'It Must Be Near the Men and Things We Love'

Two writers whose work I don’t know well and haven’t read in some time have unexpectedly converged, and their meeting spawned thoughts of yet another writer, one dear to me. John Masefield (1878-1967) I first encountered as a boy, probably in an anthology or textbook. I’m certain I read “Sea-Fever,” romantic and almost sing-able for an Ohio landlubber who didn’t see the sea until he was sixteen. The ocean remains a strictly literary notion for this reader, best approached through Melville, Stevenson and Conrad. 

I discovered last week that the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark in 1953 published a monograph, John Masefield, that sounded like a collision of worlds. I know only her early novels – Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The first is an eerie masterpiece. But I’ve read little else by her.

In the Masefield volume, Spark tells us she was attracted to the Poet Laureate’s “narrative art,” his storytelling. She reserves her strongest praise for “August, 1914,” which strikes me as a minor-key masterpiece, an exception to the customary Georgian pigeonhole. Can you think of a sadder, more ominous title for a poem? Spark calls it Masefield’s “first really reflective poem of note” and likens its “slow, tempered measure” to Gray’s “Elegy.” She writes: “Not original in thought it none the less embodies a mood peculiarly English, which the contemplation of a still landscape evokes in times of national danger, and which, in August 1914, many must have experienced.” Consider this:

 

“. . . the heartfelt things, past-speaking dear

To unknown generations of dead men,

 

“Who, century after century, held these farms,

And, looking out to watch the changing sky,

Heard, as we hear, the rumours and alarms

Of war at hand and danger pressing nigh.”

 

Midway, starting with the eleventh of its nineteen stanzas, it becomes overtly a war poem:

 

“But knew the misery of the soaking trench,

The freezing in the rigging, the despair

In the revolting second of the wrench

When the blind soul is flung upon the air,

 

“And died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands

For some idea but dimly understood

Of an English city never built by hands

Which love of England prompted and made good.”

 

"August, 1914" was written soon after the month signaled by the title, but Masefield, unquestionably a patriot, already suggests the war is being fought for “some idea but dimly understood.” I find the next stanza quite moving, if somewhat sentimental:

 

“If there be any life beyond the grave,

It must be near the men and things we love,

Some power of quick suggestion how to save,

Touching the living soul as from above.”

 

Here is where the presence of a third writer emerges -- Vladimir Nabokov. The stanza just quoted might have been written – though perhaps deleted – by John Shade, author of the poem that lends Pale Fire its title. Addressing the “inadmissible abyss” of death, Shade writes in Canto 2:

 

“There was a time in my demented youth

When somehow I suspected that the truth

About survival after death was known

To every human being: I alone

Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy

Of books and people hid the truth from me.”

 

Spark writes of “August, 1914”: “Implied in the poem is the suggestion that ‘life beyond the grave’ is but a shadowy, flickering reflection of terrestrial life, and that it is, in the poet’s phrase, ‘An influence from the Earth from those dead hearts’ and ‘A muttering from beyond the veils of death.’”

 

[Nabokov reviewed Masefield’s 1940 novel Basilissa, a Tale of the Empress Theodora, for New Republic. He didn’t like it. Neither did Spark: “I do not think it succeeds.” You can find Nabokov’s review in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]