Novels or War Novels?

...The murder of the German prisoners affects scarcely a tenth of the novel's characters, directly or indirectly...

...And this is not to mention the forms of purely social modernity, such as the pre-war sexual liberation looked back upon, cynically, by Richard Aldington in Death o~ a Hero, 1929...

...To me, the most disappointing chapter in The First World War in Fiction is C. N. Smith's_essay.on Mann...

...MARK TAYLOR The Face of S a t t l e JOHN KEEGAN Viking, $10.95 The F i r s t World War in Fiction HOLGAR KLEIN, ED...

...The plan of The First World War in Fiction is commendable...

...The earnestness of this inquiry, the absence in it of hyperbole, begins to become clear...

...Trying to explain "the eternal quality contained in the best literature of the First World War," John Keegan now asks, movingly: "Was it . . . that the public had recognized that from the literature of the First World War, from the story of the Somme, it had learnt as much as it ever would about what modern war could do to men, and perceived that some limit of what human beings could and could not stand on the battlefield had at last been reached...

...The Passchen...

...Surely out of the pristine preservation of a professional writer's feelings and impressions would come a memorable reflection, one that would satisfy Sacco-Vanzetti cultists as much as the recent proclamation of the Governor of Massachusetts removing the "stigma and disgrace" from the two...

...on the evidence, it remains for Smith a great war novel...

...Related to this procedure is that of Frederic Manning in Her Privates We, which not only affixes Shakespearean epigraphs to each chapter and models whole episodes on scenes in Shakespeare's plays, but even in its structure--moving from the unpleasant reality of the front lines to the illusory peace of a rear area and once again to the front, where Manning's hero Bourne dies--resembles the tripartite development of most Shakespearean comedy...

...The Ypres League was but one of many monuments constructed by survivors of the Western Front--monuments to shared experience, fallen comrades and surreal horrors, but also efforts to transmit to those who had not fought something of what the trenches had been like, or to understand them, or to place blame for them...

...This is true, but (as Bradbury sees) it is not the whole truth either, for there remains the notoriously vexing question of the direction of influence--which influenced the other...

...but more often we never hear of the soldier again...

...American literature in the 1930s, not a rich decade for it, would be measurably smaller without Company K. It is much more than a war novel...

...Certainly all these presumptions were justified by the title of her book...

...But they can, at times, also obscure it...

...Several of the contributors to Holger Klein's collection make this point...

...The novel possesses a loose chronological scheme...

...It is rather a compilation of 113 episodes, ranging from half a page to nine pages in length (the average is about one and one-half), each the narrative of a different officer, NCO, or man in the company...

...These four sentences say more than many volumes about why the British, after dumping one and a half million shells on the German trenches in a week, were massacred at the Somme, and why the war took the course it did...

...the recent Penguin Companion to American Literature omits all mention of the author and his book, as do such standard studies as Richard Chase's The American Novel and its Tradition, Robert Spiller's The Cycle o/ American Literature, and Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds...

...and the intricacy of his relationships with those about him, men, women, soldiers...

...WILLIAM T. LISTON (William T. Liston is a member o/the English department at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana...

...Critical categories clarify the nature of literary achievement, and they aid often in its recognition...

...In his Introduction he explained why: "In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, [the officer-poets] made [the suffering of their men] their own...

...By contrast, John Morris finds Aldington's Death of a Hero, despite a "great" third part, "Cantabile," to suffer, in the manner of a political pamphlet, from stereotyped and grotesque characterization, and an excess of undifferentiated anger and bitterCommonweal: 569 ness...

...on the other hand, if it is a characteristic of literary modernism that the mind is more its own place than ever before, then perhaps we can understand why no other place offers even that limited comfort...

...Miss Porter was a part of the events...

...Oddly, this commonplace gained additional truth on the Western Front, where the spring was the time for offensives and thus brought man closer than ever to death...

...In Robert Graves's "Goliath and David" it is the Philistine who slays the Israelite, and in Wilfred Owen's "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" Abram hears the angel's command to spare Isaac "but slew his son, / And half the seed of Europe one by one...

...Keegan explains "what it was about the new warfare that made it different from all other warfare men had hitherto experienced: . . . it marooned them, as it were, on an undiscovered continent, where one layer of the air on which they depended for life was charged with lethal metallic particles, where man in consequence was forced to adopt a subterranean dwelling and an abject posture, where the uses of day and night were reversed and where _9 . . good h e a l t h was regarded as a burden, but wounds as a benefaction to be sought and enjoyed...

