Not So Quiet...

by Helen Zenna Smith

  My section title, “Ears Only,” is not only meant to convey the urgency and secrecy of messages sent in wartime. It suggests that as Freud interprets blinding or the assault on the eyes in dreams as a figure of castration, we might consider the ear as an image of female sexuality, with its outer folds and inner labyrinthine passages where balance and equilibrium are lodged. If we experience noise as rape, what does it mean if the woman writer writes a noisy text? To use Julia Kristeva’s terms, it is a “semiotic” rather than a symbolic text. But by her criteria, the semiotic text is in touch with the child’s experience of learning sounds from the mother before it is initiated into masculine or symbolic language. Yet the whole force of this novel on the level of content is rage against the mother, refusal to deal with the fathers as makers of war. The heroine of this novel is truly “up to her ears” in war; it disorients and unbalances her. As an ambulance driver at the Front, she is not only overwhelmed by the noise of battle, she is a noise-maker herself. By taking over a man’s job, she both experiences the rape of the ear and she “ears” herself, in the Old English sense of the word meaning to plough, an apt term for driving an ambulance across no man’s land.

  Helen Zenna Smith was the pseudonym of Evadne Price. The National Union Catalogue lists her birthdate as 1896, but Kenneth Attiwill, her second husband (of 54 years), claims she was born in 1901. (The narrator of Not So Quiet . . . would have been born in 1896 or 1897.)20 When Angela Ingram and I began to work on these novels [ Not So Quiet . . . and its sequels, Women of the Aftermath (1931), Shadow Women (1932), Luxury Ladies (1933), and They Lived with Me (1934)], information on the author was hard to come by. Zenna was spelled Zennor in some places, but Evadne Price was revived by Cadogan and Craig in You’re a Brick, Angela, a popular account of the history of English girls’ books, and Women and Children First: The Fiction of the Two World Wars.21 Evadne Price was a very successful free-lance journalist, and her career includes everything from children’s books to romances, serious stage parts to acting and writing for several films, as well as playwriting. Her Helen Zenna Smith books were serialized in The People, and she was their war correspondent from 1943, covering the Allied invasion and all the major war stories through the Nuremberg Trials. Her husband was a POW in Japan, and for two years she believed he was dead. She wrote a great deal of popular fiction with titles like Society Girl, Glamour Girl, Escape to Marriage, and Air Hostess in Love. Her play Big Ben, written for the Malvern Festival in 1939, was successful (the Times called it “a large, comfortable play with a soul to call its own”). The Phantom Light (1937) was a stage version of her novel, The Haunted Light, and it was also made into a film starring Gordon Harker. Once a Crook, on which Kenneth Attiwill collaborated (1939), was also both a play and a film.

  The author of several hundred paperback romances first serialized in Novel Magazine, Evadne Price had another career when television began, as a broadcast storyteller. An afternoon horoscope show called “Fun with the Stars” led to a long-running evening horoscope program. Price was “our new astrologer extraordinaire” for twenty-five years for SHE magazine and published a successful collection of these columns as SHE Stargazes. When she and her husband retired to Australia in 1976, Evadne Price wrote the monthly horoscope column for Australian Vogue. Before she died in April 1985, she had begun work on an autobiography to be called Mother Painted Nudes.

  As I write, the press is having a field day over the revelation that Nancy and Ronald Reagan consult astrologers. What is the feminist scholar to make of a talent that spans social realism and pulp fiction, a talent that composed sensational reports of World War II battlefronts and also concocted horoscopes for fashion magazines? Can we include in our feminist project the magnetic, feminine “little” personality with “raven black hair,” a “cultivated” accent, and “English rose complexion,” the born performer who longed to be in the public eye, and said:

  I was a real little show-off. . . . I loved reciting, singing, dancing, telling make-believe stories, making people laugh or cry, anything to be the center of attention. And when they took me to my first ever theatre—it was a pantomime—I knew that I wanted to be an actress and have my name up in electric lights. . . . I wanted to be a star and shine.22

  Evadne Price’s popularity is a challenge for feminist criticism. Would unacknowledged snobbery about “high” and “low” culture dismiss Evadne Price as a commercial opportunist? Is our reading of the Helen Zenna Smith books contaminated by the astrological charts? Is Not So Quiet . . . diminished by the fact that its author adored housekeeping and gardening in Sussex and prided herself on being a very good cook? We claim that aesthetic judgments are no longer based on such considerations. Critical theory insists that the “author” is dead. But what if the dead author is not Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf, but Evadne Price?

