by Philip Hoare
As the summer stretched ahead, Wilfred and Harold were left to their own devices and diversions – among them one of the most splendid spectacles at sea that the country had ever seen, as the new king-emperor arrived to review his fleet. But the focus that day subtly shifted, from the monarch to another figure.
Claude Grahame-White was Britain’s most celebrated and handsome aviator, a former car salesman whose aeronautical outfit consisted of a three-piece knickerbocker tweed suit, cap and tie, sportily set off with a cigarette dangling nonchalantly from the corner of his mouth. His aeroplane looked more like a mechanical bird than a flying machine: a fragile thing of wood struts, doped linen and animal glue, yellow-skinned and thin-boned, held together by faith as much as by technology. Its appearance, one thousand feet over Torbay, was akin to the sighting of a UFO; the first time most of the crowd – which had been, up until that moment, an Edwardian assembly with straw boaters and picture hats and long skirts, craning their necks to watch the plane swoop over the bay – had ever seen anything other than a seagull in the air. Suddenly, they were modern. They were looking at the future. A man, flying.
The Farman III biplane took off from the beach-side field in front of Torre Abbey, flying over its gothic arches and the Georgian mansion where Nelson had once dined. Biplanes generally flew at dusk, when the day’s winds had abated. Grahame-White was borne up on a thermal, rising on the summer heat that had kept children paddling in the water all day. The aircraft glowed as sparks from its engine lit its linen wings like a Chinese lantern. Suffused with the colours of twilight, the scene might have been painted by John Singer Sargent.
Yet the pilot’s intent was anything but glamorous. The next day, on his second launch, he flew in the cold light of dawn. It was a foggy morning, and it seemed the review would have to be called off. But then the mist lifted to reveal eight columns of ships of the Royal Navy, sea-going enforcers of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. It was a unique assembly, an absolute demonstration of imperial power and industrial mastery of the sea: one hundred million pounds’ worth of weaponry. These ‘engines of war’ were an index of dominion, sweeping over heroes and victories and kings and colonies and out to the stars themselves: St Vincent, Collingwood, Lord Nelson and Temeraire; Edward VII, Hibernia, Africa and New Zealand; Dominion, Commonwealth, Hindustan and Britannia; Vanguard, Superb, Bellerophon and Jupiter. Not even the underwater world went unpatrolled. Six submarines – led by the leviathanic D1, built in utmost secrecy in Scotland and showing ‘like a salmon among minnows’ in the mechanical shoal – rounded Berry Head to the surprise of its dolphins and porpoises, and slid into place in the bay.
George V’s ascent to the throne, the reassurance of the same, seemed a bulwark against the changes of the new century. But that summer, as Wilfred and Harold swam and children played on the beach, Britain was filled with war games. Territorial troops were training on Salisbury Plain, and in Kent soldiers practised with machine guns on night operations. In Wales, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers were faced with the prospect that a revolt in Ireland had been followed by a landing of forces north of Aberystwyth. And in a vast exercise carried out on the Firth of Forth, hundreds of troops, including the Cyclist Battalion of the Royal Scots, fought an imagined invasion landing at Dunbar, intent on marching on Edinburgh. Every shore of the kingdom seemed threatened; the country was preparing for attack from every direction, even from under the sea.
The militarised new monarch – ‘it must not be forgotten … that the King himself has handled a torpedo-boat, voyaged in a submarine, and commanded various classes of vessels from a gunboat to a big cruiser’ – watched from the armipotent battleship Dreadnought, the incarnation of imperial might (for all that a few months before, Virginia Woolf, along with five of her Bloomsbury male friends, two of whom were lovers, had conducted their own stunt, boarding the ship in Weymouth wearing costumes and blacked-up faces, pretending to be a royal delegation from Abyssinia).
As the monarch peered up through his telescope, the biplane passed directly overhead. To The Times, it was an uplifting sight; Grahame-White was exhibiting a new kind of art. ‘He made a particularly pretty flight, rising easily to about 1,500ft … then gliding round to a lower level to give the King an opportunity of seeing him more closely as he flew over the Dreadnought.’
