Wittgenstein and WWI authors

In his analysis of writings by WWI veterans, Samuel Hynes writes that:

Writing like this, seeing like this, implies a fundamental separation in the perceiver: it asserts that there is a reality in war that the customary ways of seeing and saying cannot render, and consequently it divides the soldier from the civilian, Front from Home, Us from You, Us as We Are from Us as We Were.... The whole of the war experience was unique and beyond the comprehension of those who had not fought. ^{(Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture [London: Bodley Head, 1990], p. 116)}

Based on this next bit by J. M. Winter, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan seems to have exemplified this separation:

Harold Macmillan was one of the many who believed fervently that the men who went to war had been initiated into mysteries that they and only they could really understand. (Winter, 'Oxford and the First World War' in The History of the University of Oxford: Volume VIII: The Twentieth Century, ed. Brian Harrison [Oxford University Press, 1994], pp. 3-25, at p. 24)

Here we have a group of individuals who have been marked and set apart from the majority by their experiential grasp of some profound and otherwise incommunicable truth.

Authors in this group try to gesture, at least, towards this ineffable truth but despair of capturing it in words. But who is their audience? After all, other veterans of the front already know the 'mysteries' at which the author gestures, while those individuals who have no battle-front experience are (by hypothesis) in no position to understand such matters.

Edmund Blunden points to this predicament in his 'Preliminary' to Undertones of War (his WWI memoir):

I know that the experience to be sketched in it is very local, limited, incoherent; that it is almost useless, in the sense that no one will read it who is not already aware of all the intimations and discoveries in it, and many more, by reason of having gone the same journey. No one? Some, I am sure; but not many. Neither will they understand – that will not be all my fault.' (Blunden, Undertones of War [London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1928], p. vii)

This despair of being understood by the uninitiated echoes Wittgenstein's remark in the 'Preface' to the Tractatus: 'Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it -- or at least similar thoughts'. ^{(Wittgenstein, Tractatus, trans. Pears & McGuinness)} (The 'Preface' to the Philosophical Investigations includes this plaintive sentence: 'It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another -- but, of course, it is not likely'. ^{(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe)})

Like other WWI writers (and like many writers who have experienced trauma), Wittgenstein was in the odd predicament of writing about the incommunicable. Of course, for many of these writers (e.g., Blunden), the incommunicable truth resided in their battle-front experience while, for Wittgenstein, it dwelt in 'the mystical'. While Blunden and others aspired to give some sense of their ineffable insight, they could not hope to induce the relevant experience via their writing, for the experience in question required being plunked in the middle of horrendous violence. By contrast, those who aim at some truth about the mystical can, perhaps, through their writing foster or provoke an experiential insight into their target. (Think of romantic poets trying to kindle a sense for the sublime.) Perhaps Wittgenstein tailored his cryptic style towards such ends.

Regardless, it's likely that any hermetic tendency in the young Wittgenstein was strengthened by his WWI experience. After such knowledge, how could one hope to capture in words the profoundest truths, insights gleaned from raw and rare experience? I think, here, of Wittgenstein turning his back on the Vienna Circle members and reading to them Tagore's poems.

Some events and quotes from early 1916

February 6: Jan Smuts (future Prime Minister of South Africa) accepts command of a British force, which includes African and Indian soldiers, that is to capture German East Africa. One of Alfred North Whitehead's sons, Thomas North Whitehead (later a professor at Harvard Business School), serves in the east Africa campaign.

February 12: From a letter by Arthur Graeme West:

I got a "Spenser" from T....., and am now travelling through "The Faerie Queen" with the chaste Britomart. Yes, by all means send me "Tom Jones": those long things I can manage very well here, when we are back from the hellish trenches, where I find it hard to read, though I can manage to write letters, more or less.....How bloody people seem to be in England about peace and peace meetings. I suppose they are getting rather Prussian in the country, but are all peace meetings always broken up by soldiers (who've probably never been here at all)? (West, Diary of a Dead Officer, p. 12)

February 23: Étienne Gilson is taken prisoner by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun.

Indian troops at Kut Al Amara

Source of above image.

March 1: An excerpt from Abhi Le Baghdad by Sisir Sarbadhikari, who served with the British Indian forces that were trapped in the Siege of Kut Al Amara (about 100 miles south of Baghdad):

A bombardment started on the morning of March 1....A Gurkha was standing outside his tent, smoking, and the bomb fell near him. For a while there was only smoke and dust. When it cleared we saw only chunks of flesh and bone; the earth around there had turned into blood-soaked mud. (Sisir Sarbadhikari, Abhi Le Baghdad, trans. Amitav Ghosh [Calcutta, 1958], p. 80)

On April 27, three British intelligence agents, including Captain Thomas Edward Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), offered the Ottoman commanders a million pounds' worth of gold in exchange for release of the troops at Kut. The offer was refused. The British Indian forces surrendered to the Ottoman forces on April 29, 1916. At the time, it was the largest surrender of troops that the British had made.

