Some Desperate Glory

by Max Egremont

  That’s what I want.’

  These moods give no permission to be idle;

  For men are changed by what they do;

  And through loss and anger the hands of the unlucky

  Love one another.

  Wilfred Owen was enlisted by the 1930s left when Stephen Spender claimed that among Owen’s post-war themes would have been ‘the industrial towns and distressed areas’ of Britain. The public school-educated, publicity-conscious and boyishly handsome Spender was sometimes mocked as ‘the Rupert Brooke of the depression’, an indication of the fall in Brooke’s standing. By 1936, Owen’s manuscripts were on show in the British Museum, alongside classics of English literature. But there were still no entries for him in the 1953 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

  Another poet of genius tried to stop this gradual sanctification. W. B. Yeats thought that war should be written about in the style of Homer, as an epic of courage, even glory. He left Owen out of his 1937 anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, writing to a friend that the poet was ‘unworthy of the poets’ corner of a country-newspaper … He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick … he calls poets “bards”, a girl a “maid” and talks about “Titanic Wars” … There is every excuse for him, but none for those who like him.’

  Owen’s exclusion from Yeats’s eccentric book was criticized, especially as some war poems were selected; Sassoon made it with his ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, Blunden had ‘In Festubert’ and ‘Report on Experience’, Grenfell got in with ‘Into Battle’ (much more Yeats’s style) and Herbert Read with the long ‘The End of a War’. Others like Robert Nichols (who, Yeats said, had submitted a number of ‘unreadable, vague, rhetorical and empty’ poems) and Rupert Brooke were represented by peacetime work. Yeats disliked poems about individual suffering, preferring robustness. He wrote in the introduction of how a friend of his had heard some soldiers back from the Boer War describe repeatedly ‘and always with loud laughter’ how an unpopular sergeant hit by a shell had ‘turned round and round like dancer wound in his own entrails’. To Yeats ‘that too may be a right way of seeing war’.

  A very influential anthology published in 1936, The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts, adopted a view similar to Auden’s. Roberts, a poet himself (and much more on the left than Yeats), excluded all poets whom he thought hadn’t contributed to an advance in poetic ‘technique’, even if – as with Blunden, de la Mare and Charles Sorley – he admired them. This gave the book a modernist flavour, with several American poets and Eliot and Pound well represented; there were also the young, often political 1930s writers like Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Day Lewis. Sassoon was out completely, as was Gurney, but Owen had seven poems and Rosenberg five, with Herbert Read – an Eliot admirer who had written war poetry – in with eight and Graves with thirteen (but no war poems).

  By the mid-thirties, the war did seem horrible to most people. But with this came a fascination among those who’d been too young to fight. Young people began to feel shocked at what an older generation had brought on the world, yet also guilty at having missed the great test. Christopher Isherwood’s father had been killed in the trenches; Isherwood, influenced (as he said) by Owen and Sassoon, turned against flag-waving patriotism and ‘the old men who had made the war’, yet admitted to being ‘secretly attracted to it’. Philip Toynbee, a rebellious public schoolboy, murmured the name Passchendaele ‘in an ecstasy of excitement and regret’.

  In 1927, Siegfried Sassoon went back to Flanders. He drove across the battlefields with Glen Byam Shaw, the young actor whom he loved, weeping at the memories. He wrote ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’ about the pompous memorial designed by the imperial architect Sir Reginald Blomfield for Ypres and inscribed with the names of the dead.

  Sassoon had tried politics and lecture tours; he discovered sex, fooling himself that he could reform his decadent lovers, all the time feeling a bit lost. Thomas Hardy became an idol and Edmund Blunden an essential friend; to see the two together at Max Gate, Hardy’s home in Dorset, allowed Sassoon to imagine a world that might respond to his increasingly traditionalist style. When, in 1924, Blunden went to teach in Japan, Sassoon missed him badly; and nostalgia became more intense as he became less inspired by the present. ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’ evoked the bitterness and anger of his war.

  The anger prompted a yearning for a better place, a once happy land. Towards the end of the 1920s, Siegfried Sassoon began his prose trilogy about innocence ending in the tragedy of the trenches. In Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston’s Progress, he chose the format of partly fictionalized memoirs, where the narrator George Sherston resembles the author, with a childhood of tranquillity, horses and cricket, before the western front. But there’s none of Sassoon’s own pre-war turmoil; sex appears only obliquely, as in Sherston’s crush on another young horseman.

