A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  Kipling had been born in colonial India and his novel Kim (1901), reflecting his childhood in Bombay (now Mumbai), contains a much more sympathetic depiction of the relation of what he called ‘East and West’. The basic idea of Kipling's poem is clear enough. Empire is the imposition of a white civilisation on peoples who are, and will always be, ‘half devil and half child’. The act of empire is essentially benign. It is a ‘burden’ undertaken with no thought of national gain and, most poignantly, no expectation of any thanks from those inferior races lucky enough to be colonised by the white man. Today Kipling's poem is a literary embarrassment. It met with overwhelming approval in 1899. Times change.

  In that same year, 1899, another work about empire and the white man's imperialism was published – Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924). It is a much more thoughtful effort and, most would agree, a much greater work of literature. Conrad had been born in Ukraine, of Polish parents, as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. His father was a patriot, a poet and a rebel against the Russian occupation of his homeland. He dedicated his life to the cause of independence. It meant the young Józef could never base himself in Poland. Exile was his destiny. He embarked on a career as a sailor, and in 1886 became a British subject and an officer in the British merchant navy, and changed his name to Joseph Conrad. Then, in his mid thirties, he left the sea for literature.

  The autobiographical seed for Heart of Darkness was Conrad's being commissioned in 1890 to skipper a decrepit steamer up the Congo River to an inland station, run by a dying manager, called Klein (renamed ‘Kurtz’ in the novel: klein means ‘small’, and kurz means ‘short’ in German). For a few months Conrad – a man of decency, if not entirely immune from the racial prejudices of his age and class – was in the service of a colonial agency that Europe should, forever, be ashamed of: the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo.

  The so-called Congo Free State had been founded in 1885 by Belgium, one of the smaller European imperial nations. ‘Free’ meant free to plunder. King Leopold II farmed out the million square miles his country ‘owned’ to whatever firm would pay most. What the purchaser did thereafter with their colonial leasehold was entirely up to them. The result was what has been called the first genocide of the modern era. Conrad called it ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’.

  The river voyage had a profound influence on Conrad: ‘Before the Congo I was a mere animal’, he later said. It took eight years for the ‘horror’ (a key word in the novel) to settle sufficiently in his mind for him to write Heart of Darkness. The story is simple. Marlow (Conrad's hero-narrator in a number of his novels) entertains some friends, as the sun sinks over the yardarm, on his boat, the Nellie, bobbing sedately in the mouth of the Thames. Looking down towards London, in a momentary lull in conversation, he muses: ‘This also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ He is thinking of the Romans and ancient Britain. Behind every empire, we apprehend, lies crime.

  Marlow goes on to recall a command he had in his early thirties. He was recruited in Brussels (a ‘whitened sepulchre’ of a city) to go on a mission in Africa (the heart-shaped ‘dark’ continent) up the Congo to the heart of the Belgian colony, where a station manager, Kurtz, had gone crazy in the process of harvesting elephant ivory. (Ivory was in huge demand in Europe and America to make things like billiard balls and piano keys.) The voyage is one that takes Marlow into the dark truth of things – capitalism, human nature, himself and, most importantly, the nature of empire.

  Loyal (in a sense) to his adoptive country, Conrad maintains that Belgian imperialism is crueller and more rapacious than its British counterpart. But within Marlow's remark about ‘the dark places of the earth’ is the implication that all empires are, at root, the same. Good empire and bad empire is a false distinction: it's all bad. Heart of Darkness is a profoundly unsettling novel, written by a man himself profoundly unsettled by what he saw in Africa's darkest place.

  The ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire was, proverbially, India. By general agreement the most thoughtful and masterful novel about colonial India is E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924). The idea of the work was inspired by Forster's trips to the sub-continent. He fell in love with the country and its people. He was entirely free of any Kiplingesque sense of colonial superiority. Forster was a liberal to the core – one of the free-thinking Bloomsbury Group (Chapter 29).

  The odd title requires explanation. Superficially it refers to the travel (‘passage’) taken from England to India by ocean liner. One of the main narrative strands in the novel follows a young English woman, Adela, who has come to the country to marry a British official. Things go very wrong after she may, or may not, have been assaulted in some local caves (which have ancient religious significance) by a young Muslim doctor, Aziz. Her innocent intention was to make friends with a native. Near riots and a trial ensue in which Aziz is acquitted. Adela's ‘passage to India’ – and her prospective marriage – end in humiliating ruin. No one knows precisely what happened in the Marabar Caves – it is part of the ‘mystery and muddle’ that is colonial India.

