Thursday, 20 September 2012
F. W. Harvey and Wilfrid Gibson
Monday, 27 August 2012
In Memoriam Dominic Hibberd
As a biographer, editor and literary critic, Hibberd made an immense contribution to the public and scholarly understanding of the First World War. He began his career as a scholar of Wilfred Owen, and his collection of publications on Owen—a biography, a book-length study, and many essays—sets him apart as that poet’s most perceptive literary critic. Between them, Hibberd and Jon Stallworthy have ensured Owen's pre-eminence in discussions of modern war poetry, but as his biographers, at times they have seemed like rivals. The main area of contention was spelt out by Hibberd in the introduction to his biography: ‘One claim often made about Owen is undoubtedly true, although there are still people who prefer not to believe it. He was gay'. Hibberd's claim about Owen's sexuality is now established beyond reasonable doubt, and his biography amounts to an astonishing piece of scholarship—lucid, thorough, fluent, and extremely well researched—but its weakest point is an understandable desire to overstate what could have been more calmly asserted. Stallworthy had written his authorised biography under the watchful eye of Owen’s family, and had left gaps where exposure had been impossible. Once or twice, Hibberd is slightly too noisy (and speculative) in filling the silences. Yet Hibberd's is still the definitive Life, and I would group it among the finest biographies that I have read. Quite rightly, it pays meticulous attention to Owen’s wartime experiences, but it also gives a convincing account of Owen’s early years.
The biography seems to have represented the culmination of Hibberd’s research on Owen, and it draws extensively on much of his previous scholarship. Yet his earlier work was not entirely superseded. Hibberd's article on Owen’s pararhyme (1978) remains the most perceptive treatment of that subject. He was never anything less than an accomplished close reader, always alive to poetry’s figures and patternings; and at his best he wrote an historically-informed formalist criticism which was deeply attentive to textual variants and complications. It is not least because of Hibberd's detailed editorial work that we are able to feel confident of the chronology of Owen’s development as a poet.
From the start, Hibberd explored the work of other writers in Owen’s circle, most obviously Sassoon, Graves and Harold Monro. The impression given by his writing on the first two of those poets is that his attention is prompted more by their relationship to Owen than by any intrinsic interest. His contribution to a collection of essays on Robert Graves and his contemporaries was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a piece assessing the influence of Graves on Owen, although another essay in Gravesiana (2010) does suggest that Graves might have become significant for Hibberd’s scholarship in his own right. Sassoon remained less of a presence in Hibberd’s writings: he is studied only where he plays a role in Owen’s life and poetry.
The work on Harold Monro is altogether more important. Until Hibberd took up his case, Monro was a man often cited but never studied. A poet himself, he was better known as an editor and bookseller, whose support encouraged many young poets especially during the war years. Hibberd’s biography of Monro manages the task of bringing its subject to life while recognising that many readers will be more concerned with the pen-portraits of the company he kept: not just Owen but Charlotte Mew, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Robert Frost, and many others. Monro was active at the time when the schism between Modernism and Georgianism occurred, and since then, poetry in English has never quite managed to heal the breach. Hibberd shows Monro to be a fascinating character for his close links with rival parties, but he also makes claims for him as a poet worthy of study. All the strengths apparent in Hibberd’s biography of Owen—its painstaking scholarship, its fluency, its ability to illuminate the work as well as the life—are repeated here. Hibberd has also done Monro the great service of making his poems readily available, first in Strange Meetings: Poems by Harold Monro (2003), and then in Harold Monro and Wilfrid Gibson: The Pioneers (2006).
Apart from his work on Owen, it is as an anthologist that Hibberd is best known. Hibberd’s work here couples his impressive textual scholarship with a desire to expand the canon of First World War poetry. His first anthology, Poetry of the Great War (edited with John Onions in 1986) was the first anthology to represent women satisfactorily alongside the more celebrated poetry of the soldier-poets. Hibberd described his next anthology, The Winter of the World (also with John Onions, 2007) as a further assault on ‘the 1960s myth’ of the War. Organised chronologically year by year, and with a final section covering the decade after the Armistice, this anthology is the most learned and inclusive to date. It exposes the shoddy scholarship of many of its predecessors, and challenges many of the common preconceptions about contemporary attitudes to the war and its poetry: for example, Hibberd and Onions rightly argue that it can be ‘misleading to assume that the Somme campaign... was a turning point for poetry by soldiers’, and their selection of poems proves their case.
