews had to drink seawater only to see how long they could stand it.31 The two horrible notions, that of the atrocity itself and the ‘reason’ for it, are spread over two lines, at once linked and separated by the adverb ‘only’. The absence of punctuation at the line’s end offers the reader two meanings: an ostensible one, that seawater alone was allowed; and a buried one, that the sole reason for this was curiosity. These two meanings, enabled by the form of free verse, replicate Reznikoff ’s strategy, which is to observe but also implicitly to judge. Reznikoff ’s success is precisely as an Objectivist poet who, in his words, does ‘not write directly about his feelings but about what he sees and hears’ and instead ‘expresses his feelings indirectly by the selection of his subject matter’.32 It is not only the poet’s, or speaker’s, ‘feelings’ which are made thus apparent. As I have argued, we also understand that the poem’s speaker is perforce a bystander, separated from the events he narrates by time and geography. The speaker’s American English (‘pajamas’, ‘candy’) is not the language of those he represents, as is conveyed by the speaker-editor’s translations both within the poem (‘“Jude”, that is, “Jew”’) and in the Author’s Notes. It is almost to parody the footnote to include in the Notes one which informs the reader that ‘SS’ stands for ‘Schutzstaffel’, without further definition, but its effect is to show the linguistic gap between the poem’s speaker and its readers, and the world it represents. But finally the decontextualisation of the horrors Reznikoff represents lessens the distance between the Second World War and mid-1970s America. In both Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Charles Reznikoff ’s Holocaust, a narrator mediates between the events of the Holocaust and a contemporary English-speaking readership. This mediation both preserves the voices of eyewitnesses and, of necessity, modifies them to suit a literary purpose. Spiegelman exaggerated the Yiddish-inflected English spoken by his father for the purposes of the graphic novel, and changed the name by which he was known in the US, ‘Willie’, back to the Polish ‘Vladek’, placing him more firmly in the past. Reznikoff turned first-person utterance into third-person representation, legal testimony into poetry. In both texts the construct of a narrator enacts, but also helps to close, the gap between the Holocaust, the camps and contemporary American life.

Notes 1. Thanks to Bob Moore and Dan Stone for their help in writing this chapter. 2. Jürgen Förster, ‘Complicity or Entanglement? Wehrmacht, War, and Holocaust’, in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (eds), The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 278. 3. Ben Flanagan, Joanne Reilly and Donald Bloxham (eds), Remembering Belsen: Eyewitnesses Record the Liberation (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 445

30/01/2012 16:24

446

sue vice

4. Robert H. Abzug (ed.), Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 5. Nicholas Hammer, Sacred Games, ed. Gerald Jacobs (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995); Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth 1939–1945: The Documented Experiences of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen (London: Giles de la Mare, 1996); Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1978); Samuel Pisar, Of Blood and Hope (New York: Macmillan, 1980). 6. Sylvia Plath, ‘Daddy’, in The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper, 1981), pp. 222–4. 7. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale; My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale; And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1991). 8. Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975). 9. Spiegelman, Maus, p. 5. 10. Spiegelman, Maus II, p. 78. 11. Spiegelman, Maus, p. 131. 12. Rick Iadonisi, ‘Bleeding History and Owning His (Father’s) Story: Maus and Collaborative Autobiography’, CEA Critic, 57.1 (2004), pp. 41–56. 13. Spiegelman, Maus, p. 52. 14. Ibid. p. 125. 15. Spiegelman, Maus II, p. 136. 16. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. Nicholas R. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 17. Marie Syrkin, ‘Charles: A Memoir’, in Milton Hindus (ed.), Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984), p. 64. 18. Reznikoff, p. 40. 19. Ibid. p. 42. 20. Ibid. p. 58. 21. Robert Franciosi, ‘Detailing the Facts: Charles Reznikoff ’s Response to the Holocaust’, Contemporary Literature, 29.2 (1988), pp. 241–64 (p. 257). 22. Reznikoff, p. 29. 23. Ibid. p. 9. 24. Ibid. p. 37. 25. Ibid. p. 37. 26. Ibid. p. 75. 27. Ibid. p. 76. 28. Shoah, film, directed by Claude Lanzmann. France: Les Films Aleph, 1985. 29. Milton Hindus, Charles Reznikoff: A Critical Essay (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1977), p. 65. 30. Peter Weiss, prefatory ‘Note’ to The Investigation, trans. Jon Swan and Ulu Grosbard (New York: Antheneum, 1966). 31. Reznikoff, p. 9. 32. Charles Reznikoff, quoted in Robert Alter, Defenses of the Imagination (Philadelphia: Jewish Publishing Society of America, 1977), p. 130.

Further Reading Eitinger, Leo, ‘The Concentration Camp Syndrome and its Late Sequelae’, in Joel E. Dimsdale (ed.), Survivors, Victims and Perpetrators (London: Taylor and Francis, 1980). Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989). Naimark, Norman N., ‘War and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941–1945’, Contemporary European History, 16:2 (2007), pp. 259–74.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 446

30/01/2012 16:24

literature of the camps in the second world war

447

Rothberg, Michael, ‘“We Were Talking Jewish”: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as “Holocaust” Production’, Contemporary Literature, 35:4 (1994), pp. 661–87. Rousset, David, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Pavois, 1945). Shaw, Martin, War and Genocide (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). Sutherland, Janet, ‘Reznikoff and His Sources’, in Milton Hindus (ed.), Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 447

30/01/2012 16:24

45

‘THAT FIGHTING WAS A LONG WAY OFF ’: DESERT AND JUNGLE WAR POEMS Peter Robinson

I

‘ n 1939, Bernard Spencer observes in his 1962 University of Madrid lecture, ‘whether we wanted it or not, we in England had to face Man in his Social Setting; a pessimist might say Man in his Preferred Social Setting – the one where he likes to be: The World War had started’ and he adds: ‘The Social School of Poetry no longer existed in its earlier sense.’1 I quote this testimony from a younger participant in the ‘Social School of Poetry’, the left-leaning writers of the 1930s, to suggest that for such poets the coming of war appeared to destroy the context for their work. But what happened to the political consciousness of the pre-war decade? Did the war poets of the second global conflict carry forward awareness of ‘the death of the old gang’2 and, in the theatres of desert and jungle, bring it into contact with the British Empire, the defence of India and Burma from the Japanese, or the route to India from the Italians and then the Germans? It is just eight years from Auden’s settling in America to the partition of India, and less than six from the declaration of war to Clement Attlee’s victory in the 1945 election. Does the war poetry connected to the desert and jungle campaigns show any awareness that while the Empire could, with the aid of America, be successfully defended from the Italians, the Germans and Japanese, it could not be defended from its local populations? How, as readers, we imagine the theatres of individual war poems will be essential to reading them aright. This can be best sensed in cases where a poem has been attributed with a location in the pigeonhole of a war poetry anthology. ‘A Thousand Killed’ by the poet I began with, Bernard Spencer – who links the theatres of my topic by having been born in India, the son of a high court judge, and posted for most of the war to Cairo – first appeared in the April–May 1936 issue of New Verse. On the basis of the lines ‘And am glad because the scrounging imperial paw / Was there so bitten’3 and the date of first publication, before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936, this poem was probably inspired by news of the First Battle of Tembien (20–24 January 1936) in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–6), described as inconclusive. Though the Ethiopians suffered 8,000 casualties, Italian casualty figures are given as 1,100: I read of a thousand killed. And am glad because the scrounging imperial paw Was there so bitten: As a man at elections is thrilled

448

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 448

30/01/2012 16:24

desert and jungle war poems

449

When the results pour in, and the North goes with him And the West breaks in the thaw. The anti-imperial politics of Spencer’s poem are clear in the context of Mussolini’s ambitions for Roman stature in North and North-East Africa: there ‘scrounging’ makes more sense, as the being ‘glad’ aligns the poem with left-liberal thinking and the League of Nations sanctions introduced in protest against Italian expansion in Abyssinia and Eritrea. Yet Spencer’s election analogy implies that the elation at a setback inflicted with such disproportionate cost could equally be produced by a change of government, by winning the North and West – associated via homophone and rhyme, from ‘paw’ to ‘pour’ to ‘thaw’, preparing for the turn to ‘Wars’ in the final stanza. This is separated from the first by a parenthetical aside that precedes Geoffrey Hill’s use of a similar device in ‘September Song’ by some three decades: (That fighting was a long way off.) Forgetting therefore an election Being fought with votes and lies and catch-cries And orator’s frowns and flowers and posters’ noise, Is paid for with cheques and toys: Wars the most glorious Victory-winged and steeple-uproarious . . . With the lives, burned-off, Of young men and boys. Spencer’s poem has internalised the First World War lesson in its suspicion of victory celebrations a long way from carnage, while simultaneously articulating the anti-fascist hopes in this ‘bitten’ paw, this setback. Yet it would be wrong, I think, to assume that the recognition of the costs in the second verse, and the role of distance in the parenthesis, negate the elation in the first. Its opposition to the ‘imperial paw’ and its desire for political ‘thaw’ are implicitly congruent with the opposition to what Spencer grimly called ‘Man in his Preferred Social Setting’. Despite the alignment between opposition to Mussolini’s policies in Africa and his support for Franco, the appearance of ‘A Thousand Killed’ in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse4 provides Spencer’s poem with insufficient desert terrain and the wrong politics. Calling Generalissimo Franco’s forces ‘scrounging imperial’ as they subdued their native earth does not correctly match the detail of the poem’s occasion. The wrong location of such poems in anthologies, smudging their meanings, is one form of the cultural forgetting that presses on all sides. War poems, especially, can thus appear slightly out of focus, both because they are inevitably caught in the confusions of micro-history, and because our insufficient knowledge of their occasions blurs them: that fighting was a long way off in time, now, as well as space. By contrast, placing F. T. Prince’s ‘Soldiers Bathing’ in ‘The Desert’ section of The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939–19455 specifies its setting even more definitively than the poem had seemed to require. It begins ‘The sea at evening moves across the sand’, and I had thought that the hot and dusty men taking to the water to cool off belonged to the Italian campaign, following the association with high Renaissance art (‘Michelangelo’s cartoon / of soldiers bathing’).6 However, having been written in 1942, the ‘sand’ at the end of Prince’s first line evokes not an Italian beach (the invasion of Sicily began in July 1943), but an edge of the North African desert stretching down into the Mediterranean

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 449

30/01/2012 16:24

450

peter robinson

Sea. Similarly, the ‘Italians who knew war’s sorrow and disgrace’7 figure Prince’s awareness of, and his indebtedness to, the culture of that same ‘scrounging imperial paw’ definitively driven from its Libyan Empire after El Alamein. Bernard Gutteridge’s ‘Patrol: Buonomary’, a poem in ‘The Jungle’ section of The Terrible Rain, describes how ‘The men swam idly all the afternoon, / Beech leaves on the brilliant water; / The tide dropped; stems of the mangroves shiny and seal black / Lifted tight green sheaves from the lagoon’, his final stanza’s implied politics making it unlikely that the poem is set in Burma, though it appears among poems definitely located there in Traveller’s Eye (1947): ‘And in the policeman’s house I slowly sipped / The poisonous rhum with some alarm; / Admired a photo of De Gaulle’.8 Rather it derives from the September 1942 phase of the Madagascar campaign (undertaken to protect the Indian Ocean) that resulted, within the month, in the taking of the capital Tananarive. Gutteridge’s poem observes ‘Ten small figures running stumbling over the hill’ and ‘that was all the enemy’s resistance’. By no means Japanese infantry, the enemy here are Vichy French troops, unlikely to be highly motivated given the photo of De Gaulle in the policeman’s house. Specific terrain and political implication are thus inseparable. There are no geographical deserts or jungles in the British Isles. For these soldier-poets ‘History’ was ‘now’, but it wasn’t ‘England’.9 The poetry that derives from these experiences cannot be dissociated from British involvement in Egypt and the Suez Canal, the route to India and the twilight of Empire. Ahead of the poetry there looms the Independence granted to Burma in 1947, Partition of India in 1947 and the Suez Crisis of 1956. Wallace Stevens remarked in 1942: ‘We are close together in every way. We lie in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on. There is no distance.’10 But even so, ‘That fighting was a long way off.’ The author of that line, in Cairo in 1942, his wife in London as he wrote ‘Yachts on the Nile’, Spencer may not have agreed: ‘I look for a distant river, a distant woman, / and how she carried her head’.11 Keith Douglas’s ‘Cairo Jag’ underlines distance in the desert campaign (‘But by a day’s travelling you reach a new world’)12 and Geoffrey Hill echoed the idea: ‘two absolutely different worlds co-exist at about a day’s journey from each other’.13 Yet these worlds could be so sharply contrasted only because Rommel was halted and turned in October 1942. If he had not been, the war would have reached the cities, as was feared at the time of ‘The Flap’ the previous July. These two ‘worlds’ were conjoined not least by the occluded politics of the contiguous countries and their local populations. Spencer’s ‘Libyan Front’ foreshadows the final stanza of Douglas’s most famous poem, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’: ‘Very distant the feet that dance, the lifted silver and the strings / Poets and lovers and men of power are troops and no such thing / Libyan front’.14 This warfare is taking place at a remove from the home world, the place where ‘Steffi’, the dead 88 gunner’s girlfriend in ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, will have received news of her lover’s death in combat with the Afrika Korps,15 or the Welsh towns where Alun Lewis’s wife and family experienced their bereavements following the poet’s death on 5 March 1944 in Burma. The inevitable consequences of combat reached thus into bedrooms in ways Wallace Stevens may also have had in mind.16 The engagements first with the Italian and then Axis armies in the desert places of western Egypt and Tunisia were geopolitically linked to the campaign against the Japanese in Burma. Control of the Suez Canal was essential for the maintenance of British India. Prisoners of war captured in North Africa could expect to be sent to camps in the Asian subcontinent. Axis war-aims propaganda included the liberation of British Imperial subject populations. These campaigns against Egypt and India succeeded to the extent that within a decade of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 450

30/01/2012 16:24

desert and jungle war poems

451

hostilities ending both propaganda-inflected war aims had been differently achieved. This is not, of course, how the Second World War was presented either at the time or later. The combination of legitimate national interest, response to unprovoked attack and opposition to expansionist regimes was enough to occlude the possibility that British nationals, defending imperially controlled territory, might be alienated from their task. Alun Lewis in ‘All Day It Has Rained. . .’ and Keith Douglas in ‘Desert Flowers’ selfconsciously compared themselves with poets who had died on active service in the Great War. ‘I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart’, writes Lewis, than the scene around Sheet and Steep ‘where Edward Thomas brooded long / On death and beauty — till a bullet stopped his song.’17 Douglas’s comparison touches a problem they had as poets, for however much they would like to compare their war with that of their fathers, to give its alien-ness a familiar meaning, the literal differences of terrain, and the politics of those terrains, made what they were saying not the same at all:18 ‘Living in a wide landscape are the flowers — / Rosenberg I only repeat what you are saying — / the shell and the hawk every hour / are slaying men and jerboas’.19 But the mud of Flanders was ruined farmland, with European pastoral conventions for contrast. Poems by Douglas and Lewis are thus differently marked by evasive consciousnesses, the former an appalled but complicit self-defensive trivialisation, the latter a romanticised metaphysics brewed from Rilke and Lawrence, D. H. and T. E., both of them painfully ‘bogus’, to borrow Adam Piette’s trenchant word,20 yet both pointedly informative about the necessary alienation of the combatants from the real history to which they were nonetheless contributing. In ‘Desert Flowers’ and ‘All Day It Has Rained. . .’ the reassuring continuity is a syntactic insertion marked by dashes. In Lewis’s poem this association identifies with fatality. Criticism of war poetry too frequently detaches the ‘pity’ of combat and death in combat from the specific conditions of engagement and, more, the politics of those conflicts. Lewis underlines such disjunction in the opening stanza of ‘Midnight in India’: ‘Here is no mined and cratered deep / As in the fenced-off landscapes of the West / Within this Eastern wilderness / The human war is lost.’21 Thomas’s pastoral patriotism was far more compatible with an unquestioning national politics than Lewis’s state of mind in his transit towards combat: ‘Acceptance seems so spiritless, protest so vain. In between the two I live’.22 Sidney Keyes’s ‘The Wilderness’ is his only poem with a desert setting. A quatrain from its opening section reveals a young poet’s desperate indebtedness to the styles of an Eliot Four Quartet or The Waste Land: ‘The rock says ‘Endure.’ / The wind says ‘Pursue.’ / The sun says, ‘I will suck your bones / And afterwards bury you.’23 The religious and symbolic scenery, a battlefield turned into a spiritual test, strikes the same note as Lewis on the jungle: ‘But oh the temptation of the wilderness, darling; for it is the wilderness into which we have gone.’24 Arriving in British India, Lewis wrote that he could ‘sense a perpetual undercurrent of mockery and hostility towards us among the people’ and foresaw anticolonial war.25 At the close of his poem ‘Karanje Village’, ‘the people are hard and hungry and have no love / Diverse and alien, uncertain in their hate’: And love must wait, as the unknown yellow poppy Whose lovely fragile petals are unfurled Among the lizards in this wasted land. And when my sweetheart calls me shall I tell her That I am seeking less and less of world? And will she understand?26

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 451

30/01/2012 16:24

452

peter robinson

Lewis’s poetry is pressed upon and partly resists a host of conflictual ‘unanchored issues’:27 imperial agendas, conscript armies and un-homely spaces. His poems set in India are marked by a most acute lack of integration, as in the close of ‘The Peasants’: ‘Across scorched hills and trampled crops / The soldiers straggle by. / History staggers in their wake. / The peasants watch them die.’28 But what is the ‘history’ that ‘staggers in their wake’? When Lewis died it was reported to his wife and in the newspapers as an accidental death. Gweno clearly thought that he had fallen from a narrow path not far from the enemy positions, and his revolver had gone off when he hit the ground. Piette interprets his likely suicide in political, not Rilkean, terms – as a means for resolving, privately, the massive public paradoxes in which he found himself caught.29 The history that ‘staggers in their wake’ in ‘The Peasants’ is the imperial past behind them, but it may also be a future history that will stagger into being after the soldiers’ deaths. It is as unlikely that the tank commander Douglas during a campaign of rapidly shifting pursuit could be repeating what the non-commissioned Rosenberg bogged down at break of day in his trench might have been saying.30 Neither Douglas nor Lewis in their combat zones could effectively call upon such north European poetic conventions and structuring contrasts, setting them a challenge as poets, and equally implicating them in what was also a late-colonial conflict. Their work includes uneasy poems about the local civilian situation behind the lines, poems such as Douglas’s ‘Egyptian Sentry, Corniche, Alexandria’, in which the soldier is a blank mute, unaware of the ‘sentient lovers or rich couples’ in ‘the modern flats’, or ‘gossipers, soldiers, drunkards, supple / women of the town’ in ‘the cafés and cabarets’: Everywhere is a real or artificial race of life, a struggle of everyone to be master or mistress of some hour. But of this no scent or sound reaches him there. He leans and looks at the sea: sweat lines the statue of a face.31 Yet there is a terrible blankness too in Douglas’s preferring to use the sentry as a foil for what the poet knows and the Egyptian does not, a device that makes the poem painfully partial. Behind the false consciousness of comparisons with the Great War, the emptiness and boredom of army life, the disbelief at propaganda’s uses for suffering, there is the significance of what was taking place. Remembering life in wartime Cairo, Edward Said has Mr Pilley, Honorary Secretary of the Gezira Club (to which Said’s father belonged), shout at the boy: ‘Don’t you know you’re not supposed to be here?’32 Douglas and Lewis are united in sustaining, whether they know it or not, this institutional unreality, supported by an occluded political history. Our finest hour, as it were, was also the penultimate episode in a profoundly undignified global presumption. Spencer published a brief ‘Obituary Notice’ on Douglas in the final issue of Personal Landscape, describing his work as ‘among the small amount of successful verse written by soldiers from the battlefield’ and noted that ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ exemplified the ‘surprise and force of his images’.33 Douglas’s poem, one of the best-known of the Second World War, maximises suggestions in two more by Spencer that he will have read the previous year,34 exemplifying how his ‘choices took energy from’, among other poets, ‘the detached intensities of Bernard Spencer’.35 Just as the dead 88 gunner is ‘mocked at by his own equipment

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 452

30/01/2012 16:24

desert and jungle war poems

453

/ that’s hard and good when he’s decayed’, so Spencer’s ‘Death of an Airman’, from the 1940 Italo-Greek campaign, had similarly contrasted the organic and the mechanical in its laconic close: ‘And when your roots in the dark finger earth’s springs / Your strength has an understanding that includes / Those shot-down wings.’36 Spencer had also composed on wartime communication between lovers in ‘Letters’: ‘The “dear” and “darling” and the “yours for ever” / are relics of a style’,37 as is ‘Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht / in a copybook gothic script.’38 Yet sympathy with the enemy dead has the paradoxical effect of depoliticising the meaning of the war at the point when the political advantage is gained, as in Hamish Henderson’s ‘Fort Capuzzo’.39 Spencer’s wartime politics involved him similarly in opposing depersonalisation, not least by co-editing Personal Landscape, the magazine where ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ first appeared.40 Previously called ‘The Lover’, ‘A Dead Gunner’, ’88 Gunner’ and ‘Elegy for an 88 Gunner’, in its final version Douglas’s most famous poem adopts Steffi’s German for its title. With terrain and politics comes language and the place of the Anglophone, an issue touched on in Norman Cameron’s ‘Green, Green is El Aghir’, set during the North African campaign, relating an encounter of cultures and languages: Sprawled on the crates and sacks in the rear of the truck, I was gummy-mouthed from the sun and the dust of the track, And the two Arab soldiers I’d taken on as hitch-hikers At a torrid petrol-dump, had been there on their hunkers Since early morning. I said, in a kind of French ‘On m’a dit, qu’il y a une belle source d’eau fraîche, Plus loin, à El Aghir’. . .41 Cameron’s poem reports how a terrain of endurance and fear encounters one of human sustenance and culture: ‘A mairie, a school, and an elegant Salle de Fêtes.’ It delicately acknowledges both religious taboo and human need: ‘Then, swollen with water, we went to an inn for wine. / The Arabs came, too, though their faith might have stood between. / “After all,” they said, “it’s a boisson,” without contrition.’ The poem’s casual voice wryly reasserts a sense of safety in the French colonial town, for ‘Such blessings, as I remarked, in effect, to the waiter, / Are added unto them that have plenty of water.’ Gutteridge’s ‘Patrol: Buonomary’, concludes with a similar communicative venture beyond the Anglophone: And in the policeman’s house I slowly sipped The poisonous rhum with some alarm; Admired a photo of De Gaulle, laboured: ‘Oui, Paris avec les Boches, Madame, Ce n’est pas Paris’.42 Both Cameron’s and Gutteridge’s poems show young British soldier-poets were confronted by the far larger cultural and political world, an educative challenge indicated in each case by their attempts to speak a kind of French. Gutteridge’s ‘Burma Diary’ recalls in memory of Alun Lewis: ‘The soft Welch voice / Telling a story in French in an Indian garden / By scarlet flowers.’43 This section of his poem ends with a similarly humanising encounter with a Japanese POW and his poetry: ‘The prisoner wears a cherry blossom badge, Sakurai Heidan. / We probe into his other life: his letters from home / And photographs; the poetry he wrote’.44 Once again, the human and the political have to be, and are, kept apart. Yet

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 453

30/01/2012 16:24

454

peter robinson

the war poetry of deserts and jungles, then, later and now, cannot properly be understood without the political histories of their terrains, their civilians, and their enemies – because these are the conflicted frames of meaning without which their fates, for whatever motives, will be smudged and blurred.

Notes 1. Held in the Bernard Spencer Collection at the University of Reading, call number BSP 2/4/1 [MS 5369]. 2. W. H. Auden, ’1929’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 53. Though Auden repudiated his early politics, this phrase, from the month of the Wall Street Crash, was not cut. See The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 40. 3. Bernard Spencer, ‘A Thousand Killed’, in Collected Poems, ed. Roger Bowen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 14. Details of first publication are on p. 135. 4. Valentine Cunningham (ed.), The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 391. Christopher Hitchens has the war in Ethiopia as the correct context in ‘A Thousand Killed: What a Little-Known British Poet Named Bernard Spencer Knew’, Slate, 9 September 2004, available at http://www.slate.com/id/2106466/, accessed 6 September 2011. 5. F. T. Prince, ‘Soldiers Bathing’, in Brian Gardner (ed.), The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939–1945 (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 96–8. 6. F. T. Prince, ‘Soldiers Bathing’, in Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993), p. 55. 7. Ibid. p. 56. 8. Bernard Gutteridge, ‘Patrol: Buonomary’, in Traveller’s Eye: Poems (London: Routledge, 1947), p. 56. 9. T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 222. 10. Wallace Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 653. 11. Bernard Spencer, ‘Yachts on the Nile’, in Collected Poems, p. 33. 12. Keith Douglas, ‘Cairo Jag’, in The Complete Poems, ed. Desmond Graham, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 102. 13. Geoffrey Hill, ‘“I in Another Place”: Homage to Keith Douglas’, Stand, 6.2 (1963), p. 11. 14. Bernard Spencer, ‘Libyan Front’, in Collected Poems, p. 26. 15. Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, in Complete Poems, p. 118. 16. See John Pikoulis, Alun Lewis: A Life (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1984). 17. Alun Lewis, ‘All Day It Has Rained. . .’, in Raiders’ Dawn and Other Poems (London: Allen and Unwin, 1942), pp. 16–17. See also the companion poem ‘To Edward Thomas’, pp. 25–7. 18. See Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (London: Papermac, 1995), pp. 16–17. 19. Keith Douglas, ‘Desert Flowers’, in Complete Poems, p. 108. 20. Piette, Imagination at War, pp. 13, 137: ‘the bogus desert of propaganda and culture’ and Lewis’s ‘personal myth so powerful and bogus’. 21. Alun Lewis, ‘Midnight in India’, in Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets: Poems in Transit (London: Allen and Unwin, 1945), p. 74. 22. Alun Lewis, In the Green Tree (London: Allen and Unwin, 1948), p. 36. 23. Sidney Keyes, ‘The Wilderness’, in The Collected Poems, ed. Michael Mayer (London: Routledge, 1945), p. 112. 24. Alun Lewis, Letters to my Wife, ed. Gweno Lewis (Cardiff: Seren, 1989), p. 382.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 454

30/01/2012 16:24

desert and jungle war poems

455

25. Lewis, In the Green Tree, p. 48. 26. Alun Lewis, ‘Karanje Village’, in Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets, p. 43. 27. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 60ff. 28. Alun Lewis, ‘The Peasants’, in Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets, p. 57. 29. Piette, Imagination at War, p. 141. 30. Douglas probably has ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, with its conjunction of warfare and animal life, in mind, though ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ would equally answer. See The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Vivian Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 128, 139–42. For interpretation of contrasting protective spaces, see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Books, 1969). 31. Keith Douglas, ‘Egyptian Sentry, Corniche, Alexandria’, in Complete Poems, p. 90. 32. Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta Books, 1999), pp. 44–5. 33. Bernard Spencer, ‘Keith Douglas: An Obituary Notice’, Personal Landscape, 2.4 (1945), p. 20. 34. Desmond Graham gives two inflections to Douglas’s relations with Spencer: ‘a minor poet who once edited things with Spencer — but to do him justice, has forgotten it’. Yet Graham adds that ‘[David] Hicks, like others in Cairo at this time, recalls, however, that Spencer and Douglas became good occasional friends’, adding, mistakenly, that ‘Spencer died in 1957.’ (Keith Douglas 1920–1944: A Biography [London: Oxford University Press, 1974], p. 148n.) Spencer died in Vienna on 11 September 1963. 35. Adam Piette, ‘Keith Douglas and the Poetry of the Second World War’, in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 123. 36. Bernard Spencer, ‘Death of an Airman’, in Collected Poems, p. 24. 37. Bernard Spencer, ‘Letters’, in Collected Poems, p. 25. 38. Douglas, Complete Poems, p. 118. 39. Hamish Henderson, ‘Fort Capuzzo’, in Gardner, p. 103. 40. Personal Landscape, 2.2 (probably summer 1944), p. 3. 41. Norman Cameron, ‘Green, Green is El Aghir’, in Collected Poems and Selected Translations, ed. Warren Hope and Jonathan Barker (London: Anvil Press, 1990), p. 72. 42. Gutteridge, Traveller’s Eye, p. 56. For Gutteridge’s admiration of Spencer and his poetry, see his letter of 2 October 1963 to Anne Humphreys, expressing condolences: BSP 4/3/16 [MS 2413] in Special Collections, the University of Reading. 43. Bernard Gutteridge, ‘Burma Diary’, in Traveller’s Eye, pp. 37–8, but citing the shortened version in Old Damson-Face: Poems 1934 to 1974 (London: London Magazine Editions, 1975), p. 46. 44. Gutteridge, ‘Burma Diary’, in Traveller’s Eye, p. 39.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 455

30/01/2012 16:24

46

CITYSCAPE: THE BOMBED CITY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR Leo Mellor

I

n Hangover Square, Patrick Hamilton’s great novel of murder, somnambulistic self-loathing, and a redemptive love of cats, the sunny calm of London in August 1939 contains a bleak and inescapable teleology. For as George Harvey Bone, the post-Munich anti-hero par excellence, notes to himself, it was: ‘Fine, fine, fine. . . Blue and sunshine everywhere. . . [. . .] You could hardly believe it would ever break, that the bombs had to fall.’1 In that ‘had’ there is an extra-knowingness in Hamilton – one absent from, say, Orwell’s George Bowling with his premonition: ‘the train was running along an embankment. A little below us you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop.’2 For Hangover Square was completed in 1941 – after the bombs its characters fear had actually arrived. The proleptic fear of bombing had burst into certainty, and the inevitability tested in the novel was assured. Recent tours of interwar culture have shown how a love of what can be termed ‘airmindedness’, visible in air races, alloy-trophies and pilots-as-hero eulogies, was intermeshed with the fear of aerial attack.3 This was a fear that in Britain grew from memories of the Zeppelin raids in the First World War; but it also fed off continual fictional extrapolations, from H. G. Wells onwards, of the destruction that gas, bombs or heat-rays could bring to cities lying open under the sky. Stanley Baldwin’s speech, with the phrase ‘the bomber will always get through’, counterpoints Auden and Isherwood watching Japanese air strikes in China; and from the Italian theorist of aerial attack Giulio Douhet it is only a few minutes along the cultural glidepath to close analysis of Eliot’s poetical ‘raids on the inarticulate’. Poetry and prose that engaged with the wars in Abyssinia, China and Spain returned again and again to observation-as-premonition, typified in Edgell Rickword’s 1937 poem ‘To the Wife of any Non-Interventionist Statesman’. Here the air attacks visited upon Guernica by the Luftwaffe are projected onto Britain: ‘in Hitler’s frantic mental haze / already Hull and Cardiff blaze, / and Paul’s great dome rocks to the blast / of air-torpedoes screaming past’.4 But while prophetic fears of aerial attack in the 1930s have been well served, writing on the actual city in wartime – pace Second World War literature in general – has been neglected. This chapter thus focuses on bombsites – and it seeks to understand, through focusing on London, how the actual ruins of the city transformed temporality as well as materiality; time as well as rubble. The elastic second, the shard-like minute and the alternative future all sprung from the debris – and provided complex problems and possibilities for writers.

456

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 456

30/01/2012 16:24

the bombed city in the second world war

457

Fire The bombed city as a place where time as well as structures become mutable is obvious from the strand of writing closest to the flames – that of firemen-authors. ‘The Wall’ was William Sansom’s first short story, only three and a half pages long, written in one sitting (on 2 April 1941). It begins with looming fear: Until this thing happened, work had been without incident. There had been shrapnel, a few inquiring bombs, and some huge fires; but these were unremarkable and have since merged without identity into the neutral maze of fire and noise and water and night, without date and without hour, with neither time nor form, that lowers mistily at the back of my mind as a picture of the air-raid season.5 This passage, with its concatenation of indeterminacy as every knowable marker is negated, ends with the naturalisation of terror-bombing into something near-Keatsian. Yet the ‘thing’ – the collapse of the titular wall from the burning warehouse onto the firemen – is inescapable, bringing with it a moment of frozen anticipation: ‘It hung there, poised for a timeless second before rumbling down at us. I was thinking of nothing at all and then I was thinking of everything in the world.’6 Time is contorted for the reader and the characters within the story as perception becomes heightened and details mass, attended to in implausible ways. The fulfilment of Isherwood’s dictum – ‘I am a camera’ – appears as a punctum in the fire and chaos: In that simple second my brain digested every detail of the scene. New eyes opened at the sides of my head so that, from within, I photographed a hemispherical panorama bounded by the huge length of the building in front of me and the narrow lane on either side.7 The eventual ending – where the narrator survives after being ‘framed’ in best Buster Keaton fashion by a window of the falling building – frees the bound time and lets life continue, but only thanks to happenstance and contingency. Against eternities compressed fire also acts as a connective elemental force, notably in the close of the air-raid warden T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ (1942): ‘And the fire and rose are one’.8 But there could be a non-theological dimension to this trope, as can be glimpsed in the Welsh-Argentine poet Lynette Roberts’s wartime work which included the extraordinary short story ‘Swansea Raid’. This attempted to answer the problem set by David Jones in regards to the previous war, ‘it is not easy in considering a trench-mortar barrage to give praise for the action proper to chemicals – full though it may be of beauty.’9 This she does by portraying her sensations in watching a city burn: ‘A glade of magnesium waning to a distant hill that we know to be Swansea. [. . .] Look at those flares like a swarm of orange bees. They fade and others return. A collyrium sky, chemically washed Cu.DH2.’10 Moreover Roberts’s poems of the period return to the problem of being true to discordant sensory experiences that destabilise linearity. In ‘The Temple Road’, written two years after a trip through bombed London, the smell of a blowtorch for paint stripping transports her back: there was a carpenter at my door, and the smell and the sound of the paint blew into My nostrils and ears, and gathered My thoughts, as I looked out of the window

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 457

30/01/2012 16:24

458

leo mellor

[. . .] A week’s devastation melted half the Block with the fury of rising flame throwers. Then to Pimlico I took the bus. . . I found warm flesh charred. . .11 This work mixes the domestic and military, moving over a few lines from the process of memory to abject tactility; it thus captures the problem of depicting – as well as witnessing – the blast-torn confusion and juxtapositions that typified the aftermath, and after-effects, of bombing. Henry Green served, like William Sansom, throughout the Blitz in the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS). In his novel Caught (1943), firefighting stretches the credibility of time perception – on the level of the sentence as well as the episode. The parenthetical corrections in the text show that any attempt at description by the fireman/hero gives way to (re)-creation: ‘(It had not been like that at all. . .)’.12 Readers must continually readjust themselves to this narrator, feeling forward slowly as the tenses and objects shift under them; and the anti-climactic unravelling starts to offer a human time span of post-raid trauma stretching out into an uncertain future. Such doubts about events – and what to do with the time that stretches between definable incendiary experiences – come to final formal prominence in Green’s short story ‘The Lull’. Here firemen, referred to only by number, try to fill or organise their time in the ‘lull’ – that is the time between the Blitz and the later raids and V-bomb attacks. The seven sections mix stories, memories and anecdotes told around the fire station bar. But its mix of different narrative forms – dialogue and reminiscence, allegory (a crow attacks like a dive-bomber) and time-wasting – is only compensatory – ‘they were seeking to justify the waiting life they lived at present, without fires’.13 Indeed the piece ends with a nearexistential dilemma – what is a fireman if there are no fires? The tenth man said to the eleventh: ‘I’m browned off Wal, completely.’ The eleventh answered: ‘You’re not the only one.’ ‘Wal, d’you think there’ll ever be another blitz?’ ‘Well, mate, if he doesn’t put one on soon we shall all be crackers.’ ‘You’re telling me’.14

Fragments A cityscape of fragments produced by bombing had been proleptically foreshadowed in both the laments of high modernism and the mise en scènes of surrealism. But how could writers engage with the reality of it? In the final section of ‘I See London’, a poem by the polymathic Humphrey Jennings, the apparent simultaneity of sight gathers debris in literary mimesis of a raid’s aftermath: I see a thousand strange sights in the streets of London I see the clock on Bow Church burning in daytime I see a one-legged man crossing the fire on crutches I see three negroes and a woman with white face-powder reading music at half-past three in the morning I see an ambulance girl with her arms full of roses

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 458

30/01/2012 16:24

the bombed city in the second world war

459

I see the burnt drums of the Philharmonic I see the green leaves of Lincolnshire carried through London on the wrecked body of an aircraft.15 Other fragments of the Blitzed city also became causal to the shaping of narratives – and the shards are temporal as well as actual. In several of Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime short stories the uncanny emerges through the instability of time in destructive circumstances. In ‘The Demon Lover’, the dust from destroyed buildings has blown into the closed-up house that Mrs Drover is inspecting. The ghosts of past life – in the marks on the floor and wall – eventually crystallise into the malevolency of a lost love, a figure from the past whose return is presaged by a letter and who cannot be imagined beyond the embossed mark of his button. In ‘Mysterious Kôr’, an alternative cityscape dreamt up by the protagonists takes them out of London and into another world (and a literary one at that) and another time: I cheered up some time ago. This war shows that we’ve by no means come to the end. If you can blow whole places out of existence, you can blow whole places into it. I don’t see why not. They say we can’t say what’s come out since the bombing started.16 Such apparitional spaces still had potency in The Heat of the Day (1948), where Bowen dramatised the progress through the city of the ‘uncounted’ London dead: Most of the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence – not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s living – felt throughout London. Uncounted they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses.17 This testing of the fragmentary city for some trace of spirituality is central to many other works – including David Gascoyne’s unfinished ‘The Bombsite Anchorite’.18 As he planned it, it would have been a long meditation on ‘the possibility for post-Auschwitz theology’. The form would have been an extended encounter between a narrator and a reclusive hermit who lived in the shells of shattered buildings: a bombsite anchorite. The key pivot in the poem would have been the altar the anchorite was to build outside his hut, situated deep in the wastes of the bombed City. This shrine was to have been composed of rubble and fragments – as Gascoyne said laconically: ‘bits of buildings, cornices of churches, shattered pediments’.19 Inscribed upon this altar would be the unevenly carved line ‘To the Unknown God’. This figure of intense light – amid the wastelands of broken building, set beside his altar – reaches a state where he cannot be described physically; he is just so ‘scoured by the flushed sky’s abrasive radiance’ as to dissolve.20 Yet this is not a holy apparition – for Gascoyne, without the certainties of faith, the anchorite as a figure of light is a symbol of despair, showing the limits of language and remaining a true enigma. But theology drives one of the greatest completed modernist works that relies upon collected fragments. The artist and writer David Jones had a relatively ‘good’ Second World War; relative, that is, to his First World War experiences in the trenches with the Royal Welch Fusiliers – which led to several breakdowns, depression and the resultant semi-cathartic composition of his poem In Parenthesis (1937). For while he spent most of 1939–45 in various London rooms (which he termed his dugouts), he managed to work on various texts or paintings, some later collected into The Anathemata (1952). In this epic,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 459

30/01/2012 16:24

460

leo mellor

itself subtitled ‘fragments of an attempted writing’, it is possible to trace the development of Jones’s method of investigating, bricolaging and recovering language. The very first line of his preface offers a source that could authenticate the unstable yet totalising nature of the work: ‘I have made a heap of all that I could find.’21 Here the poetics of gathering of words as physical traces or tactile objects becomes explicit. But what might be in a heap that encompasses ‘all’? The poem begins and ends with the service of the Eucharist, with the liturgical words momentarily interrupted, as the chalice is raised, by the entire poem. By using this particular service as a frame Jones restates the link between language and physicality, showing how a form of words can alter objects: ‘We already and first of all discern him making this thing / other. His groping syntax, if we attend, already shapes’.22 This starting point, the transformative ‘othering’ of a ‘thing’, offers a thematic lead. For the weight of notes and guidance given for a reader by the poem shows a project of rescuing not only historical and mythic knowledge – but also the linguistic and literary forms, the actual words themselves, that such knowledge was couched in. The Anathemata thus repeats the conception of language as, foremost, a physical thing that has to be continually rescued and thus performed – and this offers an acute contrast with Jones’s recently rediscovered Wedding Poems. These were composed in the midst of air raids in 1940–1 for his friends’ marriage and labelled with their very hour of completion; such as, for the much shorter and ostensibly romantic ‘Prothalamion’ – ‘written between 10.30 and midnight on Thursday Sept. 12th, 1940. 61 King’s Road Chelsea, SW3’.23 This specificity was part of the textual apparatus for their presentation as gifts – but it also overtly freezes the encounter with history into this moment of despair in ‘flame-lap and split masonry’. The longer ‘Epithalamion’ gives a grand sweep of history, seen through a succession of beautiful women culminating in the bride, but it is tightly linear – a glassy and glossy stepping down to the debased age of wartime. The immediate actuality of bombed London cannot give anything apart from fear and wreckage to poetry – such interpretation of the shattered city as revelatory would have to wait until his postwar works. Thus the project of salvage in The Anathemata necessitates the cataloguing of specifics – and so it is cloyingly filled with proper nouns, tying action or memory down to places – and suggesting not only how the words should be read but also spoken. Yet Jones does not use diacritical marks to guide this, but rather his combination of a tightly interlocking hemstitch and parentheses in the mise en page gives emphasis; italics show contrasts while constant cribs to pronunciation mean that a reader is ushered through the marvels with an interpretive framework both guiding and ensnaring. Yet materiality only becomes truly palpable when the book as a whole is considered. For interleaved within the chapters – and bearing no direct relationship to the specific parts of the poem they appear next to – are illustrations and examples of Jones’s calligraphy. These inscriptions, Latinate phrases or parts of prayer, counterpoint the broader narrative sweeps as the text obsesses over rescued fragments and words. Descriptions of the unearthed phrase collapsing history and linking together all wars in a Spenglerian fashion match up to the inclusion of these illuminated inscriptions, making the text seemingly enact the messy process of recovery. These inscriptions seem to be partially broken, moss-coated, lovingly saved – with the controlled layers of murk lifting like an internal horizon on ‘NORTH MENS / THING MADE’24 or the scrawled marks – of a pseudo-trowel? – on ‘ROMA CAPUT’.25 The patina of physical objet trouvé dirt and the ersatz-archaeological frisson is however a prod-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 460

30/01/2012 16:24

the bombed city in the second world war

461

uct of careful creation, the nuanced application of gouache and colour wash. Jones’s writings do not directly disclose the contemporary shattered city, London, where they were composed; but their apparent material provenance as recovered fragments from wreckage gives another, implicit, Blitz-time story.

Flowers The creation of implausibly lush zones in the midst of London was one of the most unexpected transformations that resulted from incendiary and high-explosive bomb attacks. Blackened timbers, fallen masonry and exposed brickwork of the bombsites, markers of how the war had arrived in the city, were also habitats that the metropolis had not previously possessed. But analogous to the pre-war concept of the city as a modernist zone of fragmented destruction, literary and visual culture had long envisaged the return of the wild to the metropolis. An archetypal visitor from the future, such as Gustave Doré’s engraving of ‘The New Zealander’ (1873) sketching the broken and shattered buildings of the capital arrayed in tiers, haunted many of the late-Victorian pessimistic-futuristic ideas of Britain becoming a depopulated and unkempt pile of ruins.26 Visions of a metropolis collapsing into a silent but bucolic jungle ran through Victorian literature and into the twentieth century as a pleasure – and a genre. Notable for using a native British character in excursions into a proto-future of pleasure and menace is Richard Jefferies in After London: or, Wild England (1885). The title itself offers both a lament to the passing of a city and a new preferred state: a reversion to a ‘wild’ countryside undominated by the great wen. Here the drowning of the Thames valley is envisaged through a prism of the arts and crafts movement; the new sea that covers London leads to a reversion of the people to a life of honour, peasantry and subsistence farming. The actions of steadily incremental organicism are retold with pleasure by the narrator: For this marvellous city, of which such legends are related, was after all only of brick, and when the ivy grew over and trees and shrubs sprang up, and, lastly, the waters underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown.27 Another dreamer of metropolitan destruction was Edward Thomas. Throughout the 1890s he happily tramped through England, yet to sell his articles he had to travel into vilely urban London. This pain was remedied in his texts through focusing on transience and finding the hopeful signs of decay in the city streets. The comforting power of nature can be seen in Thomas’s poetry, such as in ‘Adlestrop’ with ‘willows, willow-herb and grass / And meadowsweet and haycocks dry’;28 yet only one of these flowers is transplantable to London: I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers – as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero. I like to see the preliminaries of this toil where Nature tries her hand at mossing the factory roof, rusting the deserted railway metals, sowing grass over the deserted platforms and flowers of rose-bay on ruinous hearths and walls.29 This particular plant matters. For one species, more than any other, recurs in the scientific and creative catalogues of the actual bombsite plants: the pink flowers and jagged,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 461

30/01/2012 16:24

462

leo mellor

down-coated leaves of Epilobium angustifolium – more commonly known as rosebay willowherb – and it became the emblematic flower of the bombsites. R. S. R. Fitter offered some suggestions as to why this was so; it was good at colonising – 80,000 seeds per plant – and it had a liking for soil that has been subjected to heat ‘which enables it to get a firm hold before its competitors’.30 But what cannot so easily be explained is the plant’s cultural potency. Even its commonest nickname – ‘fireweed’ – is worthy of elucidation; on one level it is a very basic descriptive noun: this plant comes after fire and it is a weed. But it also looks like a conflagration still burning – with drifts of flowers both translucent pink and vivid red – and therefore offers a seeming afterimage of destruction in the actuality of rebirth.31 Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950) gives a synoptic view of ruined London in the guise of a family saga; it recognises such complexity in its images of willowherb, as the flower carries both a reminder of specific violent destruction by fire of the area around St Paul’s, as well as being talismanic of recovery. In the novel it is present in every litany, covering the smashed windows, stones and traces of pre-war life: The children stood still, gazing down on a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundation of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, brambles and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs.32 Willowherb then supplants the treasures of a bomb-damaged Inigo Jones courtroom, as it replaces the ‘silver cup with gilt acorns dangling, the Holbein, the Van Dyck, the plaster fruit and flowers’33 with real organic life. Furthermore, it acts to signal to the reader one of the darker and more complex strands of the book – the admission that a metropolis full of new life is also one that must recognise the unleashed and uncontrollable nature of nature in the city, with the natural as a category beyond human agency. While walking through the ruins after dark Raoul is surprised by ‘a cat – or was it a wolf? – [that] leaped from beneath his feet’;34 and a bestiary not only exists within the ruins but also extends to threaten the boundary separating humans from animals by the continual analogies that are drawn; men ‘become’ wildcats and ‘act’ like lizards. But a pagan sense of nature, with vegetation hiding the ruins of civilisation or waiting to re-engulf it, had been a persistent theme for Macaulay. In 1913, she had Cambridge collapsing back into primordial marsh and ooze, with the recuperative power of nature set against the fear of what would happen if ‘wild things from without peered through’ and civilisation was revealed as just a veneer: ‘Through the rent veil they did sprawl and wade / Blind bog-beasts and Ugrian men / And the city was not’.35

Futures Post-war literature could historicise the actual city of bombsites and debris – but it also wishes to utilise its ongoing, time-distorting effects. In John Lodwick’s Peal of Ordnance (1947) the only way that the traumatised ex-sapper can make sense of London on his return is to attempt to blow more of it up.36 William Golding’s Darkness Visible (1980) opens with the emergence of the flame-wreathed child whose life (and body) is forever then marked by the Blitz;37 Wolf Mankowitz’s novel My Old Man’s a Dustman (1956) makes a hero of Arp – the amnesiac central figure whose rescue from a burning building denudes him of all iden-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 462

30/01/2012 16:24

the bombed city in the second world war

463

tity apart from his ARP (Air Raid Precautions) buckle – which then becomes his name.38 These characters – and others like them – populate a literature where the impact of war on the cityscape of London is not only reflected in the materiality of ruins, but in the mental states such ruins enforce on characters as the natural condition of city life. Post-war narratives of rebuilding, be they actual or psychological, then had to acknowledge the fragility of the metropolis; a fragility that in the aftermath of the Second World War owed much to the persistence of its ruins as still potent, darkly complex, and yet alluring.