  Forster's title echoes a poem of Walt Whitman (Chapter 21) with the same title, published in 1871. Whitman's poem poses a question that goes to the heart of the imperial situation and which Forster's novel sets out to probe. Is it possible to have a fully human relationship if that relationship is complicated by colonial possession and racial difference? This is how Whitman puts it:

  Passage to India!

  Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first?

  The earth to be spann'd, connected by network,

  The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

  The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near,

  The lands to be welded together.

  Whitman was gay, as was Forster. At the core of Forster's novel, the relationship between a male British schoolteacher and a Muslim doctor is intense, verging, the novel hints, on passionate. But, as Kipling had written: ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’

  Forster found his novel almost impossible to finish. No ending seemed ‘right’. It was not because of any writing block. What Forster was up against was the fact that fiction, by its nature, cannot ‘solve’ the problems of empire. A Passage to India ends inconclusively, but with fine artistic effect, with the two men who can never come together, becoming ‘welded’, as Whitman puts it. They are last seen riding horses across the monsoon-soaked Indian landscape:

  But the horses didn't want it – they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’

  Forster's ‘not yet’ would be a quarter of a century coming, with Indian independence in 1947. Salman Rushdie would celebrate it in his novel Midnight's Children, one of the greatest of post-colonial works (more of which in Chapter 36). A Passage to India is anticolonial. Written when it was, it could not be, Forster implies, anything else.

  The theme of empire has inspired a whole literature in its own right, from Shakespeare's The Tempest to works such as Paul Scott's The Raj Trilogy Quartet, the novels of V.S. Naipaul, and William Golding's Lord of the Flies (where it is the ultra-white English public schoolboys who are ‘half devil and half child’). We shall see how things look from the other side of the colonial relationship in a later chapter. But the central moral complexities of empire have never been more sensitively explored – if not ‘solved’ – than in Conrad's and Forster's novels. They can still be read, and enjoyed, with those strange mixtures of pride, guilt and perplexity. But make sure you know the history first.

  CHAPTER 27

  Doomed Anthems

  THE WAR P
OETS

  War and poetry have always gone hand in hand. The first great work of poetry that has come down to us, the Iliad, is about nations in conflict. War figures in most of Shakespeare's plays which are not comedies (and it comes up in some of them, too). One of the most graphic descriptions of the ‘horrors of war’ (as the Spanish artist Goya called it) is to be found in Julius Caesar:

  Blood and destruction shall be so in use,

  And dreadful objects so familiar,

  That mothers shall but smile when they behold

  Their infants quartered with the hands of war

  No war, however, has produced a greater wealth of English poetry than the war that was called ‘Great’, the First World War of 1914–18.

  It was the most blood-drenched war in British history. At the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, a quarter of a million British soldiers were lost in months of fighting in deep mud, with barely five miles of ground won. Of those who came from Britain's public schools (many of them straight from the classroom) to the Front, one in five never returned; instead, their names appeared on their schools' ‘boards of honour’. These young men were both the ‘officer class’ and the ‘poetry-writing class’.

  In almost every village in Britain, somewhere prominent will be a monument, now often moss-covered and barely legible. It will record the flower of that community's youth, cut down in the awful 1914–18 conflict. Under the list of names, if you can read it, will be an inscription such as ‘Their Name Liveth Forever More’.

  The Great War was different from other wars not merely by virtue of its unprecedented scale and the lethal nature of its weapons (notably the machine gun, the aeroplane, poison gas and tank) but because it involved conflict not merely between nation states, but within nation states. Put another way, many soldiers, on both sides, were driven to ask themselves, ‘Is the enemy in front of us, or behind us?’ This is the question asked by the most famous novel to come out of the war, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by the German author Erich Maria Remarque. Remarque had fought and been wounded in the trenches barely a mile or so away from another famous survivor called Adolf Hitler.

  The poets of those awful four years whom we most admire struggled to come to terms with the fact that their real enemy might not be the Kaiser (a first cousin of their own king, George V) and his jack-booted Huns but an English society which had somehow lost its way and blundered into a wholly meaningless slaughter of its own best and brightest, for no good reason at all.

  The angriest of the poets, Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), was a thoroughly English ‘fox-hunting’ man, despite his German forename. He illustrates this sense of England-vs-England in his short poem, ‘The General’:

  ‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said

  When we met him last week on our way to the line.

  Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,

  And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

  ‘He's a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack

  As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

  But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

  Who, then, is ‘the enemy’ in this poem? Let's recall Tennyson's ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (Chapter 22). With a botched plan of attack a general in that engagement caused the death of almost half of his 600 cavalry. But Tennyson does not criticise the commander, or his country. Instead he lavishes praise on the bravery of those soldiers who rode to their death (‘theirs not to reason why’) into the barrels of the Russian artillery. Their deaths were ‘glorious’.

