'War Is an Ancient Imposter'

“It was a sunny morning, that of July 1, 1916. The right notes for it would have been the singing of blackbirds and the ringing of the blacksmith’s anvil.” 

Without his experience during the Great War, Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) might have become a nature poet. He loved John Clare’s poetry (he named two of his children John and Clare) and Gilbert White. He was a nineteenth-century man in many ways, born to write pastorals. Instead, as his friend Siegfried Sassoon said, Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. The passage above begins his essay “The Somme Still Flows,” written in 1929 and collected in The Mind’s Eye (Jonathan Cape, 1934). He continues:

 

“But, as the world soon knew, the music of the sunny morning was the guns. They had never spoken before with so huge a voice. Their sound crossed the sea. In Southdown villages the school-children sat wondering at that incessant drumming and the rattling of the windows. That night an even greater anxiety than usual forbade wives and mothers to sleep. The Battle of the Somme had begun.”

 

Just as many say the true Sixties started November 22, 1963, with the murder of President Kennedy, so my private calendar suggests the abattoir that would become the twentieth century started on July 1, 1916. The 141-day Battle of the Somme would result in more than one million casualties (killed, wounded, missing).

 

In 1915, a year after the start of the war, Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British Army’s Roy Sussex Regiment. Soon after he was sent to France and posted to its 11^th Battalion, part of the 116^th Brigade of the 39^th Division. Once he was gassed but otherwise never wounded during his almost two years on the Western Front.

 

“Villages, wiped out in a few hours, earned reputations for hopeless horror when our men rose in the daylight from their already destroyed positions and moved to capture them. Some of them they did capture. Few who survived long enough under German guns and machine-guns to enter the trenches opposite could have retained any illusions.”

 

Blunden is seldom graphic in his descriptions of men wounded or killed. He refers to the battle as “a slow slaughtering process.” Blunden closes his essay like this:

 

“War had been ‘found out’, overwhelmingly found out. War is an ancient imposter, but none of his masks and smiles and gallant trumpets can any longer delude us; he leads the way through the cornfields to the cemetery of all that is best. The best is, indeed, his special prey. What men did in the Battle of the Somme, day after day, and month after month, will never be excelled in honour, unselfishness, and love; except by those who come after and resolve that their experience shall never again fall to the lot of human beings.”

'But You Call This Instinct'

Tucked into a brief section at the back of The Poems of Edmund Blunden (Cobden-Sanderson, 1930) titled “Occasional Pieces” is “Under a Thousand Words,” a poem that seems at first to have little to do with Blunden’s service in the Great War. At age nineteen, Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment. He served for almost two years on the Western Front, took part in the engagements at Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. 

“‘A thousand words on Courage.’—This request

Dropped on me like a bomb on a sandbag shelter,

And after much vague mental repetition

Ranging from La Boisselle to Lord Macaulay,

And metaphysical cross-examination

On memories of conspicuous gallant conduct,

I gave it up.

That afternoon our boat

Touched on a mud-flat, which we chose to cross.

And as we waddled through it, a three-inch crab

Disputed progress; one of his arms was gone;

The other he held ready like a boxer.

And backed and sidled to our every movement.

His one arm ready; and to command full view

Of the two monsters who had crossed the frontier.

He strained his body backward, and stood titled,

Parrying every stroke we acted at him.

Eyeing us, holding the line.

‘But you call this Instinct.’”

 

During the week of Veterans Day (November 11), high-minded editors often call for comparably high-minded, embarrassingly idealistic think pieces on Patriotism and Courage – stuff to inspire the folks on the home front. In my experience, veterans snort at such concocted marzipan. Blunden is mostly polite about it. One clue as to his true subject (this is not a nature poem) is the reference to La Boiselle, a village in France contested during the opening days of the Battle of the Somme. On the first day, July 1, 1916, British forces alone suffered more than 57,000 casualties, including more than 19,000 killed. Andrew Roberts writes in Elegy: The First Day on the Somme (Head of Zeus, 2015):

 

“It has been calculated that it would take three and a half days for the 888,246 British  and Commonwealth troops who died in the First World War to march past the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London, even at four men abreast.”

'His Discreet Irony'

An old friend tells me he’s reading Sir Thomas Browne for the first time – Religio Medici (1643) – and having a wonderful time. If you like your first taste of Browne, you’re likely to stick around for the full banquet. His prose is rich and nutritious. I’m pleased that another writer I admire agrees. Rose Macaulay is best known, if known at all, for her novels but in 1931 she published an excellent little book, Some Religious Elements in English Literature (Hogarth Press). She writes of Browne: 

“This charming doctor, distinguished among writers of the day by not being a clergyman, produced, in the most exquisite and splendid prose of the century, the best and most agreeable confession of the Anglican religion ever, before or since, published.”