  It wasn’t only Sassoon who looked back. Blunden’s war memoir, Undertones of War, published in the same year, 1928, starts with two quotations: one from the articles of the Church of England; the other from John Bunyan. Both infer, through beautiful but archaic language, how the modern world and its weapons had destroyed the idea of a noble war. The inclusion of certain poems – ‘The Zonnebeke Road’, ‘The Watchers’ (recalling comradeship and kindness), ‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau’, ‘Gouzeaucourt: The Deceitful Calm’ and others, many written since 1918 – revealed yet more covering of old ground. Edmund Blunden couldn’t get the war out of his mind, saying that the rabbit holes in a calm Wiltshire garden were like the rutted aftermath of the Somme. He revisited the Flanders battlefields and, not believing that the war veteran Hitler could want another war, stayed naively sympathetic to German intentions. The rich Sassoon could afford the time to remember; Blunden worked obsessively, teaching in Japan, Oxford and Hong Kong, producing a stream of poems, articles, reviews, books and letters; Graves’s widow said that her husband had kept himself far too busy to be melancholy.

  These were part of the war’s literary resurrection at the end of the 1920s. In 1927 came T. E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert and Max Plowman’s A Subaltern on the Somme; a year later Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man and Undertones of War and the last volume of Ford Madox Ford’s quartet of novels, Parade’s End; in 1929, Robert Graves published Goodbye to All That, its brisk tone different from Sassoon’s and Blunden’s artful prose. ‘If I can be said to have a prose-style,’ Graves explained, ‘I learned it at Wrexham when a young officer. Captain “Shots” Jones taught me to compose field-messages to the formula of: “Time, place, date – from whom, to whom – who, how, when, where, why – how dispatched”, cutting out everything not pertinent to the message.’ This was fine but the book’s inaccuracy and indiscretion caused offence. Sassoon was furious when Graves revealed Mrs Sassoon’s attempts to reach Siegfried’s dead brother through spiritualism and quoted an unpublished Sassoon poem that showed the poet on the edge of a breakdown.

  Graves believed that an artist could tell ‘the truth by a condensation and dramatisation’. In But It Still Goes On, published in 1930, he did a parody of an English officer (repressed, homosexual, vain) possibly based on Siegfried Sassoon – whom he felt should have lent him more money – and with echoes of Owen. To this character, called David, the war came as a kind of relief. ‘Do you know how a platoon of men will absolutely worship a good-looking gallant young officer?’ he declares. ‘If he’s a bit shy of them and decent to them they get a crush on him. He’s a being apart – an officer’s uniform is most attractive compared with the rough shapeless private’s uniform … a very very strong romantic link. That’s why I had the best platoon and then the best company in the battalion. My men adored me and were showing off all the time before the other companies. They didn’t bring me flowers. They killed Germans for me instead and drilled like angels…’ He goes on to say, ‘I like to boss people I’m in love with, to have them look up to me…’ Graves’s poetry went
back also, as in his 1938 ‘Recalling War’ and, in 1947, ‘The Last Day of Leave (1916)’.

  Some war veterans thought these books too depressed, too bitter and despairing, or, in Goodbye to All That, too keen on paying off old scores. It’s true that they imply victimhood and pessimism, the sacrifice of innocents against a relentless enemy. Much British writing about the First World War makes it hard to recall that the Allies had won, that despair wasn’t universal. Hadn’t Owen boasted to his mother that he had ‘fought like an angel’? Hadn’t he said on the western front that there was no other place that he would rather be?

  Charles Carrington, whose A Subaltern’s War came out in 1929, said that he wanted to ‘strike a responsive chord in the hearts of some old soldiers who are tired of the uniform disillusion of most war books. For it is time the world remembered that among the fifteen million there were other types as well as the conventional “Prussian militarists”, and the equally conventional “disillusioned” pessimists.’ But it wasn’t only the poets who were critical. By the 1930s, the war’s commanders were under attack from politicians and strategists, in the writings of the influential military thinker Basil Liddell Hart or in Lloyd George’s memoirs which criticized Haig for the losses of the Somme and Passchendaele. The view that this had been a grotesquely mishandled, even unnecessary, war began to take hold.