March 1: Benito Mussolini promoted to rank of Corporal. From his recommendation:

For his exemplary activity, high Bersaglieresque spirit and calmness. Always first in every enterprise of work or daring. Heedless of discomforts, zealous and scrupulous in the carrying out of his duties.

March 2: Charles de Gaulle is wounded and captured by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun.

Franz Marc, 'Dreaming Horse' - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

March 4: Artist Franz Marc is killed at the Battle of Verdun. 'In one day at Verdun...7,000 horses were killed by German and French shelling....In one of his last letters before his death, the German painter Franz Marc exclaimed: "The poor horses!"' Shortly after his death, Marc's 1914 paper ('Im Fegefeuer des Krieges') is published with the epigraph 'Im Anfang war die Tat'.

March 8: Edmund Husserl's son Wolfgang Husserl is killed at the Battle of Verdun. In a letter to Hugo Münsterberg, Husserl writes, 'In this conflict, they [young Germans] went to fight in a Fichtean spirit, considering it a holy war, and to offer themselves wholeheartedly in sacrifice to the homeland'. (trans. by me from a French translation of the original German in Marc de Launay's 'Professorenkriegsliteratur' Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, no. 3 [2001]: 83-100 [at 96, n. 47])

March 17: Apollinaire receives a head wound from shrapnel, from which he never recovered. He died in 1918.

Apollinaire

 March 20: From Siegfried Sassoon's letter to Edward Dent:

On 18 March 1916 David Thomas was wounded in the jaw and died the same evening, aged 20: ‘an artery went, & he was choked,—drowned in his own blood....When the parson had finished (& the machine-guns kept making his words inaudible) a big thing fell about 150 yds away & burst with a final smash. And so my Tommy went away, happy and stainless.

-Shortly afterwards, Sassoon writes the poem 'Golgotha'.

March 23: Wittgenstein receives orders that transfer him to the eastern front; he takes with him a copy of the Brothers Karamazov. His diary entry for April 6 is 'Life is one'.

March 24: Spanish composer Enrique Granados Campiña is killed when his ship is sunk by a U-boat.

Late March: Eugene Bullard is seriously injured at the Battle of Verdun. Though American, he had joined the French forces. He was the first African-American military pilot, and he later worked as a club owner and as Louis Armstrong's French interpreter.

Christopher Eccleston reading Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce Et Decorum Est':


Also in March: Arthur Graham West writes a poem called 'Night Patrol'.

April 3: Ernst Toller suffers from shell-shock and is removed from the front at the Battle of Verdun. On April 29, at a hospital near Strasbourg, he is diagnosed as having suffered a complete nervous collapse and is removed from active service. (F. S. L. Schouten, Ernst Toller: an intellectual youth biography, 1893-1918, Ph.D. dissertation, 2007, pp. 108-110)

April 10: After meeting with David Lloyd-George (then Minister of Munitions), Bertrand Russell writes (in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell) that Lloyd-George 'was very unsatisfactory & I think only wanted to exercise his skill in trying to start a process of bargaining.' On April 25, Russell reports to Morrell that

I got the impression that Ll. George expects the war to go on for a long time yet; also that he thinks the whole situation very black. He seemed quite heartless. 

Lloyd George had invited Russell and other members of the No-Conscription Fellowship to meet and discuss the situation of conscientious objectors, some of whom were in a legal position no different from that of deserters (who could be shot).

April 22: Siegfried Sassoon writes a poem called 'Stand-to: Good-Friday morning'.

April 24-30: Lenin attends a conference of the International Socialist Commission in Kienthal, Switzerland.

April 28: In a performance at the Bürgertheater in Vienna, Austrian troops on leave re-enact the March 21st Battle of Uscieczko, which they lost to the Russians. Karl Kraus pillories the event in Die Fackel:

As those up there knelt down to pray before the audience, and as those up there saluted, and the vermin down below cheered them and sang patriotic songs, and stood there side by side in their top hats and tails, it struck him as the most terrible of all contrasts, like an infernal battle between the glory of God and the arguments of the devil, and the anguish for a delirious humanity, mocking its own sacrifice.

Audio of Kraus reading from 'Die letzten Tage der Menschheit'; and of Kraus reading a passage about Verdun.