...The problem," he wrote, "for the writer trying to describe elements of the Great War was its utter incredibility, and thus its incommunicability in its own terms...

...Topography reveals part of this reality, and so do statistics...

...For once, there was something new under the sun...

...with a multiplicity of perspectives playing on them, Company K's most henious moments become morally problematic, but then so do its most benign...

...For the archers at Agincourt and the musketeers at Waterloo thrift in the expenditure of ammunition was a large military virtue...

...O'Connell refused to intervene in the case--and he likely could have intervened effectively through Governor Fuller to forestaI1 execution--because among other things he too believed the case had been taken over by ideological opportunists...

...Then one would pay more attention to the extraordinary impersonality of Her Privates We...

...Naturally, this allows March to display a full array of human motives, sometimes heightened by conditions of battle--courage, cowardice, greed, selfishness, toadying, and the like--standard operating procedure for the war novelist...

...So Seeger writes, "I have a rendezvous with Death / On some scarred slope of battered hill, / When Spring comes round again this year/And the first meadow-flowers appear...

...She put her body on the line, and for that history holds her honorable...

...as a matter of fact, I can hardly think of a novel I would more like to see reintroduced into print in America...

...still, even these works profit from being regarded, more narrowly than is customary, as documents from the war...

...But this is only part of the story...

...One solution to this problem lay in the employment of traditional literary modes to convey the experience of the Western Front...

...But in hanging herself up on the fair-trial issue, she isolated herself on a detail that, however lamentable, had early become academic...

...Nor is any sort of morality presumed to be an authority...

...Another answer is literary echo, also used ironically...

...in Greece the tragic chorus danced...

...It has always been easy, on the one hand, to set the experiences of Owen and Sassoon beside the bucolic poetry in the Georgian anthologies of Edward Marsh and note how inadequate the mood of the latter is to reception of the former, and how necessary would be the formulation of an entirely new rhetoric...

...She has been silent since about the case, nursing her impressions and going about her business as exquisite short-story writer, accomplished novelist and campus celebrity, at the same time refusing to read any book or article about the pair until she had revised or arranged her notes on the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti...

...the soldiers exist, they float in and out of the reader's field of vision, independent of the cohesive story being told...

...and returns to the States, ending here in the early thirties...

...But on the other hand, this comparison succeeds only through a suppression of evidence, for Georgian poetry was largely an anachronism in its own time, and would be seen as such today had there been no Great War...

...In the Great War profligacy became the virtue, for the tactical aim was only incidentally the destruction of a single man with a single shell or bullet...

...and it is surely a characteristic of much...

...so, I suspect, are many other war novels...

...the problem was that she agonized about it long after agonizing made any sense intellectually...

...ideally, one arrow or one shot sufficed for each enemy...

...Whichever way one has it, there almost certainly has been too little emphasis by critics on the role of the war in the formation of modern literary consciousness...

...It would be hard to find a poem from the Great War that is more deferential to its canonical companions...

...Some brave men survive, others don't...

...And it isn't that Smith doesn't appreciate Manning's book but rather that he doesn't appreciate it enough...

...Thus, David Jones uses the materials of Arthurian legend and Welsh folklore in In Parenthesis, and Edmund Blunden, that "harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat," develops his memoir Understones of War, though ironically, in the context of literary pastoral...

...Fussell acknowledges - - f o r instance, in his pages on David Jones--how hard a time many writers had shaping their recalcitrant materials to the traditiorg how resistant these materials were to sliding into any preexistent context...

...The Great War had broken all the rules of the behavioral codes," Robert Pynsent writes in an essay on Jaroslav Hasek and Karl Kraus...

...There is sometimes a fascinating relationship between what a soldier reveals of himself in his own vignette and what we learn of his fate, perhaps fifty pages later, from someone else, and this possibility demands attentive reading...

...And if that proclamation left open gubernatorial judgment about their actual innocence, then surely from Miss Porter would come a testament to the innocence of the two men who died for robbery and murder, but also because they were avowed anarchists, discomforting ideologues and "foreigners...

...his fictional persona Private Joseph Delaney describes his intention to his wife: "I want [the book] to be a record of every company in every army...

...In his Songs of Innocence Blake wrote, "Such such were the joys," and in his nonsense poem "Cold are the Crabs" Edward Lear wrote (it is the intentionally uncompleted last line), "Such such is life...

...Whether or not the English poets, memoralists and novelists were all particularly gifted writers, they were, as Fussell demonstrates, surpassingly educated in their own literary tradition...