 

Browne is not writing a straightforward tract in Religio Medici, so don’t be frightened. He perfected the digression in English. There’s something almost childlike about his sense of curiosity. Everything seems to interest him. As Guy Davenport put it, “Curiosity, I’m convinced, is intelligence.” Macaulay celebrates “the delicate, amused, philosophically ironic mind of the most charming writer of his time.” Here is a passage from Religio Medici, an extended analogy, I found quoted recently in a non-literary, musical context:

 

“[T]here is a musick where ever there is a harmony, order, or proportion: and thus far we may maintain the music of the Sphears; for those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For my self, not only for my obedience, but my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.”

 

Though Browne was a scientist, according to the learning of his day, no one reads Browne looking for information about astronomy or the biosciences. As Macaulay writes:

 

“Sir Thomas is an odd mixture of the wild beliefs of his age, in astrology, witches, demoniacal possession, and so on (and though as to all these things we can never take him at his face value, for his discreet irony lies sometimes very deeply hid in the suave turn of a phrase, he is by no means playing at witch-belief), and of a sane and advanced modernism as regards, for instance, the nature of dreams, and hell.”

 

In other words, Browne must be judged as a writer, not as a theologian or scientist. He not only loved words, he invented many of them for English speakers. Among the writers most often cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, Browne ranks seventieth. He is cited 775 times for the first usage of words, and not all are obscure or strictly medical or scientific. Browne gave us, among other things: approximate, carnivorous, coma, computer, electricity, exhaustion, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, holocaust, jocularity, literary, locomotion, prairie, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior, ultimate and veterinarian.

'A Future Close Enough to Smell'

One of my favorite contemporary poets is Deborah Warren, who lives in Massachusetts. She’s smart, technically adroit, has a musical ear and a sense of humor – rare qualities among poets today. Some of her poems stick with me, memorability being a prerequisite of first-rate verse. My mind is associative. One thing leads to another, not always for conscious or logical reasons, though sometimes the linkage is obvious, as with her poem “Down-to-Earth”: 

“In the field the coyote yip-yips imminent danger;

the dog in the kitchen rumbles a basso growl;

the field sends back a shrill elastic baying;

the kitchen gives a soprano howl.

 

“These two aren’t discussing climate change,

war, flu, layoffs; in this dialogue

a well-informed coyote’s not relaying

to a pessimistic dog

 

“grounds for worry—national cases of mange,

the mountain lion population swelling,

a cougar-sighting fifteen miles away—

only a future close enough to smell.”

 

I had been thinking, rather absently, about my brief spell of working as a copy editor at the newspaper in Schenectady, N.Y. This meant knocking off at midnight. The newspaper’s office stands on a bluff above the Mohawk River. When I pulled out onto Maxon Road and headed home, pairs of piercing white lights stared at me, from the pavement and among the trees and tall grass at the side of the road. My previous experience with coyotes was confined to Western movies. The lights stood, unmoving, and I always stopped driving to watch. Furtively, without hurry, they disappeared. Usually, I encountered several more down the black road.

 

Though it occurred in a city, a thoroughly urban environment, where Thomas Edison founded the General Electric Co., this experience ranks high in my encounters with the natural world – up there with a monarch butterfly landing on my shoulder and a squirrel who climbed up my arm when I leaned over to offer him a peanut.

'Hope, Indeed, Is Very Fallacious'

Some years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called MGUS (pronounced EM-gus) -- monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. It’s a symptom-less and in most cases benign disorder, but it can be a precursor to multiple myeloma. It means I see the oncologist once a year, pee in a cup and have six vials of blood drawn. Cancer has consumed a larger portion of my consciousness since it killed my brother two years ago. 

On Thursday, I saw a new doctor, a young woman who worked hard to cheer me up, even though I wasn’t feeling particularly dispirited. In fact, her bubbly approach was annoying but I kept it to myself. Near the end she enthused, like a slightly demented cheerleader, “There’s always hope!” Tell that to my brother.

 

I’m of at least two minds when it comes to hope. On one side, there’s the famous list prepared by the great Soviet writer Varlam Shalamov, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps,” after he survived seventeen years in Stalin’s camps. Here is number eighteen: “I learned why a man lives neither on hope — there are no hopes at all, nor on will — what will?, but only on the instinct of self-preservation, the same as a tree, a rock, an animal.”

 

Similarly, here is a portion of a 1984 interview the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert gave to two of his American translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, in the wake of Jarugelski’s neo-Stalinist crackdown and the rise of Solidarity:

 

Q: “What is the main reason why you write?”

 

A: “Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. ‘Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don't like hope.”

 

Shalamov and Herbert survived Communism. You could say their experiences were too extreme, not typical of humanity’s lot. That’s one way to ignore human nature and its results in the twentieth century.

 

On the other hand, there’s Dr. Johnson, many years before the rise of totalitarianism, writing in the November 6, 1750, issue of The Rambler:

 

“Hope, is indeed, very fallacious, and promises what it seldom gives; but its promises are more valuable than the gifts of fortune, and it seldom frustrates us without assuring us of recompensing the delay by a greater bounty.”

