Why was Musil unfair to Karl Kraus?

You can see and hear Kraus reading from one of his texts at 8.21 in the above clip.

Among Karl Kraus' fans were many first-rate geniuses. Kafka, Wittgenstein, Canetti (who wrote about Kraus on pp. 65-74 on The Torch in My Ear), Benjamin (who also wrote about Kraus), Berg, and Webern all avidly followed Kraus' journal, Die Fackel. So, I'm intrigued when other geniuses are strongly critical of Kraus. In some cases, the antipathy is to be expected, as when Freud has this to say about one of his most acerbic critics:

I was very proud of the message you dedicated to me, but then again annoyed that you made an obeisance to Karl Kraus who stands at the very bottom of my ladder of esteem. (letter to Arnold Zweig, Dec. 2, 1927, The letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, ed. Ernst L. Freud)

More puzzling are Robert Musil's repeated digs at Kraus. I first learned of these barbs from a letter by Walter Kaufmann in the August 9, 1973 issue of the New York Review of Books. The letter was part of an exchange with Erich Heller. Kaufmann quoted this passage from Musil's diary:

Long before the dictators, our times brought forth spiritual veneration of dictators. Stefan George, for instance. Then Kraus and Freud, Adler and Jung as well. Add to these, Klages and Heidegger. What is probably common to these is a need for domination and leadership, for the essence of the savior. (Diaries: 1899-1941, selected & trans. Philip Payne, (Basic Books, 1998, p. 432)

As far as I can tell, this diary entry is from late August, 1937. Its assimilation of Kraus to Freud seems especially biting in view of Kraus' low opinion of psychoanalysis. In effect, Musil is saying that Kraus was no better than the figures whom he had especially despised.

Musil, Ea von Allesch, Martha Musil, & Franz Blei with unidentified clown

Photo Source.

Musil took Kraus to resemble Freud in having something like the role of a 'savior'. This point about Kraus appeared much earlier in Musil's diary. In an entry under the heading 'Krausians' (c. 1924), Musil wrote,

Bettauer treats Kraus, who once pilloried him "unjustly," with pained reverence. ... Kraus is the redeemer figure; Kraus, by simply being there and pouring out abuse, makes everything good again. (Diaries, pp. 303-4)

Consider this next entry from spring, 1939. Musil has just mentioned the view of National Socialism as a 'religious movement and a type of sect.' This leads him to consider psychoanalysis, another doctrine that putatively aspires to a comprehensive vision or world-view that makes sense of life. Of psychoanalysis' explanatory repertoire, Musil says,

These dozen concepts that its registered members use to explain the world. Any other scheme at all could probably achieve the same effect. ... That which has been explained is then left completely barren and there is not a single path, however narrow, that leads on further from there. (Total explanation as a bad sign.) In a minor key, the Kraus sect, the Klages sect, Jung, Adler. The "materialistic interpretation of history" also had the same function. (Diaries, p. 481)

'Total explanation as a bad sign' -- we are close to Popper's critique of psychoanalysis, Marxism, etc., according to which any such theory that seems capable of explaining everything, come what may, in fact explains nothing; since the theory can accommodate every possible outcome, it rules out no possible outcome and therefore lacks determinate, empirical content. The theory makes no interesting predictions, or 'there is not a single path ... that leads on ... from there.'

It seems unfair to include Kraus in the same category as Klages and the psychoanalysts (let alone the National Socialists), for while Kraus may have resembled leaders of quasi-religious sects in one respect, he lacked one of their defining features. Specifically, there may have been a cult of celebrity around Kraus -- he may even have been regarded by some as radiating a savior's charisma -- but he didn't preach a new and supposedly comprehensive view of life as an answer to all your questions and a cure to whatever ails you.

So, why the invective in Musil's remarks about Kraus? I don't know. It might have resulted from Kraus' feud with Alfred Kerr, who had been Musil's mentor (and who was Judith Kerr's father).
 

Café Culture

London coffeehouse -- 'A disagreement about the Cartesian Dream Argument turns sour'

Source.

A new book from Berghahn: The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture, ed. Ashby, Gronberg & Shaw-Miller: 'The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna.'

Prague's cafés: 'Just up Národní street from Slavia is Café Louvre, a former haunt of Kafka’s when he participated in the philosophical discussions of the Brentano Circle, a group that met there to discuss the ideas of philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano. ... At one time Café Arco was the base of the city’s German-speaking writers, a group that included Kafka and his closest friends as well as Franz Werfel and Egon Erwin Kisch. The café and its literary inhabitants became so closely associated that the Viennese writer and satirist Karl Kraus mocked the café’s “Werfel-s and Brod-s and Kafka-s and Kisch-es,” dubbing the group the Arconauts.'