...hence, one part of the problem for them was to discover the means of extending this tradition so as to accommodate the materials of the new reality...

...He banished them from his 1936 edition of The Ox/ord Book o~ Modern Verse...

...Nevertheless, despite some fiat writing, unconvincing deaths related in the first person by the men who are dying, and occasional instances of authorial forgetfulness (the company's comman2 September 1977:370 der, killed in France, is seen later wandering about New York City), and without denying that it is grand and terrifying as a war novel, I find Company K of immense technical interest as a modern fiction...

...The First World War in Fiction is a rewarding and valuable study of some novels...

...BOOKS SACCO AND VANZETTI JOHN DEEDY The Never.Ending Wrong KATHERINE ANNE PORTER Atla.ntic.Little, Brown, $5.95 It is easy to make a snap judgment in favor of Katherine Anne Porter's 50th anniversary memoir about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the good shoemaker and the poor fish peddler who went to their deaths in Massachusetts' Charlestown State Prison on August 23, 1927...

...Other books have lain neglected for years, and whether this is proper or not varies from case to case...

...Contemporaneous with Marsh's first anthology, in 1912, or at least before the war, or before much of its significance had been perceived, were the founding of Poetry magazine in America, the efforts of Ezra Pound in England to make it new, the publication of Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait, and the marshaling of a host of fresh aesthetic-isms (imagism, futurism, vorticism, perhaps dadaism), and it should be obvious that here is where modern culture stood before the impact of the war...

...In conclusion, Smith endorses the judgment of Eric Partridge that Her Privates We was "uncontradictably the best English war novel," but consider the nice difference between that statement and what the English critic Walter Allen has written elsewhere, that "Her Privates We seems to me the best of the English war novels and to possess enduring merit...

...moves to France, the battles of St...

...It will be a happy day, indeed, if commentators ever stop patronizing Rupert Brooke for his "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" and damning him for the patriotism of the 1914 sequence, and attend, rather, to the innovations of "In Freiburg Station" (1912), a kind of extended exercise in imagism, and the purposely indecorous mixture of styles in "A Channel Passage" (1909...

...I I John Keegan is a young military historian, and The Face of Battle, which offers as well a vindication of the author's discipline and a meditation on the future of battle, tries to recreate, from the point of view of common soldiers actually there, the battles of Agincourt and Waterloo in addition to the Somme...

...but that they were nevertheless, in their writing, adding flesh, if not vital organs, to this literature, and not merely creating a subgenre outside it, appears to me imperfectly realized...

...2 Septembr 1977:566 A third answer was to retell old stories and give them new endings, or to leave the old endings but show how modern circumstances nevertheless changed their implications...

...If its cast and overtones are American, that is only because the American scene is the one that I know...

...Perhaps the only writer to whom Fussell is manifestly unfair is the American Alan Seeger, whose once enormously popular "Rendezvous" he scolds for bad manners, because it "operates without allusion, without the social instinct to invite a number of canonical poems into its vicinity for comparison or ironic contrast...

...The Never-Ending Wrong is sketchy and rambling, the confusions of a very old person whose interest in the case turns out to have been, and remains still, more institutional than individual-the probable innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti being secondary to whether they got a fair trial--and whose latterday preoccupation is whether she was "used" a half-century ago by radicals (read Communists) seeking to exploit the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti for their own ideological purposes...

...The three battles receive equivalent space, but a major part of Keegan's thesis is that it was at the Somme, and more generally throughout the Great War, that combat became for the first time humanly unendurable...

...And like everyone else affiliated with the company, he respects his audience and makes few concessions to it: when you come to Stratford you are expected to be capable of witnessing unadulterated Shakespeare...

...1929...

...passive suffering is not a theme for poetry...

...Perhaps criticism is uneasy with historical reality...

...The fairness question was settled, and the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti sealed beyond doubt, the golf day at the Worcester Country Club when Judge Webster Thayer spoke of "those bastards down there" and how he was going to "get them good and proper...

...Another 400,000 casualties...

...Surely, too, Miss Porter would convey something of the intensity of the period to generations that know Sacco and Vanzetti but dimly, if at all, and who may not suspect that even then the system could be perverted to cause a frightful miscarriage of justice...

...Is there anywhere an earlier mention of the First World War...

...of the war's literature that it works "by self-conscious disjunction, and not easy continuity, with the past...

...it begins in a training camp in America...

...Barnes & Noble, $18.50 I none of the refinements of military technique or perfections of weapons achieved by science since 1918 had effectively worsened the predicament of the individual who found himself in the killing zone...