Notes 1. Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (London: Constable, [1941] 1974), p. 101. 2. George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1939] 1990), p. 19. 3. See Ian Patterson, Guernica and Total War (London: Profile, 2007), or, from a more militaryhistorical standpoint, Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 4. Edgell Rickword, ‘To the Wife of any Non-Interventionist Statesman’, in Collected Poems (London: Bodley Head, 1947), p. 78. 5. William Sansom, ‘The Wall’, in Fireman Flower (London: Hogarth Press, 1944), pp. 108–11 (p. 109). 6. Ibid. p. 109. 7. Ibid. p. 109. 8. T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets (London: Faber, [1944] 1979), p. 43. 9. David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber, 1937), p. xiv. 10. Lynette Roberts, Diaries, Letters and Recollections, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), p. 103. 11. Lynette Roberts, ‘The Temple Road’, in Collected Poems, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), p. 98. 12. Henry Green, Caught (London: Hogarth Press, 1943), p. 176. 13. Henry Green, ‘The Lull’, New Writing and Daylight (Summer 1943), pp. 11–21 (p. 11). 14. Ibid. p. 21. 15. Humphrey Jennings, ‘I See London’, in The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, ed. Kevin Jackson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), p. 297. 16. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Mysterious Kôr’, in The Demon Lover and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), pp. 173–89 (p. 176). 17. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1948] 1962), p. 91. 18. David Gascoyne, ‘The Bombsite Anchorite’, in Selected Poems (London: Enitharmon, 1994), p. 250. 19. Personal communication, 1999. 20. This scene of blinding light and existential doubt has a Christian doppelgänger in Charles Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve (London: Faber, 1945): ‘It was of part of London after the raids – he thought of the City proper, for a shape on the right reminded him dimly of St. Paul’s. The light was the most outstanding thing in the painting; presently, as Richard looked, it seemed to stand out from the painting and dominate the room itself [. . .] It was everywhere in the painting – concealed in houses and their shadows, lying in ambush in the Cathedral, opening the rubble, vivid in the vividness of the sky’ (pp. 25–6). 21. David Jones, The Anathemata (London: Faber, 1952), p. 9. 22. Ibid. p. 49. 23. David Jones, ‘Prothalamion’, in Wedding Poems, ed. Thomas Dilworth (London: Enitharmon, 2002), p. 33.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 463

30/01/2012 16:24

464 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

leo mellor Jones, The Anathemata, p. 54. Ibid. p. 126. Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Vintage, 1999), pp. 2–3. Richard Jefferies, After London: or, Wild England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1885] 1980), p. 36. Edward Thomas, ‘Adlestrop’, in Collected Poems, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 71–3 (p. 73). Edward Thomas, The South Country (London: Dent, [1909] 1993), pp. 75–6. R. S. R. Fitter, Natural History of London (London: Collins, 1945), p. 231. See also Geoffrey Hill’s poem ‘Churchill’s Funeral IV’ in which he memorialises the churches lost in the Blitz – ‘St. Mary Abchurch, St. Mary Alderbury, St. Mary-le-Bow’ through glimpses of ‘the ragwort / and the willow-herb / as edifiers / of ruined things’ (Caanan [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996], p.48). Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness (London: Virago, [1950] 1983), p. 53. Ibid. p. 180. Ibid. p. 74. Rose Macaulay, ‘Trinity Sunday’, reprinted by Constance Babington-Smith in Rose Macaulay: A Life (London: Collins, 1972), pp. 68–9. John Lodwick, Peal of Ordnance (London: Methuen, 1947). William Golding, Darkness Visible (London: Faber and Faber, 1980). Wolf Mankowitz, My Old Man’s a Dustman (London: Andre Deutsch, 1956).

Further Reading Blythe, Ronald (ed.), Components of the Scene: An Anthology of the Prose and Poetry of the Second World War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Hewison, Robert, Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939–45 (London: Methuen, 1977). Mackay, Marina, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). –– (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Mengham, Rod and N. H. Reeve (eds), Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Maclaren-Ross, Julian, Memoirs of the Forties (London: Alan Ross, 1965). Piette, Adam, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1995). Rawlinson, Mark, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Stonebridge, Lyndsey, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 464

30/01/2012 16:24

47

THE EIGHT-WEEK COLLEGE OF THE AGE OF EXTREMES: THE BARRACKS AND THE TRAINING GROUND Glyn Salton-Cox

I

n a century of warfare marked by a new sense of engagement, the space of the barracks seems to operate outside of our iconic perceptions of warfare. Whether considering the trenches of the First World War, the atrocities of the Second World War or the jungles of Vietnam, it has appeared that the barracks and the training ground are places of secondary importance to the trench, the bombed city, the death camp and the tree line shimmering with napalm. However, this occlusion of the site of the barracks is misconceived. This chapter will consider two main ways in which the living arrangements of servicemen and women may be seen as centrally important. The first is suggested by Georg Lukács’s discussion of mass armies in The Historical Novel (1937). Lukács stressed the key importance of the change in the living space of servicemen in the Napoleonic Wars, who now interacted with diverse civilian populations in new ways. For Lukács, these new living arrangements of soldiers helped create the ‘concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them’.1 Lukács’s account highlights the key importance of the mode of interaction which mass armies have with civilian populations in the formulation of historical consciousness. The mass barracks of the twentieth century present some especially instructive examples of how this interaction develops. For instance, Rex Warner’s anti-fascist novel The Aerodrome (1941) considers the interaction of the barracks with the local village as synecdochal for the advent of a new form of warfare in Britain. The second sense in which the barracks may be considered central is suggested by Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of the ‘state of exception’ as paradigmatic of twentiethcentury government. While for Agamben, the camps of Auschwitz or Guantánamo Bay are the sites par excellence of the state of exception, the barracks may also be considered in light of state of exception theory, as itself conceptually separate and yet symbolic of the political and legal oppressions of civilian life. The barracks always operates in a state of exception, with its own laws and its extra-legal oppressions, and yet this allows the space of the barracks to present an ideological high relief of different moments in the history of twentieth-century conflict (a possibility probed explicitly by Evelyn Waugh in his Sword of Honour trilogy). Indeed, in Britain, the term ‘martial law’ which came to denote early twentieth-century British political states of exception first applied to law which applied to servicemen.2 On this reading it might be possible to see the modes of control of the barracks

465

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 465

30/01/2012 16:24

466

glyn salton-cox

– both directly coercive and more subtly ideological – as exemplary of those of twentiethcentury state power in general. In the literature of the First World War, the barracks and training ground figure as the absurd, the inadequate and even the forgotten spaces of warfare. This is unsurprising, given the obviously pathetic inadequacy of the training given to soldiers in the early stages of the war. In Goodbye to All That (1929), Robert Graves records that he only spent three weeks ‘on the square’ before being deployed as a guard for enemy alien prisoners, and then, when he recommenced his training before being deployed in France, Graves mentions nothing of his training apart from obtaining a new tailor, missing the Grand National and dealing with breaches of regulations by the soldiers.3 Graves’s memoir is notoriously inaccurate and was written, by his own admission, for the boom in war memoirs in the late 1920s, sparked by the publication of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928).4 Graves’s account therefore serves most importantly to show what the reading public expected of a war memoir, and his scant treatment of barracks and training reflects – and, of course, helps to create – the total liminality of these spaces in the memory of the First World War. A fitting metaphor for the First World War barracks could be the West Coast Defense Force depot, ‘Twelve Mile Dump’, manned by George Bowling during the First World War in George Orwell’s coming of the Second World War novel, Coming Up for Air: a forgotten, neglected, pointless space which, nevertheless, in its very occlusion in popular memory reflects the absurd futility of First World War tactics and training.5 T. E. Lawrence’s account of his time as a volunteer airman in the early 1920s, The Mint, ‘scribbled at night, between last post and lights out, in bed’,6 is perhaps the most important British record of barracks life available from that time, and a key precursor to many later accounts. Lawrence depicts such phenomena as the gleefully imaginative obscenity and brutality of the NCO (‘Christ, man, if I was so big as you I’d eat my rifle: – eat it, and shit a field gun’), the comradeship of the men, the yearning for civilian life, the absurdity of barracks duties, and the mix of homophobia and homoeroticism, all of which have become paradigmatic for our understanding of barracks life.7 The Mint is marked by three main emphases: the arbitrary nature of the authority exercised by the officers and NCOs, the brutal treatment of the volunteers (in which Lawrence witnessed a distinct note of sadism),8 and a burning sense of comradeship (which Lawrence believed could transcend class boundaries).9 The synthesis of these central elements of barracks ideology creates a strange, almost fascistic utopia, whereby Lawrence believes that his unit has ‘attained a flight-entity which is outside our individualities. The self-reliance each has singly lost is not lost to us all’.10 This utopia rests on the very oppression that Lawrence decries throughout: As we waited in the passage for the oath which would bind us (we waited two hours, a fit introduction to service life which is the waiting of forty or fifty men together upon the leisure of any officer or NCO), there enwrapped us, never to be lost, the sudden comradeship of the ranks; – a sympathy born half of our common defencelessness against authority (an authority which could be, as I had just re-learnt, arbitrary) and half of our true equality: for except under compulsion there is no equality in the world.11 The Spanish Civil War offered new ways in which military comradeship may be conceived, without the alarming stress on arbitrary authority found in Lawrence’s account; rather, accounts of this war tend unsurprisingly to stress the desirable inversion of tra-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 466

30/01/2012 16:24

the barracks and the training ground

467

ditional barracks custom, ideology and discipline. While Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms depicts military experience as inherently devoid of honour, a critical sense of the First World War shared by American writers such as John Dos Passos in Three Soldiers (1920), e. e. cummings in The Enormous Room (1922) and, later, Dalton Trumbo in Johnny Got His Gun (1938), the Spanish Civil War presented new opportunities for ideological engagement for Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) presents war without barracks, or, perhaps more appropriately, with a totally different barrack-experience. In a number of ways, the cave in which Robert Jordan plans his blowing of the bridge presents a radical alternative to traditional barracks life, not least in the inclusion of women. One of these women, Pilar, even becomes the Sergeant Major figure of the cave, telling the battle-weary Paolo, ‘No. Listen. Take the wax from thy hairy ears. Listen well. I command.’12 In Pilar’s account of the start of the movement in a small town, the barracks is naturally the first target of the revolutionaries; as this barracks is destroyed, new forms of living space and training take its place. The inversion of the norms of barracks life is explicit and clear in Hemingway’s novel. The traditional barracks is a place of obsessive order, cleanliness, discipline and is of course exclusively and intensely male, both homophobic and homoerotic, whereas the cave is messy, dirty, disordered and the site of heterosexual consummation. In Homage to Catalonia (1938), George Orwell presents an even more decidedly utopian reversal of traditional barracks virtues. In his depiction of the Lenin Barracks at Barcelona, Orwell notes the complete lack of discipline, as ‘if a man disliked an order he would step out of the ranks and argue fiercely with the officer.’13 But it is precisely here, in the chaotic inversion of normal barracks discipline, with the shabby uniforms and ‘extraordinarylooking rabble’14 of militiamen that the most utopian moments of Orwell’s account occur: Orwell meets another militiaman and enthuses that ‘his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy.’15 However, when Orwell returns from the front, he encounters the Popular Army, which, although ‘not quite the same’ as a bourgeois army, brings with it a more conventional structure. Officered by young men who, Orwell notes caustically, ‘had gone to the School of War in preference to joining the militia’,16 the new smartness of the Popular Army is, for Orwell, the first big sign of the Communist reaction and the internecine troubles to come. The restoration of the traditional structures of the barracks thus figures as a key point of denial of the earlier utopian potential in Barcelona. While in Orwell and Hemingway, the possibility of leftist utopias is central to their depiction of unorthodox Spanish Civil War barracks, Rex Warner’s 1941 novel The Aerodrome gives fuller expression to the fascistic possibilities Lawrence seems to have unwittingly conjured up in The Mint. Warner’s anti-fascist novel focuses on the uneasy interaction between the aerodrome, which functions as a synecdoche for militaristic fascism, and a neighbouring village, symbolic of a sleepy rural England hitherto untouched by realpolitik. The aerodrome is camouflaged in a cunning way so as to resemble part of the landscape, in a description which not only sets up Warner’s cautionary tale of a home-grown British fascism, but also expresses the strangely double character of the barracks, at once part of the community and completely outside of it: The long hangars were set not in rows nor in any regular order, but were so disposed and camouflaged that even from quite close at hand they appeared merely as rather

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 467

30/01/2012 16:24

468

glyn salton-cox

curious modifications of the natural contours of our hills [. . .] One of the main depots for the storage of arms had been constructed so as to appear indistinguishable from an old country church; the canteen where, I had been told, champagne was drunk as freely as beer is drunk in our public house resembled, in spite of the luxury within, an old barn.17 Gradually the mysterious and seductive (note the champagne) yet brutal world of the aerodrome comes to totally dominate the village, and the narrator of the novel is persuaded to enlist as an airman, where he discovers the totalitarian ambitions of the Air Force, which holds that all individuals, even those in the Air Force ‘are, in the last analysis, worthless’.18 The recruits are told that the aim of the Air Force is not merely to defend a civilisation which they believe decadent, but also to transform it: Such, then, gentlemen, is the civilization into which history has brought us and which, wholly indefensible as it is, it is yet part of our duty to defend. You will discover in course of time that we aim not entirely to defend it, but also to transform it.19 Warner is particularly acute when it comes to the sexual politics of the barracks. In a speech given by the Air Vice Marshal, the recruits are told, in a formulation strikingly similar to that used by Lawrence, that ‘your business as members of the Air Force is first and foremost to obtain freedom through the recognition of necessity’, a process which must involve a hardening in the recruits’ attitudes towards heterosexual romance.20 The speech takes an interesting turn when the Air Vice Marshal urges the airmen to always be the recipient rather than the giver of love, by which the stigma of the penetrated male is ironically raised: ‘you must be certain that you are never the “giver” but always the receiver, though you may often pretend to “give yourself” and will derive an additional pleasure very often from the pretense.’21 The Aerodrome is a particularly successful work of what has become known as ‘synthetic realism’, defined by Peter Widdowson as a mode of writing ‘in which the enormities of contemporary history are “tea tabled” by peripheral and irresponsible goings-on within individual hells’ which ‘allows the physical and mental landscape of an ugly and neurotic world, private and public, to be depicted’.22 The private lives of the individual characters – a Tom Jones-style psychodrama played out between the narrator, Roy, and the Air Vice Marshal who turns out to be his father – are caught up in the sweep of high ideological history, and yet their narrative is always somehow imperfectly grafted onto the historical canvas of the novel. This mode of writing is particularly suited to a depiction of barracks life, with the massed lives of servicemen at once removed and yet central to twentieth-century history. The Aerodrome, despite being published in 1941, in this sense belongs to the 1930s, a politically charged novel of warring ideologies. With accounts of Second World War barracks, a shift occurs away from this ideological focus, into a sense of deep disillusionment, or even of ‘ideological vacuum’ as Paul Fussell has termed the lack of clarity with which British and American servicemen perceived the purpose of the war.23 However, even in accounts – such as Evelyn Waugh’s – which exhibit an extreme ideological scepticism concerning the aims of the war, the ideological work of barracks literature continues to be clearly legible. In an article written in 1946 Evelyn Waugh commented on the eccentricity of the men he encountered in the Army, claiming that ‘I found myself under the command and in the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 468

30/01/2012 16:24

the barracks and the training ground

469

mess with one man of startling singularity after another.’24 Adam Piette has highlighted the way in which Waugh’s experience as an officer introduced him to an idea of the war as ‘the expression of an organized army of eccentricities’ in which ‘Britain, as represented by its army, down at the level of the regular soldier, had become its own enemy.’25 The first volume of Waugh’s retrospective war trilogy, The Sword of Honour Trilogy, Men at Arms (1952), set almost entirely in or around barracks and on training grounds, can be read as an extended working-through of this very problem. How was an army of eccentrics to function effectively? Waugh’s scepticism about the ability of regimental culture to achieve the desired results is clear from his ironic tone: ‘the discipline of the square, the traditions of the mess, would work their magic and the esprit du corps would fall like blessed unction from above.’26 Waugh’s answer to this problem in Men at Arms was the creation and sacrifice of the ultimate army eccentric and twentieth-century miles gloriosus, Apthorpe, who at first appeared to be marked out for promotion (‘Apthorpe alone looked like a soldier’) although his obsession with porpoise-skin boots sounded an early warning note.27 The principle comic interest of Men at Arms resides in Apthorpe’s adventures, including a pointless war with the signal corps and a bathetic struggle with his commanding officer, the equally eccentric Ben Ritchie-Hook, over Apthorpe’s ‘thunderbox’. Apthorpe dies at the end of Men at Arms, from drinking a bottle of whisky that the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, brought him while he had a fever. Apthorpe thus functions as a pharmakon, or perhaps as sublated extreme, by which the eccentricities of the rest of the officers may be accommodated. In A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell provides much the same sacrificial offering with the creation of Bithel, another officer abjectly unfit for service (‘he seemed almost painfully aware of his own dilapidation’) whose excess allows for the eccentricities of the other officers in the mess.28 While Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1955) is recognised as a classic of Second World War literature, Julian Maclaren-Ross’s wartime stories, collected in The Stuff to Give the Troops (1944), which crucially foreshadow Catch 22 in their depiction of the absurdities of army life, have not received the recognition they deserve. Maclaren-Ross served as a private in the army, experiencing only the training ground and the barracks until 1943, when he was discharged following his desertion and imprisonment. His barracks stories echo many elements of The Mint in their realistically foul language (which provoked some censorship problems) and portrayal of arbitrary authority. However, in Maclaren-Ross’s stories there is none of the utopian fellowship of Lawrence’s account, which is replaced by a hard-bitten cynicism and acknowledgement of the absurdity of barracks life. In this way, Maclaren-Ross’s stories function as a key demystification of barracks life. Lawrence’s fantasy of class levelling is directly refused in ‘The Tape’, which tells the story of the betrayal of the middle-class recruit who, pressured by his girlfriend, takes a commission despite his socialist principles. ‘I Had To Go Sick’ is perhaps the story which most obviously foreshadows Catch 22, depicting the absurd bureaucracy of barracks life through the peregrinations of the narrator – whose bad leg is mainly caused by the electric massage that he was given – between different hospitals, medical boards and barracks. Perhaps the most striking element of barracks life that Maclaren-Ross captures is the perverse way in which the misfortunes of fellow soldiers come to serve as a sort of cruel entertainment. In ‘They Put Me in Charge of a Squad’, a score is settled by an NCO giving the narrator charge of a squad of invalids and malingerers, ‘all the worst janker wallahs were there, mixed with a few well-known malingerers and a man just back from detention barracks who had no top teeth.’29 Meanwhile, a group of NCOs gathered to watch the performance of getting the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 469

30/01/2012 16:24

470

glyn salton-cox

squad in order, ‘“Good as a play,” the C.Q.M.S. was heard to say. “Beats cockfighting.”’30 Even more disturbing is ‘This Moral Coil’, in which the night-terrors and somnambulism of a soldier are viewed as a sort of nightly entertainment for a group of men and NCOs. The sleeping soldier rages against the army, and the entertainment the men derive from his ‘performance’ thus functions as a sort of pressure valve, by which communal criticism of the army can be safely accommodated. At this point ‘This Moral Coil’ provides a further demystification of barracks ideology. Rather than airing anti-army prejudice in order to defuse it as part of soft propaganda (as seen in, for instance, Carol Reed’s 1943 barracks film, The New Lot), in Maclaren-Ross’s story, the accommodation of criticism of the army into a military structure is itself revealed to be part of the ideological work of the barracks, framed by casual violence, ‘“Hammond hit him on the nut with an entrenching tool once and that didn’t wake him.”’31 Another story which captures a key absurdity of Second World War barracks life is ‘Invasion According to Plan’ which sends up the endless tactical exercises that were performed in training (which were also parodied in Waugh and Powell’s novels): Then a dispatch rider fell off his bike in front of BHQ and staggered in with a sealed package from the Scotch. They were the enemy and supposed to invade us. The major tore open the package; inside it said they were sorry, for some reason they couldn’t invade us, not just yet. So we disconnected our equipment and took off our trousers before kipping down; everyone said, “What a muck-up.”32 The Vietnam War presented a new set of ideologically charged responses to barracks experience, perhaps most notably in the medium of film. Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam film, Full Metal Jacket (1987), based on the novel The Short-Timers (1979) by Gustav Hasford, stands out as a film over half of which is spent in the depiction of recruit training at a barracks, memorably described by the protagonist as ‘an eight-week college for the phony tough and the crazy brave’.33 The breakdown of Leonard Lawrence (nicknamed ‘Private Pile’) following his abuse at the hands of Sergeant Hartman is the climax to the first section of the film. Hartman’s foul language takes barracks obscenity to new, almost absurd levels – ‘wipe that stupid grin off your face or I will rip out your eyeballs and skull fuck you’, or the equally homophobic/erotic, ‘I bet that you are the kind of guy who would do a guy up the ass and not have the common courtesy to give him a reach around.’ What is particularly notable about Lawrence’s breakdown is the way in which he exactly mimics the conventions of drill and the fetishistic personification of his rifle which formed the key moments in the recruit’s training (the recruits are ordered to give their rifles female names, and to sleep with them at night). Another recruit is concerned when he sees Lawrence talking to his rifle, and his final act before the murder of Hartman is to execute a series of perfect drill manoeuvres. Lawrence’s breakdown in meticulous form tells the most important, although perhaps also most obvious story of the barracks of all – that the barracks and the training ground, in their functions as the preparation of men and women for the state of war, are necessarily also the site of a training in violent rage and horrific abuse. In this capacity, the barracks again becomes a key diagnostic site for twentieth-century ideology, the ‘eight-week college’ of the age of extremes. The formulations of Agamben and Lukács clearly illuminate this diagnosis. Whether considering the fascistic group identity constructions explored in The Mint and The Aerodrome, the leftist utopias of Hemingway and Orwell, Waugh and Powell’s deeply conservative ideological moves, or the more cynical demystifications of The Stuff to Give the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 470

30/01/2012 16:24

the barracks and the training ground

471

Troops and Full Metal Jacket, the barracks persists as an important point of contact between the military and the civilian, and thus as an example of the scrupulously demarcated yet ultimately revealing nature of such sites of exception. These configurations of brutality and bleak humour, of propaganda and accommodation of course remain pertinent today. For at a time when the disgraceful American and British involvement in the Middle East continues, with piles of abused bodies recalling the camps of the Second World War, it appears that the political and military evils of the twenty-first century may sadly continue to be exceptionally visible in accounts of barracks life.

Notes 1. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Penguin, [1937] 1969), p. 22. 2. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 18. 3. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1929] 1982), pp. 62–72. 4. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 206–7. Interestingly, in All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque elides the barracks with the school, a similarity notable in British accounts such as T. E. Lawrence’s The Mint (Bungay: Penguin, [1936; 1955] 1978) and Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (London: Vintage, [1941] 2007). 5. George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (London: Penguin, [1939] 1990), pp. 121–4. 6. Letter to Edward Garrett, cited in ‘Note by A. W. Lawrence to First edn’, The Mint, p. 9. 7. Ibid. p. 136. 8. Lawrence claimed that on one occasion he actually noticed an officer with an erection as he chastised the men: ‘evident through their clothes is that tautening of the muscles (and once the actual rise of sexual excitement) which betrays that we are being hurt not for our good, but to gratify a passion’ (The Mint, p. 126). 9. Ibid. p. 97. 10. Ibid. pp. 181–2. 11. Ibid. p. 44. 12. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (London: Random House, [1940] 2004), p. 60. 13. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin, [1938] 2003), p. 8. 14. Ibid. p. 7. 15. Ibid. p. 2. This is an interesting moment, particularly given Orwell’s notorious homophobia. 16. Ibid. p. 94. 17. Warner, p. 17. 18. Ibid. p. 220. 19. Ibid. p. 179. 20. Ibid. p. 187. 21. Ibid. p. 183. 22. Peter Widdowson, ‘Introduction’ to Patrick Hamilton, Impromptu in Moribundia (Nottingham: Nottingham Trent, 1999), p. viii. 23. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 129–43. 24. Evelyn Waugh, ‘Fan-Fare’, 8 April 1946, in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 33, cited in Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 93. 25. Piette, p. 93. 26. Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms, in The Sword of Honour Trilogy Trilogy (London: Random House, [1952] 1994), p. 40. 27. Ibid. p. 40.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 471

30/01/2012 16:24

472

glyn salton-cox

28. Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones, in A Dance to the Music of Time (London: Minerva, [1952] 1991), vol. 3, p. 21. 29. Julian Maclaren-Ross, ‘They Put Me in Charge of a Squad’, in Selected Stories, ed. Paul Willetts (Stockport: Dewi Lewis, 2004), pp. 135–41 (p. 136). 30. Ibid. p. 136. 31. Julian Maclaren-Ross, ‘This Moral Coil’, in Selected Stories, pp. 92–6 (p. 94). 32. Julian Maclaren-Ross, ‘Invasion According to Plan’, in Selected Stories, pp. 209–12 (p. 209). 33. Full Metal Jacket, film, directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: Warner Bros., 1987.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 472

30/01/2012 16:24

Adam Piette

Part V Introduction: Genres

INTRODUCTION: GENRES

W

ar exerts pressure on all genres by politicising them (inevitably, since war is a political act), by infiltrating into their forms of representation the morbidity of its themes (death, destruction, militarisation of bodies and minds) and by propagandising itself into everything it touches, however hermetically sealed and peaceable. The genres we look at here range from popular genre fiction (the thriller, the detective novel, the espionage novel, fantasy, children’s literature, science fiction), through genres that stand in contradistinction to fiction (contemporary theatre, war art, war games), to subgenres which the twentieth century has generated, war correspondence and theory. In all the examples chosen, twentieth-century Anglo-American wars generate a new hybrid, a warhyphenated form of the genre in question; for the technology, mass harming and mediapropaganda associated with the warfaring not only generated a viral method of possessing popular forms of writing, but also relied on genre writing and associated popular art forms to have ideological impact. It is a real question whether the war texts generated by genre writing are a symptom of war culture’s hunger for popular form; or whether those forms constitute valid forms of resistance to that hunger; and, as a corollary, whether that resistance is not itself weaponised by war-cultural aims and objectives. By way of example, one might reconsider the most germane of genres for the expression of war resistance, war poetry. If we look at the poetry written in protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we see a war-hyphenated genre (already well established as anti-establishment since World War I and its pacifist and oppositional practice) become a media-Internet phenomenon, existing as a sharp and telling presence on the Web. Not since the work of activists in Vietnam have we seen such a concerted campaign as that constituted by the ‘Poets Against War’ movement, whose core zone was and is the website http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org. Here the practice of oppositional poetics redefines the anti-war poem as not only a combatant zone of angry witness in the spirit of Sassoon (the site includes poems by serviceman like Kevin Nicholson, in the National Guard but also a conscientious objector), not only war poems by prominent poets in the spirit of Vietnam (and the site includes Vietnam war vets like John Balaban, and 1960s anti-Vietnam poets like Ferlinghetti and Adrienne Rich), but also as a genre that is coextensive with a networked activist zone, with links to political lobby groups like Open Democracy, Operation Truth, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, and Iraqi Body Count as well as literary sites relevant to war poetry. The effect of this already-networked status is that the poems submitted by amateurs to

475

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 475

30/01/2012 16:24

476

adam piette

the site tend themselves to interrogate the postmodern media warfare of the conflicts in the desert; to mediate upon the televisual ethics of the wars within United States conscientious objection. Mark Brunke’s poem ‘Artificial Light’ was chosen as one of the poems of the month for March 2010, for instance. The poem reflects on how 9/11 is drilled into the soldiers’ unconscious through cultural propaganda: Under the sweet desert the anniversary impulse is bred into the soldiers heart. . . in time nine beats for eleven measures and self disappears into the arabian rhythm.1 The anti-Arabic cultural propaganda is figured as a ‘violent’ and ‘violet’ pop song working its way into the solders’ psyche, like the pop stations in Vietnam did (as featured in the film Good Morning Vietnam), but here oddly uniting both sides, singing ‘good morning / to insurgents and surges / of soldiers’ alike. The American army’s stations are matched by the insurgents’ Arabic services, pumping ideology into the airwaves. The music is compared to the sodium flares igniting above the desert targets (‘Under yellow sodium / artificial light / death came’), but also like the lights on a TV or film set, semi-divine, occupying the same lethal space as the perpetrator bombers. For Brunke, finally, the wargame comes down to a heavily over-mediatised dynamic not only recording the war and constituting the channels of propaganda, but also in many ways structuring the warfaring enemies as lethal ‘faces’: Two televisions sit facing each other, transmitting in different languages, filling the air with sounds mixing together, playing to an ever deafening crowd.2 Similarly, the war poem as a subgeneric hyphenated field of textual production has moved on from a print oppositionality towards a screen performance of the ways the postmodern wars in the Middle Eastern deserts play to televisual crowds. It does so at considerable risk to its own ethical critical distance: for its central claim, that the Arabic and American forces are indistinguishable since both sides are so media-structured, is itself open to the charge that this reflection on this very fact is coloured by a trance-like disappearance ‘into the arabian rhythm’ of US obsessions with its spectral enemy. Appearing on a screen, ‘soldiered’ by American voices, stationed on its .org island, its strategies of opposition to the Pentagon rest on Brunke’s assumption that American and Arab media can only be the same sort of thing, Aljazeera = CNN. This has the odd effect of making the war poem itself a mediation between the enemies, a desert screen, a televisual ‘face’ with its own derivative rhythms and music: and as such militarised. Like Brunke, the published poets on the website, gathered mostly in opposition to Bush’s policy of pre-emptive strikes in 2003, are fraught with the strange horror of framing

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 476

30/01/2012 16:24

part v introduction: genres

477

defiance of their own government based on emotions roused by televisual evidence. C. D. Wright, who wrote that she wanted ‘to add my voice to the many who oppose the war which is mostly being treated as a major sporting event by the American media’, offered the poem ‘Once Again the Old Urge to Be Alone in a Car No Matter Where the Local Roads Are Going’, which has a long mournful harangue about the tourist destination she is wandering around (Cuba?), and ends: once more the old urge to be alone in a rented car – saltwater-stripped hair wind-buffed shoulders – waking up in the full sun missing everyone – minimally deluded it would all stop – mercy out of nowhere like a wave in the face of an old friend she hasn’t seen in years yelling on television in the open-air lobby his subtitled expletive: For Christ’s sake: Hold your fire!3 The weary traveller hobo on-the-road dream of freedom is re-energised by the wonderful sight of the friend’s anger, giving voice to the repressed anti-war feeling otherwise motivating the persona’s aimless wanderings across the foreign landscape. Wright’s persona is guilty about her holidaying (‘ashamed of her pleasure in being here – to be ashamed / is to be the American’), but it is a guilt that is also a Bush-era guilt: international contempt for American war policy is leeching into American citizen guilt at enjoying life while others pay for American freedoms. Every citizen feels on holiday, in the sense of complicit inactivity, while the government is at its warfaring game. The turn at the end seems to be a turn to anger against the pre-emptive strikes ordered by the Bush Pentagon, a sense of recognition of repressed activist expletives, speaking truth to power. And yet who is this friend? And why ‘yelling on television’ and not, as one would expect ‘yelling at the television’? It turns out, of course, that the friend is Mel Gibson, in Mad Max 2, shouting ‘For Christ’s sake: Hold your fire!’ The allusion is canny and timely: the film stages two mighty warrior tribes at desert war motivated by energy shortages; with the ‘Humungus’, a psychotic, psy-war marauder on an evil warpath, which C. D. Wright identifies as Bush. At the same time, the activist anger is passive, televisual, mediated through film on TV, so doubly distant; and watched from abroad, on holiday, possibly in that remnant of Cold War battles, Cuba. War poetry as a genre is thinned down to this: a textual response, guilty-American, to a war so mediatised as to make all war-hyphenated genres subject to televisuality, even the righteous indignation aimed at the Humungus Pentagon. The genres in this section all do the work necessary to unpack and unpick the networked powers of the media–military–industrial complex to inhabit the citizen imagination. Again, these war genres should be read as essays aiming to inspire new directions in the field, exemplary rather than comprehensive, intimating roads that might be taken in the future.

Notes 1. Mark Brunke, ‘Artificial Light’, available at http://bibliosity.blogspot.com/2009/09/artificiallight.html, accessed 20 September 2011. Some of the best poems have been published in Sam Hamill (ed.), Poets Against the War (New York: Nation Books, 2003).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 477

30/01/2012 16:24

478

adam piette

2. Ibid. 3. C. D. Wright, ‘Once Again the Old Urge to Be Alone in a Car No Matter Where the Local Roads Are Going’, available at http://austingranny.com/points/once_again.htm, accessed 20 September 2011

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 478

30/01/2012 16:24

48

CONTEMPORARY WAR DRAMA: CARYL CHURCHILL Julia Boll

‘

W

ho’s going to mobilise darkness and silence?’ Joan asks, in the midst of a spectacular and increasingly surreal war, in Caryl Churchill’s allegorically encoded play Far Away (2000), in which the characters have to adapt to a permanent state of conflict and exception.1 In shortly under one hour, one of the most significant British political playwrights conjures a grotesque dystopia on an Orwellian scale and confronts the British audiences with the possibility of war in their home country. This chapter attempts to trace the structures of contemporary warfare through three of Churchill’s recent plays, thereby arguing that the playwright not only quite prophetically depicts the current war on terror in Far Away, but already portrays the set-up for a closed society, a huge ‘psychologically gated community’ indifferent towards the reality of war and conflict, in This Is a Chair (1997),2 until she demonstrates how the recreation of memory leads to the violence that reproduces violence in her succinct take on the creation of front lines in a little girl’s head in Seven Jewish Children (2009).3 A recent political-philosophical study on the future of empire suggests that, instead of progressing into a peaceful future, we have slipped back in time into the nightmare of perpetual and indeterminate state of war.4 War, it seems, is no longer the exceptional state, but ‘the primary organising principle of society’,5 thus apparently returning to Heraclitus’s observation that ‘war is the father of all things’6 and echoing Giorgio Agamben’s declaration that the state of exception has become the status quo.7 In the past two decades, a number of political theorists have discussed the possibility of a new form of war, the so-called ‘new wars’, a term coined by the political scientist Mary Kaldor in her seminal and much discussed study New and Old Wars (1999) to describe the development of a new type of organised violence emerging during the last decades of the twentieth century as ‘one aspect of the current form of globalisation’.8 Kaldor crucially emphasises that the new wars: involve a blurring of the distinctions between war (usually defined as violence between states or organized political groups for political motives), organized crime (violence undertaken by privately organized groups for private purposes, usually financial gain) and large-scale violations of human rights (violence undertaken by states or politically organized groups against individuals).9 She stresses the interdependency of war and the evolution of the modern state and argues that society derives from this history a stylised notion of war which ‘still profoundly affects

479

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 479

30/01/2012 16:24

480

julia boll

our thinking about war and dominates [. . .] the way policy-makers conceive of security’:10 modern warfare, as developed in the nineteenth century, ‘involved war between states with an ever-increasing emphasis on scale and mobility, and an increasing need for “rational” organization and “scientific” doctrine to manage these large conglomerations of force’.11 Foreshadowing what the sociologist Ulrich Beck would later describe as a general break-down of modernity’s dualisms,12 Kaldor states that ‘[t]he erosion of the distinction between public and private, military and civil, internal and external, also calls into question the distinction between war and peace itself ’,13 a state portrayed in Churchill’s Far Away, which describes a society that seems to be engulfed in a constant undefined conflict while attempting to maintain a sense of ‘normality’, thus mainly signifying that the state of exception has become the rule. The front lines are unclear and there is a permanent and diffuse threat by that which is foreign. The characters lose control of their lives in these chaotic circumstances, having long lost track of what the conflict is about and where they themselves stand. ‘[E]veryone’s moving and no one knows why’, Joan says in Far Away, and she describes how even the elements are perceived as a potential threat: ‘everyone’s moving and no one knows why [. . .] But I didn’t know whose side the river was on, it might help me swim or it might drown me.’14 The political theorist Neil Curtis states that for a number of commentators (for example, Hardt and Negri), ‘the war against terror epitomizes this challenge to the status of war in which the post-Cold War era is no longer split into bipolar superpowers but governed by one military massive hyperpower.’15 War has been ‘reduced to a form of police action in which a vastly superior force simply arrests activity that is not in its interest’. This radical shift in power singles out the current era of warfare; ‘the war against terror claims to be a war in defence of modernity as a way of life.’16 Curtis considers that it might be precisely our conception of modernity which leads us to perceive war as a marginal topic only: It is as if war is merely an aberration that modernity would correct. Understood as the road away from immaturity, barbarity and the particularities of tribalism, modernity is a beacon of civility and universality; a relatively autonomous intellectual journey of reason towards enlightenment.17 He argues that, while modernity is actually tied to the violence of political revolution and the ensuing wars, it has been fashioned as ‘transcendent, lifting itself and its adherents above the violent and aggressive impulses of earlier stages of human development’.18

Ceci n’est pas une guerre: This Is a Chair (1997) Progressing from this avoidance of the reality of war, the peculiar, at times openly neglectful, attitude towards many contemporary conflicts is not entirely surprising. And just how successfully Western societies have internalised and normalised the permanent state of exception and war, to the point of a perceived state of peace even while engaged in war, is described by Ulrich Beck, who considers Jean Baudrillard’s quite radical statement that the first war in Iraq in 1990 had not taken place.19 Beck maintains that the weakness of Baudrillard’s theory lies in the fact that the Iraq war did take place, but that both statements do not exclude each other: the war took place for the others, but not in the country of the warfaring nation. Perceived peace and actual war may thus coexist simultaneously, locally and socially separated, and linked to each other within the selective virtuality of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 480

30/01/2012 16:24

contemporary war drama: caryl churchill

481

the war by a certain staging and legitimising paradigm. ‘It is, by the way, the Western gaze which is articulated in Baudrillard’s pointed remark’, Beck reflects, ‘the gaze which is blind for the victims of the other’.20 In Churchill’s 1997 play This Is a Chair, war, global conflict and pressing national and international political issues are even more present by their absence, by Churchill’s insistence on having them announced or displayed in the form of titles at the beginning of the ostensibly perfectly mundane scenes, thus demonstrating how war could and could not be there at the same time. Playing on Kant’s concept of mediate representation (something has all the attributes of what is commonly recognised as a chair, hence it is a chair), the title of the play obviously also refers to René Magritte’s famous surrealist painting La Trahison des images (1928–9), which portrays a pipe, while its caption stresses ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘this is not a pipe’) – it is just a very realistic image of a pipe. In Churchill’s play, the titles of the individual scenes, of which the script states that they ‘must be clearly displayed or announced’,21 are headlines such as ‘The War in Bosnia’22 and ‘The Labour Party’s Slide to the Right’. Though negotiated in the realm of politics, but not by the individual citizens, these themes are often wilfully excluded from domestic life; they might well be regarded as taboo themes. The dialogues in the play are often painfully banal, remain on a superficial level and are preoccupied with private conflict, betrayal and deceit, but they transport an eerie undercurrent of unspoken horror, such as the family dinner scene which occurs twice in the play, once under the title ‘Pornography and Censorship’,23 once under ‘The Northern Ireland Peace Process’,24 in which parents attempt to coerce their daughter to eat, hinting at unspecified consequences if she refuses: Father: Is Muriel going to eat her dinner? Mother: Yes, eat up, Muriel. Father: Have a special bite of daddy’s. Mother: Yes, eat up, Muriel. Father: Muriel, if you don’t eat your dinner you know what’s going to happen to you. Mother: Yes, eat up, Muriel.25 Janelle Reinelt suggests we read this scene specifically as a portrayal of human behaviour on a small scale, but also in terms of ‘versions of larger problems’; thus, the underlying threat in the family conversation points at the diffuse modes of oppression and unspoken intimidations operating in conflict situations on a larger scale. However, Janelle Reinelt admits that a literal reading is almost impossible.26 In the preface of a recent edition of her plays, Churchill states that the titles ‘should probably be updated for new productions. . . “The War in Afghanistan” would probably be a title, and “Climate Change” would be there. Though not, of course, written about.’27 As the scenes evade a proper decoding, as one struggles to reconcile the grand themes of the titles with the very private scenes displayed, one realises that this is an inversion of Magritte’s discrepancy between caption and display. In this play, it is the display which states, for example in the first scene, ‘ceci n’est pas la guerre de Bosnie-Herzégovine’, though, clearly, it has been announced that it is, arguing in contrast to both Kant and Magritte that, even though there is no sign of the Bosnian war on stage, it is still equally real; the two realities of a botched date and of a large-scale genocide are not mutually exclusive. Part of the reality of the Bosnian war in the middle of Europe is that Europe ignored its occurrence until it was too late, while it was not only ‘on display’ via media reporting, but also actually happening.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 481

30/01/2012 16:24

482

julia boll

The World Risk Society of Far Away (2000) Three years later, Churchill’s play Far Away returns to the widening gap between people’s daily lives and the political sphere that Churchill had dramatised in This Is a Chair.28 While the latter showed a society eerily disconnected from political realities and blatantly self-indulgent, Far Away documents the slow escalation of underground guerrilla action via official state barbarism to a world at war, tying in the acceptance of violence in a ‘closed society’. The drama is divided into three acts. In the first, young Joan accidentally witnesses violent assaults outside her Aunt Harper’s farmhouse: people are loaded into a truck, there is blood on the floor, and somebody is being hit with an iron bar. Harper convinces her niece that in fact something revolutionary and good is happening on the farm. In the second act, the now older Joan works in a hat factory. She and her colleague Todd design elaborate hats, whose purpose is revealed in the middle of the act: prisoners exhibit the hats during a bizarre death march on the way to their execution. The third act is again set in Harper’s house. As Joan is sleeping, Harper and Todd, who is now married to Joan, talk about the global war, in which not only all peoples but also the animals and even the elements are involved. Joan wakes up and reports of her dangerous journey to Harper’s house in the middle of a war that has long lost all dimensions. The exact social and political circumstances, however, are only hinted at and never fully explained. For the audience it is therefore as impossible to position itself within this intricate framework of alliances and antagonisms as it is for the characters, who are caught helplessly within a despotic system, the ideology, power centre and international relations of which remain ambiguous and unstructured: Harper: The cats have come in on the side of the French. [. . .] Todd: But we’re not exactly on the other side from the French. It’s not as if they’re the Moroccans and the ants. Harper: It’s not as if they’re the Canadians, the Venezuelans and the mosquitoes. Todd: It’s not as if they’re the engineers, the chefs, the children under five, the musicians.29 In the characters’ imagination, new groups are constantly formed and dissolved again, but their interconnectedness remains indistinct and opaque, consequently leading to paranoia and isolation. The randomness of enemies and absurdity of front lines demonstrates what contemporary paranoia is made of – a statement of particular importance in a world which one year after the drama’s première, in September 2001, became engaged in a global war on terror, and thus, in the original sense, on fright.30 At this point, it might be worthwhile to return to Agamben’s analysis of the state of exception, which he determines as having become the permanent state of affairs: Faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been called a ‘global civil war,’ the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics [. . .] Indeed, from this perspective, the state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism.31

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 482

30/01/2012 16:24

contemporary war drama: caryl churchill

483

The philosophers Hardt and Negri see the development of potentially indeterminate war as ingrained in the decline of the nation state (and with it, the decline of armed conflicts between nation states) and the subsequent emergence of a global empire, within which rages a global civil war.32 Arguing that the ‘isolated space and time of war in the limited conflict between sovereign states has declined [and] war seems to have seeped back and flooded the entire social field’, they agree with Agamben’s assertion that the state of exception has become the rule and now determines both foreign relations and homeland security in most states.33 War seems to have become ‘a permanent social relation’.34 Analysing the global framework of risk awareness and the resulting politics of fear, the sociologist Ulrich Beck seems to have found the skeleton key to what in Agamben’s argument remains obscure, namely the underlying motives for the global society’s increasing acceptance of the state of exception as the norm. He observes that worldwide there are new security arrangements in place as a reaction to anticipated terror attacks which did not, in fact, take place.35 The anticipation of catastrophe changes the world, he says, and we have become members of a ‘world risk society’.36 Risk has a similar force of destruction to that of war, Beck argues, as ‘[s]ocial hardship is hierarchical, whereas the new risks are democratic. They also hit the rich and powerful. The shock becomes noticeable in all areas.’37 This leads to fear governing the attitude to life and to security gaining top propriety over liberty and equality on a scale of civil values, followed by a tightening of current laws and a seemingly sensible ‘totalitarianism of danger prevention’.38 The ‘economy of fear’, Beck continues, will feed on the general nervous breakdown. The lately emerging ‘terrorist world risk society’ has to be understood as an anti-governmental constellation of threat within which the state of exception becomes normal and thus simultaneously disempowers governments (as their established means become unfit) and empowers them, because the call for lost security predominates and justifies everything – finally at the cost of liberty, equality and democracy.39 The global risk society finds itself engaged in a restless quest for lost security, by means of sanctions and strategies, which simulate rather than ensure control and security and ‘add fuel to the general feeling of insecurity and threat’. The perception of danger: causes widespread solidarity overcoming differences of class, nation and religion and a consent on the legitimate defence against dangers which break with the basic principles of humanity.40 The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman agrees that fears have become completely absorbed into daily routine, have become self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, with ‘a momentum of their own’.41 The most unbearable and overwhelming fears are produced by the ‘insecurity of the present and uncertainty about the future’, rooted in a sense of impotence and the perception of having lost control over the presumably rational.42 He observes that, in spite of being well protected and relatively safe, it is Western society which feels ‘more threatened, insecure and frightened, more inclined to panic, and more passionate about everything related to security and safety than people of most other societies on record’.43 The dialogue between Todd and Harper encapsulates the rhetorical process that enables the cultural construction of the fear of everything strange; the manner in which a demonised, dehumanised or otherwise threatening ethnically defined ‘other’ is forged through narratives, myths and the deliberate planting of rumours. The characters lose control of their lives in these chaotic circumstances, having long lost track of what the conflict is about and where they themselves stand:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 483

30/01/2012 16:24

484

julia boll

Harper: You agree with me about the crocodiles? Todd: What’s the matter? You don’t know whose side I’m on? Harper: I don’t know what you think. Todd: I think what we all think. [. . .] Harper: You hate the deer. You admire crocodiles. Todd: I’ve lost touch because I’m tired.44 When little Joan of the far-away land sinking into total war tells her aunt what she saw in the courtyard at night, she evokes iconographic images of contemporary warfare that have become part of the postmodern collective experience, such as images of human beings crowded together on trains or lories to be evacuated or taken away.45 However, Far Away does not show any explicit violence on stage; it is only implicit – diffuse even. What exactly Joan has seen in her Aunt Harper’s house never becomes clear;46 what kinds of repression the state exercises against its citizens is only hinted at;47 even Todd’s descriptions of his deeds in the war are brief and in any case remain so surreal that a haunting, violent atmosphere is transmitted, but the shock is a second-hand experience for the spectator.48 The only scene depicting an unfiltered occurrence, without transformation by a character’s narrative, is II, iii, the prisoners’ death march: Next day. A procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on their way to execution. The finished hats are even more enormous and preposterous than in the previous scene.49 Churchill, herself, stresses the importance of this scene by placing the following request into the list of characters: ‘The Parade (Scene 2.5): five is too few and twenty better than ten. A hundred?’50 This scene, standing in for all death marches and other processions of victims, conjures associations of prisoners being transported to concentration and extermination camps in Hitler’s Third Reich, the expelled Armenians’ march in the Middle East, streams of refugees fleeing the war-torn former Yugoslavia, the train of prisoners on their way to Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, or the Rwandan exodus.51 Refugees, prisoners, asylum-seekers, slaves or forced labourers are all possible interpretations; due to the restrained wording of the stage direction, a production may also choose to reference a more contemporary event. The June 2001 production of Far Away in Berlin, for example, showed sixty handcuffed prisoners whose eyes were sealed shut with black duct tape.52 In hindsight, this seems eerily anticipatory: similar pictures were transmitted only one year later from Afghanistan, showing the seizing of alleged Taliban fighters by US troops. The prisoners in the Dublin production in 2004 wore the orange-coloured overalls of American detainees, mostly known to the international public from footage from the American detention camp in Guantánamo Bay on Cuba.53 The monstrous and frightening images, with the prisoners wearing elaborately designed hats that, in a grotesque way, are reminiscent of fashion shows or the crowd at horse races, counteract the friendly chatter between Todd and Joan during the second act. In the obvious public humiliation of the prisoners, as they are on display and ready to be abused, there is, of course, also an element of the ritual sacrifice to be found. In his comprehensive study Violence and the Sacred (1972), René Girard lists the social categories from which the victims of scapegoat rites are drawn in ritual, naming ‘vagabonds, beggars, cripples’

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 484

30/01/2012 16:24

contemporary war drama: caryl churchill

485

– to which, now, one might perhaps add economic and war refugees, asylum seekers, displaced persons, illegal immigrants, unlawful combatants. Girard asserts that ‘derision of one form or another plays a large part in the negative feelings that find expression in the course of the ritual sacrifice.’54 A scapegoat rite asks for a surrogate victim to appease the violence within the community. Usually, the victim is destroyed; it is always expelled, at which point the community considers itself to be free from infection.55 The scapegoat is, of course, the person who has become a taboo, the Roman homo sacer: the one whose life is sacred, who cannot be sacrificed but nevertheless must be killed, whose life is defined purely by being excluded from the polis and stripped of all civil rights.56 By its exclusion from the polis, the homo sacer is initially ‘situated at the margins of the political order’, but through a gradual process of merging of what is inside and what is outside, the excluded is positioned at the political centre of the state of exception.57 Agamben admits that it is difficult to define the state of exception due to its close relationship to civil war, insurrection and resistance, as civil war is contrary to ‘normal conditions’ and thus ‘lies in a zone of undecidability with respect to the state of exception, which is the state power’s immediate response to the most extreme internal conflicts’. ‘In this sense’, he states: modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.58 Refusing to allow a clear-cut interpretation or any specificity of location within the audience’s reality, the play may be read as an allegory. It uncovers social structures that benefit the development of violence and war. Harper’s willingness and ability to deceive herself and her niece and to convince both of them that the manhandling of others will ultimately lead to good is mirrored in Joan’s readiness to stoically accept and ignore the drawbacks in the hat factory and the bigger grievances within her country. Her silence is also an image of the average citizen’s confusion, who bemusedly turns away from international happenings – just as Joan does not watch the parades and the executions, allowing herself to ignore their existence.59 It is obvious from Joan’s casual remark, ‘It seems so sad to burn them with the bodies’,60 that she knows of her hats’ significance, but she reacts rather indifferently to the horrible circumstances. Proud of her work, she does not seem to comprehend that she personally contributes to the regime’s atrocities.61 Of course, Joan actively chooses not to witness, let alone question, the alarming circumstances in her country, and thus the play comes full circle in the last scene, as the action returns to Harper’s house and the bellicose results of the events described in the beginning are shown. Joan’s life as a fellow traveller and her silence are broken only with her decision to tear free from society’s constraints and to dare the step towards freedom, when she recognises that it is impossible to maintain a simple alliance, or even to separate the dangerous from the absurd. The surreal and apocalyptic visions of this play have been criticised for an alleged ‘lack’ of reality, for inventing unrecognisable settings and conflating familiar European or Western surroundings with a war zone not compatible with the Western self-perception. ‘The evening constantly astonishes’, The Guardian’s critic Michael Billington writes,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 485

30/01/2012 16:24

486

julia boll

‘[b]ut, while I am prepared to accept Churchill’s thesis that we are slowly sliding into barbarism, I would prefer the case to be argued rather than presented as a dramatic given.’62 The play, however, acknowledges as a given a status quo which the audience largely refuses to recognise either on or off stage. It might be worth considering that ‘surreal’ does not exactly signify ‘unreal’: by locating the civil war in an undefined reality that is nevertheless perceived as uncannily familiar, Churchill forces a Western audience to confront the possibility of war in its midst, to question the idea of it only happening in the realm of the other. Girard argues that violence as an anathema still operates today: its sacred, or taboo, character may be determined by recognising the neglect modern societies display towards the concept of collective violence, the ‘refusal to attach any significance to the phenomenon, even when it thrusts itself upon our attention’.63 Thus, to portray, or to exhibit, the taboo on stage, to a modern society that might consider itself too enlightened to still have any taboos left, is to cause the audience to recoil, bodily and mentally, at the enforced contact with the anathema, the existence of which is vehemently denied. By dislocating the wars into the midst of what Bauman calls ‘Fortress Europe’, which strengthens its borders against the east and the south,64 but which could easily be extended to, for example, ‘Fortress West’, Far Away demonstrates that the roots of violence and conflict are always to be found in peacetime society, that the civil war is not generated ‘outside’, but always endogenous.

