War Trauma and English Modernism: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence

War Trauma and English Modernism

Also by Carl Krockel THE POLITICS OF INFLUENCE: D.H. Lawrence and German Culture

War Trauma and English Modernism T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence Carl Krockel

© Carl Krockel 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–29157–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Krockel, Carl. War trauma and English modernism : T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence / Carl Krockel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–29157–7 (hardback) 1. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Literature and the war. 3. Psychic trauma in literature. 4. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 5. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965.—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930.—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR888.W65K76 2011 820.9'00912—dc22 2011011831 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To my mother

This page intentionally left blank

Contents List of Abbreviations

viii

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction 1

1

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow

24

2 Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915

44

3 Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love”

60

4 Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land

89

5 Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties

128

6 Trauma Transfigured: “The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding

156

Conclusion: The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism

197

Notes

212

Bibliography

222

Index

230

vii

List of Abbreviations T.S. Eliot ASG

After Strange Gods. London: Faber & Faber, 1934.

AWL

The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

C

The Criterion [1922–39] 18 vols., ed. T.S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber 1967.

CPP

The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.

EAM

Essays Ancient and Modern. London: Faber & Faber, 1936.

FLA

For Lancelot Andrewes. London: Faber & Faber, 1928.

ICS

The Idea of a Christian Society. London: Faber & Faber, 1939.

IMA

Inventions of a March Hare. London: Faber & Faber, 1996.

LE

The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume I. Ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. London: Faber & Faber, 2009.

NTDC Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber & Faber, 1948. PP

On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber & Faber, 1957.

SE

Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 1959.

SP

Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber & Faber, 1975.

SW

The Sacred Wood. London: Faber & Faber, 1997.

TCC

To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber & Faber, 1965.

UPUC

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London: Faber & Faber, 1933.

VMP

The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. Ed. Ronald Schuchard. London: Faber & Faber, 1993.

WLFT The Waste Land: a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1971.

viii

List of Abbreviations ix

D.H. Lawrence Letters ii.

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Volume II. Eds. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

iii.

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Volume III. Eds. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

iv.

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Volume IV. Eds. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

v.

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Volume V. Eds. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

vi.

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Volume VI. Eds. James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton and Gerald M. Lacey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

vii.

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Volume VII. Eds. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

LBR

D.H. Lawrence’s Letters to Bertrand Russell. Ed. Harry T. Moore. New York: Gotham, 1948.

Works AR

Aaron’s Rod. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

EmyE

England, My England and Other Stories. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

FLC

The First and Second “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. Eds. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

FWL

The First “Women in Love”. Eds. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

K

Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

x

List of Abbreviations

LCL

Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

LEA

Late Essays and Articles. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

LG

The Lost Girl. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

MEH

Movements in European History. Ed. Philip Crumpton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

MM

Memoir of Maurice Magnus. Ed. Keith Cushman. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987.

MinM

Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays. Ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

MN

Mr Noon. Ed. Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

PUFU

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

R

The Rainbow. Ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

RDP

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine. Ed. Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

SS

Sea and Sardinia. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Studies Studies in Classic American Literature. Eds. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Study

Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

VG

The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories. Ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

WL

Women in Love. Eds. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Faber & Faber for permission to reproduce copyright material of Eliot’s papers at Houghton Library, Harvard. I am grateful to the hospitality and assistance of librarians at Houghton and Kings College, as well as the Berg Collection at New York Public Library. Also I am indebted to Emma Grenville Wood for translations of Eliot’s quatrain poems in French.

xi

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

One of the legacies of our last, violent century is the split in our reading of its formative period, the First World War and the rise of Modernism, between history and aesthetics, the “Georgian” war writers on one side and the Modernists on the other. This division was present during the war, in the terms over which it was fought. The international avant-garde was associated with the rising industrial power of Germany which threatened British imperial interests established in the previous century; this attitude was maintained at great cost in the early years of the war while Britain resisted matching Germany’s industrial-scaled onslaught. As the “Men of 1914” the Modernists both emerged and were obliterated on the first year of war. Wyndham Lewis recalled how “It was, after all, a new civilisation that I – and a few other people – was making the blueprints for . . . Then the war came, and that ended chapter i of my career as a writer and artist with an unceremonious abruptness.” Lewis went to war, T.E. Hulme was killed in 1916, T.S. Eliot struggled to financially support himself and his wife, and D.H. Lawrence kept writing while desperate to escape; Ezra Pound tried to continue to foster literary production despite conceding in 1916 that “the only person of interest left in the world of art, London”,1 was himself. Meanwhile in the warzone Wilfred Owen looked back to Algernon Swinburne, disregarding Modernist trends in his record of experiences. After the war Siegfried Sassoon consistently rejected Modernist poetry as exclusively cerebral, singling out Eliot as his bête noire. In constructing a post-war culture, Modernists tended to pass over the memory of war. Pound emigrated to Paris, while Eliot and the members of Bloomsbury appealed to an exclusive cultural alliance with France, rooted in the late nineteenth century. Eliot valued James Joyce, Pound and Lewis for 1

2

War Trauma and English Modernism

being apparently unaffected by the war, and his attitude was crucial to his whole notion of Modernism which excluded the war poets. His essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” supplanted immediate historical conditions with the legacy of great writers from Homer onwards. Eliot appealed to Joyce’s example in setting the challenge of art “to create a new world” (AWL, 186), while Lawrence’s aim in writing Women in Love was to “build up a new world in one’s soul” (ii. 555). The “war boom” of memoirs at the end of the Twenties overshadowed the “Modernist experiment” at the beginning of the decade. Eliot dismissed this war writing as symptomatic of the rising tide of military aggression in Europe, and W.B. Yeats famously excluded Owen from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1935. Yeats’s attitude was motivated by a sense of Owen and other war poets competing with him as a model for the politically committed poets of the Thirties. As an affront to him and Eliot, Louis MacNeice confirmed that “the nineteen-thirty school of English poets . . . derives largely from Owen”. This opposition continued after the Second World War. Bernard Bergonzi and Jon Silkin privileged immediate eyewitness poetry in their canon of war literature, since their priority lay in access to the authentic experience of war. Tacitly, their approach refuted formalist assumptions about poetry, turning from New Critical principles which had established the pre-eminence of Modernist poetry.2 This perceived absence, or repression, of the memory of the First World War in English Modernism threatens to restrict the event to Flanders instead of the whole of our culture and history. Nonetheless the division between Modernism and war writing that we have inherited is not an arbitrary consequence of later cultural trends, but is rooted in the conditions of the war itself. We need to trace this division back to these origins, in order to revise it.

The authority of experience: the case of the bayonet Despite the devastating impact of war upon Modernist writers, more poetry was composed between 1914 and 1915 than perhaps any other period in British history. However, in lauding the heroism of the troops for King and country the significance of this poetry lay most in how it inspired others to write in opposition to it. As serving soldiers, these writers took on the responsibility of communicating the conditions of the battlefield to civilians. Vivian de Sola Pinto, Sassoon’s secondin-command, described how the civilian and military sides formed “Two Nations”. Sassoon later explained that “the essence of my war poems

Introduction 3

was fellow feeling for the troops, whose sufferings were so remote from the comprehension of many civilians”; likewise Owen returned to the front in 1918 “in order to help these boys . . . indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can”.3 A classic example of the poetry which sought to respond to this split between soldier and civilian is Sassoon’s “Remorse”. A soldier in no-man’s-land recalls bayoneting a German who clutched at his knees in terror: “there’s things in war one dare not tell Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds.”4 For Sassoon “the essential quality” of his poetry lay in it being “true to what I experienced. All the best ones are truly experienced and therefore authentic in expression”;5 this principle runs counter to the Modernist aesthetic of impersonality. Yet instead of bringing the “two nations” together, his poetry presented an unbridgeable gulf between them. The shocking effect of “Remorse” relies on the presentation of a personalised form of war recognisable to the civilian, the hand-to-hand combat of the bayonet. Similarly, in Owen’s “Arms and the Boy” the bayonet alludes to Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy”. Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. Let the fixèd bayonet Gleam with sharp desire to wet Its bright point in English blood Looking keen as one for food.6 Shelley was describing the soldiers at the Peterloo massacre of 1817, and through the allusion Owen made the point of how the army, which was supposed to safeguard its inhabitants, had become perverted by a futile lust to kill indiscriminately. The political point was well made by Owen – however, accuracy regarding the conditions of modern war is sacrificed for it. Combat by bayonet had all but disappeared in the conditions of large-scale war. In Blasting and Bombardiering Lewis reported that “Sixty per cent of the casualties on the Western Front were caused by shell-fire, forty per cent by bullets. (Bayonet wounds were so rare that they do not enter into

4

War Trauma and English Modernism

the statistics.)” In Disenchantment C.F. Montague commented that “the bayonet’s thrust is more of a gesture: a cogent appeal, like the urgent ‘How’s that?’ from the whole of the field when a batsman is almost certainly out”. In Death of a Hero Richard Aldington noted that “it was a war of missiles, murderous and soul-shaking explosives, not a war of hand-weapons”. The historian Denis Winter confirms these observations: “‘No man in the Great War was ever killed by a bayonet,’ claimed one soldier, ‘unless he had his hands up first’. . . . Then as now the bayonet’s function was symbolic and ornamental: without them the sculptures’ internal dynamic is thrown irremediably out of kilter.”7 Remarkably, Lawrence managed to register this fact in the revision of his short story “England, My England”. In the 1915 version Evelyn’s death is described in terms of how an uninformed civilian could imagine the reality of war: For one moment he felt the searing of steel, another final agony of suffocating darkness. The German cut and mutilated the face of the dead man as if he must obliterate it. He slashed it across, as if it must not be a face any more; it must be removed. (EmyE, 232) Evelyn’s death is the culmination of his nullified existence which drove him to war; the whole story is presented through his consciousness at the point of death. Hence the concluding scene focuses on how the German kills him, personally with a bayonet, while trying to obliterate his impersonal expression, a product of his immersion in mechanised warfare. Where Sassoon and Owen expressed the horror of warfare, Lawrence conveyed the horror of what one becomes through participating in it. Then in the 1919 version of the story Lawrence excluded the protagonist’s death by bayonet because he was not concerned with the significance of his protagonist’s death, but in his civilian existence which impelled him to war. Battlefield experience is dismissed, perhaps with self-conscious irony on Lawrence’s part, as “small, unimportant action”, in comparison to the action at home which determined it (EmyE, 30, 32). In effecting this change Lawrence turned out to be more faithful to the actual conditions of war than Sassoon and Owen were. The crucial point indicated by this comparison is how soldiers’ writing of the war tends to be suffused by rhetoric which sacrifices the accuracy of its description. War poetry is in dialogue with its civilian readers, presenting the battlefield as an alien environment. It inverts the images of propaganda, replacing heroism with horror – but still in a personalised

Introduction 5

form. This quality most often occurs in the description of death, which is both the defining cost of war, and which absolutely resists representation. Dennis Welland notes in his critical study of Owen that “a reliable guide to war poetry could be written in terms of changes in poetic attitudes to death”. Bergonzi lists the range from the uninformed acceptance of Rupert Brooke to Sassoon’s angry rejection and Owen’s burning pity. When Owen and Sassoon described the death of a soldier it became suffused in rhetoric, for instance in the concluding part of “Counterattack”: “Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed”. Criticising the commanding officers’ ineptitude, this part was tagged onto the preceding description of the battle scene composed while Sassoon was at the front. Owen also inserted rhetoric into the shocking description of the gassed soldier’s “froth-corrupted lungs” to force home the irony of “Dulce et decorum est”.8 By contrast, in describing his own situation of being declared dead, Graves could only mention the laconic anecdote that a letter of condolence was prematurely written to his mother. These war poets, then, cannot be read uncritically for the veracity of their depictions of war, and neither is their writing a simple product of the horror of war. Most of Owen’s war poems are based on his experiences of the first five months of 1917; he endured very little of the monotony of trench duty which is considered by historians to be the most typical Western Front experience. Sassoon began writing poetry after only a month on the front line in November 1915 and February 1916, without being directly involved in the fighting. Also the divide between combatant and non-combatant follows the outdated lines between the genre of realism as an unmediated reflection of experience, in contrast to the stylistic experimentation of Modernism. It is most problematic in the sense that the extreme conditions of the reality of war demanded new techniques to represent them. Despite being angered by the indifference of Londoners to war in 1915, then the “war-madness” of the following years, Robert Graves conceded the difficulty of comprehending and describing encounters on the field: “All we heard back there in the sidings was a distant cheer, confused crackle of rifle-fire, yells, heavy shelling on our front line, more shouts and yells and a continuous rattle of machine-guns.” Even Sassoon himself conceded in his fictional Memoirs that his outlook on the war was limited to his battalion, and that despite his arrogance about the ignorance of people at home, the war was too large for him to understand. Perhaps the most comprehensive expression of war experience that he witnessed was in the screams of a delirious man in hospital: “All the horror of the Somme attacks was in that raving.”9

6

War Trauma and English Modernism

Breaching the critical divide Reflecting an awareness of these issues, since the Seventies the debate on war literature and Modernism has become more complex, questioning the apparent divide between participants and non-participants. In The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell directly contradicted Bergonzi that the best literature of the war was demythologising: “No: almost the opposite. In one sense the movement was towards myth, towards a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental, and the universally significant. In short, towards fiction.”10 The rhetoric which I have described can be subsumed in this notion of “fiction”. Having distinguished truth value from factuality, Fussell took the debate in two new directions by relating the war to modern culture, and by opening up the theme of sexuality. Criticism has since followed these directions, extending the theme of sexuality to women’s experience of the war, and revising the relationship between soldiers and civilians, especially those producing Modernist culture. Gilbert and Gubar, for instance, identify the shared resentment of Sassoon, Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Lawrence towards women’s empowerment during wartime; also they detail the shared passive suffering of Lawrence, Eliot and civilian women in relation to events beyond control and comprehension.11 These developments notwithstanding, Fussell maintained the divide between front line experience and civilian ignorance, excluding the Modernists; Vincent Sherry accuses him of “a kind of ‘combat gnosticism’”, a term borrowed from James Campbell. Sherry’s The Great War and the Language of Modernism represents the most significant attempt to redress this. It argues that the language of Anglo-American Modernism in the Twenties formed a critique of the rhetoric of liberalism during the war: the politically dominant Liberals had tried to square their values of enlightened democracy which was pacifist with the imperialist defence of Britain’s economic resources. According to Sherry, Modernists such as Eliot and Pound deconstructed the platitudes of liberalism by exposing the contradictions of its logic, and developing a language which located a reality in the objective expression of feeling.12 One of the most striking aspects of his book, though, is how Sherry excludes Lawrence from what is otherwise a comprehensive survey of Modernists. After all, Lawrence was most directly affected by the war in having his work banned, and suffering persecution by the authorities as a suspected spy. Given the direct effect of war on Lawrence, the exclusion of him reflects how Sherry is maintaining the divide between