  When Robert Graves went to Max Gate in 1920, Thomas Hardy advised him against free verse, thinking it would never mean much in England: ‘all we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us’. A poet who ignored this was David Jones, a former private in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, the regiment of Sassoon and Graves.

  Jones’s In Parenthesis, published in 1937, is a modernist war epic – part poetry, part prose – and also a startlingly vivid account of what it felt like to be in the trenches. Set on the western front from December 1915 to July 1916, during the build-up to the Somme, using soldiers’ slang and jokes, the poem sees beauty in a ‘Waste Land’, a mysterious world of ‘sudden violences and long stillnesses’. Mechanical power, the war of shells and machines, comes into this ‘place of enchantment’ and wrecks it. Jones sees the experience as the climax of what soldiers had known for centuries, at Agincourt, Waterloo and Hastings. Myth and allusion – to ancient Welsh verses, to the Bible, to chivalry and The Song of Roland, to Shakespeare, to Alice in Wonderland – crowd into the narrative as when the Queen of the Wood gives garlands to those killed in a battle at Mametz. David Jones denied that In Parenthesis was a war book; it was, he said, about life and virtues made clear in war. To T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden it had genius. In Parenthesis should be read as a whole; extracts seem discordant and pointless. After the war Jones wrote poetry and drew and painted – which brought admiration but little money. A quiet man, he tried to live up to the qualities he’d seen in the infantrymen on the Somme.

  Robert Nichols lived at a perpetual shout, his best-selling poems and post-war lecture tour of the United States boosting his Byronic side. Graves, once an admirer, saw instability inherited from a mother who’d been treated in a mental hospital, perhaps why Nichols had lasted such a short time in the line. What came after those three weeks with the artillery was, Graves said, ‘a terrific comet of success in poetry in 1917’, the American lectures when Nichols ‘told frightful lies about his war service’, then ‘passionate terrible love affairs’. One of these was with the bohemian heiress Nancy Cunard, who wrote in her diary of a ‘mad’ young man who ‘thinks he is a genius instead of which he is really a shocking poet…’. Nichols once threw a revolver at her feet, begging her to stop him from shooting himself.

  To escape, Robert Nichols went to Japan, to teach at Tokyo University, preceding Edmund Blunden as a professor there. He married (it didn’t last), tried screenwriting in Hollywood, wrote plays that included a vast unfinished version of Don Juan and, by 1939, was in debt and living in the south of France. Hoping to revive his fame, he worked on an anthology of First War poetry; by January 1940 the introduction had reached eighty-two pages, with only fifty-one pages of poems. When the Germans invaded France, Nichols crossed the Channel and settled in Cambridge, where he met a new mistress – ‘the great love of my life’. In 1942, his selected poems, Such Was my Singing, was published. The reviews were lukewarm.

  Nichols once told Marsh that his favourite music was ‘the sound of my own voice’. His introduction to the anthology of First War poetry, eventually published in 1943, was almost a hundred pages long, taking the form of an imaginary conversation between himself as a First War veteran and Julian Tennyson, the great-great-grandson of the Victorian poet laureate. Tennyson is about to go off to fight in the Second World War and, over tea (‘you’ll find a tea cake under the lid to your left’), Nichols recalls his noble aspirations of 1914, learned from Alfred de Vigny and Tolstoy; how there’d been amateurism and chivalry among the British, quite different to German cold-blooded professionalism. In the book were Brooke’s five sonnets, four poems by Owen, thirteen by Sassoon, Sorley in with only ‘All the Hills and Vales Along’, nine by Blunden and eight by Graves, including ‘Recalling War’. Nichols gave himself two: ‘Battery Moving Up’ and the post-war ‘Epic Wind’ as an epilogue. The book had nothing by Edward Thomas or Ivor Gurney or Isaac Rosenberg. The sequence, as in his own earlier Ardours and Experiences, showed a fall into disillusion, perhaps increased after its publication when young Tennyson was killed fighting the Japanese in Burma in 1945. Nichols died of heart failure in 1944 – bitter, self-pitying, angry that he’d been forgotten.

  For Siegfried Sassoon the 1930s were hard as his marriage – a strange leap after his affair with the androgynous young aristocrat Stephen Tennant – failed. New life in a country house bought with a legacy from a rich aunt failed to inspire his poetry, a disappointment for him; his memoirs may have sold well, but to be a great lyric poet was what Sassoon wanted, not a poet of war, a satirist or a writer of prose. One consolation was a son George, born in 1936, but the brilliant boy soon became caught up in his father’s possessiveness and collapsing marriage.