Bare Lives in Seven Jewish Children (2009) In her recent essays on war and grief, Judith Butler discusses how the objectification and dehumanisation of the cultural other allows for the withholding of grief and for the killing of the other. She argues that while we protect certain lives, while the termination of their claims to sanctity are sufficient to mobilise the forces of war, other lives are not subject to this protection and do not qualify as ‘grievable’, either: They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost, or, rather, never ‘were,’ and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. The derealisation of the ‘Other’ means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there are established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims.65 Butler speaks out against the idea that grief is privatising and politicising, arguing instead that it offers a sense of political community of a complex order by emphasising the relational ties and their implications for theorising mutual dependency and ethical responsibility.66 Grief should be a ‘point of departure for a new understanding’, she states, ‘if the narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia can be moved into a consideration of the vulnerability of others’.67 She refers to Aeschylus, to the Oresteia, when she proposes to refuse the cycle of violence in the name of justice founded in grief, to form the world anew by taking into account how it came to be involved in this cycle of mourning and violence in the first place.68 It is at this point that one might want to consider Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 486

30/01/2012 16:24

contemporary war drama: caryl churchill

487

Children, staged first at the Royal Court Theatre in London in February 2009, written as a response to the situation in Gaza in January of the same year. In seven very short scenes, the history of a state is evoked, leading up to the last scene, set in January 2009. In every scene, the unnamed adult speakers discuss how to explain the respective current situation to a little girl: the prosecution, the camps, the emigration, the division of the country, wars, Intifada, how to justify the air strikes against a neighbouring country, how to protect the child from fear and install a sense of being in the right. This is negotiated by evoking the past suffering of the people, by constructing and negating the other, culminating, near the end, with: Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army. Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn’t she know? Tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? Tell her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we’re the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can’t talk suffering to us.69 As in Far Away, this demonstrates how effectively the other is excluded by stripping the other of the attributes that designate a citizen and reducing being to bare life, to the homo sacer, the exclusion of which becomes a rationale for a continuation of the war, which is fought from memory and often over memory. The incompatibility of the different narratives forming the identity of the central (but absent) character of a little girl points to the lacuna at the centre of the play, and to acknowledge this lacuna turns it into a taboo again – which is repeated in the off-stage, public discussion of this play.70 The girl at the centre of the play remains obscured, in ‘darkness and silence’, as it were, waiting to be mobilised for another turn of the war.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Caryl Churchill, Far Away (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2000), p. 44. Caryl Churchill, This Is a Chair (1997), in Plays: 4 (London: Nick Hern, 2008), pp. 37–58. Caryl Churchill, Seven Jewish Children (London: Nick Hern, 2009). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 7. Ibid. p. 7. Heraclitus, fragment no. 53: ‘War is both father and king of all, some he has shown forth as gods and others as men, some he has made slaves and others free.’ Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [2003] 2005), p. 8. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 2nd edn (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, [1999] 2006), p. 1. I will henceforth refer to this second, extended, edition of Kaldor’s study. Ibid. p. 2. Ibid. p. 17. Ibid. p. 26. Episode 5 – Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour, in David Kennedy’s series ‘How to Think About Science’, CBC Radio, 30 January 2009. Kaldor, p. 32. Churchill, Far Away, pp. 43–4.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 487

30/01/2012 16:24

488

julia boll

15. Neil Curtis, War and Social Theory: World, Value and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. x. 16. Ibid. p. x. See also Hardt and Negri, p. 39. 17. Curtis, p. ix. 18. Ibid. p. ix. 19. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Sydney: Power Publications, 2000). 20. Ulrich Beck, Weltrisikogesellschaft. Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Sicherheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), p. 273. 21. Churchill, This Is a Chair, p. 40. 22. Ibid. p. 41. 23. Ibid. p. 44. 24. Ibid. p. 55. 25. Ibid. on both pp. 44 and 55. 26. Janelle Reinelt, ‘On Feminist and Sexual Politics’, in Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 18–35 (pp. 32–3). 27. Caryl Churchill, ‘Foreword’ to Plays: 4, p. viii. 28. Cf. R. Darren Gobert, ‘On Performance and Selfhood in Caryl Churchill’, in Aston and Diamond, p. 116. 29. Churchill, Far Away, pp. 35–6. 30. Cf. Cordula Quint, ‘Terror of the Contemporary Sublime: Regional Responses to the Challenges of Internationalism and Globalization in the Drama of Caryl Churchill and David Edgar’, in Jochen Achilles, Ina Bergmann and Birgit Däwes (eds), Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003), pp. 178–9; also José Ramón Prado Pérez, ‘Issues of Representation and Political Discourse in Caryl Churchill’s Latest Work’, in Margarete Rubik and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (eds), (Dis)Continuities. Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2002), p. 103. 31. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 8. 32. Hardt and Negri, p. 3. See also Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 25. 33. Hardt and Negri, p. 7. 34. Ibid. p. 12; original emphasis. 35. Beck, p. 13. 36. Cf. Bauman, p. 11. 37. Beck, p. 27. 38. Ibid. p. 28. 39. Ibid. p. 84. 40. Ibid. p. 279. 41. Bauman, p. 9. 42. Ibid. p. 26. 43. Ibid. p. 55. 44. Churchill, Far Away, pp. 41–2. 45. Ibid. pp. 14–15. 46. Ibid. pp. 12–21. 47. Ibid. pp. 23, 37. 48. Ibid. pp. 40–1. 49. Ibid. p. 30. 50. Ibid. p. 8. 51. Cf. Prado Pérez, pp. 98, 101. 52. Reviewed by Ulrike Kahle, ‘Far Away’, Theater Heute, 4 June 2001, p. 1515.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 488

30/01/2012 16:24

contemporary war drama: caryl churchill

489

53. Bedrock Productions, directed by Jimmy Fay, 2004, available at http://www.bedrockproductions.com/productions/far-away/, accessed 14 September 2011. Detainees in American prisons wear the orange overalls when being transferred etc. 54. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London and New York: Continuum, [1988] 2005), p. 268. 55. Ibid. p. 281. 56. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1995] 1998), p. 8. 57. Ibid. p. 9. 58. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 8. 59. Cf. Prado Pérez, p. 99. 60. Churchill, Far Away, p. 31. 61. Quint, p. 108. 62. Michael Billington, ‘Surreal Shocks from Caryl Churchill’, review in The Guardian, 2 December 2000. 63. Girard, pp. 88–9. 64. Bauman, p. 53. 65. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), pp. 33–4. 66. Ibid. p. 19. 67. Ibid. p. 30. 68. Ibid. p. 17. 69. Churchill, Seven Jewish Children, tableau 7. 70. See, for example, the discussions in The Atlantic. Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘Caryl Churchill: Gaza’s Shakespeare, or Fetid Jew-Baiter?’, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2009/03/caryl-churchill-gaza-apos-s-shakespeare-or-fetid-jew-baiter/9823/, accessed 20 January 2011; also portrayed in Chris Wilkinson’s theatre blog on The Guardian’s website (‘Noises off: Controversy about Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children hits US”’, available at www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/apr/01/caryl-churchill-noises-off, accessed 20 January 2011).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 489

30/01/2012 16:24

49

NUCLEAR WAR IN SCIENCE FICTION David Seed

A

lthough the first description in fiction of an atomic explosion occurs as early as 1895, we associate that subject particularly with the Cold War.1 Throughout this period novels struggled to give narrative expression to an eventuality which was both dreaded and expected. Most nuclear war novels perform the function of literary jeremiads, warning the reader and the broader public of the dangers within the arms race. Jacques Derrida has argued that ‘nuclear weaponry depends, more than any weaponry in the past, [. . .] upon structures of information, and communication, structures of language.’ He continues: ‘but the phenomenon is also fabulously textual to the extent that, for the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it.’2 In other words, the nuclear subject is a unique one in depending on the cultural discourse of the period for its articulation and in its speculative dimension. The only partial glimpses of what such a war might involve were offered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but allusions to those events gradually disappeared from fiction as the destructive capability of nuclear weapons increased. Science fiction was uniquely suited to give narrative expression to nuclear fears in that it is an extrapolative mode, speculatively extending tendencies seen in the writer’s present. The overwhelming preponderance of Anglophone nuclear war narratives were published in the US and we shall see a constant tension between the fear that a nuclear war might mark the ultimate end of civilisation and the hope that a saving remnant might survive. Even before East–West tensions arose, Murray Leinster’s The Murder of the USA (1946) described not a war but an unprovoked nuclear strike. With one eye on Pearl Harbor, Leinster’s novel and those which followed all describe the US’s posture as defensive and reactive. Nuclear war fiction explores the deep-seated civilian fears as adumbrated by William Faulkner in his 1950 Nobel Prize address: ‘When will I be blown up?’ On the other hand, science fiction is implicated in US defence policy, at times offering scenarios which the military have developed.3 The vast majority of nuclear war novels address its aftermath, which inevitably distances and to a certain extent sanitises the subject, breaking it down into questions like genetic mutation and civil reconstruction. It is as if the nuclear strike itself was unimaginable, only to be approached from a future point of retrospection. One of the very few narratives to supply graphic descriptions of a bomb drop was Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow! (1954), which describes the fate of two Midwestern cities. Wylie was a government consultant on civil defence (CD) issues and clearly intended his novel to warn readers of the necessity for preparedness. The point is made schematically as a contrast between the city

490

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 490

30/01/2012 16:25

nuclear war in science fiction

491

with a civil defence plan and that without, but the real impact of the novel is felt when ‘X-day’ arrives. A city editor is one of the first to register the visual blast: It was a Light of such intensity that Coley could see nothing except its lightness and its expanding dimensions. It swelled over the sky above and burst down toward him. He felt, at the same time, a strange physical sensation – just a brief start of a sensation – as if gravity had vanished and he, too, were a rushing thing, and a prickling through his body, and a heat. And he was no more.4 Like the famous city blast in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), the bombing is described in slow motion, a method also used in William Sansom’s accounts of the London Blitz in Fireman Flower (1944). The micro-seconds are slowed down and sequenced in order to make comprehensible a momentary experience which, as we see here, is fatal to the observer. In that sense the description approaches Derrida’s notion of the ‘fabulously textual’. In his attempts to convey the enormity of a nuclear blast, Wylie is describing an impossible experience, one too rapid and too fatal for human perception. Then, drawing on accounts of Hiroshima, Wylie presents a montage of casualties: a baby cut open by flying glass, a man walking on his shin bones after his feet have been sheared off, and horrendous burns. And, once the first wave of casualties has been registered, the urban centre is engulfed in a fire storm. Wylie’s grim descriptive realism very soon became superseded by accelerations in nuclear delivery, since intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) minimised warning times; and by the radically increased scale of destruction by such weapons. Indeed, Wylie’s subsequent scepticism about civil defence emerges clearly in Triumph (1963), where there is only minimal human survival of a massive nuclear holocaust which lays waste to the entire northern hemisphere. Nuclear war fiction constantly evokes conditions of emergency: in 1963 the novelist Poul Anderson declared: ‘the present moment is the most dangerous in the history of mankind.’5 In this period, one form of ultimacy, the notion of cosmic ending, shades into another, usually signalled by superlatives. Apocalypse became familiar through its science fiction expressions. One of the most powerful early accounts of nuclear war is The Last Day (1959) by Helen Clarkson (the pen name of Helen McCloy), which begins as a description of a couple’s holiday on an oddly deserted Massachusetts coast. A radio supplies news of an impending crisis. By blanking out the identity of ‘the enemy’ Clarkson avoids crude nationalism and instead focuses on the nuclear arms industry as a domestic issue which characters debate before and after the bombs fall. The nuclear event seems to be entirely visual, a ‘flash in slow motion’, followed by the remorseless effects of fallout. Clarkson’s narrative begins in the realist mode and then gradually morphs into science fiction as the consequences of the bombs make themselves felt. The novel explicitly challenges national faith in the happy ending by denying the reader any relief. The wife-narrator gradually becomes isolated by the deaths around her, until by the end of the novel it seems that the world itself has died. On the last page the narrator settles down to die. Clarkson grimly anticipates Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982) in suggesting that Nature itself is threatened by nuclear war. As in Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, the reader is led into a narrative cul-de-sac giving no indication of the narrative’s provenance and grimly warning of our own imminent fate. Roshwald’s 1959 novel is partly a technological dystopia and partly an exploration of one specific fear which surfaced early in nuclear war fiction, namely that the processes

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 491

30/01/2012 16:25

492

david seed

of nuclear weaponry had become so automated that human control had been lost. The novel is narrated as the diary of X-127, an officer in a subterranean nuclear command bunker. His ‘name’ reflects his dehumanised position within an administrative structure. He lives entirely within a technological environment with its own timetable and functions; and, although the bunker is situated within a national system, Roshwald gives no indication of the identity of that nation or of its enemy. One morning the narrator is given the order to push his button. The resulting images on his screen resemble those of an electronic toy: ‘Aesthetically the picture was quite pleasing. Red blobs and blue and yellow spots, some on the red blobs and some outside them.’6 There is a radical disconnection between action and consequences, between image and referent. The sheer ease of his task gives X-127 food for thought and the remaining sections supply his reflections on the implications of what he has done and describe the ironic contact with the outside world forced upon him as radiation gradually seeps down to his level. Only after the war has taken place is it revealed that twelve rockets escaped the electronic control of the enemy and that the orders to push the buttons had been triggered automatically by the home defence system. Tied to the subject of nuclear attack is the all-important question of survival. From 1949 onwards, the year the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device, civil defence became an institutionalised feature of American life. School ‘duck and cover’ drills became routine; the Federal Civil Defense Administration was set up; and self-help publications began to appear, like Richard Gerstell’s How to Survive an Atomic Bomb (1950) commending the stockpiling of food and preposterously suggesting wide-brimmed hats as radiation shields. At stake was not just the question of survival, but also national morale. Survivalist narratives thus tend to have the political function of reassuring their readership. Judith Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth (1950) brought a stern realism to the subject by describing the necessary transformations that take place in a New York housewife as she struggles to deal with the results of a nuclear strike. Merril’s novel remains a powerful early example of fiction dealing with civil defence, but one which avoids the self-help tradition reinforced by public booklets and by Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas, Babylon.7 This has remained one of the most popular of nuclear war novels, perhaps because it gives such a reassuring account of practical communal reconstruction after the bombs fall. The setting is the small town of Fort Repose in central Florida, far from the urban targets of a strike and the action revolves around the inventive improvisations of a community leader in restoring civic order. The drama is somewhat vitiated by the geographical advantages of its location and both Merril’s and Frank’s narratives were anyway superseded by the proliferation of nuclear weaponry. Robert Heinlein was an ardent campaigner in publicising the dangers of nuclear war. Sceptical about government plans to disperse the populations of cities, he appealed to the reader’s self-reliance in recommending the acquisition of practical skills, a stock of canned food and weapons. Heinlein took a grim pleasure in arguing that the ‘soft’ would not survive a nuclear war and embodied these beliefs in Farnham’s Freehold (1964). The action starts on a note of urgency in the wake of crises in Cuba and Berlin. Farnham, like Heinlein himself at the time, lives in Colorado near the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) centre, that is, within a nuclear target area. His impeccably equipped shelter is his ‘insurance policy’, whose need is confirmed when the local TV station broadcasts an emergency signal. Farnham is clearly a Heinlein surrogate, demonstrating decisiveness and authority in the face of crisis. The early sec-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 492

30/01/2012 16:25

nuclear war in science fiction

493

tions of the novel are written almost entirely in dialogue revealing the different ways in which characters react. Nuclear war, in other words, acts as a test of their resilience and of Farnham’s efficiency. The blast of a ‘Cosmic Bomb’ displaces the group into a future USA where Black Muslims treat American whites as their slaves, a racial fear which is scarcely connected to nuclear war. The survivors finally return to their original present where they run a trading post flying the stars and stripes above their sign, an iconic endorsement of their patriotic grit. Heinlein’s nationalistic confidence in survival was echoed in the 1980s during the debate over Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative by writers like Dean Ing. Ing’s Pulling Through (1983) combines in one volume an account of nuclear survival, primarily depicted in individual and family terms, and practical hints about how to build and equip an effective shelter. This low-key narrative studiously distinguishes itself from the resurgent militaristic science fiction of the 1980s. In Fahrenheit 451 nuclear bombers shriek overhead, largely ignored by an apathetic public. Bradbury dissociates military activity from civilian life and a recurring theme in this fiction is the fear that the US Army was running out of control in an apparent pursuit of the machismo of bigger and bigger weapons. This fear was turned into black comedy in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove (1964), co-written by Terry Southern. Here a paranoid US Air Force officer, convinced that a communist conspiracy is afoot to rob him of his ‘precious bodily fluids’, launches a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union. In the ensuing negotiations between the two premiers it emerges that the Soviets possess a ‘Doomsday Device’, which cannot be controlled. Partly a metaphor for the military–industrial complex identified by President Eisenhower, this device also marks the culmination of a self-perpetuating arms race on the American side. Kubrick’s black comedy emerges through contradiction: SAC (Strategic Air Command) proclaims ‘Peace is our Profession’, but SAC bombers attack the Soviet Union; and the film concludes with Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’ over repeated images of a nuclear blast. In a similar surreal vein, James Morrow’s This is the Way the World Ends (1986) takes an average citizen as its protagonist, who is presented as a scapegoat and prosecuted on behalf of the nation’s unborn after a nuclear holocaust takes place. At one point he signs an agreement with the MAD Hatter, a pun on the Cold War military doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, according to which neither side would launch a nuclear strike because this would inevitably lead to escalation and massive destruction. Civil defence is ridiculed by Morrow as a totally ineffective commercial enterprise implicating the civilian population in the same business as that which produces the weapons.8 It should already be clear that one of the recurrent issues in nuclear war narratives is that of control. In Dr Strangelove both the US and the Soviet Union prove to be the prisoners of their own nuclear systems. The greater their sophistication, the greater the risk of malfunction or autonomous function.9 Ben Bova’s 1976 novel Millennium extends the Cold War into near space. The action takes place in the year 1999 – the string of nines stresses imminence – and concerns satellite-based missile systems. It is set primarily on twin Soviet and US moon bases whose commanders are old friends. Conflict is already happening since each side is shooting down the other’s satellites and to stave off the seemingly inevitable nuclear war the US commander declares Selene (the moon-base) to be independent. Selene possesses non-aggressive military technology; it can destroy any incoming missile but it cannot itself launch missiles against the Earth. The US commander travels to New York and supports his cause of world government. The millennium of the title signifies not a new order about to come into being, but rather the nuclear brink

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 493

30/01/2012 16:25

494

david seed

over which the superpowers must not pass. It is a wish-fulfilment narrative of the rational self-interest perceived to be missing from superpower politics. Nuclear war fiction which presents versions of its aftermath and consequences is frequently focused on the human body, sometimes as mutation. Judith Merril’s muchanthologised 1948 story ‘That Only a Mother’ describes a young couple eagerly awaiting the birth of their first child, but the baby proves to be so deformed that the nurses are uncertain of its gender. Mutation from radiation poisoning was a recurring scenario in the late 1940s and 1950s, implying that nuclear war had damaged the genetic make-up of the body and presenting grim images of the post-nuclear future. In cases like Henry Kuttner’s Mutant (1953) and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955), war has produced children with a telepathic faculty, producing fear in the ‘normal’ population, which stigmatises the telepaths. One of the most grotesque descriptions of self-disgust comes in Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952), where post-nuclear pacifists attempt to expunge aggression by having surgery performed on their limbs, hence the pun in the title. The post-nuclear landscape is at once cultural and territorial. The US – since this is the most frequent instance – becomes fragmented into autonomous regions. Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence (1952) presents the Mississippi as a new quarantine border between the relatively unscathed western states and the eastern ones riddled with fallout and pneumonic plague. In Alfred Coppel’s Dark December (1960) the western terrain is full of craters, ruined towns and the terminally injured. Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka’s Warday: And the Journey Onward (1984) applies the conventions of a travelogue documentary to describe the journeys of its two narrators around a country which no longer exists as a unified nation. California, for instance, has declared independence and slid into totalitarianism. The most common characteristics of these landscapes are their reversion to more primitive ways of life and their fragmentation into smaller communities. Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948) sets the tone for many later novels by showing a post-holocaust America which has lapsed into tribal rituals, the final consequences of a diseased nationalism. This America has to be rediscovered by an exploratory expedition from New Zealand. Huxley’s novel thus exemplifies a characteristic theme of cultural reversion found in many post-nuclear novels, where the surviving society has regressed into pre-industrial forms of organisation. The very title of Neil Barrett’s Through Darkest America (1986) makes clear how, as in Huxley’s novel, America has to be rediscovered and re-explored. Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955) describes a neo-agrarian society which forbids the reading of books. Its young protagonist escapes from his repressive community and goes in search of a legendary underground research centre. The latter represents the archive of neglected history and resembles a museum of the development of nuclear technology, exactly what the new authorities are attempting to conceal behind religious fundamentalism. In other cases the past might be represented through a disused library or simply through the buried traces embedded in the landscape itself, in which case the protagonists become, to use Fredric Jameson’s phrase, archaeologists of the future.10 This is why novels describing a post-nuclear America like Ape and Essence or Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore (1984) describe literal excavations, attempts to bridge over the rupture between past and present brought about by the cataclysm of nuclear war. Unplanned excavation opens one of the most powerful and densely textured nuclear narratives, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). Here a monastic novice stumbles across a disused nuclear bunker in the middle of the Arizona desert. In it he

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 494

30/01/2012 16:25

nuclear war in science fiction

495

finds cryptic fragments of documents and a blueprint. These become cult objects within the novel’s neo-medieval world and introduce the ambitious spread of Miller’s range of reference. The novel displaces the history of the Judaeo-Christian tradition on to the American landscape and reruns history up to the 1950s. This entire sequence takes place after an earlier nuclear war – the Flame Deluge – which has obliterated literacy and produced countless deformed humans. As the novel progresses from its new present, the third into the fourth millennia, Miller recapitulates the cultural history of the West, the (re)discovery of print, the resurgence of science and the formation of the modern nation state. The culmination of the novel comes with the ultimate repetition, that of nuclear war which breaks out afresh between the superpowers. Although the new USA in the novel is recognisable in the state of Texarkana, Miller’s focus is transnational and constitutes nothing less than an ironic attack on one of the most cherished grand narratives of Western culture: that of technological progress. In the introduction to his 1985 anthology Beyond Armageddon, Miller makes his position clear: ‘I point to the West’s idolization of Logos, not to disparage science, [. . .] but to preface the assertion that sometimes the use of reason is so inappropriate as to be either laughably or criminally insane.’11 Reason tied to the imperative of manifest destiny in Miller’s eyes becomes monstrous, hence the prevalence throughout his novel of distortions, distortions of words and of the human form. This motif focuses on the key element of fire, as in Fahrenheit 451 a warming, life-giving force, but also a force for destruction in nuclear weaponry. By the close of the novel Miller suggests that, far from being under human control, history is a script which humanity is ‘doomed’ (as one character reflects) to repeat again and again. In his famous meditation on the nuclear subject quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Derrida stresses how it depends on language and communication systems. We have seen the abstracting and therefore anaesthetising effects of electronic transmission in Roshwald’s Level 7. The final section of Miller’s novel dramatically underlines the inefficiency of modern media. An Autoscribe malfunctions dramatically and a ‘radiogram’ (a missive about the new missiles) prints out in reverse. The congruence between miscommunication and nuclear war recurs in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), where a deformed language has become the carrier of traces from a nuclear age which also climaxed in war. Hoban’s novel is set in an unspecified future but describes a culture resembling that of the Iron Age. In that sense it represents an extreme case of the temporal paradoxes of much nuclear fiction. The action takes place in Kent (Hoban has been a resident of England since 1969) in the distant aftermath of a nuclear war and centres on the eponymous twelve-year-old narrator whose name reflects a dual function: he walks around Kent, in the process ‘riddling’ or puzzling over what he finds. Archaeology figures in the novel as salvage; characters constantly dig up ‘ancient’ artefacts. But the most innovative aspect of the novel lies in its language. Even when speech has been changed in the wake of nuclear war, novels usually preserve a neutral narrative register. Here, however, Riddley’s language is partly a phonetic simplification of English, partly a deformation as can be seen in the following extract from the ‘Eusa Story’. ‘Eusa’ carries connotation of officialdom and a possible echo of ‘USA’. The passage describes a Punch-like struggle which recapitulates the splitting of the atom: Eusa wuz angre he wuz in rayj & he kep pulin on the Littl Man the Addoms owt strecht arms. The Little Man the Addom he begun tu cum a part he cryd [. . .] Owt

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 495

30/01/2012 16:25

496

david seed

uv they 2 peaces uv the Littl Shynin Man the Addom thayr cum shyningnes in wayvs in spredin circels.12 Hoban makes a complex use of puns throughout the novel, here the central one being on ‘atom’ and ‘Adam’. Through this pun nuclear fission is presented as a primal act of violence against humanity ushering in the ‘Bad Time’. Just as Riddley struggles to decipher everything he encounters, so the reader constructs semantic strands from his narrative which expand outwards like the circles which could also be measuring radially the dimension of the nuclear blast and fallout.13 Thus words function like nuclei, shifting meaning from context to context. With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 nuclear war predictably tended to lapse as a subject for fiction. However, Eric L. Harry’s Arc Light (1994) returns to the theme when a hawkish Soviet general launches a strike against China. One miscalculation leads to another and the US is drawn into an undeclared war. Harry packs his novel with details about emergency procedures and nuclear technology, using the thriller method of cutting to and fro between key locations. He shows rational leaders on both sides to be the prisoners of their own systems, which virtually run out of control. In contrast, Brendan DuBois’s Resurrection Day (1999) sets its action in the aftermath of an alternate history account of the Cuban missile crisis, which this time has led to a nuclear exchange. The US of 1972 is run by a military regime headed by one General Curtis, modelled on Curtis LeMay who wanted to bomb and then invade Cuba in 1962. The novel is a cautionary retrospective account of the political power exercised by the military. In that respect it continues the tradition in nuclear war fiction of interrogating the nation’s cultural and political practices.

Notes 1. The first atomic explosion occurs in Robert Cromie’s The Crack of Doom (1895); see Paul Brians, ‘Preface’ to Nuclear Holcausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1984 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987). Expanded edition available at http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/nuclear/, accessed 21 September 2011. 2. Jacques Derrida, ‘NO APOCALYPSE, NOT NOW (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’, Diacritics, 14.2 (1984), p. 23. 3. Thomas B. Allen, War Games: The Secret World of the Creators, Players, and Policy Makers Rehearsing World War III (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987). 4. Philip Wylie, Tomorrow! (New York: Rinehart, 1954), p. 68. 5. Poul Anderson, Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, CT: Monarch Books, 1963), p. 7. 6. Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7, ed. David Seed (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 118. 7. See David Seed, ‘The Debate over Nuclear Refuge’, in Rana Mitter and Patrick Major (eds), Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London: Frank Cass, 2004), pp. 125–32. 8. The militarisation of the US is discussed in Fred J. Cook, The Warfare State (New York: Macmillan, 1962). 9. One of the most famous novels to deal with malfunction was Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), which describes how a faulty condenser almost causes nuclear war. The fail-safe system was brought into operation to prevent such an eventuality. 10. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 496

30/01/2012 16:25

nuclear war in science fiction

497

11. Walter M. Miller and Martin H. Greenberg (eds), Beyond Armageddon: Survivors of the Megawar (London: Robinson, 1987), p. 14. 12. Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker, expanded edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 32. 13. Peter Schwenger, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 31.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 497

30/01/2012 16:25

50

THE CHILDREN’S WAR Katie Trumpener

I

n Hans von Grimmelshausen’s picaresque novel The Adventurous Simplicissimus (Germany, 1669), marauding soldiers notice a twelve-year-old shepherd, rape, torture and murder his family, and torch their farm. He alone survives to narrate the novel – and become a soldier. Across Central Europe, the brutal Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) remained the measure for subsequent wars, and twentieth-century novels for and about children followed Grimmelshausen, focalising war’s horrors through children’s consciousness. In Rudolf Frank’s children’s novel No Hero for the Kaiser (Germany, 1931), fourteen-year-old Jan watches, in September 1914, as clashing German and Russian troops massacre his PolishGerman village. Rueful German soldiers adopt Jan as a mascot, dressing him in their uniform; after Jan’s local knowledge and reconnaissance repeatedly save German lives, army officials plan to ‘reward’ him with German citizenship, making him a poster-child for the German war effort. Yet after his stay in an army hospital serving French, British and Belgian POWs alongside German soldiers, Jan understands that help to ‘his’ side betrays ordinary sufferers on the other side – and silently vanishes, becoming legend. Frank’s children’s novel develops a tale of military heroism and loyalty, yet veers into pacifist fable. Hence its enthusiastic 1931 German reception – and banning and public burning after the Nazi seizure of power. After World War II, Grimmelshausen’s war-traumatised innocent gained wide circulation, centring highly influential adult war novels, memoirs and war films, including Arnošt Lustig’s Diamonds of the Night (Czechoslovakia, 1958), Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (Germany, 1959), Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (USA, 1965), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade (USA, 1969), Walter Kempowski’s German Chronicle series (Germany, 1971–84), Imre Kertesz’s Fateless (Hungary, 1975), J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (UK, 1984), René Clément’s Jeux interdits (France, 1952), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (USSR, 1962) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (USSR, 1985). Anne Holm’s widely read children’s novel, I Am David (Denmark, 1963), focused similarly on a disoriented, peripatetic child (a concentration camp escapee uncertain of his own identity). Most children’s authors hesitated to adopt Grimmelshausen’s picaro, his existential randomness. Yet twentieth-century wars had systematised attacks on civilians, including children. World War I German Zeppelin raids on London and Paris killed dozens, terrifying millions. During the Spanish Civil War, German and Italian bombers terrorised Republican

498

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 498

30/01/2012 16:25

the children’s war

499

cities (Guernica, Madrid, Barcelona). In World War II, fought increasingly as a ‘total war’, bombers repeatedly razed cities and civic infrastructure, sometimes killing tens of thousands (and, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dooming many survivors). Worldwide, millions of children were intentionally killed, orphaned, interned or rendered homeless – despite high-level efforts to shelter them. Already during the Spanish Civil War, some 20,000 niños were evacuated from war zones to safer countries. In 1937, Britain accepted 4,000 Basque niños, and in 1938, 10,000 Jewish children evacuated, on the Kindertransport, from anti-Semitic persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. (Most niños were eventually repatriated. Many Kindertransport refugees never saw their families again; thousands settled permanently in Britain.) Beginning in 1939, the British government organised mass evacuations of children from London and other potential German Air Force target areas, the largest mass displacement in British history. ‘The London stations, accustomed to receiving trainloads of child refugees from the Third Reich, now got down to the business of dispatching trainload after trainload of children the other way.’1 Some 16,000 British children were evacuated overseas to Canada, Australia and the United States – but such programmes disbanded abruptly after German torpedoes sank an evacuee ship, drowning 77 children. (Almost 8,000 British children died in wartime enemy action, including air raids, with similar numbers seriously wounded.) In Germany, five million children were evacuated from air raid-threatened cities (Kinderlandesverschickung). In Japan, half a million children were evacuated from Tokyo in 1944 – and over 800 drowned after the Americans torpedoed one refugee ship. Governments’ efforts to protect domestic children did not preclude the internment, deportation, enslavement, even murder of children deemed ‘alien’. The British interned 14,000 ‘enemy aliens’ on the Isle of Man, including not only Jewish, anti-fascist refugees but 500 children and teenagers. Some Jewish teenagers were later deported to Canadian and Australian prison camps.2 From 1942 onward, the United States and Canada deported 120,000 ethnic Japanese West Coast residents to desolate inland internment camps; over half were children. The 130,000 civilians in Japanese concentration camps included many children. German-organised ghettos and concentration camps interned hundreds of thousands of children, often in life-threatening conditions; across German-occupied Europe, millions of teenagers were ‘conscripted’ or impressed into forced labour (often resembling slavery). In the early 1940s, German secret euthanasia campaigns killed thousands of physically and mentally handicapped German children; later, German authorities systematically murdered a million Jewish and tens of thousands of Gypsy children. Marxist aesthetician Georg Lukács argued influentially in The Historical Novel (1937) that during the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), millions of Europeans experienced historical events as conscripts and civilians, resulting in a change of historical consciousness and the new popularity of historical fiction (particularly Walter Scott’s influential novels). World War II, arguably, marked a similar watershed in civilian consciousness – and in children’s literature. Millions were profoundly, lastingly affected by the war – whose delayed effects belatedly galvanised new models of children’s literature. Children’s literature was particularly well established in Britain. Yet until the mid twentieth century, it offered a contradictory account of wartime experience, bifurcated along genre and gender lines. Adventure, magical and historical fiction treated the intact household as a limit to action. For the plot to begin, child protagonists needed to be orphaned, cast away, or left by absent or negligent parents; war offered a particularly

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 499

30/01/2012 16:25

500

katie trumpener

dramatic, prolonged and perilous opening to adventure and history. Nineteenth-century boys’ fiction framed war as testing courage and prowess, girls’ fiction as testing endurance and loyalty. Boys’ fiction imagined wartime children ‘liberated’ from the home and formal education; girls’ fiction envisioned them shackled more than ever to domestic chores. Girls’ fiction extolled the mute heroism of drudgery and self-sacrifice, yet generally saw this feminised realm as innately less important than the male sphere of action. Yet during World War I, girls’ fiction began registering war’s horrors, and after 1945, once-opposed modes for representing war began to converge. Adventure and fantasy fiction still stressed the romance of combat, yet began registering a new dissociation, presenting home as lost utopia. Girls’ fiction, meanwhile, began representing war as literal and psychic unhousing, which left families sundered, transformed beyond recognition.

War Time In August 1914, eleven-year-old Annemarie Braun recovers from scarlet fever in a North Sea island children’s sanatorium. The outbreak of war shatters her seaside idyll. At risk of being stranded for the duration, the children are swept into the island’s panicked evacuation. Annemarie squeezes onto the last ship for the mainland, then an overflowing train. In the melee, her favourite doll is lost forever; separated from her guardians, she herself must be helped by strangers to reach the safety of home. In transit, she encounters the mass hysteria of war, something of its shock, randomness and brutality. Thus ends Nesthäkchen in the Children’s Home (1915), the third of Else Ury’s ten-novel Nesthäkchen series. A Berliner whose nickname means ‘nestling’, ‘baby of the family’, Annemarie moves through the predictable stages of womanhood (tomboy, bluestocking student, mother, grandmother), a serene existence punctuated by small disappointments, misbehaviours, misunderstandings. The exception is volume 3’s eruption of world war. Yet volume 4, Nesthäkchen and the World War (1917), describes war’s subsequent unfolding from a settled, patriotic perspective. Back in Berlin, Annemarie rejoices when war preparations disrupt school, yet abandons her tomboy ways to throw herself into war work, knitting for the troops and adopting an orphaned refugee baby. Sometimes her zeal proves misplaced. She balks at learning French, an ‘enemy’ language, believing inevitable German victory will soon force all French to learn German. To raise money for the war effort, she fines family members using French or English coinages instead of ‘German’ words. She cuts her friendly Siamese neighbour, thinking him Japanese, and rallies her class against a Polish-speaking war refugee, believing her a Russian spy – yet repents after learning the girl’s father is a German front officer. During the Weimar Republic, Nesthäkchen and the World War became Ury’s most popular book, Ury’s series enshrined as the German girls’ classic. Yet during the Third Reich, Ury’s books were officially condemned, because Ury was Jewish; in 1943, Ury herself was murdered in Auschwitz.3 After 1945, Ury’s series was repeatedly reissued in West Germany, regaining its classic status but never its former ubiquity. For its Wilhelmine setting now seemed quaint. Volume 4, now considered ‘militaristic’, was simply omitted from all post-war reprintings. In original sequence, volumes 3 and 4 offered startling tonal discontinuities, together delimiting the twentieth-century possibilities for children’s war literature: a historical novel of the recent past, bringing child readers close enough to war’s terrors to feel the cold breath of history – or a domestic novel ‘normalising’ and neutralising war experience, everyday travails contributing to a patriotic war effort and moral education.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 500

30/01/2012 16:25

the children’s war

501

Lucy Maud Montgomery struggles to reconcile these possibilities in Rilla of Ingleside (Canada, 1921), the wrenching final volume in her Anne of Green Gables series. Rilla’s plot closely parallels Nesthäkchen in the Great War. In 1914, Anne Shirley Blythe’s daughter Marilla is a lively, wilful teenager. Then her nature is ‘changed and matured and deepened’ by wartime suffering.4 Like the briskly cheerful Nesthäkchen, Rilla spearheads war work, knits socks and adopts a war orphan. Yet Rilla also agonises over war’s human cost. In 1917, Canada’s introduction of the draft inaugurated a prolonged conscription crisis (with riots in Quebec). Montgomery’s novel explores the domestic dimensions and ramifications of that crisis. In 1914, while Ingleside’s young men rush to enlist, Rilla’s beloved brother Walter hesitates, grimly predicting ‘years before the dance of death is over’, and warning of ‘the Piper’, whose ‘awful and irresistible music’ will bring grief to millions, ‘every man and woman and child in Canada’.5 Walter dies in battle. Yet like John McCrae’s 1915 ‘In Flanders Fields’, Walter’s prophetic poem, ‘The Piper’ becomes a popular memorial to the war dead. While Ingleside righteously persecutes its few remaining pacifists and war resisters, Walter’s grief-wrenched sister, mother and fiancée struggle to find meaning in a distant war, a violent world. Great war literature, Montgomery insists, is apocalyptic and visionary rather than comforting, describing the reconsecration, then breaking of the domestic world. The advent of war, Ury and Montgomery demonstrate, even ruptures generic conventions. Series fiction posits a full, normal, lived-out life cycle; its ultimate horizon is generational succession, perpetuation. In moments of mass death, however, some generations are lost forever – and with them any illusion of unbroken cyclicality. In 1941, Eleanor Estes began publishing episodic children’s novels about the fatherless Moffat family, drawing on Estes’s 1910s working-class childhood. The series’ third novel, Rufus M. (USA, 1943), published after the United States entered World War II, chronicles a World War I parallel, as Connecticut’s children join the nascent war effort. One Moffat, a Red Cross volunteer, sings and acts for soldiers; another knits military scarves and sweaters. Rufus’s class proudly knits string washcloths, which begin identically but develop in expressively idiosyncratic ways. Rufus, a messy, left-handed penman, knits ‘the way he wrote, with large loose generous stitches’.6 The final washcloth – wide, dirty, holefilled – must be boiled before deemed fit for the front. The Red Cross is to distribute the washcloths. Yet when his class attends a troop send-off, Rufus gives his washcloth directly to a departing soldier, drawing the wrath of teacher and principal – and a long-cherished postcard from the soldier himself: ‘The washcloth you knitted sure comes in handy. My buddies and I all take turns.’7 At war’s end, Rufus puts a return message into the family stove, asking the soldier to bring him any leftover, demobilised pony. The family’s written hopes for better times are also cast into the stove, becoming smoke. Estes’s closing image suggests apotheosis, epic history and everyday life mingled. The washcloth itself embodied mythic, talismanic powers: soiled, humble, embodying a child’s gusto, it expands almost magically to serve a whole platoon. War intensifies the Moffats’ economic fragility – yet formalises their anchoring sense of community, and fosters creative self-expression, from pageantry to knitting. Montgomery enacts the death or transfiguration of a life world; Estes, a vernacular modernist, celebrates war’s intensified expressivity. Woman modernists, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued, often found world war personally liberating, opening male occupations, opportunities for self-realisation.8 Yet children felt increased vulnerability, reduced agency, shattered security. War pushes

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 501

30/01/2012 16:25

502

katie trumpener

children into partial maturity, but only by stripping them of their illusions, innocence or homes. Nesthäkchen in the Children’s Home and Rilla are permeated by catastrophe. In 1943, Estes can still remember World War I as everyday magic. Thereafter, children’s war fiction develops a darker emotional palette, tinged with vertigo and horror.

War Games: Scouting for Boys Napoleon’s 1806 occupation of Germany catalysed a lingering German preoccupation with martial valour and civil defence. Nineteenth-century picture books, Wilhelmine and Third Reich primers depicted military parades and boys’ war games.9 During the Weimar Republic, such militarism was refuted in pacifist texts like Frank’s No Hero for the Kaiser. Yet the Nazis, Erika Mann polemicised in School for Barbarians: Education under the Nazis (USA, 1938), rapidly remilitarised both school curricula (jingoistic history lessons; military calculations as arithmetic problems) and childhood leisure (Nazi youth organisations’ paramilitary drilling, marching and scouting). In Britain, long protected from invasion by its geography (and legendary navy), children’s literature either avoided war or treated it as a game, implicitly linked to empirebuilding. Early modern chapbooks, long the mainstay of children’s reading, emphasised military battles and martial feats. Yet during the Romantic period, children’s literature was reshaped by reformist, Rousseauian and Evangelical women who eschewed war (and even adventure) as children’s subjects. The Napoleonic Wars galvanised Scott’s novels – yet had little immediate impact on children’s fiction.10 Yet many nineteenth-century children read Scott, while children’s authors adapted Scottian models.11 G. A. Henty’s historical novels – including With Clive in India, The Beginnings of an Empire (UK, 1884) and With Frederick the Great, A Tale of the Seven Years War (UK, 1898) – placed child protagonists amidst historical conflicts, accompanying army campaigns, participants in and witnesses to history. In James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leatherstocking Tales (USA, 1823–41), Scott-inspired historical novels of the French and Indian Wars, Native American informants taught white frontiersmen to track, scout and forage, lore codified in Karl May’s four Winnetou novels (Germany, 1893–1910), and Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages (USA, 1903) and Wild Animals I Have Known (USA, 1899), naturalist works honing woodcraft through animal observation. In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (UK, 1894), a child learns survival skills from (anthropomorphised) jungle animals; in Kipling’s Kim (UK, 1901), an Anglo-Indian military orphan, adept in several Indian languages and religious traditions, is trained to spy for the British imperial forces. Late nineteenth-century British troops officially learned Leatherstocking’s scouting skills, from military manuals like Robert Baden-Powell’s Reconnaissance and Scouting (UK, 1884) and Aids to Scouting for NCOs and Men (UK, 1899) – and during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Baden-Powell’s own deployment of local teenagers as messengers and orderlies helped British forces in Mafeking (British Bechuanaland) surmount a 217-day siege against greatly superior Boer forces. Baden-Powell envisioned British children, too, as a potential auxiliary militia, prepared for military invasion, learning reconnaissance and outdoor survival skills. Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (UK, 1908) launched Scouting as a mass movement, which soon spread from Britain to North America and the empire, drawing girls alongside boys. Immersed in Thompson Seton and Kipling, Baden-Powell drew on The Jungle Book for Scouting lore, and sharpened Scouts’ memories with ‘Kim’s Game’ (a memorisation exercise central to Kim’s reconnaissance training).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 502

30/01/2012 16:25

the children’s war

503

Generations of children embraced Scouting’s military drills, hierarchy and comradeship. During both World Wars, Scouts assisted the war effort both with scrap-metal drives and as a trained network of emergency helpers and watchers, alert for fifth columnists. In children’s literature, too, juvenile reconnaissance, adventure and spy stories converged. In Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (Germany, 1929), mobilised children track and entrap a criminal; the children’s ‘gang’ in Erika Mann’s A Gang of Ten (USA, 1942) is simultaneously war’s product and antidote: at a residential school, an international crosssection of war orphans, child evacuees and refugees unite, foiling Nazi plotters. Domesticating Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (UK, 1883), Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series (UK, 1930–47) commemorates Lake District vacations for the Walkers, a merchant navy officer’s children, and the Blackett sisters, aspiring ‘pirates’. Their games – sailing, camping, exploring and mock naval battles – teach practical survival skills, daring and self-reliance, and reshape the family to military hierarchies, preparing the Walker boys for future naval or colonial service. Yet Ransome’s initial Swallows and Amazons (1930) centres on their sister, a nascent writer whose reading mediates imaginative play as Sir Walter Raleigh encountering primitive natives, her reverent quoting John Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ itself linking literary experience to exploration. Alongside practical skills for imperial life, Ransome’s children model intuitive, interpretive alertness. In the mode of John Buchan or Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (UK, 1903), they foil poachers, elude surveillance and counter real-life pirates in the North, Caribbean and China Seas. Ransome’s series elaborated an Edwardian Scouting ethos. Others celebrated – or counteracted – combat experience. W. E. Johns’s Biggles series (UK, 1932–1970) described the World Wars from the cockpit, its jingoist identification with RAF fighter pilots untroubled by aerial warfare’s moral ambiguities. During World War I, Hugh Lofting, conversely, was appalled by mistreated war horses. To avoid describing such horrors, his front-line letters to his children instead developed the story of Doctor Doolittle. Lofting’s twelve Doolittle books (UK, 1920–52) created an alternative universe where animal and human species become mutually intelligible, a utopian conceit paralleling internationalist political initiatives like the League of Nations, and pacifist narratives (No Hero for the Kaiser) of solidarity transcending national or linguistic divides. In C. S. Lewis’s seven Chronicles of Narnia (UK, 1950–6) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (UK, 1954–5), epic apocalyptic struggle necessitates cross-species’ alliances, sometimes reminiscent of World War II. Lewis conceived the Chronicles after four schoolgirl evacuees received wartime billeting in his house; in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), four Pevensies, evacuees from London’s Blitz, exploring their billet, tumble into a parallel world they help save. The Pevensie siblings are ordinary children, strongly reminiscent of Ransome’s Walkers, yet their surname suggests their preordained role in the war of the worlds. In 1066, William the Conqueror’s invading army landed at Pevensey. Now, during Germany’s attempted conquest of Britain, the Pevensies help repel dark forces. Writing during and after World War II, Tolkien, Oxford professor of AngloSaxon, retrofitted his light-hearted Hobbit (1937) as epic, drawing on medieval epic and personal Great War traumas. Like Lewis, Tolkien valorises martial prowess, just war. Hobbits reluctant to relinquish domestic life soon grasp it as an ideal worth fighting for. Lewis’s and Tolkien’s epic form and apocalyptic urgency shaped most subsequent fantasy literature. Since the 1960s, time-slip novels like Pauline Clarke’s The Twelve and the Genii (UK, 1963), Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes (UK, 1969), Mabel Esther

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 503

30/01/2012 16:25

504

katie trumpener

Allen’s Time to Go Back (UK, 1972) and Diane Wynne Jones’s A Tale of Time City (UK, 1987) have amplified Lewis’s and Tolkien’s linkage of war, trauma and time travel. Lewis’s protagonists disappear from a war-ravaged ‘real’ world where they are accidental victims into a parallel universe where their choices have cosmic consequences; Tolkien’s reader travels from the atomic era into a world where individual heroism still turns the tide. Post-war children’s authors celebrate their predecessors’ imaginative geographies yet introduce a hermeneutics of suspicion. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (UK, 1995–2000) challenges Lewis’s theological certainties, gender politics, racism and xenophobia. In Joan Linton’s The File on Fräulein Berg (UK, 1980), three Belfast schoolgirls spend World War II stalking their German teacher, a putative Nazi spy. Linton’s narrator, a working-class scholarship girl, later discovers Fräulein Berg was a Nazi-traumatised German-Jewish émigré. As she always half-knew, their surveillance involved scapegoating, redirecting sectarian fears around Irish partition and the girls’ own class differences. She herself half-identified with the pariah, escaping her conscience by immersion in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s distant literary world. In wartime Toronto, conversely, homesick British evacuees in Kit Pearson’s Guests of War trilogy (Canada, 1989–94) escape into Swallows and Amazons, The Jungle Book and Kim’s game, literary echoes of imperial war games evoking their lost home. In Britain, crashed German airmen inspired elaborate espionage games. In Canada, Blitz experiences and war games become sources of prestige – and subject to rethinking. Detective or espionage skills yield to empathy: Pearson’s evacuee protagonist defends scapegoated German-Canadian classmates, eventually becoming a pacifist. Clarke and Farmer use a different literary legacy – Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë’s Gothic-tinged novels – to meditate on war play and historical empathy. Clarke’s modernday children discover the Brontës’ childhood tin soldiers, reanimated Napoleonic War veterans. Farmer’s Charlotte repeatedly timeslips, trading places with a girl attending her boarding school in 1918. Helped by her adoptive sister Emily, and war-bereaved Agnes, Charlotte adjusts to wartime conditions – and grasps the Great War’s long emotional aftershock. Back in the present, one elderly teacher still mourns a long-dead fiancé. Charlotte is devastated to learn her alter ego died in the 1918 influenza epidemic: all along, she has inhabited a landscape of ghosts. Distinctions blur between war and peace, past and present; ‘what had happened to her would go on mattering, just as what had happened in the war would go on mattering, permanently.’12

The Home and the World Playing at piracy, war and colonial conquest, Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons constitute an aquatic home guard. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (USA, 1868–9) musters the March sisters in a female-led home guard, while their father is wounded on Civil War battlefields – and their mother goes to nurse him. Absorbed by quarrels, celebrations and daily chores, the Marches repeatedly forget the distant war – yet their father’s imperilment in the abolitionist cause buttresses their struggle for selflessness. Later, Jo March marries a lonely German émigré, exiled veteran of an equally idealistic fight for liberal democracy. Domestic fiction, Alcott suggests, has a special relationship to war literature. War frequently redefines what home is, testing families’ adaptability. Is Christmas still Christmas if father is away, fighting? Twentieth-century authors pressed further: can a ghetto, secret annex, refugee barracks, internment camp become a home?

