A Little History of Literature (26 page)

Loyal (in a sense) to his adoptive country, Conrad maintains that Belgian imperialism is crueller and more rapacious than its British
counterpart. But within Marlow's remark about ‘the dark places of the earth’ is the implication that all empires are, at root, the same. Good empire and bad empire is a false distinction: it's all bad.
Heart of Darkness
is a profoundly unsettling novel, written by a man himself profoundly unsettled by what he saw in Africa's darkest place.

The ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire was, proverbially, India. By general agreement the most thoughtful and masterful novel about colonial India is E.M. Forster's
A Passage to India
(1924). The idea of the work was inspired by Forster's trips to the sub-continent. He fell in love with the country and its people. He was entirely free of any Kiplingesque sense of colonial superiority. Forster was a liberal to the core – one of the free-thinking Bloomsbury Group (Chapter 29).

The odd title requires explanation. Superficially it refers to the travel (‘passage’) taken from England to India by ocean liner. One of the main narrative strands in the novel follows a young English woman, Adela, who has come to the country to marry a British official. Things go very wrong after she may, or may not, have been assaulted in some local caves (which have ancient religious significance) by a young Muslim doctor, Aziz. Her innocent intention was to make friends with a native. Near riots and a trial ensue in which Aziz is acquitted. Adela's ‘passage to India’ – and her prospective marriage – end in humiliating ruin. No one knows precisely what happened in the Marabar Caves – it is part of the ‘mystery and muddle’ that is colonial India.

Forster's title echoes a poem of Walt Whitman (Chapter 21) with the same title, published in 1871. Whitman's poem poses a question that goes to the heart of the imperial situation and which Forster's novel sets out to probe. Is it possible to have a fully human relationship if that relationship is complicated by colonial possession and racial difference? This is how Whitman puts it:

Whitman was gay, as was Forster. At the core of Forster's novel, the relationship between a male British schoolteacher and a Muslim doctor is intense, verging, the novel hints, on passionate. But, as Kipling had written: ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’

Forster found his novel almost impossible to finish. No ending seemed ‘right’. It was not because of any writing block. What Forster was up against was the fact that fiction, by its nature, cannot ‘solve’ the problems of empire.
A Passage to India
ends inconclusively, but with fine artistic effect, with the two men who can never come together, becoming ‘welded’, as Whitman puts it. They are last seen riding horses across the monsoon-soaked Indian landscape:

Forster's ‘not yet’ would be a quarter of a century coming, with Indian independence in 1947. Salman Rushdie would celebrate it in his novel
Midnight's Children
, one of the greatest of post-colonial works (more of which in Chapter 36).
A Passage to India
is anticolonial. Written when it was, it could not be, Forster implies, anything else.

The theme of empire has inspired a whole literature in its own right, from Shakespeare's
The Tempest
to works such as Paul Scott's
The Raj Trilogy Quartet
, the novels of V.S. Naipaul, and William Golding's
Lord of the Flies
(where it is the ultra-white English public schoolboys who are ‘half devil and half child’). We shall see how things look from the other side of the colonial relationship in a later
chapter. But the central moral complexities of empire have never been more sensitively explored – if not ‘solved’ – than in Conrad's and Forster's novels. They can still be read, and enjoyed, with those strange mixtures of pride, guilt and perplexity. But make sure you know the history first.

CHAPTER
27

Doomed Anthems

T
HE
W
AR
P
OETS

War and poetry have always gone hand in hand. The first great work of poetry that has come down to us, the
Iliad
, is about nations in conflict. War figures in most of Shakespeare's plays which are not comedies (and it comes up in some of them, too). One of the most graphic descriptions of the ‘horrors of war’ (as the Spanish artist Goya called it) is to be found in
Julius Caesar
:

No war, however, has produced a greater wealth of English poetry than the war that was called ‘Great’, the First World War of 1914–18.

It was the most blood-drenched war in British history. At the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, a quarter of a million British soldiers were lost in months of fighting in deep mud, with barely five miles of ground won. Of those who came from Britain's public
schools (many of them straight from the classroom) to the Front, one in five never returned; instead, their names appeared on their schools' ‘boards of honour’. These young men were both the ‘officer class’ and the ‘poetry-writing class’.