...There is one prophetic moment, however, that should be recalled from Death o/ a Hero: Aldington writes, "Already one foresees the creation of Chairs in the History of the First World War to be set up in whatever civilized countries re~ain in existence after the next one...

...It's hard to quarrel with a book that offers f r e s h readings by eighteen men and women of a greater number of English, American and Continental novels, many all but forgotten, or unknown outside their own countries, that in some sense take the Great War as their subject...

...the tantalizing complexity of Bourne as an anti-hero...

...ing's Her Privates We (1930), not that Smith is by any means unperceptive as a critic...

...The desirable characteristics of the heavy howitzer were pinpoint precision and intense concussive effect...

...Consequently, aRhough it appears from one perspective (that of the Georgians) that the Great War made modernism possible, it appears from another (that of Marinetti) that modernism made the Great War possible...

...but Charles Hamilton Sorley (killed in 1915 at the Battle of Loos) began a sonnet, "Such, such is Death...

...I I n 1920 Field Marshal Viscount John French of Ypres founded the Ypres League in order that the English might forever have "a record of that service for themselves and their descendants and belong to the comradeship of those who understand and remember all that Ypres means in suffering and endurance...

...However, Company K explodes beyond war fiction when one sees how little these human motives uRimately matter, or to be more precise, it displays a mechanism that is not of the battlefield only but of civilization...

...Why one sort of war should have been planned and the opposite fought is a historian's Gordian Knot, but Keegan's analysis of certain tactical dimensions of the matter is masterful...

...others hardly recognize it, even in France...

...If it is valuable to think of A Farewell to Arms, for a moment, as just a First World War novel, then it would be equally valuable to reverse the process with Her Privates We (as Garrety does with The Spanish Farm Trilogy) and try to think of it as an imaginative construction whose subject happens, as it were, to be the First World War...

...He points out, for example, that the ho2 September 1977:568 witzer was the main offensive weapon of the war, and the machine gun, the main defensive weapon, and that between 1914 and 1918, machine guns were simply much better able to perform the task for which they were designed than were howitzers...

...But I cannot imagine that it is regarded much at all...

...And it is probably true that March saw his book as a war (or anti-war) novel...

...it is the same topos drawn on, a few years after "Rendezvous," in the opening line of The Waste Land: "April is the cruellest month . . . . " Nature revives each spring...

...As such hers becomes an almost reactionary memoir, and she herself a curious counterpart of the exalted Boston Cardinal, William Henry O'Connell, who like Miss Porter was a periphery character in the Sacco-Vanzetti story...

...The Maxim met the first fairly, the other two very well...

...Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne, rear areas and Paris...

...issued this year as an Oxford paperback) Paul Fussell contributed greatly to our understanding of the voice from the trenches...

...that I MARK TAYLOR teaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...

...Klein's editorial prerogative and the perfectly sound choices of his contributors...

...The earth has become hostile to human life to a degree undreamed of in nineteenth-century naturalism...

...Fussell's book-has done much to redress this situation, and it will be helped by some of the essays, particularly Bradbury's, in Klein's...

...Manning's ironical detachment from his story...

...The process of law, more specifically its possible abuse, was precisely why she was involved...

...but perhaps what I have been trying to say is that what is needed is more reflection on the First World War and fiction...

...With different names and different settings, the men of whom I have written could, as easily, be French, German, English, or Russian, for that matter...

...She picketed for Sacco and Vanzetti, was arrested and bailed to picket again, to be arrested and bailed anew, etc...

...The difference lies in Allen's ascription to the novel of enduring merit...

...I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation...

...In fact, Seeger's poem adapts the ancient topos defined, to give one example out of hundreds, in the title of a sonnet by the Earl of Surrey in the early sixteenth century, "Description of Spring, wherein each thing renews, save only the Lover...

...it took no small amount of courage given the prejudices of the day...

...the aim, rather, was the creation of a whole environment within which life was impossible...

...What proceeded from that point was sheer travesty, and seemed to call for Commonweal: .$71...

...And she was outside the prison gates the night the juice was thrown, twice...

...But, conventions aside, the story is hardly cohesive at all...

...It has, also, a central dramatic action: the machine-gunning of some German prisoners by men in Company K. These features--"plot" and catastasis --may be seen as features of the traditional novel, but almost the first thing one notices reading the book is that its presentation of character is at deliberate cross-purposes with these conventions...

...He focused on the literature of the war as "an attempt to make some sense of the war in relation to inherited tradition...