'The third space: the cafe’s place in forming modern Japan'. David Cozy reviews Merry White's Coffee Life in Japan. 'In Japan, as elsewhere, as work ceased to be something that was done at home, among family and neighbors, and happened instead at a location to which one commuted, intermediate spaces such as cafes that were neither home nor work, became necessary. Cafes, then, are both a product of modernity and, through the space they provide for new ideas to develop, a driver of modernity.'

Matthew Green  on 'The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse': 'Sauntering into some of London’s most prestigious establishments in St James’s, Covent Garden and Cornhill, he [John Macky] marvelled at how strangers, whatever their social background or political allegiances, were always welcomed into lively convivial company. They were right to be amazed: early eighteenth-century London boasted more coffeehouses than any other city in the western world, save Constantinople.'

Charles Lamb on a newspaper hoarder in Nando's [Ferdinando's] coffeehouse: 'What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando’s, keeps the paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, ‘the Chronicle is in hand, Sir.’'
 

Links to scintillating excogitations, largely Wittgensteinian

Rose Rand, who was born in Lemberg and moved to Austria, where she was a member of the Vienna Circle, and fled to England in 1939 with Susan Stebbing's help.

From the BBC: Raymond Tallis and Ray Monk on Wittgenstein (it starts about 57 seconds into the audio file). From the BBC in 2003, Melvyn Bragg interviews Monk, Barry Smith, and Marie McGinn about Wittgenstein.

Arthur W. Collins reviews Paul Horwich's book Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy.

Andrew Lugg reviews Wittgenstein's Tractatus: History and Interpretation (ed. Sullivan & Potter).

Matthew Frost's notes on his continuing project of translating Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

Duncan Richter's two posts about Tractarian elucidation.

Reshef Agam-Segal on 'thinking and willing subjects in the Tractatus'.

Philip Cartwright on propositional form.

From last March, Lars Hertzberg on talking (non)sense about nonsense (good comment thread), and a follow-up (with further interesting comments).

Duncan Richter's two posts about Wittgenstein on 'good'.

Gavin Kitching on Rupert Read's Wittgenstein Among the Sciences.

'Why on earth is it so difficult to describe the Contents of my Consciousness?'

A. C. Grayling on 'Wittgenstein on Scepticism and Certainty'.

Henrik Lagerlund's 'Science and Reason', Part 1 ('Rationality of Modern Science') and Part 2 ('Pessimism and the Myth of Progress') -- lots on G. H. von Wright.

From Siris -- 'In Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy'.

Last May and June, SOH-Dan put up several posts on Dummett's Frege, McDowell on cog-sci, and Sebastian Rödl on Kant's first analogy.

MWQ quotes a lengthy passage from Steven Tester's new translation of Lichtenberg. The quoted passage focuses on Lichtenberg's philosophy of mind. Here's one of my favourite passages from Lichtenberg; it's about the mind-body relation and seems to anticipate Ryle's 'ghost in the machine':

Long before we could explain the common phenomena of the physical world we ventured to explain them through the agency of spirits. Now [that] we know better how they are linked together we explain one phenomenon by means of another; but we nonetheless have two spirits left to us, a god and a soul. The soul is thus even now, as it were, the ghost that haunts our body’s fragile frame. (G. C. Lichtenberg, c. 1776; trans. R. J. Hollingdale)

The Stanford Encyclopedia finally has entries for Moritz Schlick and Heinrich Rickert. Still no entries for Sir William Hamilton, Wilhelm Windelband (who influenced not only Rickert and Max Weber but also Samuel Beckett), Georg Simmel, Susan Stebbing, Friedrich Waismann, Rudolf Carnap (!), Ruth Barcan Marcus (!), William Dray, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley (though they're of course referred to in other entries). I don't mean this to be any strong criticism of the editors, who have likely already commissioned entries for many of the above-named figures. I know that the editors have launched an initiative to give more coverage to female philosophers.

Philosopher's Zone interviews Simon Blackburn about human nature; and Hubert Dreyfus and David Deutsch on AI. Here's Blackburn's Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture (also available here).
 

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

Comrades! Jail the idlers who don't update library holdings!

V.I. Lenin on May 21, 1921 (p. 77):

Have the gubernia and uyezd libraries copies of the Plan for the Electrification of the R.S.F.S.R., which was submitted as a report to the Eighth Congress of Soviets? If so, how many copies? If not, it shows that the local delegates to the Eighth Congress of Soviets are dishonest and ought to be expelled from the Party and dismissed from their responsible posts, or else they are idlers who should be taught to do their duty by a term of imprisonment ....

This book was published in the USSR in 1983. The original Russian version appeared in 1977.

