Class in war

Ah, the joy of coincidence . . . I mention the possibility that social inequality might have something important to tell us about who wrote most of the WWI poetry we know, and here’s Sam Jordison, posting a couple of hours ago,

In 1940, George Orwell summed up the general consensus when he claimed that if you looked for the working classes in fiction “and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole in the air”. So when the Angry Young Men came along, they were seen as completely revolutionary. As Martin Knight (who is now 50) explains: “I was led to believe that this kind of earthy, gritty working-class fiction only broke cover in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Well these books – that so far have been glossed over and removed from history – prove that’s absolute rubbish.”

Then Sam goes on to tell us about a pair of dead tree artefacts that came and went soundlessly – for all practical purposes. Call me mad, but I’m more inclined to trust Orwell as an authority on the working class fiction of his day than an enterprising 21st-century publisher talking up books to which he’s probably acquired reprint rights for a penny or two. . . Yes, yes, I’m delighted that they are being brought to our attention, but George was right.

. . . The connection between the class war and class in warfare is still on my mind. I’ve been wondering about the long gap between WWI’s shattering of the old social order and the advent of John Osborne & Co. since freepoland’s thoroughly engaging suggestion:

I would like to offer the proposition that the canon of WW1 poetry – Owen, Sassoon, Thomas etc [. . .] introduced a new function for poetry. [. . .] And what name to give that ‘new function’ is problematic. Try ‘Politico-therapeutic-hallucinatory-ironic’.

freep doesn’t explicitly get into class issues, but his inclusion of ‘politico’ led me to sense them hiding there between the lines (but I’ll stand corrected, if need be.)

I’ve never been able to forget class in connection with war since the acquiring editor of the extraordinary Achilles in Vietnam gave me a copy of the book in 1994, the year it was published. Its author is Jonathan Shay — a shrink who, in working with traumatised veterans of that disastrous war, noticed a close parallel between the experiences of his patients and the soldiers of the Iliad, who were also psychologically devastated by being betrayed by their commanders.

The epigraph of his first chapter is a quotation of Judith Herman, a colleague who said at the 1990 Harvard Trauma Conference:

Every instance of severe traumatic psychological injury is a standing challenge to the rightness of the social order.

American egalitarianism was one of the many forces behind our Angry Young Men bursting onto the scene. So I found it ironic to learn from Shay’s book that Vietnam was the first major Western war in which senior officers did not fight beside the men they commanded. In this respect, Homer’s epic did not fit at all: sophisticated communications technologies allowed the fortunate to wage war by remote control:

The Iliad reminds us that military and political leaders have not always been thousands of miles away from the war zone. Agamemnon, the highest Greek political and military authority, personally shares every soldier’s risk on the battlefield . . .

In WWI, senior officers, most of them members of the upper classes, behaved like Agamemnon, as far as I know. But in all the wars the US has fought since Vietnam, nearly all the men and women on the front have been soldiers drawn from the working classes – which has always struck me as shameful beyond describing.

It’s sad that there appears to have been so little poetry by men of ‘other ranks’ in WWI, and that thought mightn’t have occurred to me if Achilles in Vietnam hadn’t left an imprint like a searing brand. One Isaac Rosenberg from Whitechapel isn’t enough to undo that conclusion. Besides, he was Jewish, and the glory of Judaism (not the religion of my own family) is that education has always been given the highest importance for ‘people of the Book’ of all classes.

Fighter-poets

Three questions about the World War I poets interest me. Am I right to think that no war in European or American history left a comparable legacy of verse written by actual soldiers in gaps in combat, and if so, why is WWI the exception? If I’m wrong, do parochialism and xenophobia explain why we don’t seem to hear or read about the others?

I’ve never taken the time to solve those puzzles. Or to investigate what facts support the old obsession of an Anglo-Scottish friend — the idea that no recent war decimated a single country’s prime breeding stock to the shocking extent that the Great War did the ranks of Britain’s most intelligent, talented and educated men of that generation. If I hadn’t lost touch with this friend, a historian, I would ask him why he was so sure that there weren’t symmetrical losses in Germany.

I agree with hazlitt, who says on this blog,

Doomed Youth and Break of Day are amongst some of the best poetry to come out of WW1;besides these the works of Eliot and Pound seem trivial as poetry,despite their great interest as records of human suffering and the stupidity of life.

And here’s why I think he’s right . . . I discovered some of the famous WWI poems all by myself in classrooms long ago. When all but homicidally bored by unimaginative teachers bludgeoning the staggeringly obvious, line by line, or offering interpretations that struck me – insufferably arrogant child, yes – as wide of the mark, I would sneakily turn to pages not on the syllabus and as different as possible from the poem on the butcher’s block that day.

Even knowing little about the circumstances in which they were composed, and nothing about the lives of the poets, I was entranced and moved by the raw power of the poetry. And the effect has endured, in most cases. In Flanders Fields elicits the same shiver now as it did from the ten year-old playing mental hooky.

. . . On a quick visit to the Guardian site a few minutes ago, I noticed that pinkroom appears to share my curiosity about the uniqueness of the WWI soldier-scribes. I see that deadgod is trying to offer WW II’s novels as scrip, but my own questions are specifically about poetry.

Could class have had something to do with the WWI poets’ seeming uniqueness? The fact that WWI could have been the last major war in which the sons of the elite were actually on battlefields in large numbers?

Though I’m sure that an innate gift for poetic expression is evenly distributed across the population, I’d also guess that whereas an ex-public schoolboy or grammar school star would have been relatively unembarrassed about trying his hand at verse – and might even have had a talent for versifying recognised in classrooms – most soldiers from the working classes would have had little or no education in poetry. Certainly, they’d have had no praise or encouragement for their early efforts, and would have been seen by family and friends as giving themselves airs – if unwise enough to talk about what they were trying to do.

. . . Or, does WWI’s poetry trail have something to do with battles fought on a timetable, with skimishes restricted to set hours — limited the way office work is today? (That’s only an impression of mine about WWI, and I could easily be mistaken.) Did it have something to do with soldiers’ long nights in cold sodden muddy trenches in which they mostly had to find ways of amusing themselves?