Some Desperate Glory (25 page)

Edward Thomas never fell into obscurity. His 1920
Collected Poems
had as its frontispiece a romantic photograph of the poet looking down in melancholy, and there was a list of his twenty-three books and two edited anthologies. Walter de la Mare wrote a foreword, declaring, in an attack on modernism, that Thomas had ‘detested mere cleverness', that he had resembled, perhaps even surpassed, Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Hardy, Hudson and Doughty, for ‘England's roads and heaths and woods, its secret haunts and solitudes, its houses, its people – themselves resembling its thorns and juniper – its very flints and dust, were his freedom and peace'. There was, de la Mare thought, ‘nothing precious, elaborate, brilliant, esoteric, obscure in his work'. The description of Thomas's looks, abruptness, yearning for solitude and dislike of being confined in a city portrays the poet as a solitary, mysterious outsider. Robert Frost, increasingly famous in the United States, praised his old friend's work, helping it to become known there.

Helen Thomas broke down after Edward's death. In the early 1920s, she published a memoir with frank depictions of her husband's early sexual innocence that annoyed some of his friends, including Frost. Helen yearned for living memories of him. Ivor Gurney had set some of Thomas's poems to music, and mentioned him in his post-1918 poem ‘The Mangel-Bury' (‘Edward Thomas had fallen at Arras') about the war dead and also in ‘I Saw England – July Night' where home is ‘a village of lovely knowledge' that held Thomas, Shakespeare, Hardy and Borrow. In 1932, Helen Thomas went with Marion Scott to see Gurney in his Dartford asylum.

At first the patient seemed normal; then, still obsessed with sinister messages, he said, ‘It was wireless that killed Edward.' Helen waited, and they spoke of the country near Gloucester before going into another room, where there were other patients and a piano, and Ivor Gurney played. Helen Thomas heard that Gurney avoided the asylum's garden, thinking it tame compared to the wilder land of his imagination. Attempting perhaps to evoke this wildness, on another visit she brought Edward Thomas's old maps so that they could trace where he'd walked near Dymock; and Gurney, who'd known the landscape, seemed happy as this, or his version of it, came back. She thought that he should be released, but it was believed that he would kill himself if he were.

Ivor Gurney died in December 1937 of pleurisy and tuberculosis. He'd just seen the proofs of the number of
Music and Letters
, put together by Marion Scott and Gerald Finzi, that was entirely about his work. Unable to take it in, Gurney murmured ‘It is too late…' He was buried at Twigworth, near Gloucester. A later attempt at a memorial came in 1954 when Edmund Blunden edited and introduced a selection of seventy-eight of Gurney's poems. The book received little attention. The great War Poets boom had not yet begun.

Ivor Gurney had been helped by Eddie Marsh; Edward Thomas too had known Marsh and had been at the Poetry Bookshop in January 1913 for the launch of the first Georgian anthology. The Georgians then had seemed fresh, even shocking. It was Marsh's hour. By 1918, that was passing.

A Georgian volume, the fourth, came out in November 1919, also published by Harold Monro at the Poetry Bookshop, with a very short introduction by Marsh, still the editor, that included the facetious comment, ‘I hope it may be thought to show that what for want of a better word is called Peace has not interfered with the writing of good poetry.' The sense of a dying movement was intensified when the critic Middleton Murry, among others, declared that most of the poems were limp.

Marsh had another try in November 1922, with a final volume that, for the first time, included Blunden. Now sales crashed: 8,000, in contrast to the 19,000 of November 1915. Marsh himself was caricatured in H. G. Wells's 1925 novel
Men Like Gods
as the civil servant Freddie Mush, renowned for his ‘Taste. Good taste … He's dreadfully critical and sarcastic. Mr Mush with his preposterous eyeglass and love of good food … spoke in a kind of impotent falsetto…'

In 1926, Robert Graves, who'd been in the later volumes, claimed that the Georgians had become too ‘concerned with Nature and love and leisure and old age and childhood and animals and sleep and other uncontroversial subjects'. By then Graves was in thrall to the American modernist writer Laura Riding; and 1922, the year of the last Georgian collection, was also the year of Eliot's
The Waste Land
, of Joyce's
Ulysses
, of Virginia Woolf's
Jacob's Room
.