The reporter was caught up in wonder like the rest of the crowd; this was aerial choreography to rival any Russian ballet. ‘All his gyrations and movements were made with that ease and smoothness for which he is noted, and his swoop to the landing-place was particularly workmanlike and beautiful.’ And as he rose over the trees under which their carriages were gathered, the crowd looked up as one in wonder. Their horses stood straight ahead, eyes blinded by leather blinkers.
At five o’clock that afternoon the aviator made his third flight. The fog was thickening, putting an end to the naval exercises, and the ships were coming in. As he soared over Dreadnought once more, Grahame-White dipped his wings and saluted his monarch.
The king waved his telescope-sceptre from the deck of the world’s most mighty ship. He did not realise what had changed in that instant.
The pilot had proved his point. None of the navy’s guns, able to quell rebellion and enforce diplomacy in every ocean, could swivel upwards and – had Grahame-White been an enemy – take him down. This Icarus in a tweed suit, borne aloft by linen wings and perched on what was little better than a kite with a car engine, was an augury of the time when such frail contraptions would become terrible firebirds, dealing not delight but death from above. As any classically-educated observer in the crowd might have noted, the word augury referred to the Roman belief in determining the future from a bird in flight, and shared the same root as avian and aviator.
That night, Wilfred and Harold stayed out on the cliffs until midnight. Looking down on the promenade strung with lights and dotted with palm-like cordylines, they pretended Torquay was some city in the tropics, shimmering under the dark-blue sky. Out at sea, the fleet was also lit up, and every now and again a ship would send up a rocket, its trail reflected in the black waters of the bay like a falling star.
The following spring, Wilfred returned to Torquay, alone. He missed Russell, who was now at Harvard, and in solitary moments the young poet sat on the rocks at Meadfoot, reading a French book he’d bought, filled to overwhelming with the sea. As a would-be university scholar himself, Wilfred translated a passage from Alphonse Daudet for his mother’s benefit: ‘You know, don’t you, this lovely intoxication of the soul? You are not thinking, you are not dreaming either. All your being escapes you, flies off, is scattered. You are the plunging wave, the dust of foam which floats in the sun between two waves … everything but yourself.’
‘Well, I was reading the book at Meadfoot the other afternoon,’ said Wilfred, as he broke off from his reverie, ‘when who should I see but the boy-youth whom we met with Russell Tarr, and who played croquet with us on the lawn, as Harold will …’
But the rest of the letter is missing, as are Wilfred’s other letters about Russell, censored by his brother in order to preserve his brother’s reputation – at least, as he saw it. Harold blocked Wilfred’s words with black ink; often he cut out paragraphs or removed entire pages. What was left made a mystery of what might have been banal, or perhaps not so. That not-knowing, the withdrawal of permission, is physical, like someone holding their hand in front of your face. He was doing to Owen’s letters what the sea had done to Shelley’s notebook; only instead of the water washing out the words, thick squid-black ink covered their traces. The result was quite contrary to Harold’s intent. He only made the ordinary more extraordinary.
It wasn’t the job Wilfred had imagined back in Torquay, but it would do for now. He was hurtling through the country lanes of Berkshire on his magical Sturmey-Archer three-speed bike, attending to his duties as assistant to the vicar of Dunsden. Cycling, like swimming, was a release; it took him into the natural world. He was a keen bird-watcher, an
d admired swallows so much that his family called them Wilfred’s swallows. Such fast birds fascinated him, built only for the air, hardly ever touching the ground, yet travelling from one hemisphere to the other. He had recently written a Keatsian ode to the swift, ‘Airily sweeping and swinging, | Quivering unstable’, and as he cycled below, their wings carved their own curves into the sky: ‘If my soul flew with thy assurance, | What Fields, what skies to scour! what Seas to brave!’
Despite its sententious reverend and the deadening sound of the vicarage clock ticking away the afternoon, Wilfred liked his new post. Dunsden sounded dull, but it lay close to the Thames; he was excited to learn that Shelley had lived in a cottage by the river in Marlow, where he’d erected an altar to Pan in the woods.
A photograph of Owen in the vicarage garden shows a typical teenager. He sits with his legs crossed and his body at an angle; a short, neat young man, just five foot five.