Hibberd has left us with substantial and groundbreaking biographies of Wilfred Owen and Harold Monro; his editorial work has helped to clarify Owen’s texts and to provide a confident chronology of that poet’s development; his literary criticism proved him to be a leading scholar of modern poetry; and the anthologies, particularly The Winter of the World, have brought to readers a new and expanded canon of First World War verse. It is an exemplary achievement, for which all of us who read war poetry must be grateful.
Tuesday, 21 August 2012
Isaac Rosenberg Celebration
Sunday, 12 August 2012
Gilbert Frankau
Gilbert Frankau (1884-1952) has hovered at the edges of the war poetry canon for many decades. He is problematic for three reasons: he hated the Germans with an intensity matched only by his master, Rudyard Kipling; in 1933, he wrote an article for the Daily Express titled 'As a Jew I am not against Hitler' (but soon recanted); and there is the practical consideration that his wartime work remains in copyright in the UK. So, he is politically dubious, and his work comes with a price tag attached. The same is true (on both counts) of one or two other prominent war poets---Frankau was not alone among them in expressing support for Fascist leaders in the 1930s---but his work can be more easily ignored than theirs. As for copyright laws, the absurdity is compounded by the fact that his collected poems are freely available online here and here. Were I blogging from the US, I could include as many poems as I wanted in this post.
Frankau joined the East Surrey Regiment in October 1914, later seeing action at Loos, Ypres and the Somme. He became a regular contributor of poetry to the Wipers Times, and published two war volumes: The Guns (1916) and The City of Fear (1917). In October 1916 he was sent to Italy to counter German propaganda via press and film campaigns. Suffering from delayed shellshock, he was invalided out of the army in February 1918, and began a successful career as a novelist. He served as a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War.
Frankau was a gifted and authentic poet, although the attitudes expressed in a lyric like 'The Beasts in Gray' ('Let the sword decide what the sword began: / "No truce with the Beasts in Gray!"') have not dated well. Having described a friend's torture at the hands of German captors, Frankau in 'The Reason' sums up his unambiguous animosity towards the enemy:
Hate! Not an individual loathing felt
For this one gaoler or the Kommandant
(With pardon and trade orders for the rest)
But absolute revulsion, merciless,
Inexorable, reasoned, and approved---
A plain man's hatred of the Unclean Folk.
It comes as no surprise that the last phrase sounds like something out of The Jungle Books. Here as in so much of his work, Frankau took his cue from Kipling: his boastful admission, 'I've learnt how to hate', is a direct response to Kipling's 'The Beginnings' ('When the English began to hate').
Were Frankau's poetry one long hymn of hate, it would only be worth reading as a necessary corrective to the cherished myth that Tommy and Fritz were brothers-in-arms. But Frankau is much more compelling when he stops denouncing the Germans. Despite its title, 'The Other Side' has nothing to say about the beasts in grey, and more about attitudes in Blighty. The speaker of the poem is reacting to a book of verse sent to him by 'a former subaltern of his battery' who has somehow got back to England. His response is to condemn the florid rhetoric and abstract musings of this representative soldier-poet:
My grief, but we’re fed up to the back teeth
With war-books, war-verse, all the eye-wash stuff
That seems to please the idiots at home.
You know the kind of thing, or used to know:
‘Heroes who laugh while Fritz is strafing them’—
(I don’t remember that you found it fun,
The day they shelled us out of Blauwport Farm!)
[…]
But what's the good of war-books, if they fail
To give civilian-readers an idea
Of what life is like in the firing-line…
You might have done that much; from you, at least,
I thought we’d get an inkling of the truth.
But no; you rant and rattle, beat your drum.
