RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  ‘I seem to be in America,’ he told his mother, ‘on this delicious Norman Coast,’ adding a little drawing of the Stars and Stripes to his picture postcard of Étretat’s cliffs. Warmed by the sunlight filtered through cream-coloured canvas, he could believe he had gone to heaven. ‘This is the kind of Paradise I am in at the present,’ he told Colin, his youngest brother. ‘The doctors, orderlies and sisters are all Americans, straight from N.York! I may get permission to go boating & even to bathe.’ He couldn’t quite comprehend that he would soon be back in England – ‘I shall believe it as soon as I find myself within swimming distance of the Suffolk Coast,’ he declared, as if he might flout all authority and swim back home. Instead, he contented himself with the prospect of the French beach: ‘If I go bathing this afternoon it will be to practise swimming in Channel waters.’ He was only a few miles from the shore where Mrs Browning had come to dip her body in salt water.

  A few days later, Wilfred was taken back to England by converted West Indian liner – with the luxury of a cabin to himself – not to the Suffolk coast, but up the Solent to Netley’s vast military hospital. ‘We are on Southampton Water, pleasantly placed,’ he told his mother, ‘but not so lovely a coast as Etretat.’ The sea overcame words and what he had witnessed. ‘Nothing to write about now. I am in too receptive a mood to speak at all about the other side the seamy side of the Manche. I just wander about absorbing Hampshire.’ He felt a sense of disconnection, in his abrupt transition from the front and its deafening death cult to a semi-rural site with its main building an endless brick terrace topped by a verdigris dome, and behind it, rows of wooden huts. (One newspaper reported, ‘We are reverting to primitive ways. Like disciples of Thoreau we have gone forth and built huts in the woods and by the waters.’) He wasn’t impressed with my hometown. ‘This place is very boring,’ he decided, ‘and I cannot quite believe myself back on England in this unknown region.’ He added a sardonic caption to his postcard of the huge hospital, calling it a ‘Bungalow’.

  In this sprawling medicropolis-cum-military resort, a halfway house between the martial and the civilian world, soldiers exchanged their khaki for pale-blue uniforms known as hospital pyjamas. They were loose enough to evoke holiday clothes, perhaps; but they were accessorised by blood-red ties. As an officer, Owen escaped this indignity; he merely wore a blue armband to signify his changed status. He was in limbo, awaiting his assessment as a mentally-rather than physically-wounded man. Half of all shell-shock casualties from the front were cleared through Netley; the fields teemed with traumatised men, a war-damaged crop. Wilfred may not have been able to believe himself in this place as he walked its beach, but I could. Swimming off that same shore, I look over and expect to see him trudging through the shingle, talking to himself.

  After a week at Netley, and a stopover in London – where he boasted of writing a letter from a Piccadilly teashop under an opium den, perhaps remembering his decadent friend Tailhade – Owen arrived at Craiglockhart, a down-at-heel hydropathic establishment outside Edinburgh, complete with swimming pool and Turkish baths. It was now occupied by shell-shocked officers shipped there from flooded trenches; some wore nothing but borrowed bathing costumes from the pool. The house magazine, which Owen would edit, was called the Hydra after the mythical many-headed water-snake; but equally it might have evoked the snarling monsters that haunted the men’s dreams.

  Military medicine fed on its own victims. But encouraged by his enlightened doctor, Captain Arthur Brock – who had studied in Vienna and who used as a teaching aid a print of a classical sculpture of Hercules and Antaeus wrestling – Owen tried to readjust, ‘chiefly by swimming in the Public Baths really religiously, for it never fails to give me a Greek feeling of energy and elemental life’. An Edinburgh librarian who met him around this time described Owen’s ‘comeliness’: his features fluid and sharp, his compact body like that of a boy, with the muscles of a man; a century later I would meet Owen’s nephew – he had that same short body, that same broad forehead. Yet Wilfred’s physical recovery was not reflected in his face. It had tightened; the slight smile and dark eyes now held a haunted look. It is the same change I see in photographs of my own grandfather: a handsome young soldier in 1914; a haggard man with a lined face just five years later.