Perhaps it’s Sunday, the dullest, freest day of the week. He’s wearing a checked Norfolk jacket, flannel trousers, a Homburg hat by his side. His hair is side-parted. There’s a critical look on his unformed face as he reads aloud from a book held in one hand, the other curled under his chin. He may be serious; he may not. I imagine him arguing passionately from under that floppy hair and furrowed brow, all taut with complexities, even as you can hear him complaining about being told to tidy up his room when he has more important work of his own to do.
He had just returned from the Lake District, where he’d spent a week at an open-air Evangelical gathering, his generation’s version of a music festival. He was devout despite his doubts, and in his letters – he would write five hundred to his mother during his lifetime – his voice comes alive, funny and questioning and energetic; so many words, as if he were cramming them all in. At this field camp, with its endless hymns and sermons, he’d slept in a smelly tent and sung along with all the other young men, finding only one, a mining lad, interesting. When he took his shirt off, the boy’s back showed the scars of his subterranean work; to Wilfred, he seemed somehow angelic, ‘tho’ pricked with piercing pain’.
Escaping the camp’s holy orders, Wilfred swam in the nearby lake, and cycled forty miles in the pouring rain to Coniston to see Ruskin’s house, Brantwood, set over the slate-grey water. Ever the fan, Wilfred called on Ruskin’s secretary and biographer W.G.Collingwood, who lived nearby. I don’t know if he swam at Coniston too; I did, and found it fearful with the memory of Ruskin’s madness, imagining the critic-prophet watching the storm clouds of the nineteenth century from his gothic turret overlooking the lake. That night Wilfred rode back through the storm, ‘drunk on Ruskin’ and utopias and possibilities.
Now he was back in his routine, on his bike, making pastoral visits to elderly parishioners, delivering not food but comforting words from the sermons of Charles Spurgeon, ‘about human lives being as frail as flowers, as fleeting as meteors’. Of course he wanted to be a meteor too, ‘fast, eccentric, lone, | And lawless’. Astronomy fascinated him: that April he had witnessed the greatest solar eclipse for fifty years (for which Virginia Woolf had travelled to Yorkshire), and in an earlier letter he had sketched a new comet he’d seen in the night sky.
Wilfred rode on with his head full of all these things: with Keats and Shelley and Ruskin and shooting stars and comets and his own poems as he hurtled through the countryside, when suddenly his bike skidded and he slid violently to the ground.
The incident lasted barely ten seconds. Dazed and in shock, he managed to ride back to the vicarage, where the housekeeper took one look at his white face and the deep cuts on his hand and sent for the doctor. Wilfred started to lose consciousness.
‘Sudden twilight seemed to fall upon the world, an horror of great darkness closed around me.’ He heard the blood roaring in his ears, and ‘strange noises and a sensation of swimming under water’. Although he did not faint, he broke out in a cold sweat and, somewhat deliriously, found himself ‘gasping at a window, without quite knowing how I got there’. He went to look in the mirror, in which he admired his ‘really beautiful and romantic pallor’, and claimed, ‘I had a presentiment that something of note would happen shortly.’ Wilfred was all too sensitive to omens; around this time he made a note on one of his loose pages: ‘why have so many poets courted death?’ He was in love with death, as boys are. It was the biggest adventure.
A few days later, Wilfred resumed work on ‘The Little Mermaid’, now into its second exercise book. He sent his heroine diving to the sea floor to find ‘a marble statue, – some boy-king’s, | Or youthful hero’s’, whose cold face she kissed. The drowned image, out of Coleridge and Shakespeare, foresees her fatal meeting with her prince, for whom she forsakes the sea, her elegant tail bisecting into two painful legs, as if she were walking on knives, like Byron. The poem ends as she helplessly pursues the prince’s ship into a storm, ‘All ears | Hark to a grumbling in the heart of the seas.’
On the Friday after Harvest Festival, Wilfred got back on his bike and rode to his cousins’ house for a family reading of The Tempest. The play was a set text on his correspondence course in his attempt to get to university, and he had recently seen it performed in London. The elemental drama touched him with its strangeness; it spoke to the distance he felt between his art and his nature; between the future and the past, between what people expected and what he wanted to be. Later that year he went to see it in London for a second time, and from the train on the way back he saw a biplane ‘high in the Western sky’, so high he could not hear it. The machine, from Grahame-White’s new aerodrome at Hendon, was all the more impressive for its silence against the setting sun, held in the windless air.
