English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  WILFRED OWEN: THE LAST TELEGRAM

  When Wilfred Owen discovered that Shelley used to visit the sick and poor of the Thames Valley, he was overjoyed: ‘I knew the lives of men who produced such marvellous verse could not be otherwise than lovely.’ This is not the usual view. There are too many cases of great poets who were selfish, cold and cadging, indifferent to the welfare of their nearest and dearest, Percy Bysshe Shelley himself not excluded. But Wilfred Owen was a lovely man.

  His life was short as Keats’s. They both died at the age of twenty-five, but their lives feel shorter still, because these slight, little, bright-eyed men both came across as so incurably youthful. Owen had a special affinity for children of all ages, and he thought that any true poet ought to be childish. ‘Now what’s your Poet but a child of nine?’ was his playful answer to Wordsworth’s question about the nature of a poet.

  But, like Keats whom he worshipped, Owen also had a sharp intelligence and a searing wit, which makes the reader jump out of any sentimental reverie. His verse is intensely realistic and direct. And so are his letters. Guy Cuthbertson says in his new biography that Owen’s letters achieve ‘Matthew Arnold’s aim for literature that it should see the object in itself as it really is’. There is no English poet, except Keats again, whose letters I would rather have by my bedside.

  It is a pity then that Cuthbertson does not quote as copiously from them as did the poet Jon Stallworthy in his wonderful 1974 biography. Instead, Cuthbertson tends to wander off into digressions on other writers and artists who don’t really seem to have much to do with Owen. In the space of two pages, he gives us little riffs on Joyce in Berlin, Toulouse-Lautrec in Bordeaux and Isherwood in Berlin. Elsewhere we are told about the painter Augustus John’s concussion, W. H. Auden’s ideal college for bards and a character called Mr Owen in the novel by Agatha Christie which used to be called Ten Little Niggers but now isn’t. I’d prefer more of Wilfred and less of this motley supporting cast.

  Wilfred Owen was born in 1893, the son of a stationmaster on the Welsh borders. Cuthbertson seems keen to prove that Owen was not really Welsh at all, although his name and his short stature suggest otherwise. Besides, at Oswestry, Shrewsbury and Liverpool where he was brought up and educated at unremarkable schools, he was surrounded by Welshmen, often Welsh-speaking ones, who had spilled over the borders. I don’t think it’s too fanciful to see something Welsh, too, about his flaring-up and forgiving nature, and the easy way he made friends when he wanted to, although his temperament was shy and naturally aloof.

  Owen was certainly resentful about the start in life he was dealt. Cuthbertson rightly points out that few writers want to be lower-middle class – especially if they feel, as the Owens did, that they had come down in the world. It was ‘a terrible regret’ for Wilfred that he did not go to Oxford instead of a dim college which was scarcely yet a university. But even his complaints of his modest origins were partly playful, as was his father Tom’s occasional claim that he was really a baronet in disguise. Wilfred had an unquenchable gaiety which made people seek his company. He said himself, ‘You would not know me for the poet of sorrows.’

  Was he gay in the modern sense, and how relevant was this to his life as a poet? Gay-ish, and not very, Cuthbertson suggests, and convincingly so. The impression he gave to his friends was virginal, even sexless. There is no doubt that the most important thing in his life, apart from poetry, was his mother Susan, to whom he wrote unceasingly: ‘I stand (yes and sit, lie, kneel and walk too) in need of some tangible caress from you . . . my affections are physical as well as abstract, intensely so.’ She certainly mothered, if not smothered her favourite son. Well into his teens, she was still peeling his apples for him. Yet Owen did not feel short of experience. He said before he joined the army in 1915: ‘I know I have lived more than my twenty-one years, many more; and so have a start of most men’s lives.’

  He had not volunteered with alacrity. In fact, he was tempted to dawdle on at Bordeaux where he was teaching English. Rather than being keen to make the supreme sacrifice, ‘I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of the deflowering of Europe.’

  But join up he did, and he turned himself into a popular and efficient officer with the same brisk despatch that he had mastered the techniques of verse and added a few of his own, notably those slithery half-rhymes which give his elegies such a haunting quality (leaves/lives, ferns/fauns, cauldron/children). From the start, he had none of the illusions that are romantically attributed to war poets:

  I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and the face-to-face death as well as another, but extra for me is the universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul . . . everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them glorious.

  It is impossible to read a life of Owen, as it is a life of Keats, without coming close to tears. And Cuthbertson’s heart is in the right place. But he seems strangely eager to hurry over those tragic last two years as if they were too much for him. There were three momentous episodes in Owen’s war service in France: when he was smashed up at St Quentin in April 1917 and shortly afterwards invalided home with shellshock; then on his return to France in September 1918 when he won the Military Cross in a blistering hand-to-hand attack; and finally on 4 November that year, when he was killed crossing the Ors Canal under relentless shell and machine-gun fire. Up to the very last, Owen describes all this with his unforgettable candour and vivacity, while the military archives make clear in detail just how suicidal the missions were. Unfortunately, each time Cuthbertson telescopes what happened into a couple of sentences. Here’s a snatch of what we are missing:

  All one day we could not move from a small trench, though hour by hour the wounded were groaning just outside. Three stretcher-bearers who got up were hit, one after one. I had to order no one to show himself after that, but remembering my own duty, and remembering also my forefathers the agile Welshmen of the mountains I scrambled out myself & felt an exhilaration in baffling the Machine Guns by quick bounds from cover to cover. After the shells we had been through, and the gas, the bullets were like the gentle rain from heaven.

