Literary Giants Literary Catholics (22 page)

I mention all this as a preamble to Seymour’s
Retrieved from the Future
, which is, I believe, his first foray into fiction. In its pages one sees the distant shadow of Wells in the fact that the novel is set in the future, but although the form is Wellsian, the substance is decidedly Chestertonian. It is a cautionary tale of the collapse of consumerism and the emergence of distributism in its wake. Yet it is not a tale of Orwellian gloom but of Chestertonian rambunctiousness filled to the brim with characters spilling over with Bellocian bombast. Certainly one could make many technical criticisms, but it is enough that this novel exudes common sense to a world in dire need of more of the same.

In this age of pulp fiction, to speak of a modern novel exuding common sense sounds so incongruous that it almost has a ring of Chestertonian paradox about it. So be it. I love Chestertonian paradox, and I enjoyed this novel.

PART THREE

THE WASTELAND

17

_____

The Poetry of War

I
N THE SPHERE OF LITERATURE
, the modern world has precious little to teach the Middle Ages. It is, therefore, refreshing to find that, in the sphere of war poetry at least, the twentieth century has something of real value to offer. It has something to say of enduring value. In fact, it has something to say that has seldom been said as evocatively in any of the preceding centuries. In the poetry of war, if in very little else, the twentieth century has a place of honor.

In days of yore, the poetry of war was punctuated with pomp and pomposity and executed with the excitement and exhilaration of battle. We hear in the Norse sagas how King Harald Sigurdsson’s “war-seasoned heart never wavered in battle”.

     Norway’s warriors were watching

     The blood-dripping sword

     Of their courageous leader

     Cutting down their enemies.

Similarly, the
Orkneyinga Saga
recounts with relish the blood spilled at the battle of the Menai Strait.

     On shields the arrow-storm

     Spattered; as men fell,

     deftly the lord of Hordar

     dealt the Earl’s death-blow.

The bloodlust of the Viking versifiers was shared by the poets of England. Michael Drayton’s triumphal depiction of the English victory over the French at the battle of Agincourt glories unashamedly in the gore of battle. Shakespeare, in
King Henry V
, also waxes lyrical over the English victory at Agincourt, though with greater subtlety than Drayton. Before the battle, the king tells his outnumbered troops that they are destined for immortality.

     This story shall the good man teach his son;

     And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

     From this day to the ending of the world,

     But we in it shall be remembered—

     We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

     For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

     Shall be my brother.

Great military blunders could be made as glorious as great military victories. Tennyson immortalized the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade during the battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War with a eulogistic elegance that turns the blunder to wonder. With a graceful flourish of his pen, mightier by far than the sword, Tennyson makes the blood of the butchered glow as gloriously as that of the martyrs.

     Not tho’ the soldier knew

     Some one had blundered:

     Theirs’ not to make reply,

     Theirs’ not to reason why,

     Theirs’ but to do and die:

     Into the valley of Death

     Rode the six hundred.

By the twentieth century, attitudes to war had changed. Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”, written shortly before the poet’s death in 1915, was the last glorious swan song of the poetry of War Glorified.

     If I should die, think only this of me:

     That there’s some corner of a foreign field

     That is for ever England.

Attitudes to war had changed because war itself had changed. No longer was war a trial of strength between man and man but between man and machine, or even, and increasingly, between machine and machine—with man in the middle. There was nothing glorious about going “over the top” to certain death in a hail of machine-gun fire; nothing glorious about poison gas or barbed wire; nothing glorious about trench fever or dysentery. War was no longer about warriors but about killing machines and killing fields. War was now about machine as victor and man as victim. Fate and fatality had been replaced by fatuous futility.