Virginia Woolf thought at the end of 1918 how quickly the war had faded, perhaps not surprising since few of her friends had had any part in it. Six years later, when describing a farewell dinner given for Edmund Blunden who was going to teach at Tokyo University, she made no mention of the poet's time in the trenches – so vital to his writing – even though he was clearly still suffering from it. Instead she wondered loftily, ‘Did we believe in Blunden's genius? Had we read his poems? How much sincerity was there in the whole thing?' Sincerity there would have been, for many people loved Blunden, even if some, notably Siegfried Sassoon, looked on him with condescension.

Woolf was thinking of the limitations of Blunden's work. Memories of such strong and terrifying experiences did impose a limit, through their power. The poets couldn't leave the war, even if, like Robert Graves, they wanted to move on. When Graves lived in a village near Oxford, many of the locals called him Captain Graves (a title which Thomas Hardy said he envied). As a veteran, he was asked by the vicar to speak at a church service commemorating the war dead and rebelled by choosing as his text poems by Sassoon and Owen instead of the patriotic theme of dying for your country. Graves's affair with Laura Riding took him into new territory; and his autobiography
Goodbye to All That
, a best-seller in 1929, showed a resolve to leave England. After 1918, as if determined to forget, to avoid dreams of a lost pre-1914 paradise, he often seemed didactic and brisk, even when his subject was love. ‘The Rock Below', from the 1923 collection
Whipperginny
, displays hope of rebirth, of escape. Graves stayed apart from Eliot and Pound and is closer to another kind of poetry: a realism, even nostalgia, that stretches from Hardy, Masefield, through the Georgians, through parts of Auden and MacNeice, to Larkin and to Hughes. Edward Thomas is there, as are post-war Sassoon and Blunden.

Isaac Rosenberg is harder to place. The first peacetime edition of his poems (published in 1922) had a long introduction by the Georgian poet Laurence Binyon, to whom Rosenberg had sent his work. This starts patronizingly with ‘Of the many young poets who gave their lives in the war, Isaac Rosenberg was not the least gifted,' noting also that ‘whatever criticism can be made of his poetry, its faults are plainly those of excess rather than deficiency'. Binyon goes on to quote from the poet's letters and say how the ‘straining and tormenting of the language', the immaturity, didn't reflect enough the hard work and rigorous ‘self criticism' of their author. He left Rosenberg out of his 1924 anthology
Golden Treasury of Modern Lyrics
.

The next Rosenberg collection came in 1937. T. S. Eliot refused to write a foreword because (he said) of the conflict with his position at Faber & Faber (a rival publisher), and W. B. Yeats declared he couldn't stand the ‘windy' poetry, so it was left to Siegfried Sassoon, who felt flattered to be asked. The trouble was that Sassoon, although admiring the poems, couldn't think of what to say about them; they were so different from his own writing, particularly from what it had become after the war. One of the editors offered a phrase about Rosenberg being ‘a fruitful fusion between English and Hebrew culture'; probably Sassoon himself came up with the idea that the verses were ‘scriptural and sculptural'. The leading critic F. R. Leavis wrote an article in praise of Rosenberg; Marsh continued rather dutifully to try to help ‘poor little Isaac Rosenberg's' reputation as an artist and a poet. In the next war, the poet Keith Douglas, remembering ‘Break of Day in the Trenches', wrote in ‘Desert Flowers':

Living in a wide landscape are the flowers –

Rosenberg, I only repeat what you were saying …

A new
Collected Poems
(with the same Sassoon foreword) came out in 1949. By then Rupert Brooke's war had been eclipsed; fading also was the idea of a lost generation of brave young British aristocrats who might have saved the world. Between the wars, partly because of their mother's memoir of them, the Grenfell boys – Julian and Billy – were seen in some conservative circles as magnificent examples of English manhood and chivalry. There were admirers whom they and their family would probably not have wanted, like the best-selling historian Arthur Bryant, an apologist for Hitler, who compared Julian to ‘a trumpet call in men's hearts to remind them how valiant, how beautiful, how generous man at his best could be'. But as the war became thought of as inexcusable rather than glorious, ‘Into Battle' could seem offensive, if beautiful, even typical of an absurd euphoria that had led to slaughter. The socialist critic and poet Jon Silkin wanted to exclude Julian Grenfell's poem from his 1978
Penguin Book of First War Poetry
, putting it in only because of its fame. To Silkin, Rosenberg seemed the greatest poet of the war.