May11: Physicist Karl Schwarzschild dies from an illness that he caught while serving on the Russian front. Albert Einstein is critical of Schwarzschild for having joined the war effort. In a letter to Michele Besso (on May 14), Einstein writes: 'Schwarzchild ... is a real loss. He would have been a gem, had he been as decent as he was clever.' (quoted from Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin [Bantam Books, 2003], p. 130)

May 12: After meeting with Prime Minister Asquith (on May 11), Bertrand Russell reports to Ottoline Morrell that he is 'immensely encouraged'. Asquith was 'very sympathetic' and seemed 'prepared to exert himself to prevent C. O.'s being shot'. On May 12, Asquith sends a note to General Haig, instructing him not to have conscientious objectors shot for disobeying orders.

May 16: Karl Planck (son of Max Planck) is killed at the Battle of Verdun.

May: Edmund Blunden arrives in France as part of the 11th Royal Sussex Battalion.

Philosophers reading (and being read in) WWI lit

Here's another philosopher who was a soldier in WWI: Etienne Gilson, who was taken prisoner early in the Battle of Verdun (in February, 1916). Earlier, while on leave from the front, Gilson managed to put together a journal publication.

It's interesting to see how many veterans were critical of the war memoirs and novels that started appearing in the 1920s (esp. in 1929). I've noted Luce's public criticism in a Belfast sermon, which seems to have been aimed chiefly at Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That. Graves' book also drew the ire of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, who meticulously documented the book's inaccuracies in Sassoon's copy of it. 

Wittgenstein was mildly critical of R. C. Sherriff's play Journey's End (1928). According to M. O'C. Drury, Wittgenstein read the play in 1936. Drury quotes Wittgenstein as follows:

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them. I couldn't understand the humour in Journey's End. But I wouldn't want to joke about a situation like that. (M. O'C. Drury, 'Conversations with Wittgenstein', Ch. VI in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981], p. 144)

An early WWI text (1919) was Arthur Graeme West's Diary of a Dead Officer. West was killed on the front in 1917. His diary was edited for publication by his friend, the pacifist and philosopher C. E. M. Joad. There are references to Bertrand Russell in West's Diary (pp. 50-57) . West had been reading Russell's 'A Free Man's Worship' and Justice in War Time. In West, one sees the full disenchantment that is dramatized in many WWI books -- initially a religious patriot who wanted to serve King and country, West became an atheist and seemed on the point of refusing to fight any longer when he was killed by a sniper.

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....'

Roundup on recent English translations

A shot from Carol Reed's The Third Man.

From John Gray's review of a new translation of Curzio Malaparte's The Skin:

If you want a vividly realistic picture of the state of Naples when it was liberated, you should turn to Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 – another blackly comic book that is also luminously sane. If you want to enter into the delirium and cruelty of the period, it is The Skin you must read.

I like Gray's juxtaposition here of Lewis' greater accuracy with Malaparte's greater truth. An embellished account may be truer to life. This reminds me of a similar contrast between Blunden's Undertones of War and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That: Blunden stuck closer to the facts while Graves, despite his greater freedom with the truth, gave us a book that better conveys what it was like (at times) to be there.

W. W. Norton & Company has issued Susan Bernofsky's new translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Here's an excerpt, and here's an essay that Bernofsky adapted from her Afterword. Rebecca Schuman reviews the new translation in Slate.

Schuman reviews two more books on Kafka (h/t LGH). And here are two reviews of Reiner Stach's Kafka biography: one by John Banville and one by Stephen Mitchelmore.

Robert Pogue Harrison reviews Zibaldone, a translation of Giacomo Leopardi's notebooks, all 2592 pages of them. The translation was produced by a team at the University of Birmingham. Joshua Cohen calls Leopardi's notebooks 'one of the greatest blogs of the nineteenth century'. Tim Parks on the translation of 'zibaldone': 'The word zibaldone comes from the same root as zabaione and originally had the disparaging sense of a hotchpotch of food, or any mixture of heterogeneous elements, then a random collection of notes....'

From Mark O'Connell's review of W. G. Sebald's A Place in the Country (Jo Catling's translation of which has just been released in North America by Random House):

Sebald has a way of viewing the world whereby seemingly minor misfortunes or cruelties are made to stand for catastrophes too terrible to be directly observed.

Here's an excerpt from Sebald essay on Robert Walser. Here's an interview of Catling and Anthea Bell on translating Sebald.

Alma Books publishes Sandor Marai's poems in English: 'This collection, the first and only edition of Márai's poems in the English language, presented in John Ridland's and Peter V. Czipott's brilliant verse translation, and with an introduction by Tibor Fischer, offers a comprehensive selection spanning the author's whole career.'

Zsófia Szilágyi on a newly discovered manuscript by Sandor Márai: 'Confessions of a Bourgeois is undoubtedly one of Márai’s most significant books, with one of the most beautiful endings in Hungarian literature, narrating the news of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination that reached the writer in an idyllic summer milieu. “Princip has aimed precisely. Exactly into the middle of our lives”, as Márai wrote elsewhere.'