Introduction 7

war writers and civilian Modernists who reacted to the war’s ideological consequences, not directly to its violence. Sherry’s attitude also points to the much larger issue of how a “subjective” Lawrence is often considered a peripheral figure in an impersonal and detached Modernism. With Lawrence, the issue of the relation between Modernists and war writers becomes much larger, an issue about how we characterise Modernism itself. To relate Sherry’s otherwise powerful theory to Lawrence, one needs to change its points of emphasis. Lawrence’s case foregrounds how a crisis in language could become expressive of one’s psychological crisis in being unable to comprehend the war, and one’s place in history. Sherry appeals to the Modernists’ attempt to “recover the memory, and the shock”13 of the ideological crisis of liberalism; however the shock and memory are much deeper and broader than this for Lawrence, reaching to the actual question of personal survival. Consequently, where Sherry’s focal points are linguistic and political, in the case of Lawrence one should add the biographical and psychological. Also, one can apply these points to the writers whom Sherry discusses, especially Eliot. A book that at least goes in this direction is Modernism, History and the First World War by Trudi Tate. One of her prime examples of civilian war neurosis is how the poet H.D. (Hilda Dolittle) believed that the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 caused the stillbirth of her first child – and the child can be considered a casualty of war.14 However, Tate’s book leaves further questions to be asked. One of its most formidable critics is Sherry, who criticises the terms of her study. Ostensibly about “Modernism”, it restricts itself to prose since Tate argues that the writers only registered the presence of how propaganda distorted the actual conditions of war. According to Sherry, through this choice Tate avoids considering how “modernists might distinguish themselves by becoming animated by these fresh incentives and fashioning an answering language”. So, where Sherry omits Lawrence from his range of Modernists, Tate does not include Eliot, since his response to the war cannot be separated from his development of a Modernist literary style. Also Sherry is critical of Tate’s lack of research into contemporary notions of trauma, by which she could have shown the compensatory function of its symptoms such as the “fugue”, a flight from reality: “Delusional as the ‘fugue’ may be, its protagonist is engaging nonetheless in some sort of compensatory enterprise, regarded by Rivers himself as a regrettable but potentially necessary way of actually dealing with what has happened – a sort of transitional, ultimately beneficial fantasy.”15 Tate points out Lawrence’s delusional treatment of his

8

War Trauma and English Modernism

characters’ injuries, such as Maurice in “The Blind Man” “whose war injury is a source of deep insight, vitality, and joy”.16 On the question of the truth of war, Tate is on the side of Bergonzi’s demythologising, not Fussell’s mythmaking of war. In this context, she regards Lawrence as merely a pathological case of erotic fantasising; she does not recognise how he created a myth as a way of coping with, and ultimately surviving the pressures of war. To understand this larger question one need not only investigate in more depth the nature of trauma, as Sherry advises, but also the psychological and biographical context of the writing. By this means we can show how, and to what ends, the writer is personally reacting to history. None of the major books on the literature of the war that I cite above have done this, for the main reason that it threatens to restrict the consideration of the subject of literature and World War I to an intensive study of a couple of writers, not the period as a whole. I have attempted to counter this problem in my choice of writers, Lawrence and Eliot, who are in so many respects diametrically opposed figures of Modernism, as indicated by Sherry’s exclusion of Lawrence and Tate’s of Eliot. By bringing the two writers together we can break down the boundaries within Modernism, between personality and impersonality, a literature which registers or transcends history, and one constructed from experience or the play of language. Finally, perhaps the most satisfying exploration of the issue of the relative experience of soldier and civilian in the First World War is offered by Samuel Hynes since he has written two books on the subject – which directly contradict each other. His study of 1990, A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture, makes the most convincing link between war writers and Modernists in a shared aesthetic that communicates direct experience – where Sassoon and Owen forged a kind of “objective correlative” from enduring trench warfare. Hynes dismisses their division between combatant and non-combatant experience as a “myth” and as “a curious kind of elitism, not unlike the avant-garde artist towards bourgeois society, but set in terms of war”. Six years later, however, in The Soldier’s Tale Hynes reverses his position, arguing that war writing does not follow a literary tradition because it is confined to experience, to “make war actual”. He describes it as a form of ultrarealism which comes “as close as language can to rendering the things of the material world as they are”.17 I do not draw attention to Hynes’ radical contradictions to undermine his interpretation of the relationship between war and literature, but rather to present it as a model that I wish to emulate. We can only

Introduction 9

acknowledge the contradictions that beset our understanding of the formative period of literature in the last century, between soldier and civilian, direct and indirect experience, entrapment inside and outside historical events, realism and experimentation, physical and psychological trauma. In Lawrence and Eliot I will explore these contradictions. These writers were not threatened by shellfire, but by a society fixated upon war. They were helpless to participate in events which were remote from them, but so was the soldier helpless while caught up in these events. They could not represent war realistically because they had not witnessed it, but realism is an inadequate technique for representing what is too extreme and immense to be grasped by an individual subject. Their lack of physical injury was a consequence of their distance from the violence, but this condition mirrors that of the traumatised soldier, who could not locate his wounds externally and was victim to an injury inside his mind.

Modernism and war poetry: a shared culture Throughout this study I will compare Eliot and Lawrence to a broad range of war writers, including Edmund Blunden, Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Manning, Ford Madox Ford, Herbert Read, Richard Aldington, and ordinary soldiers who gave testimony. I will maintain my focus upon Owen and Sassoon, since they were decisive in constructing the “divide” which my study addresses. They are traditionally regarded in opposition to civilian Modernists not just because of their war experience, but also the “Georgian” techniques they used to articulate it. I will demonstrate that the force of war experience gravitated both civilian and soldier, Modernist and Georgian, towards comparable modes of expression. While establishing links with Modernists, Hynes notes that writers on the front “arrived at the aesthetic of direct experience through experience”,18 not through adherence to Modernist aesthetics. However both groups developed their aesthetics in response to the advent of Modernity, in the industrial conditions of the city and battlefield. In the rest of this Introduction I will draw attention to their shared Romantic inheritance of decadence, which they both modernised by bringing it to bear upon these historical circumstances. I will introduce into my discussion Isaac Rosenberg, who was patronised and misunderstood by Pound and Edward Marsh alike; for my purposes he serves as a bridge between Modernist and Georgian, civilian and soldier. In 1916 Harold Wiltshire’s article for the Lancet discredited the notion that shell shock was caused by the physical effect of shells, since its

10

War Trauma and English Modernism

symptoms were not in genuinely wounded men; instead in the prolonged strain of trench warfare, “the effect of the blows was psychic rather than physical”.19 Two of the most prominent psychiatric doctors during the war, W.H.R. Rivers and M.D. Eder, struggled to distinguish traumas of war from peacetime. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud acknowledged this similarity of symptoms in these cases, only distinguishing those caused in the war zone by their hypochondria and melancholia, and more comprehensive enfeeblement.20 The common link between these civilian and military cases was the economic, social and political conditions of Modernity causing them. The idea of trauma originated during the expansion of the railways in the 1860s, in cases where passengers physically unhurt by an accident later suffered from recurring nightmares and flashbacks. Freud took the railway accident alongside casualties of the war as his defining examples for the condition. Eric J. Leed argues that “war neurosis, like neurosis in peacetime, was a flight from an intolerable, destructive reality through illness”. Just as in peacetime the civilian experienced alienation from an incomprehensibly large economic and social structure, so was the war meaningless to the soldier as an individual because of its enormity: it was impossible to rationalise in terms of plan, order and execution.21 Modernists endured an analogous condition to industrial alienation in the social alienation of the city, and their aesthetic enabled them to at least include this experience as the material for poetry, if not to master its recalcitrant elements. In Death of a Hero Richard Aldington, both soldier and Modernist writer, compared conflict within the city to that of the trenches: How curious are cities, with their intricate trench systems and perpetual warfare, concealed but as deadly as the open warfare of armies! We live in trenches, with flat revetments of house-fronts as parapet and parados. The warfare goes on behind the house-fronts – wives with husbands, children with parents, employers with employed, tradesmen with tradesmen, banker with lawyer, and the triumphant doctor rooting out life’s casualties. Desperate warfare – for what? Money as the symbol of power; power as the symbol or affirmation of existence.22 Here Aldington’s war writing feeds off his Modernist heritage of the city as a nightmare world of monstrous, predatory egos where confrontations can be sudden and shocking, or a slow accumulation of obsessive fears building into morbid hysteria, all in the struggle to survive. Similarly, having left the appalling conditions of London’s East End for

Introduction 11

the Western Front, Rosenberg imagined a “queer sardonic rat”23 in the trenches as if it had arrived from the boulevards once frequented by Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, one can position war writers culturally by comparing their work to, if not rooting it in, earlier Modernists such as Baudelaire. Eliot summed up his centrality to Modernist culture in literary style and personal reaction to historical circumstances: “Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar of modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important” (SE, 426). In his early poetry Eliot emulated Baudelaire’s techniques to convey the disorientation of his experience in the city, and towards the end of the war he adapted them for a more generalised disorientation in historical circumstances; Lawrence mirrored this development from Women in Love onwards, with moments of apparent incoherence providing glimpses of the incomprehensibility of the world it describes. Baudelaire’s, Eliot’s and Lawrence’s Modernist tendencies are not merely the outgrowth of preceding literary trends, but strategies of survival improvised under the shifting pressures of modernity. However where for them “survival” was psychological, for the war poets it was also simply a question of avoiding death. In its plethora of threats and shocks Baudelaire’s Paris represents the archetypal environment for the Modernist artist. Walter Benjamin described how Baudelaire’s “experience of the crowd bore the traces of the ‘heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks’ which a pedestrian endures in the bustle of a city and which keep his self-awareness all the more alert. . . . Baudelaire battled the crowd – with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind.” The soldier faced comparable psychological stresses to Baudelaire, intensified to an almost unimaginable degree. The most important condition for fostering war trauma on the front was the soldier’s immobilisation during combat. For hours in the trench he had to listen to the sound of each approaching shell to calculate whether it would explode at a safe distance or blow him to pieces. Rivers argued that the rational response to anxiety lies in the active attempt to eliminate the source of the threat to oneself; through this activity one acquires a sense of autonomy and volition in relation to the world outside. However, the soldier could not respond to the threat of shellfire, but only remain in the trench and hope that it would miss him. Lieutenant Anthony Alfands explained the high psychological toll from trench warfare: “You sit like rabbits in a burrow and just wait for

12

War Trauma and English Modernism

something to come and blow you to hell. You don’t see the enemy and you kill very few of them. But you shell them very often.”24 While the soldier was unable to objectify the threat of shells, instead internalising it in a paralysed state of terror, Baudelaire internalised the crowds of Paris through a combination of desire and revulsion, without directly representing them. He could not locate the violence of Paris: it was both outside and within him, in the present moment and beyond time. Peter Nicholls explains that for Baudelaire, “in so far as the abrupt movements of the city were incorporated into the artist’s internal life, so the self began to lose its boundaries, becoming instead a flux of sensation and contradictory states of mind”. “Le Démon” is the most striking personification of Baudelaire’s experiences; in “La Destruction” “Il nage autour de moi comme un air impalpable; / Je l’avale et le sens qui brûle mon poumon”. (“He swirls around me like a subtle breeze; / I swallow him, and burning fills my breast”). In Rosenberg’s “The Immortals” trench lice are the equivalent of Baudelaire’s “Démon”, while signifying the ghosts of the enemy whom he kills in his restless nights, only for them to rise again. Owen also presented war not as confrontations with an identifiable enemy: “I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt.” In “Exposure” he described “the merciless iced east winds that knive us” and “the mad gusts tugging on the wire, / Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles”; the stanzas end with “But nothing happens.”25 Virginia Woolf wrote of the importance of the artist’s “shock-receiving capacity”, and Rosenberg formulated a corresponding artistic credo in war: “I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary conditions of this life.” Baudelaire’s techniques are an instructive model for understanding how Modernist and war writings attempt to master, and create, the experience of shock: he was a “traumatophile” drawn to the shocks which generated his poetry. The mastery of shock was necessarily partial since, as Benjamin explains, “if it were incorporated directly in the registry of conscious memory, it would sterilize this incident for poetic experience”. In the dynamic between idéal and spleen Baudelaire both held shock in time, mastering it, and enacted its disturbing effects, as he described his “fantasque escrime” (“quaint swordsmanship”) in “Le Soleil”: “Flairant dans tous les coins les hazards de la rime, / Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés” (“Stumbling on words as over paving stones, / Sniffing in corners all the risks of rhyme”).26 Baudelaire’s poetry explores the rhythms of the psyche through the rhythms in line and stanza. There is no temporal development; the narrator is buffeted

Introduction 13

between moods, and can only record these internal and external commotions. In this mediation of shock Baudelaire is at the forefront of the Modernist aesthetic of direct experience, and in this respect Modernism is closest to the priorities of war writers. Eliot admired Baudelaire’s elevation of “the imagery of the sordid life of the great metropolis . . . to the first intensity” (SE, 426); Eliot’s early poetry of the city was fed by the periodic “nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in the city” (LE, 82). Owen returned to the front in 1918 for the intensity of direct experience out of which to fashion his poetry. Sassoon’s poetry is too easily labelled as realism, however it is far more ambitious, trying to enact the shock of war conditions upon the civilian reader, as he wrote of his most extreme images, “these healthy shocks do people good”.27 Benjamin observed that the artistic consequence of these shocks lies in the way they cause “words to collapse”. Compared to Stéphan Mallarmé and others who would insulate poetry from the dislocated materials of everyday life, Baudelaire incorporated these materials into a fragmentary and often incoherent verse. Eliot shared this tendency in his imperative to “to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (SE, 289). Rosenberg wrote to Marsh that “you can only, when the ideas come hot, seize them with the skin in tatters raw crude, in some places beautiful, in others monstrous”,28 and his method of sewing fragments into poems can be compared to Eliot’s. In the introduction to the 1918 edition of Counter-Attack and Other Poems Robert Nichols described how Sassoon “dislocates his sentences, tumbles out his images as if he would pulp the makers of war beneath them”. The force of directness often overwhelms syntax, in a violent impulse to shock the reader, for instance, in “The General”: “we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine” and “he did for them both by his plan of attack”.29 The apparent simplicity of language is so extreme that it is near to unintelligible, while its meaning becomes secondary to the force of anger behind it.