In almost every village in Britain, somewhere prominent will be a monument, now often moss-covered and barely legible. It will record the flower of that community's youth, cut down in the awful 1914–18 conflict. Under the list of names, if you can read it, will be an inscription such as ‘Their Name Liveth Forever More’.

The Great War was different from other wars not merely by virtue of its unprecedented scale and the lethal nature of its weapons (notably the machine gun, the aeroplane, poison gas and tank) but because it involved conflict not merely
between
nation states, but
within
nation states. Put another way, many soldiers, on both sides, were driven to ask themselves, ‘Is the enemy in front of us, or behind us?’ This is the question asked by the most famous novel to come out of the war,
All Quiet on the Western Front
(1929), by the German author Erich Maria Remarque. Remarque had fought and been wounded in the trenches barely a mile or so away from another famous survivor called Adolf Hitler.

The poets of those awful four years whom we most admire struggled to come to terms with the fact that their real enemy might not be the Kaiser (a first cousin of their own king, George V) and his jack-booted Huns but an English society which had somehow lost its way and blundered into a wholly meaningless slaughter of its own best and brightest, for no good reason at all.

The angriest of the poets, Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), was a thoroughly English ‘fox-hunting’ man, despite his German forename. He illustrates this sense of England-vs-England in his short poem, ‘The General’:

Who, then, is ‘the enemy’ in this poem? Let's recall Tennyson's ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (Chapter 22). With a botched plan of attack a general in that engagement caused the death of almost half of his 600 cavalry. But Tennyson does not criticise the commander, or his country. Instead he lavishes praise on the bravery of those soldiers who rode to their death (‘theirs not to reason why’) into the barrels of the Russian artillery. Their deaths were ‘glorious’.

Sassoon has a different and more complicated attitude. There was no such ‘glory’ in his view of things. ‘The General’ was written in 1916 and published in 1918, when the question ‘Why did we fight this war?’ was still white-hot. Cowardice (‘the white feather’, as it was called) did not come into it. Sassoon himself was a ferocious fighter, nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’ by his comrades (ironically ‘Siegfried’ means ‘joy in victory’ in German) but for the life of him (literally) he could not see the point of the war. When he was awarded a Military Cross for outstanding valour, he is supposed to have thrown the medal into the River Mersey.

The last surviving British ‘Tommy’ to have fought in the First World War, Harry Patch, who died in 2009, aged 111, agreed. On visiting Passchendaele, on the ninetieth anniversary of the battle, Patch described the war as the ‘calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings. It wasn't worth one life’. By its end, in November 1918, it had cost over three-quarters of a million British lives. More than 9 million soldiers are estimated to have died, on both sides.

A better poem than Sassoon's was ‘Futility’ by his friend and comrade-in-arms, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). A decorated and gallant officer, Owen contemplates the corpse of a soldier, lying in the snow, to whose family he must now write the formal letter of condolence:

The poem, which shows the clear influence of Keats, has an emotional warmth bordering on the erotic. Will the sun bring this unknown warrior back to life, as it brings the seeds out of the earth in spring? No. Was his death worthwhile? No, it was futile. A total waste.

Owen is a more experimental poet than Sassoon technically and his anger is cooler. ‘Futility’ is an artfully constructed sonnet, with uneven lines and half rhymes (e.g. ‘once’ / ‘France’). Invoked subtly throughout are the traditional funeral lines, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. It's generally agreed that, had he lived, Owen would have had a huge influence on the course of English poetry in the twentieth century. He died in the last week of the war. The telegram announcing his death was delivered to his family as the church bells began ringing for the declaration of peace.

By the time ‘Futility’ was written the war had degenerated into bloody stalemate. Lines of trenches and barbed wire stretched, like a badly stitched wound, across Europe. Neither army was able to break through and thousands died every week. This bloodbath had begun with an obscure street crime: the assassination of Emperor Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, in the Balkans. The Austro-Hungarian
Empire, a vast conglomeration of states, almost immediately fell apart. A succession struggle ensued and complex international alliances were called into play. The dominoes began to fall. By August 1914 (a glorious summer in England), war was inevitable.

Most people fondly thought the war would be over by Christmas. The spirit of the nation was summed up in the word ‘jingoism’ (it's wonderfully evoked in the 1963 musical play,
Oh, What a Lovely War!
). The most famous poem written at this jingoistic early stage of things was ‘The Soldier’, by Rupert Brooke (1887–1915):