David van Dusen on Miklós Szentkuthy's newly translated Marginalia on Casanova, which is 'Szentkuthy’s commentary on the German edition of a French memoir written by a Venetian librarian, Giacomo Casanova, in the 1790s.' Nicholas Lezard included Marginalia in his list of the best paperbacks of 2013. The translation was published by Contra Mundum Press. Rhys Tranter liked it.

Here's Rainer Hanshe on Szentkuthy's Towards the One and Only Metaphor.

Biographer Bengt Jangfeldt on “the battle for Mayakovsky”.

Amanda Lewis on Haruki Murakami and the Nobel Prize. Several more pieces on Murakami.

Blunden's morbid poetry in Undertones of War

One of the best books that I read last year was Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War. Though a work of prose, Blunden's WWI memoir bears marks of the author's poetic skill. Indeed, it was no surprise to learn that an editor of London Magazine, G. S. Fraser, once ran excerpts from Undertones as free verse in that journal. I don't know which passages Fraser selected, but I hope he included this bit from chapter 20, where Blunden is dodging shells in a quagmire of wrecked trenches while confronting 'the thought of being pitched bleeding into the gummy filths and mortifications below.'

Another choice passage appears in chapter 12, which is titled 'Caesar Went into Winter Quarters'. Blunden there describes a trench as having been 'blasted out by intense bombardment into a broad shapeless gorge, and pools of mortar-like mud filled most of it.' Later in the same paragraph, he says that the men

were not yet at the worst of their duty, for the Schwaben Redoubt ahead was an almost obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and death, and life were much the same thing – ... in one place a corpse had apparently been thrust in to stop up a doorway’s dangerous displacement, and an arm swung stupidly. ... The whole zone was a corpse, and the mud itself mortified. (Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War, ch. 12)

Notice the 'mort-' words. Men are 'mortified' in the mud, likened to 'mortar-like' material fit for holding a door in place. The mud sucked away their humanity.

Santanu Das has examined the role of mud in WWI narratives. In connection with the above passage, he says: 'While shelling killed and mutilated, mud insidiously took away human subjectivity: it rendered the living human being a Thing, formless and foundationless.' (For more reflection on this excerpt from Undertones, see pp. 67-8 of Das' Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature.) Mud is a formless (or 'shapeless') morass in which distinctions fade. In it, 'death and life [are] much the same thing'. In this chaos, dying itself loses its meaning -- there can't be a dying if life and death are one.

In chapter 24, while describing his situation after an attack, Blunden says: 'Inside, the pillbox was nearly a foot deep in water, which was full of noxious and rancid matters, metamorphoses, God knows what – scire nefas.' Such ominous allusions to what lurks in pools and streams appear throughout Undertones. Earlier, in chapter 20, we find this observation:

The water below, foul yellow and brown, was strewn with full-sized eels, bream and jack, seething and bulged in death. Gases of several kinds oozed from the crumbled banks and shapeless ditches, souring the air. One needed no occult gift to notice the shadow of death on the bread and cheese in one’s hand, the discoloured tepid water in one’s bottle. (Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War, ch. 20)

'Seething and bulged in death.' Pure poetry! And there's that word 'shapeless' again applied to the landscape. The juxtaposition of food and oozing gases suggests some sort of chthonic digestive process in which forms are broken down and obliterated in 'rancid ... metamorphoses'.

Similar patterns appear in Blunden's 'A Battalion History', in which Blunden says that his unit

had become accustomed to two views of the universe: the glue-ridden formless mortifying wilderness of the crater zone above, and below, fusty, clay-smeared, candle-lit wooden galleries, where the dead lay decomposing under knocked-in entrances. (Edmund Blunden, 'A Battalion History', as quoted in Hew Strachan's 'Introduction' to Undertones of War [Penguin Classics, 2010])

Dark Arcadias

Henry Fuseli 'Titania's Awakening' (1785)

Three of these five BBC broadcasts on 'Dark Arcadias' may still be played. 

Chapter 5 of John F. Lynen's 1960 book on Robert Frost's pastoral art. (A review of Lynen's book.)

'The Dark Pastorals of Robert Frost and Hayden Carruth'.

In his The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell documented the strange appearance of the pastoral form in several works (esp. trauma narratives) by WWI British vets. The use of the pastoral mode seems strange in connection with such a catastrophic event, or it does if we think of the pastoral form as being all sweetness and light (bucolic, idyllic, etc.).

(Henry Fuseli [aka Johann Heinrich Füssli] had a more complicated vision ...)