Owen and Sassoon: romantic to modern However, we need not rely upon these stylistic and historical correspondences to relate the supposedly “Georgian” Sassoon and Owen to Modernists since they share a cultural tradition reaching back to Romanticism, both English and French. Where Georgian poets tended to stress a native, English tradition, Sassoon and Owen were deeply influenced by late nineteenth-century French poetry, in particular the culture of Decadence, a late Romantic flowering from which English Modernism

14

War Trauma and English Modernism

sprang. Owen’s reading of French literature was as wide-ranging and profound as any Modernist’s, strengthened by his personal relationship with the poet Laurent Tailhade. As a reaction to the rise of modernity in the nineteenth century, Decadence contains the psychological tropes that developed in twentieth-century war and peacetime, of ennui becoming a pathological withdrawal from reality, into narcissism where the libido is channelled into sadomasochistic fantasies. Nonetheless it is steeped in a Romanticism which disavows these historical pressures upon it; crucially, Modernists and war writers used this inheritance to express pathological conditions, while tracing its causation to the city and battlefield. The opening poem of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs, “Au lecteur”, makes a declaration which resonates throughout the whole collection: Il ferait volontiers de la terre un debris Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde; C’est l’Ennui! (He willingly would devastate the earth And in one yearning swallow all the world; He is Ennui!) The endless repetition of stress in the urban environment can result in ennui, which causes a painful hypersensitivity and nervousness fostering traumatic neurosis. Baudelaire most strikingly allegorised the repetitive stress of the city in “Les Sept Vieillards” where the narrator is shocked by a “cortège infernal” of old men, who reflect how the mechanical shocks of the city are stamped upon its inhabitants. Benjamin contextualised Baudelaire’s ennui in the “epidemic of boredom” in Paris from the 1840s; he quoted the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet on factories as “true hells of boredom”.30 C.E. Montague introduced his memoir of the war, Disenchantment, with the statement that “all the ungifted young people came back from the war to tell us that they were ‘fed up.’ The war was their ailment, in outline.” In Parade’s End Ford Madox Ford recounted how on becoming a war of attrition, “suddenly it became boring”. Sassoon commented on the disparity between war being “described as the greatest event in history” yet being only “tedious and repetitional”. Those at home were also bored by the war for similar reasons, as Trevor Wilson

Introduction 15

explains: “it went on too long, caused too many deaths, and produced the same indistinguishable episodes too many times”.31 The soldier’s ennui accumulated into pathological withdrawal from the repetitive shock of shells landing near his position. From a sense of immobility and powerlessness, he regressed into psychic retreat. William Johnson described this process during the repetitive attrition of artillery at the Somme: This duel frequently lasted several hours or even days and during this period of waiting the nerves were all on edge. . . . In such instances a breakdown occurred slowly; a gradual change would be noticed in the demeanour and behaviour of the patient and he would eventually reach hospital with the report that he was “quite useless in the line”.32 Ernst Simmel considered the soldier’s detachment from the world as his only viable response to it: rational fear against specific threats to one’s safety turned into a sense of ceaseless, total dread of the environment. It became “unreal” and determined by forces beyond human intervention, subjecting soldiers to its random destructiveness. They became indifferent to their environment because they were unable to determine their relation to it, and from this retreat into narcissism they developed the neurotic symptoms of shell shock. Owen observed this pathological ennui in his men: “not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s”.33 Ennui in Baudelaire’s Paris marks the sociological transition in his poetry from a Romantic to a Modernist sensibility. Eliot accordingly described Baudelaire as “the offspring of romanticism, and by his nature the first counter-romantic in poetry” (SE, 424). Barbara Wright explains that as spleen ennui was more intense than the world-weariness of “melancholy” associated with Romantics in France and Britain, such as Lamartine and Keats. While they despaired in frustration at the gap between the ideal and real, Baudelaire’s ennui is closer to clinical depression or anxiety neurosis, traceable to a sense of personal inadequacy in the face of hostile circumstances: “a kind of no-man’s land, intermediate between life and death, in which objects are anthropomorphised and the poet is depersonalised in a series of lucid self-explorations”. For instance in “Spleen (II)”, where ennui “Prend les proportions de l’immortalité” (“takes on the size of immortality”),34 the poet’s memory mutates into a large chest of drawers, then a pyramid, a graveyard, a dusty boudoir, and finally a granite sphinx.

16

War Trauma and English Modernism

Eliot matched Baudelaire’s expression of ennui in The Waste Land by describing how “the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting”, and took it back to the war zone with a soldier in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” as a “silent vertebrate in brown” (CPP, 68, 56). Similarly, in Owen’s “The Last Laugh” the war environment becomes more alive than the men: “Rabbles of Shells hooted and groaned; / And the gas hissed”. Where Modernists developed a metaphor for psychological damage incurred in the city, on the Front men were literally depersonalised into inanimate matter, as in the “naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair, / Bulged, clotted heads” of Sassoon’s “Counterattack”, and the “jolting lump” of “A Working Party”. Owen, closer than Sassoon to Baudelaire and Eliot, described depersonalisation as a psychological condition of the disturbed victim, for instance “stupid like a cod, heavy like meat” in “The Dead-Beat”.35 Eliot lampooned the Georgian poets, with whom Owen and Sassoon identified, as retrograde Romantics. Certainly Owen’s and Sassoon’s expression of tormented desire is rooted in Romanticism, however, the war transformed Sassoon’s treatment of loss from Romantic melancholy to the condition of anxiety neurosis comparable to Baudelaire’s ennui. For instance the early war poem “The Investiture”, like the pre-war “At Daybreak”, imagines the visit of the ghost of a dead friend to Sassoon’s country home, with a sense of poignancy that papers over potential bitterness at futile loss. In later poems such as “Lamentations” Sassoon attempted to replace sentimentality with a political message in the description of a man mourning his lost brother: Moaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling Half-naked on the floor. In my belief Such men have lost all patriotic feeling. Yet Sassoon often doubted the political impact of his poetry. As in “How to Die” and “Suicide in the Trenches” the political message does not match the intense feeling of loss: there can be no compensation in sentimentality or politics. Consequently, he could only combine loss with a traumatised guilt and helplessness. In “Dead Musicians” the music playing on the gramophone needle pierces the narrator, like the “cursed cares” felt by Baudelaire as “La pointe de soucis maudits” (“a needle entering my soul”): And so the song breaks off; and I’m alone. They’re dead . . . For God’s sake stop that gramophone.36

Introduction 17

Citing Baudelaire in particular, Mario Praz noted that “ennui is only the most generic aspect of the mal du siècle; its specific aspect is – sadism”.37 Baudelaire’s sense of personal inadequacy was compensated by fantasies of violence. In “La Cloche fêlée” the narrator’s lethargy alternates with gratuitous violence; from being a victim he identifies with his potential aggressors, while his cracked bell-like voice resembles the rattle of a wounded man in a scene of lurid violence, over which he relishes. Baudelaire’s self-portrayal as victim and executioner was adopted by a later generation of decadent artists such as Jean Lorrain and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam as the greatest refinement of experience. They retreated from his traumatised realism of modern life into a narcissism of interior experience, aestheticising sensation beyond moral conventions, to the point of sadomasochistic fantasy. With the advent of l’art pour l’art, another indicator of the artist’s alienation from society, beauty became the justification of art: the more depraved the subject, the greater the ambition of the artist was in aestheticising it. The combination of death and desire expressed the artist’s paralysed desire, while it was fetishised and fixed into art. In Huysmans’ A rebours, referred to by Arthur Symons as “the breviary of decadence”, des Esseintes is subjected to his own desires turned inwards, till being consumed by them; he tries to eroticise his failure of fulfilment by deliberately pressing his sensuous pleasures beyond limits of his own natural endurance of consumption, turning his desire into a masochistic anticipation of failure, or sadistic fury. In his last poetry Owen’s debt to French poetry became secondary to Algernon Swinburne, having taken Poems and Ballads into his final battle. Notorious for an abiding fascination with sadomasochism, Swinburne wrote of de Sade as “The poet, thinker, and man of the world from whom the theology of my poem [Atalanta] is derived”. He took Baudelaire’s Fleurs as justification for art’s moral responsibility to challenge social conventions through its artistic presentation of sexual deviance; however he isolated Baudelaire’s erotic subject matter from its source in urban experience, as did the later generation of French writers. Eliot singled out Swinburne’s late Romantic lack of focus upon a specific reality, where “it is, in fact, the word that gives him the thrill, not the object” (SE, 125). In “Asleep” Owen was partially culpable of this effect; “the slow, stray blood came creeping / From the intruding lead, like ants on track” emulates Swinburne’s delicate image in “Laus Veneris” of the dead lover’s neck where “the pained blood falters and goes out; / Soft, and stung softly – fairer for a fleck”.38 Even here, though, where Swinburne’s language draws the reader from the object described,

18

War Trauma and English Modernism

Owen reached beyond him by challenging the reader to tear the veil of language to expose the reality of the “lead” bullet and the suggestion of decomposition in the ants. In “Imperfect Critics” Eliot generalised his criticism of Swinburne to the style of late Romantics as “a short cut to the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples only back upon themselves” (SE, 26). However, Samuel Hynes writes that “strangeness is the great constant in remembered wars”; consequently, “what is constant in [combatants’] narratives is not the horror of war but its difference from any other imaginable existence”.39 The task that the war poets faced lay in committing the resistant “strangeness” of their experience to paper, to preserve its essential, traumatic quality. Graves summed up this challenge in being struck by splattered human brains “as a poetical figment”.40 While setting the Modernism of Joyce in contrast to Swinburne, Eliot wrote that “the language which is more important to us is that which is struggling to digest and express new objects, new groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects” (SE, 127). Owen modernised Swinburne’s imagery by using it to digest and express the experience of war, for instance transforming the pre-war “Has your soul sipped” which lovingly describes the smile of a boy whose throat has been cut, into “Greater Love”: Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead. Although writing in the style of a late Romantic Decadence, Owen updated it with a Modernist apprehension of reality; as Dominic Hibberd writes, “he took the twilight of the Decadence out of dream and fantasy and related it to history”.41 The imagery of Owen’s greatest poems, “Strange Meeting”, “Mental Cases” and “The End”, is drawn from his poetic forbears and private dreams, while recontextualised in war. Unlike Decadent writers including Swinburne, Owen shared with Baudelaire the expression of his personal condition as something historically collective, not merely a psychological phenomenon. As we shall see, Eliot in “Saint Sebastian”, “Ode” and “Sweeney Agonistes”, and Lawrence in Women in Love also brought the sadomasochistic fantasy of Decadence back into contemporary history, under the impact of war. Following this historical model that focuses upon the correspondences and interrelations between Modernists and war writers, I will conclude this Introduction by tracing Lawrence’s and Eliot’s relation to world war at the intersection between the psychological apprehension of events and the artistic expression of them.

Introduction 19

Civilians writing through war The argument of this book is set out in three sections: the outbreak of the First World War, the war years and immediate aftermath, and the post-war era. In each period Lawrence and Eliot are positioned in different ways towards war, to yield distinctive literary testimonies; within this chronological frame there is a psychological one which moves forwards and backwards. Here I will introduce the structures within this frame: the circumstances of the onset of trauma, the defence of anxiety against it, the impact of the trauma, the belated defence against it, and the gradual and partial recovery. Paul Davis has provided an overview of the condition of a brokendown soldier in the Second World War, which can be extended to its predecessor: Amidst a welter of different emotions he will be subject predominantly to feelings of acute anxiety and of exhaustion, of shame at having broken down, of relief at being out of the fighting, of depression and irritability, of hatred for and at the same time fear of the enemy, and so on. But the uppermost factor in his mind must be that he has – temporarily at any rate – failed in his duty as a soldier, whether he openly accuses himself of [it] as not infrequently occurs, or whether he seeks partially to excuse his conduct: he has fallen out of a group of which he was a part and is now separated from it and has to face alone an overwhelming flood of painful emotions.42 Davis’s account includes the social aspect of trauma, of the shame of failing to fulfil one’s duty as a soldier and man, and the corresponding isolation from others. Both Owen’s and Sassoon’s writing is loaded by guilt in letting down their men, Owen being regarded as a coward by his commanding officer for his loss of nerve in January 1917 which caused his following breakdown, Sassoon regarding himself as “a bit of a fraud” for not being involved directly in the Somme advance, and for leaving his troops to make his “Protest” in 1917. These complex motives find their analogies in Lawrence and Eliot. However, where Owen’s and Sassoon’s guilt is thrown into relief by their actions as officers responsible for the welfare of their men, Lawrence’s and Eliot’s is simply from their inability to make a contribution to the war effort or to its cessation, or even to know the conditions of the war zone. Lawrence’s ignorance of the reality of war in 1916 was compensated by his imagining its horror in the violent relationships between

20

War Trauma and English Modernism

the characters of The First “Women in Love”. As he revealed in “The Nightmare” of Kangaroo, his later profound sense of violation during military examinations was partly from a denial of guilt and inadequacy in not being fit enough to be conscripted; the healthy men beside him were destined to risk their lives while he was set free. His writing from The Rainbow onwards was both an attempt to repudiate the war, and to make his contribution to it alongside the soldiers. In the French poems from 1917 Eliot satirised his own existence as both passively subject to the war and outside its sphere of influence. In “Gerontion” he struggled to present himself as both overmastering observer and active participant, resorting to rhetorical gestures which both occlude and betray his failings as a non-participant. From guilt, Owen and Sassoon identified with the victims whom they failed to protect; meanwhile Eliot and Lawrence identified with the soldiers who were sacrificed in their stead. Eliot’s relation to the war is dominated by identification with Jean Verdenal, whose death in 1915 sealed Eliot’s estrangement from him, imbuing it with a sense of guilt since Eliot had rejected the confused idealism that compelled him to participate in the war; Verdenal became an object of melancholy and mourning in The Waste Land. Eliot’s and Lawrence’s war is almost as much from the anxiety of anticipating trauma, as from directly experiencing its impact. Freud explained anxiety as a signal warning of future danger by recreating the affect of discomfort that one felt in a previous situation that resembled the danger. Yet most often, rather than preparing Eliot and Lawrence to face the war, anxiety reminded them of a previous experience of helplessness which disabled them from dealing with it; alternatively, they would appeal to a fantasy of childhood which alleviated their terror, but failed to prepare them for the war. In the first year of war Lawrence attempted to come to terms with the new conditions of warfare, first in the essay “With the Guns” whose description of shellfire practice in Germany only confirmed his horror, and in The Rainbow whose setting in the South African War as a conflict between individuals allayed his anxiety, while falling short of the reality in Flanders. Anxiety as a defence against possible trauma dominated Eliot from 1914 onwards. In poems of 1914 and 1915 such as “The Love Song of Saint Sebastian” then “The Death of St Narcissus” he referred back to a Decadent idea of sadomasochism to understand the rise then overflowing of international tensions in Europe, however this also represented retreat into a literary erotic fantasy. Eliot’s anxiety re-emerged after the war, accumulating up to the outbreak of the following World War. For him remembrance of war was an unpredictable strategy for avoiding its repetition;