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 504

30/01/2012 16:25

the children’s war

505

During World War II, children’s and child writers strained to affirm such possibilities. Meta Samson’s Spatz Shapes Herself, written inside Nazi Germany (although published posthumously, in 1990) shows a Jewish nine-year-old struggling to become more responsible, while adapting to increasingly constrained, perilous circumstances; meanwhile, her mother attempts to arrange their emigration, prepare Spatz for life and enable an almost normal childhood. Samson based Spatz on her own situation, Spatz on her own daughter (although her nickname, Sparrow, also evokes Ury’s Nesthäkchen). Spatz was slated for publication in 1937, but its German-Jewish publisher was forcibly suspended after the Kristallnacht pogrom; in 1942, Samson and her daughter perished in Auschwitz. In P. L. Travers’s eyewitness novel I Go By Sea, I Go By Land (UK, 1941), children’s transports from Britain to North America present fascinating opportunities. Even Anne Frank, facing mortal peril in occupied Holland, struggles to narrate her situation as an adventure – although Frank’s diary reveals family life reshaped by duress. For anti-fascist exiles Kurt Held and Lisa Tetzner, war’s catastrophes, the collapse of the family and traditional communities, offered political opportunities, potentially empowering children to build a new order. In Held’s Giovanni and Maria (Switzerland, 1955), echoing Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (UK, 1887–9) and Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (Italy, 1883), Italian war orphans are recruited into criminal gangs, before uniting to found a children’s democracy. Early reviewers condemned the harshness of Tetzner’s nine-volume The Children of No. 67 (Germany/Switzerland, 1932–48), an epic attempt to describe a generation’s divergent fates. Opening in 1929 in a Berlin tenement, it follows child inhabitants through the Third Reich, into the Hitler Youth, resistance or peripatetic exile. Some are killed, others foster fellow orphans. No. 67 is levelled in an air raid, burying hundreds. Yet some survivors – and their international coevals – converge in post-war Germany to build a different world. Virginia Sorensen’s Newbery-winning Miracles on Maple Hill (USA, 1956) celebrated the reintegration of returning veterans, the redemptive power of family, community. Later autobiographical fiction like Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia (USA, 1968) and Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (UK, 1971) showed war inverting generational hierarchies, weakening or severing family bonds, destroying children’s personal and national identity. Yet even here family and community slowly re-emerge, in new forms and places. Deported in 1941 from Soviet-occupied Poland to Siberia, Hautzig’s family struggles for survival – yet Hautzig discovers Russian literature and begins integrating into Siberian society. Bawden’s Carrie, evacuated from urban England to rural Wales, discovers a compensatory cultural and social world. During the early 1970s, women began publishing wrenching accounts of wartime childhoods as deportees, émigrés and hidden children. Drawing implicitly on psychoanalytic (and feminist) models of trauma, blockage and neurosis, they showed family dynamics mirroring, memorialising, even refighting the war, deepening survivors’ dissociation. War-damaged lives prove difficult to repair. Long interned as enemy aliens, the Japanese-American protagonists of Yoshiko Uchida’s The Journey to Topaz: A Story of the Japanese-American Evacuation (USA, 1971) and Journey Home (USA, 1978) return to their old hometown, but remain displaced, disenfranchised, disoriented. Judith Kerr’s Berlin-Jewish family fled to Switzerland, France and Britain. Repeatedly forced to uproot herself and to parent her helpless mother, the protagonist of Kerr’s autobiographical trilogy When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Bombs on Aunt Dainty and A Small Person Far Away (UK, 1971–9) gains new equilibrium, a closer maternal bond, yet remains inwardly displaced and terrified to revisit Berlin.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 505

30/01/2012 16:25

506

katie trumpener

The novelistic sequel or sequence enables the revisiting – and revision – of earlier stocktakings, providing nested narratives of psychic strain and recovery. In Kerr and Uchida’s initial novels, child protagonists reach a fragile peace, a tentative acceptance of their fates. Yet subsequent narratives reveal this equilibrium as short-lived, troubled or undone by further trials. Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses (USA, 1964), Johanna Reiss’s The Upstairs Room (USA, 1972) and The Journey Back (USA, 1977) and Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener, rue Labat (France, 1993) verge on avant-garde texts, their stripped-down style reflecting harrowing bereftness: parents prove unable to protect their children, putative rescuers prove entrapping seducers. After intimate losses, failures and betrayals, these child survivors note permanent impairment to their capacity for intimacy, difficulty rejoining the world as if nothing had happened. Detailing her father’s deportation, her hidden childhood in occupied Paris, Kofman indicts her forced assimilation into French culture, grounding Kofman’s subsequent life as a (feminist) philosopher, yet creating unbearable voids of loss; Kofman committed suicide shortly after her memoir’s publication. Reiss’s autobiographical children’s novels, Upstairs and Journey, recount her hidden childhood in occupied Holland and difficult post-war reintegration. A Hidden Life: A Memoir of August 1969 (USA, 2009) probes more lasting emotional scars; twenty-five years after the war, Reiss’s half-buried past apparently contributed to her husband’s mental breakdown and suicide, a few days after visiting her wartime hiding place. Her refuge there, Reiss realises, involved implicit sexual menace; their post-war home failed to heal her husband or herself. The notion of war trauma as transmissible to family members preoccupies the ‘third generation’, offspring of child Holocaust and war survivors. In the 1950s, Anne Frank became the emblematic wartime child, writing for a posterity she confidently expected, personally doomed yet programmatically optimistic. (The diary’s terse epilogue allowed readers to avoid imagining her final sufferings.) Later memoirists detailed childhood despair – while straining to emphasise their own escape, survival, redemption or reintegration. In their wake, Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners (UK, 1985), Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight, Mr. Tom (UK, 1982) and Linda Newbery’s Blitz Boys (UK, 2000) represent aerial bombardment as apocalyptic shock: randomly death-dealing; leaving houses bisected, exposing intimate spaces; smashing families; reactivating veterans’ World War I shell shock. Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (UK, 1984) and Westall’s Blitzcat (UK, 1989) combine Grimmelshausen picaresque with therapeutic notions of homecoming and makeshift community: talismanic animals circulate through world war zones, alternately intuiting and ignoring war’s realities, inchoately attached to distant masters. Like Fred Wilcox’s war-dog film The Courage of Lassie (USA, 1946) and Holm’s David, such narratives present war as irreparably damaging yet the survival of primal bonds and homing instincts ground psychic reconstruction. Meg Rosoff ’s How I Live Now (UK, 2004), finally, envisions a post-9/11 world war involving germ warfare, armed occupation, random massacres and government betrayal. Child relatives are separated and interned, becoming traumatised Grimmelshausen picaros, stumbling through a landscape of mass death – and reassembling as a therapeutic collective. When war began, the teenage protagonist took comfort in an incestuous affair. By war’s end, Wuthering Heights has become Jane Eyre: her cousin is crazed by war trauma and survival guilt – so she becomes his nurse rather than lover, coaxing him back among the living. In the 1960s and 1970s, autobiographical depictions of wartime deaths and dysfunction broke taboos – and remained controversial with educators and librarians. Yet even as

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 506

30/01/2012 16:25

the children’s war

507

school culture began moving towards more therapeutic educational models, many schools escalated a curricular focus on wartime trauma. Former concern over children’s ability to process disturbing, violent material has yielded to the implicit belief that, in an age of cultural and moral relativism, only large-scale catastrophes, wars and genocides can give children ethic imperatives, a moral compass. Grade-schoolers are routinely asked to identify with Anne Frank – or Zlata Filipovic´’s self-consciously Frankian Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo (Yugoslavia, 1992). While journalists regularly focalise war coverage through children’s perspective (helping adult audiences grasp their human cost), reading Frank or Filipovic´ putatively inoculates children against warmongering. War narratives increasingly frame children’s schooldays and pop-cultural surround. Recent children’s literature struggles with the Rodney King riots, Rwandan genocide, September 1l, Guantánamo Bay. . . The World Wide Web documents both intermittent juvenile jadedness about their war trauma curriculum (child readers’ reviews complaining that Journey to Topaz or Kerr’s 1971 When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit drag, between mortal threats) and apparently insatiable juvenile appetite for online combat games, including apocalyptic quest narratives extending Lewis and Tolkien. For Nesthäkchen, Rilla and Simplicissimus, war nightmarishly transformed tranquil surroundings. For many contemporary children, it is (vicariously) all war all the time.

Notes 1. Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘Letter from London’, 3 September 1939, in The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes (London: Pandora, 2008), pp. xxv–xxviii (p. xxvii). 2. Michael Kerr, As Far as I Remember (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2002), ch. 37; Henry Kreisel, ‘Diary of an Internment Camp’, reprinted in Shirley Neuman (ed.), Another Country: Writings By and About Henry Kreisel (Edmonton, AB: NeWest, 1975), pp. 18–44. Juliet Gardiner’s The Children’s War: The Second World War through the Eyes of the Children of Britain (London: Imperial War Museum, 2005) provided most statistics cited here. 3. Marianne Brentzel, Nesthäkchen kommt ins KZ. Eine Annäherung an Else Ury, 1877–1943 (Zurich: Edition Ebersbach, 1992). 4. Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 113. 5. Ibid. pp. 33–4. 6. Eleanor Estes, Rufus M. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943), p. 36. 7. Ibid. p. 56. 8. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988–94). 9. Ingeborg Waldschmidt, Fibeln, Fibeln. . . Deutsche Fibel der Vergangenheit (Berlin: Deutsche Volkskundemuseum, 1987), p. 17. 10. Matthew Grenby, ‘“Surely there is no British boy or girl who has not heard of the battle of Waterloo!” War and Children’s Literature in the Age of Napoleon’, in Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel (eds), Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), pp. 39–58. 11. Ala Alryyes, Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 12. Penelope Farmer, Charlotte Sometimes (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), p. 189.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 507

30/01/2012 16:25

51

THE TROUBLES WITH THE THRILLER: NORTHERN IRELAND, POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND THE PEACE PROCESS Aaron Kelly

T

he thriller has come to dominate the fictional representation of the Northern Irish State, with over four hundred being produced since the arrival of British troops in 1969, though it is worth mentioning that the Troubles as such had already begun by the mid 1960s with an upsurge in Loyalist paramilitary activity and murder. But the first writers to try their hand at the genre in relation to Northern Ireland were largely British journalists who drew upon the experiences of their tours of duty after the dispatch of the British Army. These early attempts at depicting the conflict in the North through the thriller form began to appear from the early 1970s. Such works range from the more morally serious to the meretriciously voyeuristic and the plain ridiculous.1 What this initial trend did most of all was to establish the prevailing terms for a mode of representing the North. Perhaps because most of the early thriller writers were British journalists, the emphasis tended to be upon explaining a strange, hostile environment to a curious or anxious external readership. While the use of the thriller was a new development in this context, there is equally a strong sense in which such representations in fact merely partake in the continuance of an existing sedimentation of British discourses about Ireland stretching back hundreds of years. In other words, however novel the deployment of the genre, such writing repeats and renews British versions of Ireland and the Irish as exotic, uncontrollable, intractable, violent, mysterious: in short, as Other. Each designation of the Irish in these terms of course also functions in binary form to reassure the person undertaking such representations that he or she is the opposite of these terms; that he or she is identifiably rational, reliable, familiar, civilised and so on. In this very specific usage of aspects of the thriller form, therefore, there is a conflation between certain elements of the genre – not just action and intrigue but also the desire to regulate, police, control and know that which is criminal, threatening, mysterious, unknown – and a dominant British view of the unravelling social conflict in Northern Ireland as the mere product of the ongoing, recidivist irrationality of the Irish. For example, Christopher Hawke’s For Campaign Service claims that ‘the answers were always more difficult to set right in this theatre of operations because of one highly unpredictable factor – the Irish mind.’2 Correspondingly, Private Nelson, the British soldier in Kevin Dowling’s Interface: Ireland, ‘was frightened of the dark, unpredictable Irish who nursed their hatred as a mother will nurse a child. He thought the only cure for them was death’ while John de St. Jorre and Brian Shakespeare attempt a survey of ‘the Irishmen’s baffling religious war’ in The Patriot Game.3

508

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 508

30/01/2012 16:25

northern ireland, political violence and peace process

509

In such representations the Troubles are an anomaly beyond the tenets of a supposedly normative liberal democracy in Britain and elsewhere and it is the attendant duty of the latter to police and control the former. The thriller offers itself as a form of knowledge, a gaze of surveillance or regulation, which can subject the Northern Irish conflict to reason and law. Even if the genre cannot always explain or systematise the apparent unknowability of the enigmatic Irish, it strives within this body of literature at the very least to contain it, to ensure that it is monitored, criminalised or punished. So even if British thrillers about Northern Ireland cannot provide their readerships with the full reassurance that the aberrance of the Irish conflict can be explained and known in its entirety within a system of knowledge, still this very unknowability – the sheer alterity of the Irish – is offered as the means by which the British state reassures itself as to the justice and legitimacy of its own intervention. It is the task of the British state to police and regulate the recalcitrant aberrance of the Irish – in this instance in the move and counter-move of the thriller form as it depicts and exposits the Northern conflict.4 In addition to the body of fiction penned by British journalists from the outset of the conflict, a discernable constituency of military personal has also and subsequently used the genre, most particularly from the 1980s to the present. Much of the fiction – especially thrillers nominally based upon true events – by former soldiers, special forces or secret services operatives was greatly facilitated by the publication of Peter Wright’s Spycatcher in 1987.5 Wright was an ex-MI5 officer and his Spycatcher memoirs were the subject of a gagging order by the British Government which used the Official Secrets Act to ban the book in the United Kingdom – despite its publication elsewhere in the world. The ban was overturned by the Law Lords in 1988 and that decision paved the way for not only further memoirs from ex-operatives but also a deluge of fiction supposedly based on the insider knowledge of those involved in covert operations. There is a further time lag between fiction by journalists and that by soldiers quite simply because the former could often turn immediately to writing while the latter did so only after years of service in the field. So while there are practical and legal reasons why growing numbers of ex-military and secret service veterans were able to publish both memoirs and fictions from the 1980s onwards as opposed to the previous decade, the shift from the journalist to the soldier as the figure mediating an Irish otherness to a British readership in the Troubles thriller also chimes with another determining factor: the emergence of a populist militarism during and after Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher’s own interpretation of the Falklands War with Argentina in 1981 set the tone for the popular militarism which was built on that British victory. To Thatcher, the Falklands restored some lost British glory and strength. Thatcher pronounced in the immediate afterglow of the Falklands victory: We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence – born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away [. . .] and so today we can rejoice at our success in the Falklands and take pride in the achievement of the men and women of our task force. But we do so, not as some flickering of a flame which must soon be dead. No – we rejoice that Britain has rekindled that spirit which has fired her generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before. Britain has found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.6 This effort to remilitarise Britain’s grandeur and standing in the world crystallised in the cult of the Special Air Service (SAS) through the 1980s to the present. In many ways the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 509

30/01/2012 16:25

510

aaron kelly

SAS embodied Thatcherism’s maverick individualism and antipathy to the post-World War Two social settlement and Welfare State in Britain. Paradoxically, the SAS provided a collective framework for the rogue individual to renegotiate its legality and belonging. Hence, in Terence Strong’s Whisper Who Dares, the hero Turnbull is described in terms at once independently individual and loyally committed: Turnbull was a loner, introverted, and his degree of independence and self-containment was his own personal measure of success. He never allowed this private driving force to form a barrier between his colleagues. If he had, it would have been impossible to work with the Special Air Services, where total trust, reliance and compatibility within a Sabre team is of paramount importance. He knew that he would never find the action he craved nor the independence he enjoyed outside the regiment, or at least not on the right side of the law.7 The SAS in popular culture provided a kind of codified cultural shorthand for the New Right project more widely, the Thatcherite usurpation of One Nation or patrician Toryism, and assault on the post-World War Two social settlement associated with the Welfare State. Gender also plays a role in the socio-cultural rise to iconic prominence of the SAS. John Newsinger argues that the cult of the SAS proffered ‘a massive assertion of British masculinity in a troubled and dangerous world’. Newsinger states: The fascination with the SAS, with ‘men behaving militarily’, can be usefully seen as part of the male backlash against feminism and the women’s movement. At a time when changing patterns of employment are contributing to the undermining of the certainties of traditional masculinity, of male self-confidence, the reassertion of a warrior masculinity restores men to their proper place in the order of things.8 There is perhaps a further subtlety and import in the SAS’s profound cultural resonance that helps explicate its populist significance. For the era of late capitalism that has eroded conventional forms of masculinity is characterised by the shift to post-Fordism, by the decline of traditional industry and its replacement by a service-based economy of flexible specialisation. The latter is particularly geared towards the employment and exploitation of increasing numbers of female workers, who are more poorly paid and more easily hired and laid off. The SAS, as their name itself implies, are paradigms of flexible specialisation, and as such, proffer an idealised means of aggrandising, and most importantly, masculinising these economic relations, of paradoxically creating a mythic national virtue from the logic of conditions which attest to Britain’s relative economic decline and the loss of much of its industrial means of producing wealth to the power of multinational capital. Thus, in Eddy Shah’s Fallen Angels, a group of SAS renegades actuate a plan to eliminate the IRA militarily that was discussed but discounted by the government as being too politically risky. This action is shrouded in an aura of populist militarism by the head of MI6: nobody’s against it. The public, even the Press. There is a grudging sort of respect and acquiescence there. Gives a whole new meaning to the word privatisation. These boys are sorting out what the Government and the security forces should have dealt with a long time ago.9 SAS veterans turned writers who achieved fame writing about other conflicts, most notably the first Gulf War, and then tried their hand at Troubles thrillers include Chris

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 510

30/01/2012 16:25

northern ireland, political violence and peace process

511

Ryan, Andy McNab and Shaun Clarke. These works gave an even sharper militaristic focus to a developing set of texts written by former soldiers earlier in the conflict, such as A. F. N. Clarke’s Contact (1983). The shift to soldiers rather than journalists as the primary interpreters of the conflict in the North of Ireland does signal a drift towards more military solutions to the Troubles as a result of Thatcherite triumphalism and its legacies. An interleaving of both trajectories is provided by Cause of Death (1995), written by Falklands veteran, Simon Weston, and Patrick Hill, a journalist with both the Daily Mail and The News of the World. With regard to the thriller as a form, the usage to which it is put by an array of British writers in the Northern Irish conflict would seem to confirm accounts of crime fiction and its various subgenres as reactionary or conservative. That is, standard accounts of the crime genre interpret it as protecting the status quo in a manner which regulates society through systems of knowledge that serve power and the state, criminalising and punishing otherness, deviance or resistance. In turn, the habitual representation of the North of Ireland by British thriller writers tends to accord with this paradigm in its reiterative desire to oversee, know and discipline. Franco Moretti’s work typifies the standard, in this case rigidly Foucauldian, account of the crime genre as the apotheosis of representational coercion: ‘this culture knows, orders and defines all the significant data of individual existence as part of social existence. Every story reiterates Bentham’s Panopticon ideal: the model prison that signifies the metamorphosis of liberalism into total scrutability.’10 Such a formulation positions the crime genre as a form which regulates every facet of society from the perspective of an all-seeing, all-knowing power – hence, via Foucault, the reference in Moretti’s thinking to Jeremy Bentham’s model Panopticon prison structure that was designed to grant a vantage point on all inmates so that no one was beyond the investigation of authority. According to such an interpretation of the genre, crime as a narrative maps society downwards from an elevated, omniscient gaze which is able to systematise, order and criminalise inferior or marginalised constituencies of people in terms of interstices such as class, gender, race and so on. Moreover, this Foucauldian model does not merely render crime fiction as the form which protects the social order from criminal threat, it simultaneously removes criminality from the fabric or functioning of the social order. In other words, crime and criminals are individual or localised aberrations which momentarily interrupt the legality and settlement of a social order which is then able to repair itself and its borders. This account of the crime genre construes its formal structure as beginning with order (that is, a ‘normal’ society) then moving to disorder (the criminal disruption of that order) and finally concluding with the return to order through the punishment and removal of the criminal elements. By way of example, Jerry Palmer contends: What the thriller asserts, at root, is that the world does not contain any inherent sources of conflict: trouble comes from the people who are rotten, but whose rottenness is in no way connected with the nature of the world they infect. At the base of the thriller is a breath-taking tautology: ‘Normally the world functions normally. Today it doesn’t. Therefore something abnormal is affecting it’.11 Under this kind of interpretation, the crime genre is highly protective of the status quo for it suggests that crime is external to, and interruptive of, the established social order: crime may therefore be detected, controlled and expurgated in a form that restores and legitimises the state. The genre proffers a mode whereby codes of normality, stability

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 511

30/01/2012 16:25

512

aaron kelly

and legality ensure the endorsement of the existing social formation, so that the order of that dominant social formation is to superintend crime as a localised and individualised aberration. Perhaps the most blunt formulation of the need to extricate this sequestered blight from decent, law-abiding society is the ‘terrorising the terrorists’ strategy evidenced particularly in the most elementary ‘good versus evil’ texts. One example thereof is Andy McNab’s Immediate Action and its SAS hero’s desire for an official Shoot to Kill policy: ‘If there was, we wouldn’t still be here – we’d be back home and they’d be dead. We know where they all are – if someone was giving the green light we’d just go in and take them out.’12 Such a solution to Irish terrorism as causal disruption is a strategy which seeks in turn to validate and legitimise subsequent action of otherwise dubious legality by the hero or the state in repairing the status quo. In relation to Northern Ireland, this tautology assists an understanding of the use of Special Powers Acts and Emergency legislation, by both the British and Irish Nation States, as avowedly temporary measures designed to combat the irruption of such abnormal intrusions in the guise of the Northern conflict. In actual fact both states and their legislation are inextricably embroiled in the production (and as products) of the very historical conditions and complex relations of social classes and forces which led to the onset of such conflict and which maintain the state in its current form. The legitimisation of the Northern state on the premise of the ‘Troubles’ as a disruption of its ordered, normative tautology serves as a determinate historical affirmation of Walter Benjamin’s formulation that ‘[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.’13 In specifically grappling with the historical emergence of fascism, Benjamin affirms that ‘it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency [. . .] One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.’14 Benjamin’s analysis intimates that it is the perpetual assignment of all analysis to interrogate the fixities of any given status quo: in this case that legitimised by the production of a sectarian state of emergency in dominant accounts of the Northern Irish conflict politically and institutionally, or culturally in the case of the thriller where the Troubles are depicted as a cordoned, extractable problem besetting an otherwise ordered continuity. Indeed, the prevailing view of the conflict in both British policy and in fiction produced by swathes of British journalists and soldiers also saturates the few instances where Irish writers – the prestigious or more ‘literary’ ones – have employed the thriller genre. For the most part, Irish writers have looked down snootily on the thriller as a form and disdainfully avoided using it in relation to the Northern conflict. The exceptions to this attitude predominantly deploy the standard template. Benedict Kiely’s Proxopera (1977) and Eugene McCabe’s Victims (1976) trace the intrusion of terror upon a putatively normal bourgeois private sphere – in these cases, haut bourgeois country houses and the wider social order which they symbolise are taken over by terrorists. In an urban setting, Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence (1992) comparably jars the supposed security of a Belfast middle-class home with the terror of the thriller genre. However, what is striking since the peace process of the mid 1990s is that a number of ‘serious’ novelists who avoided the thriller genre during the conflict turned to it in writing about peace (or at least the uneasy coincidence of residues of the war in a new dispensation of ceasefires and agreements). For example, Glenn Patterson’s The Third Party (1997) uncovers the existence of ‘dirty’ money amidst the new business and economic development of peace process regeneration in a global economy. David Park’s Swallowing the Sun (2004) has a corresponding take on peace where a griev-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 512

30/01/2012 16:25

northern ireland, political violence and peace process

513

ing father pursues a vigilante vengeance against the drug-dealing former terrorist leaders who now carve up Belfast’s black economy and who supplied the narcotics which killed his daughter. Park’s The Truth Commissioner (2008) seeks to undermine the nominally respectable politicians of the new peaceful dispensation by exposing their violent past. Again such work would appear to bewail the contamination of liberal democracy enjoyed so normally elsewhere with the criminal political violence and networks of the Troubles. But, in the spirit of Benjamin’s state of emergency, it is possible to collapse these works, and the standard versions of the thriller produced so numerously during the conflict, back upon themselves. Rather than maintaining a clear demarcation between liberal democracy and sectarian recalcitrance, between order and disorder, all these works unconsciously disclose a disorder at the heart of apparent social order, a constitutive violence at the core of the liberal democratic state. Even the most rabidly reactionary British military texts – which so avowedly strive to uphold representative democracy against the threat of Irish terror – embody a key contradiction. In textualising the secret operations and activities of the British state, these works, even as they seek to laud and glorify those operations and activities, divulge the fact that British liberal democracy is held together by a repressed, covert violence. In other words, the apparently open, pluralist and tolerant liberal democracy defended by these works lays bare its own suppressed, constitutive and coercive violence. If anything, the criminal, corrupt basis of the liberal democratic state is unwittingly exposed in these works. And this more radical dynamic has always been a part of the thriller just as much as the Foucauldian model advanced by Moretti’s account of the crime genre. In work by Eoin McNamee, such as Resurrection Man (1994) or The Ultras (2005), crime is found not only amongst aberrant individuals but at the centre of the British state and its policy in Ireland as the government and secret services orchestrate a hidden network of violence, coercion, illegality and racketeering. So Chris Petit’s The Psalm Killer (1996) traces the efforts of British Intelligence to mask its own violence and corruption. This guise of the crime genre – the conspiracy thriller – therefore disrupts the conventional critical account of order disrupted by rogue criminality. Here the apparent order of society is itself exposed as disorder, corruption and crime. In such thrillers one crime leads not to its resolution but rather its attachment to other seemingly interminable concatenations and labyrinths of crime and conspiracy. This conspiratorial mode harnesses a radical desire to uncover and trace the social totality and its complexity in however degraded or skeletal a manner through such criminal patterns and intrigues. Crime, then, in the thriller form becomes ‘a connective tissue’ through which to uncover concealed relationships and hidden attachments within late capitalism and the liberal democratic state.15 Fredric Jameson observes that the ideology of the single crime has been subsumed in the era of late capitalism by ‘the sense that it is society as a whole that is the mystery to be solved’.16 Jameson comments further upon: ‘the conspiratorial text’, which, whatever other messages it emits or implies, may also be taken to constitute an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what landscapes confront us in a late twentieth century whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic impersonality.17 That is, order is not reassuringly restored in the thriller – not least in radical thrillers which consciously strive to uncover the corruption of the state but also, just as importantly, even in the more reactionary thriller which discloses the covert violence of the democracy it would nominally defend. Instead the apparent victory of the liberal democratic order in the

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 513

30/01/2012 16:25

514

aaron kelly

peace process collapses back onto the disordering violence which underwrote the facade of that order. As such, the social order is not set in opposition to criminality or violence but rather embodies each. It is notable in both Park’s Swallowing the Sun and Patterson’s The Third Party that the liberal subject implodes in unravelling its own violence. Swallowing the Sun pursues a need for vigilante vengeance by the bourgeois individual where the apparent moral purpose of the mission is undermined by the fantastic need for revenge. In The Third Party the liberal subject literally and suicidally destroys itself as though its violence has been futilely disorientated. In both cases it seems that where once the state and the role played by the British Army could channel and mystify the violence of the bourgeois state, in an era of ceasefires the liberal subject must express that violence itself in a newly rogue form. But, as any good conspiracy tale will insist, these are not just individuals, they are part of a social totality whose coercion is systemic. Hence, the conflict and the peace process should not be considered as distinct dispensations but rather as ongoing phases in the modulations of the liberal democratic state and its efforts to naturalise its own violence. There is no better evidence of that violence to be detected than when writers such as Park or Patterson, who were styled as liberal dissenters during the conflict, begin to express in individual form a violence which was once cloaked as the legitimate action of the democratic state. No matter whether the politics is avowedly liberal or reactionary, when writers use the thriller then that form always has the capacity, either consciously or unconsciously, to expose the limits of a society’s dominant ordering of itself, to uncover what cannot be acknowledged. Across the Troubles and the peace process, the thriller has divulged the latent violence of the liberal democratic order which would oppose itself to crime and corruption but which continually unveils itself as its own antithesis.

Notes 1. Thrillers by working or former journalists include Tom Bradby, Shadow Dancer (London: Bantam Press, 1998); Peter Dickinson, The Green Gene (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973); John de St. Jorre and Brian Shakespeare, The Patriot Game (London: Coronet, 1973); Kevin Dowling, Interface: Ireland (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1979); Gavin Esler, Loyalties (London: Headline, 1990); Stephen Leather, The Chinaman (London: Coronet, 1993); G. F. Newman, The Testing Ground (London: Michael Joseph, 1987); William Paul, Seasons of Revenge (London: Futura, 1985); Donald Seaman, The Bomb That Could Lip-Read (London: Futura, 1975); and Gerald Seymour Harry’s Game (Glasgow: Fontana Collins, 1975). 2. Christopher Hawke, For Campaign Service (London: Corgi, 1979), p. 57. 3. Dowling, p. 41; de St. Jorre and Shakespeare, p. 82. 4. For an account of these prevailing discourses see Pat Magee, Gangsters or Guerrillas? Representations of Irish Republicans in Troubles Fiction (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2001). 5. Peter Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (New York: Penguin Viking, 1987). 6. Robin Harris (ed.), The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher (London: Harper Collins, 1997), p. 235. 7. Terence Strong, Whisper Who Dares (London: Coronet, 1982), p. 56. 8. John Newsinger, Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1997), pp. 141–2. 9. Eddy Shah, Fallen Angels (London: Doubleday, 1994), p. 299. 10. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988), p. 143.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 514

30/01/2012 16:25

northern ireland, political violence and peace process

515

11. Jerry Palmer, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 87. 12. Andy McNab, Immediate Action (London: Corgi, 1996), p. 210. 13. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 248. 14. Ibid. p. 249. 15. Peter Messent (ed.), Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel (London: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 1. 16. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London: BFI Publishing, 1992), p. 39. 17. Ibid. p. 3.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 515

30/01/2012 16:25

52

FANTASIES OF COMPLICITY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR R. W. Maslen

A

fter the bombing of Guernica, many novelists of the Left in Europe turned away from avant-garde experiment and took to realism, shocked into re-engaging with the material conditions that underpin mid-twentieth-century culture – the ‘objective reality’ of the Marxist philosopher-critic Lukács – by the casual obliteration of the Basque capital by a fleet of Nazi bombers in April 1937.1 But this event seems also to have led to an explosion of fantastic narratives of unprecedented inventiveness and complexity, written by novelists of many political shades united only in their opposition to fascism. By ‘fantasy’ and the ‘fantastic’ here I mean literary texts that deal in the impossible, foregrounding their own violation of social, physical and technological codes or laws: a loose ragbag of fictions which embraces what we now call utopias, dystopias, works of science fiction, alternate histories, secondary world fantasies and magic realism. With the exception of the first, these categories had not yet been formally defined in the 1930s, nor had the distinctions between them yet taken on ‘overtones of that bitter opposition between high and mass culture crucial to the self-definition of high modernism’, as Fredric Jameson puts it.2 Perhaps as a result, writers of all backgrounds showed themselves willing to experiment freely with one or more of these genres or modes as a means of articulating the dreadful irruption of fantasy into the material world that was Nazism. The notion of Nazism as realised fantasy – the embodiment of a patriarchal, militaristic nightmare – is directly expressed in Katharine Burdekin’s celebrated novel of 1937, Swastika Night.3 Set in a future Europe which has endured Nazi rule for seven hundred years, the novel describes a chance meeting between an Englishman called Alfred and a free-thinking German Knight, whose family has secretly preserved a heretical history book for many generations. The book demonstrates that the Nazi version of history is no more than an elaborate lie designed to bolster the related myths of Aryan racial supremacy, of martial prowess as the highest human value, and of the natural ascendancy of men over women. The Knight’s presentation of this book to Alfred both reverses and reinforces the Englishman’s entire world view. Alfred has long imagined himself to be intellectually equal or even ‘superior’ to many Germans he knows – a genetic impossibility according to Nazi doctrine – while dismissing his imaginings as puerile daydreams with no possible basis in fact. Now he realises that this dismissive attitude to his own self-assessment is the product of conditioning: ‘Everything’s fantastic if it is out of the lines you’re brought up on.’4 The Knight’s book reveals to him the validity of his own fantasies, the bankruptcy of the Nazi intellectual tradition and the patent absurdity of the Nazi version of history,

516

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 516

30/01/2012 16:25

fantasies of complicity in the second world war

517

and this tallies with Alfred’s reading of the material evidence provided by archaeological remains he has found back home in England. The ruling elite are exposed as constructors of elaborate castles in the air, the lone fantasist as an impeccable logician. Burdekin’s imagined future – which is itself an impossible vision of how history could unfold, according to the preface to the second edition of the novel (published by the Left Book Club in 1940), since the contradictions of Nazism could never last so long – shares with other fantastic novels of the 1930s and 1940s an unnerving willingness to acknowledge the complicity of its author’s gender and nation in the rise of Nazism.5 According to the Knight – whose name is von Hess – envy of the military might of the British Empire served as ‘one of the motive forces of German imperialism’.6 And both British and German women acquiesced with enthusiasm in their own subjugation. They shaved their heads, the Knight claims, and made themselves ugly so as to bolster the case for Nazi misogyny, in the belief that catering to these anti-feminist fantasies will somehow strengthen their status as objects of male approval and desire. Of course, the opposite has happened, and by the time we meet Alfred and von Hess all male desire for women has long been eradicated, to be replaced by a form of homoerotic desire between men which is merely the corollary to their disgust with the female of the species. What convinces Alfred to accept the Knight’s heretical version of history is a photograph that reawakens the possibility of mutual desire between men and women: the image of a small, dark, paunchy Hitler (as opposed to the blond giant of myth) standing beside a tall, square-jawed figure which Alfred takes at first for a lovely boy, until the Knight tells him it is a girl, a being inconceivably far removed from the cowering shaven gnomes of Alfred’s experience. This restoration of women to desirability makes possible a future for them; Alfred ends the book with the vision of a world where his daughter can hope to exist as something better than a breeding animal whose sole function is the fabrication of boy soldiers for some always-deferred future war in Asia. For Burdekin, a lesbian who felt unable to write freely about gender politics except under a male pseudonym (she published novels as Murray Constantine), imagining a better future for women may have seemed almost as revolutionary in 1930s Britain as it would have done in a Nazi Britain seven hundred years later. Burdekin is of course not alone among fantasy writers of the 1930s and 1940s in taking British complicity with fascism as her subject. She is also not alone in identifying the particular social group she belonged to (in this case, European women in general) as being specially implicated in this complicity. Before Guernica, the Permanent Secretary for the Irish Department of Education, Joseph O’Neill, wrote a novel about fascism in Britain called Land Under England (1935); and although his recognition of the British capacity to absorb totalitarian ideologies was informed by the experience of British imperialism in Ireland, his particular focus in painting a totalitarian state is his own specialist area, the education of the young.7 A young man retraces the steps of his long-lost father by descending into a hole near Hadrian’s Wall. He finds himself in an underground landscape lit by luminous fungi and infested by monsters – grotesque embodiments of the horrors that lurk in the human mind (O’Neill was a passionate Freudian). Further down, he discovers a race of human beings descended from the Roman soldiers who built the Wall. These people are still recognisably Roman in costume and technology, still locked into a militaristic ideology, but utterly removed from their ancestors in one remarkable way: they have raised the skill of mind-control to an astonishing new level. Every citizen has his or her mind telepathically shaped in childhood to the precise specifications of some designated occupation. Soldiers, labourers and craftspeople are trained up to be incapable of independent

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 517

30/01/2012 16:25

518

r. w. maslen

thought, while all the mental powers of the ruling elite are directed towards monitoring the psychological state of their slavish subjects. What drove these descendants of Romans to adopt this mental dictatorship was fear: an ungovernable fear of the monster-infested darkness, which drove many of their number to suicide before the techniques of mind control were brought to perfection. The novel’s narrator too experiences this fear, and finds himself on the verge of giving up his mind to the rulers of the underworld as his father has done before him, surrendering his individual will to the requirements of a collective war against the flesh-devouring beasts of the underworld, until the memory of his strongminded mother and the sunlit world she inhabits provokes him to resist. In O’Neill’s novel, then, as in Burdekin’s, the idea of empowered women stimulates resistance to fascism, which is represented in both cases as a peculiarly aggressive manifestation of patriarchy – the next evolutionary phase, perhaps, of mid-twentieth-century phallocentrism. The underground Romans of Land Under England are clearly fascists – the fasces being a symbol of the ancient Roman republic, adapted for their purpose by the followers of Mussolini. But the Roman model also underlay the British Empire, a link enshrined in the centrality of Latin to the British private-school system. For the Irishman O’Neill, the narrator’s father with his obsession with Rome stands for a pernicious obsession with ancient bloodlines among the British aristocracy; his family name is Julian and he traces his descent from the governors of Roman Britain. This obsession is kept in check by his bond with the narrator’s mother, whose Northern English family stands for technological innovation and industrial labour. But as soon as the conjugal bond is broken by the father’s departure to fight in the First World War – which he sees as a war in defence of Roman civilisation against the forces of barbarism – the delicate balance between the father’s fantasies and the mother’s practicality is destroyed, so that it later seems natural for the father to throw in his lot with the subterranean warriors. At the end of the novel, the narrator’s now homicidal progenitor must be killed before the young man can return to the surface. As though assisting at a grotesque symbolic re-enactment of Ireland’s emancipation from its paternalistic British oppressors, the young man watches as his father flings himself into a crowd of toadlike carnivores, which ritualistically cut his throat. In the process, the older man’s veneration for imperial Rome is reduced to a suicidal commitment to violence, to patriarchy, to the assertion of his own physical and mental supremacy over all potential rivals. The father once dead, the young man is free to determine his own future, liberated from the nightmare of history – though conscious still of the lurking menace of an army of Roman automata beneath the wholesome English soil, ready to burst out and overwhelm the island if it can find a convenient exit. In describing his fantastic underground society, the educator O’Neill dwells on the agonising educational processes of the underworld, as teachers ‘root up and destroy the deepest sources of those torrents of vitality’ in young children – curiosity and wakening intelligence – in order to mould them into components of an efficient military machine.8 The Welsh journalist and broadcaster Howell Davies, by contrast, writing under the unlikely pseudonym of ‘Andrew Marvell’, places his own trade of journalism at the centre of his novel of fascist Britain, Minimum Man (1938).9 This ‘story of the counter-revolution of nineteen seventy’ tells of a reporter’s accidental discovery of a new phase in human evolution: a breed of men and women no more than a foot in height, naked and covered with fur, whose astonishing powers of mind and body enable them to initiate a coup that overthrows the fascist dictator of Britain and installs one of their number in his place.10 The reporter, a man called Swan, uses his professional skills and contacts first to ferret out

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 518

30/01/2012 16:25

fantasies of complicity in the second world war

519

information about the origins of this new species (they turn out to have been spontaneously conceived by a rural Welshwoman) and later to help coordinate their anti-fascist coup. But even as he does so he worries that he is merely replacing one dictatorship with another. The phrase ‘Minimum Man’ refers not just to the size of the new species but also to their willingness to strip down every question of morality and social organisation to its most basic components – their freedom, that is, from the trammels of history. Uncooperative members of their breed are mercilessly slaughtered for the collective good. Human beings who threaten their safety are casually disposed of. Love is as unknown among them as monogamy. Unencumbered by taboos, they are both capable of imagining better ways to organise society – a miniature woman speculates at one point about the benefits of matriarchy11 – and disconcertingly comfortable with their status as harbingers of the end of the human species. Although they throw in their lot with the anti-fascists, their confidence in their own superiority makes them sound fascistic. At the end of the novel the future under their regime is uncertain; but as one human woman puts it – an old partisan who has fought against the Nazis and the Franco regime – if they turn out to be as bad as or worse than the dictator they have toppled, ‘I shall fight them. . . I will not be a slave.’12 Howell Davies conceives, then, of a future quasi-fascistic dictatorship which is like him spawned in Wales, whose cause is aided and abetted by his own journalistic profession, and whose paramilitary coup is staged in the part of London where he lived, Highgate Hill, only yards from the cemetery where Marx is buried. Minimum Man sprang fully fledged from Davies’s head, and is entwined with Davies’s cultural and intellectual environment, so that his complicity with its imagined conquest of Britain is both profound and complicated. But unlike their knowing creator, his miniature assassin-dictators have a disarming innocence about them: a bluntness of speech and a refusal to countenance the wickedness of human adults which suggest another explanation for his decision to make them the size of newborn infants. They are shocked and disgusted by the perverse social arrangements of the ancient world in which they find themselves; and their insistence on improving it makes them attractive as well as horrifying. This notion of a disturbing innocence in the adherents of fascism crops up quite often in the fantasies of the 1930s and 1940s. One of Burdekin’s main characters is Hermann, whose unquestioning acceptance of Nazi doctrine comes second only to his passionate love of the Englishman Alfred, and who is described by the Knight von Hess as ‘an innocent man’ despite the fact that he kills a young boy in the early pages of the novel.13 As it happens, his love for Alfred turns Hermann in the end into a passionate defender of Alfred’s one-man anti-fascist insurrection. But in Winifred Ashton’s anti-fascist fantasy The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939) – written under her pen name Clemence Dane – the paradoxical innocence of the bloodstained protagonist undergoes no such redemptory volte-face. White Ben is an ordinary scarecrow – accidentally brought to life by a little girl holding a mandrake – who goes on to become the fascist dictator of England. If this sounds an implausible premise, it is made convincing by the sheer intensity of Ashton’s descriptions of Ben and the countryside that makes him. Ben springs from the fertile English soil, and a litany of flower names and tree terms accompanies him on his road to power: morning glory, mayweed, briony, horse chestnut, campion. He is constructed, too, from the old garments that clothe him: ‘a priest’s vestment, a soldier’s gauntlets and civilian mackintosh, a gentleman’s pleasure-hat’, and the operating coat of a surgeon killed in the disastrous war of the 1950s. ‘Men’s memories’, in fact, are ‘buttoned about him’.14 And as he marches towards London, gathering followers on the way from among the human debris left behind

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 519

30/01/2012 16:25

520

r. w. maslen

by the recent conflict, he accumulates a stock of phrases and attitudes from men and women of all classes, so that when he is in London perpetrating his atrocities both the aristocratic Lady Pont and the working-class butler Trelawney recognise their own language spilling from his turnip lips in justification of his crimes against humanity.15 Being a scarecrow, the chief lessons Ben learns from his friends are lessons of fear and hatred, and his career, which begins as a crusade against crows, quickly becomes a massacre of people, since everyone thinks he uses the word ‘crows’ metaphorically. The hatreds of his friends become his hatreds; but unlike them he was assembled with the sole purpose of acting on his dislikes, and he has an uncanny gift for provoking his allies, too, to aggression: especially those acts of mutual self-destruction that are so often deployed by nascent military regimes, pitting friends against friends to consolidate their power. As a result, the love and hero worship Ben excites in their hearts turn to bitterness and loathing, and he quickly finds himself isolated, a living tool that has been used by England’s new military governors and can now be dispensed with. But when he disappears at the story’s end, worn out by the weight of hatred and expectation that has been laid on his flimsy shoulders, his story is retold as myth. Monuments are erected to his memory, and the tale of his journey from birth to power is retold again and again by those who knew him, with a solemnity that belies the appalling preposterousness of its turnip-headed hero. He becomes once again a figurehead of militarism, the fantastic nature of his existence as a living scarecrow underscoring the vein of fantasy that feeds the fascistic rule of force. Winifred Ashton was a playwright and screenwriter, and as one reads the Arrogant History it becomes clear that Ben’s career is made up of a series of performances. His awakening is described with the visual precision of a set of cinematic storyboards. The central section of the novel takes place in a country house, and the dialogue in it resembles that of a black comedy, something by Ashton’s good friend Noël Coward, directed in this case to the appalling ends of overthrowing a legitimate government and restarting a recently abandoned war. Ben is forever making speeches, and the fact that his words are not his own (he has picked up every phrase, crow-like, from scraps of other people’s conversation) reinforces his association with Ashton’s professional life among playhouses and film studios. We keep hearing his story in retrospect as having been performed in theatres and music halls – a device that both places a Brechtian distance between reader and narrative and brings the narrative closer to the world of Winifred Ashton. One can imagine her exclaiming when the scarecrow has grown bloodthirsty and bewildered, as Lady Pont exclaims at one point, ‘Oh Ben, Ben, don’t put it upon me!’16 It is as if Ashton wishes to feel in her bones, as it were, the truth of the book’s last sentence: that Ben is ‘no more than the wish fulfilment of a backward people, and that he personifies in their folk-lore the natural human instinct to maltreat the harmless and destroy the happy’.17 What was ‘natural’ for her was a sense of theatricality, and she had the courage to see how her own performer’s instinct could translate itself into the instrument of violent oppression. These four now little-known fantasies demonstrate the extent to which anti-fascist writers of the Western Archipelago were prepared to figure fascism as emerging from the dark recesses of their own brains. Complicity with fascism among certain elements of British and Irish society in the 1930s is of course an attested fact; but there is something startling and, on reflection, impressive about these writers’ readiness to suggest that they cannot so easily exonerate themselves from some degree of participation in the circumstances that gave rise to the fascistic state of mind. Ashton refers several times in the Arrogant History to the psychologically and economically crippling terms imposed on Germany by

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 520

30/01/2012 16:25

fantasies of complicity in the second world war

521

its enemies at the end of the Great War; terms which planted and cultivated the seeds of resentment that sprang up as Nazism. O’Neill reminds us that every mind contains its monsters – the sources of reasonable or unreasoning terror – and that acquiescence in dictatorship can be a form of self-defence against those monsters. For Burdekin, fear of the other sex can dominate the unconscious of either gender, and Nazism is one means by which patriarchy may choose to express its gynophobic paranoia. And Davies, like O’Neill and Burdekin, sees fascism as springing from the desire to engineer a Darwinian evolution away from a condition of subservience to all these fears and paranoias. Once one has noticed this theme of complicity running through the obscurer fantastic novels of the 1930s and 1940s, one begins to see it everywhere in the work of better-known fantasy writers of the period. For a while, novels, novelists and Nazism were woven together in a horrible symbiotic knot, and it seems as if fantasy was a form or mode particularly well suited to undertake the controversial task of addressing this symbiosis. The brilliant Irish humorist Brian O’Nolan, for example – better known as Flann O’Brien – wrote a novel in 1940 in which the two qualities for which he was most celebrated, wit and knowledge, find themselves fused into the components of a kind of Irish atom bomb, always on the verge of detonation.18 The unnamed protagonist of The Third Policeman murders an old man in order to fund his learned commentary on the mad philosopher de Selby. He then finds his way to a mysterious police station filled with mind-troubling inventions, where he is summarily convicted of the crime he has just committed, despite the total absence of any evidence against him. While awaiting execution he is shown around an underground facility which seems in some obscure way to control the fantastic world he has strayed into; his policemen friends must constantly fine-tune its arcane mechanisms to prevent the whole shebang from exploding and wiping out humanity. All this is told in scintillating comic prose like a more elaborate version of the anecdotes O’Nolan unfolded in his famous column for the Irish Times, ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’. Europe, it would seem on the evidence of this novel, has got itself enmeshed in an appalling practical joke, which will not release its victims until its inexorable logic has been worked out – at the expense of their lives or their collective sanity. Another Irishman, the scholar C. S. Lewis, wrote a trio of science fiction novels between 1938 and 1945 as ‘propaganda’ for Christianity – competing with, yet also likening itself to, the other forms of indoctrination that occupied the printing press and airwaves at the time of writing. In a fragment of a fourth novel, The Dark Tower, composed between 1938 and 1940 but not printed till the 1970s, he imagines a parallel world of ‘Othertime’ which is rapidly approaching his own time and place: a world where horned dictators, served by a goose-stepping, brainwashed militia, occupy a tower which is a precise replica of the new library building at the University of Cambridge.19 This tower contains a library, like its English counterpart; but it is a library of atrocities, whose books record knowledge obtained through the torture and death of children. The threat that drives the book’s plot is that the tower and the Cambridge Library will converge, and that when they do their environments will combine, and England be enslaved by the horned dictators. Lewis had read Land Under England, and reacted to its horrible yet potent premise by transposing O’Neill’s fascistic automata into the heart of the community he loved most, that of the British intellectual elite. T. H. White, who spent the war years in Ireland as a conscientious objector, wrote most of his Arthurian fantasy sequence The Once and Future King (1958) in the 1930s and early 1940s, reconfiguring the global conflict as a civil war in his heart’s homeland, medieval

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 521

30/01/2012 16:25

522

r. w. maslen

Britain. Mervyn Peake began the first of his Gormenghast books, Titus Groan (1946), while vainly seeking employment as a war artist, and made its protagonist a young man who is half-heroic and wholly power-hungry, a would-be dictator who poses in succession as artist, actor, clown, adventurer and ladykiller – very much like Peake himself.20 Finally, when Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien assembled the most influential work of modern fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, between 1938 and 1949, he began and ended it in a fictional Shire that closely resembles the country round his home town of Oxford. As the final volume of the sequence draws to a close its hobbit heroes return home to find that the Shire has been taken over by a quasi-fascistic government run by the former wizard Saruman. The hobbits’ journey through the war-torn lands of Middle Earth has, among its other purposes, that of preparing them for this eventuality and teaching them the appropriate response to it: namely, the extirpation of profiteering invaders, the naming and shaming of collaborators, and the demolition of the industrial architecture that has fouled their beloved rural environment. The particular journey of Tolkien’s principal hobbit, Frodo, had as its end the destruction of a Ring that conferred invisibility; and it is only when Frodo finds himself confronted with Saruman on his own doorstep that this invisibility stands exposed as (in part) a metaphor for the secret workings of complicity that can transform even the neighbourly Shire, in Frodo’s absence, into productive ground for totalitarianism. In twenty-first-century parlance, the word fantasy is often used to mean a form of wish-fulfilment, the conscious or unconscious fashioning of simulacra of the sometimes forbidden things we most desire. British and Irish fantasists of the mid century showed their readers that what they most desired sometimes bore a disturbing resemblance to what they most loathed: innocently murderous scarecrows, sadistic rulers with poisonous phallic horns in the middle of their foreheads, paternalistic instructors with total control over the minds of their pupils, brilliant, athletic, handsome miniature replacements for the bloated and obsolescent human species. They tell a version of the history of the mind in the 1930s and 1940s which could not have been told in any other way. It is time we paid attention to this version.