  The news of his death reached his parents at noon on the day the Armistice was declared. The bells were still ringing in the local church when the little chimes at the Owens’ front door announced the fatal telegram.

  What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

  Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

  Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

  Can patter out their hasty orisons.

  But Wilfred Owen’s orisons are still ringing in our heads.

  JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES: COPULATION AND MACROECONOMICS

  To catch Keynes on the hoof, the gallop is the pace to go at. All his life Keynes reached rapid conclusions and revised them just as rapidly. Nor was he ashamed of what others called his inconsistency. The perfectly consistent fellow was ‘the man who has his umbrella up whether it rains or not.’ It’s not quite clear to whom he allegedly retorted: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ But it is clear that no scholarly scruple slowed him down. ‘Words ought to be a little wild, for they are assaults of thoughts upon the unthinking.’

  Nervous readers may worry that of the seven lives Richard Davenport-Hines attributes to Keynes in his sparky headlong biography – ‘Apostle’, ‘Lover’, ‘Connoisseur’ and so on – he finds no room for ‘Economist’. This puckish tactic is, I fancy, designed to give us a jolt. Keynes had only eight weeks’ training in economics (though from the great Alfred Marshall), he never sat an exam in the subject and he embarked on his theoretical work only after years of experience in managing real-world crises. He thought economics a queer sort of science, if science at all, and one which needed taking down a peg: ‘If economists could manage to ge
t themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.’ The irony is that his own dazzling career was instrumental in raising the profession’s status to that of modern rainmaker and all-purpose wizard. In any case, if you are looking for technical stuff, the economic equivalent of data on drills and implants, you won’t find it here. Davenport-Hines swims past Keynes’s masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with barely a sideways glance.

  For the fiendishly complex arguments between Keynes and his critics, you will need to go to the middle one of Robert Skidelsky’s three volumes. And marvellous though that book is, even then you may end up a little bemused. At times, after reading Skidelsky, you get the feeling that almost everyone is a Keynesian at heart (public works and printing money are not exactly novel remedies for unemployment). At other times, you feel that nobody is, not even Keynes himself, for the Master has already moved on from his first thoughts.

  What Davenport-Hines makes vividly clear is that Keynes’s indisputable greatness was as a public servant. For thirty years, from the outbreak of the Great War to his death in 1946, he was at the elbow of power, indefatigable, ingenious and dazzlingly quick, in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘like quicksilver on a sloping board – a little inhuman but very kindly, as inhuman people are’. For a prime minister or governor of a central bank who wanted advice on how to stop a panic half an hour before the markets opened, Maynard was your man. As a junior Treasury staffer in the liquidity crisis of July–August 1914, he guided Lloyd George to reduce bank rate, guarantee outstanding bills and pump money into the capital markets – the sort of thing which we now call quantitative easing and which then enabled the Allies to pay for the war. He more or less repeated the advice in the Great Crash of 1929. There is never much new about great financial crises, and not much mystery about how to solve them either.

  Keynes’s detractors, envious of the influence he had gained with so little apparent effort, denounced him as showy and unsound, even a little sinister. John Buchan cast him as the shifty stockbroker, Joseph Barralty, in The Island of Sheep. D. H. Lawrence was typically more visceral: ‘Why is there this horrible sense of frowstiness, so repulsive, as if it came from deep inward dirt – a sort of sewer – deep in men like K?’ When Keynes’s tract against the Versailles Treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, had its worldwide success, H. G. Wells described him as ‘a man who believes himself to have been brilliant, but was really only opportune.’ It was, after all, already a popular view at the time that the Allies were storing up trouble for the world by imposing such harsh terms on the Germans. The great physicist J. J. Thomson, declared that what Keynes said in that book ‘was only what every sensible person knew already. He merely got easy publicity by mentioning things that he could have known only by being in the public service, such as Clemenceau’s wearing mittens.’

  Like many economists who achieve fame outside their profession, Keynes possessed enormous charm, both in person and in print, just as Walter Bagehot and John Kenneth Galbraith did. Every page of his contains a fetching wisecrack or a vivid character sketch. And he was a relentless persuader. Looking back on his Cambridge days, he wrote of the Apostles who moulded him: ‘Victory was to those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility.’

  He could charm the trousers off a guardsman as easily as he charmed money for the ballet out of the Treasury. When he showed off the statistics of his sexual conquests to his fellow Apostles, he became known as ‘Maynard, the iron copulating machine’. Unlike his first biographer, Roy Harrod, who was constrained by the law, and Skidelsky, constrained I think by delicacy, Davenport-Hines gives us the sex life, hot and strong, blow by blow. It is worth noting that Keynes also used the language of flirtation and seduction to describe his negotiations with bankers and politicians.