Introduction 21

instead he advocated “forgetting” through religious transcendence. Alongside religion, in Burnt Norton and The Family Reunion he appealed to a fantasy-laden memory of childhood as guidance in facing, and escaping from, renewed conflict. As in Dry Salvages where he recalled the example of New England fishermen as a model for the war effort at sea, the inadequacy of these memories to match up to the threat tended to leave Eliot defenceless against it. The moment of trauma itself consists of subjection to a violent event that one was unable to prepare for, usually in circumstances of ongoing stress which leave the subject weakened. Especially from 1915 onwards the war period was stressful for Lawrence and Eliot, in terms of how to survive materially and emotionally in a xenophobic, warmongering society. Lawrence’s stress accumulated from late 1915 with the banning of The Rainbow till he suffered a breakdown in January 1916 with physical symptoms resembling those of contemporary shell shock victims; this provided the psychological conditions for the composition of The First “Women in Love”. His stress intensified further throughout the rest of the war with persecution by neighbours, police and government agents, up to the humiliation of his second physical examination. Lawrence would spend the rest of his life struggling to recover from these experiences. On Eliot’s side, the stress of his difficult material circumstances and shared tendencies to hysteria with his wife culminated in the shock of discovering her infidelity in the final year of war. The relationship between the stress of war and his marriage is impossible to disentangle, and can only be read together in the poetry from “Hysteria” in 1915 to The Waste Land. Also the worsening circumstances of the Second World War up to 1942, when he completed Little Gidding, represent a second period of trauma in his life. The actual traumatic event is difficult to identify in both Lawrence’s and Eliot’s biographies, and consequently reading their work in terms of war becomes more a matter of identifying symptoms as reactions to events, than the events themselves. These symptoms consist of belated defences, of repression, fantasy and traumatic imitation, which both writers struggle to overcome. Lawrence is most subject to traumatic imitation, a condition identified by the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. Unlike the more typical form of identification as reclaiming a lost object of desire, in this case the victim identifies with, or mimics, his aggressor in a desperate attempt to survive. Lawrence first displayed this symptom as early as 1915 in The Rainbow where he attempted to envisage an alternative “fight” in Ursula, but his terms became more aligned with the dominant war ideology of an authoritarian social hierarchy. Traumatic

22

War Trauma and English Modernism

imitation dominated his attitudes after the war, while its terms became enmeshed in his erotic vision, for instance in The Lost Girl and The Plumed Serpent. In Eliot’s case, traumatic imitation only took place in the extreme crisis of writing Little Gidding where he could celebrate a religious triumph in the midst of the darkest year of war, by making the war the instrument of this triumph. Otherwise, Eliot more typically repressed the war, the strict form of the quatrain poems reigning in personal confession, and poems such as the “Ode on Independence Day” alternating abreaction with repression. Also there was a turn to fantasy, as in the vision of New England seamen replacing the tragic heroism of soldiers in the first drafts of The Waste Land. Seen in purely diagnostic terms, Eliot’s turn to religion represents a fantasy outside the pressures of history, most blatantly in Ash Wednesday and The Rock; it conceives disempowerment as resignation and transcendence. These defences all occur in the ongoing struggle to recover from the First World War, of both repetitively acting out trauma and working through it. Lawrence was caught in a “vicious circle” of violently struggling out of the war’s legacy of violence, especially in the prose works of the Studies in Classic American Literature drafts through to the introduction to Memoir of Maurice Magnus. His most striking act of self-therapy is in “The Nightmare” chapter of Kangaroo where he simulated traumatic recall in his protagonist and alter ego Somers; the result is a mixture of acting out the trauma, and coming to a partial awareness of it. However the following novel, The Plumed Serpent, celebrates militarism and authoritarianism more than any other by Lawrence. In his rewriting of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, at least, he progressively worked through the residues of violence from the war, where Connie and Mellors develop a relationship independent of its terms. Compared to Lawrence’s abreactive exposure of trauma, Eliot’s recovery lies more in finding a larger scheme within which to interpret personal experience, beginning with the appeal to “Tradition” in the cross-referencing of The Waste Land. After his conversion he attempted to place experience in the scheme of Anglo-Catholic values; this scheme continued to articulate and repress experience, perhaps most intensely in Little Gidding.

As we shall see, trauma theory is an extremely powerful tool for positioning Lawrence and Eliot in relation to war, since it supplements historical materialism with a methodology for understanding how individuals experienced large-scale events. Kai Erikson reverses the process

Introduction 23

of identifying the victim by the extremity of the event: “it is how people react to them rather than what they are that gives events whatever traumatic quality they can be said to have. . . . it is the damage done that defines and gives shape to the initial event”.43 Trauma theory can be used to measure the impact of the destruction of the symbolic order by which people make sense of their lives. However this strength is open to abuse, as many legal claims for childhood abuse have demonstrated in recent years. We need to be alert to the dangers highlighted by Roger Luckhurst, of how “trauma also appears to be worryingly transmissible: it leaks between mental and physical symptoms, between patients (as in the “contagions” of hysteria or shell shock), between patients and doctors via the mysterious processes of transference or suggestion, and between victims and their listeners or viewers who are commonly moved to forms of overwhelming sympathy, even to the extent of claiming secondary victimhood.” We can claim “secondary victimhood” of war for Eliot and Lawrence, but we need to maintain a distinction between them and the primary victims in the field. The overall purpose of this book, as intimated at its opening, is to explore the magnitude of the impact of world war not only upon its immediate participants, but upon British culture in the twentieth century. In doing so, I will guard against diffusing the extremity of suffering of its immediate victims; instead I wish to commemorate them as the front-line victims of events so cataclysmic that their impact has left no aspect of our culture unmarked.

1 Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow

On 5 August 1914 Henry James registered his shock that the preceding “treacherous years”, “during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering”, had instead led to “this abyss of blood and darkness”. In refuting the claims to progress of capitalism, imperialism and industrialisation, the outbreak of war also proved false the values of the novel since the nineteenth century, of civilisation’s progress through individuals. James later pondered on this: The subject-matter of one’s effort . . . has become itself utterly treacherous and false – its relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world that was to be capable of this – and how represent that horrific capability, historically latent, historically ahead of it? How on the other hand not represent it either – without putting into play mere fiddlesticks? James set the writer an intimidating task: he must deal directly with the war, analyse how civilisation had led to it; otherwise his art was trivial. Resigned to the situation as “too tragic for any words”,1 he could only declare his affiliation to the British cause by naturalising in 1915. A member of Lawrence’s younger generation of Modernists, Wyndham Lewis had attempted to identify with rising war fever in the 1914 issue of BLAST. As “primitive mercenaries in the Modern World” Lewis and his fellow contributors aimed to set up violent opposition as a mechanism of creativity; conflict was a means of generating the energy of inspiration, which was their “cause”. Yet despite the mechanical violence of the war mirroring the geometrical art of BLAST, it was tied to the one-sided cause of nationalism. Consequently in the “War Issue” of July 1915 Wyndham Lewis described how “BLAST finds itself surrounded by a multitude of 24

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 25

other Blasts of all sizes and descriptions. This puce-coloured cockleshell will, however, try to brave the waves of blood, for the serious mission it has on the other side of World-War.”2 Modernist art now lay outside the war, and could only hope to survive it as a bystander. Lewis attempted to explain the problems of representing war: “Like the multitudes of drab and colourless uniforms – these in their turn covered with still more characterless mud – there is no room, in praising the soldiers, for anything but an abstract hymn.” At this early stage he retained the ambiguity whether there were simply too many acts of “brilliant daring” for the poet to comprehensively describe, or whether in the nature of the war, like “ant-fights”, there were none. He echoed Lord Kitchener’s outburst on first seeing trench warfare on the Western Front: “I don’t know what is to be done . . . this isn’t war.”3 It was a new form of warfare that British Military Command, and British artists, struggled to comprehend. Furthermore, there was the issue of confused loyalty, which Lawrence was particularly subject to with his German wife Frieda. Brooke overcompensated for his attachment to Germany with an abstract English patriotism, while Graves pre-empted any accusations based on his German lineage by enlisting immediately. Charles Hamilton Sorley, while also volunteering, perhaps was closest to Lawrence in agonising over the moral right of each side, since his sojourn at the University of Jena had left him pro-German rather than British. For him the war was a tragic paradox of two equally legitimate cultures denying each other the right to exist. Artists during the first year of war were challenged by this three-fold problem of how to analyse, describe and position themselves in relation to war. Lawrence at least had the advantage of witnessing modern militarism when he escaped from England with Frieda in 1913 to the German garrison town of Metz. This setting was crucial for the revolutionising of his art from the realism of Sons and Lovers to the internal exploration of characters, as in “The Prussian Officer” and “The Thorn in the Flesh”. In these short stories he analysed violence as a consequence of repressing erotic desire; he subsequently maintained on 21 September 1914 that “the war doesn’t alter my beliefs or visions” of the necessity to “get our sex right” (ii. 218). A further development of this exploratory style can be found in a surviving fragment of the second version of The Rainbow, composed between August 1913 and January 1914. Ella, the prototype of Ursula Brangwen, and Rupert Birkin touch each other for the first time: She crouched together on the floor, crying like some wild animal in pain, with a kind of mooing noise, very dreadful to hear, a

26

War Trauma and English Modernism

sound she was unaware of, that came from her unproduced, out of the depths of her body in torture. For some wild moments the paroxysms continued, when she crouched on the ground with her head down, crying with an inarticulate, animal noise. (R, 476) This scene is unprecedented in Lawrence’s work for its visceral expression of emotional pain. Later, tears fall from Ella’s eyes, “as from a touched wound”; they drop on Birkin’s “breast bone eating into it like fire” (R, 477). Lawrence was exploring her deep emotional wound which Birkin promises to heal; he defined the significance of her relationship with Birkin in terms of her traumatic one with Ben Templeman, later to be renamed Anton Skrebensky. In turning to the earlier relationship, Lawrence was drawn back from this material with Birkin which later became Women in Love, towards the material of The Rainbow. He wrote The Rainbow to further explore Ella’s emotional trauma, and the events that led to it. A year before the outbreak of war, then, Lawrence anticipated James’s challenge to analyse the violence of the present in terms of the past. In the succeeding drafts he would foreground this violence until it dominated his treatment of Ursula’s and Skrebensky’s relationship. Lawrence began the final version of the novel in December 1914 and completed it just after the first anniversary of the war; consequently it addresses the war in terms of his development over the course of its composition since March 1913. The Rainbow is an attempt to apply an aesthetic developed before the war, to the war period: Ursula inherits Ella’s trauma as a symbol of war.

The South African War as world war Ursula’s relationship with Skrebensky is set around the South African War of 1899 to 1902, which becomes a vehicle for Lawrence’s treatment of the First World War in the novel. Certainly, Lawrence was perceptive in relating the two wars, both of which were expected to be over by Christmas; the South African War became the longest, costliest, bloodiest and most humiliating conflict since 1815, only to be superseded by the First World War. “The constant bad news of the war” (R, 309) in South Africa reflected British news from the Western Front while Lawrence wrote the novel in 1915. The introduction of the telegraph in the South African War enabled reporters to cable back news as events occurred, capturing the public’s attention in an unprecedented way. Headlines such as “Terrible Reverse of British

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 27

Troops – Loss of 2,000” in early November 1899 during the “Black Week” when the British army was chased back to the British town of Ladysmith, anticipated reports of the terrible retreat from Mons between late August and early September 1914.4 The South African War also anticipated the stalemate of trench warfare, such as Spion Kop and Magersfontein Ridge where neither side could exploit its hard-won advantages. The drawn-out attrition of the First World War was comparable to the starvation of the Boers into gradual submission. Both wars, in different degrees, were to expose the decline of British imperial power. Through this historical analogy Lawrence suggested that Britain’s principles for entering war with Germany in 1914 were based on imperialistic and economic concerns, as in 1899. Despite its intentions of denying Germany a navy, colonies or economic superiority, Britain claimed to be preserving a system of national and international order against Germany’s aggressive “Kultur”. Britain stood for the laws of “civilisation”, of rational, democratic reform and Christian values. In Ursula’s conversations with Skrebensky, who adheres to these values, Lawrence exposed the hypocrisy of Britain’s position in the First World War. In his argument that the British “nation” needs Khartoum for space to live in, Skrebensky ascribes to the social Darwinism of Britain’s imperialism in the nineteenth century, with its ideology of the “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest”. This ideology was combined with a Christian militarism which Skrebensky interprets in the Sunday sermon, “the voice of law and order” (R, 302). Kitchener’s triumph at Khartoum was hailed as revenge for Major-General Charles Gordon’s “martyrdom” in 1885 by the supposedly immoral and uncivilised Mahdist regime.5 In 1915 British national unity was centred upon Lord Kitchener as the hero of Sudan and South Africa; his image was identified with the campaign for enlistment. In citing Khartoum, Lawrence anticipated that his projected reader in 1915 would recognise the similarities between Britain’s imperialism and Germany’s call before 1914 for the “Lebensraum” of new colonies. Britain and France, who controlled the great majority of available territory, cited Germany’s belated imperialism as part of its militaristic “Kultur”. Lawrence highlighted the hypocrisy of the Allies’ justification of their cause against Germany. The South African War was also ridden with these ideological contradictions. In the confrontations leading up to war the British demanded from the Boer Government equal political rights for the Uitlanders,

28

War Trauma and English Modernism

who were British migrants to the recently discovered gold mines at the Rand. This demand for democratic reform concealed the imperial ambitions of Sir Alfred Milner to annex the Transvaal region and rule it as a Crown colony, since the Uitlanders outnumbered the Boer population.6 Hence, when Skrebensky returns from the war, after which the Boers submitted to Milner’s demands, Ursula scoffs at democracy in which each voter is “a money interest”. She is alluding to Britain’s disguised imperialism in its call for democracy in the Transvaal, and by implication Lawrence was alluding to Britain’s denunciation in 1914 of Germany’s undemocratic constitution. She dismisses democracy and Britain’s “governing [of Indians] for their own good” (R, 427) in the same breath. Skrebensky represents the class and colonial values of the nineteenth century, including its individualistic capitalism. As a member of “the horsey set of the sappers” he embodies both the traditional, aristocratic side of the army in its cavalry, and the technologically progressive side represented by the Royal Engineers. Ursula is fascinated by Skrebensky’s identity as a soldier, pondering “over his appearance, his clothes, the button with his regimental badge, which he had given her. Or she tried to imagine his life in barracks. Or she conjured up a vision of herself as she appeared in his eyes.” She is attracted to the way that “he was himself”, with his “directness” and “independent motion”, “acquiescent in the fact of his own being”. She imagines him as an aristocrat, or as one “those Sons of God” from Genesis whom it is her “secret hope” (R, 274, 285, 270–1, 257) to marry. Skrebensky’s individualism has aristocratic associations, but as Ursula realises over the course of her relationship with him, it is only an aristocracy of “money”. As the orphan son of the Baron Skrebensky, an impoverished refugee from Poland, he has joined the army to become a fully accepted member of English county society. The army represented an alternative to the relative lack of career opportunities for sons of selfassigned gentlemen. In fact, the regiment resembled a large, comfortable Victorian county family. It is Skrebensky’s “real home” (R, 272); he lives with its commanding officer, Colonel Hepburn, later marrying his daughter, and into his wealth. Although it is not explicit in the novel, Hepburn finances Skrebensky’s career; the greatest challenge for an officer was to maintain the high cost of his lifestyle, which assured the social homogeneity of his rank. The cavalry was the most expensive sector of the army, demanding a private income of between £600 and £700 a year; the failure to match this cost risked social ostracism and even

