Authors: Thomas Mallon
A confederate officer, for himself & all his comrades, regrets exceedingly that damage & pilfering was committed in this house, before it was known that it was within our lines, or that private property was imperilled—Especially we regret that Ladies property has been disturbed, but restitution has been made, & punishment meted out as far as possible.
By this point she is stoical enough to admit that “if our own Army had swarmed over us & encamped there for two days—it would have been quite as bad for us.”
More than the family’s property, Elizabeth strives to protect and advance its reputation. She passes on to Samuel an encouraging rumor of opium use among the rival Frémonts and keeps him up to date about her efforts to secure him a better ship (“I will continue to jog”). She bitterly imparts news of David Porter’s elevation to commodore and cries with disappointment when her husband fails to receive a promotion. (Lincoln appreciated the Blairs as a brave, if scrappy, clan, but the self-interested pitches of both Elizabeth and her father must have tried even the president’s famous patience: “Father told me to night it was a matter he meant to talk over with the President—&
to follow up
until the end he most coveted was attained.”)
The letters sent home by Samuel Phillips Lee become physical substitutes for his presence. Elizabeth lets young Blair interrupt his supper to hear them, sometimes “over & over.” The boy will pat the pages “with his fat hand as he does living things he likes.” His mother wishes she could “seal up some of [Blair’s] merriment” in her replies; more realistically she hopes for strong winds behind the mail boat. Her plain, masculine penmanship, full of dashes instead of full stops when there’s any punctuation at all, seems propelled
by urgent gusts blowing from the left margin. Her brother-in-law pronounces her a better talker than a writer, a judgment she doesn’t dispute. Indeed, some of what Elizabeth puts down on paper might have seemed more appealing if spoken, softened as it would have been by facial expression and gesture. One imagines the Lees playfully sparring when allowed the chance to be together. Since the war years offer few such face-to-face opportunities, they are lucky to have had important epistolary practice, twenty years before, while courting. Elizabeth’s father hadn’t wanted the match, and so Samuel Phillips Lee had sent letters to his future bride through an intermediary, using a made-up name: “Oh how often I have regretting
[sic]
sending them back to you,” Elizabeth writes in 1863. “Stolen joys were very sweet—so I remember those letters with not half the repentance I ought—”
But different times call for different measures and manners. In 1864, Elizabeth reminds “Phil” that he once long ago asked her “never to read over what [she] had written,” lest it lose its spontaneity. Now, she knows, he is “too overworked for such trespassing nonsense,” and she will continue to make “all of my letters short and as plain as print.”
After Phil’s retirement, he and Elizabeth would have a quarter century for less urgent communication, as they lived together in Washington and Maryland until the death of Admiral Lee (he eventually got his promotion) in 1897. Elizabeth survived until 1906; thirty-six years after that, her grandsons discovered the letters in the hayloft at Silver Spring.
ON JANUARY 9, 1917
, his first day ever in no-man’s-land, Wilfred Owen received a letter from his mother. “It seems wrong,” he replied, “that even your dear handwriting should come into such a Gehenna as this.” If irony, as Paul Fussell demonstrates, was the chief mode of the very literary Great War, then the domestic communications sent by English mothers and sweethearts only added to it. Modern transport and the home front’s proximity to the battlefield meant that letters often arrived inside a parcel with hand-kerchiefs
that hadn’t lost their crease and biscuits not yet gone stale. The psychic gulf between the two worlds would grow vast and bitter, as English soldiers gave up their limbs and sanity and lives just a boat-train’s trip away from their own families. In his letters from France, Owen more than once reminds his mother that he is writing “while you are at Tea.”
For all the speed and shortness of their journey, letters traveling back and forth across the Channel between 1914 and 1918 served all the ancient emotional functions of wartime correspondence. Owen’s own dispatches alternate between grim frankness and filial reassurance, and on a couple of occasions he communicates his unit’s position in a code arranged between him and his mother. Without the replies he receives from her, he declares, he should simply “give in.” He cannot write her “without intensity” or without sometimes falling into a woozy biblical cadence, and on other occasions he dispatches blandishments that seem more a sweetheart’s than a son’s, dismissing all the competing charms that can be matched by the “little finger” of his “precious Mother.” He knows they both “find letter writing a fitter mode of intimate communication than speaking,” and he would like the pages he sends to substitute for something else as well: “because they are my only diary, I humbly desire you to keep these letters.”
