Idealism and Horror

...More difficult, I think, for Miss Sontag than outraging the gentility of our cultural presuppositions (which she actually enjoys: vertigo is one of the conditions in which we recognize our behavior), is the necessity she acknowledges, in writing about so many creative figures unexposed, ignored, or simply misunderstood, as about so many kinds of art not yet assimilated to the canon of "entertainment," of performing the Edmund Wilson-like task of defining a bibliography, offering biographical and historical filler, and generally brushing in the very canvas cyclorama she wants to slash through...

...In the early years of the War it was possible to be exhilarated by the prospect of heroic endeavor, of patriotic commitment...

...in practice, however, the discrepancy between ends and means became too great, and the horror of the means discredited the end...

...Bergonzi quotes Robert Graves as saying that the combatants of World War I had forgotten a very important principle, that one should never "fight beyond the point where victory will cost more than defeat...

...Of course Sontag is admirably equipped to do certain kinds of demolition-work, as in the piece on Walter Kaufmann, "Piety Without Content," just as she is ready to tackle something as ungainly as a New York theater season in order to squeeze out our public myths of sanctity and nihilism like so many blackheads...

...This youthful idealism, this mood of commitment to a sacred cause, was generated during the period of the German invasion of Belgium and was sustained only through the first years of the War...

...As Bergonzi remarks, "In theory, no doubt, to die in agony from a gas attack was no different from dying 'cleanly' by the sword or a bullet in the traditional manner...

...But she functions best, I think, when she need not educate and need not attack, but explore, speculate and expose herself (read, love) to the qualities or the forms of human consciousness (her definition of art...

...On the other hand, the essays on films, the piece on happenings, the notes on Camp, necessitating no such luggage, are her finest technical performances and display precisely that classicism she claims for the contemporary...

...Such a stance, such an over-insistent focus allows her to make herself clear, certainly to herself and even to us, but in its exclusiveness it is also where she runs afoul of our arri??re-garde critics and even of our neutral readers, whoever they may be...

...Bergonzi dramatizes the change by setting up two opposing figures from Shakespeare in his opening chapter: Hotspur, who "exemplifies the moral virtues of heroism and single-minded pursuit of honor," and Falstaff, "who habitually puts life before honor...

...Rupert Brooke, in particular, has come to symbolize the spirit of personal surrender to the national good...

...We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense") derives from a commitment to her vision, a responsibility to her task too engrossing to rescue a polite surface...

...There were calls for a negotiated peace with Germany and a sense of terrible waste of lives and goods and values...

...These poets knew the War from the point of view of the man in the trenches, and they described it without hiding the horror...

...Was it not Aristotle himself who once said that poetry is philosophically superior to history because history deals with what has happened and poetry with what can happen, moment by moment, under certain conditions...

...The title of Bergonzi's book, Heroes' Twilight, suggests the difference...

...Bergonzi demonstrates what a great many students of the early decades of the century have already guessed: that the temper and tone of the early years of World War I, as recorded in the literature of the time, were vastly different from popular and literary attitudes in 1917 and later...

...We are at present engaged in a costly jungle war that threatens to escalate into another world war, a war that may assume the transcendent logic of impersonal, uncontrollable force and require the sacrifice of humanity itself...

...This accounts, I think, for the occasionally rueful or schoolmistressy resonance in the earlier essays (earlier in the book, I mean), though I greatly admire the energy and the exhaustiveness of the very pieces 1 think she should not have had to write: on Lukacs, on Leiris, on L?©vi-Strauss-or rather, should not have had to write in that way...

...His poems were and still are enormously popular, and especially the haunting poem "The Soldier," which, whatever its flaws, can still move one even today: If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England...

...On occasion, in this operation, Sontag's responsibilities as a cultural historian blur or whelm her higher allegiances to "the new sensibility...

...And instead of turning away, pretending it is not there, she has-in her fictions of cruelty as in this book of fontal essays-pretended that it is all that is there...