  Sassoon has a different and more complicated attitude. There was no such ‘glory’ in his view of things. ‘The General’ was written in 1916 and published in 1918, when the question ‘Why did we fight this war?’ was still white-hot. Cowardice (‘the white feather’, as it was called) did not come into it. Sassoon himself was a ferocious fighter, nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’ by his comrades (ironically ‘Siegfried’ means ‘joy in victory’ in German) but for the life of him (literally) he could not see the point of the war. When he was awarded a Military Cross for outstanding valour, he is supposed to have thrown the medal into the River Mersey.

  The last surviving British ‘Tommy’ to have fought in the First World War, Harry Patch, who died in 2009, aged 111, agreed. On visiting Passchendaele, on the ninetieth anniversary of the battle, Patch described the war as the ‘calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings. It wasn't worth one life’. By its end, in November 1918, it had cost over three-quarters of a million British lives. More than 9 million soldiers are estimated to have died, on both sides.

  A better poem than Sassoon's was ‘Futility’ by his friend and comrade-in-arms, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). A decorated and gallant officer, Owen contemplates the corpse of a soldier, lying in the snow, to whose family he must now write the formal letter of condolence:

  Move him into the sun –

  Gently its touch awoke him once,

  At home, whispering of fields unsown.

  Always it woke him, even in France,

  Until this morning and this snow.

  If anything might rouse him now

  The kind old sun will know.

  Think how it wakes the seeds, –

  Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

  Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,

  Full-nerved, – still warm, – too hard to stir?

  Was it for this the clay grew tall?

  – O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

  To break earth's sleep at all?

  The poem, which shows the clear influence of Keats, has an emotional warmth bordering on the erotic. Will the sun bring this unknown warrior back to life, as it brings the seeds out of the earth in spring? No. Was his death worthwhile? No, it was futile. A total waste.

  Owen is a more experimental poet than Sassoon technically and his anger is cooler. ‘Futility’ is an artfully constructed sonnet, with uneven lines and half rhymes (e.g. ‘once’ / ‘France’). Invoked subtly throughout are the traditional funeral lines, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. It's generally agreed that, had he lived, Owen would have had a huge influence on the course of English poetry in the twentieth century. He died in the last week of the war. The telegram announcing his death was delivered to his family as the church bells began ringing for the declaration of peace.

  By the time ‘Futility’ was written the war had degenerated into bloody stalemate. Lines of trenches and barbed wire stretched, like a badly stitched wound, across Europe. Neither army was able to break through and thousands died every week. This bloodbath had begun with an obscure street crime: the assassination of Emperor Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, in the Balkans. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, a vast conglomeration of states, almost immediately fell apart. A succession struggle ensued and complex international alliances were called into play. The dominoes began to fall. By August 1914 (a glorious summer in England), war was inevitable.

  Most people fondly thought the war would be over by Christmas. The spirit of the nation was summed up in the word ‘jingoism’ (it's wonderfully evoked in the 1963 musical play, Oh, What a Lovely War!). The most famous poem written at this jingoistic early stage of things was ‘The Soldier’, by Rupert Brooke (1887–1915):

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there's some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England. There shall be

  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

  A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

  A body of England's, breathing English air,

  Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

  And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

  A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

  Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

  Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

  And laughter, learnt of friend
s; and gentleness,

  In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

  It's a noble sentiment, made all the nobler by what we know of its author. Brooke was a very handsome young man and bisexual. He was close to E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and other ‘Bloomsberries’ (Chapter 29). He was a gifted poet, but compared with Wilfred Owen he was more traditional in technique. So was his patriotism traditional. He volunteered on the outbreak of war, although somewhat overage, and died in the first year of the conflict of an infected mosquito bite, not an enemy bullet. He is indeed buried in a ‘foreign field’, the Greek island of Skyros.

  Brooke's poem was instantly taken up by the war propaganda machine. It was read out to the congregation in St Paul's Cathedral. Clergymen all over the country gave sermons on it. Schoolchildren had it recited to them at morning assembly, encouraging the older pupils to volunteer en masse to die honourably in foreign fields. It was a particular favourite of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. It was Churchill who wrote the glowing obituary of Brooke in The Times, the national ‘paper of record’. But three years and all those deaths later, Brooke's anthem to patriotism rang very hollow. War was not glorious or heroic: it was, many fighting men believed, futile.