Fuseli 'Titania & Bottom' (c. 1790)

Fussell focused on Edmund Blunden, who closed Undertones of War with his self-portrayal as 'a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat'. While Fussell didn't discuss Robert Graves' work in this connection, other critics have spoken of Graves' 'darker Arcadia' (which was supposedly more complex and archaic than Blunden's). In music, Ralph Vaughan Williams was prompted to write his 3rd symphony, 'A Pastoral Symphony', by his WWI experiences in France, and Williams' unfinished cello concerto from the 1940's was completed by David Matthews and named 'The Dark Pastoral'.

Of course, as Fussell notes, the pastoral is not all sweetness and light. Its history is much more complex and nuanced than that. From Erwin Panofsky's article 'Et in Arcadia Ego', Fussell had learned of a tendency by some artists to include a memento mori amid Arcadia's bucolic setting. Panofsky identified this motif in paintings by Poussin and Guercino, both of whom planted a death's head in the garden.

The Arcadian Shepherds (c. 1618) by Guercino

More about this painting, which is the modern source of the line 'et in Arcadia ego.' If you expand Guercino's above artwork, you can see the Latin phrase imprinted under the skull. Poussin created two paintings with that same Latin title.

In his paper, Panofsky wrote,

At the very moment when this new Arcadia was created [by Virgil], a dissonance made itself felt between its preternatural perfection and the fundamental limitations of human nature as such: even in Arcadia there existed the two fundamental tragedies of human life, inextricably connected with one another: frustrated love and death. ('Et in Arcadia Ego', in Philosophy & History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and H. J. Paton [Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1936], pp. 227-8)

Panofsky excavated the correct translation of 'et in Arcadia ego'. Many had taken it for a bit of nostalgia from the grave; they thought it was spoken by a deceased person and meant 'I, too, was in Arcadia'. Panofsky argued (Ibid., p. 232), partly by reference to Guercino's above painting, that the line should be attributed to death itself (e.g., to a death's head) and means 'even in Arcadia, there (am) I'.

Fussell says that this morbid association with Arcadia was more influential among English authors. Signs of it appear in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the first section of which is entitled 'Et in Arcadia Ego'. Waugh has the phrase etched into a skull that one of the characters keeps in a bowl of roses in his room at Oxford. The phrase adorns a gravestone in an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. More recently, it featured in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia.

On a related note, here's a 2012 dissertation by Andreas Schardt about an English tradition of mixing the pastoral with the gothic: Gothic Pastoral: Terrible Idylls in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature. From the 'Abstract':

'The Gothic and the pastoral have mostly been regarded as entirely antithetical modes so far. However, there are numerous texts in English literature where an overlap between both forms can be observed. Authors like H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft or William Golding, for instance, employ depictions of an idyllic nature or the motif of the Golden Age as typical of the pastoral in combination with Gothic features like the insistence on a barbaric past of superstition and anarchy threatening an enlightened present.' (Emphasis added)

Schardt's dissertation includes material about the graveyard poets, one of whom (Edward Young) wrote Night Thoughts, which was read by Blunden during WWI.

Sir John Everett Millais,'Ophelia' 1852

Here's a cd called Dark Pastoral: Songs and Poetry From World War One. And here's 'Dark Pastoral' by Matthews and Vaughan Williams:
 

Items of interest

Image from Time's Flow Stemmed.

'Paris, Beckett and Me' by John Calder.

Alasdair Gray interviewed in the Scottish Review of Books.

From the Irish Times, Patrick Nugent on Henning Mankell on Wallander.

Lucette Lagnado on Justine, the first part of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. (ht Books, Inq.)

MWQ has posted several extracts from Confederacy of Dunces (which is moving up on my TBR list).

John Gray on a ghost story by Walter de la Mare: 'When he encounters the visitor, the traveller realises that "this being, in human likeness, was not of my kind, nor of my reality". ... [W]hat the traveller has experienced leaves him with the suspicion the world that's normally given us through the senses may itself be an illusion. No assurances are given him regarding any other world.'

Censoring Anton Platonov's Soviet surrealism: '“On the surface, Platonov is the least ‘literary’ of writers," [Robert] Chandler said "His language can seem crude, elemental; it has been described as ‘the language that might be spoken by the roots of trees.’  At the same time, however, this language is extraordinarily subtle, packed with the most delicate of puns and allusions.”'

In this next quotation, Tolstoy's describing a military theorist, but his words seem especially apt for some economists of the not so distant past and perhaps even (gasp!) some philosophers. The quoted passage appears in War and Peace (Book 9, Ch. 10); I've used the words in the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, although the link is to the older on-line trans. by the Mauds).

Pfuel was one of those theorists who so love their theory that they forget the purpose of the theory - its application in practice. In his love for theory, he hated everything practical and did not want to know about it. He was even glad of failure, because failure, proceeding from departures from theory in practice, only proved to him the correctness of his theory.