...But is that what is always wanted, truth...

...These archetypal figures represent the poles of the change that Bergonzi traces in his book...

...But the most arresting of the war art which is no more than a superior entertainment (it was Keats who said he would not spoil his love of gloom by writing an Ode to Darkness), but by facing the "problem" straight on: by discovering that "boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration,' that "banality is always a category of the contemporary...

...Before the end of the War the mood had changed drastically...

...at least, a reaction against what is understood as the romantic spirit dominates most of the interesting art of today with its insistance on coolness, its refusal of what it considers to be sentimentality...

...For this author has discovered that in herself as in a certain (new) kind of art all over the world today, and not only among the literary men but eminenter among the painters, the film-makers, the scientists, there is a valorization, a recuperation of boredom, of banality, of that inertia in the ego which refuses to be interpreted or transformed...

...their eyes were not clouded over with ideals and dreams of heroism and national honor...

...The polemical, the dialectical necessities of her case make it difficult for her to state it fairly -fairly to herself, I mean: for surely it is evident that the aggressive, free-wheeling tone of these pieces ("From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art...

...They saw the War for what it was, a large-scale butchery...

...In the beginning there were writers like Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell, who assumed the conventional heroic stance and accepted death with the equanimity and selflessness of the unquestioning patriot...

...The reason for this renewed interest is obvious...

...Bergonzi focuses on the literature, and this is the right approach, for journalistic and historical accounts of war tend to lose the reality of battlefield conditions as they are experienced by living and dying men...

...After all, who has not at some time or other sacrificed his reputation in order to save himself...

...There was the development of an anti-heroic temper, realistic, shrewd, and cynical...

...I would say the same thing for Susan Sontag, who by first performing in it, exploiting with disinterested attentiveness her understanding of the arbitrary, the inert and the unjustifiable which she acknowledges as obsessive in her experience of life and essential to her response to art, may be seen as having "created" the sensibility of the age...

...There is a locution we use in our accounts of the performing artswe say that a singer, for instance the famous Henrietta Sontag who first performed in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis 150 years ago, created the work...

...As Wordsworth said he was doomed to create the very taste by which he would be judged, Sontag seems condemned to evoke the very climate she would judge, an effort she performs with remarkable and unfailing good humor, but with a (communicated) sense that this is not her mission...

...A passage from a poem by Owen makes the new attitude very clear: If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gurgling from the frothcorrupted 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...

...Reviewed by STEPHEN STEPANCHEV Author, "American Poetry Since 1945: A Critical Survey" Bernard Bergonzi's study of the literature of the Great War appears at a time of renewed interest in the first of the great mechanized wars of this century, when meatgrinder trench warfare cut short the lives of millions of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans and put the viability of Western civilization in doubt...

...Often it is Miss Sontag's thankless obligation to define the locus of "the bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self" who are our "culture-heroes," in order to oppose to them the next phase in the dialectical process in which she so resolutely lodges herself: "Many of the serious works of art of recent decades have a decidedly impersonal character...

...The contrast in mood-disillusionment with costly ideals and emphasis on the realistic and antiheroic elements of war experiencecan be found in the work of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Siegfried Sassoon...

...The work of art is reasserting its existence as "object" (even as manufactured or mass-produced object, drawing on the popular arts) rather than as 'individual personal expression.' The exploration of the impersonal (and trans-personal) in contemporary art is the new classicism...

...I for one do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one...

...This principle is still being disregarded, and that is why the history and literature of modern warfare has the grim fascination of reports of suicide...

...The essay on Simone Weil suggests her division of purpose, and the difficulty she has in articulating both sides of the enterprise: "Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination...

...Their poems were full of realistic detail...

...A powerful imagination of the quality of Wilfred Owen's or Isaac Rosenberg's can make an engagement at the Somme far more vivid and moving than a historical account full of the statistics of encounter and casualties and miles won or lost...