Thursday, April 17, 2014

Some Blunden links

Carcanet has published a volume of poetry by John Greening. Most of the poems are addressed to WWI poets. The volume also includes translations of some German and Austrian poets (e.g., Trakl and Heym). One of Greening's poems is 'To Edmund Blunden (Ypres)', read by Greening on YouTube.

Greening on Blunden:
Here was a war poetry that had never quite left Pound’s ‘dim land of peace’. It was comfortable with syntactical inversion, ‘poetic’ diction, literary allusion. It described nature. Blunden wrote of shepherds as others might mention bus conductors. He assumed readers knew the difference between an ash and an elm, could recognise a coppice, had heard of a hame, a garth.
Another quotation of Greening, this time on Blunden's preferred mode of pastoral being stressed to the breaking point on the western front: 'The period 1914-18 was a stylistic turning point. You see it in the work of someone like Blunden, who wants to be a conventional pastoralist, but whose style is almost torn apart under the pressure of events (his ‘Third Ypres’ for instance).'

Also from Carcanet, Fall in, Ghosts: The War Prose of Edmund Blunden, ed. Robyn Marsack.

From Michael Slater's 1997 review of Overtones of War (ed. Martin Taylor):
A most valuable feature of this edition is Taylor's inclusion of all Blunden's post-publication handwritten annotations to poems, made in 1929 and 1954: against "A.G.A.V." he wrote, "Shot himself in a fit of despair, 1924, after long mental misery ... Vidler had been badly wounded, and could not endure many years after though always full of friendship and humour."
'...but we could do nothing except just stare....'

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

WWI literary links

Artists Rifles, Salisbury Plain (1914)
Source.

Serpent's Tail has a new edition of Frederic Manning's Her Privates We. Here's Manning's earlier version of that book, The Middle Parts of Fortune.

A few years ago, Serpent's Tail also re-issued Fear by Garbriel Chevallier (trans. Malcolm Imrie). Imrie's award-winning translation of the novel is about to be re-issued by New York Review Books (with the same Introduction by John Berger). Here's Tobias Grey's review in the WSJ.

Jean Echenoz's 1914 is reviewed at Tony's Book World, and at the Mookse, and by Max Byrd at the NY Times, and by Martha Hanna, and by M. A. Orthofer at Complete Review.

Last year, Alma Books published a bio of Flora Sandes, 'the only Western woman to enlist as a soldier in the First World War'.

Also from last year, Lydia Kiesling on Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.

A TLS survey from last fall of some recent anthologies of WWI poetry.

Here's a good site with brief entries for several English-language WW1 poets, and another good list (from the same site) of WWI works of  fiction, memoir, and drama.

Vayu Naidu summarizes the proceedings of the Royal Society of Literature's program Voices of the Great War. A 90-minute podcast of the program is available. On it you may hear Michael Longley reading from several of the great WWI poets' works.

Derwent May reviews two books, one on Wilfrid Owen and one one Sigfried Sassoon.

The new book on Owen is by Guy Cuthbertson and was also reviewed by Jason Cowley, by Ferdinand Mount, and by none other than Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.

The one on Sassoon is by Jean Moorcroft Wilson and combines material from her earlier, two-volume Sassoon biography. This shorter version has also been reviewed by Piers Plowright. Wilson was interviewed about Sassoon a few years ago at the BBC.

Here's a substantial article from 1998 (just before vol. 1 of Jean M. Wilson's bio appeared) by Mark Bostridge about Sassoon's post-war travails.

George Simmers on some of the controversy arising from realistic accounts of WWI brutality in Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed. It was controversial, but in 2002 it was re-issued by Annick Press, a publisher of books for children and young adults.

Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly is now available on-line.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

WWI author C. E. Montague

Charles Edward Montague, a Guardian journalist who volunteered to serve in France although he had earlier been opposed to the war.

'Although forty-seven with a wife and seven children, Montague volunteered to join the British Army. Grey since his early twenties, Montague died his hair in an attempt to persuade the army to take him. On 23rd December, 1914, the Royal Fusiliers accepted him and he joined the Sportsman's Battalion.'
He was a 'journalist; author of a number of acclaimed books; 24th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, 1914; full sergeant (grenadier-sergeant), 1915; lieutenant; captain (intelligence); press-officer; after the war one of the authors in the 20's that wrote devastatingly of WWI. Disenchantment was his rather philosophical book about World War I combat.'
Here's a detailed summary and analysis of Disenchantment, according to which, 'The book is ... difficult to read, full of allusions to events, perhaps well-known then but now obscure, packed full also of references to Thucydides, Shakespeare and other allusions of a classic liberal education.'

From Montague's diary (Dec., 1917):
To take part in war cannot, I think, be squared with Christianity. So far the Quakers are right. But I am more sure of my duty of trying to win the war than I am that Christ was right in every part of all that he said, though no one has ever said so much that was right as he did. Therefore I will try, as far as my part goes, to win the war, not pretending meanwhile that I am obeying Christ, and after the war I will try harder than I did before to obey him in all the things in which I am sure he was right. Meanwhile may God give me credit for not seeking to be deceived. (Quoted from the above-linked Spartacus bio.)
Several of Montague's works are available on-line.