Notes 1. See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Boston: MIT Press, 1972) and The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1989); and Jane Goldman, Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 28ff., 214ff. 2. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 5; but see the whole of chapter 5, ‘The Great Schism’, for a discussion of the relationship between science fiction, utopia and fantasy. On definitions of fantasy see Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), ch. 2. 3. For Burdekin’s reaction to fascism, and especially the impact on her of the bombing of Guernica, see Daphne Patai, ‘Afterword’ to Katharine Burdekin, The End of This Day’s Business (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989). For introducing me to the works of Burdekin and Winifred Ashton I am grateful to my mother, Elizabeth Maslen, who discusses them in her book Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction, 1928–1968 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 4. Murray Constantine [Katharine Burdekin], Swastika Night, Left Book Club Edition (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), p. 98.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 522

30/01/2012 16:25

fantasies of complicity in the second world war

523

5. Ibid. p. 4. 6. Ibid. p. 78. 7. For O’Neill’s life and works see M. Kelly Lynch’s fine introduction to his last novel, The Black Shore, ed. Lynch (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000). 8. Joseph O’Neill, Land Under England (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 132. 9. For Howell Davies’s life and work see Adrian Dannatt’s ‘Foreword’ to Davies’s novel Congratulate the Devil (Cardigan: Parthian, 2008). 10. Andrew Marvell [Howell Davies], Minimum Man (Worcester and London: The Science Fiction Book Club, 1953), p. 5 11. Ibid. p. 95. 12. Ibid. p. 214. 13. Constantine, p. 127. 14. Clemence Dane [Winifred Ashton], The Arrogant History of White Ben (London and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1939), p. 20. 15. Ibid. pp. 348–9. 16. Ibid. p. 315. 17. Ibid. p. 420. 18. For O’Brien’s imagined complicity with the bombings of the 1930s and 1940s see R. W. Maslen, ‘Flann O’Brien’s Bombshells: At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman’, New Hibernia Review, 10.4 (Winter 2006), pp. 84–104. 19. For a detailed analysis of The Dark Tower and its relationship with O’Neill’s Land Under England see Robert W. Maslen, ‘Towards an Iconography of the Future: C. S. Lewis and the Scientific Humanists’, Inklings Jahrbuch für Literatur und Asthetik, Band 18 (2000), pp. 222–49. 20. For a fuller account of Peake’s anxieties about complicity, see Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems, ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), introduction; and R. W. Maslen, ‘Fantasies of War in Peake’s Uncollected Verse’, Peake Studies, 10.4 (April 2008), pp. 5–23.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 523

30/01/2012 16:25

53

VISUALISING THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF WAR: WAR AND ART IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Roger Tolson

T

he scale of conflicts in the twentieth century, when societies were rebuilt and redefined by the needs and transformations of war, set new agendas for the visual arts which, in turn, observed, critiqued and helped shape these transformations and our understanding of them. Pre-First World War cultural expression, notably in the writing and art of Wyndham Lewis, had addressed the dynamics of change, but now artists were invited partly through government schemes but also through personal circumstances and agenda to a more active role, namely to record and commemorate. War art defined and drove, mitigated against and measured the social, economic, psychological, environmental and political aftermaths of conflict, and it was these responses to change that give this art a particular richness and intensity. This chapter will study works by Lewis, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, John Singer Sargent, Stanley Spencer and others to explore the visual language of change. Their output encompasses extremes of influences and styles, but all were from urban environments – the embodiment of modernism with its technology, dynamism, industry, social flux and signifiers – whether it be the impact of social confluence, the dependency and reconstruction of identity around mass production, or the codifying of social hierarchies. All were working within a paradigm of liberal, cultural expression that was to be exploited by government official war art programmes during the First and Second World Wars, notably in Britain and Canada.1 Although major work about war was made outside of these programmes, the scale, scope and ambition of these programmes merit specific attention, and, in particular, the complex relationships between commissioner, artist and subject. War art was commissioned and acquired by governments to support specific social, cultural and political needs and concerns. Such was the nature of these projects that even images that explicitly questioned the execution of war could be accommodated, reaffirming the liberal credentials of the commissioning authorities and undermining the notion of war art as merely a depiction of victory or heroism. With subject matter ranging from the home front – industrial and agricultural production, debilitation and reconstruction, streets, factories, hospitals and schools – to the front-line battles, war art became an essential factor in the shaping of the public understanding of the war through prints, publications and exhibition programmes. The collapse of the private market for art meant that for many artists the commissioning programme would be their major

524

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 524

30/01/2012 16:25

war and art in the twentieth century

525

Figure 8: Percy Wyndham Lewis, Before Antwerp (1915), woodcut. Cover for Blast, War Number source of income, whether as salaried artists, through specific commissions, or targeted acquisitions. Wyndham Lewis, as one of the leaders of the Vorticist movement, had developed an aesthetic and philosophy influenced by both Futurism and Cubism. It rejected the cinematic movement of the former and the latter’s fragmentation, to develop a visual

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 525

30/01/2012 16:25

526

roger tolson

Figure 9: Percy Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled (1919), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum language of hard abstraction and human form caught in flux and on the edge of chaotic void. Wyndham Lewis’s cover design for the war edition of Blast from 1915 embodies these tensions.2 Using a visual language that is resolutely brutal, human forms are caught in to the abstract whole. Text and image are interwoven around the double meaning of the word ‘Blast’ as curse and explosion. The fractured visual plane expresses the forces that would explode and judge – ‘blast’ – Victorian social values and aspirations while the construction, like the typography, distils the values of urbanity and mechanisation that are equally ‘blessed’. The soldiers and their rifles, absorbed into the staccato architecture, enshrined Wyndham Lewis’s disillusioned belief that war was embedded into the culture and society of modernity: ‘Everything will be arranged for convenience of War. Murder and Destruction is man’s fundamental occupation.’3 There is a certainty in his agenda in Blast but his final commission for the British Government, A Battery Shelled,4 introduces a distinctive element – the distanced observer – a role he himself undertook as an artillery officer directing the fire of others on enemy targets. The frenzied round of carrying, loading and firing shells that drill the air, and the enemy responses, are part of a seemingly endless routine but with the introduction of the active observer Wyndham Lewis comes closer to the reality of engagement where both soldier and observer are participants. Required to observe and reflect on sites and situations wholly unfamiliar, which in many cases language struggled to depict or comprehend, artistic responses necessarily sought to understand why and how these situations had evolved and with what consequences. For many younger artists in the First World War the disruptive and dislocated patterns of Vorticism became the means to describe the technologically driven cataclysms to which they were witness. David Peters Corbett has noted how the traditions of landscape painting were particularly brutalised.5 Where formerly they described the relative certainties of the ‘natural’ social order and interdependencies of British rural life, as the Great War spread into rural France and Belgium it could no longer present an Arcadian antithesis of the city and its relentless demands. The growing distance between urban and rural experience was dramatically shrunk by the forces of economic rivalry, the output of

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 526

30/01/2012 16:25

war and art in the twentieth century

527

Figure 10: Paul Nash, The Mule Track (1918), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum factories: engineering, trains and armaments. Moreover, removed from the controlling codes of the city, the confusion and transience, the spectacle and violence of modern life was now spreading uncontained. Paul Nash’s pre-First World War work had explored the landscape with a gentle lyricism, influenced by mythology. He served at the Ypres Salient with the Hampshire Regiment but was discharged shortly before most of his company was killed at Hill 60. Returning as an official war artist for the British Government, he wrote: I have seen the most frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature, unspeakable, utterly indescribable. In the fifteen drawings I have made I may give you some idea of its horror, but only being in it and of it can ever make you sensible of its dreadful nature and of what our men in France have to face.6 Andrew Causey notes, ‘Nash found the expressive forms of Vorticism an equivalent for the sense of death in whose shadow he was constantly living’, and that the disorder embodies Blakean notations of the void and its chaotic annihilation.7 Nash also drew on the language of the sublime, notably in eighteenth-century Romantic paintings. The Mule Track8 has strong parallels with paintings like Loutherbourg’s Avalanche in the Alps,9 replacing the fear of nature or God with the control of officers and the power of munitions.10 In The Menin Road,11 the new technology starts to reshape the landscape in its own image: sunlight morphs into the barrels of a gun; tree stumps into steel girders; the landscape redefined as a teasing, deadly riddle, to be negotiated with no guide. We are Making a New World12 draws apocalyptic conclusions from the front line. Based on a watercolour made during Nash’s return to Ypres, Sunrise, Inverness Copse,13 New World documents the aftermath of an action which has pummelled the earth and shredded the trees, removing all other trace of man. Stripped of all its defining features, the landscape is no longer recognisable, navigable or useful. The title and visual language is explicitly apocalyptic – the end of a familiar world of social ordering, landscape and technology

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 527

30/01/2012 16:25

528

roger tolson

Figure 11: Paul Nash, We are Making a New World (1918), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum – and the new Earth which emerges is as a result discredited. The morning light exposes and passes judgement on a scene in which all Kantian consolations of progressive civilisation are dismissed. There is one redeeming sign: in the distance the trees appear strangely animated. Robbed of modern meanings and understanding, Nash’s landscape has revealed a new but primitive mythology which he was to elucidate in his post-war work and that is embedded in his major work of the Second World War, Totes Meer14 and Battle of Britain.15 The most obviously critical of all his paintings, New World still found its way into the nascent Imperial War Museum’s collection in 1918 and on to the front cover of the third edition of British Artists at the Western Front published by Country Life on behalf of the Ministry of Information.16 Faced with this assault on values and norms, there was an understandable desperation to find signs of redemption, order and morality. These come in the predictable expressions of the stretcher bearer, the medical orderly, the casualty clearance station, the hospital tent. Stanley Spencer takes this subject and interweaves it with a much more explicit image of redemption. Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station17 depicts muledrawn stretchers bearing wounded men arriving at a dressing station and operating theatre housed in an old Greek church. The setting draws on Nativity scenes, with its human and animal spectators who are drawn to the light and away from the ivy which ties them to their earthly existence. The presence of the injured, their bodies fossilised beneath blankets, their faces fading and fragile behind mosquito nets, suggests a more complex mystery into which they in turn will shortly be drawn. The calm and stoical medical staff are not just performing life-saving operations – symbolically, eye surgery in the depicted operation – but are part of a redemptive process in which Christ is reborn in each event. Transcendence and transformation in the routines of service were themes Spencer was to

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 528

30/01/2012 16:25

war and art in the twentieth century

529

Figure 12: Stanley Spencer, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (1919), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum pursue in later work, notably in his work for the Sandham Memorial chapel, which covered his entire wartime experience. Spencer had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in July 1915, based at a hospital in Bristol before being posted to Macedonia where he served with the 68th Field Ambulance. He volunteered as an infantryman in August 1917, joining the 7th Royal Berkshires in Macedonia. Although Travoys was a commission from the British Government, the depth of Spencer’s response can be seen when further work ended abruptly with Spencer declaring he had lost his Balkan feelings and refusing to complete further paintings. In Sargent’s masterpiece from the First World War, Gassed,18 the contagion of war has entered the atmosphere. Sargent, born in 1854 to American parents and largely educated in France, was established as a famous society artist by 1914. He moved to America between April 1916 and May 1918, but on his return to London he was commissioned to paint a work for the British War Memorials Committee’s Hall of Remembrance scheme, a scheme intended to rival the patronage of the Medicis in its scale and quality. At 20 ft x 12 ft, the painting was to be the Hall’s centrepiece. Travelling to France with fellow artist Henry Tonks in July 1918 he found little evidence to support the original theme of his commission, Anglo-American cooperation, and the subject was inspired by witnessing victims of a mustard gas attack at a dressing station at Le Bac-du-Sud. Although introduced as a humane weapon (its impact was relatively short-lived) the sight of so many, and so enfeebled, clearly moved Sargent. A number of narratives can be read into the scene. The arrival from the battlefield is a given although the only direct evidence of fighting are the spotter planes, high above the scene watching and manipulating the carnage below, though the yellow evening light

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 529

30/01/2012 16:25

530

roger tolson

Figure 13: John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum could be read as a reminder of the gas. On the other hand, the impact of the gas attack is graphic. The men in Gassed are helpless, depending on the closeness of their comrades and the direction of medical orderlies towards treatment and recovery. Some vomit on the way. The football match, continuing uninterrupted in the background, suggests that the scene is a relative commonplace reinforced by the treated being left to lie by the side of duck boards, forming a detritus of khaki. In addition, the coordination and abilities of the players is deliberately staged in stark contrast to the two stumbling groups of eleven in the foreground. Other elements remain less clear: the guy ropes of the casualty clearing station are depicted but the process of healing is left unresolved. There is a suggestion that the playing of an organised game is not just the final stage of healing process but a deliberate staging post back to the battlefront and a more bloody sport. This lack of context defies attempts to read this as transition. However, Sargent has clearly selected a group of young, handsome men. Even if we cannot see their journey from battlefield to healing, we know them from his society portraits, the depiction of their symbols of status were never better visualised than by Sargent; every nuance depicted to create stability and permanence. Sargent has dragged them first out of society salons and then away from the routines of watching, preparing for combat, directing and fighting to question the very purpose and direction of the war. William Orpen’s soldiers are drawn from a different world, more public bar than painted salon. Sent by the British as an official war artist in 1917 to the aftermath of the Somme, Orpen enjoyed a liberal life behind the lines and chose to stay on in France long after his commission. His final commission was for three canvases of the Versailles Conference. The first two of these reduced the politicians and military leaders to bit players in the majestic setting of the palace. The third and final one eventually saw Orpen over-paint their portraits and replace them with a coffin draped in the Union Flag and guarded by two soldiers, along with cherubs.19 At the vanishing point of the corridor is a crucifixion. ‘It all seemed so unimportant somehow’, he wrote. In spite of all these eminent men, I kept thinking of the soldiers who remain in France for ever [. . .] So I rubbed out all the statesmen and commanders, and painted the picture as you see it – the unknown soldier guarded by his dead comrades.20 Two soldiers are pulled straight from his watercolours of the war. Described as dead in this painting, they were barely alive in the drawings as they staggered, unbalanced and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 530

30/01/2012 16:25

war and art in the twentieth century

531

Figure 14: William Orpen, Blown Up (1917), pencil, watercolour on paper. Imperial War Museum unhinged, onto a stage littered with bones and debris. Like characters from the music hall who have forgotten their lines, theirs is a gaze desperate for a cue. Their voices and their character are stripped away along with their uniform and any shred of dignity. Having watched and depicted London society and dressed himself in a series of theatrical tableaux, in these works Orpen found a new and authentic voice and performance depicting the individual at the edge of life. Henry Moore’s Second World War sketchbooks21 observe similar territory of the shattered individual. Exploring the impact of the Blitz, he depicts sheep and cattle ablaze, and fields littered by shattered aircraft. More disturbingly, the fabric of London is punctured and disturbed beyond recognition. Below ground, underground shelterers gather in family clusters, faces stripped away to reveal the bricks and mortar of their

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 531

30/01/2012 16:25

532

roger tolson

Figure 15: Henry Moore, First Shelter Sketchbook page 26. © Trustees of the British Museum

Figure 16: Elsie Hewland, A Nursery-School for War Workers’ Children (1942), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum surrounds; above buses are swallowed into craters; steelwork, penetrated by falling bombs, is distorted beyond recognition; facades are stripped from houses revealing spaces stripped clean by the explosion and leaving families, equally reduced and forlornly gathered in the street. Moore focused on sleep as the ultimate escape from the nightly barrage. Eric Newton, a contemporary commentator, describes Moore’s drawings as capturing the very rhythm of sleep: the breathing, the turning of heads, the folds of blankets.22 Here, life begins: awaking is to return to the public nightmare of the city, to a fragmentary and splintered exist-

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 532

30/01/2012 16:25

war and art in the twentieth century

533

ence. Here, the private world can be stitched together and a form of public life allowed. After the war, as lives and society were rebuilt and public spaces re-owned, Moore’s own artistic journey ran in parallel to the shelterers. The family groups were to become public sculptures in the very towns occupied by families leaving the East End of London at the end of the war. Nursery schools were a new support for women conscripted into full-time employment during the Second World War, with over 1,300 schools established by 1943. Although essential to the war effort, the government was careful to stress their temporary nature and that they were not the means to a new peacetime social order. In A Nursery-School for War Workers’ Children,23 Elsie Hewland carefully choreographs a number of encounters that embody the significant challenges and possibilities for the children moving into nursery school. Her child-height perspective creates giants of the staff and monumentalises the new facilities, but it also creates an all encompassing and secure environment to be explored. In the foreground are pegs and benches for changing; then new supervisors take control and new introductions are made; beyond them craft tables are set out for play and for learning new skills. Some of the children take in this new environment and begin to explore. Just as the viewer peers in through the latticework of ordered space and routines, at the back of the room one child looks out onto this new world through latticed fingers. At one level the war is deliberately excluded from the equation but the very presence of the facility implies a world of social change not just for the children but for both fathers and mothers drafted into military and supporting industries and whose challenges are met in turn by their children. If women are being drafted into essential industries, then the threats of the Blitz will not be far away. The scale of these external drivers is simply conveyed by the very existence of the nursery which has been designed to hide all threats and create a sense of complete security. Within this visual paradox, Hewland suggests a value in the facilities for their own sake, and not merely the result of extraordinary needs. Paul Nash’s Battle of Britain, another image of the extraordinary, stands in stark contrast to We are Making a New World. It was painted during the Second World War, when Nash was no longer able to serve in the armed forces, but actively sought a strategic and influential role in the war effort not just for himself but for other artists, in particular by developing visual propaganda. Battle of Britain majestically reveals the possibilities of art engaged with history and also encapsulates Nash’s propagandist agenda. Nash’s description of the painting, written for his employers, the War Artist’s Advisory Committee, gives a sense of this intended grandeur. The painting is an attempt to give the sense of an aerial battle in operation over a wide area and thus summarises England’s great aerial victory over Germany. The scene includes certain elements constant during the Battle of Britain – the river winding from the town and across parched country, down to the sea; beyond, the shores of the Continent, above, the mounting cumulus concentrating at sunset after a hot brilliant day; across the spaces of sky, trails of airplanes, smoke tracks of dead or damaged machines falling, floating clouds, parachutes, balloons. Against the approaching twilight new formations of Luftwaffe, threatening. . .24 Its ambition and the scale of the setting immediately impress; we look down on a huge swathe of the English Channel and France beyond. Produced at the time of the battle,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 533

30/01/2012 16:25

534

roger tolson

Figure 17: Paul Nash, Battle of Britain (1941), oil on canvas. Imperial War Museum the painting encapsulates its scale and importance. However, this is not just an image of modern warfare, with its violence and destruction, or even an iconic victory; it is also a restatement of the value of art and the defeat of Nazism. Nash, a fierce critic of the way that fighting on the Western Front of the First World War had been conducted, was immediate and steadfast in his revulsion towards Nazi Germany and its imposition on artistic culture. In the painting, defences rise up as if out of the very soil of England to meet the fascistic machines of war, and, as a final redemptive act of creativity, the regimented patterns of the Luftwaffe, attacked by Allied fighter planes, are broken and defeated, forming great flower-like shapes in the sky, before plummeting into the landscape from which the British defences have arisen. Wyndham Lewis was to argue at the end of the Great War that art had been retrenched into a more subjective language: What has happened [. . .] as a result of the War, is that artistic expression has slipped back again into political propaganda and romance, which go together [. . .] The attempt at objectivity has failed. The subjectivity of the majority is back again, as a result of that great defeat, the Great War, and all that has ensued upon it.25 In practice, faced with demands at the limits of language, the language of art had to exploit every style and format to describe changing rather than static situations. Consequently, all have sought to subvert and challenge the visual references they have drawn on. The works described above have deliberately explored different realms, from the interior life to the work place, from the redemption to apocalypse, from the music hall to the society salon. All have sought different means to respond; all draw on acute observation and deep engagement with subject matter; all struggle to encapsulate the enormity of what they were observing – for many of the artists, the return to peace was either a return to obscurity or a struggle to find an equivalent purpose – but in each image we encounter the complexity of worlds changing through war.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 534

30/01/2012 16:25

war and art in the twentieth century

535

Notes 1. See Laura Brandon, War and Art (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007) for a single overview. The British art schemes alone employed and commissioned over 230 artists, representing a broad stream of British cultural life, as well as acquiring work from another 130. 2. Percy Wyndham Lewis, Before Antwerp (1915), woodcut. Cover for Wyndham Lewis (ed.), Blast, War Number: Review of the Great English Vortex, 2 (July) (London: John Lane and Bodley Head, 1915). 3. Wyndham Lewis, Blast, War Number, p. 16. 4. Percy Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled (1919), oil on canvas (London: Imperial War Museum). 5. See David Peters Corbett, The Modernity of English Art, 1914–30 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 6. Paul Nash, letter to Margaret Nash, 16 November 1917, London: Tate Archive. 7. Andrew Causey, Paul Nash (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 61–2 and pp. 76–7. 8. Paul Nash, The Mule Track (1918), oil on canvas (London: Imperial War Museum). 9. Philip De Loutherbourg, Avalanche in the Alps (1803), oil on canvas (London: Tate). 10. Ulrike Smalley, ‘“A Terrible Beauty”: the influence of the sublime on First World War landscape paintings’, unpublished paper from Conflict Landscapes: Materiality and Meaning in Contested Places, 1900–2007 (London: Imperial War Museum, 2007). Smalley argues that Loutherbourg’s painting can be compared to works like Turner’s The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810) (London: Tate) which was bequeathed with other works by Turner to the Tate in the mid nineteenth century and it is very possible that Nash would have seen it. 11. Paul Nash, The Menin Road (1919), oil on canvas (London: Imperial War Museum). 12. Paul Nash, We are Making a New World (1918), oil on canvas (London, Imperial War Museum). 13. Paul Nash, Sunrise, Inverness Copse (1918), ink, chalk, watercolour on brown paper (London: Imperial War Museum). 14. Paul Nash, Totes Meer (1940–1), oil on canvas (London: Tate). 15. Paul Nash, Battle of Britain (1941), oil on canvas (London: Imperial War Museum). 16. British Artists at the Front. III, Paul Nash, with introductions by John Salis and C. E. Montague (London: Offices of Country Life Ltd and George Newnes, 1918). 17. Stanley Spencer, Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916 (1919), oil on canvas (London: Imperial War Museum). 18. John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919), oil on canvas (London: Imperial War Museum). 19. William Orpen, To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1921–8), oil on canvas (London: Imperial War Museum). 20. William Orpen, printed hand bill, in his cutting book. 21. Henry Moore, 1st and 2nd Shelter sketchbooks, 1940–1 (London: British Museum and Perry Green, Henry Moore Foundation). 22. Eric Newton, commentary to ‘Out of Chaos’, film, directed by Jill Craigie. UK: Sydney Box, 1944. 23. Elsie Hewland, A Nursery-School for War Workers’ Children (1942), oil on canvas (London: Imperial War Museum). 24. Paul Nash, handwritten note, 1941 (London: Imperial War Museum). 25. Percy Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Calder and Boyars [1937] 1967), p. 134.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 535

30/01/2012 16:25

54

TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPY FICTION James Purdon

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn. (1913) New Orleans [. . .] was a good reminder. Civilization is always just twelve, maybe fifteen, hours away from barbarity [. . .] Yesterday, you were living in a great city, today it’s Mogadishu. The line’s that thin. (2006)

I

I

n 1913, the villain of John Buchan’s The Power-House evaluates the precarious position of Western society. Over ninety years later, a character in Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance takes a similar view.1 The identical accents at the beginning of consecutive centuries speak to repeating conditions of cultural anxiety, and help to account for the renewed vigour of spy fiction since 9/11; in each case, perceptions of weakness in institutions and infrastructure engender paranoia, undermine trust in the stability of society, and precipitate crises – at once disturbing and liberating – of individual agency. Under such circumstances, conspiracy becomes a presiding mythos, the lone gunman is invested with world-changing power, and narratives of subversion and espionage find potent expression. The spy novel is a phenomenon of modernity, intimately connected with war and the fear of war. From the beginning, its popular appeal has depended upon a shared fantasy of personal power in increasingly impersonal societies where lives are regulated and determined by sluggish party politics and mercenary corporate interests. Against this, it posits a social order that is unexpectedly fragile and vulnerable. Early examples of the genre encourage belief in the power of individuals to affect the course of history – opening vertiginously on to a political id of clandestine heroics and villainy – while more recent deployments reiterate the same theme in a minor key, depicting individuals crushed or compromised by secret bureaucracies, and mythologising the Miltonic figure of the double agent, one of contemporary culture’s most powerful embodiments of heretical resistance. For these reasons, the spy has been a focus of uncommon fascination for twentiethcentury readers and authors alike. ‘The soul of the spy is somehow the model of our own,’ wrote Jacques Barzun, ‘his actions and his trappings fulfill our unsatisfied desires.’2 Writers

536

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 536

30/01/2012 16:25

twentieth-century spy fiction

537

who came of age reading Buchan were primed to find in the spy a peculiarly modern figure whose pretended loyalties and questionable methods crystallised major anxieties of a shattered inter- and post-war Europe. Among those writers was W. H. Auden, in whose early poems the enigmatic spy serves not only to encode the covert operations of desire and dissent but also to probe the public and private fissures of a world divided by class and national conflicts. Thus, in a Scrutiny article of 1932, Auden described ‘the liberal’ as ‘the secret service of the ruling class’, and, the following March, began a grandstanding review of Winston Churchill’s Thoughts and Adventures by taking aim at ‘the English’ as ‘a feminine race, the perfect spies and intriguers’.3 Auden’s view of espionage as a form of cognitive dissonance anticipated the criticisms made by Barzun, for whom identification with the spy was a symptom of world-historical decline. Yet there is more to the charm of spy fiction than the charms of the spy, and amid the ‘grubby romances’ that Barzun saw in contemporary espionage fiction novelists have found scope for sophisticated analyses of the cracks in the foundations of the modern mind into which its escapist fantasies pour. Over the course of a century, spy novels have developed from propaganda into political critique, and from Boy’s Own adventures into subtle explorations of the condition of Europe and the United States during and after the Cold War. Meanwhile, the clandestine services have continued to feature disproportionately in the curricula vitae of major twentieth-century literary figures, both for writers who engaged in secret government work (Maugham, Mackenzie, Ransome, Bowen, Fleming, Greene, Le Carré) and for those who were at one time or another suspected of subversion (Madox Ford, Pound, Lawrence, Auden). And if fiction has learned from the world of the spies, the ‘black world’ has borrowed in turn from literary theory and practice. Nowhere has this been clearer than at the CIA in the years after the Second World War. There, under the poetaster and mole-hunter James Jesus Angleton, a ‘Yale School’ of officercritics including Norman Holmes Pearson and Richard Ellmann adopted a definition of counter-intelligence – described by one later critic as ‘the practical criticism of ambiguity’ – which uncomfortably yoked together the interpretive strategies of Richards and Empson in the service of the Company.4 Intelligence successes aside, the best work to emerge from this ferment was John Hollander’s Reflections on Espionage (1976), a verse novel that addresses the development of a poetics of secrecy and suspicion adequate to the matter of spycraft and its myriad betrayals. Not, in truth, a spy thriller, Hollander’s long sequence is nonetheless one of the century’s finest literary treatments of secret service, and a compelling meditation on poetry’s own feints and obscurities.

II Although spies and spying have a venerable literary history – prompting analysts of the genre to find precursors in Homer, the Bible and Shakespeare – the emergence of a modern ‘spy novel’ can be dated to war-fearing turn-of-the-century England, with its invasion scares, its competition with the military–industrial power of Germany, and its overmastering terror of social, physical and imperial decline. Critics attempting to locate the earliest examples of the genre often point to landmarks such as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), or to E. Phillips Oppenheim’s tales of bright young Englishmen and beastly foreigners. Yet those landmark texts are by no means the whole story. Kim, with its chameleonic boy adventurer, is more a tale of initiation into the duties of Empire than a thriller; The Riddle of the Sands is less concerned

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 537

30/01/2012 16:25

538

james purdon

with spying per se than with the politics of rearmament and a Baden Powellish vision of adventuring as a specific against political apathy. Generally speaking, the many bluff young fellows who appeared in the jingoistic catchpenny fiction of the century’s first decade were primarily deployed as reagents in well-established invasion scare stories. In truth, the espionage novel developed, and continues to develop, in contention with other genres, in correspondence with other media (spy films, radio plays, television dramas, video games) and in parallel with real-world politics. Just as Victorian detective novels had played up and played upon the fears and anxieties of their time – family secrets, repressed desires, the demons behind the facade of civilisation – the early spy novel both indulged and disseminated the military fantasies of Edwardian England. In 1909, William Le Queux published Spies of the Kaiser, a novel which proved uncommonly influential in the formation of government intelligence policy. Le Queux specialised in a new form of the invasion fiction that had grown in popularity since the Napoleonic wars and reached its widest readership with George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871). Where the yarns spun by Chesney and his imitators had raised the spectre of an assault on Britain from outside, Le Queux emphasised the threat of a fifth column of foreign agents disguised as hairdressers, waiters and cooks. A shrewd self-publicist, he cleverly promulgated the myth of his own access to secret information in order to blur the lines between rollicking fiction and alleged fact, borrowing the coy tones of another precursor of the spy novel: the memoirs of secret service produced by such Victorian spies and spymasters as Thomas Beach (‘Henri Le Caron’) and Robert Anderson. Le Queux’s contract with readers, like the memoirists’, was based on the semblance of secret knowledge which he alone could provide, and ratified by serial publication in the Weekly News, which, having spotted an opportunity to boost circulation, offered prizes for letters detailing encounters with foreign agents. As correspondence flooded in, Le Queux passed it to Lieutenant-Colonel James Edmonds, the assiduous new head of MO5 (Britain’s Counter-Espionage Bureau), who in turn presented it as evidence to the Committee of Imperial Defence, leading to the formation of a new ‘Secret Service Bureau’. Spy fiction, in other words, developed in collaboration with the national espionage and counter-espionage organisations in whose back rooms and safehouses the twentieth-century thriller would be staged. As Joseph Conrad pointed out in The Secret Agent (1907), espionage blurs the boundary between reality and fiction: ‘That the spy will fabricate his evidence is a mere commonplace. But in the sphere of political and revolutionary action, relying partly on violence, the professional spy has every facility to fabricate the very facts themselves.’5

III Fiction was slow to adapt to this new world of official secret agents, resisting the portrayal of British spies as institutionally sanctioned professionals. Its preference was for the amateur: the accidental hero who in the performance of his civic duty foils the enemy’s plots. The British yellow press had long delighted in ridiculing the ‘spy fever’ which periodically engulfed France (culminating in the affaire Dreyfus) and took pride in British immunity to the condition. As late as April 1910, while Edmonds’s men were unpacking their files, the Irish Nationalist Member of Parliament T. P. O’Connor spoke in Parliament against antiFenian operations by appealing to ‘the people of this country, who have a racial instinct against the spy and the informer’.6

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 538

30/01/2012 16:25

twentieth-century spy fiction

539

Rehabilitation came at a cost: if the spy was to be accepted as a professional soldier, he had to display a willingness to suffer as well as to wound. In this capacity, Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928) represents a turning point for the genre. Maugham, who had spied in Geneva and in pre-revolutionary Russia, included all the early appurtenances of the genre: international travel, fine hotels, counts and countesses of Mitteleuropa; but there is also a growing sense of the squalid and seedy side of the profession and an acknowledgement of the quotidian frustrations involved in waging war by clandestine means. At one point Ashenden resolves the question of whether to blow up a munitions factory (along with the innocent workers within) by tossing a coin. In its moral ambiguity, Maugham’s contribution marks the thriller’s crucial loss of innocence; in its depiction of a spy’s day-to-day work – ‘monotonous as a City clerk’s’ – it anticipates the psychological malaise that would later be made, by Greene and Le Carré, into the dominant note in twentieth-century spy fiction.7 There were, of course, counterpoints: Compton Mackenzie’s satire Water on the Brain (1933) offers parody as an alternative reaction to the bureaucratic entanglements of wartime intelligence work. Yet even parody cannot escape the exchange between real and fictional espionage: it has been reported that Mackenzie’s spoof was used by British, American and Russian intelligence services as a training manual; certainly, it was high on every recruit’s reading list.

IV The new exigencies of the Second World War sent the gentlemen-spies into hiding for a time. Eric Ambler continued Maugham’s work of stripping away glitter, and brought left politics and philosophy into what had, for most of its existence, been an undemanding and reactionary genre. ‘Did spies quote Hegel?’ asks a character in Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy (1938). ‘Did they read Nietzsche? [. . .] Why shouldn’t they?’8 Ambler’s protagonists are ordinary men swept unwillingly along in the current of international affairs, victims of blackmail, or hack writers in search of a plot for their next novel, as in his masterpiece The Mask of Dimitrios (1939). Spies, for Ambler, are merely men who are able to affect in some small way the more powerful geopolitical forces that determine their lives. In this, he suggests, the enemy spy is no worse than the friendly one, and his sympathetic portrayals of Soviet agents, displaced Eastern Europeans and communists are remarkable in the thriller of the time. It is not important ‘who fired the shot,’ Ambler points out, ‘but who paid for the bullet’.9 His novels attempt to trace the networks of complicity between secret agents, national war machines and international finance. For Dimitrios, both arms and information are commodities; international conflict provides business opportunities, while its disruption of prewar jurisdictions and surveillance systems offers the perfect means of escape. Writers now took their cue from Maugham and Ambler. Graham Greene established a reputation with Stamboul Train (1932) and Brighton Rock (1938), and embarked on spy fiction with The Confidential Agent (1939). Greene’s enduring interest in the figure of the double agent was cultivated during his early participation in the Secret Intelligence Service, on which he drew in expanding both the psychology of the genre and its geography. Helen MacInnes’s witty, suspenseful first novel Above Suspicion (1941) made spies of a young English couple on holiday in Germany on the eve of war, and inaugurated her long career in espionage fiction. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous spy, publicised by the propaganda posters of Fougasse and Gerald Lacoste, became increasingly hard to ignore outside

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 539

30/01/2012 16:25

540

james purdon

the genre. One of the best spy novels of the Second World War – indeed, one of its finest novels – is not a thriller at all. Stella Rodney, in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948) knows ‘two or three languages’ and is, when the novel begins in 1942, ‘employed in an organization better called Y.X.D., in secret, exacting, not unimportant work’. In Bowen’s novel, set in London during the Blitz, fiction and reality weave together, so that, travelling to meet her lover Robert, Stella feels herself ‘to be going to a rendezvous inside the pages of a book. And was, indeed, Robert himself fictitious?’10 Robert, as it turns out, is not fictitious, but he is treacherous, working as a Nazi spy. Stable identities, hitherto locked into peacetime routines and relationships, come loose in the atmosphere of suspicion and clandestinity fostered by bomb and blackout; personality dissolves into enigma, turning lovers into spies and spies into lovers. Elsewhere, clubland derring-do survived in updated form. In a climate of post-war austerity, Britain gave birth to a new breed of jet-setting spies, among whom Ian Fleming’s James Bond was pre-eminent. Sadistic, aspirationally fussy and seductively amoral, Bond emerged from a brutalised nation to provide vicarious enjoyment for a British readership craving good food, international travel and a decisive role in the superpower conflicts of the Cold War. As the country slowly recovered, Bond’s excursions became more outlandish. Northern France, the setting for Casino Royale (1953), gave way to Jamaica and Japan in later novels. For those exhausted by the Fleming formula, Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File (1962) provided a welcome alternative: an anonymous, working-class spy whose gourmet tastes are matched, unlike Bond’s, with culinary skill. Deighton’s spy is a gastronome; Fleming’s an epicure: substance versus style. Even before Bond began globetrotting, events at home had begun to change espionage fiction in favour of substance, dictating the course it would take in the second half of the century.

V In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, both prominent in the British Intelligence establishment, were exposed as Soviet double agents: the first of the ‘Cambridge Spies’. Harold ‘Kim’ Philby, the group’s highest-ranking member, followed them to the Soviet Union in 1963, having passed British and American secrets to the KGB for more than three decades, and in 1979 the so-called ‘Fourth Man’ was revealed as Anthony Blunt, the prominent art historian and former Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. In 1990, a KGB defector named the former Bletchley Park codebreaker John Cairncross as the fifth member of the Cambridge ring. This scandal has been central to the espionage fiction of the Cold War. In the United States, Robert Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959) explored the aftermath of Korea and a growing national fear of communist conspiracy. Across the Atlantic, too, writers were discovering the possibility of double identities, as in Derek Marlowe’s A Dandy in Aspic (1966), the story of a Soviet agent in British Intelligence ordered to assassinate his own alternate self. The Cambridge ring is also in the background of Graham Greene’s The Human Factor (1978), which traces the career of Maurice Castle, a file clerk in the British security services, whose gratitude for the help of communists in allowing him to escape from apartheidera South Africa with his black wife leads him to pass information to Soviet handlers. Unlike Philby and his colleagues, Castle is a low-ranking operative and a non-communist, believing not in the cause but in his personal debt to those who rescued his wife and child; nonetheless, his fate when circumstances force him to flee to Moscow – a shabby

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 540

30/01/2012 16:25

twentieth-century spy fiction

541

apartment and a boondoggle in propaganda – echoes the dismal reception accorded to his real-life counterparts. Greene also pays quiet tribute to the history of the genre, nodding to Conrad by placing a spies’ post office in a dingy Soho bookshop, and killing off a hapless young operative who fancies himself as James Bond. At the centre of the novel is a scene in which Castle discusses with his Soviet contact the possibility of escape, and through which Greene weaves a shifting pattern of pronouns as his characters struggle with the verbal consequences of multiple allegiance. In the end, for Castle, as for Greene, the incompatible duties foisted upon individuals by national identity and ideology give way to the personal dramas of independent agents. ‘I wish we were on the same side,’ says Castle. ‘We?’ replies his handler. ‘You and I.’11 Greene’s query-marked pronoun registers, on the smallest linguistic scale, the destabilisations wrought by the Cold War and recapitulated geopolitically in third-world proxy conflicts, Red Scare paranoia, and East–West double-agency. A deeper verbal uncertainty pervades John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy (1986), a novel which combines significant aspects of Le Carré’s own life with the story of a high-ranking defector from the British secret service. Aptly divided, the novel is in part a confession and autobiography penned by its narrator, Magnus Pym, as he hides from his pursuers in a chilly boarding house, and in part a thriller which follows the efforts of British agents to track him down. Part writer and part fictional spy, Pym is a portmanteau character with a portmanteau name, fusing Dickens’s Pip with Kipling’s Kim, and, by association, with ‘Kim’ Philby. Like Kipling’s boy-spy, who discovers the abyss hidden under a name – ‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’12 – Pym discovers in the writing of his confession that the spy’s multiple identities are part of a wider disunity of psychological narrative. Like Rousseau, or Proust, Pym reaches for an elusive certainty by cleaving to, and cleaving into, the third and first persons of a younger and an older self: ‘Pym contrived to leap in with a funny word in order to stop the fight. What the word was, I don’t remember. . .’13 Such instabilities mark sites of spy fiction’s communion with more general crises of Cold War identity and fidelity, a fact also discernible in the epigraph from a poem by Theodore Roethke that precedes Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost (1991): ‘Which I is I?’ Like A Perfect Spy, Harlot’s Ghost achieves a reconfiguration of the spy novel; but where Le Carré undertakes an extension of the Greene-style thriller into a modern European Bildungsroman, Mailer casts his bulky book as a version of the Great American Novel, taking the imagined secret history of the CIA as a secret history of the Cold War world. To this geographical division can be added the historical one serendipitously furnished by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989: appearing two years later, Harlot’s Ghost was already an elegy set to the background noise of demolition. For Mailer, the spy’s skill is also an art: The man with talent for counter-espionage, the true artist [. . .] draws on his paranoia to perceive the beauties of his opponent’s scenario. He looks for ways to attach facts properly to other facts so that they are no longer separated objects.14 What is being described here is a talent for narrative, that sense of the literariness of spying which runs through the whole history of the genre and finds its most eloquent and subtle expression in John Banville’s The Untouchable (1997). Like Mailer’s American spooks, Banville’s Victor Maskell discovers a ‘talent for narrative’ while writing his secret reports. Maskell is another suggestively named spy, whose moniker (Maskell) hides a version of Anthony Blunt. Extending the question of uncertain identities across the whole

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 541

30/01/2012 16:25

542

james purdon

novel, Banville engages a cast of characters, behind various onomastic masks, who reflect aspects of real figures: ‘Boy Bannister’ is a medley of Burgess and Philby; Maclean is ‘Philip MacLeish’. More mischievously, a prying, serpentine caricature of Graham Greene (‘Querell’) appears at intervals to move the action along, to sow discontent, and to evoke the long commerce between espionage and fiction. A spy writing spy novels in a spy novel: here, indeed, is covert intelligence as the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ described by James Jesus Angleton in words borrowed from Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’.15 Eliot aside, Maskell is a well-read spy. He has, for instance, ‘read [. . .] Buchan and Henty’, and so knows what is expected, just as the ‘literary innkeeper’ in Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) knows the score when Richard Hannay is being chased across the Scottish moors: ‘it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.’16 Books, after all, are one of the tools of the trade, and protagonists of the spy thriller have been among the most practical of critics, sifting the canon for hidden messages and connections. In Mr Standfast, Hannay passes notes through Pilgrim’s Progress; Greene’s Castle uses War and Peace and Clarissa to send his coded communications; Le Carré’s Pym filters his messages through Simplicissimus (Grimmelshausen’s great picaresque romance of the Thirty Years’ War); and Mailer’s Harry Hubbard, like James Angleton, takes advantage of the creative ambiguities offered by the poems of T. S. Eliot to send messages that remain open to interpretation even in plaintext. For those seeking codes, meanwhile, books that resist decryption become objects of suspicion. In his memoir Little Wilson and Big God (1987), Anthony Burgess remembers his time as a reluctant recruit in the Army Medical Corps in the midst of the Second World War. Failing to fit in as ‘one of the boys’, Burgess still managed to escape the persecution of his peers, having brought ‘a copy of Finnegans Wake, generally supposed to be a code book’.17

VI The early years of the twenty-first century have seen an unexpected resurgence in the spy thriller genre. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet power, the potential of espionage for generating new narratives seemed to diminish. The emphasis of the popular thriller shifted its focus to the commando, on the one hand, and to corporate conspiracy on the other, with some notable exceptions. The unique case of Berlin remained a powerful fascination in novels as dissimilar as Ian McEwan’s The Innocent (1990) and James Buchan’s enigmatic Heart’s Journey in Winter (1995), which explore Anglo-American-Soviet power relations at the beginning and end of the Cold War, respectively. In the words of Buchan’s narrator, the fall of the Berlin Wall ‘buried not just the division of Germany but a way of looking at the world’;18 it heralded the dissolution of the USSR and inaugurated the era described by Francis Fukuyama – somewhat prematurely – as ‘the end of history’. That history of ideological conflict soon resumed. Terrorist attacks in New York, Bali, Mumbai, Madrid and London reproduced the conditions of suspected fragility from which spy fiction emerged. Focus has shifted once again to the lone agent. Meanwhile, espionage novels aimed at young readers have found success, with Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series and Charlie Higson’s Young Bond leading the field. Like Robert Anderson before them, high-ranking intelligence operatives such as Stella Rimington have exchanged clandestine careers in secret service for celebrity as authors of autobiography and ‘insider’ fiction. As Western societies have come once more to seem vulnerable in the midst of a so-called ‘war on terror’, the powerful fantasies of espionage have regained their allure.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 542

30/01/2012 16:25

twentieth-century spy fiction

543

Notes 1. John Buchan, The Power-House (London: Polygon, 2011), written in 1913, when it was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine, and first published in book form in 1916; Jonathan Raban, Surveillance (London: Picador, 2006). 2. Jacques Barzun, ‘Meditations on the Literature of Spying’, The American Scholar, 34 (1965), p. 168. 3. W. H. Auden, ‘Private Pleasure’, Scrutiny, I (May 1932), pp. 191–4; ‘Gentleman Versus Player’, review of Winston Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, Scrutiny, I (March 1933), pp. 410–13. 4. William H. Epstein, ‘Counter-Intelligence: Cold War Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies’, English Literary History, 57.1 (Spring 1990), p. 84. 5. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (London: Penguin, [1907] 1963), p. 144. 6. Hansard, 21 April 1910, vol. 16, cols 2354, 2407. 7. W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden (London: Mandarin, [1928] 1991), p. 70 8. Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy (London: Everyman, [1938] 1984), p. 87. 9. Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios [UK: The Mask of Dimitrios] (New York: Pocket Books, [1939] 1944), pp. 12–13. 10. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Vintage, [1948] 1998), pp. 26, 97. 11. Graham Greene, The Human Factor (London: Bodley Head, 1978), p. 153. 12. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Penguin, [1901] 2000), p. 331. 13. John Le Carré, A Perfect Spy (New York: Bantam Books, [1986] 1987), p. 140. 14. Norman Mailer, Harlot’s Ghost (London: Abacus, 1991), p. 441. 15. James Jesus Angleton, quoted in Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 327. 16. John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, [1915] 1999), p. 33. 17. Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 255. 18. James Buchan, Heart’s Journey in Winter (London: Harvill Press, 1995), p. 4.

