WAR AS LITERARY EXPERIENCE

...But they had a more immediate source in the curious fin de siecle cult of the Ura-nian love, which produced poems of sublimated devotion to young men, usually called "boys" or "lads...

...The Great War lives on, in all sorts of unsuspected ways, even in the casual cliches of our bureaucratized daily life, where one is "bombarded with forms" or faces a "barrage of complaints...

...Fussell brilliantly illustrates these considerations in a series of chapters on the various categories through which front-line experience was mediated...

...that is to say, he has read so widely and throws out so many ideas that he sometimes tries to follow too many at once and so loses the thread of his argument...

...but it has the truth of literature rather than of unadorned documentary...

...I found this book totally fascinating and almost totally convincing...

...they are carefully formed, directed and controlled by literary categories, and have in turn, helped to shape our own understanding of the Great War...

...Graves's Goodbye to All That, so vivid and relaxed a narrative, might well strike an unwary reader as simply "telling it like it was...

...Such a realization does not detract at all from the originality of Owen's poems...

...As Mr...

...At least, he implies that the violent rhetoric and antagonisms expressed by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis in Blast were a wartime phenomenon, whereas the first issue of Blast came out before the war, if only by a few weeks...

...It was, as Mr...

...Others, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden and David Jones, did, and in later years returned to their wartime life in autobiographical works...

...Methodologically, this is a very up-to-date book, since it rests on assumptions that are much more common oow than fifteen or twenty years ago...

...But, as Mr...

...BOOKS WAR AS LITERARY EXPERIENCE BERNARD BERGONZI The Great War and Modern Memory PAUL FUSSELL Oxford U. Press, $13.95 Americans who write about English culture often get it wrong, in ways that jar on the British reader...

...Fussell seems slightly to fudge the evidence...

...and where such once precise terms as "to go over the top" or be in "no man's land" survive as metaphors whose original force is half-forgotten...

...Fussell says, a very literary war...

...but I doubt if implacable oppositions in cultural models were also, as he argues, a result of the war...

...The chapter where Mr...

...These records are in no way unmedi-ated transcripts of personal experience...

...I readily believe that irony as a dominant mode of modern literary consciousness arose from the bitter disappointments and betrayed idealism of 1914-1918...

...The necessary blend of detachment and knowledge and sympathy was, I think, shown by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky in their studies of the 1930s and the early career of George Orwell, and it is equally apparent in Paul Fussell's remarkable new book...

...Fussell's words, "I have tried to understand something of the simultaneous and reciprocal process by which life feeds materials to literature while literature returns the favour by conferring forms upon life...

...Pursuing his argument, Mr...

...My occasional reservations arose from a suspicion that Mr...

...It is also profoundly true...

...Fussell sometimes claims too much...

...He is marvelously illuminating about simple instances...

...Housman was a distinguished poetic exponent of such sentiments, and there is a striking sense in which Owen gives a terrible new content to the literary wistfulness of A Shropshire Lad...

...On the other hand, some Americans have achieved a broader and more perceptive view of English affairs than most English writers, precisely because they can look at the situation with an unprejudiced eye...

...This apart, his book is a tour de force, a superb combination of acute critical analysis and informed cultural history.cultural history...

...In Mr...

...The private soldiers, though less well educated and less given to literary allusions, were still part of a traditional verbal culture, not yet affected by the electronic media, and many of them naturally expressed themselves in the idiom of the English Bible and Pilgrim's Progress...

...but it indicates the complex fusion of tradition and unprecedented reality that formed them...

...Fussell reminds us that a whole tradition of describing skies and sunrises and sunsets had grown out of Ruskin's Modern Painters-it is conspicuous, for instance, in Hop-kins's letters and journals-and during the war it directed both the observation of such things, and the literary response to them, whether in poems or memoirs or private letters...

...Fussell displays only the defects of his qualities...

...I refer, first, to the idea that "reality" is not some kind of raw, unformed flux but is necessarily shaped and limited in the very act' of understanding by the pre-existing categories of the mind...

...where negotiators adopt "entrenched positions" but still hope for a "breakthrough...

...Fussell finds many elements of the British experience of the First World War surviving as myth or convention in American novels about the Second, by Mailer and Heller and Pynchon...

...After all the "class war," perhaps the most implacable and enduring instance of such oppositions was, as a concept, a product of Victorian England...

...Owen and Rosenberg did not survive the war...

...Fussell again, "the Oxford Book of English Verse presides over the Great War in a way that has never been sufficiently appreciated...

...The sky was always visible from the trenches, and sunrise and sunset were much more apparent to the soldier than to the civilian town-dweller...

...Fussell notes, Owen's "sad shires" sounds like a deliberate distorted echo of Housman's "coloured counties...

...The Englishmen of 1914 were at a high pitch of literacy...

...Englishmen of all classes, enduring a seemingly endless war, could readily see the water-logged battlefields of Passchendaele as a literal Slough of Despond...

...This mode of feeling, the author suggests, might be called "homoerotic" rather than overtly or consciously homosexual, and it has evident roots in the culture of the English public school...

...The young officers, who wrote most of the literature of the war, had received a classical education, and were extremely well read in English poetry, so that Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Keats, would be constantly quoted or alluded to when they wrote about the war, either publicly, in established literary forms, or privately, in their correspondence...

...and secondly to the belief that a poem, or other literary text, can never be a totally unique entity, however original in theme and feeling, since it inevitably uses and modifies existing literary codes and conventions...

...English poetry provided a sense of identity and continuity, a bizarre world as well as a mode of means of accommodating to life in a consolation...

...They may not know enough, and even if their information cannot be faulted they may still miss the point or convey a false impression...

...Fussell shows, it is a most conscious and crafty book, where practically everything that Graves sees and undergoes is presented as a form of Jonsonian farce, and where the narrative is a tissue of tall stories...

...Again, many of the poems by Wilfred Owen and others, lamenting the premature deaths of fine young men were in an ancient tradition reaching back to classical pastoral...

...Fussell tries to establish this case, called "Adversary Proceedings," seemed to me weaker than the rest, and it is the one place where Mr...

...Thus, as a matter of history, the most crucial parts of the day at the front were dawn-when attacks might be launched-and dusk-when raiding patties would set out...

...The peculiar significance of dawn is conveyed in one of the finest front-line poems, Isaac Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches...

...Otherwise, Mr...

...He is interested in the inter-penetration of literature and history in the British experience of the Western Front in 1914-1918, in the way in which the soldiers' immediate experience was often apprehended in literary terms, and the literary means in which it was later recalled, codified and, ultimately, mythologized...

...To quote Mr...