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 29

expulsion for the young officer. Skrebensky’s underlying materialistic concerns are insinuated by his fastidious valuation of the necklace that Ursula gives to the bargeman’s daughter. He is dependent on Hepburn for his swift rise from subaltern without a commission to first lieutenant, since the regimental commanding officer was the sole judge of promotion through merit.7 Alongside these financial obligations, the individual freedom of the officer was at the cost of obedience to a wide range of rules and regulations in military law. This obedience was instilled during public school education which developed independence of character alongside a team spirit based on order, authority and discipline. The officer-gentleman tradition, which Skrebensky ascribes to, stressed individual honour, integrity and courage, alongside a conformity to etiquette, dress and deportment of polite society.8 Lawrence revealed Skrebensky’s consciousness of his social status as an officer and gentleman. When Ursula observes that the bargeman is “gentle”, Skrebensky remonstrates that he cannot be a “gentleman” since his wife was probably a servant. In her outburst against Skrebensky’s contradictory individualism and tendency to conform to social customs, Ursula switches from the common file to himself: “I hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do you fight for, really?” (R, 293, 289). Against the supposed aristocratic individuality of the cavalry officer, Skrebensky’s identity as a Royal Engineer signifies a more middle-class, modern side of the army. The Engineers were not based on the tradition of purchasing commissions as other sectors were; instead promotion was secured through examinations. They were expanded at the expense of other sectors in the late nineteenth century to provide infrastructure to the colonies. Apart from road building, bridging rivers and arranging water supplies, they also implemented the modern technology of telegraph and telephone links, and the railways.9 In India Skrebensky would be a member of the governing class, concerned with the “fulfilling and executing of the better idea of the state”. He would impose “civilisation” upon the colony to facilitate its economic exploitation. In belonging to the Engineers, he also belongs to the world that Ursula repudiates in her various adventures, of the coal mines and urban schools, of the “blind, sordid, strenuous activity, all for nothing, fuming with dirty smoke and running trains and groping in the bowels of the earth, all for nothing”. Despite expressing his individuality in work and aristocratic sports, Ursula recognises that “he was always side-tracking, always side-tracking his own soul”. He is

30

War Trauma and English Modernism

“secretly moved” by Ursula’s appeal for rule by aristocracy, but only because the army was resistant to reform by the Government, which endangered its traditional prestige.10 His “aristocracy” is made up of “those who have money and the brains for money” (R, 411, 431, 411, 427) to sustain an officer’s extravagant lifestyle; he can only emulate them through the financial support of his colonel. Lawrence’s comparison between the South African and First World Wars, then, focuses upon the decline of British dominance in world affairs, from unexpected defeats and the stalemate of trench warfare. He revealed the emptiness of the term “nation” whose economic and political interests override the needs of its individual civilians. Britain’s “democracy”, too, is only a banner under which to wage its imperialistic aggression. The army which serves these values is structured around material wealth and a jealously guarded social hierarchy, concealed by an image of aristocratic heroism. In this respect, Lawrence meets the challenge set by Henry James at the beginning of war, of “how to represent that horrific capability, historically latent, historically ahead of it”.

Historical anachronisms Yet there are deep strains in Lawrence’s reading of history in terms of contemporary experience. This is evident in the manuscript of The Rainbow where Skrebensky argues that “If we hadn’t wiped out the Zulus, they’d have wiped us out.” This argument is not appropriate in the context of British colonial expansion, but echoes the attitude between the opposing sides of the Great War; the emerging climate of attrition predicted that the defeated side would be the first one to run out of soldiers. Lawrence is also anachronistic in recording that “everywhere was a fizz of excitement” (R, 622, 303) on the outbreak of the South African War in October 1899. As Thomas Pakenham testifies, the British public felt little emotion or tension at the outbreak of what was dubbed “the tea-time war”.11 Given that, as Lawrence was aware, Kitchener had only recaptured Khartoum a year earlier in 1898, the South African War was part of an ongoing struggle by Britain to maintain its colonial interests. Every year in the last third of the nineteenth century (except 1883) was marked by the British army’s involvement in colonial wars.12 More critically, by 1915 the professional army that Skrebensky belongs to had been all but decimated. John Keegan describes the Battle of Ypres between October and November 1914 as both “a crucial success and the destruction of the old regular army”. A third of the BEF (British

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 31

Expeditionary Force) was killed in this battle alone, and further losses were exacted in early 1915 at Neuve Chapelle and the Second Battle of Ypres. Graves described how in eight months of fighting, his battalion had lost its full fighting strength five times over.13 For a professional soldier such as Skrebensky the South African War had been an opportunity to climb the social ladder; in the first year of the Great War the great majority of his fellow officers would have been killed. Skrebensky’s self-assured individuality is a product of his career in the army. In The Soldier’s Tale Samuel Hynes describes how war was a career and ultimate field sport for the original British army: “In that old tradition, war was a splendid occupation for gentlemen and a personal one.” The soldier was a free agent in his own war. Skrebensky resembles the professional soldier Julian Grenfell, one of the first “war poets” to be killed, for whom war was “like fox hunting, or pig sticking, or polo, a sport that called for skill and courage and a bit of luck”. Skrebensky looks forward to living in India where “There’s a good deal of social life, and plenty going on – hunting, polo – and always a good horse – and plenty of work – any amount of work.” His speculation that war would be “exciting” (R, 411, 287) reflects Grenfell’s famous observation in October 1914: “I adore War. It is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic.”14 Professional officers were replaced by middle-class volunteers with public-school or university backgrounds, who lacked a sense of the traditions and rules of military life, or of how to behave in combat. Graves, for instance, only enlisted to postpone going up to Oxford; on the battlefield he would calculate the most opportune time of the day for receiving a non-fatal wound, as a tactic of survival.15 These men later depicted the First World War as we now understand it. Their war was developing beyond the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century disputes over colonial territory into an event that had its own rationale. Lawrence shared with his contemporaries the problem of comprehending the unprecedented scale and technological complexity of modern warfare. The war effort was directed by Sir John French, cavalry commander during the South African War, who was frustrated continuously in his intentions of using the cavalry to cross no-man’s-land. The failure of British offensives in 1915 was due to the colonial outlook of commanders who expected decisive results from a comparatively small outlay of forces. Men were no longer free agents in their own war, but had been thrown into unimaginable conditions where slaughter was too commonplace to be distinctive. The technology of machine-gun and shell fire caused unprecedented slaughter; it also resulted in random

32

War Trauma and English Modernism

and anonymous killing, against which soldiers were powerless to determine their fate. Instead of personal, defiant acts, the soldier could only resort to a passive courage of endurance; technology demanded the organisation of materials and men into an abstract, unified system of force. The war effort was a result of the scale of production of the participating nations: war had become an autonomous machine dictating the motions of men, not an opportunity for them to display their valour, as Skrebensky does in South Africa.16 This issue underpins the long-running critical debate on Lawrence’s treatment of history in The Rainbow. While celebrating the novel as a record of “essential English history”, Leavis’s distinction between Lawrence’s “religious” and George Eliot’s “ethical” visions pointed towards the difference between his style and that of nineteenth-century realism. This distinction was seized upon by Graham Holderness in his comprehensive rebuff of Leavis’s argument; he claimed that in Lawrence’s “abandoning realism” for “myth”, the novel’s “form and method amount to a denial of history and an affirmation of ideology”. Mark Kinkead-Weekes has since authenticated the novel’s allusions to industry, urbanisation and education; he argues that Lawrence’s “double-focus” deviates from this empirical history to “myth” in an attempt to envisage a possible alternative direction for the future.17

Crisis Nonetheless, in contrast to the general ignorance of others, Lawrence was exceptional in his awareness of the modern conditions of warfare. In his article “With the Guns”, published in the Manchester Guardian on 18 August 1914, he recalled his observations of the Bavarian army training in the Isar valley during the previous autumn. From this experience he could dismiss the cries of “When you see ’em, let ’em have it” by women to departing English soldiers: “I could see what war would be like – an affair entirely of machines, with men attached to the machines as the subordinate part thereof, as the butt is part of a rifle.” He knew that the soldiers would not even “see” their enemy when they “let ’em have it”, but would fire in the direction of “an enemy a mile and a half away, men unseen by any of the soldiers at the guns”. Identifying with the soldiers, he described them “serving a machine which, for ought we knew, was killing our fellow-men, whilst we stood there, blind, without knowledge or participation, subordinate to the cold machine”. On the other side, “Who it was did not matter. There were no individuals, and every individual soldier knew it. He was a fragment of a mass, and as a

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 33

fragment of a mass he must live or die or be torn. He had no rights, no self, no being” (TI, 81–2). Lawrence concluded the article asking, “But what is it all about? I cannot understand; I am not to understand. My God, why am I a man at all, when this is all, this machinery piercing and tearing?” (TI, 83–4). He could understand the passion of individuals fighting face-to-face, but not warfare on a mass-scale. Consequently, from the beginning the First World War in its scale and intensity overwhelmed Lawrence. He set up the question of how to respond to it by pouring his own feelings into Ursula during the South African War: Vaguely she knew the huge powers of the world rolling and crashing together, darkly, clumsily, stupidly, yet colossal, so that one was brushed along almost as dust. Helpless, helpless, swirling like dust! She wanted so hard to rebel, to rage, to fight. But with what? (R, 304) She echoes Lawrence’s immediate response to the “colossal idiocy” of the First World War, in which “everything seems gone to pieces”. Like Lawrence in “sheer rage” (ii. 212, 206), she wants “to rebel, to rage, to fight. But with what?” Lawrence lamented on 25 August 1914 that “the war is just hell for me. I don’t see why I should be so disturbed – but I am. I can’t get away from it for a minute: live in a sort of coma, like one of those nightmares when you can’t move” (ii. 211). This sense of helplessness and paralysis is crucial to the traumatic nature of war, since the victim cannot adequately retaliate, only withdraw upon himself; John Middleton Murry described Lawrence in late 1914 with “head bowed, radiating desolation”.18 The trauma cannot be countered because it both escapes the victim’s grasp, and penetrates his being. Cut off from events, the closest that Lawrence could get to them was to imagine himself as a casualty, as in the poem “New Heaven and Earth”, first drafted between January and July 1915: “When I saw the torn dead, I knew it was my own torn dead body. / It was all me, I had done it all in my flesh” (CP, 257). Meanwhile, he lamented that “the subterranean black universe of the things which have not yet had being – has conquered me for now, and I can’t escape” (ii. 307). As we shall see in the following chapter, in poems such as “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?” Lawrence mirrored Eliot in identifying narcissism as a defensive measure which could be inverted by masochistically relishing violation; significantly though, composing in the first person Lawrence both diagnosed society, and himself.

34

War Trauma and English Modernism

Lawrence’s early reaction to the war, which would dominate him in the post-war period, can be diagnosed in terms of “traumatic identification”, of mimicking the aggressor. In December 1914, while declaring himself “tired of this country, the war”, Lawrence also claimed to be “glad of this war” since “people have felt much more deeply and strongly these last few months, and they are not going to let themselves be taken in by ‘serious’ works whose feeling is shallower than that of the official army reports”. Having written the first hundred pages of the final version of The Rainbow, he believed it to have the emotional weight of a casualty list or report of manoeuvres. Over the course of 1915 he internalised the violence of war, for instance in April that “Sometimes I wish I could let go, and be really wicked – kill and murder – but kill chiefly. I do want to kill. But I want to select whom I shall kill. Then I shall enjoy it. The war is no good. It is this black desire I have become conscious of. We cant so much about goodness” (ii. 240–1, 315). At best, Lawrence could only reintegrate violence into his organic notion of growth. Against the sentiment “no need for hate or growth” in Bertrand Russell’s synopsis for “Philosophy of Social Reconstruction”, he wrote that “there will always be hate & conflict. . . . But let our hatred & conflict be really part of our vital growth, the outcome of our growing, not of our desire for sensation” (LBR, 95). As Diana Fuss explains, the process of identification with others both organises one’s identity, and destabilises it since there can be “multiple and contradictory identifications coexisting in the subject at the same time”. In traumatic identification there is a radical splitting in the victim’s psyche between identifying with and suffering from the aggressor. Ferenczi sketchily explains this in his Clinical Diary: “When I am frightened of a dog, I become a dog. After such an experience, the ego consists of the (undisturbed) subject and the part that has become the object through the influence of the trauma.” Combined with the subject’s instability from this splitting of the self, traumatic identification has a multiplicity of potential meaning: as an act of repression attempting “to make a sustained injury not have happened”; as unconditional surrender; as seeking to “know the dangerous opponent through and through . . . so that one can protect oneself against him”;19 or as communication to the aggressor of their own brutality. Where his personal alternative of fulfilment was alien to mass manoeuvres and genocidal carnage, and his solitary voice was drowned out by the clamour of press, politicians and populace, Lawrence could only resist the war by compromising with it. The instability of positions, between suffering and identification, and within identification

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 35

as denial, surrender, protection and communication, characterises Lawrence’s early reaction to the war. His psychological contradictions are expressed in the contradictions of The Rainbow, between the individual and collective, love and violence. In denial he presented Ursula’s inner division between the self that fights and feels alongside her later miscarriage, as necessary sacrifices for her self-realisation. He surrendered to the large-scale forces of war with an abstract language expressing Ursula’s loss of selfhood in her confrontations with Skrebensky. To protect himself by understanding war, he imitated its technological aspect with a language of scientific precision; also to assimilate himself into it, in letters he envisaged himself as a leader of a community whose hierarchy mirrored that of wartime. Finally, he attempted to communicate to his readership the brutality of war with an imagery that included “blades of destruction” and “annihilation”. In my analysis of these manifestations of traumatic identification I will focus on the tension between the representations of personality and impersonality in the novel.