Further Reading Bloom, Clive (ed.), Spy Thrillers: From Buchan to Le Carré (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). Britton, Wesley A., Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005). Denning, Michael, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). Merry, Bruce, Anatomy of the Spy Thriller (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977). Palmer, Jerry, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). Panek, LeRoy L., The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890–1980 (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1981). Stafford, David, The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies, rev. edn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991). Wark, Wesley K. (ed.), Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence (London: Frank Cass, 1991).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 543

30/01/2012 16:25

55

‘PLAY UP AND PLAY THE GAME!’: THE NARRATIVE OF WAR GAMES Esther MacCallum-Stewart

‘

T

here’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –’. . . ten players are facing their greatest opponent. They have come well armed, equipped with a variety of different skills and abilities, all honed to perfection from hours of fighting in hostile terrain and from the battlegrounds of the world. Their raid leader has spent fifteen minutes briefing them on the upcoming fight. Her second in command types instructions into the party chat channel so that the non-English players can understand the rapid conversation, flagging each target with a raid mark. Group one are to move to the left, group two to the centre and right. As the main tank engages the enemy, enfilade comes from supporting units who will also fend off additional mobile units (mobs). The off-tank prepares to pick up the enemy the moment that the first starts to bleed out. The two medics move to the back of the area and check their packs one last time. Everyone watches their line-of-sight and stands carefully within the arena in order to avoid friendly fire caused by their own positioning. With luck, and if they listen to their raid leader’s instructions during the fight, it should take them about thirteen minutes to down the target. If, after ten minutes, the casualties are too high, the order to withdraw will be given, they will reset, revive the casualties, ‘buff ’ themselves up again, dissect their progress, tweak their strategy and keep trying. Computer games have come a long way from SpaceWar! (1961), but the narratives and similes of war continue to be ingrained in most digital games. From battling bards to the latest Flight Simulator game, war remains core to the gaming experience, and as these games develop in style and complexity, they have become increasingly capable of extremely subtle readings of warfare. In particular, their commentary on the wars of the twentieth century provides a valuable insight into the paradoxical social understandings of warfare as a social, cultural and political condition. At the same time, their reliance on literary readings of war is also interesting, arguing that warfare is often viewed through the lens of cultural representations, rather than political or military ones.1 This is very much the result of the growing sociality of games as game designers and players bring these ideas into the fray, from role players creating battleworn heroes to strategists determined not to commit atrocities as they fight across the latest map. At the same time, this often means that preconceived ideas of warfare, or tropes gleaned primarily from literary accounts take precedence, as these are readily available, quickly recognisable and easy to imitate. Finally, the difficult relationship between war games and the moral panics concerning video game violence prompts a mixed discourse in war games design; one which uses old, vainglorious

544

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 544

30/01/2012 16:25

the narrative of war games

545

modes of address to engage and mollify users, but at the same time can provide harsh, often extremely deviant commentary on the state and perception of warfare in a modern era. The ten players from the raid encounter above might typify this development; united in a common cause to kill a monster, yet coming from environments where different attitudes concerning war affect what they understand, how they play and how they interpret the narrative of the fight itself. War and games are inextricably linked, with strong comparative associations to be drawn between both linguistic similarities and the emotional fluctuations experienced during the acts of combat and competition. Newbolt’s poem ‘Vitae Lampada’ is one of the most commonly used popularist examples of this, linking a game of cricket with a subsequent battle, but despite the apparent archaism of the sentiments expressed, these ideals have a surprising level of close fit in today’s gaming society. Indeed, although the majority of literary accounts of war are often couched in terms of protest and horror, games are perhaps more expressive of undercurrents in society (and political thought) which support war as a necessary act, and create cultural artefacts to support this. From the jingoistic poetry of the First World War, to comic books and Hollywood films, Guy Westwell describes this act as ‘mutual exploitation’ between popular culture and the military, seeking to present a validated version of combat.2 Video games carry on this difficult relationship, and are additionally caught between a need to justify themselves as valid texts in their own right, and to negate the strong claims against them as violent and without social merit. War games in particular epitomise this struggle. The most visible type of wargame is the first-person shooter (FPS). In these games, the player controls an individual avatar and the game world is visualised directly through their eyes (hence the term ‘first-person’). The objective of FPS games is to complete levels, by progressing through a linear landscape and (usually) being attacked by hostile non-player character (NPC) avatars who need to be killed or eliminated. Secondary objectives involve discovering all of each level’s map, accessing secret or difficult to reach places, collecting every artefact available – from weapons to more abstract icons such as stars or medals – completing the game in a certain amount of time, or performing tasks such as escorting NPCs to safety or capturing various objectives. These games are usually singleplayer and are widely available on consoles, PCs and handheld gaming devices. They are characterised by high-definition graphics and cinematic, active narratives. Although some FPS games involve tactical behaviour where players can avoid conflict (for example, by sneaking past, stunning or otherwise distracting enemies), the majority of these games rely on aggressive military action, gunfire, explosions and rapid assault action. Series such as Medal of Honor (1999–present), Call of Duty (2003–present) and World War II Online/ Battleground Europe (2001/2006) epitomise the FPS genre. As the most visible type of war game currently available, FPS games have distinctive attributes and problems. Their symbiotic relationship with complex graphics means that over time, they have deviated from the fantasy/science fiction genre towards representations that can be easily compared to their real life counterparts. The development of games such as Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002), which contains levels simulating aspects of the D-Day landings, can be associated directly with both the popularity of Saving Private Ryan (1998), and the ability to map textures, skins and vehicles more effectively on the PC. Their technical proficiency means that FPS games are often benchmarks for improvements in memory or graphical capability.3 Better graphics has meant a proclivity towards ‘real’ themes and scenarios, and perhaps

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 545

30/01/2012 16:25

546

esther maccallum-stewart

because of this, FPS games are often criticised for their inability to convey historical detail, despite signifiers which allude to their historical accuracy; for example, by using military phrases such as ‘Call of Duty’, or ‘Medal of Honor’ in their titles, implying that they have real-life reference points, ‘Modern Warfare’, or by setting them in real geographical locations. Several facets contribute to this, most notably the representation of player as protagonist. The player is of course the hero; and ludically, this hero must survive. Physically, then, they become superhuman – stronger statistically than the average soldier. They are also the narrative’s most active protagonist, usually guided by a short introductory speech by a voice actor before each level begins, who explains their role as well as the mission ahead. The difficulty here is that FPS games need specific narrative agendas. If they followed socially acceptable patterns for representing warfare, that is, portraying it as a social evil which dehumanises the individual, they would defeat their central objective – allowing players to take the part of a military hero who single-handedly fights, against all odds, to the winning conclusion. Therefore FPSs often return to older narratives which promote the individual as heroic; becoming more human, even self-redemptive, despite what they witness. Alternatively, the protagonist is loaded with weapons, equipment and sometimes physical enhancements which remove their humanity. Both of these alterations are often couched in ‘it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it’ representations of the self; the player is absolved of any moral pathways the avatar follows.4 The emphasis within FPS games on the corporeality of bodies also problematises discourses of war. Successfully killing enemies can take multiple attempts, with accompanying cries, screams of pain, animations, and ultimately, graphics depicting dead bodies. As the game AI removes graphical clutter, these bodies gradually fade away, thus an enemy’s death throes transition from cinematic to static or even invisible in a matter of seconds. This emphasis on the body activates an engagement with trauma – one that must be quickly removed but is also a marker of success. Unless the player is supremely good, or has activated a cheat, their avatar will die. The player must become accustomed to seeing their avatar repeatedly crumple to the ground, usually accompanied by the ‘sigh’ of death. Throughout their game, the player will hear their ‘self ’ groan in pain, pant with exhaustion and cry out when hit by enemy fire. Unlike real life, however, the game needs to keep the player alive for more than one shot; their superhuman nature is unconsciously asserted as they literally have to be riddled with bullets before death. This emphasis on faces, bodies and the collapse into death engages trauma and wounding as major elements of play, and ones which the player must confront.5 This emphasis on the visceral (and the vicarious) is also a key element in recent war films and literature:6 [trauma] ensures that historical events are thoroughly psychologised thereby eliding the contradictions, ambiguities and difficulties of history. As a result history is understood in very limited terms in relation to an individual traumatic experience that, with the imposition of the right therapeutic narrative, can be overcome and resolved.7 Thus, presenting the player with statistics on a level’s completion, rather than a death toll, offsets killing into a therapeutic narrative, as well as convincing the player that their actions have gain. The psyche employed here is very linear, but quickly moves the player away from the possibilities of traumatic pleasure whereby the act of killing is fetishised as both grotesque and pleasurable. FPS games present extremely straightforward experiences where achievement is easily

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 546

30/01/2012 16:25

the narrative of war games

547

measured by the completion of each level.8 However, player agency is far more developed within other genres, enabling more complex, nuanced readings of war.9 Warfare is prevalent in several other major games genres which bear little relation to the FPS. ‘God’ games, in which the player omnipotently manages a world or civilisation; real-time strategy (RTS) games, where they control and deploy forces against a real or virtual opponent; and role-playing games, this last category including the current Titans of the gaming world, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). In all of these games, warfare is often narratively integral. All of these genres force players to engage in warfare in less linear ways and to question their actions. God games often allow players to attempt peaceful world building – although this can be difficult. In fact, the growing awareness that the building of a civilisation is not entirely predicated on war has helped to dramatically change these games. The Civilisation, Settlers and Europa Universalis series have all developed their cultural, political and social sections over time, so that the player needs to pay attention to factors such as economics, and often gains more from developing cultural or social output than simply using military force. Negotiations and trade agreements, peace treaties and political agreements rather than simple declarations of war feature heavily in the development of successful worlds. God games naturally endorse counterfactualism as part of their gameplay, and specialise in deliberately ambivalent narratives. Players have considerable agency – they can remain as a tiny settlement or span the world. They need never invent the wheel yet become masters of medical science and so on. However, the didactic power of these games stems from the developmental paths that the player takes and their subsequent results. Thus god games can argue specific points about causative narrative within historical progress. For example, in Victoria (2003), the ‘Social Conscience’ research development increases plurality in a population and converts 5 per cent of them into liberals when it is completed. This affects the population’s economic power, as well as their tolerance of certain rulership styles. However, the assumption that socially conscious people will also be liberals is predicated on later historical (and to some extent, literary) developments. It is, of course, entirely possible to develop a social conscience at any time in history, to have a social conscience and not condone pluralistic thought or to be liberal without a social conscience. This very simple chain of cause and effect is interesting because it also suggests that social conscience is politically disruptive. Additionally, while the game player may be a liberal, free-thinking individual, they might restrict their virtual people on the basis of the modifiers produced by this action. While this may only manifest as a statistical change, the narrative implications are profound. This type of understanding of the game as text certainly needs addressing, as the narrative is submerged, deliberately multifaceted, and yet can lead to the evolution of very clear narrative patterns that make quite definite arguments. Specifically, games may pursue politicised agendas not immediately apparent, or make cultural assumptions about the actions that surround potential warfare (protesting against the status quo is bad, civil war has negative results) which present specific opinions. An interesting example of this in practice is the treatment of Palestine in Supreme Ruler 2020 (Paradox, 2008). Here, players can take the role of many different countries. The game is essentially one of conquest and domination. This means that if a player loses all of their land, they have reached the ‘game over’ situation. If Palestine is selected, however, within a month of game time, all of their land is lost to encroaching enemies; players who choose this country cannot win or even proceed very far into the game. These limited options are antithetical to gameplay and appear to be present simply to demonstrate that

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 547

30/01/2012 16:25

548

esther maccallum-stewart

Palestine cannot sustain itself independently. The player must construct their own meaning from this act, but the politicisation of the choice is apparent. Political commentary of this nature is in fact, relatively common in games – see, for example, September 12th.10 In September 12th, the player bombs a cityscape to kill terrorists. As a result, several innocent civilians are always hit. More terrorists ‘spawn’ from each grieving family. Thus, inaction is preferable, and the game state collapses in order to make its message clear. These examples all point to the developing narrative capability of games, and their ability to draw upon previous sources in order to develop their own nuanced texts. If, as Daniel Floyd argues, games are to be seen as a new artistic and narrative medium, then this is only the beginning of intertextual interpretations of war narratives.11 The next section looks at a genre of games in which this development is much more apparent. MMORPGs make definite usage of literary understandings of war. They are usually fantasy or science fiction themed, both genres which already draw heavily on war narratives. MMORPGs present players with large worlds in which multiple story arcs and ideas play themselves out. Thousands of players interact together simultaneously. As a result of this diversity, several different play styles are provided, from following traditional quest narratives, to collective play in large groups (such as the opening example given), to competitive play against other players. Because players are active participants in these worlds, and are narratologically assumed to be amongst its elite – ultimately rising to become heroes – the transmission of narrative happens during ongoing daily life. Players are theoretically involved in shaping the narrative itself, and it is presented as if the player has direct agency upon the world. However, MMORPGs are persistent landscapes – the world continues around players. Thus, the transmission of plot happens through devices such as overhearing dialogue between NPC characters, through opinions and information shared by quest-givers, through completing quests (and effecting ‘change’), and by the world’s own mythos and history, which is usually discretely embedded in both the world and in periphery sources; sometimes retrieved within the game itself; sometimes available in displaced narratives such as cutaway exposition scenes, or histories presented on official wikis and forums; sometimes because the game is part of a series with an existing mythos. In this sense, MMORPG worlds function as convergence texts12 – the full narrative is not visible unless several different sources are approached. The presentation of warfare and the perceived enemy is crucial to supporting MMORPG backstories and thus presenting a cohesive sense of narrative in-world, as well as an immersive identity for the world itself. Often, this narrative is that of ongoing or looming conflict. In order to sustain this, MMORPG narratives frequently draw upon concurrent cultural beliefs about warfare, as well as reforming ideas about conflict in the same ways as more traditional fantasy and science fiction texts. Multiple narratives (because the world is large and diverse) mean multiple perspectives, and thus the player can be subjected to many readings, often contradictory, during their progression through the game. Literary sources, such as poetry or accounts of war, are often heavily sublimated into these narratives. The ongoing tension between the Horde and Alliance sides in World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the strongest examples of this. Players, when they choose their avatars, can become either Horde or Alliance – this choice is voluntary and there is no ‘good’ or ‘evil’ faction; simply two different sides within the world. The game narrative states that each side is engaged in an ‘uneasy truce’, yet it provides ample opportunities for Horde and Alliance players (who cannot communicate through speech and must communicate

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 548

30/01/2012 16:25

the narrative of war games

549

through crude emotes or physical movements) to attack each other. The majority of games servers are player versus player (PvP) active, meaning that this can happen outside the ‘normal’ staged areas of battleground and arenas, and that players are able to engage in conflict as they travel through the world. Signifiers of war are a daily part of the WoW experience. From the derelict tanks and biplanes that litter the world, to the preparations made by busy troops training in Shattrath City or the heralds calling for combatants in the Argent Tournament, WoW presents itself as a world at war. However, it is more subtle aspects such as the terminology of quests, and the idle comments made by NPCs, that help to build a more complex ideology. WoW’s societies are ideologically engaged in, and preparing for warfare. War is endemic to the peoples from Azeroth, Northrend and the Outlands, as well as being a fundamental aspect of gameplay. These signifiers are frequently predicated on literary metonyms of warfare. Many ‘quick’ narrative signifiers are dropped into the game in order to sustain narratives and rely on exterior recognition by the player. For example, the annual ‘Fallen Heroes’ festival each November encourages players to visit shrines to the lost, to remember the dead and to think about past battles. In Stormwind, NPCs discuss the two ‘Great Wars’ and two veteran NPCs promenade around the city discussing their experiences during ‘the raid on Darrowshire’ and the time they were ‘stuck in a muddy trench for two weeks’. Since the world of Azeroth is primarily fantastic (with some elements of Steampunk), images and representations from the First World War are common. However, more recent portrayals of war are also apparent in events such as the Alterac Valley battleground (which requires players to use shock and awe tactics in order to win), or backstory which provides more complex readings of the political tension between major figures within the worlds.13 There are two major types of conflict made explicit in WoW – war against common enemies, and the ‘truce’ state between Horde and Alliance. The former is presented in fairly straightforward terms and supported by highly visible conversations which occur in public areas. For example, after the implementation of the ‘Opening of the Sunwell’ patch, three NPCs were given extra dialogue (this time, next to the teleport portals – an area that characters frequently utilise), discussing their allegiances and the necessity of working together: General Tiras’alan: Why do you suffer the presence of this despicable Lady Liadrin. She and her followers distort the Light and make a mockery of all we stand for! A’dal: Patience, general. The Light embraces all who enter Shattrath in good faith. Lady Liadrin: Thank you for allowing me to speak, A’dal. I know many of your allies despise me and my knights for our treatment of M’uru [. . .] I’ve come to realise our path was a false one [. . .] A’dal: Both our peoples suffered greatly at the hands of Kael’thas and his agents. Lady Liadrin: Your people were not the authors of their own fate, but they will die if they do not change. These conversations, which are on a timer and repeat themselves perpetually, instruct players about the ongoing developments in the war as they move past on their daily business. The ‘Opening of the Sunwell’ patch also required players to work cooperatively by completing a certain amount of server-wide tasks. This gradual accumulation of actions wore down the opposition’s forces. In 2006 ‘The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj’ had a similar shared objective – players had to donate goods to a cooperative war effort, allowing them to eventually access a series of quests. Cooperation in completing these resultant quests was

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 549

30/01/2012 16:25

550

esther maccallum-stewart

dependent on large groups in different factions working together in order to finally open the gates. On the Moonglade EU server, a low raiding population meant that the Alliance guild Vir Mortalis had to coordinate its efforts with their Horde counterparts Honorbound – an act which led to considerable player controversy as a result.14 Elsewhere, I have argued that the worldness of WoW promotes combat – it is, after all, a game predicated on the fact that players can fight each other as well as the world that surrounds them.15 However, it is also undeniable that the game embeds ethical reasons within the narrative designed to confront the player with their own actions. Much of this is predicated on the heroic discourses of war; if players ‘Play up and play the game’, surely they also need to adopt the codes of chivalry and fairness. Killing a member of the Horde just as they resurrect from their graveyard (corpse-camping), or sneakily poisoning enemy cookpots are hardly acts that fall within this sphere, and yet the former is a common act in battlegrounds and the latter a quest that anyone who allies themselves with the ‘Scryer’ faction had to perform.16 Interestingly, this opinion is shared by players themselves, who see themselves willingly engaging in inter-racial conflict despite its dubious rationale. In ‘Are We the Bad Guys of Azeroth?’, Allison Robert expresses a typical sense of tension over this: Assuming we’re all still in it for the fun of PvP (and, well, the gear)17. . . it’s interesting to consider that player-characters are, lore-wise, among the primary contributors (rather than the primary responders) to the friction between the Horde and the Alliance.18 Interestingly, Robert notes that it is players who are largely responsible for the ongoing conflict, despite the internal narrative of the game which guides them. It is to this aspect that this chapter now turns. MMORPGs, by their very nature, encourage sociability. Players are constantly interacting together, and often need each other’s support to complete aspects of the game. This affects their perception and imaginative reconstruction of the game world. The roleplaying aspect of MMORPGs means that, often, the narrative provided by the world is supported, expanded and given life by role players, who take the fundamental narratives provided and appropriate them accordingly. Designated role-playing servers have high populations of players who arrange events, write fan fiction and background stories, and role play with each other during their gameplay. Players write backstories (or ongoing journals) and post them on exterior websites – the Argent Archives19 is a dedicated roleplaying forum with enough traffic to merit a full-time employee. Frequent staged events complement the narrative remit provided by Blizzard, and players often attempt to remain ‘in character’ to support this ideal. Many of these actions and events exploit the tension between Horde and Alliance: The grand House of Silvermist will move down from Silvermoon City in force carrying the white banners of truce under authorization from both capitols. The Lord Regent of Silvermoon City has authorized this mission, as well as the Governing Body of Stormwind City. The Silvermist Convoy will move south and settle in a peaceful area outside Stormwind City.20 These events often use previous well-known discourses of war – in this case a sort of Christmas Truce event. Other events, such as the annual player run Steamwheedle Faire on the Moonglade EU forum, also rely on adages such as the two sides in war being ‘not

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 550

30/01/2012 16:25

the narrative of war games

551

so different’. The event usually includes a military parade and a storytelling competition. Role-played accounts of warfare by players often emulate war poetry, with players telling tales of the horrors of war alongside those of bravery and camraderie; for example, in the machinima by Cody, The Burden of Consequence (2010) and The Craft of War: BLIND by Percula (2008);21 and these seem to demonstrate the hybridity shown in the world, where combat is essential but also tragically necessary. Games form narratives in very different ways to more traditional media, including literature. This does not mean, however, that they are incapable of providing players with rich texts as a result. Games vary greatly, but as they become more open-ended, so too do the resources provided to players, allowing them to become active participants in these narratives. Games function as convergence texts in this respect – they rely on their players going elsewhere to gather and to disseminate information. This means that often, metonymic devices in-world are translated outside into more multifaceted ideas. Historical games in particular often drop contentious or controversial elements into their games, although at the same time they also have a vested interest in keeping players playing (and paying). The most well-known themes of war literature are translated into these new contexts, with both designers and players incorporating a mishmash of ideas and themes gleaned from previous texts. Games are, however, in a unique position to exploit the often contradictory representations of war that exist in contemporary societies. Their players may be engaging in warfare, but at the same time, they are often encountering artefacts with the game suggesting multiple readings of conflict. In simpler games such as FPS titles, this is less obvious, although designers often try to offset the violence of their games by providing rewards in the form of ‘real’ historical information or artefacts which discuss not only first-person experiences, but provide military, social and sometimes politicised context. Overall, the response to warfare in games is both surprisingly conscientious, given their ultimate aim to promote conflict ‘in-world’, and diverse. Increasingly, successful games encourage players to question both narratives and the moral decisions they have to make as player-avatar. Games may often leave these choices up to the player, but this does not mean they are without meaning. Finally, players act as active agents within more complex games. They develop and debate intensive strategies and alternative simulations for god games, personify their characters through the lens of war writing, and finally, show through their development of existing narratives within games that they have a keen awareness of the complexity of the issues which underlie war games. This may not seem to be immensely literary, but player action, and wargaming design, is frequently underpinned by a knowledge of the literature that has gone before, and an appropriation of these themes into a more transmedial, immediate context.

Notes 1. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (London: Bodley Head, 1990); Dan Todman, The Great War, Myth and Memory (London: Hambleton Continuum, 2005). 2. Guy Westwell, War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line (London: Wallflower Press, 2006). 3. Interestingly, the ability to produce more effective morphing animations has meant that this has come full circle – a crude sketch of the FPS can be seen through the release of Doom in 1993 (two-dimensional demons and monsters), Goldeneye on the N64 in 1997 (early facial mapping of actors onto their in-game counterparts), Call of Duty and Medal of Honor (‘pliable’ faces and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 551

30/01/2012 16:25

552

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

esther maccallum-stewart

expressions, increasing in sophistication with each subsequent release, especially in areas such as movement), and back to Bioshock (2007) (Steampunk robots) and Halo (2001–present) (three-dimensional fantasy creatures and robots with sophisticated morphing graphics). It is recommended that readers watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIu-FymZQSw (accessed 8 September 2011) to give them an idea of how levels work and appear. This video shows a player demonstrating a ‘walkthrough’, that is, completing the level in the optimal way. The smoothness of this makes the game appear extremely cinematic. The player follows the instructions of the voice-over, but otherwise controls all actions and direction. Note also the cinematic and narrative conceits at play in the use of music and shifting camera perspective See Lisbeth Klastrup’s excellent chapter on the relationship of the player with death, ‘What Makes World of Warcraft a World? A Note on Death and Dying’, in Hilde Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettburg (eds), Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (Boston: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 143–67. See for example the success of fiction such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong (1993), both of which have pursued this psychologised attitude towards warfare and trauma with great commercial success. Westwell, p. 95. The player is often rewarded for this, and interestingly, this is often in the form of files that give the player access to historical accounts – images of the incidents that the game is based on, or even witness testimony by veterans. For further investigations of how this affects the historicity of these games, cf. Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ‘Controversies: Historicising the Computer Game’ (2007), DiGRA printed proceedings available at http://www.digra.org/dl/ db/07312.51468.pdf, accessed 8 September 2011; and Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ‘A Biplane in Gnomeregan’, in Michael Howard (ed.), A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War (London: Continuum Press, 2008), pp. 190–8. Cf. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (Boston: MIT Press, 1998) and Justin Parsler, Agency in Digital Games, unpublished doctoral thesis to be completed 2012, University of Brunel. Available at http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm, accessed 8 September 2011. Daniel Floyd, ‘Videogames and Storytelling’ (2007), available at http://www.youtube.com/user/ kirithem#p/u/14/1jdG2LHair0, accessed 4 February 2010. Cf. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006). See for example the complex factioneering and military history of a character like Jaina Proudmoore, available at http://www.wowwiki.com/Jaina_Proudmoore, accessed 8 September 2011. Wowwiki: 2008 at http://www.wowwiki.com/Server:Moonglade_Europe, accessed 8 September 2011. MacCallum-Stewart, ‘Controversies’. This was removed for plot reasons when the two became allied during the Sunwell story arc. PvP = player versus player combat. Gear (or kit) = equipment worn by player avatars. PvP combat often allows the accumulation of powerful gear as points or tokens are gained by defeating the enemy. Allison Robert, ‘Are We the Bads Guys of Azeroth?’, 2 April 2008, available at WoW Insider, http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/04/02/are-we-the-bad-guys-of-azeroth/, accessed 8 September 2011. Argent Archives, available at http://www.argentarchives.org/, accessed 7 July 2008. Argent Archives News, http://www.argentarchives.org/news, accessed 7 July 2008. Cody (2010), The Burden of Consequence, available at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wY1KwPo791s, accessed 11 September 2011; Percula (2008), The Craft of War: BLIND, available at http://vimeo.com/5241163, accessed 11 September 2011.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 552

30/01/2012 16:25

56

WAR CORRESPONDENCE Kate McLoughlin

I

n the second scene of Macbeth, as battle rages between King Duncan’s forces and the rebels led by Macdonald, the King, Malcolm, Donalbain and Lennox encounter a ‘bleeding Captain’. Taking in his appearance, Duncan immediately sizes him up as a potential war correspondent: the ‘bloody man’ can ‘report, / As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt / The newest state’ (I, ii, 1–3). The Captain’s wounds, in other words, are badges not only of courage but also of participation in the off-stage fray and therefore authorise him to report on it, both to the King and to the theatre audience. ‘Say to the King the knowledge of the broil / As thou didst leave it,’ encourages Malcolm (I, ii, 6–7), again emphasising the fact that the bringer of news has first-hand experience of what he relates. The Captain’s bleeding gashes make theatrically the point fundamental to the poesis of war correspondence: that autopsy – or at least its appearance – is the indispensable guarantee of information. The etymology of ‘autopsy’ includes both ‘auto’ and ‘optic’: its primary sense is ‘seeing with one’s own eyes, eye-witnessing; personal observation or inspection’1 (its secondary meaning, the dissection of a dead body, derives from this idea of seeing for oneself). In its exploration of twentieth-century British and American war correspondence, this chapter will focus on the interaction between developing communications technology and the autopsy tropes, and the consequences for reportorial credibility. By the time of the Crimean War (1854–6), typewriter ribbon, Pitman shorthand and electrical telegraphy had all been invented but the telegraph was costly to use and the wiring network not extensive. The conflict’s most famous reporter, William Howard Russell (often regarded as the father of modern war correspondence), still wrote his dispatches in pencil and posted them to the London Times in the form of a letter that might be printed days or weeks after the events in question.2 By 1911, Russell’s approximate contemporary, George Washburn Smalley, New York Tribune and London Times correspondent and founder of the first overseas press bureau, could write that what Russell produced was ‘not exactly journalism. It had nothing to do with that speed and accuracy in the collection and transmission of news which [. . .] must be the chief business of the correspondent’.3 By contrast, a decade after the Crimean conflict, the use of the electrical telegraph in the American Civil War (1861–5) gave rise to the personal byline and the strap-line ‘By Telegraph’.4 These paratexts communicated both immediacy and proximity, linking the reporter directly to the story, vouching for his presence in the midst of the action and enhancing his authority. But by 1889, the London Spectator was questioning

553

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 553

30/01/2012 16:25

554

kate mcloughlin

the benefits of the new technology on the grounds that speed and plurality of information led only to confusion: The constant diffusion of statements in snippets, the constant excitements of feeling unjustified by fact, the constant formation of hasty or erroneous opinions, must in the end, one would think, deteriorate the intelligence of all to whom the telegraph appeals.5 Already, then, there is the suggestion that the increasing sophistication of media might actually diminish the value of the data conveyed, counteracting any credibility achieved by autopsy. Nonetheless, rapidity of reportage continued to be a key journalistic value, at least for the daily newspapers. Commissioned by both the New York World and the magazine Collier’s Weekly to cover the Boxer Rebellion (1900), Frederick Palmer noted that the former required him to cable in copy while the latter expected articles and photographs by mail.6 The fragmentation of war correspondence into punchy news items and lengthy, illustrated think-pieces – part of the growing movement towards specialisation and professionalisation in journalism – was beginning. By the start of the twentieth century, work by James Clerk Maxwell of Scotland, Heinrich Hertz of Germany and Guglielmo Marconi of Italy had established wireless telegraphy alongside electrical telegraphy. During the First World War, by using the cable at the ‘double urgent’ message rate (75 cents per word), the New York Times could print news from the battlefield of the current day’s date.7 On the declaration of war in 1914, New York Times and Collier’s correspondent Arthur Ruhl took a ship across the Atlantic to Liverpool and from there went by train to London and Antwerp. His memoirs Antwerp to Gallipoli: A Year of War on Many Fronts – And Behind Them (1916) advertise first-hand experience in their very title and are littered with other pieces of evidence attesting to autopsy: photographs, reproductions of posters and a facsimile of his passport ‘covered with visés’.8 On 13 October 1914, the New York Times published a piece headlined ‘DODGED ANTWERP SHELLS.; [sic] Arthur Ruhl Tells of His Experience When Caught in Cross-Fire’.9 The strap-line is ‘Special Cable to the New York Times’ (it is not evident what might have been ‘special’ about the cable but the adjective makes it seem momentous) and the date-line ‘London, Oct. 12’. After these indicators of urgency and efficiency, the article opens: Arthur Ruhl arrived in London tonight, having left Antwerp just as the Germans were getting into the city. He was under fire several times, especially when he accompanied a British surgeon into the zone between the inner and middle forts on Thursday, where they were caught between cross-fires.10 Though the reporter has left the war zone, ‘tonight’ gives the impression of immediacy (the piece in fact came out the following day) while ‘under fire’ and ‘caught between crossfires’ are stock phrases that lend the correspondent quasi-military standing and reinforce the sense of his closeness to the action. The rest of the article purports to record a conversation with Ruhl: ‘Speaking of his experiences, Mr. Ruhl said: “Like most other people, I have read the hackneyed expression that shells whistle through the air, but I know now that they whistle louder than they do in any book.”’11 Though it cannot be the case that an oral conversation is being represented (the first transatlantic telephone call would not be made until 1927), the illusion of a personal exchange is created – an exchange in which

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 554

30/01/2012 16:25

war correspondence

555

the benefits of first-hand witnessing are explicitly stated. The combination of up-to-themoment news made possible by wireless telegraphy and certain stylistic devices (the use of direct, first-person utterances rather than reported speech, for example) enhances the invaluable effect of autopsy, reinforcing the standing of both Ruhl and the New York Times as reporters of war. Nonetheless, in the First World War, the improvement in communication conferred by wireless telegraphy was counterbalanced by the swingeing censorship that inhibited it. In 1915, the British authorities granted permanent, pooled accreditation to just five correspondents, who operated under strict controls: Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle, Herbert Russell (Reuters), William Beach Thomas (Daily Mirror, Daily Mail), Perry Robinson (Daily News, Times) and Percival Philips (Daily Express, Morning Post).12 Once a reporter had typed his dispatch (the qwerty keyboard had been invented in 1873, the first portable typewriter in 1892),13 he gave it to a military minder who vetted it before sending it onwards to General Headquarters where it was telephoned to the War Office and from there taken by hand to the newspaper’s offices. Once passed by GHQ, the copy could not be altered.14 While the United States remained neutral, conditions for American correspondents were better than this (though Arthur Ruhl writes of his frustration at the ‘excursions’ organised by the German General Staff which rendered reporters from neutral nations ‘as personally helpless as a package in a pneumatic tube’, but once the country entered the war in 1917, censorship was imposed by the US military authorities.15 Richard Harding Davis, glamorous correspondent for the New York Evening Sun and Collier’s Weekly and leading advocate for American intervention in the war, began to doubt whether representation could ever bring home the truths of conflict. In his memoirs, With the Allies (1915), Davis suggested that the technologies of print media and the newsreel were still no substitute for direct witnessing: The loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, the wrecking of cities, and the laying waste of half of Europe cannot be brought home to people who learn of it only through newspapers and moving pictures and by sticking pins in a map. Were they nearer to it, near enough to see the women and children fleeing from the shells and to smell the dead on the battle-fields, there would be no talk of neutrality.16 In this instance, Davis politicises autopsy: actual presence in the war zone, he proposes, would annihilate the isolationists’ cause. Given that it would be impractical for the entire American public to cross the Atlantic to see for themselves, vivid and persuasive reportage assumed a highly practical significance and the role of the journalist as mediator of information was enhanced. Davis himself moved from mediator to media star. If reporting of the First World War was restricted by the pool system, in the 1930s bylines were being used ‘liberally’ as a growth in interpretative reporting emphasised the role of the correspondent as political commentator rather than as passive news carrier.17 Nonetheless, it was still imperative for the reporter to be there and to see – or (a different point) to be seen to be there and seeing. The memoirs of the New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews contain extensive analysis of the Spanish Civil War but Matthews also quotes Benedetto Croce’s remark that one cannot stand outside events and move as in a void. It is necessary to pass through them, to feel the impact and the agony which they generate in order to stand above them, rising from suffering to judgement and knowledge.18

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 555

30/01/2012 16:25

556

kate mcloughlin

Among the reporters Matthews met while based at the Hotel Florida in Madrid was Martha Gellhorn, then beginning her career as a correspondent for Collier’s magazine. Gellhorn’s Collier’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War are textbook examples of the 1930s’ New Reportage, alternating scenes and viewpoints in a collage-like way; describing, as the theorists of socialist realism stipulated, the causes and consequences of the suffering she witnessed rather than simply presenting emotive images without explanation; and, above all, emphasising the eyewitness epistemology that the genre and the times demanded. ‘Only the Shells Whine’, Gellhorn’s first dispatch, was mailed to Collier’s, which published it on 17 July 1937, trailing it with the information that she had ‘for six weeks [. . .] lived in [the] city [Madrid]’.19 From the article’s outset, the correspondent-persona is, via the second person singular, expressly located both in the field and in the text: At first the shells went over: you could hear the thud as they left the Fascists’ guns, a sort of groaning cough; then you heard them fluttering toward you. As they came closer the sound went faster and straighter and sharper and then, very fast, you heard the great booming noise when they hit.20 Sounds and sensations place the reporter’s actual presence at the scene beyond doubt, while the pronoun ‘you’ reaches out to draw the reader into a three-dimensional situation in which the shells seem to be landing in real time and real space (‘closer [. . .] faster and straighter and sharper’). The grammar and the frightened sense of urgency therefore recapitulate Gellhorn’s political point: her American readers are not isolated from the conflict and the US government’s policy of non-intervention in the Spanish War should be reversed. A reflective article that Collier’s spread over four pages and illustrated with pooled photographs, ‘Only the Shells Whine’ did not aim to bring stop-press news and so featured no paratextual indicators of immediacy. But Gellhorn’s later think-pieces for the magazine, about the Spanish Civil War, the Russo-Finnish War, the Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, would prominently advertise that they had been sent by cable and wireless telegraphy direct from the front line. By the start of the Second World War, radio was established as a mass medium. Mitchell Stephens suggests that early radio journalists adopted the ‘dispassionate voice of the newspapers where they trained’ but, while it is true that short sentences and simple vocabulary were important for aural clarity, radio was to become an increasingly intimate medium.21 The CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow broadcast from London to the United States and Canada during the Second World War, his famous opening line – ‘This is London’ – attesting to his presence in the midst of events. An advocate of American entry into the war, Murrow, like Gellhorn in Spain, addressed his listeners as ‘you’, described details of landscape and weather to build up a reality effect and used autopsy tropes as a means of political persuasion. On 26 August 1940, after witnessing a night of bombing in London, he told his audience, ‘tonight [Londoners] are magnificent. I’ve seen them, talked with them, and I know.’22 Exploiting the capabilities of the medium, Murrow would kneel down in the gutter and reach out his microphone so that people on the other side of the Atlantic could hear the crunch of the bombs, and so, in a sense, be present in the situation themselves, listening with and through Murrow and so taking on his perspective.23 Radio telegraphy also meant that print journalists could include the information ‘Radioed from’ in their strap-lines, creating a reassuring impression of technological

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 556

30/01/2012 16:25

war correspondence

557

sophistication as well as of speed and of the proximity of the reporter to the thick of the action. But, again, restrictions on correspondents’ access to the war zones counteracted the constantly developing efficiency of communications. British censorship was as strict as in the First World War. General Eisenhower believed that ‘public opinion wins war’ and the Americans allowed greater access to the front but still censored correspondents.24 Iris Carpenter, reporter for the Daily Express and later the Boston Globe, recalls the restricted situation after D-Day in her memoirs, No Woman’s World (1946): Commuting at that time was inevitable. Such transmission as existed in France was available only to correspondents who had landed with the assault troops. Others had to get their stories back to the cable head and through censorship in London. If they were unlucky enough to be women, they had to fight the copy through. Combat started with getting orders, proceeding through skirmishes in which no holds and no tactics, including wolfing, were barred, to get the lady air or sea lift to the far shore, a good story when she got there, transportation back to file it, and finally transmission while it was still news.25 As Carpenter points out, the attitude of the British War Office to women correspondents was ‘we will not tolerate them’.26 American commanders would concede that ‘there were angles of the war picture which could better be written about by women’ and even that the point of view of both sexes should be represented but ‘invariably [. . .] they preferred to have it done on somebody else’s territory.’27 Carpenter’s memoirs are an extended critique of the gender inequalities entrenched in the treatment of Second World War correspondents – inequalities whose natural consequence was to confine women to the parapolemical subjects of hospitals and homes and thereby to deny them the authenticating experience of the war zones. Nonetheless, despite these limitations, American and British women did attain the war zone – and often attained it first. In addition to Carpenter, Margaret Bourke-White (photographer for Life), Mary Marvin Breckenridge (of CBS), Lee Carson (International News Service), Ruth Cowan (Associated Press), Virginia Cowles (Sunday Times), Martha Gellhorn (Collier’s), Mary Welsh Hemingway (Daily Express), Marguerite Higgins (New York Herald Tribune), Helen Kirkpatrick (Chicago Daily News), Lee Miller (photographer for Vogue), Anne O’Hare McCormick (New York Times), Inez Robb (International News Service), Sigrid Schultz (Chicago Tribune), Ann Stringer (United Press), Dorothy Thompson (New York Herald Tribune) and Sonia Tomara (New York Herald Tribune) all reported from the European Theatre of Operations during the Second World War.28 By late 1944, the Allied Public Relations Headquarters in Paris employed staff to deal each week with three million words from nearly a thousand correspondents, plus 35,000 photographs and 100,000 ft of newsreel film.29 But to gather this information, correspondents were reduced to measures as low-tech as the means by which they sent it were sophisticated. To characterise the range of stratagems, disguises, concealments, improvisation and sheer chutzpah by which correspondents accessed data during the Second World War (and in conflicts before and since) despite the official restrictions, it is helpful to turn to the thinking of the French sociologist Michel de Certeau. Certeau uses the militaristic terms ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ (made famous by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz [1780–1831] in his work On War, published posthumously in 1832) to describe the interaction between individuals and power-wielding entities such as cities, companies and institutions.30 Unequal to the social, economic and political strategies deployed by

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 557

30/01/2012 16:25

558

kate mcloughlin

such entities, the individual must instead rely on tactics: clever tricks, the knowledge of how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning’, manoeuvres, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries. Certeau explains: A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety [. . .] Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time – it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing’ [. . .] It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities’.31 Certeau is writing of the practice of everyday life, specifically the behaviour of consumers, but his model is peculiarly apt to describe how a correspondent collects data in wartime. The power-wielding entity is the military authorities, the tactician the individual reporter. Like the consumer in a high capitalist economy, the war correspondent must trace ‘wandering lines’ (lignes d’erre): trajectories which describe the ‘interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop’.32 The tactic, therefore, has a subversive topographical element to it: a means of temporarily occupying, even appropriating, forbidden space. Arthur Ruhl cadging a lift with a surgeon into the cross-fire is one example of this; another, from the Second World War, is the trick by which Martha Gellhorn managed to land on the Normandy beaches on D-Day plus 2. Lacking official accreditation, she hid in the toilet of a hospital ship and successfully made the Channel crossing.33 Encapsulating this tactical figure is the notion of kinesis. The reporter is the opposite of what Gaston Bachelard, in his analysis of ‘topophilia’, terms the ‘sheltered being’: inhabitant of hotels, camps and foxholes, the war journalist’s existence is one of danger, contingency, shallowness, impermanence, itinerancy.34 On not a few occasions, reporters have been mistaken for spies (Richard Harding Davis describes the experience in the chapter ‘To Be Treated as a Spy’ in With the Allies), a phenomenon suggestive of borderline status: the journalist and the spy must both be part of, but essentially separate from, the subject of their observation. Other avatars might be the ethnographer or the scientist on a field trip: figures who are both outsiders and insiders, observers and participants. There is a flâneurlike aspect to the war recorder, as well as a sense in which he or she, in sending back accounts of battle, accumulates the spoils of war. From these models, the war correspondent emerges as a hybrid figure: the audience’s representative but also a flamboyant showman, a marginalised itinerant who makes his or her way to the very centre of the action. Moreover, given the skills and cunning that the reporter has necessarily had to master, it is unsurprising that information overload, rather than deficit, has been the hallmark of war journalism as the twentieth century has progressed. America’s wars in Korea and, particularly, Vietnam, were television wars. Blame for the United States’ failure in Vietnam was (and continues to be) placed by many on the right with the ‘liberal’ coverage of the conflict on TV and in the press. Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs: More than ever before, television showed the terrible human suffering and sacrifice of war. Whatever the intention behind such relentless and literal reporting of the war, the result was a serious demoralization of the home front.35 This thesis has been criticised by, among others, Daniel C. Hallin and Greg McLaughlin, who point out that any tendency on the part of the media towards negative reporting was

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 558

30/01/2012 16:25

war correspondence

559

‘limited’.36 What television coverage of Vietnam did give rise to was the need somehow to order the mass of information – and an attendant sense of the impossibility of attempting to do so. Martha Gellhorn went to South Vietnam because ‘I had to learn for myself, since I could not learn from anyone else, what was happening to the voiceless Vietnamese people’: her six reports, which she was unable to place with an American publication, were published by the Guardian.37 She found in Saigon, in August 1966, ’399 representatives of the news media of the world [. . .] large governmental information services, Vietnamese and American, as well as the Vietnamese press, including three English-language newspapers’ – and a dearth of hard facts.38 Technology, in other words, was muddying rather than assisting communication: Gellhorn, using techniques learned in the Spanish Civil War, instead passed through ‘the barrier of silence’ and interviewed the cautious South Vietnamese themselves.39 In the decades since Vietnam, communications technology has become increasingly sophisticated. NATO’s bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 was reported by email and on the Internet as well as by the mainstream media, thereby reaching niche audiences.40 The US–British invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was reported over video-phone. The First Gulf War of 1991 was the first to receive 24/7 live television coverage. Since, in twenty-four hours, there are necessarily long stretches in which nothing of televisual interest happens, the result was a proliferation of what Daniel Boorstin termed the ‘pseudo-event’: a planned ‘synthetic novelty’ such as an interview or press conference.41 Indeed, Jean Baudrillard’s theory is that the events of (post)modern warfare are simulacra stage-managed for the media. In The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1994), he writes: The Iraqis blow up civilian buildings in order to give the impression of a dirty war. The Americans disguise satellite information to give the impression of a clean war. Everything is trompe l’oeil!42 This is not to say that the Gulf War, and the death and injury it entailed, did not happen (though that is often how Baudrillard’s claims are interpreted) but that the ‘Gulf War’ was a contrived series of pseudo-events and sound- and action-bites.43 The effect was compounded by the tight media management on the part of the American military, who had learned lessons from the British practice during the Falklands War of 1982 and their own experiences in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). A pool system was used, so that the data given to journalists was restricted, and correspondents were accompanied by military escorts.44 The information flow was therefore highly controlled. War, Baudrillard would propose, had become no more and no less than reported war. Though this argument can lead to the dangerous belief that real conflict is somehow not occurring, it usefully alerts us to the potential speciousness of the marriage between high technology and the autopsy tropes. When a correspondent giving a television report appears against a background of distant explosions and tracers, his or her authority is underscored by these indicators of proximity to the action. What is less visible is the possibility that the report itself is an artificial event. Twenty-first-century war correspondents benefit from ever improving technologies: satellite, cable and digital broadcasting. At the same time, new Internet-based fora and genres are becoming available for spreading news of war: blogs, chat-rooms, bulletin boards, virtual discussion groups, networking sites and web feeds.45 War can be consumed through live video and audio reports, multimedia slide-shows, animated graphics and

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 559

30/01/2012 16:25

560

kate mcloughlin

interactive maps.46 Anyone with a mobile phone may now record and upload images of conflict; CNN features i-reports by sojos (solo journalists). In the plurality of media and a situation of globalised terror, everyone is a potential war correspondent. Stuart Allan argues that this democratisation (or de-professionalisation) of war reporting has converted the ‘us and them’ outlook of conventional journalism to a ‘here and there’ approach.47 In another formulation, a ‘transmission’ model of communication, which imparts, sends or gives information, is being supplemented by a ‘ritual’ model which emphasises sharing, participation, association, communion and fellowship in data exchange.48 Radical new witnessing is possible and it is worth noting that at the forefront of all these new media and genres are the autopsy tropes made possible by the latest technology. But there are a few caveats. Plural war correspondence on this scale produces not so much information overload as information overwhelm. Greg McLaughlin traces a proportionate ‘decline in the editing function, the cumulative sense of judgement’ as technology improves, a diagnosis not dissimilar to the Spectator’s 1889 editorial view that the electrical telegraph ‘deteriorate[d] the intelligence’.49 The traditional figure of the professional eyewitness correspondent, selective and subjective in his or her choice of what news to send, is more necessary than ever to lead the way through the data morass. It is important, though, that first-hand experience be real and not hyper-real: technology should enhance true autopsy rather than just create the impression of it. ‘There is only one way to cover a war, and it has never been different’, wrote Herbert Matthews: Go to the front and from the midst of the battle see with your own eyes what happens. Nothing else in war corresponding is worth more than the paper of the day on which it is printed. Only first-hand news endures, for it is the stuff of which history is made.50

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Oxford English Dictionary. David Randall, The Great Reporters (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005), p. 6. George Washburn Smalley, Anglo-American Memories (London: Duckworth, 1911), p. 200. Greg McLaughlin, The War Correspondent (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 26. Spectator, quoted in Joanna Neuman, Lights, Camera, War! (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 19. Frederick Palmer, With My Own Eyes. A Personal Story of Battle Years (London: Jarrolds, 1934), p. 168. John Hohenberg, Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and their Times (New York and London: Columbia University Press, [1964] 1967), p. 238. Arthur Ruhl, Antwerp to Gallipoli: A Year of War on Many Fronts – And Behind Them (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), between pp. 238 and 239. Arthur Ruhl, ‘Dodged Antwerp Shells.; Arthur Ruhl Tells of His Experience When Caught in Cross-Fire’, New York Times, 13 October 1914, p. 2. Ibid. p. 2. Ibid. p. 2. McLaughlin, p. 59. Randall, p. 9. McLaughlin, p. 59. Ruhl, p. 128.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 560

30/01/2012 16:25

war correspondence

561

16. Richard Harding Davis, With the Allies (London: Duckworth, 1915), p. 8. 17. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 145. 18. Herbert Matthews, The Education of a Correspondent (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), pp. 11–12. 19. ‘Next Week’, Collier’s, 10 July 1937, p. 4. 20. Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: Granta, 1998), p. 18. 21. Mitchell Stephens, A History of News (Fort Worth: Harcourt, Brace, 1997), p. 271. 22. Edward R. Murrow, This is London (London: Cassell, 1941), p. 160. 23. Hohenberg, pp. 336–7. 24. Dwight D. Eisenhower, quoted in Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo (London: Prion Books, [1975] 2000), p. 344. 25. Iris Carpenter, No Woman’s World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), p. 32. 26. Ibid. p. 32. 27. Ibid. p. 34. 28. Julia Edwards, Women of the World. The Great Foreign Correspondents (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), passim. 29. Knightley, p. 344. 30. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984), p. xix. 31. Ibid. p. xix. 32. Ibid. p. xx. 33. Gellhorn, pp. 119–31. 34. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1969), pp. xxxi, 5. 35. Richard Nixon, The Memoirs (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), p. 350. 36. Daniel C. Hallin, The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 10. 37. Gellhorn, p. 248. 38. Ibid. p. 281. 39. Ibid. p. 262. 40. McLaughlin, p. 203. 41. Daniel Boorstin, The Image (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961), p. 9. 42. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (London: Power Publications, 1994), p. 62. 43. See Richard Keeble, ‘Information Warfare in an Age of Hyper-Militarism’, in Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (eds), Reporting War. Journalism in Wartime (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 43–58. 44. See Lyn Gorman and David McLean, Media and Society in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 177–8. 45. Stuart Allan, ‘The Culture of Distance: Online Reporting of the Iraq War’, in Allan and Zelizer, p. 349. 46. Ibid. p. 350. 47. Ibid. p. 362. 48. James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Winchester, MA and London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 15–18. 49. McLaughlin, p. 43 50. Matthews, pp. 536–7.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 561

30/01/2012 16:25

57

THINKING WAR Nick Mansfield

T

he canonical theories of war in the Western tradition fall into broadly two groups: those which see war as fundamentally opposed to civil society, and those which see it as the expression of social values and intentions. The first group can be connected to the work of Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant who, in different ways, tried to explain the origins of civil order and sovereign authority as the attempt to quell the human tendency towards war, seen as our natural inclination. The second account is identified with Carl von Clausewitz, who argued that war is ‘the mere continuation of policy by other means’.1 For Clausewitz, war not only enacted policy, but it could also be an expression of the energy of the people. Both of these accounts remain highly influential. The Hobbesian remains live in the rhetoric of politicians and the media which quickly associates any notion of a challenge to law and order with war. It surfaces in persistent talk of social problems as forms of warfare: we have had wars on poverty, drugs, crime and even obesity. Clausewitz’s account, on the other hand, remains the most influential and cited explanation for warfare in the era after globalisation, because it has been seen by radical critical commentators as an explanation for the coordination of military action with the global neo-liberal agenda. However, there have also been a number of modern and postmodern theories of war which have presented a more complicated picture of the relationship between war and civil society as double, paradoxical or aporetic. The most influential of these accounts remains Sigmund Freud’s, but other thinkers from Georges Bataille to Deleuze and Guattari and Jacques Derrida have developed it in highly productive ways. According to Hobbes, human beings in their natural state aim simply to fulfil their desire, regardless of the needs and requirements of others. On top of this, however, they recognise that if their desire is to be fulfilled, they must not only aim to pursue specific wants, but to somehow guarantee that what they want will continue to be available to them in the future. In the natural state, without any legal mechanism to ensure private property or justice, they can have no certainty that they will be able to have access to what they want or hold onto it when they get it. They are in a state of anarchy, of a permanent war of ‘every man, against every man’.2 In order to guarantee the ongoing fulfilment of their desire, they decide, somehow, to institute a style of civic order that will secure their ability to pursue their desires. They can only do this by handing over some of their individual prerogative to an authority greater than themselves, a sovereignty that has the executive power to control, even quash, their natural inclination towards mutual violence.