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)

World War I books (mostly Canadian)

'Paths of Glory' by C. R. W. Nevinson (1917)

The First World War centenary will soon be upon us. I've been looking for some good books about the Great War. As noted in a previous post, I've plunged into Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War. Other classic books about the War are Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That and Siegfried Sassoon's books, and, of course, there's Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. I've already read Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel.

With the help of the University of South Carolina Press' site for The Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Series (and this list of WWI fiction), I've been able to find some good books by British, German, Australian, American, and French authors, but it's proven difficult to find Canadian books about the War. Of course, there's Timothy Findley's The Wars, which was mandatory reading in my high school and which won the 1977 Governor General's Fiction Award, but I'm looking for novels or autobiographical works by people who served in the War.

One frustrating matter in my search is that some apparent Canadians turn out to have been Yankees. For instance, I was excited to find a well-reviewed book by a veteran of the Canadian Expeditionary Force named Charles Yale Harrison, but he was born in Philly and spent most of his life in NY. (His book, Generals Die in Bed is online.) Another American who signed up in the Canadian army was Humphrey Cobb, whose Paths of Glory (review) was the basis of a movie by Stanley Kubrick.

It looks like many of the Canadian books were superficial exercises in 'rah, rah' patriotism. There are two books by Canadians, though, that look to be more realistic and rewarding.

First, there's Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly. Published in 1929, it has long been out of print, and the only used copies that I can find cost more than $100. Thankfully, it looks like a new edition is being prepared by Dundurn. The novel includes many literary allusions (inc. some to Nietzsche). Ford Madox Ford wrote the preface. The book received warm praise in a letter to Acland from Bertrand Russell. Here's the favourable review that ran in the New York Times.

Acland, a Torontonian, worked in advertising and, in 1942, began six years of employment in the 'secretariat of the Prime Minister of Canada' (according to a note in the NY Times [Jan. 28, 1949]). After that, he returned to advertising and was selected to head the Toronto office of Day, Duke, & Tarleton, Inc. (says the same NY Times note), a New York agency that was created in 1946 'by veterans of J. Walter Thompson Co., Foote, Cone & Belding, Lennen & Mitchell and William Esty & Co. in New York' (sounds Mad Men-ish).

The other Canadian novel is God's Sparrows (1937) by Philip Child, who was an artillery officer from Hamilton, Ontario. He became an English professor at the University of Toronto. Unlike Acland, Child wrote several other novels. He won a Governor General's Literary Award in 1949 for Mr. Ames Against Time.

Why are there so few good WWI books by Canadian veterans of the War? George Simmers conjectures that 'the reaction in the Dominions against the disillusioned war books of the late twenties and early thirties went further than that in Britain.' Perhaps the hostile climate discouraged other disillusioned veterans with literary talent from writing publicly about their experience.

For more information about the Canadian literature on the Great War, see this entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia and this site at Library and Archives Canada. Also, there are many relevant posts on Brian Busby's blog and at a blog that is devoted to Canadian war literature. There's also this pdf by Eric Thompson, 'Canadian Fiction and the Great War'.

'Canadian Gun Pit' by Wyndham Lewis (1918)

Update: There are two Canadian autobiographical works about WWI that have received generally good reviews. First, there's Ghosts Have Warm Hands (1968) by William R. Bird, who was in the Canadian Black Watch. This title is an updated version of Bird's And We Go On (1930). Next, there's The Great War as I Saw It (1922) by Canon Frederick George Scott, an Anglican chaplain. From the table of contents, it looks like this is an account of several of the main battles in which Canadians fought. Here's a 1991 article about this book; and here's Monique Dumontet's doctoral dissertation at the University of Manitoba as a pdf: 'Lest we Forget': Canadian Combatant Narratives of the Great War (2010).

He didn't use the example of 'game' but ...

I'm reading a 19th-century author, Richard Whately, who was the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin. He wrote the first modern (not entirely Aristotelian) logic textbook in the English-speaking world (Elements of Logic [1826] -- which influenced C. S. Peirce). He also wrote an influential textbook on rhetoric (Elements of Rhetoric [1828]). Both works were standard textbooks in the UK and US for many decades.

In Elements of Rhetoric, Whately disabuses the reader of

the common error of supposing that a general term has some real object, properly corresponding to it, independent of our conceptions; — that, consequently, some one definition in every case is to be found which will comprehend every thing that is rightly designated by that term; — and that all others must be erroneous: whereas, in fact, it will often happen, as in the present instance, that both the wider, and the more restricted sense of a term, will be alike sanctioned by use, (the only competent authority,) and that the consequence will be a corresponding variation in the definitions employed; none of which perhaps may be fairly chargeable with error, though none can be framed that will apply to every acceptation of the term. (Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric [1828], p. 2)