Is Japan's own version of War and Peace a 6-volume work about the Russo-Japanese War? Here's Hiroaki Sato: 'I asked a Japanese friend how he would characterize Shiba Ryotaro’s famous historical novel, Clouds Above the Hill. I’ve known its immense popularity, but Shiba had started its newspaper serialization after I left Japan in 1968, and the size of the finished work — six volumes in book form — had daunted me, so I’d never read it. My friend’s reply: “The nation’s favorite book.” Now it’s in English translation, in four large volumes — two of them out, the remaining two to come out later this year.'

Eli Kirzner on Ryu Murakami's From the Fatherland (published in English by Pushkin Press).

From Enda O’Doherty's review of Sebald's A Place in the Country:

Sebald’s subjects in this volume, first published in German in 1998 under the title Logis in einem Landhaus, are the dialectal poet, storyteller and pedagogue Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826); Rousseau; poet and novelist Eduard Mörike (1804-1875); novelist and short story writer Gottfried Keller (1819-1890); novelist Robert Walser (1878-1956) and painter Jan Peter Tripp (1945- ).

Terry Pitts' posts on A Place in the Country.

A look at the texts in The Rings of Saturn.

Vertigo has posted a video of Sebald reading from Austerlitz. Here's the clip on YouTube.

Let's introduce a new category: found poetry in novels. I found part of this passage in Blunden's Undertones of War. It has a nice deployment of Heraclitus' image and is taken from 'Night Thoughts' by Edward Young:

Life glides away, Lorenzo, like a brook;

For ever changing, unperceived the change.

In the same brook none ever bathed him twice:

To the same life none ever twice awoke.

We call the brook the same; the same we think

Our life, though still more rapid in its flow; ...

Noga Arikha on Robert Burton's great work: 'Melancholy is an old concept; in ancient Greek, melan means black, and hole is the word for bile. Melancholy literally means black bile: however ancient, we still know what that means.'

Bastille Day was on July 14.

Mireille Mathieu - La Marseillaise by bisonravi1987

Blunden: No time for the present

I noted that in Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden juxtaposes the pastoral landscape and its wreckage by modern, industrial warfare. He also juxtaposes different time-scales, gliding between the daily minutiae of his army life and larger time-frames that dwarf such mundane events. This is evident from his use of the term 'ancient', which serves usually to cast our view back to the medieval and early modern life of the French churches and towns along the front.

Present events are made to seem even more trivial when Blunden gestures at the vast stretches of nature's prehistory. Take this passage, for instance:

Date yourself 1916, and come, little as you wanted to stir this afternoon; the autumn day is moody, the ground churned and greasy; leave Martinsart Wood, and the poor dear platoon scrubbing equipment, coaxing stray dogs, hunting for canteens and scrawling letters. We cross the Nab, that sandy sunk road, and, if we are not mad, the ancient sequestered beauty of an autumn forest haunts there, just over the far ridge. Aveluy Wood, in thy orisons be all our sins remembered. (Blunden, Undertones of War)

But, as Blunden adds, 'Within, it is strangely uninhabited.' There is nothing in the Wood that will say prayers ('orisons') or remember him. There, in the Wood, is only indifference to his travails.

Consider the nuances of this next passage, in which Blunden mentions a train schedule from the recent past, something that has been suspended in the present geopolitical crisis:

But here we leave the road, and file along the railway track, which, despite all the incurable entanglements of its telegraph wires, might yet be doing its duty; surely the 2.30 for Albert will come round the bend puffing and clanking in a moment? Below, among mighty trees of golden leaf, and some that lie prone in black channels as primeval saurians, there is a track across the lagooned Ancre. (Blunden, Undertones of War)

The present crisis sends him away from the recent past of train schedules and closer to a prehistoric, and even pre-human, time.

The larger time-frame can be a refuge. When Blunden is dodging enemy fire, his attention is locked within the present instant as he flees into a subterranean shelter. He there finds that 'time-values have changed for a moment from furious haste to geological calm when one enters that earthy cave with its bunk beds, squatting figures under their round helmets, candles stuck longways on the woodwork, ....' (Blunden, Undertones of War)

Blunden's focus is repeatedly expelled from its refuge, cast away from an ancient, other existence of geological calm and back into the violence of the present. As his unit marches back to the front after some R & R, Blunden observes that 'the failing ancient sun shone on the wide and shallow Ancre by Aveluy, and the green fancy-woodwork of the mill belonged to another century, indeed another existence, as we crossed the long causeway leading from the pleasures of rest, and turned along the opposite hillside with its chalky excavations, old trenches and spaces of surviving meadow-like green, towards the new arena.' His trajectory from the rest site towards the front is in parallel with the temporal references: from the ancient age of the sun to the more recent century in the mill's past to the still more recent signs ('old trenches') of earlier stages in the War to their next arena.