  Evadne Price’s career is a twentieth-century woman’s success story. She had enormous mimetic gifts; she was, as feminist psychologists document in many women’s lives, extraordinarily adaptive. Evadne Price was a genuinely popular writer. She knew what the public wanted and she gave it to them. Readers of thirties novels of socialist realism will have no trouble recognizing the genre of Not So Quiet . . . and its sequels, the lost heroines of the later books, bored and weary mistresses and kept women, enacting the general social malaise of the Depression in a female “depression” at being culturally deprived of work. Like Jean Rhys’s miserable heroines, “Nello,” as she is called in the later novels, is downwardly mobile and ends up sleeping on the Embankment when what prostitutes now call “sex work” is no longer available. Helen Zenna Smith does not write as lyrically as Jean Rhys. There are almost no figures of speech in her brutal, tense, angry narrative. But the technique of dramatic monologue, of inner and outer soliloquy and mental scene-making are superb examples of what Bakhtin calls “dialogism” in fiction. (The recently revived and translated work of the Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, has proved especially useful for analyzing the way that history works in the novel. Gender was not an important category for him, but his ideas are easily translated for feminist readings. His idea of the “carnivalesque” has proved useful for discussing black literature and relates directly to the macabre humor of war novels as well as the latrine scenes of male bonding in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.)

  Evadne Price here shapes a new form of cinematic, dialogic, and dramatic interior monologue for modernism, a very tightly controlled but daring form, very different from James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, or Virginia Woolf. One consciousness, Helen’s, is a kind of mistress of ceremonies of the carnival of voices in her imagination. She jerks the puppet strings and they all “act out.” Furious with her mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington (her mother’s rival in war work and village recruiting) for their pious, smug inability to conceive of the terrors of trench life for soldiers or the unspeakable conditions in which the women drive ambulances, she hallucinates them onto the scene, wanting to imagine their response: “Shut your ears, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, lest their groans and heart-rending cries linger in your memory as in the memory of the daughter you sent out to help win the War.”

  Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front appeared in 1929 to instant international acclaim. It remains a classic anti-war novel, a touching, comic, life-affirming first-person narrative of a young German soldier’s experience. Albert Marriott, the publisher, approached Evadne Price with a free-lance project to write a spoof from a woman’s point of view (“All Quaint on the Western Front”). She read Remarque and found “quaint” an unsuitable response to its power. She herself had never been at the Front, so she convinced Winifred Young, who had kept diaries of her experience as an ambulance driver, to let Price write a novel faithful to Young’s experience of actual life at the Front. We do not have those diaries to compare to Not So Quiet . . . . We know that Evadne Price locked herself up with them for six weeks and wrote a novel fit to put on the shelf next to Erich Maria Remarque’s. The questi
on of its origins as a work of art, its originality or creativity in the face of Evadne Price’s deliberate mimesis of All Quiet on the Western Front, and her use of Winifred Young’s diaries are fascinating.

  Not So Quiet . . . is a multi-authored text, like the King James Bible, which was written by a committee, and it seems to demonstrate Virginia Woolf’s thesis in A Room of One’s Own that “masterpieces are not single and solitary births. They are the product of thinking by the body of the people . . . .” Not So Quiet . . .’s “heteroglossia,” in Bakhtin’s terms, its multi-voicedness, comes from Evadne Price’s extraordinary ability to hear and read the popular experience of the horror of this particular war, popular revulsion at the destruction of a whole generation of European youth, male and female alike.23 Socialist feminists should be interested in a fiction which makes no pretense at “individual genius” and enacts as well a female literary class demobilization in the narrative of Helen’s move from volunteer ambulance driving, a breakdown, and home leave to the deliberate rejection of class privilege and her return to the Front as a cook’s assistant with working-class W.A.A.C.s.

  Virginia Woolf, in “Professions for Women” (1931), imagined that women would be able to tell the truth about the body in fifty years’ time. She meant, of course, female sexual experience. But if she read popular fiction, she would have seen that Evadne Price (and other women war novelists) could tell the truth about the body in/at war. Some subjects remain taboo. Helen never tells us, except in veiled allusion, what happens to the menstruating body at the Front. Did the harsh conditions stop the menstrual flow? Did women connect menstrual blood with the blood of wounded soldiers? Some anthropologists have argued that men’s wars are a form of menstruation envy. Did death-blood, flowing so ceaselessly from men’s bodies, affect women’s perceptions of their own life-blood? Menstruation may still have been in la zone interdite for women’s fiction in 1929, but the body covered with lice was an arresting and shocking substitute. May I warn the gentle reader to cut her fingernails before reading Not So Quiet . . .? Even on the second and third readings this novel will send you into a fit of itching and scratching, so graphic is its description of the horrors of lice in the hair and sleeping bags, called “flea bags.” Not So Quiet . . . sends the reader rushing to the bath, wondering whether Army and Navy stores still offer carbolic body belts for squeamish readers of war novels.

  The disorder and disorientation of the body at war are evoked immediately by the narrative voice in the modernist “continuous present” of Gertrude Stein (though more familiar to readers in the work of Hemingway and Remarque). The first-person speaker seems to be unreeling a black and white cinematic series of graphic images in the flat (but ominous) monotone of an old newsreel. The personal, reportorial “I” deliberately suppresses emotion, but extends the I-narrative with more private forms—the diary, the letter, the waking dream—so that she creates the illusion of multiple voices, trying to speak, as if over the static of a field radio and the continual rumble and whine of guns and bombs, the screaming and moaning of the wounded. This “background noise,” the deafening roar of the engines of death, is the source of the title, as well as a reversal of Remarque.