 

My MGUS remains stable: no cancer.

'Spirit, Mettle; Courage, Pluck'

“It happened to me last year to lose my home with all contents in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called blitz, though why we should use the German for lightning for attack by bombs I do not know, unless to appease by euphemism, like calling the Furies Eumenides.” 

Perhaps it’s that Churchillian orneriness of the people of England during World War II. More than bravery it’s defiance, a quality summed up in such words as spunk and grit – tough little monosyllables, hard as rocks. The writer is Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), the perennially forgotten and quite wonderful novelist (The Towers of Trebizond) and superb writer of nonfiction. I’ve written before about her essay “Book-Building after a Blitz,” published in the June 6, 1942 issue of the Saturday Review of Literature.

 

Macaulay had returned to London on May 13, 1941, to find that her flat in Marylebone and its contents had been destroyed during a German bombing raid three nights earlier. The Blitz started on September 7, 1940. For fifty-six of the following fifty-seven days, the Luftwaffe bombed the city. The day-and-night raids lasted until May 11, 1941. Some 37,000 civilians would eventually be killed in Great Britain.

 

Macaulay writes without self-pity or any suggestion of having been singled out for misfortune. She recounts the titles of books lost with sadness but also with a sort of actuarial coolness. She knows what she has lost and will never recover, and writing about it is an act of homage to her books, some of which were originally her father’s. Her literary taste is impeccable, and her library is one any respectable reader or writer would envy. Among her “indispensables” are Browne, Burton, Boswell, Johnson and Gibbon – the cream of English prose.

 

Now I’ve learned a happy coda of sorts. In his essay “The Pleasures of Rose Macaulay,” J. V. Guerinot writes

 

“When her library was totally destroyed in the bombing of London, the first volumes she replaced were the OED. There are those who like their novelists (and such novelists greatly abound) shirts off, muscles rippling, and those who think that the only muscles a novelist may hint at possessing are those needed to take down the wanted volume of the OED from its accustomed shelf.”

 

Our glory as a species is language and the OED is the crown. Its first editor, James Murray (1837-1915), once said when addressing the Philological Society: “I feel that in many respects I and my assistants are simply pioneers, pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no white man's axe has been before us.” I highly recommend Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977), written by his granddaughter, K.M. Elizabeth Murray.

 

Some of us don’t merely consult the OED. We read it. Take those words mentioned above. Spunk: “Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck.” Grit: “Strength of character; courage and resolve; endurance, stamina.”

[Guerinot’s essay is published in the Spring 1987 issue of Twentieth Century Literature.]

'A Dull and Childish Ignorance'

“I have a dreamy way of withdrawing into myself, and, besides, a dull and childish ignorance of many common things.” 

Among the most rewarding gifts of concentrated reading is encountering thoughts we previously assumed were held only by ourselves. This happens most often with writers aware of their own inadequacies. Think of Samuel Johnson and Proust but think especially of Montaigne. Reading his essays is like reading our better selves, but never forgetting our most fallible moments.

 

The line quoted above is taken from a late essay with an unpromising title, “Of three kinds of association.” In it he confirms my “ignorance of many common things.” My list comes readily to mind – foreign languages, sports, Chinese history, automobiles and machines generally (especially computers), politics, gambling, most contemporary pop culture. By this point in my life, I expect to remain “dull and childish” in my ignorance of such things. Montaigne writes:

 

"Life is an uneven, irregular, and multiform movement. We are not friends, and still less masters, we are slaves, if we follow ourselves incessantly and are so caught in our inclinations that we cannot depart from them or twist them about.”

 

The first time I encountered the word “multiform” was many years ago in John Berryman’s poem “Canto Amor” (1947): “Love is multiform.” Montaigne would agree, but the observation doesn’t go far enough. Purity of anything is rare. In the human realm all things are various, shifting, protean. Our natures are watery. Love lives next door to hate. Part of the reason we “follow ourselves incessantly” is that it offers a sense of security, something solid regardless of its truth. I’m reminded of an admirably concise line in Yeats’ poem “Remorse for Intemperate Speech”: “Great hatred, little room.” Yeats is writing of Ireland. He might be writing of human behavior generally. Donald Frame writes in his biography of Montaigne:

 

“His task is to see and describe himself as accurately as he can. His ideas may not be true; his account of them must be. What he aims to make known, he says, is not things but himself; not the measure of things but the measure of his sight. The only certainty he guarantees is ‘to make known what I think, and to what point, at this moment, extends the knowledge I have of what I am treating.’ Hence he speaks out freely even outside his competence. ‘For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed.’”

 

How unlike so many of us, who assume what we believe, our precious opinions, are Gospel. In his conclusion Montaigne offers some hard-earned advice:

 

“The mind is exercised in books, but the body, whose care I have not forgotten either, remains meanwhile inactive, droops and grieves. I know of no excess more harmful to me, or more to be avoided in my declining years.”

 

[The Montaigne passages are from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]