Personal and impersonal visions of war In “With the Guns” Lawrence approved of the Italian soldier’s inability to adapt to modern warfare. The traditional “old natural courage” in which the “naturally good” Italians “see our enemy and go for him” (TI, 83) can be related back to Lawrence’s celebration of “a belief in the blood”, as expressed in the Italian’s impulse “to kiss that girl”, or “to insult that man” (i. 503, 504). This personal form of war fed into Lawrence’s prescriptions in “Study of Thomas Hardy”, begun in September 1914. He set up the opposition between the principle of “self-preservation” in civilisation and how man has “wasted himself”, from “begetting children” to “making graven images of his unutterable feelings”. War is a negative form of creative existence in reaction to our security: “No wonder there is a war. No wonder there is a great waste and squandering of life. Anything, anything to prove that we are not sealed in our own self-preservation as dying chrysalides.” For Lawrence life was a personal war, in “the firing line, where what is and what will be separates itself off from what has been”, not of “states and nations with their ideals, their armaments of aggression and defence”. The battle of each living being lay in realising “the full achievement of itself” (Study, 7, 15–16, 35, 39, 12). In war, by contrast, people longed to throw off the burden of their individual freedom for a nationalistic authoritarianism; for instance in November

36

War Trauma and English Modernism

Lawrence decried how after the shelling of Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough, “the whole country is thrilled to the marrow, and enjoys it like hot punch” (ii. 244). Consequently, in The Rainbow Lawrence resolved to follow the war “home to the heart of the individual fighters – not to talk in armies and nations and numbers – but to track it home” (ii. 233). In Ursula’s confrontations with Skrebensky she would, symbolically, “with her bare hands fight the face of the earth, beat the hills in their places” (R, 304). Yet it is debatable to what extent her development can provide a model of realising Lawrence’s vision. For instance, she begins her relationship with Winifred Inger amid the ensuing reports of the South African War where, “in this state, her sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within her” (R, 309). War hysteria resembles an epidemic which infects her sexuality. Likewise, her destructive relationship with Skrebensky is as much subject to the contagious influence of war, as it represents a locus of health. Ursula’s development reflects the darkening of Lawrence’s analysis of the war in 1915. Where the “Study of Thomas Hardy” characterised the volunteer’s motives as a reflex action against the materialism of modern society, an assertion of the right to throw away one’s own life, in “The Crown” this assertion was reinterpreted as a grotesque form of self-realisation, a sexual consummation. Also, Lawrence’s appeal for individual realisation instead of mass annihilation was tempered, even contradicted, by his revolutionary break from the realist novel’s “the old stable ego of the character” over the course of redrafting The Rainbow. In the September 1914 letter to Gordon Campbell he proclaimed his “vision” to “get our sex right”, not through a masculine or feminine “ego” that “feels”, but through the “female” and “male” that “is”. He associated personal feeling with the “mechanical”, reflex response to war, of aspiring towards empty values such as honour and material wealth in civil society (ii. 183, 218). He admired Hardy most for how his characters “explode out of the convention” (Study, 20), breaking from society, and from their egos which are constituted out of its values. To fully realise itself, the individual must transgress the prescribed boundaries of the ego to the “firing line” of otherness and the unknown. In this violent aspect, Lawrence’s impersonal style also facilitated what Kinkead-Weekes observes in the final revisions of The Rainbow as an intensifying of “the potential destructiveness already there in some of the conflicts” in the manuscript.20 As we shall see, though, Lawrence’s “impersonal” language risks mimicking the violence of war, instead of articulating the characters’ selfrealisation in opposition to it.

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 37

In the stackyard scene between Ursula and Skrebensky during the wedding party Lawrence introduced a language of impersonal violence. We can glimpse his process of composition by analysing a passage of the manuscript (the published variants are in square parentheses): She took him in the kiss, hard her kiss seized upon him, hard and fierce and cold [burning corrosive] as the moonlight. . . . Till gradually his warm, supple shadow [soft iron] yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, blazing fierce and hard and cold upon him, and his heart was gone, and his strength. Under her hard, openmouthed, coldly fierce kiss he succumbed, and she held him there, the victim. [corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. And her soul crystallised with triumph, and his soul was dissolved with agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed, annihilated.] (R, 627, 299) The romantic expression associated with being seduced (“succumbed”) is replaced by a scientific one (“dissolved”). The chemical process of Ursula “dissolving” Skrebensky while her being “crystallises” is recorded with precision. Skrebensky is still personally a “victim”, but a “victim, consumed, annihilated”, like a substance. On the next page of the published novel Lawrence replaced the personal expression “murdering” with “annihilating” (R, 628). Another suggestive passage occurs before Ursula and Skrebensky dance, which Lawrence revised from the manuscript, and typescript also: And she knew that, if she turned, she could tear him to pieces, scatter his shadow in fragments under the moonlight. [would die. A strange rage filled her, a rage to tear living things asunder. Her hands felt like knives, like metal blades of destruction.] [would die. A strange rage filled her, a rage to tear things asunder. Her hands felt destructive, like metal blades of destruction.] (R, 625, 297) There is a three-fold development in this passage. In the typescript Lawrence excised the romantically evocative image of the shadow and inserted the physical details of “knives” and “blades”. In the published version he moved towards a more generalised imagery of “blades” and

38

War Trauma and English Modernism

“destruction”, like the change from Ursula “murdering” to “annihilating” Skrebensky. Lawrence turned from romantic abstraction to the physically tactile, then back to an abstract language which evokes not feeling, but the indiscriminate, large-scale slaughter of war. In the final version Ursula does not merely want to “tear living things asunder”, but all “things” – including civilisation and culture – which was beginning to occur in Europe through the war in 1915. In this scene Ursula and Skrebensky are most impersonal, and closest to enacting the violence of the Western Front; they are so close to it in their lack of volition as individuals, that Lawrence’s alternative to the war risks becoming indistinguishable from it. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, other English Modernists such as Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists in BLAST attempted to identify with the war by marrying their artistic innovations with its technological developments. Despite Lewis’s admission of defeat in this enterprise, the July 1915 issue sought to depict the war directly, from its front cover of soldiers pointing their rifles at the buildings of Antwerp, to images of a “War-Engine” and marching soldiers. Lewis opened the issue with “War Notes”, while H. Sanders contributed “A Vision of Mud”. In “Vortex (written from the Trenches)” Henri Gaudier-Brzeska celebrated “the intensity of life” among the waves of slaughtered “human masses”, horses, dogs, and “the bursting shells, the volleys, wire entanglements, projectors, motors”.21 His tragic death within the year betrayed the grave reality belying their aestheticisation of war. In the letter to Campbell, Lawrence prescribed “awe and dread and submission” before the “tremendous unknown forces of life . . . driving us, forcing us, destroying us if we do not submit to be swept away” (ii. 218). Yet men volunteered to submit and be swept away by “tremendous unknown forces of life” on the Front, only to be destroyed by them. Although Lawrence was responding to the war in his depiction of the violence between Ursula and Skrebensky, he is also straining to dissociate Ursula from the war, to set her up as an alternative to Skrebensky. Lawrence was caught in a dilemma: on the one hand, the generalised images of Ursula’s violence can be confused with those of war; on the other hand, in distancing her from the war’s large-scale violence, her relevance to it is weakened. To resolve this dilemma between the individual and impersonal Lawrence found himself once again identifying with the war, in terms of its prevailing ideology which celebrated the nostalgic sentiments of individual courage and communal spirit. Eric J. Leed describes August

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 39

1914 as the last great national incarnation of the “people” as a unified moral entity. The masses were no longer a potential mob, but a moral presence embodying the solidarity of the nation. Described by T.E. Lawrence as “equality under compulsion”, the war ideology maintained the “community of August”: in a rigidly structured, conventionalised existence the soldier and the patriotic civilian avoided the indecision, aimlessness and loneliness of peacetime. Men renounced their materialistic, socialclimbing egos, and the dilemma of serving themselves at the expense of others in society, for action which was supposed to serve both parties. On a larger scale, the war filled in the fissures of a society on the brink of disintegration with the looming threats of civil war in Ireland and a general strike in industry.22 Lawrence’s struggle to force reconciliation between individualism and the social whole characterises his political ideas in 1915, and to an extent in The Rainbow. For instance, he explained to Lady Ottoline Morrell the spirit of Rananim as where “each one may fulfil his own nature and deep desires to the utmost, but wherein the ultimate satisfaction and joy is in the completeness of us all as one”. Inadvertently, Rananim mirrors the philosophy of the British army, as well as its class structure. Impressed by Lady Ottoline’s “nobility”, Lawrence invited her to form the “nucleus of a new community”; he described himself as a “naked, intrinsic class-less individual”, yet still “would give a great deal to have been born as an aristocrat” (ii. 271, 265, 281) like her. The military ideal of the adventurous soldier who serves his comrades, who is subservient to a rigid class structure, is mirrored in Lawrence’s own political ideals. As the war progressed, Lawrence was no longer critical of the war because it suffocated individuality, as he argued in “Study of Thomas Hardy”, but because it failed as a force for social unity: it was a symptom of social disintegration. Referring to the Welsh Strike on 14 July 1915, he argued that “this war is going to develop into the last great war between labour and capital”, and that “unless real leaders step forward, to lead in the light of a wide-embracing philosophy, there will be another French Revolution muddle”. He believed that only his “religious” philosophy could inspire leadership over a unified nation, as he expressed to Gordon Campbell in March 1915: “in me, and in you, is the living organic nation. It is not politics – it is religion” (ii. 366–7, 301). In his commitment to the dismantling of the state, Bertrand Russell repudiated Lawrence’s vision of a nationalised state which, as Ray Monk comments, demanded “perhaps even greater control over its citizens than the one that had plunged England into the First World

40

War Trauma and English Modernism

War”. Critics such as Macdonald Daly have criticised Lawrence’s vision as “reactionary” and irrelevant to “the actual historical conditions of wartime England”.23 The problems of Lawrence’s politics lie at the root of critical arguments regarding the ideology of The Rainbow, and they become most urgent at the novel’s conclusion.

At The Rainbow’s end: “England, My England” Lawrence wrote the first version of the short story “England, My England” immediately after completing The Rainbow. Despite its title alluding to William Ernest Henley’s poem celebrating the English soldier’s “faith”, “life”, “joy” and “death” to the “bugles blown” in South Africa, Lawrence made a significant step towards understanding the development of the war by making its protagonist Evelyn Daughtry a volunteer, not a professional soldier. The short story is something of a postscript to the novel: while Evelyn escapes from civilian life through a consummating death, Ursula faces a “destructive consummating” struggle towards a new life. In his depiction of Ursula’s second series of encounters with Skrebensky in “The Bitterness of Ecstasy”, preceding her final vision of the rainbow, Lawrence attempted to establish a language from the war, to articulate an alternative to war. However there are many analogies between Ursula’s psychology and Evelyn’s, which confirm Lawrence’s increasing struggle to distinguish his vision from the war. On the battlefield Evelyn’s being is married to the machinery: he experiences “the keen isolation of his own abstraction, the physical activity at the guns keen as a consummation” (EmyE, 227). In this respect, he is part of the industrial reality that Ursula and Skrebensky disavow in their “superb consummation” together. He resembles Ursula’s uncle Tom Brangwen in his passivity before the machinery which determines his actions and existence; while Tom maintains his self-preservation in an industrial society, Evelyn awaits death in an industrialised war. Ursula liberates herself from Tom’s industry, and by implication from Evelyn’s war, through “a great, passionate effort of will” (R, 417, 324). The parallel between Evelyn and Skrebensky bears upon Lawrence’s diagnosis that “man must find a new expression, give a new value to life, or his women will reject him, and he must die” (ii. 635). Evelyn is unable to adapt his “old breeding” to the roles of husband and father, while Skrebensky can only locate his identity in the declining class-system and imperial cause. Both men belong to an old world that is disintegrating in the midst of war.

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 41

And yet, Evelyn’s identity as a soldier bears many similarities to Ursula in her confrontations with Skrebensky. His “destructive spirit entering into destruction” mirrors Ursula’s hands, “destructive, like metal blades of destruction”. Both characters initiate a split within themselves between their social, personal self and their other “self”. Evelyn has abandoned his civilian “loving constructive self” (EmyE, 226–7), while Ursula rejects all social relations in the isolation of her “permanent self” (R, 418). Evelyn is profoundly ambivalent upon his arrival in France: “He hated it violently, and yet it gave him the only real satisfaction he could have in life now” (EmyE, 226). Ursula closes off part of herself while achieving “her satisfaction” with Skrebensky (R, 411). In the final chapter Ursula’s detachment from physical reality foreshadows Evelyn’s state, “detached from his wounds and his body” (EmyE, 230). After being hit by the shell, Evelyn establishes a “knowledge” beyond an awareness of his body, of “a transcendent state of consciousness”: Beyond his knowledge of his mutilation he remained faint and isolated in a cold, unchanging state. His being had become abstract and immutable. . . . And out of the cold silence came the knowledge. It was decided he remained beyond, clear and untouched, in death. (EmyE, 230–1) Lawrence used similar language to describe the “unchanging”, “inalterable knowledge” of Ursula’s “isolation” from physical reality: As she sat there, spent, time and the flux of change passed away from her, she lay as if unconscious upon the bed of the stream, like a stone, unconscious, unchanging, unchangeable, whilst everything rolled by in transience, leaving her there, a stone at rest on the bed of the stream, inalterable and passive, sunk to the bottom of all change. (R, 454) Both Evelyn and Ursula transcend the physical being of their bodies and the outside world; their sense of being can only be described in negative terms such as “unchanging”, “unchangeable”, “inviolable”, “immutable”, “inalterable”. Lawrence was unable to express Ursula’s being positively, which left it indistinguishable from Evelyn’s state in death. In his “isolation” from the outside world, Evelyn has no reason to continue living: “He had no relation there. He fell away towards death” (EmyE, 231). Ursula and Evelyn are trapped within themselves, in a civilisation where the immediacy of human contact, once possible

42

War Trauma and English Modernism

through erotic desire or shared communal values, has been supplanted by a contact which brings mutual destruction. In establishing Ursula as the harbinger of an alternative to war, Lawrence was forced to imagine a future reality that she could represent. In historical terms, the ending of The Rainbow demanded a projected resolution to war, only six months into its four-year duration. Ursula’s vision bestrides the whole of industrial society, while being embodied through individuals: “the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit” (R, 459). A day before completing the manuscript on 3 March 1915 Lawrence communicated this vision to Lady Ottoline Morrell: “To live, we must all unite, and bring all the knowledge into a coherent whole, we must all set to for the joining together of the multifarious parts, we must knit all Words together into a great new utterance, we must cast all personalities into the melting pot, and give a new Humanity its birth.” Paradoxically, where Lawrence was most clear-sighted, the contradictions of his political vision are most clearly exposed: all knowledge, Words and personalities must unite to give birth to “a race of free individuals”. Again, Lawrence articulated the dominant war ideology of apparently free soldiers willing to give up their individual lives for the “race” as a whole (ii. 297).

In The Rainbow, then, Lawrence focused upon the South African War to express his attitudes towards the First World War, and to envisage a possible alternative to it. Yet he attempted to criticise an industrialised, depersonalised form of warfare in his depiction of Skrebensky’s aristocratic, “professional soldier”. This historical anachronism marks the crisis in Lawrence’s relation to the war, which would later intensify to traumatic breakdown. At this early stage, before the climactic shock in late 1915, he suffered from the onset of traumatic stress which is manifested as identification with war, both in resistance and submission to it. This ambivalence is expressed in The Rainbow where his personal and impersonal visions of war become enfeebled alternatives to it; he resorted to resolution by identifying with the prevailing war ideology, articulated in Ursula’s rainbow. F.R. Leavis dismissed Ursula’s rainbow as an aberration compared to the rest of the novel since it fails to correspond to her personal circumstances; Holderness by contrast regarded it as “the true consummation of the novel’s form, the symbol for its explicit refusal of historical tragedy”. Perhaps the most significant quality of Ursula’s rainbow, though,

Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 43

is what John Worthen refers to as Lawrence’s “impotence in realising such hopes”24 for England in 1915. The triumphalism of Ursula’s vision of “the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the overarching heaven” is tempered by an underlying poignancy. The description of colliers with “eyes of those who are buried alive” evokes images of missing soldiers buried alive in mud displaced by shells. The “new, clean, naked bodies” (R 458–9) of individuals are only a dream for the thousands of permanently maimed soldiers, whom Lawrence witnessed at home. This subtext of despair would become the dominant theme of Lawrence’s writing in the following years while war remorselessly continued to wreak its devastation.