In April 1913, worn down by his duties at Dunsden, Wilfred returned to Torquay to recuperate from congested lungs; the sea air would clear them, so he and his mother, who feared the first signs of consumption, hoped. He found the resort a changed place. His uncle had died, and his aunt had moved to a smaller house. Wilfred revisited Teignmouth, and both there and at Babbacombe he observed that the swelling afternoon tide seemed to bring on the rain, which his scientific mind sought to explain: ‘the rise of such a vast surface of water … compresses the Air above to a greater density’. But as the clouds lifted, so did his depression about the dead end his life had reached, having failed to get into university. The ‘verray’ blue sea worked its magic – although, as he told his mother, there were three battleships in the bay, closer to shore than he had ever seen. ‘How melancholy-happy I was,’ he wrote, quoting Keats, his consumptive hero, ‘where the wide sea did weave.’
Wilfred needed to escape, and the opportunity arrived: the offer of a job as a teacher in Bordeaux. As he crossed the Channel, the world suddenly opened up. He was no longer a boy from a backwater. He was a new European man. He grew a moustache and wore his hair fashionably slicked back and centre-parted, and acquired a tan which would stay with him for the rest of his life. He even fantasised about rebuilding his body with international parts, like a mail-order version of Mary Shelley’s Creature. He chose eyes from France, mouth from Italy, hair from Greece, chest from Sweden, legs (‘badly needed’) from France also, and shoulders from America, ‘of course’. At twenty-one, he placed great store in his use of the word ‘Beautiful’.
The reality was somewhat different. Wilfred suffered hypochondriacally, detailing to his mother every symptom, living on chocolate and raw eggs and bemoaning the fact that his old green suit was wearing out. (He favoured green: it was the aesthete’s colour, as sported by Wilde and his acolytes. Later, playing a dandy in an amateur drama at Craiglockhart, he’d ask his mother to send up his green suit, green shirts and green glass cufflinks for his ensemble.)
Wilfred had accepted a new post, as tutor to the Léger family: Charles Léger was the founder of the experimental Théâtre des Poètes, and impressed Wilfred because as a boy he’d met Mrs Browning, who had shown him particular kindness; Madame Léger, his young wife, Wilfred’s student, ran an interior-design co
mpany. They were staying at their summer house in the Pyrenees, a villa in the Belle Époque style on the outskirts of Bagnères. The town’s name meant baths, famed since Roman times for its healing waters. Lourdes was only a few miles away, with its own miraculous spring.
Wilfred was introduced to a southern life. Dressed in a consciously cosmopolitan manner in straw boater, bow tie and smart ankle boots at an open-air reading, he sat next to Madame Léger – who rather fancied him, he knew – as they listened to the poet Laurent Tailhade, who rather fancied him too. A decadent anarchist and opium addict, and friend of Verlaine and Mallarmé, Tailhade had declared a terrorist bomb in the French parliament to be a ‘beautiful gesture’, much as Karlheinz Stockhausen would call the attacks of 11 September 2001 a work of art, or as Turner had hired a boat to paint the Palace of Westminster while it burned to the ground in 1834. Tailhade still supported the anarchists even after he was injured by one of their bombs and lost the sight of one eye. Under his radical, pacifist influence Wilfred’s ideas changed. He too would find art in disaster.
From the Légers’ villa Wilfred would walk into the hills, where he discovered a mountain stream in which to swim. His hosts advised against it: too cold, not deep enough, people might be about. Wilfred dismissed these prissy reservations. Having found ‘an enchanting stretch of water in an alder-glade, I was not long in “getting in”. So now I go down every day, and I know, when I vaunt my coolness and freshness, the others would be green with envy, if they were not so infernally red with heat.’ He might have been Shelley dipping naked in a neoclassical landscape. But this was August 1914, and in Futurist-inflected pararhyme, Owen recorded that last summer more surely than if he’d photographed it.