562

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 562

30/01/2012 16:25

thinking war

563

Hobbes’s explanation for the construction of political sovereignty reads like a neat narrative: human beings move through time from a primitive natural state of competition and violence to a second phase of order, calm and the realisation of desire. Hobbes’s use of this narrative model was purely explanatory, however. He did not believe in a neat evolutionary development. Indeed, he argued that the state of nature continued to coincide with that of civil order (his example was the indigenous peoples of the Americas, whom he supposed to be living in a wild state while other peoples in other parts of the world had successfully achieved civic calm).3 The international order too could be seen as analogous to the state of nature, without an overriding mechanism to oversee relationships between states, each pursuing blindly their own selfish ends. These examples merely confirmed Hobbes’s view that the state of nature remained ever present in human life, ever pressing on civil order, and always accompanying it. Kant’s argument about war in his pamphlet Perpetual Peace has some similarities with Hobbes. The most important aspect of the state of nature for Kant is its lawlessness. In fact, to be in a state of lawlessness is for Kant a state of war, even if violence does not actually take place.4 Kant disconnects war and violence, in other words, in a move that at first would seem astonishing if it were not an idea that continues to be defended widely in diplomacy and social policy. To Kant, promoting and confirming the law is not a mere desire or aspiration of civilised communities: it is a duty.5 Human beings, then, have an obligation to institute the law, which is more important than the suppression of violence. Indeed, there is nothing to stop violence being used as an instrument against lawlessness. From a belief that the maintenance of law and order is best pursued by militarised police forces, or that wars can be fought for peace, this marriage between violence and the law has deeply influenced decision making in the modern and contemporary worlds. Clausewitz’s argument, which seems to take the opposite position to Hobbes and Kant, is no less complicated. Clausewitz’s aim was to counter influential accounts of war which saw it as either a noble aristocratic art, governed by largely aesthetic notions of honour, or as the breakdown of human sociality altogether, where chaos overtook human interrelationships. His aim was to present war as coordinated with policy, as an act of cool intention. War, for Clausewitz, was another tool available to the politician when all else failed. Clausewitz’s account is not itself uncomplicated, however. Clausewitz contrasts war driven by policy with another kind of war which he calls ‘ideal war’. War as an act of force ‘belongs necessarily also to the feelings’ for Clausewitz, and attains its ‘ideal perfection’ when it becomes ‘an affair of the people’.6 Ideal war is war in its violent essence and is most clearly seen in the aggression of ‘the people’ towards their traditional antagonists. Left undirected, such war is vicious and tends towards the annihilation of one party by another. It is this deadly energy which needs to be controlled by the top-down and purposeful logic of rational policy. Truly successful political leadership is able to harness this energy. It is the figure of the military ‘genius’ who is able to join political purpose with mass energy to produce irresistible and logical force on the battlefield. For Clausewitz, the genius was not merely an inspired or courageous leader, but an embodiment of the scientific achievements of higher culture, someone able to deploy the intellectual resources of scientific civilisation amidst the historical drama of the battlefield.7 In sum, Clausewitz’s army is the totality of society in action. Elite direction and popular force join together. Yet, we do not see here a neat synthesis. The connection here remains problematic: the subtleties of élite policy may not

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 563

30/01/2012 16:25

564

nick mansfield

convince the people, whose energy in turn, may exceed élite control. The society that is put into action in Clausewitz’s account remains a challenge to itself, with differing and potentially contradictory motivations. As mentioned earlier, this has been the most influential account of war in modern times, and is still commonly cited. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was challenged by Fascist and Nazi accounts of war which saw war, not as a method, but as a value. These are best summed up in the Fascist sympathiser Filippo Marinetti’s connection between violence and the aesthetic in the founding Futurist Manifesto. For Marinetti, the modern world had brought into being ‘a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed’.8 Speed, most visible in the racing car, showed that beauty always involved violence and struggle, the apotheosis of which was war itself: ‘We will glorify war—the only true hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful Ideas which kill and the scorn of woman.’9 This aestheticisation of war contributed to the Fascist and Nazi culture of politics not as the enactment of intention, but as the expression of a racialised will to dominate. These radical experiments with the destruction of post-Enlightenment society by way of recourse to violent human energy as a type of selfsufficient beauty not only lead to unprecedented levels of atrocity, but also to an enduring disorientation of a sense of collective human purpose. In the later twentieth century, however, the realpolitik conception of war we find in Clausewitz has returned to favour, and is now taken for granted by many commentators, particularly those, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for example, who want to see Western wars nominally fought either against communism or terrorism as attempts to consolidate a capitalist or neo-liberal global hegemony. The most important example here is Michel Foucault’s increasingly influential adaptation of Clausewitz’s argument in Society Must be Defended, a series of lectures from 1976. Foucault spectacularly reverses Clausewitz’s argument to argue that politics is warfare continued by other means. He investigates a lively and under-studied reactionary tradition in Western political discourse which has always seen the institutions of civil authority as a means to securing the advantage of one social group over another. To these accounts of history, peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary.10 This idea of a social enemy within took on, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a specifically racial meaning. Foucault writes: ‘the war that is going on beneath order and peace [. . .] is, basically, a race war.’11 It is from this diagnosis of society as a racial struggle that both eugenicist and Nazi racial policies – explicit examples of what Foucault terms ‘biopolitics’ – descend.12 From the beginning of the twentieth century, a wholly other account of war has developed. Here, war is neither in contradiction with civil society nor an expression of it, but the two are in a complex and obscure relationship of ‘doubleness’. One of the first versions of this view emerges through Sigmund Freud’s response to the First World War in ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’. Freud was initially shocked at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. He had believed that the extended era of apparent peace in Europe since 1815 had indicated the achievement of a tolerant cosmopolitanism which was the culmination of a progress of civilisation for which the white races had been marked

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 564

30/01/2012 16:25

thinking war

565

out. That ‘civilised’ Europeans had spent this period of apparent peace visiting a cynical and self-interested violence upon the rest of the world did not seem to undermine this belief. Freud was especially horrified at the way in which some scientists had rushed to contribute to their nations’ war efforts, either by committing their scientific talents to the development of war technology or by ridiculing other peoples, using the rhetoric of science. How could civilisation have crumbled so quickly? Freud’s answer to this question was to argue that the primitive violence civilised society had supposedly left behind had not been overcome, but had merely been repressed. In order for tranquil social relations to proceed, selfish and antagonistic impulses had needed to be controlled. These had not been erased, however, but had merely been buried in the human psyche. ‘The pressure of civilisation [. . .] is shown in malformations of character, and in the perpetual readiness of the inhibited instincts to break through to satisfaction at any available opportunity.’13 Eventually, the pressure keeping these impulses in check would weaken or the impulses themselves would become so strong, they would explode in spasms of uncontrollable violence. This idea is not an unfamiliar one to a modern point of view. Like so many of Freud’s ideas, it has passed into our psychological common sense to think that violence, like sexual excess, can be a counter-movement to excessive repression. It is worth, however, thinking about the original and provocative nature of Freud’s logic here. Social order requires the repression of primitive violence to allow the peaceful operation of human interrelationships. This is not a contradictory or dialectical structure, however, but a complex double-movement. The more advanced and secure our social order, the more repression is required, thus guaranteeing a stronger and stronger counter-movement of violence. The greater the civilisation, therefore, the more it will rest on violence. In short, the more peaceful you are, the more violent you will become. The consolidation of peace and the intensification of violence are twin parts of a single act, therefore. Later, at the end of the war, Freud’s expectations of humanity will have been radically revised. The war had a dramatic effect on Freud’s thinking. Some of his most important work, such as the Wolf Man case study, and the seminal paper ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, which attempted an account of the human attraction to death – a ‘death drive’ – was provoked by the war. Indeed, Freud was to propose that civilisation and violence, or any of the pairings analogous to them – love and aggression, for example – were not opposites but part of the general ambivalence that defined all human relationships. He writes: ‘The law of ambivalence of feeling [. . .] governs our emotional relations with those whom we love most.’14 He goes on: ‘It might be said that we owe the fairest flowerings of our love to the reaction against the hostile impulse which we sense within us.’15 The relationship of simultaneous awe and resentment that the murderous sons had felt towards the ‘primal father’ in Totem and Taboo (1913) could now be generalised to all human feelings. Writing to Albert Einstein after the war in the correspondence later published as Why War?, Freud will no longer be mystified as to why a civilised continent collapsed into violence, but why anyone (himself included) could possibly have expected otherwise, or indeed how it is that people ‘rebel so violently against war’.16 This idea of the relationship between war and peace as being not one of either opposition or identity, but of doubleness has been taken up by a number of later thinkers. To Georges Bataille, the key problem for human societies is not how to make up for lack or scarcity of resources, but how to deal with excess. The universe is constituted by flows of energy that always drive on to greater and greater expansion and excess:

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 565

30/01/2012 16:25

566

nick mansfield

The living organism in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life: the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.17 Perhaps thinking they are providing for their basic needs, human beings end by accumulating an abundance of stuff, a consolidation of energy that needs to be dealt with. The only way the problem of such riches can be addressed is by an extravagant, even dangerous squandering. In many societies, this squandering is organised into rituals of luxury where the parsimonious logic of daily life is shrugged off and resources are wasted pointlessly in feast, games or ritual sacrifice. Again, we see here a double process: the consolidation of wealth draws on the same impulses of chaotic energy that motivate all things, attempting to harvest and direct them, but eventually leading to waste and extravagance. Even the most restrained culture of work will lead therefore to an accumulation of wealth that will need to be squandered someday, somehow. Bataille argued that the apparently peaceful era of industrialisation that had dominated Western history through the nineteenth century had resulted in such a massive accumulation of resources, capacity and materiel that, by 1914, an explosion of violence was inevitable.18 Societies, therefore, imagine themselves to be geared towards peace and general prosperity, but their disciplined work is merely guaranteeing the inevitability of war. Bataille distinguishes between two types of culture of warfare, the military society and the warrior cult. The former adopts the ethic of restrained social order and tries to gear warfare towards rational purposes such as the strategic objectives of controlling territory and gaining political advantage. In the military society ‘the expenditure of forces [. . .] is subjected to a principle of maximum yield.’19 But this is disingenuous. War exposes us to the violence our peace has made necessary. Only a warrior-culture in which the commitment to violence and excess is primary acknowledges this.20 Soldiers, themselves marked by the charisma of warrior culture, yet controlled by the needs of the civil society that employs them, live out the painful contradiction between the military and warrior impulses. Bataille has been criticised for being seduced by the appeal of excess and violence, about which he was often even recklessly enthusiastic. Yet, his key point is not to recommend violence, but to see the doubleness or ambivalence by which apparently abstemious and mild societies of accumulation are really fulfilling their unconscious commitment to death and mayhem. The entanglement of a purposeful and forward-looking practical logic, on the one hand, and a violent, impulsive and extravagant intensity, on the other, is developed in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s discussion of ‘nomadology’ in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the state is by nature geared towards systematic, long-term and legalistic thinking. In order to defend itself, it needs to harness a culture of violence that remains fundamentally alien to it. This culture they identify as ‘nomadic’, a culture of impulse rather than plan, of violence rather than order, one that sees territory as a span to cross rather than a resource to conquer and administer. The nomad unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings a furore to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequalled pity as well.21

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 566

30/01/2012 16:25

thinking war

567

What they have in mind is the nomadic culture of the steppes. To Deleuze and Guattari, nomadic culture resists the formation of the state because it is fundamentally committed to an endless and open-ended adventurism rather than careful husbandry. The state must co-opt this logic because it has no military apparatus of its own, but by incorporating this logic into itself the state places at its heart something violent and unpredictable that will bring it nothing but trouble; hence the threat the military always proposes to the political order, and that is enacted in the military coup or junta. The military order therefore both defends and threatens the state at one and the same time. Jacques Derrida goes furthest in this line by deconstructing the fundamental oppositions on which our understanding of war would seem to depend: that between war and peace, and that between friend and enemy. Although in the first case, Derrida is concentrating on Levinas’s assertion of the primacy of openness and peace as the very ground on which human relationships become possible, his argument could be transposed to Hobbes and Kant. In Derrida’s account of Levinas in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, openness to the other so conditions human exchange that there endures a trace of peacefulness even in war itself, one that war cannot completely abolish.22 As we have seen, this also holds true in Hobbes and Kant. For them, either the peaceful social order is only ever a step away from the war it supposedly supplants, or it endures only by reference to war, or war is the only means by which peace can be achieved and valued. No matter which you choose as your priority, war and peace entail one another. It has become a cliché of contemporary discussions of war that the distinction between war and peace has disappeared. To Hardt and Negri, for example, war has become ‘a general phenomenon, global and interminable’ as well as ‘the primary organising principle of society’.23 Martin Shaw has argued that war has become such an ordinary feature of contemporary policy that it is now expected war will make no difference to the daily operations of social life and economics.24 Others argue that social policies, dealing with crime, drugs, poverty and so on, have become militarised, consistently evoking a rhetoric of war and expecting police squads (SWAT teams, for example) to use military methods. In this way, the military-style aggression that is supposed only to be turned outwards towards a society’s external enemies turns inwards. Still others, like Paul Virilio in Pure War, have argued that a way of thinking and organising which was developed in the military (‘logistics’) has now taken over all business and bureaucratic thinking to the point where society is culturally on a permanent war footing.25 According to these accounts, it is the breakdown of the distinction between war and peace that represents the greatest threat to civil society. What is crucial about Derrida’s argument, however, and what links it back to Freud’s work on ambivalence, is missed in these accounts. Derrida outlines how Levinas has shown the entanglement of war with peace. Yet, there is a problem in this way of thinking. If war always bears within it a trace of peace, then any act of violence is at least notionally peaceful. The same problem can be seen with Hobbes. If peace is always defined by war, then war will always be referred to as the meaning of peace. This means that no social peace can be imagined that is not defined by its relationship to war, even though it might see war as an abomination. In this way, society will always be seen as riding on the surface of an ever present, ever pressing threat of war. War and violence are ostensibly excluded from the social only to be permanently installed in the very meaning of social relations. The practical consequence of this is that every perceived threat to social order – from organised crime to the confrontation between national and immigrant communities – is seen to expose society to its imagined

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 567

30/01/2012 16:25

568

nick mansfield

outside, the state of nature Hobbes identified as war. For the thinkers who see our present age as one in which war and peace have lost their difference, the revival of some idea of the difference between war and peace would seem then to restore to us some sense of how peace can be established beyond war. However, we can see how, from Hobbes to Levinas, arguments that try to assert this difference are actually what makes recourse to war so easy. The imagined difference between war and peace may well be the problem. Derrida’s deconstructive account allows us to see the complexity of the entanglement in difference that canonical arguments and contemporary longings disguise. War and peace are neither distinct from one another, nor can they be seen as the same thing. They constitute, encourage and require one another even as they challenge and reject one another. It is in this tangled relationship that the problem of war subsists. Now, states no longer declare war, or even admit they are at war. Western countries have been involved in wars from Vietnam to the Balkans and Iraq, which they have routinely described as advisory, policing or peacekeeping actions. In such an era, when the distinction between war and peace has become obscure, and when the simplest social policy, political or academic disagreement is labelled a war, perhaps what is revealed is that the terms ‘war’ and ‘peace’ themselves have outlived their usefulness, and that we need to consider more varied and nuanced, and less moralistic and rhetorical, ways of defining violent conflict if we are to endure it.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. J. J. Graham (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 119. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 84. Ibid. p. 85. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), p. 10. Ibid. p. 35. Clausewitz, pp. 103, 386, 384. Ibid. p. 139. F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’, in Herschel B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 286. Ibid. p. 286. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 50–1. Ibid. pp. 59–60. Ibid. p. 245. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 71. Ibid. p. 82. Ibid. p. 88. Sigmund Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 361. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay On General Economy Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1986), p. 21. Ibid. p. 25. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 66. Ibid. pp. 58–61. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism And Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), vol. 2, p. 352.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 568

30/01/2012 16:25

thinking war

569

22. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 23. Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 3, 12. 24. Martin Shaw, The New Western Way of War (London: Polity, 2005), p. 73. 25. Paul Virilio, Pure War, rev. ed., trans. Mark Palizotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997).

Further Reading De Landa, Manuel, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Münkler, Herfried, The New Wars, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 569

30/01/2012 16:25

Notes on contributors

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Kris Anderson teaches at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Her thesis is entitled Strange Growths: Politics, Place and Representation in London’s Wartime Fiction, 1939–1950. John Armitage teaches cultural and art theory in the Department of Visual Arts, Northumbria University. He is the author most recently of Virilio and the Media (London: Polity, 2011), and of ‘Targeting the Imaginist City’, in Ryan Bishop, Gregory Clancey and John William Phillips (eds), The City as Target (London: Routledge, 2011). He is co-editor, with Ryan Bishop and Douglas Kellner, of the Berg journal Cultural Politics. Jonathan Auerbach teaches at the University of Maryland, is a film theorist and historian; and author of Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007) and Cold War film articles, including ‘American Studies and Film, Blindness and Insight’, American Quarterly, 58.1 (2006), pp. 31–50, and (with Lisa Gitelman) ‘Microfilm Containment, and the Cold War’, American Literary History, 19.3 (2007), pp. 745–68. Jon Begley teaches at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, completing a monograph on the 1980s British ‘State-of-the-Nation’ novel, and is author of ‘Satirizing the Carnival of Postmodern Capitalism: The Transatlantic and Dialogic Structure of Martin Amis’s Money’, Contemporary Literature, 45.1 (2004), pp. 79–105. Julia Boll holds a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh and wrote her thesis on war and conflict on the contemporary stage. She is Co-Director of the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School, is one of the three editors of the poetry and prose magazine newleaf (Bremen), and has spoken and published on the New Wars on stage. Jonathan Bolton teaches at Auburn University, and is author of Personal Landscapes: British Poets in Egypt during the Second World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) and ‘Mid-Term Autobiography and the Second World War’, Journal of Modern Literature, 30.1 (2006), pp. 155–72.

570

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 570

30/01/2012 16:25

notes on contributors

571

Allyson Booth teaches at the United States Naval Academy and is author of Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Fran Brearton teaches at Queen’s University, Belfast, and is author of The Great War in Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and numerous articles on Irish poetry and war writing, and is currently working on a monograph on Robert Graves. Matthew Campbell is Professor at the University of York and author of Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Subarno Chattarji teaches at Swansea University, and is the author of Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and ‘Imagining Vietnam: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried’, in Jon Roper (ed.), The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 72–88. Jane Creighton teaches at University of Houston-Downtown, and was curator of the Literature Program for the exhibition, ‘War and Memory: In the Aftermath of Vietnam’, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC. She is a poet and author of ‘My Home in the Country’, in Reese Williams (ed.), Unwinding the Vietnam War (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1987), pp. 49–67, and ‘Writing War, Writing Memory’ in Valerie Kinloch and Margret Grebowicz (eds), Still Seeking and Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan (Oxford: Lexington, 2004), pp. 243–56. Santanu Das teaches at Queen Mary College, London, and is author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and author of articles including ‘War Poetry and the Realm of the Sense’, in Tim Kendall (ed.), Handbook on Modern War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Bob Eaglestone teaches at Royal Holloway College, University of London, is Deputy Director of the Research Centre for the Holocaust and Twentieth Century History, author of Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001) and The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and is co-editor (with Barry Langford) of Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). William D. Ehrhart teaches at the Haverford School in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is a Vietnam war poet, and author of ‘Above All, the Waste: American Soldier-Poets and the Korean War’, in Philip West and Suh Ji-moon (eds), Remembering the “Forgotten War”: The Korean War Through Literature and Art (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), pp. 40–54, Busted: A Vietnam Veteran in Nixon’s America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), The Madness of It All: Essays on War, Literature, and American Life (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002) and Ordinary Lives: Platoon 1005 and the Vietnam War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 571

30/01/2012 16:25

572

notes on contributors

Lee Erwin is an independent scholar whose work on modern and contemporary novels in English has appeared in journals including Novel: A Forum on Fiction, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Research in African Literatures. The writing of the essay in this volume was enabled in part by research leave from the University of Macau. James Fountain has completed a PhD on the poetry of Joseph Macleod at the University of Glasgow, is the author of Out of Time (Lewes: Book Guild, 2006) and has published articles on the Spanish Civil War. Helen Goethals teaches Commonwealth history at the University of Toulouse 2 and is author of ‘The Muse that Failed: Poetry and Patriotism during the Second World War’, in Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 362–76 and ‘Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance to the Second World War’, in Andrew McKeown and Charles Holdefer (eds), Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), pp. 109–22. David Goldie teaches at the University of Strathclyde and is author of Critical Difference: John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot in English Literary Criticism 1919–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ‘Scotland, Britishness, and the First World War’, in Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie and Alastair Renfrew (eds), Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 39–57, ‘Was there a Scottish War Literature?: Poetry, Scotland and the First World War’, in Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 153–73. Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester. Amongst other books he is author of Transatlantic Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), and (with Catherine Morley) editor of American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). He is currently finishing a project entitled Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry and American Culture, 1945–1970. Andrew Hammond is Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, and is author of The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007) and editor of the collection of essays, Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). Sara Haslam teaches at the Open University, and is author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) and ‘Making a Text the Fordian Way: Between St Dennis and St George, Propaganda and the First World War’, in Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (eds), Publishing the First World War: Essays in Book History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 202–14. Jennifer Haytock teaches at SUNY College at Brockport, and is author of At Home, At War: Domesticity and the First World War in American Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003) and ‘Looking at Agony: World War I in The Professor’s House’, in

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 572

30/01/2012 16:25

notes on contributors

573

Steven Trout (ed.), Cather Studies 6: History, Memory, and War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 228–43. Mark A. Heberle is professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, and is the author of A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001). Sissy Helff teaches at the J. W. Goethe University in Frankfurt and is the author of Unreliable Truths: Indian Homeworlds in Transcultural Women’s Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, forthcoming) and is currently researching the representation of the refugee in British literature. Alex Houen teaches at the University of Cambridge, and is the author of Terrorism and Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Aaron Kelly teaches at the University of Edinburgh, and is author of the Irvine Welsh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) and The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). He is co-editor (with Alan Gillis) of Critical Ireland: New Essays in Literature and Culture (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001) and (with Nicholas Allen) The Cities of Belfast: Interventions of Recovery (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003). Celia M. Kingsbury teaches at the University of Central Missouri and is author of The Peculiar Sanity of War: Hysteria in the Literature of World War I (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2002). Barry Langford teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is the author of Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). The essay collection Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (co-edited with Robert Eaglestone) was published in December 2007 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). He is at work on a study of Holocaust film. John Limon is John J. Gibson Professor of English at Williams College, and is author of Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Jane Lewty teaches at the University of Amsterdam, and is a specialist in modernism and sound technology. She co-edited (with Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Coyle) Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009) and has published numerous articles on modernist radio. Esther MacCallum-Stewart is a Lecturer at the University of Chichester, and a Senior Research Fellow at SMARTlab, UCD Dublin. Her work examines how online communities create narratives, and how gamers create and reform identities within games. She is Vice President of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). She is currently writing a book, Online Communities, Social Narratives (London: Routledge, 2012), as well as

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 573

30/01/2012 16:25

574

notes on contributors

(with Jessica Enevold) The Game Lore Reader (Boston: MIT Press, forthcoming), and (with Tanya Krzywinska and Justin Parsler) edited the collection entitled Ring Bearers; The Lord of The Rings Online as Intertextual Narrative (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Kate McLoughlin teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London and is author of Martha Gellhorn: The War Writer in the Field and in the Text (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) and Authoring War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Nick Mansfield teaches at Macquairie University, and is author of Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Masochism: The Art of Power (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997) and Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000). R. W. Maslen teaches at the University of Glasgow, is author of Elizabethan Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), Shakespeare and Comedy (London: Arden, 2005) and a number of essays on twentieth-century fantasy and science fiction. Hamish Mathison teaches at the University of Sheffield, and is author of Restoration and Eighteenth-century Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) and Instruments of Enlightenment, ed. and intro. Hamish Mathison (with Angela Wright), special issue of History of European Ideas 31.2 (2005). He is a specialist in submarine fiction. Jessica Meacham is a doctoral student at the University of Sheffield, working on a project on surveillance anxiety, the secret state and British writing, including writers such as John Le Carré, Pat Barker and Muriel Spark. Leo Mellor teaches at the University of Cambridge and is author of Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and ‘War Journalism in English’, in Marina MacKay (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 67–80. Margot Norris is a modernist and Joycean who teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and is author of Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Sharon Ouditt teaches at the University of Nottingham Trent, and is author of Fighting Forces, Writing Women (London: Routledge, 1994), First World War Women Writers: An Annotated Bibliography (London: Routledge, 1999) and ‘Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 245–60. Michael Paris teaches at the University of Central Lancashire, and is author of The Novels of World War Two (London and New York: The Library Association, 1989), Winged Warfare (Manchester: Manchester University Press and New York: St. Martin’s

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 574

30/01/2012 16:25

notes on contributors

575

Press, 1992), From the Wright Brothers to ‘Top Gun’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), The First World War and Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000). David Pascoe is Professor of English the University of Utrecht, and author of Aircraft (London: Reaktion, 2003), Airspaces (London: Reaktion, 2001), as well as numerous articles on twentieth-century literature. Ian Patterson teaches at the University of Cambridge, and is author of British Modernist Poetry, 1912–1999 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) and Guernica and Total War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Adam Piette is Professor at the University of Sheffield, and is author of Imagination at War (London: Macmillan, 1995) and The Literary Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Jane Potter is Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, and is the author of Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ‘The Great War Poets’, in Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts and Christopher Rowland (eds), The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in Literature (Chichester: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 681–95, and an edition of the First World War novel Good Old Anna by Marie Belloc Lowndes (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). James Purdon works on espionage fiction and the secret state. He recently organised the conference Covert Cultures: Art and the Secret State, 1911–1989. He takes up a Research Fellowship at Jesus College Cambridge in 2011. Petra Rau teaches at the University of Portsmouth, and is the author of English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) and the editor of Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature: Bodies-at-War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She contributed the essay on contemporary war writing in Marina Mackay (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and has published several articles on World War Two literature. Mark Rawlinson teaches at the University of Leicester, and is author of British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Pat Barker (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), as well as numerous articles on war writing. Jonathan Rayner teaches film at the University of Sheffield, and is author of The Naval War Film: Genre, History and National Cinema (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), a number of books on directors such as Peter Weir, Michael Mann and Geoff Murphy, as well as numerous articles, including ’1805 and All That: Defining the Naval War Film’, Diegesis, 9 (Spring 2006), pp. 32–40.

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 575

30/01/2012 16:25

576

notes on contributors

Peter Robinson is Professor at the University of Reading, is a poet and author of In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Glyn Salton-Cox is a doctoral student at Yale University. His interests centre around the literature and cultural history of Britain from the 1920s to the 1950s, with particular emphases on the thirties, the Second World War, and on the reception of Marxist aesthetics in British intellectual life of the period. He has published articles on Patrick Hamilton, George Orwell and T. H. White. David Seed teaches at the University of Liverpool, and is author of American Science Fiction and the Cold War (Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1999) and Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), and editor of Imagining Apocalypse: Studies in Cultural Crisis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). Victoria Stewart teaches at the University of Leicester, and is author of Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Lyndsey Stonebridge teaches at the University of East Anglia and specialises in Modern Literature and Critical Theory, particularly psychoanalysis, trauma theory and, most recently, critical human rights and refugee studies. She is the author of The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-century British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998). Roger Tolson is Head of the Department of Art at the Imperial War Museum, and the author of a number of articles on war art, including the introduction to Art from the Second World War (London: Imperial War Museum, 2006). Katie Trumpener is Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University, and has published widely, especially on the Romantic period, including Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). She is currently researching the history of children’s literature. Sue Vice is Professor at the University of Sheffield, author of Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), Holocaust Fiction (London: Routledge, 2000), Representing the Holocaust: Essays in Honour of Bryan Burns (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003) and Children Writing the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Mark W. Van Wienen teaches at the University of Northern Illinois, and is author of Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and editor of Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 576

30/01/2012 16:25

index

INDEX

Abbey Theatre, 22, 66–8, 120, 270 Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 78, 80, 83 Abu Ghraib, 5 Ackroyd, Barry, 4 Adcock, St. John, 20–1, 28 Adorno, Theodor, 126, 143, 353 aerial reconnaissance, 406–7 aesthetics, 1, 12, 13, 38, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 103, 108, 112, 114, 116, 140, 195, 201, 224, 225, 226, 252, 253, 254, 257, 266, 280, 313, 345, 354, 356, 357, 358, 359, 361, 362, 363, 396, 400–3, 443, 525, 563, 564, 576 Afghanistan, war in, 3, 5, 7, 27, 81, 257, 279, 282, 354, 377, 428, 429, 475, 481, 484, 559 Africa, 1, 11, 28, 59, 78, 87, 119, 120, 326, 327, 328, 329, 337, 338, 346, 449, 450, 540 African American, 77, 78, 79, 164, 181, 210, 211, 326–31 aftermath, 64, 66, 67, 68, 72, 81, 95, 113, 119, 121, 122, 143, 169, 190, 191, 196, 199, 200, 207, 211, 212, 215, 216, 218, 231, 235, 251, 277, 313, 368, 399, 400, 417, 458, 463, 490, 494–6, 527, 530, 540 Agamben, Giorgio, 126, 132, 322, 465, 470, 471, 479, 482, 483, 485, 487, 489 Agee, Chris, 243, 249 Agee, James, 372, 378 Agent Orange, 164, 165, 167, 169, 282 al Qaeda, 255 Albanians, 241–3, 246, 247 Alcott, Louisa May, 504 Aldington, Richard, 304, 309, 432, 436, 437 Alegría, Claribel, 198 All Quiet on the Western Front, 62–3, 466, 471 Allatini, Rose, 32, 36–9, 306, 308, 314 Allen, Mabel Esther, 503 Alvárez, Julia, 199 Ambler, Eric, 539, 543 Amery, Jean, 129 Amis, Martin, 440 Amnesty International, 243

Andrew, Christopher, 287 Angell, Norman, 17–18 Angleton, James Jesus, 537, 543 Anglo-Irish Treaty, 68 Antelme, Robert, 126 anti-Semitism, 140, 296, 297 apocalypse, 148, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 177, 196, 352, 353, 485, 501, 503, 506, 507, 527, 534 Apocalypse Now, 212, 354, 408, 412 area bombing, 341, 346, 366, 462, 499 Arendt, Hannah, 101–8, 144, 320, 323, 343, 344–5, 347, 515 Argentina, 104, 231–8, 509 Arías, Arturo, 198 Armistice Day, 50–2 Armistice, the, 20, 21, 25, 27, 50, 51, 52, 62, 266, 404 Army Medical Corps, 299, 529, 542 Ashton, Winifred, 519–23 Asquith, Herbert, 20, 23, 304, 305, 398 Atlantic, Battle of the, 380–6 atrocity, 68, 69, 96, 101, 104, 146, 191, 206, 243, 246, 247, 326, 384, 392, 398, 399, 440, 442, 444, 445, 465, 485, 520, 521, 544, 564 Auden, W. H., 65, 72, 80, 86, 87, 88, 91, 225, 227, 229, 311, 343, 448, 456, 537, 543 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 138, 139, 140, 141, 283, 439, 440, 441, 444, 465, 500, 505 Austin, J. L., 86, 88, 92 aviation, 155, 288, 366–77 B-29, 368, 373 B-52 Stratofortress, 168, 169, 368, 373–5 Baader-Meinhof, 139 Bachelard, Gaston, 558, 561 Baden-Powell, Robert, 502, 538 Baker, Karle Wilson, 327 Baker, Mark, 206 Baker, Nicholson, 376, 379

577

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 577

30/01/2012 16:25

578

index

Balaban, John, 167, 214, 220, 475 Balanchine, George, 97 Balchin, Nigel, 368, 378 Balkan Wars, 241–50, 406, 409, 410, 412, 507, 529, 559 Ballard, J. G., 161–3, 170, 498 Banerian, James, 216, 220 Banville, John, 541 Barber, Noel, 183, 188 Barbusse, Henri, 54 Barker, Elsa, 417 Barker, George, 75, 83 Barker, Pat, 56n, 63, 244, 249n, 285–92 barracks, 6, 41, 285, 345, 441, 465–71, 504 Barrett, Neil, 494 Barrie, J. M., 52, 514 Barry, Jon, 164 Barth, John, 114 Barthes, Roland, 377, 379 Barzun, Jacques, 536, 537, 543 Basra, 368 Bataille, Georges, 255, 562, 565–6, 568 Battle of Britain, 341, 361, 528, 533, 534, 535 Battle of the Bulge, 98 Bauer, Tristán, 237 Bauman, Zygmunt, 144, 345, 352, 355, 483, 488 Bawden, Nina, 505 Bay of Pigs, 191, 198 Beck, John, 428–30 Beck, Ulrich, 319, 480, 483, 487, 488 Beckett, Samuel, 64, 65, 72, 73, 113, 132 Beidler, Philip, 205 Belfast, 222–9, 504, 512–14 Belgium, 64, 98, 126, 326, 335, 526 Belgrano, the, 231, 233, 234, 239 Bell, Clive, 306 Bell, Julian, 304, 314 Bell, Martin, 245, 249 Bell, Vanessa, 305 Benhabib, Seyla, 320, 325 Benjamin, Walter, 103, 105, 130, 259, 311, 407, 408, 412, 512, 513, 515 Bergen-Belsen, 122, 343, 439, 440, 445, 446 Berkeley, Reginald, 335, 339 Berlin, 17, 317, 344, 346, 347, 388, 414, 484, 492, 500, 505, 507, 541, 542 Berlin Wall, 388, 541, 542 Berlin, Isaiah, 345 Bessie, Alvah, 81, 83 Bibby, Michael, 164, 253, 260 Bierce, Ambrose, 11, 277 Bigelow, Kathryn, 4 Binding, Tim, 237 Black, Tilly, 181 Blanchot, Maurice, 126 Blenheim fighter-bomber, 371 Bletchley Park, 121, 540 Blishen, Edward, 313

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 578

Blitz, the, 73, 313, 458, 462, 491, 503, 504, 506, 531, 533, 540 Bloemfontein, 12 Blunden, Edmund, 23, 25, 27, 304, 420, 436, 437, 438 Boas, Mark, 4 body, 4, 25–8, 43, 44, 49, 60, 95, 111, 120, 147, 152, 153, 156, 158, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 174, 176, 182, 184, 194, 195, 205, 208, 209, 211, 214, 217, 226, 266, 267, 270, 271, 283, 285, 288–91, 298, 299, 307, 319, 323, 327, 330, 331, 359, 360, 361, 362, 369, 374, 375, 390, 391, 396, 397, 399, 400, 402, 403, 407, 408, 413, 417–22, 436, 439, 441, 442, 459, 462, 471, 475, 485, 486, 491, 493, 494, 509, 518, 528, 546, 553, 575 body armour, 298 Boeing, 163, 373, 376, 377, 379 Boer War, 1, 3, 11, 12, 13, 22, 59, 327, 338, 351, 502 Boland, Eavan, 223 bomb disposal, 4, 313 Bomber Command, 341, 372, 373 bomber, the, 5, 142, 182, 255, 310, 352, 354, 358, 361, 367, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 456 Borden, Mary, 24 Borges, Jorge Luis, 236, 239 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 481 Bourke-White, Margaret, 342 Bova, Ben, 493 Bowen, Elizabeth, 72, 73–4, 247, 341, 459, 537, 540, 543 Brackett, Leigh, 494 Bradbury, Malcolm, 318, 324 Bradbury, Ray, 491 Bradford, Barbara Taylor, 244 brainwashing, 6, 140, 299–300 Bramley, Vince, 235, 239 Branly, Edward, 415 Brauman, Rony, 103 Brenton, Howard, 118, 119–20, 121, 124, 125 Briggs, Raymond, 233, 239 British Expeditionary Force, 59 Britnieva, Mary, 400, 403, 404 Brittain, Vera, 20, 23, 271, 311, 312, 341, 347, 400, 404 Brockway, Fenner, 306 Brooke, Rupert, 15, 21–2, 23, 24, 27, 28, 35, 73, 90, 94, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 431, 432, 435, 437 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 328, 332 Brown, Karl, 61, 63 Brunke, Mark, 476 Buchan, John, 20, 273, 307, 337–9, 503, 536, 543 Buchenwald, 103, 132, 342, 347, 439 Bunting, Basil, 304, 310 Burdekin, Katharine, 516–19, 521, 522 Burdick, Eugene, 152, 496

30/01/2012 16:25

index Burgess, Athony, 542 burial, 120, 155, 170, 226, 271, 435, 451 Burke, Edmund, 237, 252–4, 257, 270, 403 Burke, James Lee, 152 Burma, 211, 448, 450, 453, 455 Burroughs, William, 196, 197, 198, 199, 203 Bush presidencies, 5, 6, 109, 255, 354, 363, 476, 477 Butler, Charles, 99 Butler, Judith, 265, 268, 282, 284, 486, 489 Butler, Robert Olen, 211, 330, 332 Butts, Mary, 306, 308, 314 Calder, Angus, 118, 119, 120, 124, 535 Cambodia, 243, 375 Cameron, Norman, 453 camouflage, 5, 281, 284, 356–64, 366, 371 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 313 Campbell, Roy, 82–3 Campion, Sarah, 310 Cannan, Gilbert, 305–6, 308 Cannan, May, 24, 27, 30 Capote, Truman, 102 Carlos Williams, William, 98 Carpenter, Edward, 418, 557, 561 Carrington, Hereward, 417–18, 424 Carruth, Hayden, 157 Carson, Ciaran, 223, 227, 260 Cartwright, Justin, 345 Caruth, Cathy, 127 Cather, Willa, 40–5, 428, 573 Cavell, Edith, 334–5, 339 cemeteries, 267, 272, 431, 435, 519 Central America, 190–202, 279 Certeau, Michel de, 557–8, 561 Charles, Jonathan, 7 Chelmno, 440, 444 Chemical Corps, 299 chemical warfare, 396 Chesney, George, 538 Chi Thien, Nguyen, 219, 221 Childers, Erskine, 287, 503, 537 children, 6, 34, 48, 99, 118, 119, 131, 145, 152, 153, 155, 161, 167, 168, 192, 194, 201, 212, 214, 218, 226, 270, 279, 297, 310, 330, 359, 360, 364, 375, 402, 462, 475, 482, 487, 494, 498–507, 518, 521, 533, 555, 576 Childress, William, 152, 154, 158, 298, 302 child-soldiers, 330 China, 41, 151, 154, 156, 175, 182, 183, 186, 187, 219, 298, 299, 300, 301, 388, 391, 407, 410, 428, 456, 496, 503 Chion, Michael, 359, 364 Churchill, Caryl, 479–87 Churchill, Winston, 101, 172, 232, 270, 353, 361, 362, 366, 372, 537, 543 CIA, 191, 192, 197, 198, 202, 207, 208, 299, 429, 537, 541 cinema, 5, 51, 58–63, 66, 119, 134–49, 163,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 579

579

172–9, 214, 215, 251, 257, 259, 277, 286, 310, 334, 336, 337, 345, 346, 354, 355, 359, 380, 385, 406–11, 444, 498, 520, 525, 538, 545, 546, 552 civil defence, 490, 491, 492, 502 civilians, 5, 7, 20, 22, 24, 90, 94, 99, 110, 143, 151, 191, 244, 265, 267, 277, 285, 288, 296, 310, 328, 329, 335, 337, 342, 346, 347, 355, 358, 361, 366, 376, 381, 383, 385, 392, 399, 400, 411, 414, 434, 435, 452, 465, 466, 471, 490, 493, 499, 519, 559 Clancy, Tom, 376, 388, 390, 391, 394, 395 Clarke, A. F. N., 511 Clarke, Pauline, 503 Clarkson, Helen, 491 Clausewitz, Carl von, 266, 364, 407, 409, 410, 411, 412, 427, 430, 557, 562, 563, 564, 568 Cobbing, Bob, 312 Cocks, Geoffrey, 136, 141, 149 Cold War, 1, 3, 114, 131, 137, 144, 149, 152, 161–70, 172–9, 185, 190, 191, 193, 198, 201, 202, 205, 206, 212, 232, 238, 241, 243, 248, 299, 300, 301, 313, 328, 346, 357, 363, 368, 375, 388–95, 427, 428, 477, 490, 493, 496, 537, 540, 541, 542, 543 colonialism, 1, 3, 59, 181–7, 193, 232, 236, 326–9, 342, 345, 346, 428, 453, 503, 504 comedy, 13, 28, 67, 106, 113, 116, 147, 148, 175, 182, 196, 199, 200, 205, 233, 235, 272, 274, 336, 362, 443, 469, 471, 493, 520, 521, 545 Comfort, Alex, 312, 316 commemoration, 21, 62, 137, 226, 269–77, 286, 503 Common, Jack, 304, 314 communications technology, 50–1, 52, 53, 72, 73, 200, 256, 257, 301, 354, 355, 388, 406, 409, 411, 413–23, 433, 453, 490, 495, 554–5, 559, 560 communism, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 83, 151, 163, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 183, 185, 186, 191, 192, 193, 209, 216, 217, 218, 219, 266, 298, 300, 301, 312, 317, 331, 343, 467, 493, 540, 564 Communist Party USA, 177 concentration camps, 2, 3, 13, 101, 104, 131, 141, 142, 144, 147, 246, 299, 318, 342, 351, 427, 439–45, 498, 499 Condon, Richard, 152, 300 Congo, Republic of, 329 Connolly, Cyril, 88, 225 Conrad, Joseph, 538, 543 Conscientious Objectors (COs), 304–14 conspiracy, 103, 175, 196, 291, 493, 513, 514, 536, 540, 542 Contras, the, 191, 192, 193, 194 Cooke, Fred J., 163 Coppel, Alfred, 494 Coppola, Francis Ford, 354 corvette, 380–6

30/01/2012 16:25

580

index

Coulson, Leslie, 23 counter-insurgency, 164, 209, 243 Craiglockhart, 28, 285, 288, 403 Crane, Stephen, 11, 12, 43, 111 Crimean War, 58, 232, 238, 351, 553, 561 Croatia, 241, 242 Cronin, A. J., 311 Crookes, William, 416, 423 Cruise missiles, 411–12 Cuba, 190, 191, 477, 484, 492, 496 Cullinan, George, 81 cummings, e. e., 467 Curteis, Ian, 233, 239 Curtis, Neil, 480, 488 Cushman, Thomas, 243, 245, 249–50 cyberpunk, 196 Cyprus, 184, 313 Dachau, 439, 440, 441 Dalí, Savador, 65 Darfur, 284 Davies, F. T. A., 417 Davies, Howell, 518, 519, 523 Davies, Peter Ho, 345 Davis, Richard Harding, 555, 558, 561 Dawson, James, 296, 302 Day Lewis, C., 75, 76, 79, 81, 83, 86, 89, 90, 224, 229, 377 dazzle painting, 214, 356, 357 D-Day, 545, 557, 558 de Man, Paul, 126 de St. Jorre, John and Brian Shakespeare, 508, 514 de Valera, Eamon, 64, 72 Defence of the Realm Act, 38, 334 Defonseca, Misha, 130 Deighton, Len, 540 Delbo, Charlotte, 129, 133 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 566, 568 DeLillo, Don, 251, 428 Delmer, Sefton, 120 denazification, 341, 343, 344, 346, 347 Depression, the, 54 Derrida, Jacques, 114, 129, 196, 319, 322, 490, 491, 495, 496, 562, 567, 568, 569 Des Pres, Terence, 126 desert warfare, 4, 5, 6, 90, 120, 154, 162, 164, 193, 279, 322, 362, 363, 375, 376, 409, 411, 412, 428, 429, 448–54, 476, 477, 494 Detective fiction, 6, 199, 346, 416, 475, 538 Díaz, Junot, 190, 192, 198, 199–202, 204 Dickey, James, 98, 100 Didion, Joan, 193–5, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203 DiMercurio, Michael, 391, 392, 395 Diner, Hasia, 131 Dispatches, 207, 208, 213 documentary, 6, 7, 60, 61, 63, 83, 103, 140, 145, 146, 155, 183, 209, 234, 307, 308, 380, 381, 440, 442, 443, 444, 494 Dominican Republic, 190, 191, 195, 199, 200, 201

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 580

Douglas, Keith, 27, 86, 90, 229, 266, 450, 451, 455 Dove, Rita, 195 Dowden, Hester, 416 Dowling, Kevin, 508 Dr Strangelove, 135, 136, 142, 146, 148, 149, 163, 164, 172, 375, 493 Drinkwater, John, 23 drones, 147, 354, 377, 411 drugs, 207, 298, 299, 562, 567 Du Bois, W. E. B., 326–9, 331, 332 Duat, Pham Tien, 217, 220 Duffy, Carol Ann, 27, 30 Duncan, Robert, 167, 171 Duncan, Ronald, 311, 315 Dunkirk, 386 Dunn, Douglas, 222, 229 Dunn, G. W. M., 370 Durrell, Lawrence, 363 Duy, Nguyen, 219 Easter Rising, 66, 72, 227, 308 Eberhart, Richard, 373, 379 Edgar, David, 119, 124, 488 Eggers, Dave, 364 Egypt, 91, 181, 182, 362, 393, 450, 570 Ehrhart, W. D., 158, 169, 214, 215, 216, 220, 331, 332 Eichmann, Adolf, 101–8, 129, 131, 140, 144, 344–5, 442, 445 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 163, 296, 301, 352, 493, 557, 561 El Alamein, 6, 362, 450 El Salvador, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 201, 202 elegy, 24, 25, 26, 85, 176, 226, 267, 271, 272, 277, 352, 402, 541 Eliot, T. S., 13, 50, 82, 85, 115, 269, 420, 451, 457, 542, 572 enemy, the, 2, 3, 5, 6, 26, 31, 33, 35, 59, 60, 64, 79, 85, 90, 95, 104, 144, 178, 183, 193, 209, 210, 217, 267, 292, 322, 329, 330, 334, 341–7, 354, 356, 358, 361, 362, 366, 368, 372, 373, 376, 377, 381, 384, 396, 398, 399, 415, 420, 421, 427, 433, 450, 452, 453, 466, 469, 470, 476, 486, 491, 492, 499, 500, 505, 526, 538, 539, 544, 546, 548, 550, 564, 567 Enola Gay, 167, 170 Epstein, Jacob, 48 Espada, Martín, 198 espionage, 3, 173, 232, 286, 287, 290, 334–9, 475, 504, 536–40, 542 Estes, Eleanor, 501, 507 Ewart, Wilfrid, 272 Falklands/Malvinas war, 3, 231–40, 265, 368, 509, 511, 559 Fallujah, 284 fantasy, 2, 6, 53, 65, 72, 116, 123, 165, 178, 199, 201, 211, 254, 286, 287, 288, 297, 344, 345,