Under the new conditions of modern warfare, the weapons of the warrior were as redundant as the warrior himself. Swords, sabers, scimitars and shields would gather dust or turn to rust. Now, more than ever, the pen was indeed mightier than the sword. From the filth and futility of the First World War emerged a generation of poets more potent than their predecessors in expressing the grim realities of warfare. Two, in particular, emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of the conflict. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wrote with a realism that shocked and shamed their compatriots out of their indifference to the suffering of the trenches. Sassoon’s “Fight to a Finish”, “The General” and “Golgotha”, and Owen’s “Spring Offensive”, “Exposure” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” changed the public’s perception of the war. In Germany, the grim power of Otto Dix’ gruesome paintings, depicting limbless victims condemned to a postwar life of squalor, confronted and still confront the complacency of the voyeuristic noncombatant. In the Second World War, Solzhenitsyn’s disturbing poem “Prussian Nights”, with its ruthlessly unremitting realism, its depiction of mass rape, arson and murder, stands as a morbid monument to the terrors of Stalinism and to the inhumanity of the Soviet regime.

Wilfrid Owen and Rupert Brooke never survived the war. Sassoon and Solzhenitsyn not only survived but surfaced from their sufferings resurgent in spirit. In both men, the suffering of war prefigured the resurrection of the spirit and the peace it heralds. In their conversion to orthodox Christianity, Sassoon and Solzhenitsyn are witnesses to the greater Peace that war can never destroy.

18

_____

Cutting through the Cant

F
OR THOSE WHO FEEL ACUTELY
the stultifying staleness of so much modern literary criticism, Bernard Bergonzi’s new book will arrive as a breath of fresh air. Its title, though strictly accurate, tells only half the story—less than half. The war poets are the subject of only a third of the essays in the book so that the “other subjects” predominate.
War Poets and Other Subjects
is divided into three distinct parts: “Writers and War”, “Modern Masters” and “Catholics”. In each section, Professor Bergonzi, professor emeritus of English at the University of Warwick, exhibits a masterful control of his subject and an ability to cut through the cant of modern literary fads with a firm but gentle touch. He is never clumsy or heavy-handed and always gives those he criticizes a fair hearing. The subtle dexterity may cause some to feel that he suffers fools a little too gladly. He does not.

Bergonzi’s ability to fathom folly is most apparent in the first section of the book. His dissection of Pat Barker’s
Regeneration Trilogy
, a quasi-fictional account of Siegfried Sassoon’s friendship with Wilfred Owen, culminates in a complaint that Barker’s approach is marred by her lack of concern for historical truth. He reads it with “admiration but also with unease”. She is more concerned with placing her historical figures in straitjackets constructed out of certain modern preoccupations—“gender roles . . . feminism, psychotherapy, false memory syndrome, the sexual abuse of children”. Bergonzi’s unease with historical inaccuracy resurfaces in an essay entitled “The Great War and Modern Criticism” in which he questions the assumption that nationalism was a nineteenth-century invention. He alludes to the aggressive patriotism of the eighteenth century, the Englishness of Shakespeare’s history plays, and Michael Drayton’s
Battle of Agincourt
. He could, of course, have mentioned the battle of Agincourt itself and the nationalist mythology that grew up in its wake, or similar nationalist myths in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and countless other nations, all of which predate nineteenth-century “capitalism” by many centuries. In the same essay, he exposes the critic Adrian Caesar for the transparent shallowness of his approach, complaining that “he seems to be located beyond absolute pacifism, in a perspective where suffering has no place of any kind”. In contrast, Bergonzi praises Douglas Kerr for drawing parallels between Owen’s poetry and Dante’s
Inferno
, highlighting the perennial relevance of their respective approaches to the psychology of suffering.

The section on “Modern Masters” includes a discussion of Anthony West’s book about his parents, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West. The son’s bitterness toward the selfishness of his parents, particularly that of his mother, had created a love-hate triangle from which the son was powerless to escape. Other “modern masters” discussed include Aldus Huxley, George Orwell and, most notably, T. S. Eliot.

The section on Catholics features two superb essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins, an essay on Chesterton and, bravest of all, an attempt to get to grips with David Jones’ complex and often contradictory idea of art. Particularly enjoyable is an essay on “The Other Mrs. Ward”. Bergonzi’s treatment of Mrs. Wilfrid Ward’s almost forgotten novel,
One Poor Scruple
, is a poignant reminder of the neglected gems of the Catholic literary revival. I was left wishing that Bergonzi would turn his attention to the novels of R. H. Benson or Maurice Baring or to the deeper spiritual verse, as opposed to the satire, of Roy Campbell.