Hans Blumenberg described our attempts to fend off time's indifference -- its 'eternal silence' -- by using the narratives of myth and history to blanket time with meaning. But what if the present is unbearable? Time's indifference might then seem like solace. Perhaps it appeared so to Blunden, and perhaps he fixated on the indifference by resorting to the larger time-scale of prehistory.

These excerpts from Blunden's book echo an episode in Tolstoy's War and Peace. When Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, up to that moment an enthusiastic soldier, lies injured at the Battle of Austerlitz he gazes at the sky -- 'that lofty, righteous and kindly sky' (as Tolstoy says). The lofty sky with its ancient sun dwarfs the battlefield. The war now seems pointless, and its great practitioners (or Napoleon at least) are exposed as vain and trivial men.

There are, of course, differences between this episode and the above passages from Blunden's book. After all, a 'kindly' sky can't be wholly indifferent. Still, in both books the traumatized soldier finds succour in a larger perspective from which present crises 'are as nothing'.

Follow-ups to recent posts

No book has sent me to dictionaries more often than Blunden's Undertones of War, and some of the terms in that work can't be found in recent dictionaries. Case in point: 'Ephydriad'. While describing a withdrawal from the Somme, Blunden says that his unit is 'not the same "we" who in the golden dusty summer tramped down into the verdant valley, even then a haunt of every leafy spirit and the blue-eyed ephydriads, now Nature’s slimy wound with spikes of blackened bone'. This is one of the many examples in Blunden's book of subverted pastoral (about which Paul Fussell wrote), or, in the more Tolkienesque terms of my previous post, of a leafy shire deadened and transformed into a 'Dead Marshes'. But where did Blunden dig up that word 'ephydriad'? In Leigh Hunt's poetry. Blunden wrote Hunt's biography, and Hunt wrote a poem called 'The Ephydriads'.

In my post on books about WW1 by Canadian veterans of that war, I noted that Ford Madox Ford wrote a 'note by way of a Preface' for Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly (1929). Ford there describes a strange 1920's conception of what the war was like. He says that 'many imagine that the late struggle was for those engaged in it a perpetual picnic varied with sexual jamborees' (emphasis added). It seems incredible that anyone could have thought of WW1 in that fashion, but I guess it was just such ignorance that the literature of disillusion was meant to combat. As to why Ford's contribution to Acland's book was not called simply a Preface, the reason must be that the published version of Acland's novel is not the version that Ford read. Acland says so in a note that follows Ford's piece. While Ford liked the novel, he apparently didn't like it enough to re-read it after Acland's last batch of revisions.

In that same post on WW1 books, I referred to Philip Child's novel God's Sparrows (1937). Apparently, the CBC aired a ½-hour drama based on that novel on November 12, 1970. It was produced by David Peddie, directed by Peter Carter, and starred Donnelly Rhodes and Tim Henry. This TV show was part of a series called Theatre Canada: Canadian Short Stories, other episodes of which were based on the work of Morley Callaghan and Alice Munro. Ah, the good old days.

In my post on May Sinclair, I referred to Mary Augusta Ward's novel Robert Elsmere. I learned from Siris that Miriam Burstein has just released a new, annotated edition of Ward's novel.  

Canadian Headquarters Staff (1918) Sir William Nicholson

'The great discovery of the exhibition is Nicholson's 8ft-high group portrait of The Canadian Headquarters Staff showing the officers standing in front of a giant photograph of the bombed-out shell of the Medieval Cloth Hall at Ypres.'

Tolkien, Blunden, and the Great War

Reading Blunden's Undertones of War inspired me to have a look at material about the Somme campaign and its literary representations. I knew there were many texts about the Somme, but I was surprised to learn of the battles' influence on J. R. R. Tolkien's work.

Tolkien was in the Somme offensive in 1916. He was a 2nd Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He took part in one of the many attacks on the Schwaben Redoubt, a heavily fortified strongpoint in the German line. There are two books about the war's impact on Tolkien's fiction: John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War: the Threshold of Middle Earth and Janet Brennan Croft's War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Among the passages in Tolkien's work that seem to echo his WW1 experience is the Journey through the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings. Additionally, Lisa Jardine sees a reference to tanks (first used in WW1) in connection with Morgoth's iron dragons, which appeared in a story that Tolkien wrote during a leave of absence in 1916 or early 1917. The iron dragons were 'iron monsters in the likeness of dragons, which might cross difficult terrain and harbour legions of orcs to transport them safely across the open plain.'