30/01/2012 16:25

index 354, 357, 360, 361, 396, 403, 408, 411, 469, 475, 500, 503, 516–23, 536, 537, 538, 542, 545, 548, 552 Farmer, Penelope, 503 Fascism, 65, 327, 512 Faulkner, William, 490 Felman, Shoshana, 102, 104, 108, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132 feminism, 11, 37, 43, 505, 506, 510 Fenton, Roger, 58 Ferguson, Niall, 17, 352 fighter, the, 5, 78, 118, 138, 152, 354, 369–74, 377, 503, 534 Filipovic, Zlata, 507 First World War, 1, 3, 20–31, 40–6, 47–57, 58–64, 66, 67, 76, 85, 86, 89, 90, 94, 127, 132, 151, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229, 243, 267, 269–75, 285–93, 304, 310–15, 326, 327, 332–9, 352, 354, 355, 356–64, 367, 396, 404, 407, 413–24, 427, 431–7, 449, 452, 456, 459, 465, 466, 467, 471, 501, 503, 504, 518, 521, 526–31, 534, 545, 549, 551, 554, 555, 557, 564 First-person shooter (FPS) games, 545–6 Flanders, 368, 373, 417, 420, 422, 431, 432, 433, 435, 437, 451, 501 Fleming, Ian, 537, 540 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 251 Fogwill, Rodolfo, 236 Forché, Carolyn, 192, 195, 198–203 Ford, Ford Madox, 20, 32, 47, 49, 50–1, 52–3, 56nn49;59, 273, 304, 572 Ford, John, 66, 175, 179 Forster, E. M., 312, 401, 404 Foucault, Michel, 113, 114, 288, 290, 345, 511, 513, 564, 568 France, 22, 25, 41–4, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 72, 97, 98, 108, 119, 137, 139, 149, 161, 164, 170, 196, 206, 208, 217, 219, 232, 265, 267, 313, 317, 321, 326, 327, 329, 335, 337, 364, 368, 382, 389, 396, 397, 400, 406, 414, 419, 431, 432, 450, 453, 466, 482, 498, 500, 502, 505, 506, 526, 527, 529, 530, 533, 538, 540, 557 Frank, Anne, 131, 505, 506, 507 Frank, Pat, 492 Frank, Rudolf, 498, 502 Frankau, Gilbert, 20 Frazier, James, 15 Freud, Anna, 296, 302 Freud, Sigmund, 53, 116, 136, 163, 178, 295, 297, 403, 517, 562, 564, 565, 567, 568, 574 Friedlander, Saul, 345, 348 front line, the, 43, 50, 51, 60, 61, 196, 223, 224, 243, 337, 421, 433, 436, 479, 480, 482, 527, 556 Frye, Northrop, 353 Fuller, Roy, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 174, 175 Fuller, Sam, 174, 175, 407 Fussell, Paul, 94, 100, 271, 352, 355, 397, 404, 431, 437, 468, 471

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 581

581

Gaitens, Edward, 310 Gallipoli, 52, 418, 432, 554, 560 Gance, Abel, 407 Gardinier, Suzanne, 192 Garnett, David, 312 Garnier, John, 417 Garratt, Vero W., 27, 30 Garrison, William Lloyd, 327, 332 gas, 5, 97, 296, 310, 352, 354, 358, 396–404, 406, 418, 456, 529–30 Gaza, 284, 311, 487, 489 Gellert, Leon, 20, 52, 56 Gellhorn, Martha, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201, 202, 343, 347, 556, 557, 558, 559, 561 General Strike, the, 54 genocide, 101, 103, 104, 107, 131, 137, 139, 140, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 168, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 321, 341, 345, 346, 439, 481, 507 geopolitics, 2, 6, 175, 178, 392, 393, 410, 427, 428, 430, 539 George, Peter, 374, 379 Georgian poetry, 24, 28 Germany, 23, 28, 32, 33, 35, 41, 52, 59, 60–4, 80, 97, 98, 102, 103, 112, 119, 120, 121, 124, 137, 139, 140, 143–50, 161, 174, 178, 224, 273, 287, 290, 291, 292, 296, 309, 312, 317, 326, 328, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 341–8, 357, 362, 366, 367, 377, 383, 384, 385, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 404, 413, 414, 419, 427, 431, 435, 436, 439, 440, 444, 445, 448, 453, 498, 499, 500–5, 516, 517, 520, 533, 534, 537, 539, 542, 554, 555, 575 Gerstell, Richard, 492 Gertler, Mark, 21 Ghandi, Mohandas ‘Mahatma’, 311 Gibson, Hugh, 335 Gibson, Wilfrid, 22, 435 Gilbert, Sandra M., 289, 507 Gilroy, Paul, 321, 325 Ginzberg, Eli, 296 Girard, René, 484, 485, 486, 489 globalisation, 2, 3, 160, 169, 238, 429, 479, 562 Golding, William, 162, 462 Goldman, Francisco, 43, 198, 199–201 Goldring, Douglas, 306, 308, 314, 315 Gollancz, Victor, 229, 342, 347, 522 Good Friday Agreement, 223, 228 Goodacre, Glenna, 280 Gore-Booth, Eva, 308 Graham, James, 181 Graves, Robert, 20, 32, 229, 286, 304, 309, 397, 404, 432, 435, 437, 466, 471 Greacen, Robert, 312 Green Berets, 206, 209–10, 213 Green Berets, The, 206, 213 Green, Henry, 341, 458, 463

30/01/2012 16:25

582

index

Greene, Graham, 206, 208, 212, 341, 537, 539, 540, 541–3 Greengrass, Paul, 251, 256, 257, 258, 260 Greenidge, Terence, 313, 316 Grenada, 190, 559 Grenfell, Julian, 20, 21, 432, 437 Griffiths, D. W., 61, 63 Grossjean, Bruno, 130 Ground Zero, 256, 259 Grove, General Leslie, 160, 170 Grynzpan, Zindel, 105 Guadalcanal, 112, 359 Guantánamo Bay, 5, 255, 465, 484, 507 Guatemala, 190, 191, 199, 200 Guernica, 456, 499, 516, 517, 522, 575 Guillermoprieto, Alma, 192, 193, 198, 202 Gulf Wars, 1, 6, 7, 354, 363, 376, 389, 390, 409, 510, 559, 561 Gunn, Neil M., 273 Gurney, Ivor, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 421, 422, 436, 438 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 48 Haber, Fritz, 398 Haggerty, John, 245, 249 Hague, the, 36, 39 Hahn Beer, Edith, 132 Hai, Thanh, 217 Haiti, 196 Haldane, John Scott, 397 Hamburg, 341, 342, 346, 366, 378 Hamilton, Mary Agnes, 32, 35, 39 Hamilton, Patrick, 456 Hammer, Nicholas, 439 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, 480, 483, 487, 564, 567 Hardy, Thomas, 15, 24, 286, 359, 364, 365 Hare, David, 118, 120–1, 124, 557 Harris, Arthur ‘Bomber’, 366 Harry, Eric L., 496 Hart, Frederick, 280 Hart, Kitty, 130, 133 Hart, Liddell, 352 Hartman, Geoffrey, 104, 108, 126, 132 Harvey, F. W., 23 Hasford, Gustav, 470 Hauptman, William, 428 Hawke, Christopher, 508 Hawker Hurricane, 369 Heaney, Seamus, 66, 73, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229 hearts and minds, 3, 181, 184, 185, 187, 343, 346 Heidegger, Martin, 255, 261 Heinemann, Larry, 209, 213 Heinlein, Robert, 492 Held, Kurt, 505 helicopters, 297, 298, 351 Heller, Joseph, 110, 113–17

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 582

Hemingway, Ernest, 40, 43–4, 45, 52, 110, 111, 467, 470, 471, 557 Henty, G. A., 502 Hepworth, Cecil, 59, 63 Herr, Michael, 141, 207, 208, 213 Hersey, John, 161 Hewland, Elsie, 532, 533, 535 Hibberd, Dominic and John Onions, 22, 24, 275 Hicks, Cuthbert, 370, 378 Higgins, Jack, 232, 233, 238, 557 Hilberg, Raul, 131, 140, 142 Hiley, Nicholas, 286, 292 Hill, Geoffrey, 90, 440, 449, 450, 464n Hillary, Richard, 371, 378 Hinojosa, Rolando, 152, 153–5, 158 Hiroshima, 160–1, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 220, 299, 300, 328, 368, 490, 491, 499 Hiss, Alger, 173 Hitchcock, Alfred, 66, 337 Hitchcock, George, 168, 171 Hitler, Adolf, 78, 86, 94, 95, 96, 99, 119, 120, 122, 124, 126, 139, 145, 173, 267, 312, 328, 345, 357, 404, 406, 427, 441, 443, 456, 484, 505, 507, 517 Hoban, Russell, 495 Hobbes, Thomas, 562 Hobhouse, Mrs Henry, 305, 306, 314 Hollander, John, 537 Hollingworth, Larry, 245 Hollywood, 4, 61, 62, 66, 136, 138, 140, 144, 145, 172–4, 177, 183, 294, 345, 545, 551 Holm, Anne, 498 Holocaust Memorial Museum, 131 Holocaust, the, 101–8, 123, 126–33, 134–50, 321, 328, 344, 345, 355, 439–45, 506 home front, 3, 22, 31, 35, 38, 196, 198, 224, 279, 327, 328, 524, 558 Home Guard, 361, 363, 365 Home, Daniel Dunglass, 416 homosexuality, 37, 286, 290–1 Hooker, Richard, 152 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 195, 370 Hopper, Edward, 95 Horace, 265, 403, 417 Horney, Karen, 297, 302 horror, 5, 6, 24, 26, 43, 71, 101, 102, 129, 145, 155, 165, 176, 195, 196, 207, 214, 307, 351, 355, 380, 392, 396, 399, 403, 419, 476, 481, 502, 527, 545 hospitals, 155, 167, 191, 284, 285, 295, 297, 298, 309, 335, 336, 339, 371, 399, 400, 403, 469, 498, 524, 528, 529, 557, 558 House Un-American Activities Committee, 172, 173, 174, 177, 179 Hughes, Langston, 77, 83, 327, 332 Hughes, Ted, 446 Hulme, T. E., 24, 305 Hurd, Douglas, 28, 242, 243, 244, 248, 249 Hurt Locker, The, 4

30/01/2012 16:25

index Huu, To, 217, 219 Huxley, Aldous, 309, 311, 364, 407, 412, 494 Huxley, T. H., 13 hybridity, 128, 129, 174, 198, 252, 475, 551, 558 Hynes, Samuel, 24, 94, 314, 358, 364, 551 identity, 33, 35, 42, 113, 115, 116, 124, 135, 162, 200, 211, 235, 237, 238, 244, 322, 323, 331, 336, 338, 341, 344, 345, 386, 457, 463, 470, 487, 491, 492, 498, 524, 541, 548, 565 ideology, 3, 5, 33, 37, 38, 42, 44, 68, 70, 72, 76, 82, 86, 88, 110, 118, 120, 127, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 144, 145, 146, 164, 172, 173, 174, 185, 196, 205, 206, 207, 214, 216, 217, 220, 226, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 243, 266, 267, 279, 283, 294, 301, 304, 319, 321, 323, 329, 330, 341, 344, 346, 357, 362, 363, 443, 465, 466, 467, 468, 470, 475, 476, 482, 513, 517, 541, 542, 549 imagination, 2, 6, 21, 35, 70, 101–8, 131, 135, 160, 163, 164, 165, 167, 177, 178, 185, 200, 208, 214, 222, 227, 243, 253, 254, 259, 287, 319, 352, 381, 388, 396, 403, 415, 418, 434, 436, 477, 482 Imperial War Museum, 131, 401, 507, 527, 528, 529, 530, 532, 534, 576 industrialisation, 3, 360, 409, 566 information, 2, 3, 50, 59, 176, 184, 243, 256, 287, 288, 292, 299, 318, 334, 338, 376, 408, 409, 410, 411, 414, 415, 418, 422, 490, 519, 538, 539, 540, 548, 551, 553, 554, 555, 556, 557, 558, 559, 560 Ing, Dean, 493 Ingster, Boris, 178, 180 injury, 200, 202, 282, 298, 372 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 163–4, 375, 491 International Brigades, 76, 77, 243 International War Crimes Tribunal, 248 intimacy, 182, 226, 255, 259, 403, 467, 506 IRA, 64, 251, 514 Iraq, war in, 1, 3, 4–5, 7, 27, 81, 169, 190, 268, 279, 282, 354, 355, 363, 368, 375, 376, 377, 412, 428, 475, 480, 568 Irish civil war, 2, 66 Irish Free State, 64 Irish Nationalism, 31, 37 Irish Republican Army, 64, 68, 70, 71, 510 Irish War of Independence, 64, 66 Iron Curtain, The, 173 Isherwood, Christopher, 97, 311 Israel, 105, 106, 108, 138, 140, 144, 193, 321, 344 Italo-Ethiopian Wars, 448 Jakubowska, Wanda, 139 James, C. L. R., 328, 332 James, William, 4, 14 Jameson, Fredric, 252, 253, 254, 257, 353, 494, 513, 516 Jameson, Storm, 36, 311, 312, 315

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 583

583

Japan, 112, 122, 123, 153, 154, 161, 178, 296, 297, 298, 329, 372, 391, 427, 499, 540 Japanese-Americans, 174, 176, 328, 505 Jarhead, 6, 7, 363, 365 Jarrell, Randall, 374 Jenkins, Elinor, 24 Jennings, Humphrey, 458, 463 Jewish experience of war and persecution, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 95, 103–9, 129–32, 134–50, 174, 283, 297, 307, 317, 318, 321, 327, 342, 343, 346, 347, 360, 439–45, 479, 486, 487, 499, 500, 505 Johns, W. E., 503 Johnson, Denis, 212 Jones, David, 25, 358, 420, 421, 422, 457, 459, 463 Jones, James, 110, 111, 364 Jones, Sadie, 184 Jordan, June, 193, 194, 375, 571 Joyce, James, 1, 65, 371, 378 Joyce, William (Lord Haw Haw), 121 jungle warfare, 6, 164, 167–8, 209–10, 281, 363, 450–54, 465 just war, 63, 66, 344, 503 Kabul, 429–30 Kaiser Wilhelm II, 22, 286, 287, 291, 292, 335, 398, 413, 498, 502, 503, 538 Kaldor, Mary, 479, 480, 487 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 106, 107, 108, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257–61, 481, 562, 563, 567, 568 Karlin, Wayne, 211, 217 Karski, Jan, 317, 318 Kästner, Erich, 503 Kazan, Elia, 176 Keable, Robert, 47 Keane, Fergal, 243, 249 Keegan, John, 334, 337, 338, 339, 351, 355, 437 Kennan, George, 172, 175 Kennedy, A. L., 346 Kenner, Hugh, 415, 423 Kennington, Eric, 401 Kenya, 182–3, 313 Kerr, J. G., 357 Kerr, Judith, 505 Kerr, Philip, 345 Kertész, Imre, 129 Keyes, Sidney, 451 Kiely, Benedict, 512 Kindertransport, 118, 123, 499 King, Francis, 312, 316 Kipling, Rudyard, 16–18, 24, 98, 327, 330, 422, 502, 537, 541, 543 Kirstein, Lincoln, 96, 97, 98, 100 Kissinger, Henry, 169 Kitchener, Herbert Lord, 397 Knight, Robert P., 295, 302 Knightley, Phillip, 334, 339, 561 Koestler, Arthur, 317–25

30/01/2012 16:25

584

index

Kofman, Sarah, 506 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 166, 331 Kon, Daniel, 236 Korean War, 1, 81, 151–8, 164, 174, 243, 267, 294, 297, 298, 299, 300–1, 313, 328, 329, 540, 558, 571 Kosinski, Jerzy, 130, 498 Kosovo, 241, 242, 244, 246, 247, 248, 406, 409, 410, 412, 561 Kramer, Stanley, 139 Kruger, Paul, 12 Kubrick, Stanley, 63, 134–49, 375, 407, 470, 493 Kunetka, James, 494 Kunitz, Stanley, 95–6, 100 Kyle, Galloway, 23, 29 Langer, Lawrence, 126 Lanzmann, Claude, 134, 139, 140, 141–2, 146, 149, 446 Large, E. C., 311, 312, 316 Laub, Dori, 126 Laurents, Arthur, 297 Lawrence, D. H., 72, 286, 289, 314 Lawrence, Robert, 235 Lawrence, T. E., 466, 471 Le Carré, John, 537, 539, 541, 542, 574 League of Nations, 310, 503 Lebanon, 243 Lee, Laurie, 76, 83 Lee, Vernon, 308 legality, 6, 17, 33, 77, 91, 101–8, 111, 112, 137, 144, 176, 177, 232, 245, 253, 254, 257, 259, 265, 266, 267, 305, 306, 321, 322, 323, 327, 343, 344, 347, 369, 377, 390, 430, 442, 445, 465, 485, 509, 510, 562, 563, 565 Leinster, Murray, 490 Leitner, Isabella, 439 Lemkin, Raphael, 137 Leonard, Elmore, 193 Levertov, Denise, 168, 171 Levi, Primo, 129, 130, 444, 446 Levinas, Emmanuel, 567, 569 Lewis, Alun, 450–3, 455 Lewis, C. Day, 368, 378 Lewis, C. S., 503 Lewis, Wyndham, 524, 525, 526, 534, 535 Lifton, Robert Jay, 161, 170, 300, 301 Lin, Maya, 278, 279, 284 Linton, Joan, 504 Lippmann, Walter, 172 Littell, Jonathan, 147, 348 Lodge, Oliver, 415, 417 Lodwick, John, 462 Lofting, Hugh, 503 logistics, 163, 351, 359, 406–9, 412, 567 Logue, Christopher, 314 Long, Ngo Vinh, 221 Longley, Edna, 224, 225, 229, 230 Longley, Michael, 222–5, 227, 228, 229

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 584

Loos, Battle of, 22, 338 Los Alamos, 428, 429 Lowe, Stephen, 118, 122, 125 Lukács, Georg, 465, 470, 471, 499, 516, 522 Lukowiak, Ken, 235 Lusitania, the, 32 Lyotard, Jean-François, 252, 253, 257, 258 MacArthur, General Douglas, 122, 175, 298 Macaulay, Rose, 23, 32, 35, 307, 311, 462, 464 Macdonell, A. G., 272 machine guns, 5, 367, 368, 374, 406, 411 machinic, 5, 50, 68, 96, 98, 99, 107, 122, 201, 210, 237, 256, 265, 326, 351, 352, 353, 355, 358, 359, 360, 367, 368, 371, 373, 374, 377, 383, 406, 407, 408, 409, 411, 453, 518, 566 Mackenzie, Compton, 539 Maclaren-Ross, Julian, 469 MacLeish, Archibald, 81, 370 MacNeice, Louis, 72, 85, 227, 230 Mad Max, 429, 477 Magee, John, 370 Magner, James, 156, 159 Magorian, Michelle, 506 Mahon, Derek, 222, 223, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230 Mailer, Norman, 110–12, 113, 114, 115, 116, 208, 294, 296, 298, 301, 541, 542, 543 Malaya, 164, 182–3, 183–7, 313 Malick, Terence, 359 Malins, Geoffrey, 60, 63 Malleson, Miles, 306 Manchurian Candidate, The, 172, 178, 300, 301, 540 Manhattan Project, 160, 427, 428 Mankowitz, Wolf, 462 Mann, Erika, 502–3 Mann, Thomas, 80 Mannin, Ethel, 311 Manning, Frederic, 47, 49, 360 Marconi, 336, 413, 414, 415, 417, 422, 423, 554 Marcus, Morton, 171 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 408 Marine Corp, 6, 7, 146, 155, 208, 211, 212, 359, 363, 365 Marinetti, F. T., 564, 568 Marlantes, Karl, 212 Marne, Battle of the, 42 Marsh, Edward, 21, 270–1 Marxism, 185, 266, 268, 329, 352, 499, 516, 519, 522, 576 Masefield, John, 13, 18 Maskelyne, Jasper, 357, 362, 363, 364 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 210 Mass Observation, 341 massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), 547, 548, 550 Matthews, Geoffrey, 358 Matthews, Herbert, 555, 560, 561

30/01/2012 16:25

index Mau Mau, 182 Mau, Nguyen Duc, 218, 221 Maugham, Somerset, 185, 537, 539, 543 May, Karl, 502 McCarthy, Cormac, 428 McCarthyism, 172 McCrae, John, 20, 420, 431, 432, 435, 437, 501 McDonald, Walter, 168, 169, 171 McDowell, J. B., 60, 63, 378 McEwan, Ian, 121, 234, 542, 552 McGovern, James, 346 McGrath, Thomas, 157 McGuckian, Medbh, 223 McKay, Claude, 327 McLaughlin, Greg, 558, 560 McNab, Andy, 512 McNamee, Eoin, 513 media, 3, 4, 6, 137, 164, 191, 222, 225, 231, 232, 234, 235, 238, 246, 252, 256, 266, 298, 354, 409, 476, 477, 481, 495, 538, 551, 554, 555, 558, 559, 560, 562 memorials, war, 3, 22, 23, 45, 62, 137, 140, 149, 214, 217, 267, 269, 271, 272, 273, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 311, 321, 335, 421, 501, 529 memory, 3, 6, 22, 28, 31, 50, 62–3, 67, 73, 80, 81, 104, 106, 131, 132, 165, 166, 170, 190, 198, 214, 216, 218, 220, 237, 267, 271–4, 277–86, 288, 289, 300, 321, 344, 346, 419, 420, 428, 436, 440, 441, 453, 458, 460, 466, 479, 487, 518, 520, 545 Menninger, William, 294, 295, 296, 301, 302 Meredith, William, 95, 98, 100, 159 Merril, Judith, 492, 494 Messerschmitt, 371 Meštrovic, Stjepan, 243, 245, 250 Mexican-American, 153, 191 Mexico, 72, 160, 175, 178, 193, 208, 428 MI5, 286, 287, 292, 334 Michaels, Anne, 440 Michener, James, 152 Middle East, 3, 4, 314, 329, 338, 428, 471, 476 MIG-15, 368 militancy, 201, 255, 327 militarisation, 2, 3, 98, 161, 162, 163, 169, 326, 355, 427, 429, 475, 496 Miller, Lee, 342, 557 Miller, Walter, 162 Miller, Walter M., 494 Mills, C. Wright, 294 Milne, A. A., 310, 311, 312, 316 Milner, Alfred, 12 Minh-Ha, Trinh T., 218 missiles, 163, 299, 352, 389, 391, 394, 410, 493, 495, 496 Mitchell, Adrian, 314 Mitchell, Colin, 23 Mitchell, David, 237 modernism, 24–5, 43, 47–53, 65, 66, 68, 72, 86,

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 585

585

98, 102, 110–12, 114, 115, 129, 140, 141, 177, 309, 353, 358, 407, 458–9, 461, 501, 524 modernity, 3, 49, 50, 70, 83, 142, 143, 148, 160, 269, 274, 351, 352, 353, 413, 480, 526, 536 Monro, Harold, 22, 437 Mons, Battle of, 59, 62, 417 Monsarrat, Nicholas, 313, 380–7 Montgomery, Field Marshal Bernard, 284, 362, 501, 504 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 501, 507 Moody, William Vaughn, 327, 332 Moore, Brian, 512 Moore, Henry, 524, 531, 532, 535 Moore, Nicholas, 312 Moorehead, Alan, 342, 347 Moretti, Franco, 511 Morgan, Peter, 247 Morpurgo, Michael, 506 Morrell, Ottoline, 305 Morris, Jan, 247, 250 Morrow, Bradford, 428 Morrow, James, 493 Morton, H. V., 269–71, 272, 274 Muhammad, Amir, 183 Muldoon, Paul, 65, 66, 73, 223, 226 Murray, Gilbert, 18 Murrow, Edward R., 556, 561 Murry, John Middleton, 310, 311, 572 Muslims, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246, 493 Mussolini, Benito, 78, 328, 449, 518 Mutual Assured Destruction, 493 My Lai, 169 My Son John, 173, 177, 179 Myers, F. W. H., 416, 419, 423 Myers, Walter Dean, 330 Nabokov, Vladimir, 197 Nagasaki, 161, 162, 164, 299, 328, 368, 490, 499 napalm, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 299, 375, 465 Nash, Paul, 61, 366, 371, 372, 377, 524, 527–8, 533–5 national identity, 32, 33, 38, 231, 232, 267, 505, 541 national security state, 3, 161, 174, 178, 301, 427, 428 nationalism, 33, 70, 184, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 241, 247, 322, 323, 329, 345, 491, 494 NATO, 241, 242, 246, 388, 392, 409, 559 Navy SEALS, 390 Nazi Germany, 6, 80, 87, 101–4, 132–46, 163, 173, 178, 267, 299, 317, 318, 323, 326, 341–8, 352, 363, 377, 392, 439, 440, 443, 498, 502, 503, 504, 505, 516, 517, 519, 534, 540, 564 Nemerov, Howard, 368, 378 Nevinson, Margaret Wynne, 21, 28 Newbery, Linda, 506 Newman, John, 205, 208, 212 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 182, 188

30/01/2012 16:25

586

index

Nguyen, Tu-Uyen, 218 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 218 Nicaragua, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 201, 279 Nichols, Beverley, 310, 311 Nicholson, Kevin, 475 9-11 Commission Report, 256 Nixon, Richard, 169, 173, 558, 561 Nkrumah, Kwame, 329, 332 No Man’s Land, 31, 32, 33, 61, 65, 72, 73, 225, 226, 244, 289, 310, 319, 360, 413, 420, 431, 433, 435, 436 noir, 67, 172, 174, 177, 178, 208 Non-Combatants, 21, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 271, 307, 373 North Sea, 368, 422 Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, 1, 2, 64, 66, 222–9, 236, 440, 481, 508–14, 573 nuclear bomb, 3, 149, 160, 162, 164, 166, 167, 301, 375, 382, 428, 521 nuclear bunkers, 163 nuclear war, 2, 135, 136, 142, 143, 146, 160–71, 176, 197, 304, 313, 352, 357, 375, 376, 389, 391, 392, 394, 409, 411, 428, 430, 490–5, 496 Nuremberg, 101–8, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 299, 301, 343, 344, 442, 445 O’Brien, Flann, 521 O’Brien, Tim, 194, 211, 214, 571, 573 O’Casey, Sean, 66, 74 O’Connor, Frank, 68, 74 O’Faolain, Sean, 70, 74 O’Flaherty, Liam, 67 O’Malley, Ernie, 69 O’Neill, Joseph, 517, 523 Oh! What a Lovely War, 63 Oman, Carola, 24 Ophuls, Marcel, 145, 146, 150 Orpen, William, 530, 531, 535 Orwell, George, 83, 85, 88, 312, 319, 456, 466, 467, 470, 471, 479, 576 Osborne, John, 118, 181, 187 Owen, Wilfred, 15–17, 21, 24, 26, 27, 90, 229, 266, 272, 285, 304, 360, 396, 400, 402, 420, 422 Ozick, Cynthia, 440 Pacific islands, 95, 110, 161–2, 296, 298, 358, 366, 376, 391 pacification, 193–4 pacifism, 3, 4, 11–17, 36–7, 63, 64, 176, 192, 268, 287, 475, 498, 502, 503, 504 Paglen, Trevor, 428–30 Pakula, Alan J., 140 Pan-Africanism, 329 Panama, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 559 Paquet, Basil, 164 Parent, Claude, 406 Park, David, 512

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 586

Partridge, Frances, 313, 316 Passchendaele, 272, 310 Passos, John Dos, 40, 42, 44, 45, 111, 141, 243, 467 patriotism, 13, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 44, 47, 59, 62, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 274, 301, 305, 307, 335, 336, 385, 390, 432, 451, 564 Paulin, Tom, 222, 371, 378 Pax Americana, 191, 196, 201 peace, 2, 11–19, 25, 27, 36, 37, 38, 40, 47, 53, 61, 76, 78, 90, 99, 153, 164, 169, 214, 223, 229, 241, 245, 266, 267, 270, 273, 287–14, 295, 307, 310–13, 319, 326, 335, 341, 360, 368, 385, 386, 389, 428, 479, 480, 504, 506, 509, 511–15, 534, 547, 550, 563–8 Peace Pledge Union, 311, 315 Peach, L. Du Garde, 416 Peake, Mervyn, 522, 523 Pearl Harbor, 266, 294, 367, 490 Pearson, Kit, 504 Penrose, Roland, 361, 363, 365 Pentagon, 164, 165, 169, 208, 301, 358, 376, 429, 430, 476, 477 Perlman, Michael, 165 perpetrators, 101, 126, 145, 243, 244, 245, 440, 443, 444 Petit, Chris, 513 Phillips Oppenheim, E., 537 Phillips, Caryl, 321, 325 Phillips, Jayne Anne, 210 Piper, Alta Leonora, 417 Pisar, Samuel, 439 Plath, Sylvia, 440 Plowman, Max, 311 Pol Pot, 352, 484 Poland, 33, 64, 85, 86, 87, 94, 105, 121, 123, 137, 173, 283, 318, 342, 368, 441, 445, 498, 505 Polanski, Roman, 134, 148, 149 Pope, Jessie, 22 postcolonial, 238 post-imperial, 233, 237, 238, 322 postmodernism, 1, 110, 113–14, 115, 129, 143, 146, 196–7, 199, 243, 252–3, 258, 408, 409, 410, 476, 484, 562 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, 27, 51, 164, 165, 167, 207, 235, 301, 400 Potter, Dennis, 119, 181 Pound, Ezra, 44, 49, 421, 537 Powell, Anthony, 469, 472 Powell, Michael and Emeric Pressburger, 360 Pownall, David, 181 Pratt, Mary Louise, 182 prejudice, 37, 77, 78, 79, 291, 306, 308, 327, 331, 382, 470 Preminger, Otto, 138 Prentice, Eve-Ann, 246 Prince, F. T., 449 Prisoners of War (POWs), 60, 214, 281, 284, 300, 331, 345, 346, 453, 498

30/01/2012 16:25

index propaganda, 3, 6, 12, 28, 32, 35, 38, 52, 60, 61, 62, 72, 77, 83, 85, 86, 88, 91, 120, 121, 144, 145, 163, 164, 165, 173, 183, 192, 198, 211, 217, 219, 271, 310, 311, 320, 326, 331, 334, 335, 343, 355, 361, 362, 381, 384, 396, 398, 409, 411, 450, 452, 470, 471, 475, 476, 521, 533, 534, 537, 539, 541 prosthetic, 4, 5, 353 Prynne, J. H., 5, 7 psychiatry, 3, 49, 285, 294, 295, 297, 299, 301, 303 psychoanalysis, 53, 126, 127, 128, 136, 288, 294, 295, 297, 301, 309, 505, 576 psychological warfare, 3, 184, 297, 299, 301 Psychological Warfare Division, 299 Pullman, Philip, 504 Puzo, Mario, 346 Pynchon, Thomas, 110, 113, 114, 115, 163, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204 Quakers, the, 11 Queux, William Le, 286, 291, 292, 538 Quiet American, The, 206, 208, 212 Quoc, Nguyen Hung, 221 Quynh, Xuan, 218 Raban, Jonathan, 234, 235, 238, 536, 543 race, 77–9, 143, 174, 186, 267, 322, 323, 326–33, 344, 353, 511, 517, 537, 564 radar, 5, 87, 256, 257, 376, 377, 409, 417 radio, 5, 7, 72, 107, 121, 122, 154, 155, 170, 187, 209, 373, 374, 406, 409, 413–23, 491, 538, 554, 555, 556, 573 Raemaekers, Louis, 398, 399, 404 Raleigh, Walter, 367, 503 Rand, Ayn, 173 Ransome, Arthur, 503, 504, 537 Rattigan, Terence, 118 Raymond, Ernest, 47 Read, Herbert, 47, 419, 421, 424 Reagan, Ronald, 81, 192, 193, 197, 198, 201, 202, 493 real-time strategy (RTS) games, 547 Red Cross, the, 24, 41, 43, 59, 337, 400, 501 refugees, 3, 65, 123, 138, 153, 192, 217, 218, 219, 246, 247, 267, 298, 317–25, 347, 484, 485, 499, 500, 503, 504 Reiss, Johanna, 506 Resistance, the, 64, 572 Resnais, Alan, 134, 139 Rexroth, Kenneth, 77 Reznikoff, Charles, 440, 442–7 Rhodes, Cecil, 16 Rickword, Edgell, 456, 463 Rimington, Stella, 542 Rivers, W. H. R., 286, 288, 291, 293 Roberts, Lynette, 359, 364, 457, 463 Roberts, William, 401 Robida, Alfred, 397

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 587

587

Robinson, Kim Stanley, 494 Robinson, Patrick, 391, 392 Rodker, John, 308, 309, 314, 315 Roethke, Theodore, 541 Rolfe, Edwin, 77, 83 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 76, 77, 101, 295, 366, 372 Rosario, Nelly, 198 Rosenberg, Isaac, 21, 26, 27, 90, 224, 420, 451, 452 Roshwald, Mordecai, 491, 492, 495, 496 Ross, Stewart, 244, 249 Rottmann, Larry, 164, 214, 220 Roughton, Roger, 312 Royal Air Force, 118, 341, 346, 362, 366, 367, 370, 371, 372, 503 Royal Flying Corps, 32 Royal Navy, 381, 382 Ruark, Robert, 182 Rubin, Jonathan, 209 Ruhl, Arthur, 554, 555, 558, 560 Rusk, Howard, 298 Ruskin, John, 15, 353, 355 Russell, Bertrand, 17, 305, 306, 314 Russell, William, 11 Russia, 65, 71, 168, 177, 317, 329, 375, 389, 414, 539 Rwanda, 247, 329, 484, 507 Sacco and Vanzetti, 40 sacrifice, 15, 17, 22, 34, 38, 62, 69, 99, 166, 186, 194, 206, 210, 217, 218, 251–9, 271, 274, 280, 386, 427, 469, 484, 485, 558, 566 Salter, James, 152 Samson, Meta, 505 Samuels, Diane, 118, 123, 440 Sand, George, 352, 355 Sandinistas, 192 Saner, Reg, 157, 159 Sansom, William, 457, 491 SAS, 232, 509, 510, 512, 514 Sassoon, Siegfried, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 38, 49, 90, 155, 157, 224, 274, 285, 286, 288, 304, 310, 311, 402, 419, 420, 432, 434, 435, 436, 437, 475 Said, Edward, 120, 157, 363, 452, 455 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 198 Savage, Derek, 312 Scarry, Elaine, 265, 364, 455 Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg, 210 Schell, Jonathan, 491 Scholem, Gershom, 105, 109 Schumpeter, Joseph, 17, 18 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, 260 Schwarz-Bart, André, 131 science fiction, 6, 135, 170, 172, 176, 177, 196, 391, 475, 490–7, 516, 521, 522, 545, 548 Scott, Marion, 21, 28 Scott-Stokes, Natascha, 247, 250 sculpture, 49, 280, 394

30/01/2012 16:25

588

index

Second World War, 3, 6, 27, 63, 64, 80, 81, 85–91, 94–100, 101–8, 110–16, 118–24, 126–32, 134–49, 152, 157, 163, 167, 172, 175, 176, 178, 197, 207, 208, 222, 224, 227, 232, 237, 243, 248, 271, 294–301, 313, 317, 323, 325–9, 341, 344, 345–8, 352, 355, 356, 357–9, 361–3, 392, 406, 411, 427, 439, 445, 448–4, 456–63, 465, 466, 468, 469–70, 471, 496, 498, 499, 501–4, 505, 507, 516, 528, 531, 533, 537, 539, 540, 542, 545, 556–8 Seeger, Alan, 20, 420, 432, 437 Segal, Lore, 506 Seiffert, Rachel, 182, 348 Semprum, Jorge, 129 September 11, 251, 256, 400, 476, 536, 552 Serbia, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 409 Service, Robert W., 20 sexual identity, 33 Seymour, Gerald, 244 Shah, Eddy, 510 Shaw, Martin, 567, 569 shells, 49, 50, 277, 374, 397, 431–4, 436, 459, 526, 554, 555, 556 Shepard, Lucius, 196, 197, 198, 199, 203 Shoah, 134, 139, 140, 141, 146, 444 Showalter, Elaine, 288, 292 shrapnel, 166, 295, 431, 433, 457 Sillitoe, Alan, 182 Sinn Fein, 223 Sivan, Eyal, 103 Six-Day War, 140 Slimming, John, 188 Sluizer, George, 135 Sneider, Vern, 329 Snellings, Rolland, 164 Snodgrass, W. D., 99, 100 Solnit, Rebecca, 430 Somalia, 243, 247 Somme, Battle of the, 11, 23, 35, 60, 61, 63, 64, 166, 351, 355, 358, 364, 420, 432, 437, 530 Son, Trinh Cong, 218, 221 Sondercommando, 127 Sonderkommando, 138, 441 Sontag, Susan, 104, 108, 284 Sopwith Camel, 368, 369 Sorensen, Virginia, 505 Sorley, Charles Hamilton, 15, 22, 28, 272, 420, 424 South East Asia, 205, 206, 208, 212, 243, 282, 298, 300, 354, 375 Southwest Defense Complex, 428–9 Soviet Union, 161, 162, 168, 172, 299, 310, 375, 376, 388, 428, 439, 492, 493 Spanish Civil War, 1, 75–83, 86, 132, 311, 317, 327, 448, 449, 466, 467, 498, 555, 556, 572 Spark, Muriel, 102, 106, 107, 108, 415, 423, 574 Special Air Services (SAS), 232, 509, 510, 512, 514

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 588

Spencer, Bernard, 448, 452, 455 Spencer, Stanley, 524, 528, 529, 535 Spender, Stephen, 82, 83, 85, 227, 342, 343, 344, 347, 348 Spiegelman, Art, 440, 442, 445–7 Spielberg, Steven, 131, 135, 140, 148, 149 Spitfire, 370, 371, 378 Spivak, Gayatri, 184 spy satellites, 406, 411 Srebrenica, 242, 245 Stafford, William, 96, 100 Stalinism, 132 state of exception, 465–6 state of emergency, 174, 178, 181–7, 198, 410, 485, 491, 512–13 Steichen, Edward, 407 Steinbeck, John, 374, 379 Steiner, George, 126, 355 Stern, G. B., 32, 35, 38, 343, 348 Stone, Oliver, 251 Stone, Robert, 208 Stoppard, Tom, 115 Strachan, Hew, 431, 437 Strachey, Lytton, 305 Strategic Air Command, 168, 374, 375, 493 strategy, 16, 33, 147, 242, 245, 248, 271, 298, 330, 346, 354, 357, 366, 389, 406, 407, 409, 410, 411, 439, 445, 512, 544, 557 Streets, J. W., 23 Strieber, Whitley, 494 Strong, Terence, 510 Styron, William, 152, 440 sublime, the, 161, 195, 251–9, 352, 357, 369, 377, 403, 428, 527, 535 submarines, 5, 162, 192, 336, 354, 361, 382, 388, 389–95 Suez Crisis, 181, 450 suicide bombers, 4, 259 Sun Tzu, 407, 410, 411 surveillance, 3, 6, 72, 172, 174, 285–93, 295, 354, 377, 390, 407, 429, 503, 504, 509, 536, 539, 543 survival, 104, 115, 116, 126, 127, 129, 132, 138, 146, 148, 152, 161, 164, 200, 206, 207, 210, 218, 235, 265, 266, 277, 309, 320, 373, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 398, 402, 421, 439, 440, 441, 444, 491, 492, 493, 499, 502, 503, 505, 506 Sutherland, Keston, 5, 7 Swinburne, Charles Algernon, 12, 13, 14, 17, 21 Swofford, Anthony, 6, 7, 363, 365 Symons, Julian, 312, 313 systems, 2, 37, 51, 163, 164, 254, 266, 288, 320, 351, 352, 377, 392, 406, 413, 427, 429, 493, 495, 496, 511, 539, 558 Szabo, Violette, 119 Taliban, 484 tank warfare, 5, 153, 396, 404, 406, 411, 452, 544

31/01/2012 15:47

index technology, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 48, 49, 50, 51, 58, 126, 129, 143, 146, 163, 164, 177, 232, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257, 265, 288, 296, 301, 351–5, 356–64, 366–77, 380–6, 388–94, 396–404, 406–12, 413–23, 475, 491–3, 494, 495, 496, 516, 517, 518, 524, 527, 553, 554, 555, 556, 559, 560, 565, 573 Telefunken, 413 television, 3, 4, 5, 6, 119, 120, 121, 131, 134, 149, 163, 168, 181, 187, 197, 226, 233, 234, 235, 252, 376, 389, 476, 477, 538, 558, 559 Tender Comrade, 173, 179 Terminator, 377, 379 terror, 107, 165, 194, 235, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257, 295, 372, 498 terrorism, 64, 110, 181, 185, 244, 251, 256, 257, 322, 389, 391, 392, 393, 483, 486, 512, 513, 564 Terry, J. E. Harold, 336 Terry, Wallace, 210 testimony, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132, 149, 196, 442 Tet Offensive, 207, 210 Tetzner, Lisa, 505 Thatcher, Margaret, 231, 233, 235, 237, 238, 242, 248, 265, 509, 514 theatre, 2, 6, 32, 66, 68, 106, 118–26, 182, 326, 368, 388, 427, 428, 429, 475, 479–89, 508, 528, 553 theory, 6, 108, 406–12, 465, 475, 480, 537, 559, 562–8 thermonuclear, 161, 162, 168, 169, 368, 374 Theroux, Paul, 234 Theweleit, Klaus, 146, 265 Thieu, Nguyen Quang, 218, 220, 221 Third Reich, 137, 138, 139, 142, 145, 149, 375, 406, 484, 499, 500, 502, 505 Thomas, Bert, 398 Thomas, Craig, 377 Thomas, Edward, 24, 25, 224, 229, 271, 272, 451, 461, 464 Thomas, Leslie, 182 Thompson Seto, Ernest, 502 Thompson, Francis, 13 thriller, the war, 6, 193, 208, 211, 232, 336, 475, 496, 508–14, 537, 538, 539, 540, 541, 542 Titanic, 414 Toibín, Colm, 65, 73, 237, 239 Tolkien, J. R. R., 503–4, 522 Tolstoy, Leo, 17, 111, 351, 354, 355, 357 Tonks, Henry, 400, 404, 529 total war, 59, 146, 266, 313, 328, 427, 484, 499 trauma, 26, 27, 32, 49, 51–6, 60, 95, 96, 101–7, 113, 118, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129, 138, 199, 200, 206, 209, 211, 214, 215, 219, 220, 226, 235, 237, 241, 254, 258, 259, 265, 284–92, 295–7, 317, 323, 385, 398, 399, 400, 401, 403, 419, 458, 503, 504–7, 546, 576 Travers, P. L., 505 Treblinka, 142, 440 Treece, Henry, 372, 379

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 589

589

trench warfare, 2, 6, 23, 24, 36, 53, 59, 289, 373, 396, 397, 399, 401, 414, 415, 421, 431–7, 459, 465 Trezise, Thomas, 128, 133 Trident missile, 389 Trinity, Alamogordo Test Range, 160, 161, 164, 166, 170, 428, 429, 464 Trujillo, Raphael, 195 Truman Doctrine, 172 Truman, Harry S., 102, 172, 174, 175, 295, 296, 298, 299 Trumbo, Dalton, 467 Tucker, Wilson, 494 Turing, Alan, 121, 122 Tynan, Katherine, 23 U-boats, 381, 383, 384, 385 Uchida, Yoshiko, 505 Ugly American, The, 206, 212, 213 United Nations, 78, 152, 234, 243, 429 United Nations peacekeeping, 245 United States Air Force, 367 Unwin, Stanley, 306 Urquhart, Fred, 312 Ury, Else, 500 V2 missiles, 163 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 274, 276 Veltfort, Ted, 81 Vereeniging, Peace of, 12, 13, 15, 18 Viet Cong, 164, 209, 210, 215, 330, 331 Viet Minh, 164, 206 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 207, 210, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283, 284 Vietnam war, 1, 2, 3, 6, 21, 81, 136, 152, 155, 157, 160, 164–70, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 205–12, 214–20, 231, 243, 253, 267, 277–84, 298, 314, 329, 330, 331, 354, 359, 363, 375, 377, 408, 465, 470, 475, 476, 558, 559, 568 Vietnamisation, 279 violence, 5, 6, 13, 32, 40, 43, 44, 48, 65, 66, 73, 80, 90, 94, 119, 120, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149, 166, 167, 168, 175, 184, 186, 196, 200, 224, 226, 227, 228, 236, 242, 244, 247, 248, 256, 259, 265, 266, 267, 278, 282, 304, 322, 361, 381, 384, 401, 403, 470, 479, 480, 482, 484, 485, 486, 496, 509, 511, 513, 514, 518, 527, 534, 538, 544, 551, 562, 563, 564, 565, 566, 567 Virilio, Paul, 288, 354, 355, 357, 359, 364, 368, 376, 406–12, 567, 570 visual culture, 6, 60, 86, 103, 135, 139, 286, 342, 355, 363, 372, 402, 406, 407, 441, 461, 491, 520, 524, 525, 526, 527, 533, 534 von Suttner, Bertha, 11 von Trott zu Solz, Adam, 345 von Trotta, Margareta, 139 Vonnegut, Kurt, 110, 113, 114, 116, 198, 498 Vorticism, 525

30/01/2012 16:25

590

index

Wajda, Andrezj, 139 Walt Disney, 366, 378 Wantling, William, 159 war art, 6, 27, 38, 66, 68, 70, 83, 86, 87, 97, 106, 107, 112, 128, 148, 178, 181, 195, 198, 223, 284, 307, 345, 354, 359, 361, 367, 368, 372, 374, 393, 396, 397, 400, 401, 402, 403, 427, 449, 475, 524–35, 540, 541, 563, 570, 576 war correspondent, 6, 7, 59, 208, 245, 246, 342, 343, 370, 553–60 war games, 164, 475, 502, 504, 544, 545, 547, 549, 551 war machine, 6, 112, 113, 114, 116, 165, 168, 351, 358, 373, 429, 539 war neurosis, 53, 295 War Office, the, 61, 63, 286, 287, 291, 555, 557 war on terror, 1, 2, 5, 253, 255, 257, 278, 283, 347, 390, 391, 392, 429, 479 war zone, 5, 222, 224, 367, 415, 427, 429, 430, 485, 499, 506, 554, 555, 557 Ward, J. S. M., 417 Warner, Rex, 351, 465, 467, 471 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 82, 311 Warsaw Ghetto, 138 warships, 5, 383 Waterhouse, Gilbert, 23 Watkins, Lucian, 327, 332 Watriss, Wendy, 278, 282, 283 Waugh, Alec, 20 Waugh, Evelyn, 82, 465, 468, 471 weapons, 2, 16, 51, 59, 82, 108, 120, 143, 160, 161, 163, 164, 168, 196, 198, 289, 290, 298, 299, 312, 326, 351, 352, 353, 354, 356, 367, 374, 377, 388, 389, 390, 392, 394, 396, 397, 406, 407, 409, 410, 490, 491, 492, 493, 495, 529, 545, 546 weapons of mass destruction, 2, 168 Wehrmacht, 439, 445 Weigl, Bruce, 165, 215, 216, 220 Weil, Simone, 265 Weiss, Peter, 444, 446 Wells, H. G., 14, 48, 304, 354, 456 Wells, Peter, 312 West, Arthur Graeme, 23, 29 West, Paul, 251 West, Rebecca, 102, 106, 108, 343, 344, 348 Westall, Robert, 506 Western Front, 47, 51, 151, 272, 360, 422, 433, 437, 439, 528, 534 Weston, Simon and Patrick Hill, 511 Wharton, Edith, 40, 43, 45 White, Robin, 389 White, Rowland, 237 White, T. H., 521, 576 Whitehall, 232, 233, 242, 246 Whitmore, Stanford, 152 Wiener, Norbert, 373, 379

M2821 - PIETTE 9780748638741 PRINT.indd 590

Wiesel, Elie, 127, 129 wikileaks, 5 Wilbur, Richard, 97, 98, 100 Wilkinson, Ellen, 311 Wilkinson, Norman, 357 Williams, Philip, 235 Williams, Raymond, 313 Wilson, Keith, 152, 158, 329, 332 Wilson, Sloan, 297 Winchester, Simon, 247, 272, 561 Winter, Jay, 49, 423 witness, 2, 4, 25, 27, 66, 67, 105, 113, 115, 127, 131, 161, 164, 167, 183, 224, 361, 364, 381, 403, 409, 436, 475, 485, 526, 546, 566 Woodcock, George, 312, 316 Woolf, Leonard, 312 Woolf, Virginia, 28, 48, 49, 50, 52, 311, 401, 404, 421, 422, 424 World of Warcraft, 548, 552 World Trade Center, 251, 256, 259, 376 Worrall, Lechmere, 336, 339 wounded, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 43, 44, 49, 52, 70, 95, 113, 151, 152, 156, 175, 176, 206, 280, 297, 298, 359, 397, 403, 404, 431, 432, 499, 504, 528 wounds, 26, 95, 209, 212, 225, 226, 277, 290, 295, 298, 322, 400, 435, 553 Wright, C. D., 477, 478 Wright, Patrick, 238, 274, 351, 355, 404 Wright, Peter, 509 Wright, Quincy, 266 Wright, Stephen, 209 Wyler, William, 297 Wylie, Philip, 490 Wyndham, John, 162, 494 Wynne Jones, Diane, 504 xenophobia, 40, 176, 210, 234, 238, 290, 291, 504 Yad Vashem, 140 Yates, Richard, 297 Yeats, W. B., 65–6, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 80, 86, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229, 369, 378 Yom Kippur War, 140 Young, Francis Brett, 273, 275 Young, James, 126, 130 Ypres, Battle of, 25, 62, 396, 417, 420, 432, 527 Yugoslavia, former, 241, 243, 244, 247, 248, 484, 507, 559 Zacoub, Fazlullah, 7 Zeppelins, 414, 419, 456, 498 Zionism, 33, 35, 105, 138, 140 Žižek, Slavoj, 265, 268 Zlata, Frankian, 507 Zola, Émile, 11, 351

30/01/2012 16:25