  I cannot imagine what these men saw. Owen dreamed of his sentry falling back blinded, and of motor accidents, and of a man who received a shrapnel ball ‘just where the wet skin glistened when he swam’, a round red hole ‘like a full-opened sea-anemone’; the wound became infected and he died on the way home, buried at sea along ‘with the anemones off Dover’. The delayed impact of what he had witnessed infected his semi-civilian life. Others who met him then claimed that Owen carried photographs of dead and wounded men in his pocket, a gallery of horror which he would produce as proof of the true effects of war; but in reality, the poetry he was about to write would prove far more effective. By day he wandered the streets of Edinburgh; at night he returned to the trenches. If this city had inspired Jekyll and Hyde, then Stevenson’s story was replayed in the personae of Owen’s fellow officers. At any point they could switch. One moment his friend, a young officer named Mayes, was perfectly normal. The next, he appeared at Wilfred’s door with staring eyes, mouthing words he was unable to utter, making strange gestures with his hands.

  Siegfried Sassoon was wearing a purple ‘dressing suit’ on which the sun was shining brilliantly when Wilfred knocked at his bedroom door and asked him to sign his latest book. Sassoon, a hero to Bloomsbury for his rejection of the war’s aims, was of another class entirely: he would refer to Wilfred as ‘little Owen’, and thought him ‘perceptibly provincial’, but also ‘a very loveable creature’. For his part, Wilfred fell in love with Sassoon, innocently, knowingly. Being blown into the air had turned his life around; it was as if he was still falling back to earth. ‘I was always a mad comet,’ he told Siegfried, ‘a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.’

  Now everything changed again. He was introduced to the incrowd. In Edinburgh, Wilfred was invited into an artist’s house where the floor was black and the walls were white, and his hostess wore bright clothes and had her hair cut short. In London he became a house guest of Robbie Ross, Wilde’s lover and literary executor, who had painted his rooms on Half Moon Street gold as a protest against the war, and where every night Turkish delight, brandy and cigarettes were laid out for any friends who might call. These were no unknowing acts on Owen’s part. When he arrived at Robert Graves’s wedding at St James’s, Piccadilly with Ross – all but on the older man’s arm, led in like a faun found in the woods – it was a statement of allegiance. At the party afterwards he met Charles Scott Moncrieff, poet and translator of Proust, who would fall in love with him; both Scott Moncrieff and Ross were about to become entangled in the Pemberton Billing trial, a scandal of conspiracy and prejudice stirred up (not least by a now-embittered Bosie) against Wildean decadence. Wilfred wrote home that he was now ‘one of the ones’. Wilde’s heirs were dangerous people. Owen knew their power; he knew his own. As his biographer Dominic Hibberd wrote, his assault ‘on the civilian conscience’ was a wartime version of the ‘Decadent urge to shock’.

  But there was so little time left. In one month, October 1917, he wrote ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Disabled’. He had barely a year in which to compose the other poems that would make him famous. He told Harold, when they met as soldier and sailor, that his work and the war were ‘running a ghastly race’ – adding, ‘I am getting very tired and short of breath, but I don’t think the War is.’

  At the end of October, Owen was judged fit for duty. At first it seemed that he would be kept on the home front. He rejoined his regiment at Scarborough, another resort familiar from his childhood; the beach where he and his family rode horses on the sands was now lined with barbed wire. Scarborough had been shelled by the German fleet in 1914; only two months before Wilfred arrived, it was attacked by an enemy submar
ine. Some claimed that a German officer had landed from a U-boat and visited one of the town’s pubs.

  Wilfred was quartered in a smart hotel with a turret, on the cliff overlooking the North Sea. In between duties as a ‘major domo’ – effectively, a housekeeper to his fellow officers – he went shopping for antiques for his future home, which he had designed even as he lay amid the mud of the trenches, sketching a seaside bungalow, complete with colour scheme and carpets, to which he would escape, like Wilde in his beach hut, once the war was over. After drinking in the town’s oyster bar, Wilfred retreated to his turret from where he could look down on the waves and, wrapping himself in his dressing gown with his feet in purple slippers, became a poet again.