Unfortunately, the book ends on something of an anticlimactic note. The last two essays focus on Graham Greene and David Lodge, the first of whom described himself as a “Catholic agnostic” while the second prefers to be known as an “agnostic Catholic”. Bergonzi prefers to overlook these contradictions posing as paradoxes. In consequence, these essays lack the incisiveness that is so present in the rest of the book. But ultimately,
War Poets and Other Subjects
confirms Bergonzi’s place at the forefront of literary criticism.

19

_____

Poetic Pilgrimage

S
IEGFRIED SASSOON
is
arguably
the greatest of the War Poets. Arguably, but not indisputably. Many critics, begging to differ with such a judgment, would argue that Sassoon’s friend, Wilfred Owen, was more gifted and could boast a superior achievement in verse. Yet, if they are right, Sassoon becomes, if not the greatest, then certainly the most important of the War Poets. Sassoon was Owen’s mentor, without whom Owen would probably have never written the acerbically assonant verse for which both men are celebrated. Furthermore, it was Sassoon who edited Owen’s poems, following the latter’s death, introducing the public to his verse. Without Sassoon there would not have been an Owen.

Owen was killed in action on the western front in 1918, one of the final victims of the dying embers of the First World War. As such, he remains cocooned in the incorruptible image of eternal youth, a slaughtered lamb, butchered before his gifts could develop. Sassoon, on the other hand, lived to a ripe old age, growing ever closer to Christ and His Church. His life, and the poetry that was its expression, would be one long and contemplative search for truth, a poet’s pilgrimage.

Sassoon enjoyed, or rather endured, a controversially meteoric and mixed military career, his war service making him both famous and infamous, hero and villain. In June 1916 he was very much the hero, being awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in battle after he had brought in under heavy fire a wounded lance corporal who was lying close to the German lines. This and other acts of bravery earned him the nickname of “Mad Jack”. Robert Graves, a fellow officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers who would himself become a poet and novelist of some distinction, remembered Sassoon calmly reading a newspaper shortly before going “over the top” during the crucial attack at Fricourt. In 1917, after capturing some German trenches in the Hindenburg Line single-handedly, he remained in the enemy position reading a volume of poems, seemingly oblivious of the danger. This particular act of cavalier gallantry earned him a recommendation for the Victoria Cross, the highest honor attainable in the British army.

Having been wounded in the fighting on the Hindenburg Line, Sassoon was invalided home. It was then that he began to reflect upon the human butchery he had witnessed, endured and inflicted. From these moments of reflection the hero hatched the villain. The perfect soldier became the pacifist rebel. “Siegfried’s unconquerable idealism changed direction with his environment”, wrote Robert Graves. “He varied between happy warrior and bitter pacifist.”

In July 1917 his “Soldier’s Declaration”, addressed ostensibly to his commanding officer but published or quoted in several newspapers, gained him notoriety. It was made “as an act of wilful defiance of military authority” and attacked those in power who were willfully prolonging “the sufferings of the troops . . . for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.” He also complained about “the callous complaisance with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of the agonies which they do not share and have not sufficient imagination to realise”.

Sassoon’s contempt for his commanding officers, expressed prosaically in his declaration, would be exemplified poetically in verses such as “Base Details” and “The General”, whereas his anger at the jingoism of politicians and the press would be captured bitterly in “Fight to a Finish”. His plaintive reaction against the “callous complaisance” of “those at home” was immortalized with gruesome realism in “Glory of Women”.

In a further gesture of defiance, Sassoon threw his Military Cross into the River Mersey, and his notoriety reached new heights when his declaration was read in the House of Commons. Many expected that such open acts of rebellion would lead to Sassoon’s court-martial, but in true Orwellian fashion, he was declared mentally overwrought and not responsible for his actions. He was sent to Craiglockhart military hospital in Edinburgh to be treated for psychological shell shock. It was here that he met and befriended Wilfred Owen.