A Little History of Literature (27 page)

It's a noble sentiment, made all the nobler by what we know of its author. Brooke was a very handsome young man and bisexual. He was close to E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and other ‘Bloomsberries’ (Chapter 29). He was a gifted poet, but compared with Wilfred Owen he was more traditional in technique. So was his patriotism traditional. He volunteered on the outbreak of war, although somewhat overage, and died in the first year of the conflict of an infected mosquito bite, not an enemy bullet. He is indeed buried in a ‘foreign field’, the Greek island of Skyros.

Brooke's poem was instantly taken up by the war propaganda
machine. It was read out to the congregation in St Paul's Cathedral. Clergymen all over the country gave sermons on it. Schoolchildren had it recited to them at morning assembly, encouraging the older pupils to volunteer
en masse
to die honourably in foreign fields. It was a particular favourite of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. It was Churchill who wrote the glowing obituary of Brooke in
The Times
, the national ‘paper of record’. But three years and all those deaths later, Brooke's anthem to patriotism rang very hollow. War was not glorious or heroic: it was, many fighting men believed, futile.

Virtually all the great war poets were upper, ‘officer’, class. But one of the very greatest had a quite different background. Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) was Jewish and from the working class. His family had recently emigrated from Russia, fleeing the Tsar's pogroms. Isaac was brought up in London's East End, then something of a Jewish ghetto. He left school at fourteen to become an apprentice engraver. From childhood on, he displayed unusual artistic and literary talent, though he was chronically ill with lung problems. He was physically tiny. Despite these handicaps – and clearly unfit – he volunteered for the military and went ‘up the line to death’ (as soldiers said) in 1915. He was killed in hand-to-hand combat in April 1918.

Rosenberg's best known poem, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, is what is called an
aubade
– a ‘dawn poem’. Hailing the newly broken day is traditionally a joyous act, but not for a soldier in France in 1917. By military regulation soldiers ‘stand to’ at dawn, because this is the time of day most favoured for attacks:

The rats, of course, had a ‘lovely war’ – feasting on the corpses of both armies.

The four poems we have looked at in this chapter are unquestionably great verse. We are lucky to have them. But were they worth three lives?

CHAPTER
28

The Year that Changed Everything

1922
AND THE
M
ODERNISTS

Of all wonderful years in literature, 1922 qualifies as the most wonderful. It produced a bumper crop of books. But the reason for the year's wonderfulness is not the quantity or variety of what was produced but the fact that what was published in that year (and the years on either side) changed the reading public's sense of what literature could be. The ‘climate’, as the poet W.H. Auden later put it, was altered. A new and dominant ‘style’ came into play – ‘modernism’.

Historically one can trace modernism's roots back to the 1890s and the ‘end of century’ (
fin de siècle
) decade covered in Chapter 21. Writers in that period, worldwide, seemed to have all bought into a kind of creative nonconformity, a breaking of ranks. Think of writers like Henrik Ibsen, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Writers, to put it at its simplest, came to see that their principal obligation was to literature itself – even if, like Wilde, it meant ending up in prison or, like Thomas Hardy, having their latest work burned by a bishop. Authority never had an easy time with modernism. It wasn't listening. It was, as we say, doing its own thing.

If it began in the 1890s and swelled in the Edwardian (pre-war) period, it was in 1922 that this new literary wave crested. One can identify a number of forces and factors that were instrumental. The traumatic effect of the First World War had broken, forever, old ways of looking at the world. Nothing in 1918 seemed the same as it had in 1914. The war could be seen as a gigantic smash-up which left the field barren, but clear for new things to come along. It was what in Latin is called a
tabula rasa
: a blank slate.

What, then, were the works that can be said to have spearheaded the innovations of this great year, 1922? James Joyce's novel
Ulysses
and T.S. Eliot's poem
The Waste Land
, both published that year, are the first that come to mind. One could also add to these Virginia Woolf's
Mrs Dalloway
(the author's most virtuosic exercise in the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, more of which in Chapter 29). Woolf's novel was published in 1925, but conceived and set in 1922. Wilfred Owen's wartime poems, published posthumously in 1920, and W.B. Yeats's work, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 1923, were accompaniments to the great year's achievements. By general agreement the greatest Irish poet, Yeats developed strikingly during his long career, from a rhapsodiser about the so-called ‘Celtic Twilight’ (Ireland's mythic past) to a modernist poet engaged with the present – not least the post-1916 civil disorder which was tearing his country apart. Some of his greatest work can be found in the collection
Later Poems
, published in 1922.