...X could be understood by its (often ironical) likeness to Y, where Y was most often a literary constant...

...In his justly celebrated The Great War and Modern Memory (1975...

...Thus literature continued to mark off its terrain as it had usually done, by similitude, analogy, metaphor...

...Yeats, for whom Ireland in 1916 was infinitely more important than France, had great "distaste for Commonweal: 567 certain poems written in the midst of the great war...

...but the tendency, visible in histories of literature and anthologies of poetry, to compartmentalize the "Writers of the Great War" or the "Trench Poets"-- to set them off by themselves, out of the mainstream--remains...

...some malevolent spirits die, others don't...

...Alas, the disappointment...

...The writers struggled, not only in England, of course, to press a highly refractory reality into the service of art...

...I happen to think Allen is correct...

...for him it is a great novel beyond being a great war novel...

...Miss Porter, to her credit, parted company on that point...

...It is this respect for excellence that has made the Stratford Festival so popular...

...It is a historical truism that the war was largely a defensive contest ("stalemate and attrition") although all the combatant nations had prepared, following the lessons of the past, for a largely offensive struggle, with the sort of movement of armies that just didn't exist on the Western Front between late 1914 and the German breakthrough in March 1918...

...To offer a last brief illustration: William March's Company K (1933...

...Faithfully to represent the war in literature one had to break the rules of the literary code...

...During a battle in Undertones of War Blunden asks, "Was there no safety anywhere...

...I knew/I must think hard of something, or be s i c k ; / A n d could think hard of only one thing--you...

...This is a way of calling Aidington's book dated, and it is unlikely that many would dispute the judgment...

...In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies...

...that these men were, with hardly an exception, not the great makers of twentieth century literature is incontrovertible...

...Most of these monuments, which, too, could be gathered under the stated purpose of the Ypres League, are perhaps literary: the countless poems actually written in the trenches (England, wrote Edmund Blunden, half a century later, "was not after all a nation of shopkeepers but of poets"), and the vast outpouring of memoirs and novels in the decade or so, generally, beginning about 1929...

...If one wishes that space could have been found to include, say, treatments of Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory and Thomas Boyd's Through the Wheat, one is really usurping Mr...

...One wonders whether there is not in this a resistance to the facts of life, and one wonders, too, whether the Great War could possibly have had its Aeschylus (who fought at Marathon and Salamis) even if Yeats himself---or Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence--had been at the Somme or Passchendaele...

...man, only, is older, a year closer to death...

...Hill and Wang paperback) is surely regarded today merely as a war novel...

...between the Great War and modern literature--and, indeed, modernism...

...And Malcolm Bradbury says, in a discussion of Dos Passos and Ford Madox Ford, "Because literary forms are themselves socio-cultural creations, imbued with the meanings and structures of a civilization . . [the war novelists] took [the war] as a crisis for artistic form itself--a chab lenge to the texture of morality, character, and realism that had helped make up the substance of the traditional novel...

...NOVELS OR WAR NOVELS...

...Besides, what right had he or anyone to intervene in the process of the law of the land...

...Some men are scarred permanently by the war, irrespective of our assessment of their deserts...

...and that the voice from the trenches spoke for every soldier of the industrial age...

...Michael Garrety offers an extremely convincing brief for the unjust neglect of R. H. Mottram's The Spanish Farm Trilogy, which he would like to see given some less peripheral spot in our permanent literature...

...Keegan writes, "The desirable characteristics of the machine-gun, besides those of functional efficiency, were portability, concealability and compactness...

...daele battlefield became a quagmire in which not only hundreds of men but even mules were drowned, guns disappeared, and to dig a trench was merely to create a canal," writes Robert Graves...

...That a large number of men, possessed of greatly varying talents, and actuated by somewhat varying motives, labored very hard to give to their contemporaries and posterity their experiences on the Western Front is obvious...

...These neither the 6-, 8- or 9.2 inch howitzer achieved (the larger calibres were too few in number to matter...

...Some of the books under consideration here, like A Farewell to Arms, enjoy an abundance of commentary elsewhere, because they have been seen to transcend War Literature and become a part of Literature...

...It is all bafflingly random, and randomness is indeed the point: there is no authority over these lives, not March, not the constraints of the novel form, not the Army, not the war itself...

...It is a very lonely and desolate and powerful book, its formal discontinuity the image of modern despair...

...Keegan's book, however, can't really be confined to the category of military history, though as that it is brilliant, for again and again his remarks on military tactics expand into a profound demonstration of how the physical world, and human perceptions of it, have altered...