2 Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Eliot wrote that “anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year” requires “the historical sense”. His precise choice of age has encouraged contextualisation of this statement in his own biography, in which case he would have been twenty-five in September 1913, two years after his early flowering of poetry. Yet while Eliot’s “historical sense” in 1919 was of “a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (SE, 14), his sense of history from sailing to Europe in July 1914, weeks before war was declared, was of an indeterminate menace. His poetry in the first year of war strained to find meaning between private and historical experience, although he managed to compose the first fragments of what would become The Waste Land, the testament of his “historical sense”. Eliot disclosed in a letter from 8 September that war “has left a very deep impression on me”. His confused feelings about it were compounded by his struggle to orientate himself in an alien country; he noted that “the great moral earnestness on both sides . . . has made it impossible for me to adopt a wholly partizan attitude”, since up to the following March he hoped to return to Germany. His “war poem” “Up Boys and at ’em!” represented an adolescent repudiation of “our heroes” bravery at sea: What ho! they cry’d, we’ll sink your ship! And so they up and sink’d her. But the cabin boy was sav’d alive And bugger’d, in the sphincter. (LE, 61, 64) 44

Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915 45

Here he was satirising jingoistic war poets such as Jessie Pope, for instance inverting her accusations of the treacherous Germans whose “every mutilating thrust / Comes from behind”, and of non-participants who should “put on petticoats and feel a little cheap / While we go marching to Germany”.1 Yet, to assuage his sense of inadequacy and guilt while other students from Oxford were being killed, he longed to emulate the volunteers: “I should have liked to have gone in to the training corps myself, for the sake of being able to take my exercise with the Englishmen, but they won’t take a foreigner. It is not pleasant to think that if the Germans did get over here I should be obliged to sit still and not even look out of the window, but I suppose that the contingency is a remote one.” The closest that he could come to identifying with the war effort lay in his resolution in January 1915 to write an “entirely destructive” second version of his doctoral thesis on the philosopher F.H. Bradley, which would declare that “no definition of judgement . . . is formally either right or wrong; and it simply is a waste of time to define judgement at all”. However, this stance only reflected his inability to decide between the rights and wrongs of the warring parties. In November 1914 he expressed resignation about his situation: “What else should I say about Oxford, or about the war? Let us take them for granted” (LE, 67, 89, 75). As we shall see in this chapter, Eliot’s testimony of war before 1915 does not record trauma experienced, but anxiously anticipated. To prepare my analysis of Eliot’s testimony throughout the war and beyond, here I shall consider the personal and artistic aspects of his early formation which would determine his experience and response to events. His complex relationship with Jean Verdenal represents his most direct personal link to war; they were both torn between a need for personal experience and impersonal order, which Verdenal attempted to resolve by volunteering for active service. Also, in his early phase Eliot followed the tradition of Baudelaire’s poetry as a reaction to the shocks of the modern city, and will transform this style into a reaction to modern warfare.

Jean Verdenal: Eliot’s doppelgänger In one of many offhand notes to his early criticism, Eliot conceded that he had “personal reasons”2 for asserting impersonality in literature. Certainly the process of composing his manifesto of impersonality, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” from November 1919, involved a filtering of personal issues. Published in The Egoist five months earlier,

46

War Trauma and English Modernism

“Reflections on Contemporary Poetry” by contrast makes close analogies between the experiences that contribute to one’s development as a writer and man. Stressing the “peculiar personal intimacy” between the young and “dead author” through its conversational tone, the article preserves the immediacy of personal reminiscences, while displacing them from their original context: It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person. The imperative intimacy arouses for the first time a real, an unshakeable confidence. That you possess this secret knowledge, this intimacy, with the dead man, that after few or many years or centuries you should have appeared, with this indubitable claim to distinction; who can penetrate at once the thick and dusty circumlocutions about his reputation, can call yourself alone his friend: it is something more than encouragement to you. It is a cause of development, like personal relations in life, it may and probably will pass, but it will be ineffaceable.3 The references here to Eliot’s own development need to be disentangled. The most likely candidate for his “first” literary “friend” is, of course, the French poet Jules Laforgue; the “many years or centuries” of separation by “thick and dusty circumlocutions about his reputation” would indicate perhaps Dante. However, the “secret knowledge” and “intimacy” of the “first passion” of “personal relations in life” most likely indicate Eliot’s friend during his “romantic year” in Paris, Jean Verdenal. Killed in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915, his memory would implicate Eliot most profoundly in the First World War, even though their communication ended perhaps as early as 1912. Their friendship passed, but remained “ineffaceable”, to leave its strongest mark on The Waste Land. The difference between this essay and “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, which would remove the role of life experiences from the writer’s development, directs us towards the contradictions, not merely between Eliot’s poetry and criticism, biography and literary career, but within these spheres. In particular, these contradictions reflect the ambivalent presence of Verdenal, in one perspective coupled with Eliot’s literary experiences, in another regarded as something to be escaped from by means of literature.

Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915 47

Perhaps one reason for this disavowal lay in Verdenal’s failure to provide Eliot with the ability to metamorphose from “a bundle of secondhand sentiments into a person” with “unshakeable confidence”. Instead, the two men would have been drawn most to each other by the shared contradictions in their personalities, as we can gauge from Verdenal’s surviving letters to Eliot. Mirroring Eliot, Verdenal’s philosophical and cultural attitudes were individualistic and romantic on one side, while classicist and self-renunciatory on the other. This division can be summed up in his passionate adherence to the Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson, and the fascist movement Action française. France, after the Dreyfus Case in 1899, was in the grip of violent ideological divisions, exacerbated since 1905 by the law separating Church and State; in Sorbonne the prevailing scepticism of the philosophy department, which Eliot attended, left Verdenal’s generation looking for a coherent, forward-looking faith.4 Verdenal compared the “critique rationnel” (“rationalistic critic”) at Sorbonne to “l’enfant qui casse son jouet mécanique pourvoir ce qu’il y a dedans” (“the child breaking his clockwork toy to see what there is inside”) (LE, 21–2). Bergson had established a cult following at the Sorbonne for his opposing position to the other professors: “L’intelligence est caractérisée par une incomprehension naturelle de la vie.” (“The intellect is characterised by a natural inability to comprehend life.”) In one of his last letters to Eliot, Verdenal argued for an idealism that is independent of material circumstances, but “inherent à l’élan de la vie” (“inherent in the impulse of life itself”) (LE, 34). Through coining the “élan intérieur” Verdenal echoed Bergson’s celebration of “élan vital”, the force behind each individual’s “durée pure”, “don’t l’écoulement est continu, et où l’on passé, par gradations insensibles, d’un état à l’autre”, (“of which the flow is continuous and in which we pass insensibly from one state to another.”)5 In A Sermon at Magdalene College Cambridge in 1948 Eliot recalled that “my only conversion, by the deliberate influence of any individual, was a temporary conversion to Bergsonism”; the most likely candidate for this individual was Verdenal. Between January and February 1911 Eliot attended seven lectures by Bergson at the College de France, and “gave close study to the books he had then written”.6 Eliot’s “temporary conversion” is articulated in “Bacchus and Ariadne 2nd Debate between the Body and Soul” from February 1911. The promise of passionate transcendence that Verdenal hoped for is on the brink of realisation: I saw their lives curl upward like a wave And break. And after all it had not broken –

48

War Trauma and English Modernism

It might have broken even across the grave Of tendencies unknown and questions never spoken. (IMH, 68) Yet there is uncertainty whether the passionate “wave”, like the waves of Bergsonian “durée”, has broken across the grave of the lovers’ alien “tendencies” and “questions”. While Verdenal celebrated “élan intérieur” in his letter to Eliot, back in Harvard Eliot already was drafting his own critique of Bergson’s philosophy.7 In a paper on politics and metaphysics from this period he perhaps cast a stone at Verdenal while dismissing Bergson as “the sweet Siren of adventurous [wondering] philosophers”, for whom “purposes and intentions are replaced by pure feeling” (IMH, 409). For Eliot, Bergson’s notion of durée did not provide a metaphysical centre for one’s integrated self, but instead located the subject’s often traumatic experience of reality which threatened to disintegrate the self; durée was the site of contradictions, not of their resolution, which constituted identity. For instance, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which Eliot had thought “at the time, or at least before the poem was finished, was entirely Bergsonian” (IMH, 411), records durée, yet as a neurotic state of being. For Bergson the crucial ability of the artist lies in his being detached from the need to act, perceiving objects for their own sake; Prufrock’s detachment from the need to act is more from indecisiveness in not knowing how to act, and his memories, without actions to determine them, are subject to his neurotic anxieties. Perhaps Verdenal shared with Eliot an underlying dissatisfaction with Bergson, since his affiliation with the right-wing movement Action française was incompatible with the philosopher. The leader of this movement, Charles Maurras, who centred his political philosophy on classicism and French virtues, had attempted to thwart the Jewish philosopher from election to the Académie Française; besides the racial issue, Bergson’s sanctification of individual durée was anathema to Maurras’s militaristic social ideal. In his 1916 Oxford University Extension lectures in Yorkshire Eliot registered some of the convolutions within modern French culture: the “philosophy of 1910” was embodied by Bergson, with his “use of science against science”; “strongly influenced by Bergson”, Charles Péguy’s and Georges Sorel’s brand of socialism with its nationalism and Catholicism had “much in common with royalism” as practised by Maurras.8 Nonetheless in 1948, providing

Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915 49

a testimonial for the former Nazi collaborator, Eliot remembered Maurras as “a sort of Virgil who led us to the gates of the temple”; his influence upon Eliot had continued into the Thirties. Despite its contradictions with his artistic and spiritual passions, Verdenal’s affiliation with Action française would explain why he renounced deferment from military service in March 1913 to join the 18th Infantry Regiment. Action française had grown dramatically in strength since the decreasing confidence in parliament in 1905 and Moroccan Crisis in 1911 with Germany; it was pivotal in calling students, its main party of interest, to arms in the years leading up to war. Verdenal then volunteered for the Western Front at the opening of war, and from November till February 1915 as a medical officer. Just as Lawrence unwittingly succumbed to the prevailing war ideology in 1915, Verdenal immersed himself in France’s “Union Sacrée” which suspended national political divisions, and the divisions within himself.9 Eliot’s other “dead friend” in “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry”, Jules Laforgue, provided him with a “metaphysical Pierrot” (IMH, 60) to precisely and mercilessly detail the inner contradictions that Verdenal had struggled to overcome. Eliot valued Laforgue’s irony for its ability “to express dédoublement of the personality against which the subject struggles” (C XII, 469), more so than Bergson’s solution to this “dédoublement” by returning to the primary experience of “durée”. In this respect Laforgue represented a position beyond Verdenal, the final impasse of Romanticism, of recognising the futility of realising an ideal, without renouncing the aspiration towards it. Also in his doctoral thesis Knowledge and Experience from 1913 to 1916 Eliot wrote that “to realize that a point of view is a point of view is already to have transcended it”; he worked through the contradictions he shared with Verdenal as far as philosophy could take him (KE, 147). Nonetheless, despite Eliot’s consistent scepticism of metaphysical solutions, Verdenal would remain for him the image of his earlier self as the “convert” in Paris struggling for personal unity through the “durée” of his own “élan vital”. Verdenal would become a more insistent presence through death, since Eliot identified with the memory of him to compensate for his loss.

Incipient testimony The significance of Eliot’s early verse for his later poetry registering the shock of war lies in how it articulates his existential contradictions in

50

War Trauma and English Modernism

relation to his traumatic exposure to the city. In this respect, the figure of Baudelaire exerts a profounder influence upon him than Laforgue. In his later career Eliot stressed how Baudelaire set “a precedent for the poetical possibilities, never developed by any poet writing in my language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern metropolis”. Eliot pinpointed Baudelaire’s influence to the opening from “Les Sept Vieillards”: “Fourmillante Cité, cite pleine de rêves, / Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant” (“City of swarming, city full of dreams / Where ghosts in daylight tug the stroller’s sleeve”), which contributed to the vision of the “Unreal City” in The Waste Land. In particular Eliot valued Baudelaire’s “fusion between the sordidly realistic and the fantasmagoric” (TCTC, 126–7), that is, between brutal material conditions and the psychological reaction which is capable of imaginatively redeeming them as poetic material. As Eliot wrote elsewhere, in Baudelaire there was “a dim recognition of the direction of beatitude” (SE, 428). Perhaps the most apparent influence of Baudelaire upon Eliot lies in the proliferation of spleen, as it was discussed in the introduction. Eliot’s poetry is inhabited by dehumanised people such as the narrator of “Do I know how I feel?” who lies “on the floor a bottle’s broken glass”, and by humanised objects, most famously the evening “spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table” (IMH, 82, CPP, 13). Eliot described his “urban habits” as “pre-natal” (C XVII, 482); his very being was defined by the city. As for Baudelaire, the city provides the setting and material of expression of Eliot’s simultaneous desire for sin and its redemption. On the last day of 1914 he confessed to Conrad Aiken: “I have been going through one of those nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city. Why I had almost none last fall I don’t know – this is the worst since Paris. I never have them in the country” (LE, 81–2). In this sense Eliot’s experience of the city resembled that of the speaker in Baudelaire’s “A une passante” on glimpsing a beautiful widow: “not the rapture of a man whose every fibre is suffused with eros”, Benjamin explained, but “rather, like the kind of sexual shock that can beset a lonely man”.10 Lyndall Gordon sums up, that Eliot emulated Baudelaire as a traumatophile in the city “so that he might contemplate with horror a life bereft of morale or dignity”, and in so doing “find some clue to the meaning of life”.11 Eliot’s poems predating his year in Paris set the tone of his later treatment of the city, and of the First World War: divisions within the self confuse its relation with the outside world; the world in turn mirrors the self and further complicates the relation between them with its

Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915 51

own incongruous natural and artificial, material and spiritual elements. Following Baudelaire the “Second Caprice in North Cambridge” of 1909 attempts to refashion a sordid scene into a poetic vision: The helpless fields that lie Sinister, sterile and blind – Entreat the eye and rack the mind, Demand your pity. (IMH, 15) The landscape is ambivalently presented as helpless, blind and entreating on one side, and sinister, sterile and racking the mind on the other. The speaker claims to pity the vacant lots and fields, yet in so doing he denies their arresting effect upon him. Here Eliot failed to rise to Baudelaire’s challenge of redeeming the ugliness of life through the techniques of art; instead he appealed unconvincingly to religious compassion instilled by his family. In later poetry he abandoned the poses of irreverent irony and Christian charity, to explore the crisis of his identity in the midst of urban degradation. Eliot’s poetry up to 1911 often counterposes a philosophical ideal of being with a disorientating urban reality. In “First Debate between the Body and Soul” from early 1910 the blind old man is ambiguously related to the speaker sitting in an empty square, “devoted to the pure idea”: The eye retains the images, The sluggish brain will not react Nor distils The dull precipitates of fact The emphatic mud of physical sense The cosmic smudge of an enormous thumb Posting bills On the soul. (IMH, 64) The brain is unable to process random sensations into meaningful experience, leaving the soul exposed to them. The prospect of this “pure idea”, though, can also be a terrifying premonition of nothingness, as in “Silence” of June 1910. In reaction to the influence of Bergson appealed to by Verdenal, both “Bacchus and Ariadne” and “Prufrock” turn from an ideal vision of the