  He wrote poems filled with barefoot ‘little gods’ and ‘youthful mariners’, their thighs grasped with muscled arms, and decadent ghosts of Edinburgh alleys and Covent Garden stairs. He read Sherard’s book on Wilde, which steadfastly declined to discuss ‘the aberration which brought this fine life to shipwreck so pitiful’. Between the old world and the new, sex and death mingled, creating new myths. Most particularly, the image of the faun continually recurred in Owen’s work, from ‘Miners’, with its ‘the low sly lives | Before the fauns’, to an untitled poem about the son of friends in Edinburgh: ‘Sweet is your antique body, not yet young,’ among ‘sly fauns and trees’.

  There was a knowing innocence in these shape-shifters – from Peter Pan, who would never grow up, to the teenaged C.S. Lewis’s dream, in 1914, of a faun carrying parcels and an umbrella in a snowy wood. Even the boy actor Noël Coward – whom Scott Moncrieff would bring to Half Moon Street, fresh from swimming naked at Babbacombe – wrote a youthful novel about the daughter of Pan. But these hybrids, neither one thing nor the other, were also subvert emblems of a queer nature; they persisted through history like The Tempest, mixing myth with apprehension, if not a little fear. It is telling, given the moral outrage of the times, to note that the word panic derives from this amoral creature. Its disruptions reached back to Keats’s fauns and Shelley’s satyrs and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Flush as Faunus; from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Marble Faun to Herman Melville’s androgynous young Harry Bolton, ‘a mixed being’ who looked like a zebra or one of ‘the centaurs of fancy; half real and human, half wild and grotesque’; and on to Aubrey Beardsley’s lascivious beings, the sight of Nijinsky, a horned, piebald, cold-eyed faun falling wanking to the floor, and the future vision of a star who was half dog, a wild mutation.

  Slipping between species, a boy could escape, into the sea or up to the sky. One of Wilfred’s prizes from Scarborough was a bronze statuette of Hermes, god of flight, father to Pan and Hermaphroditus, a muscular form with a winged cap. The dark little deity seemed like a simulacrum of his fantastical self which he might have carried into battle if he could, with feathers sprouting out of his army cap.

  Half poet, half soldier in his khaki slacks, bare torso, dark hair and slanting eyes, Owen was acting out a rite of his own duality. It was how he saw himself. In a light-hearted letter to his mother, written in the heat of the summer in France, resting in the limbo of the American field hospital, he had described his appearance: ‘Clothing: sparse, almost faun.’ He certainly seemed so in Osbert Sitwell’s description of his small sturdy figure, with a broad forehead, wide-apart, deep-coloured eyes and ‘tawny, rather sanguine skin’; young for his age, with an eager, shy air, soft, warm voice and a ready smile. He was a twentieth-century faun, picking his way across the trenches on his goat-like feet and holding not an umbrella, but a Webley revolver.

  The war had not forgotten its claim on him. As the last days of 1917 turned into a new year, Owen felt confident in telling his mother, ‘I am a poet’s poet. I am started. The tugs have left me; I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon.’ It was now certain that, despite Scott Moncrieff’s efforts at the War Office to get him a home posting, he would be sent back to the front. Back in Shrewsbury, he met up with Harold. They stayed up late, talking into the night. Wilfred seemed about to take his brother into his confidence about his private life, but it was clear from Harold’s attitude that any such statement would be impossible. To him, love between men was ‘horrible’, ‘repugnant’, ‘revolting’. Wilfred made a joke about the supposed purity of sailors, but he had no hope of making a confession on this, their last evening together.

  Pronounced fit for overseas duty, posted to a vast army camp at Ripon in Yorkshire, Owen found a river, the Ure, in which to bathe. ‘I am rather weary now,’ he told his sister Mary, writing at midnight in his tent, ‘having Swum this afternoon, and – in consequence of the exercise –, having written a promising poem this evening.’ The poem was ‘Mental Cases’. He apologised to her for his exuberance. ‘It comes of my recent baptism in the pleasant waters of this River. It was an amusing afternoon.’

  He’d walked miles to find the bathing place, only to discover a sign reserving it ‘for the Civilian Population on Wednesdays!’ He decided that the civilians of Yorkshire would not be dismayed to share the river with an officer such as himself. But even here there were omens. One of the young cadets dived into the water, which was just two feet deep, ‘losing his head with joy … and nearly lost it again. He cut it open, but as there was no brandy, he decided not to faint, and I got him safe into a cab.’ Wilfred never knew that the boy later died of his injuries.