This gentle son of a Shrewsbury railroad superintendent—a boy drawn to botany, evangelical religion and, above all, Keats—was never a natural soldier. His 1915 enlistment in the Artists’ Rifles was a “plunge,” his first week of training marked by unexpected difficulties: “We had to practise Salutes (on Trees) this very morning. You would be surprised how long it takes to do the thing properly.” His early wartime letters to Susan Owen, full of goodwilled self-mockery and jaunty exclamation points, chronicle a year of toughening that, he swears, has turned him into “a different being … from the lounger on divans, the reader of verse … the midday riser” that he used to be. But a touching haplessness remains evident to all latter-day readers, who must proceed through the correspondence with a terrible foreknowledge.
The poet’s delicate nerves get scraped by a bullying sergeant
major, “amusing enough in
Punch
, but not [when] viewed from the ranks.” When he has to do a bit of officering himself, Owen feels distinctly uncomfortable: “I am ‘commanding’ numbers of wounded men, now restored,” he writes from Milford Camp in Surrey on July 3, 1916: “It gives me a great deal of pain to speak severely to them, as now and again need is.”
His first reports from the line show a mind and style suddenly stripped raw. The stark paragraphing of a letter written after a week spent holding a dugout near Beaumont Hamel already resembles those verses, shorn of Edwardian fat, now being produced by the war poets:
I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last four days.
I have suffered seventh hell.
I have not been at the front.
I have been in front of it.
With its covering of snow, no-man’s-land “is like the face of the moon chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.” On January 19, 1917, Owen’s company is “in a ruined village, all huddled together,” his own mind wandering back home to Shrewsbury. Two weeks later, he reflects, with an amazement too exhausted to complete the sentence: “I used to consider Tankerville Street ugly, but now …”
In April, he will be harrowed by extended duty in the line at Savy Wood:
For twelve days we lay in holes, where at any moment a shell might put us out. I think the worst incident was one wet night when we lay up against a railway embankment. A big shell lit on the top of the bank, just 2 yards from my head. Before I awoke, I was blown in the air right away from the bank! I passed most of the following days in a railway Cutting, in a hole just big enough to lie in, and covered with corrugated iron. My brother officer of B [Company], 2/Lt Gaukroger lay opposite in a similar hole. But he was covered with earth, and no relief will ever relieve him …
Even this has been sanitized for his mother. He admits to Susan Owen that a doctor is “nervous about my nerves,” but asks that she “not for a moment suppose I have had a ‘breakdown.’” Two days later, still at the Casualty Clearing Station, he concedes, as casually as he can manage:
“Some
of us have been sent down here as a little mad. Possibly I am among them.”
He has, in fact, been shell-shocked, and only four days later, in a letter to his sister, does he reveal the grotesque full truth of what did him in: “You know it was not the Bosche that worked me up, nor the explosives, but it was living so long by poor old Cock Robin (as we used to call 2/Lt. Gaukroger), who lay not only near by, but in various places around and about, if you understand. I hope you don’t!”
Suffering from nightmares, Owen is invalided to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, where—after mustering the courage to approach—he has his famous encounters with Siegfried Sassoon, the handsome huntsman-turned-poet, a half dozen years older and newly famous for his flamboyant protest against the war. “Shakespeare reads vapid” after the poems of Sassoon, Owen insists to his mother, pronouncing himself unworthy even “to light his pipe.” The older poet offers some military-sounding literary advice: “the last thing he said was ‘Sweat your guts out writing poetry!’ ‘Eh?’ says I. ‘Sweat your guts out, I say!’ He also warned me against early publishing.”
After two months of this mentoring, Sassoon leaves the hospital, prompting from Owen a sort of love letter, filled with hero worship but also self-protection: “Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor + Amenophis IV in profile … I love you, dispassionately, so much, so
very
much, dear Fellow, that the blasting little smile you wear on reading this can’t hurt me in the least.” Still, he urges Sassoon to confide this letter to the fire.
Two years earlier, when enlistment in the Artists’ Rifles took him to London, Owen had excitedly noted how close he was to the informal headquarters of the new “Georgian poetry” movement.