In the comments for Jardine's piece, Rev. John Waddington-Feather recounts a story told by Michael Tolkien, according to which the Dark Riders were based on WW1 German Uhlans.

WW1 German Uhlan. Will somebody get that horse a mask?!

According to M. Tolkien (via Waddington-Feather), J. R. R. Tolkien was caught behind enemy lines while riding a cavalry horse and had to flee three pursuing Uhlans. Looking back, Tolkien could see the Uhlans' 'skull and crossbone helmet badges'. This gave rise to a recurring nightmare from which arose the Nazgul.

Understandably, the tale breeds skepticism, but it could be true. Strictly speaking, Uhlans didn't wear skull and crossbone badges, but British soldiers didn't speak so strictly. They referred to all German cavalry as uhlans, and there were at least three German cavalry units in WW1 that adorned their headgear with the macabre decoration. There were the 'Black Brunswickers', who formed the 17th Hussars Regiment, and two regiments of Life Hussars (more here and here). While there weren't large hussar units on the western front in 1916, several such units were dispersed in smaller groups among the infantry battalions all along the front. Moreover, while the steel helmet had already been introduced by 1916, some cavalry men retained their old skull-and-crossbones hats. As to the question of why Tolkien, a signaler, was riding a horse -- well, signalers had to lay and repair the wire along which their signals ran, and it's well within the bounds of possibility that one who had been tasked with such chores would borrow a horse. After all, if a chaplain such as Canon Scott could use a horse to get around, why couldn't signalers use horses, too?

Aaron Isaac Jackson published a good article about the War's influence on Tolkien's work. His focus is The Hobbit. Jackson says,

In The Hobbit Tolkien is explicit about what they [the goblins] represent, linking them expressly to the mechanized warfare that characterized the First World War: ‘It is not unlikely' [quoting Tolkien] 'that they ... invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them’. (Aaron Isaac Jackson, 'Authoring the Century: J. R. R. Tolkien, the Great War and Modernism', English, 59 [2010], pp. 44–69, at p. 61) 

Jackson notes that as Bilbo and his company approach Smaug's lair, '‘Neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished’ greet their approach, echoing the destruction by war of the green farmlands of France.' (Ibid., pp. 61-2)

The Schwaben Redoubt by William Orpen (1917) -- the desolation of Smaug?

It's here that I see a similarity between Tolkien and Blunden. Both went to France with an iron-clad pastoralism that survived the War. Blunden called himself a 'pastoralist at war'. In his pre-war poem 'The Preamble', he wrote, 'I sing of the rivers and hamlets and woodlands of Sussex and Kent'. In 1915, he finds himself armed in a foreign territory where the hamlets and woodlands are ravaged and burned. He confronts full-bore the lethal machinery that threatens to obliterate the green fields and woods but retains his pastoral commitment throughout the conflict. This is the conservative strain in both authors' writing. Blunden, like Tolkien, sees a beloved shire under threat from the noise and violence of the modern machinery yet salvages, in his imagination at least, a verdant homeland.

Chateau Wood, Ypres (1917)

Boyd's allusions to Blunden in Waiting for Sunrise

I'm in the midst of two books about WWI: William Boyd's novel, Waiting for Sunrise, and Edmund Blunden's classic memoir Undertones of War. There appear to be several allusions to the latter work in the former one. For example, in both books the main character begins his military service in a unit called 'C company' -- in Blunden's book, this was the C company of the Royal Sussex Regiment's 11th Battalion. (Update [June 13]: Boyd's main character joined the East Sussex Light Infantry, which appears to have been a militia unit that became, in 1881, the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment.)

Blunden was a cricket fanatic and mentioned that one of his fellow officers, Charlwood, had played for Sussex. In Boyd's book, the protagonist (Lysander Rief) encounters two cricketers who play for Sussex, Vallance Jupp and Joseph Vine.

Rief is sent to a part of the western front near Festubert. Blunden's service on the western front was in the vicinity of Festubert, about which he wrote two poems ('In Festubert' and 'A House in Festubert').

Finally, in both books there are references to the Battle of Aubers (which occurred in 1915 as part of a larger operation that involved a Canadian division).

Here's a passage from Blunden's book:

Such as it was, the Old British Line at Festubert had the appearance of great age and perpetuity; its weather-beaten sandbag wall was already venerable. It shared the past with the defences of Troy. The skulls which spades disturbed about it were in a manner coeval with those of the most distant wars; there is an obstinate remoteness about a skull.

Update (June 28): Maybe I was wrong. In the Harper Perennial edition of Boyd's  book, Boyd recommends several books about the main topics, settings, etc. of Waiting for Sunrise, but he doesn't mention Blunden. Regarding books about WW1, Boyd recommends Frederic Manning's Her Privates We and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That.