  The word “quiet” in both titles indicates war’s insistence on gender reversal. Man, the noise-making animal, is forced to lie still in the trenches, while the silent woman, used to domestic peace, must participate in the incessant noise of warfare. She must take and give orders, run machines, think and act quickly during the infernal din of shelling attacks, rev up her engines. Remarque’s Paul Baumer and his comrades must leave the male world of active speaking and noisy work for the eerie longuers and passive, silent waiting for attack, which fills them with fear and makes them into “women.” The ambulance drivers are equally made into “men” by the requirements of their jobs. They must overcome their fear of open spaces and the dark and drive long distances in the night with their cargo of maimed men. Self-reliance, courage, nerve, and bravery must be summoned.

  Each experiences war through the body of the other. Paul is feminized by war; Helen is masculinized. Both novels write the body in distress, as much for gender reversal as for fatigue, sleep deprivation, hunger, rotten food, the invasion of fleas and rats, cold. Remarque writes the claustrophobia of the falsely domestic trench/hearth and Price writes the agoraphobia of the mine-trapped open space, blinding snow and wind, bombs falling from the sky. Unhoused, she must learn to operate Outside. Housed in holes of trenches, the German soldiers must learn containment, self-control, and all the female virtues of the aware and alert Inside. Woman makes noise; man maintains silence. The en-trenched and the un-trenched warfare experience profound gender traumas. The speaker becomes the listener; the listener becomes the speaker. The war/peace, front/back gender oppositions must be negotiated for survival.

  Gender identity must be maintained despite the experience of living in the body of the other sex (Helen imagines strenuously the preparations for her coming-out party while driving a particularly stressful ambulance run, and Paul and his friends risk court-martial to make love to some French women). The first opposition in the dialogic experience of reading the two novels together is in the meaning of the word “quiet.” For the woman, the new meaning in war of her speech or silence is all the more disconcerting because of the accumulated cultural associations of female virtue with silence in a cultural script which asserts (against reality) that women talk too much. In addition, the new subject position of the woman at war undoes her ordinary sexual role. Heightened sexuality is part of her active role. In contrast, the men in All Quiet on the Western Front mostly masturbate. Helen casually sleeps with the first man she meets as she gets off the boat for leave in England, an action unthinkable for a girl of her class before the war. Sandra Gilbert’s argument about gender warfare seems inappropriate to those for whom gender identity remains a serious test of endurance and new respect for the Other. Paul, on home leave, feels a tender respect for his mother, a respect born of his own feminization in the trenches. He can now empathize with her body, which is dying of cancer, when all of civilian life enrages and disgusts him. Helen falls in love with Roy Evans-Mawnington because she knows in her body’s stress what he has experienced as a soldier. The notion of woman’s “potency” deriving from men’s “impotence” is a far too simple interpretation of gender roles in World War I. The most silent soldier in Remarque’s novel, the one who hears and smells, can find food, and “read” the world around him (like a woman), is the most revered. And Tosh is the heroine of Not So Quiet . . . , with her foul mouth, continual banter, singing, joking, cursing, and clowning. Helen and her comrades cannot tell their families what they suffer. They write lying, cheerful letters and fantasize about telling the truth as they would have “before the world turned khaki and blood-coloured”:

  Tell them that all the ideals and beliefs you ever had have crashed about your gun-deafened ears—that you don’t believe in God or them or the infallibility of England or anything but bloody war and wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise—that you live in a world of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair . . .24

  Psychically speaking, what both sexes experience in these novels is a Freudian version of “the uncanny.” Though Freud associates the fear of castration with deprivation of sight, in the war experience it is hearing, noise or silence, which indicates the desexualization of the characters. (Feminist critics like Luce Irigaray have written about specularity and touch in female experience and writing as very different from the male. We might think of analyzing whether the woman’s experience of hearing and her relation to her own ears is different.) Paul Baumer associates silence with the mass murder of a battle, the final impotence of passive endurance of enemy assault.25 Helen fixates on one particular noise as the cause of her suffering, the “loathly arrogant summons” of the Commandant’s police whistle. Rousing her to roll-call at 7:30 A.M. when she went to bed at 5,
the whistle focuses her hatred:

  . . . ruining my pre-War disposition entirely. It rouses everything vile within me. Not long ago I was a gentle pliable creature of no particular virtues or vices, my temper was even, my nature amiable and my emotions practically non-existent. Now I am a sullen, smouldering thing, liable to burst Vesuvius fashion into a flaming fire of rage without the slightest warning. Commandant’s police whistle. . . .

  If I am bathing or attending my body with carbolic ointment or soothing lotion . . . it orders me to stop. If I am writing a hasty letter, or glancing at a newspaper . . . it shrieks its mocking summons. Whatever I am doing it gives me no peace. But worst of all, whenever I am asleep . . . it wakens me, and gloats and glories in the action. If only I could ram it down the Commandant’s throat, I could die happy in the knowledge that I had not lived in vain. (47)

  Later Helen’s sadistic fantasies again enact the invasion of the deep throat of the Commandant: “I wonder what she would do if I suddenly sprang at her and dug my fingers into her throat, her strong, red, thick throat that is never sore, that laughs scornfully at germs, that needs no wrapping up even when the snow is whirling, blinding and smothering . . . ”(57).