By the 1960s, Wilfred Owen was the modern master. The preface to his poetry (‘This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them…') said that his poems were about the transformation of war from the Edwardian view of military glory formed by Newbolt, Kipling and W. E. Henley or by G. A. Henty's popular historical novels – and maintained by Brooke and Grenfell – to one of horrific suffering.

Owen's ascent had been slow. In 1919, the Sitwells printed seven of his poems in their journal
Wheels
, dedicating the edition ‘To the Memory of Wilfred Owen M.C.' It was ironic; Owen had been proud to be thought a Georgian whereas
Wheels
, more modernist, had been set up in opposition to Marsh's anthologies, although it had far fewer sales. Some critics paid attention; the traditionalist J. C. Squire dismissed Owen, but Middleton Murry told Katherine Mansfield, ‘It's what Sassoon might have done, if he were any real good.'

In 1920, Chatto and Windus published
The Poems of Wilfred Owen
, edited by Edith Sitwell and introduced by Siegfried Sassoon, who had wanted to leave out the famous preface, thinking that it took attention away from the poems. Sassoon's introduction avoided analysis, saying that the book showed ‘profound humanity' and ‘absolute integrity of mind', and that he agreed with Owen's view of the war. Mrs Owen, Wilfred's adoring mother, was pleased. Edmund Blunden, in the
Athenaeum
, under the headline ‘The Real War', declared that these poems were by ‘one of the few spokesmen of the ordinary fighting man' who had articulated rebellion, in spite of his pride in enduring the pain and his wish to do his duty as an officer. For Blunden, after reading Owen, ‘it is almost impossible to conceive of any other point of view … There is no other philosophy in modern war.'

The small edition sold out. Edith Sitwell was an inaccurate editor and corrected several errors in a quick, and small, reprint. Scott Moncrieff, Robert Nichols and Middleton Murry reviewed the book, all, to Sassoon's fury, mentioning the rumour of Owen's 1917 cowardice.

In 1931 came the most complete and accurate edition yet of Wilfred Owen's work, edited, at Sassoon's request, by Edmund Blunden. This stayed within a quite small readership. But the poet's fame was growing. By 1933, W. H. Auden was writing of Owen and Katherine Mansfield in ‘The Malverns':

‘The poetry is in the pity,' Wilfred said,

And Kathy in her journal, ‘To be rooted in life,

That's what I want.'

These moods give no permission to be idle;

For men are changed by what they do;

And through loss and anger the hands of the unlucky

Love one another.

Wilfred Owen was enlisted by the 1930s left when Stephen Spender claimed that among Owen's post-war themes would have been ‘the industrial towns and distressed areas' of Britain. The public school-educated, publicity-conscious and boyishly handsome Spender was sometimes mocked as ‘the Rupert Brooke of the depression', an indication of the fall in Brooke's standing. By 1936, Owen's manuscripts were on show in the British Museum, alongside classics of English literature. But there were still no entries for him in the 1953 edition of
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
.

Another poet of genius tried to stop this gradual sanctification. W. B. Yeats thought that war should be written about in the style of Homer, as an epic of courage, even glory. He left Owen out of his 1937 anthology
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse
, writing to a friend that the poet was ‘unworthy of the poets' corner of a country-newspaper … He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick … he calls poets “bards”, a girl a “maid” and talks about “Titanic Wars” … There is every excuse for him, but none for those who like him.'

Owen's exclusion from Yeats's eccentric book was criticized, especially as some war poems were selected; Sassoon made it with his ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate', Blunden had ‘In Festubert' and ‘Report on Experience', Grenfell got in with ‘Into Battle' (much more Yeats's style) and Herbert Read with the long ‘The End of a War'. Others like Robert Nichols (who, Yeats said, had submitted a number of ‘unreadable, vague, rhetorical and empty' poems) and Rupert Brooke were represented by peacetime work. Yeats disliked poems about individual suffering, preferring robustness. He wrote in the introduction of how a friend of his had heard some soldiers back from the Boer War describe repeatedly ‘and always with loud laughter' how an unpopular sergeant hit by a shell had ‘turned round and round like dancer wound in his own entrails'. To Yeats ‘that too may be a right way of seeing war'.