Talk of Typicality
Teaching A-Level English will always bring you back to the Front Line at some point or another. Perhaps not immediately, but you will eventually find that all roads lead to Ypres, all doors unto D-Day and all um... Valleys onto Versailles. And whenever faced with WWI from a sixth-form perspective, it is usually towards the same overwhelming question we are pushed. 'How typical is Poem X of War Literature?' or 'Compare Extract B with Extract D... how typical are they of War Literature?'
That word, 'typical', has always seemed fairly haunting to me when talking of The Great War. Partly, of course, because there is nothing 'typical' about that particular conflict - which is why it is so heavily written about. Perhaps posterity has given the War an air of typicality, and if that is the case, it is much to the detriment of the human race. The idea of literature of any sort being 'typical' of it therefore seems to slightly undermine the gravitas of the subject. Things may well be typical of a genre, certainly. Nobody would bat an eyelid at the idea of discussing a 'typical sci-fi novel', or 'a play typical of the restoration era', or 'typical conventions of Canadian poetry'. It seems a little more difficult however, to discuss the typicality of a piece of writing in relation to an armed conflict which had an infinite number of manifestations, depending on one's level of involvement. There were clearly as many perspectives on The First World War as there were pairs of eyes to witness it, and there will continue to be as many more perspectives on the conflict as there are people to read about it for the rest of time.
This is, however, just one of the reasons why it is so difficult to discuss whether or not a piece of writing is 'typical' of WWI writing.
The First World War made poets of almost everyone it touched. A seemingly inexhaustible supply of verses and letters and all that lies between were found in trenches, private collections, billets, hospitals, etc. This has given rise to a popular myth among students of English however, founded upon the following chain of thought...
1. Lots of people wrote poetry during WWI
2. Most of this poetry wasn't any good - how could it be?
3. In schools, we are only exposed to a very small amount of the poetry that was produced from this era.
And here is where the non sequiturs arrive...
4. The small amount of poems we are shown of that era are, whilst being the best of their kind, typical of WWI literature.
and more frustratingly...
5. The poems that I have not been shown from the era probably have not been shown to me because they aren't very good.
I must admit, I was wholly guilty of making the assumptions numbered 4 and 5 when I was at school. I was of the opinion that everyone in England was writing glib jaunty verses about giving what-for to old Boshy, and having a chance to show those Frenchies how we do things in Blighty. Then when they got to battle, they would all turn into slightly worse versions of Wilf and Sass, disillusioned, inconsolable, Modernist poets calling upon the twin disciplines of Romanticism and Imagism to show the world the bleak, undiluted horrors of war. And women just went on oblivious to all this, and having a frightfully nice time working in factories, feeling the amazing liberating freedom that comes from having to work a 9-5 job.
This was more or less the model upon which I based 'typicality' on when looking at War literature. You think war's a good laugh, you turn up at the trenches and become Colonel Kurtz, unless you're a woman, in which case you just hum an upbeat tune and fail to notice the thousands of men coming back to Britain with missing limbs. Unsurprisingly, I was fairly wrong on this count.
Whilst contemporary sensibilities may hold Owen to be the best of the War Poets, typical he certainly was not. Take, for example, this extract from Owen's most beguiling poem (in my humble opinion) Mental Cases:
'Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicket?'
I would never argue that this is not a fantastic poetic phrasing. Aside from the fact that skulls do not traditionally have tongues. Scholars will also suggest that Owen's poetry, like Sassoon's and Rosenberg's is read more widely than your average poet of the same era because it is more timeless. What we actually mean when we say 'timeless' however, is 'in vogue'. Owen's poetry is not timeless by any stretch, but it is certainly congruous with how we wish to view WWI today.
Compare Owen's writing with this piece written by a Hospital Orderly from London around the same time:
"When the war is done we'll recall the fun-
The fun that conquered the pain-
For we'll owe a debt (and we'll not forget)
To the jokes that kept us sane:
How the wounded could laugh and bandy their chaff
and kick up the decue of a row!
