Swearing and 'Conventional Susceptibilities'

Much has been written lately about post-watershed swearing on television. It is mostly nonsense, because David Jones's preface to his sui generis masterpiece, In Parenthesis, has already made the unanswerable case:

I have been hampered by the convention of not using impious and impolite words, because the whole shape of our discourse was conditioned by the use of such words. The very repetition of them made them seem liturgical, certainly deprived them of malice, and occasionally, when skilfully disposed, and used according to established but flexible tradition, gave a kind of significance, and even at moments a dignity, to our speech. Sometimes their juxtaposition in a sentence, and when expressed under poignant circumstances, reached real poetry. Because of publication, it has been necessary to consider conventional susceptibilities.

That reference to 'conventional susceptibilities' finishes off the opposition: who would willingly sign up to such a convention? Thanks to scholars like Brophy and Partridge, we know how soldiers spoke. It is a shameful irony, though, that a nation which obliged its young men to fight and die amidst the most horrific conditions should have felt the need to protect itself from their language.

P.S. My youth was misspent editing Thumbscrew, which in early issues published essays by Craig Raine and Charles Simic about swearing.

Caen and War

The bombing of Caen by the Allies in 1944 was 'close to a war crime', according to Antony Beevor. In one respect, it is hard not to admire that weaselly phrase 'close to'. Beevor has managed to generate a lucrative controversy which will shift a few of his books, while keeping a bolt-hole into which he can flee when pursued. 'The whole thing is a grey area', he elaborates when pressed by a journalist, 'and I don't say it was definitely a war crime.' I don't say that Beevor is definitely a shameless self-publicist.

A forthcoming conference in Caen next May will consider representations of war in the 20th and 21st Century. Papers may focus on graphic art, fiction, poetry, music, life-writing, journalism, film, video, etc., as well as 'commemorative supports' such as museums and monuments. Does Beevor's book constitute a commemorative support?

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive Showreel

I always want to pick a fight with voiceovers, and there are a few opinions here which get delivered as fact. Even so, it's a terrific advert not only for the archive, but for First World War poetry in general. People love hearing about the Somme mud staining letters from the Front. As for those random metal objects which stopped bullets, I'm reminded of Housman's hope that A Shropshire Lad, handily placed in a breast pocket, might one day save a soldier's life: think of the publicity and the sales! So it was corny in 1916 and it's corny now, but that doesn't stop us gawping. Wonderful to see it all.

John Jarmain

The Normandy landings and their aftermath cost us the most brilliant poet of the Second World War, Keith Douglas. He was killed three days after D-Day, on 9 June 1944. His reputation has grown gradually over the decades, thanks to the tireless editorial and biographical work of Desmond Graham, and the support of Geoffrey Hill and Ted Hughes.

Douglas was not the only important poet lost during that month. John Jarmain, like Douglas, had survived the North African campaign; and like Douglas, he was killed in Normandy. The 65th anniversary of his death is 26 June. A note to publishers: it is virtually impossible to find a copy of Jarmain's works (although single poems do crop up in war anthologies). I hope that someone will reprint them.

Hill says of Jarmain's contemporary, Drummond Allison, that he wrote 'three or four poems of distinction'. We might claim as much for Jarmain, understanding that this is not faint praise: Jarmain's small number of significant poems belong among the finest of the War. Here can be found his 'Prisoners of War', and below is what I consider to be his masterpiece, 'El Alamein'.

El Alamein

There are flowers now, they say, at El Alamein;

Yes, flowers in the minefields now.

So those that come to view that vacant scene,

Where death remains and agony has been

Will find the lilies grow ---

Flowers, and nothing that we know.

So they rang the bells for us and Alamein,

Bells which we could not hear.

And to those that heard the bells what could it mean,

The name of loss and pride, El Alamein?

--- Not the murk and harm of war,

But their hope, their own warm prayer.

It will become a staid historic name,

That crazy sea of sand!

Like Troy or Agincourt its single fame

Will be the garland for our brow, our claim,

On us a fleck of glory to the end;

And there our dead will keep their holy ground.

But this is not the place that we recall,

The crowded desert crossed with foaming tracks,

The one blotched building, lacking half a wall,

The grey-faced men, sand-powdered over all;

The tanks, the guns, the trucks,

The black, dark-smoking wrecks.

So be it; none but us has known that land;

El Alamein will still be only ours

And those ten days of chaos in the sand.

Others will come who cannot understand,

Will halt beside the rusty minefield wires

And find there, flowers.

Anthologising the Great War

Sharp-eyed readers of this blog may have noticed that under 'My Current Research' a new project has appeared. I have been commissioned by Oxford World's Classics to edit an anthology of Great War poetry from Britain and Ireland. I have two main ambitions for the book: to make a selection which is fresh without neglecting the inescapable poems ('Dulce et Decorum Est' has to be included, like it or not), and to have an editorial apparatus which adds value.

Looking back over my posts on this site, I've noticed how often I comment on anthologies: the two Penguin anthologies, Robert Nichols's self-indulgent selection, Gerald Dawe's Irish War Poetry, Lorrie Goldensohn's American counterpart, and Catherine Reilly's Scars upon my Heart. I'd better make sure that my own anthology doesn't contradict the various arguments I've made in relation to other editors.

I would be grateful for radical or unusual suggestions of poems which ought to be included.

War and Latin Literature

Why do poets reach for Latin literature when they write about war? I heard a terrific panel discussion yesterday by two of my colleagues, Henry Power and Ed Paleit. Their subject was the poetry of the English Civil War, and the ways in which writers may have used the Latin classics (especially Virgil and Lucan) to show allegiance to one side or another. David Norbrook has argued that the attention given to Lucan is the sign of a nascent republican poetry from the 1620s onwards, and that Virgil is favoured by royalist sympathisers, but Ed and Henry demonstrated the dangers of such clean distinctions. Translations of the same passages could seem differently relevant after 1642, 1649 and 1660, and the poets themselves often reflected this awareness as they revised their works for new editions.

Henry made clear that the Civil War produced a spike in translations of the Latin classics, particularly Virgil's Aeneid. The same turn to classical tradition occurred during the Great War, when the public-school-educated officer classes tried to make sense of their experiences through the literature of war with which they were most familiar. (They knew their Greek as well: The Winter of the World contains four different versions of Simonides' epitaph for the dead at Thermopylae and claims that there were many others.) Probably the most famous lines in Great War poetry come from Horace. Yet Owen's use of classical tags and phrases is revealing because, unlike that of (say) Sassoon, Blunden and Graves, his grasp of Latin was not assured. 'Apologia pro Poemate Meo' began as 'Apologia pro Poema Mea' before Sassoon corrected the faulty grammar. Why is it, then, that Owen draws on Latin, when his own knowledge is so insecure? Is it just a sky-hook?

Recently, Andrew Motion wrote a quatrain poem called 'Causa Belli' disapproving of the Iraq War. This belongs in an Owenite tradition for several reasons, not least because he seems not to know his Latin. I suspect that the phrase he wanted was 'casus belli'. On first publication, the poem came with a gloss (handed down authoritatively in both The Guardian and the BBC website) which mistook 'causa' as plural. 'They read good books, and quote, but never learn', Motion's poem says of our political leaders, with unintended irony.

That most Latinate of modern poets, Geoffrey Hill, also alludes to Grotius but rather more successfully, in 'De Jure Belli ac Pacis' from Canaan. Are there other examples from our own time? It may be that 'Dulce et Decorum Est' has become so pervasive as to act as a deterrent: not a deterrent to war, unfortunately, but a deterrent to war poems with Latin tags.