  Some critics have attempted to elide his sexual practice and his economic theory. Both were, after all, promiscuous, a series of one-night stands. Was Keynes not famous for saying that ‘in the long run we are all dead’? For all the density of his theoretical writings, was he ultimately anything more than the maestro of the quick fix?

  Certainly it is easy to point to the things he got wrong: his belief in the 1930s that there was not going to be another world war or another world slump, his forecast of ‘the euthanasia of the rentier’, his fervent belief that by the twenty-first century we would have overcome the problems of scarcity and would all be free to pursue the lives of civilized pleasure then available only to the fortunate few of Bloomsbury. He not only lacked any religious sense, his sunny nature blinded him to the tragic possibilities of life and made him slow to grasp the menace of the Nazis.

  On the other hand, his forceful advice to governments of all parties for so many years did, literally, do a power of good. At the end of the Second World War, already desperately ill with then incurable heart disease, he drove himself to the grave by crossing and recrossing the Atlantic to nail down the American loans which saved millions in Europe from starvation. It was a hero’s end to a hero’s career.

  Davenport-Hines does not give much space to reflecting on Keynes’s legacy either to economics or to politics. The implication, though, is that he taught us what to do about slumps, but that he did not live long enough to teach us what to do about inflationary booms. Yet even his notorious opponents, Hayek and Friedman, had enough respect for the suppleness of Keynes’s intellect to be confident that he would have saved us from the pseudo-Keynesians.

  His most dubious legacy is the enhanced prestige that economists have come to enjoy, despite their repeated failure to predict the next crisis, so acutely pointed out by HM the Queen. Keynes famously claimed that ‘practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’. Recent experience would tend to suggest that something like the reverse is often the case. These days you find economists spinning theories in support of the conventional wisdom of businessmen, for example, the Efficient Market Hypothesis which declares that the market always prices things correctly. This hypothesis took a purler in 2008–09, as did the notion of ‘the Great Moderation’, which convinced Ben Bernanke and Gordon Brown that there would be no more boom and bust.

  It could be argued too that Keynes’s inexhaustible ingenuity has helped to imbue governments with an unjustified confidence in their own ability to ‘steer the economy’ and to find overnight solutions to deep-seated problems. Perhaps it is not Keynesian economic theory that has done the damage but the Keynesian political style.

  DIVINE DISCONTENTS

  Before he was hanged by the British, the Neapolitan admiral Francesco Caracciolo achieved immortality with his wisecrack that ‘England has sixty different religions but only one sauce’. Neither the foodie explosion nor the waning of faith has dented the truth of his remark. The English do have a remarkable capacity for devising their own sects. What is remarkable is not simply the number of them but their endless variety: from the implacable plainness of the Quakers to the baroque ritualism of the Anglo-Catholics, from the tearful exuberance of the early Methodists to the modern Happy Clappies, not to mention Anglican plainchant and the glories of the Book of Common Prayer. In intensity too, these churches range from the ferocious discipline of the Plymouth Brethren to the virtual absence of dogma in the more spaced-out regions of the Church of England. The varieties of English atheism too are noteworthy, from the severe demands of the National Secular Society (as insistent as those of the old Lord’s Day Observance Society) to the laid-back indifference of large swathes of the British public.

  The most interesting religious leaders of the past century and a half do seem to define their faith in terms of a certain idea of what England could or should be. Religious conservatives are, I think, mistaken when they accuse liberals of simply adjusting their Christianity to the conventional wisdom of the day. That, for ex
ample, is the complaint which old-fashioned Catholics made against Basil Hume’s leadership. Yet this saintly ex-abbot achieved, deliberately or not, something which had evaded all his predecessors: he transformed the Roman Church in Britain from a perceived foreign implant into a faith which sat at ease in the country. Similarly, the Red Dean’s blindness to Soviet tyranny was risible and deplorable, but his attempt to reconcile the Church’s social teaching with Christ’s surely had something to be said for it. So did Charles Bradlaugh’s crusade to demonstrate that an atheist could be a proud and noble person and not just a sour naysayer.

  Perhaps the most fascinating of all English religious inventions was that of Methodism and the other variants of nonconformity. Their leaders were not so different from other religious innovators, magnetic, intolerable and intolerant. But their congregations devised not only a new style of worship for the mushrooming industrial settlements of Wales, the West Country and the North but almost a new civilization and an extraordinary refreshing of life. In fact, every reforming movement in England since the beginnings of the Reformation, from the Lollards through to the Puritans and the Quakers and on to the Baptists and Methodists, brought with it, along with the regrettable sectarian squabbles and ostracisms, a giddy surge of joy which was experienced most powerfully by the poor and the lower-middling sort. Transported to North America and more recently on to South America, this has turned out to be the most vibrant current in religion today. The exuberance of nonconformist worship baffled and shocked the Anglicans of the time, just as it was to baffle and infuriate modern socialist historians like E. P. Thompson. Yet there was a glorious zest about it. In its decline in Britain if not elsewhere, we have lost something irreplaceable.