It may be, in peace, when the sufferings cease,
We'll be sadder, are sadder, than now."
I know which piece is regarded as the greater literary achievement out of this poem and 'Mental Cases'. And I know the reasons why. Because Owen's poetry is more "honest" about the war. "Oh sure, some of the men would keep their spirits up with some bouncy little fatuous scribblings, but they weren't as honest as Owen." By which we mean that Owen's poetry is more fitting with what today's Western society thinks about war, and the people who take part in it. We are looking at WWI from across a gulf in which lies September 11th, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the abolishment of the death penalty in Britain, the Vietnam war, the invention of the term 'serial killer' (I believe this was first used to refer to Ted Bundy) and the Holocaust, to names just a few of the deciding factors about what the 21st century needs The First World War to represent. It is convenient for us to think of it as 'the first big clue that let everyone know how evil the world is', 'never such innocence' and all that.
What then are we to make of the countless bouncy bit of verse we find from soldiers who faced the war and used writing as a way of keeping themselves chipper? Should we see these as being the atypical ones?I assure you, there are enough poets who saw action in WWI and still took a sense of jingoistic pride to out-weigh the poised social consciences of Owen and Sass. Take the R.A.F. Captain 'ffrench' who writes harrowingly of 'the fields where Death's harvest lies' in Song of the Aeroplane. Fields of 'Death's harvest', I might add, that were contributed to by the poet's 'eager bomb' with its 'deadly hum'.
How then, does 'ffrench's poem end? With an Owen-esque moment of despair at the horror created by him and his fellow man? With a Sassoonist call for an end to all war? With a Rosenbergian image of callous morbidness? No, no and no. The poem ends with the lines:
Proudly to Earth once again I'm returning,
Darkly to crouch till morning's fair light
Breaks, then again to the heavens go soaring,
Brave of the bravest, to-morrow we'll fight.
Far from being a remorseful tool of the government, the poet behind this piece appears not only to be proud of his own bravery, but also to see himself as an 'angel' of sorts.
Fecund is the world of WWI literature with work which bristles against the grain of our school-fed conceptions of gender-roles and the social climate of the times. Take the poem To a V.A.D. by the mysteriously anonymous poet 'C.D.'. We have here, the somewhat awkward depiction of a V.A.D. told from the perspective, presumably, of a wounded private.
"In these (and many other ways) you're piling up huge scores,
Now you are at our beck and call as we were once at yours."
The bitterness which pervades this poem is staggering. I think it to be a fairly well-written piece with regards to metre, clarity of image, strength of meaning, maturity of tone, etc. But of course we would not think it to be one of 'the good poems' of WWI because it differs so entirely from the paradigm du jour, all the way over here in Sunny 2009. In a post-suffragette universe, how could we ever applaud a poet who would write:
"They prate of sex and class and votes, of freedom and of land.
Don't heed them, dear, I beg of you; they do not understand
That once I've doffed my uniform there's but one thing I crave,
To come once more beneath your sway and be your willing slave."
This could in no way fit in with modern conceptions of WWI the way we'd like to see it. WWI was the moment when men realised how horrific the realities of modern combat were, and women realised that they could rise up into independence. Here though, we have an RAF Captain who can't get enough of flattening the German hoards and a man who seems to see the role of women to have switched from 'slave-keeper' to 'slave' as a result of the conflict.
I do not suggest that these opinions of Britain 1914-18 are more valid than the horrified eloquence of our more popular voices of the age. I would suggest however, that there is a strong case that the 'typical' voice of early 20th Century Britain is likely to be far less palatable to our modern sensibilities than we'd like. Britain was quite happily sexist, racist, elitist and imperial at the time of the war. I think it fair to say that a small handful of well-educated, upper-class, homosexual men who rubbed shoulders with the literati of the time, whilst perhaps being the most melodious, mellifluous and socially guilt-less voices of WWI as viewed a century later, they were anything but 'typical'. History is not only written by the victors, but revised by their grandchildren.
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