And blow your two-penny trumpet like the rest:
‘Red battle’s glory,’ ‘Honour’s utmost task,’
‘Gay jesting faces of undaunted boys,’…
The same old Boy's-Own-Paper balderdash!
The kinds of poetry which Frankau here attacks (and which Arthur Graeme West had also attacked in 'God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men!') have now disappeared from the canon, leaving the impression that all soldier-poetry of the First World War was characterised by resistance and bitterness. But as the attacks themselves make clear, the bulk of the War's soldier-poetry continued to celebrate honour, glory, and a divinely-sanctioned patriotism. Modern readers tend to dismiss and despise such sentimentality, while clinging to the belief that the soldiers of either side felt no animosity towards their counterparts across no-man's-land. Frankau's poetry provides a valuable, if disconcerting, corrective to that equally sentimental but far more fashionable myth.
Thursday, 31 May 2012
The Art of Robert Frost
To cleanse the palette, let me finish by promoting someone else's work. Simon Turner has a new blog called Battle Lines, which will devote itself to 'the poetry, fiction, memoirs and journalism of conflict, from WW1 to the present day.' Highly recommended.
Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Mary Borden
Mary Borden, a Chicago heiress whose father had made his fortune as a prospector and a property speculator, came to Britain before the War, having married a Scottish missionary. When he enlisted, she was also determined to contribute to the war effort, and seems to have been in no way distracted by the birth of her third child in November 1914. By the following January, she was in Belgium serving as a Red Cross volunteer, and in July 1915 she established her own hospital under French military authority. Before long, it could boast the lowest mortality rates on the Western Front.
As the areas of intense fighting moved, so did Borden: she founded a new hospital near Bray-sur-Somme in October 1916. The following year she wrote her masterpiece, The Forbidden Zone, which told of the conditions in which she worked: ‘Looking back, I do not understand that woman—myself—standing in that confused goods yard filled with bundles of broken human flesh. The place by one o’clock in the morning was a shambles. The air was thick with steaming sweat, with the effluvia of mud, dirt, blood.’
For her medical work, sometimes carried out while the hospital was under bombardment, Borden was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur. But that was not the end of her courage. During the Second World War, she set up a field hospital in France—and barely managed to escape back to England as the country was overrun—then founded a mobile unit for the Free French in Palestine and Egypt. Even so, the memories of the French poilus of 1914-1918 endured: ‘I see them still, marching up the long roads of France in their clumsy boots and their heavy grey-blue coats that were too big for them; dogged, patient, steady men, plodding to death in defence of their land. I shall never forget them.’
Borden was a prolific novelist, but today she is best and most deservedly remembered for The Forbidden Zone. Blocked from publication by military censors, the book would not appear until 1929, and fell into neglect for decades until a new interest in nurses' memoirs led scholars to champion her cause. But—perhaps surprisingly for a novelist—Borden writes a book which is more prose poem than memoir; eschewing chronology, it works by rhythm and repetition, and by offering stark tableaux vivants (not really short stories, despite Borden's intentions) which act out seemingly unconnected spots of time. The Forbidden Zone is a wonder. There is no other war writing remotely like it.
Borden did produce a handful of poems. Several of these were eventually published as part of The Forbidden Zone, although they have been dropped from the most recent edition. If her best prose is reminiscent of poetry, it is fitting that her poetry should return the compliment. 'At the Somme' finds the gap between Whitman and prose, as demonstrated in the opening lines of its second section, 'The Song of the Mud':
This is the song of the mud.
The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the naked hills like satin,
The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys,
The frothing, squirting, spurting liquid mud that gurgles along the road-beds,
The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of horses.
The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the War Zone.
Jane Conway in her superb biography reports that Borden's friend, E. M. Forster, admitted to being completely baffled: 'Stuff curiously disposed in metrical lengths. Quite three pages of the prose ran into the rhythms of Hiawatha. I cannot make out what she is up to, but then never could.' Her refusal to succumb to orthodoxy can always be said in her favour, but Borden was not a natural poet except when writing prose.
N.B. My thanks to Paul Groves for pointing out that Borden's much-loved Berkshire house, in which she died in 1968, is currently on the market for £3m.
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