Before looking at a couple of the masterpieces given to the reading world in and around 1922, let's consider some general characteristics. Exhaustion and its perverse energies has been mentioned. All the literary works start from a kind of baseline zero.
Mrs Dalloway
, for example, is set against two great holocausts. One is the First World War, from which the shell-shocked hero of the novel, Septimus Smith, never recovers and whose mental torments (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as we would call it now) drive him to a horrible suicide, throwing himself from a high window onto spiked railings. Septimus is a post-war war casualty. The other holocaust was the influenza pandemic known as ‘Spanish flu’ which swept through the world in 1918–21, killing more people than the
war itself. Woolf's heroine, Mrs Dalloway, is herself in recovery from the infection, which she has barely survived.

Another general characteristic of modernism is that its sources spring from outside the literary mainstream, rather than from within it.
The Waste Land
and
Ulysses
were introduced in parts to the public in ‘little magazines’, with tiny ‘coterie’ readerships. As we saw in Chapter 25, Joyce's work, in its complete form, was first published in Paris. No publisher in the two major English-speaking markets would touch it for decades – in Joyce's home country, Ireland, for half a century.

Exile and a sense of not belonging anywhere played its part. A large quantity of what we see as groundbreaking modernist literature was published by what the American writer Gertrude Stein (herself a notable modernist) called the ‘lost generation’ – writers without roots in any ‘home’ market. But modernism is something other than an ‘international’ literary movement. It is, more properly, what we could call ‘supranational’ – above and beyond any national origin. T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) was born, brought up and educated (at Harvard) as American as the Stars and Stripes itself. The manuscripts of
The Waste Land
reveal that early unpublished sections of the poem were set in Boston (near Harvard). Eliot was, in 1922, resident in Britain (he would later become a British citizen) although important parts of the poem were composed in Switzerland where he was recovering from a nervous breakdown. Is it a poem by an American, a Briton, or an American in Britain?

Ulysses
is a similarly ‘rootless’ work. James Joyce (1882–1941) had left Dublin, where the novel is set, in 1912, never to return. His departure was an artistic decision. Great literature, he believed, should be published ‘in silence,
exile
, and cunning’. What the novel implies is that its author could only write about Dublin if, in a sense, he was outside Dublin. Why? Joyce explained it with an image in another work. Ireland, the hero of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
affirms, is the ‘old sow that eats her farrow [piglets]’ – the mother that both nourishes and destroys you.

D.H. Lawrence's great work,
Women in Love
, had been published the year before, in 1921. Both it, and the novel that he published in
1922,
Aaron's Rod
, assert the need to ‘get up and leave’. The great tree of life (‘Ygraddisil’) was, Lawrence believed, dead in England. He himself left the ‘waste land’ in which he had been born, the child of a miner, to find what he was looking for in life elsewhere. He was, he said, a ‘savage pilgrim’.

Now let's consider the two 1922 masterpieces after which, truly, literature would never be the same again.
The Waste Land
, as its title proclaims, starts in a barren place, at a bleak time (the ‘cruellest month’, Eliot calls it). The task the poem sets itself is explained in an essay Eliot published a few months earlier, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. In it Eliot lays out the problem: how to mend a broken culture. It wasn't a case of simply sticking the leaves back on the tree. Some new ‘modern’ living form had to be found, using the materials – damaged and fragmented as they now were – bequeathed by the past (‘tradition’). How Eliot's poem goes about the task of ‘putting it all together again’ is illustrated in the section called ‘The Burial of the Dead’, which regards London Bridge, in winter, on a foggy, cold morning. ‘Unreal City’, says the observer, adding: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’ What is described is an everyday scene: commuters streaming from the railway terminus across the Thames to their offices in the City (the financial hub of the world), to make the great machine of global capitalism work. They are, most of them, ‘clerks’, in the bowler hat, brolly and briefcase garb of their profession. A dark tide on a dark morning. But the exclamation ‘Unreal City’ is, as the well-read reader was intended to notice, an echo of Baudelaire's poem, ‘Seven Old Men’, in
Les Fleurs du mal
:

The workers in Eliot's poem are the ‘living dead’. The theme is intensified by the last line: ‘… death had undone so many’. It is a direct quote from Dante's amazed response to the crowds of dead people he saw on his visit to Hell, in his poem
Inferno
: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’, says Dante, looking at the
massed ranks of the damned. Eliot regarded Dante as one of the giants of literature (Shakespeare was the other). Dante, uniquely, raised literature to the status of philosophy, and his
La Divina Commedia
(the
Divine Comedy
) is one of the masterpieces of world literature. But Eliot is not merely dropping big names to show off his reading; he is weaving a new fabric out of old threads with this kind of allusion, which runs all the way through
The Waste Land
. The poem is Eliot's (the individual talent), but its materials are great literature (tradition).