  On 31 August, he got ready to leave England. Having said goodbye to Sassoon in London, and after spending the evening with Scott Moncrieff, he rose at 5 a.m., and took the seven-thirty train to Folkestone.

  As I leave the station I ask a passing youth for directions to the sea. He just keeps on walking, pulling up his hoodie, declining to meet my eyes. ‘I’m not from round here, mate.’

  It’s not difficult to see where I must ride. The streets lead down to the harbour, its arm arching out into the Channel, ending in a lighthouse. The disused boat-train station still stands, its platforms deserted, glass awning cracked, rails rusty. On either side is the sea, the only place left to go. In the distance are the chalk cliffs of Dover.

  By 1918, this resort had suffered greatly. One German bomb, dropped on the street I have just cycled down, killed sixty people, mostly women and children. Folkestone was filled with refugees and soldiers. It was continually saying goodbye. Ten million troops had passed through its port; here the war had been leaking into England for four years, and England leaking into the war. You had only to step from the train and into France, twenty-three miles away. You could see it from the cliffs through a coin-in-the-slot telescope: a dark line on the horizon.

  It was the last day of August. A hot, sunny day. Improbable that he was leaving England at all.

  ‘But these are not Lines written in Dejection,’ he told Sassoon. ‘Serenity Shelley never dreamed of crowns me. Will it last when I shall have gone into Caverns & Abysmals such as he never reserved for his worst daemons?’ He was oddly cheerful. ‘I went down to Folkestone Beach and into the sea, thinking to go through those stanzas & emotions of Shelley’s to the full. But I was too happy, or the Sun was too supreme.’

  ‘I sit upon the sands alone,’ Shelley had written, but Wilfred told his mother, ‘my last hours in England were brightened by a bathe in the fair green Channel, in company of the best piece of Nation left in England – a Harrow boy …’ To Sassoon, he was more revealing about this shining encounter. ‘Moreover there issued from the sea distraction, in the shape, Shape I say, but lay no stress on that, of a Harrow boy, of superb intellect & refinement; intellect because he hates war more than Germans; refinement because of the way he spoke of my Going, and of the Sun, and of the Sea there; and the way he spoke of Everything. In fact, the way he spoke –’

  He left his words hanging, with that boy, on that beach.

  A lifetime ago another boy on another beach, Russell Tarr, had represented a new world. This unnamed Harrovian represented the last of England. He was the summation of other youths, like the ‘navy boy’ with whom
Wilfred had shared a train compartment, golden-headed and fresh-faced, the seaman his father had always wanted him to be: ‘Strong were his silken muscles hiddenly | As under currents where the waters smile.’ ‘And as we talked, some things he said to me | Not knowing, cleansed me of a cowardice, | As I had braced me in the dangerous sea.’ What if he had followed his father’s desires, or his own? Would they, or the sea, have saved him?

  He was going back to France, not for the love of his nation, but for the love of his men. ‘I came out in order to help these boys,’ he told his mother; to lead them as their officer, speak for their suffering. On that last day in Folkestone, Owen knew where to go: he had been here before, when he’d first shipped out from England as a soldier, back in 1916. After waiting for his shave – taking the time in the Saturday-morning queue to write a postcard home – he returned to the shore.

  Wilfred, the lone wolf, on the beach.

  People on the promenade, eating fish and chips, taking the air. Bands playing. Pierrots, made up in black and white, entertaining the crowds. On the streets, on trains, in canteens and shops and pubs and cafés, the civilian mixed with the military, blurring cups of tea with orders to advance. The tide coming in, and going out.

  I wonder where he undressed, struggling to preserve his decency under a towel. Was he going back to war with his woollen bathers in his kitbag? The warm sun must have felt good on his tanned body, trained by war for war.

  I watch him as he leaves his uniform neatly folded in a pile, striding into the sea on his short legs, feeling its rising, exhilarating chill, pushing through the waves, the water slicking back his short hair, as sleek as a selkie.

  I follow him, into the surf. It’s high tide, cold and green, washed with the light of the white cliffs.

  For a few minutes, on that beach, under the sun, everything intensified by the light, the sea was his saviour. If he’d stayed in a little longer, everything might have changed with the next tide.