“The Poetry Bookshop is about 7 mins. walk!” he told his mother. “There is a Reading this very night!” During his later convalescence, the connection to Sassoon and his own scattered publications expose him to some “first flickers of the limelight.” He meets H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett at the Reform Club and attends Robert Graves’s wedding. His poems begin to move beyond the timid realm of discipleship and acquire a more authentic style. But if they become less self-consciously “Keatsian” (the early estimation of Poetry Bookshop owner Harold Monro), Owen himself remains a steadfast practitioner of the Romantic poet’s advice for living.
He knows Keats’s prescriptions from the earlier poet’s letters, which he quotes and rereads and tries to keep on hand: “Please include in Parcel,” he writes his father from one training camp, “Keats’s
Letters
. (Vol. IV & V) (in Book
case
).” When Owen talks of how he turns into “whatever and whoever I see while going down to Edinburgh on the tram: greengrocer, policeman, shopping lady, errand boy, paper-boy, blind man, crippled Tommy, bank-clerk, carter, all of these in half an hour,” a reader recognizes Keats’s “Negative Capability,” the chameleon-like empathy that led him into poetry. The Owen who declares excitement to be “always necessary to my happiness,” and who announces
“I hate old age,”
realizes that there is “only one way to avoid” the latter—in some violent variant of Keats’s early death.
“I go out of this year a Poet, my dear Mother,” he writes on New Year’s Eve 1917, after a year of transformation almost comparable to Keats’s “living year” of 1819. Tennyson—whose music will remain detectable in even Owen’s most unsparing war poems—now seems “a great child” to his twenty-four-year-old successor: “So should I have been,” he declares, “but for Beaumont Hamel,” a place he remembers as “cobbled with skulls.” Graves counsels Owen to “outlive this war,” because he’s one of those who will “revolutionize English Poetry” once it’s over. Owen can now even dare to see beyond Sassoon, whose poetry has lately “become a mere vehicle of propaganda.”
For all his poignant careerism, Owen won’t let himself overvalue
publishing success, since his own subjects—the men fighting the war—regard print as “a dead letter.” Their handwritten personal letters, which they compose all day and which Owen is called upon to censor by the hundred, are another matter. He sees the “hope of peace” expressed in each; the “‘Daddys’ … are specially touching, and the number of xxx to sisters and mothers weigh more in heaven than Victoria Crosses.”
Owen’s own letters show him becoming less evangelical and “more Christian,” as he begins perceiving a pacifist light “which never will filter into the dogma of any national church.” The nice young man grows less afraid of political blasphemy, too. While training in January 1916, long before arriving in France, he had reported home about one colonel’s “brilliant lecture on the causes of the War.” By June of the following year he lists his personal war aim as the “Extinction of Militarism
beginning
with Prussian”—and tells of observing a major refuse to get on a train with the explanation: “‘I
eb
solutely decline, to travel in a coach where there are—haw—
Men
!” And by March 1918, with only months to live, Owen will characterize a boy who has just left school as “a creature of killable age.”
He often imagines a life for himself after the war—as a flyer; or an antiques dealer; perhaps in the bungalow for which he draws up a design. But he resists exempting himself from the slaughter. At the Casualty Clearing Station in March 1917, shortly before being sent to Craiglockhart, he decides he would be “better able to do Service in a hospital than in the trenches. But I suppose we all think that.” As 1917 ends, he knows he will have to go back to the front if he wants to describe the faces of the doomed, “more terrible than terror.” He begins forcing himself to have the explicit battle nightmares from which he is supposed to be convalescing: “I do so because I have my duty to perform towards War.”
The dates on the letters begin to click past in an awful countdown. A reader feels himself trying to thwart what’s coming. Still in England in May of 1918, Owen glimpses a chance of staying there, as lecturer to a cadet battalion, thanks to a friend in the War Office; Sassoon even threatens to stab his protégé in the leg if he attempts
returning to France. But as Owen writes his sister, in truthful self-ridicule: “I take myself solemnly now.” By September he is back in the line, bearing a different sort of evangelical witness. Early in October he receives the Military Cross for action described in a citation: “On the Company Commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally captured an enemy Machine Gun in an isolated position and took a number of prisoners.” He tells his mother—everything reads like prefiguration now—that he “fought like an angel.” His nerves, he further informs her, are this time “in perfect order.” He tells the same to Sassoon but elaborates to his fellow soldier-poet on the reason for his calm: his senses have been “charred” into numbness. Dealing with the company’s mail “I [now] don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters.”