  Sassoon needed another country. So he made further idylls of the pre-1914 world, in books like The Old Century and The Weald of Youth – autobiographies that no longer sheltered behind the fictional character of George Sherston yet still left sex out, partly because his adored, prim mother was alive and homosexuality remained (until 1967) a criminal offence in Britain. Anger became sweet, soft or stale poetry, even if he detested modern life. His poems about the Second World War are like Rupert Brooke’s patriotic sonnets of 1914.

  Sassoon thought that, if ‘little Wilfred’ had lived, they could together have made an alternative to modernism, to Eliot’s fragmented world; yet he also felt jealous of his former disciple’s fame. Might it have been better if he, not Owen, had been killed? Other figures from the past came back, shaped by nostalgia. In the poem ‘A Fallodon Memory’, Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary in August 1914, whom Sassoon had met with Grey’s stepson Stephen Tennant, becomes ‘human-simple yet profound’, a countryman and ornithologist, tragically deprived by blindness of his beloved birds and Northumbrian landscape – with no mention of the failure of Grey’s diplomacy or his part in taking Britain to war. With nostalgia came confusion. As Sassoon absorbed new revelations of German war aims and territorial ambitions, he began to doubt his own protest of 1917. Had he been wrong to call for peace? The turbulence and loneliness, the waste, haunted him. He longed for a more purposeful and ordered life, for spiritual rest. In 1957, Siegfried Sassoon converted to Roman Catholicism, welcoming its clear answers and its discipline.

  By then, there’d been another war. The Second World War felt different; earlier poets had already written about the shock of mass warfare: also there was no doubt that Nazi Germany had to be beaten. Alan Ross, a young poet who joined the navy, wrote that ‘acceptance rather than protest on the Sassoon and Owen level was the only valid response’, and this made for a less emo
tional or angry poetry. One British poet who wrote about the fighting was Keith Douglas. Douglas relished battle, like Julian Grenfell, but saw the hopelessness of the brave amateurism of young Grenfell-like officers. His poem ‘Aristocrats’ expresses pity, not anger, at their innocence and faith.

  British poets of the Second World War wrote mostly in a traditional way, like their First War predecessors. In the 1950s, the hold of modernism weakened further when new writers like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis rebelled against obscurity, metropolitan sophistication, Pound, Eliot and foreign influence. But the inspiration now was more likely to be not a lost pastoral England (although there were glimpses of it) but northern provincial towns. Philip Larkin, however, pleased Sassoon by telling him in a letter of his dislike of ‘symbolic poetry, or poetry full of quotations from other writers and other languages. I think sometimes it was an evil day when English poetry fell into the hands of the Americans and the Irish. From which you may gather that Pound and Eliot and Joyce are not my favourite authors.’ Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’, about England on the eve of the First World War, shows a country about to lose that innocence to which Sassoon looked longingly back. In his 1973 Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse Larkin went against Yeats’s earlier judgement by including seven poems by Owen (but not ‘Strange Meeting’, perhaps because it was thought by some to be unfinished). Also in were Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’, Edward Thomas’s ‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’ and ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’.

  Robert Graves returned to England when the Second World War began. He lived in the west country and joined the Home Guard, going back to Majorca when peace came. England was (he said) always his poetic inspiration, and the welterweight boxing cup from Charterhouse stayed on his desk. Graves didn’t write much about Spain or Majorca, except in the olive groves of his love poetry. In 1969, he said of his war poems, ‘I destroyed them. They were journalistic.’ He passed judgement on Sassoon and Owen, the characteristically plain speaking becoming even plainer. ‘Owen and Sassoon were homosexuals, though Sassoon tried to think he wasn’t. To them, seeing men killed was as horrible as if you or I had to see fields of corpses of women.’ That year he told the comedian Spike Milligan that ‘Sassoon’s idealism, like Wilfred Owen’s, was mixed up with homosexuality. They killed to prove their manhood, wept because of their womanhood for the corpses they left in their trail.’ Sassoon’s view of Graves in 1962 was ‘How right dear Robbie Ross was when he said that “Robert is half school-boy and half school-master.”’