52

War Trauma and English Modernism

durée of inner élan vital to a traumatic reaction to the world. The ecstatic vision of “Bacchus and Ariadne” is countered by a middle section where the speaker endures the shocks from outside: The world of contact sprang like a blow The winds beyond the world had passed without a trace I saw that Time began again its slow Attrition on a hard resistant face. (IMH, 68) As Erik Svarny notes,12 the “overwhelming question” posed among threatening, deserted, labyrinthine streets of “Prufrock” is more fully explored in “Prufrock’s Pervigilian” as the Bergsonian question of the meaning of accumulated experience: I fumbled to the window to experience the world And to hear my Madness singing, sitting on the kerbstone [A blind old drunken man who sings and mutters, With broken boot heels stained in many gutters] And as he sang the world began to fall apart. . . (IMH, 43) The blind old drunken man is a trope from Baudelaire’s “Les sept vieillards” to express the poet-narrator’s subjectivity in terms of the urban circumstances which threaten to obliterate his subjectivity. Instead of an affirmative élan vital, there are the “thousand sordid images / Of which your soul was constituted” in “Preludes III”, also composed during the summer of 1911 (CPP, 23). In Knowledge and Experience Eliot attempted to establish whether there is a truth value in Bradley’s notion of “immediate experience” which precedes the distinction between subject and object, like traumatic experience. Eliot maintained that “the only independent reality is immediate experience or feeling” because it can “never be analysed away”; however instead of providing the basis of truth, it is only “a ‘confusion’ of feeling”, “only present and is”. He concluded that “if anyone assert that immediate experience, at either the beginning or end of our journey, is annihilation and utter night, I cordially agree” (KE, 15, 30, 20–1, 31). Nothingness and the overwhelming shock of material stimuli represent the two faces of immediate experience, since it precedes conscious subjectivity. In his poetry during the war and afterwards Eliot would realise that “immediate experience” could not yield an ideal, but rather, an equally

Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915 53

valuable record of the subject’s suffering in history. In “Morning at the Window”, perhaps dating from September 1914, his Baudelairean style of urban disorientation anticipates this by articulating his early experience of war: The brown waves of fog toss up to me Twisted faces from the bottom of the street And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts An aimless smile that hovers in the air. (CPP, 27)

Preparing for war On the outbreak of war when stranded for two weeks in Germany Eliot was subjected to anxiety, as he recalled immediately afterwards, “there was really no danger for us, but the suspense” (LE, 56). Feeding from anxiety stretching back to the beginning of the year, Eliot’s series of narratives on martyrdom is apocalyptic both in the pervasion of violence and an accompanying promise of religious revelation. His poetry retains this anxiety after 1914, since his experience of the whole war would be characterised by suspense, not the tragedy from which he was excluded. An example of this poetry of anxiety, “The Engine” can be placed alongside Eliot’s other prose poem “Hysteria” in 1915, or earlier, given its ominous forebodings and ambiguous relationship between the threat and the speaker. Set on a ship boarded by American business men, the poem draws upon Eliot’s experiences of travelling to Europe, while including suggestions of war. The use of the word “salient” in the image of the American passengers’ faces forming a plane “broken only by the salient of a brown cigar and the red angle of a six-penny magazine”, could point to trench warfare; if so, the Americans, including Eliot, are ill-prepared for it. The engine driving the ship, “hard, deliberate, and alert; having chosen with motives and ends unknown” (IMH, 90), could symbolise civilisation’s remorseless mechanised progress towards selfdestruction. The engine stops, initiating a moment like in “Silence”, either nothingness of death, or a prelude to revelation. Freud concluded “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” in 1915 by counselling his civilian readers on this situation which Eliot was subject to: We recall the old saying: Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want to preserve peace, arm for war.

54

War Trauma and English Modernism

It would be in keeping with the times to alter it: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death. In his general theory, anxiety is a signal which enables the subject to foresee and expect a traumatic situation through repeating its affect in reduced form from a previous situation. David Eder diagnosed some of the traumatised soldiers under his care in 1916 as “psychasthenics”, explaining: “with Freud we can say that the hysteric suffers from his past, the psychasthenic suffers from his future. . . . To avoid the difficulties which loom so tremendous, his mind busies itself in the creation of phantasies centering around the past.”13 We have seen how Lawrence attempted in The Rainbow to define the threat that war posed to himself and his culture by reading it in terms of the South African War; Eliot was engaged in a similar effort, reflecting the threat of war by looking backward, both to the religious questions of his childhood, and by regressing stylistically to the culture of Decadence with its expressions of erotic violence. The inability to objectify the source of anxiety leads to two symptoms: the generation of further anxiety and a conflation of the threat outside with instinctual threats from within. Freud distinguished “realistic” anxiety which appears rational and intelligible, from “neurotic” anxiety which generates further anxiety, leaving the subject paralysed. Similarly, Eder noted how his psychasthenic patient “cannot fit himself into the real world which his unconscious self has already foreshadowed”. Eliot’s poems in 1914 and 1915 fail to quell the anxiety of what they foreshadow; they resemble “anxiety dreams”, from which one awakens in a state of anxiety since the mind’s censorship has failed to convert distressing feelings into wish-fulfilment.14 Eliot’s first poem anticipating war is “The Burnt Dancer” of June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, and just before Eliot set sail for Europe. Before the assassination the prospects of European war were uncertain. On a backdrop of large-scale enlistment in France, naval reinforcement in Britain and Germany, and Russia’s project of mobilising by rail, throughout early 1914 leaders within the Triple Entente and Triple Alliance discussed preparations for war. Eliot, at least, when travelling from France to Munich had been in a unique position to observe both sides during the previous most serious confrontation between France and Germany, the Agadir Crisis of 1911; at this time he received a letter from his French tutor, the writer Henri-Alban Fournier, saying that he had been an internationalist a few years earlier, but

Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915 55

would “partirais aujourd’hui bien contre” (“now very willingly march against”) the Germans (LE, 26). Nevertheless even in June 1914 the awareness of civilians, particularly Americans such as Eliot, would have been limited, with an indeterminate sense of foreboding. The moth as the “burnt dancer” is a messenger of humanity’s destiny, of which Eliot is extremely uncertain: Of what disaster do you warn us Agony nearest to delight? Dance faster dance faster There is no mortal disaster The destiny that may be leaning Toward us from your hidden star Is grave, but not with human meaning. The speaker first asks what disaster the moth warns of, reassuring himself there is “no mortal disaster”; then he states it is “grave, but not with human meaning”, which could mean either that it is irrelevant to the fate of humanity, or that it would be brutally inhumane. The vagueness of the poem’s vision is accentuated by its undigested influences, as Christopher Ricks has listed, including Symons, Edger Allan Poe, John Davidson, and perhaps most significantly Dante. Eliot’s later allusive poetry uses sources as a platform from which to, at least partially, reach a position beyond them that is set in its own historical moment; in “The Burnt Dancer” there is little transformation through its larger structures. Eliot turned back to earlier poetic manifestations of anxiety to anticipate, and also to discover a refuge from, his immediate future. His sources convert his actual threat of annihilation into a fantasy of sexual release; for instance Dante’s Paradiso XXXIII 46 “al fine di tutti I disii” (“to the end of all desires”) anticipates how the burnt dancer, “Losing the end of his desire / Desires completion of his loss” (IMH, 62–3). Eliot’s letters from Marburg in July 1914, when he composed “The Love Song of Saint Sebastian”, display the disinterestedness of an American abroad. There is a historical irony in his comments on the future setting of the Western Front in his letter to Conrad Aiken: “Flanders on the whole I don’t care for; it is neither French nor German, and seems to combine some of the defects of both. Still, it is unique, and the paintings are stunning!” Eliot’s comment to Aiken on the 25th, “We rejoice that the war danger is over”, coincided with Austria’s

56

War Trauma and English Modernism

unacceptable ultimatum designed to coerce Serbia into war. On the 26th Eliot described nonchalantly his evening routine with the pastor’s daughter Hannah: “we read the paper, and discuss the Balkan Question, and the difference in climate between America and Deutschland” (LE, 45, 49, 52). War was declared two days later. Despite this apparent ignorance of events, “Saint Sebastian” reflected upon the threat of violence in its exploration of sadomasochism and religion as a “prayer / And torture and delight”. Having studied the Sebastians of Mantegna, da Messina and Memling on his journey to Marburg, Eliot asked Aiken, “why should anyone paint a beautiful youth and stick him full of pins (or arrows) unless he felt a little as the hero of my verse?” (LE, 48). Eliot was fascinated by what the figure of Sebastian, also prominent in Decadent culture, disclosed about European culture and history running up to the present. He attempted to establish a psychological meaning for impending wide-scale violence where Sebastian mutilates himself to impress his lover: Then you would take me in Because I was hideous in your sight You would take me in without shame Because I should be dead (IMH, 78) At its most immediate relation to history, this section can be read as an analysis of sexual relationships in war: the woman’s shame is circumvented since Sebastian promises to mutilate and kill himself for her; his spectacle of martyrdom will compel her to submit to him out of guilt for his suffering. He in turn will achieve satisfaction by violating her. According to Freud the cause of neurotic anxiety is internal while realistic anxiety is external, however the distinction between them cannot be maintained in war where the external threat is beyond apprehension; in “Saint Sebastion” the gap between the imagery of sadomasochism and the actual threat of war reflects how Eliot was victim to both real and neurotic anxiety. Furthermore, as analysis of imminent war “Saint Sebastian” falters, not least because it enacts what it diagnoses. Conscious of the Decadent excesses of morbidity, sensationalism and abnormality, Eliot asked Aiken when submitting the poem, “does it all seem very laboured and conscious?” (LE, 49). Certainly, it rivals the density of Swinburne’s poetry that, as Nicholls explains, “creates a religion of pain which draws erotic violence back onto the writing, rendering it as worked upon, as belaboured, as the object of the sadist’s

Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915 57

passion”.15 Also, Eliot combined the apocalyptic with the intimate to relate the historical and personal, yet only to result in bathos: When all the world shall melt in the sun, Melt or freeze, I shall remember how your ears were curled. The fetishisation of the lover’s ear may be intended to express the aesthetic preserving of the moment of her destruction, but it fails to suggest sensuality, however perverse. Sebastian whispers to her, “I think that at last you would understand”, which implies that the reader should too, but the psychological logic is only carried through by the clumsy rhyme of “You would love me because I should have strangled you”, “And I should love you the more because I had mangled you” (IMH, 78). As in “The Burnt Dancer”, Eliot’s Decadent style is excessive, obsessed with local effect not overall sense; in its consequent lack of resolution of themes “St Sebastian” resembles an anxiety dream, generating more uncertainty, and thus anxiety, than it allays. “The Death of Saint Narcissus”, perhaps first composed at the end of 1914 but written up in mid-April 1915, further builds upon Eliot’s analysis of the psychology of war. In “The Burnt Dancer” death was like sexual release; in “St Sebastian” violence was rooted in sadomasochism; “Saint Narcissus” includes both these insights, while rooting them in narcissism. As a dominant trope in Decadent literature, narcissism reflects how art is driven to adopt more self-involuted forms of artifice to secure its autonomy from society; as in Baudelaire’s dandy, cruelty to nature and the social body entails cruelty to oneself and “aesthetic” mutilation of what one shares with others. A consequence of Narcissus’s piety based on self-love, he seems “to tread on faces” of the city populace, like “Beauté” chided by Baudelaire: “Beauty, you walk on corpses, mocking them; / Horror is charming as your other gems”.16 Where for Baudelaire beauty is callous about the suffering of others, in the case of narcissism it also disavows the suffering of its bearer. As we saw in “Saint Sebastian” the sadistic drive of the decadent aesthetic tends to recoil upon self; correspondingly, Narcissus fantasises of being a young girl, and a drunken old man who rapes and murders her, to enjoy “The horror of her own smoothness”. Narcissus’s final development lies in becoming an actual Saint Sebastian, thus bringing to a curious whole Eliot’s attempts to imaginatively understand the war: So he devoted himself to God. Because his flesh was in love with the penetrant arrows . . .

58

War Trauma and English Modernism

He surrendered himself and embraced them And his whiteness and redness satisfied him. (WLFT, 93) Here Eliot may be indebted to one of Freud’s recent insights in the paper “On Narcissism” of 1914 regarding the development of the “ego ideal” (later renamed the super-ego) as a recovery of the adult’s “narcissistic perfection of his childhood”. This ego ideal, which is partly a psychological construction of God, demands the subject to repress rather than sublimate his libidinal drives, in order to identify with it.17 In these terms we can understand Narcissus’s self-sacrifice before God as a manifestation of his ego ideal, and how in his own violation he fulfils his narcissism by transcending his body to identify with God. This formulation can be applied to the soldier volunteering for war to serve an ego ideal of God, King and Country, only able to identify with it fully through his own annihilation.

Eliot’s analysis of war psychology here has many common points with Lawrence’s concurrent poetry. For instance, “New Heaven and Earth” from the first half of 1915 has a similarly narcissistic narrator: “When I gathered flowers, I knew it was myself plucking my own flowering. . . . When I heard the cannon of the war, I listened with my own ears to my own destruction”. Regarding the world as only an extension of himself, while “Begetting and conceiving in my own body”, he is “relieved” of his own being by death; he even revels in the mass carnage of “heaps and heaps and horrible reeking heaps / till it is almost enough, till I am reduced perhaps”. The speaker in “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?”, dated 17 November 1914, is similarly narcissistic in his imperative to “preserve my life from hurt”; consequentially he hates “this body, which is so dear to me”, and welcomes the shells “to lacerate and rip up this my body”. In war he emulates Narcissus as Sebastian, his killing of another identified with himself: “And God is good, for I wanted him to die, . . . his death, my death”. On the other hand, his survival only reinforces his narcissistic self, while he walks “the earth / Unchallenged, intact, unabridged” (CP, 257, 258, 741–3). Lawrence would develop this analysis in his characterisation of Gudrun Brangwen in The First “Women in Love”. Decadent culture will

Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915 59

have a more complex role in interpreting war for both Lawrence and Eliot, not merely in its tropes of sadomasochism and narcissism, but as a medium for expressing the brute experience of modernity which Eliot had developed in his early poetry following Baudelaire. From 1916 onwards he would shift its setting from the city to Europe at war.

3 Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love”

While critical consensus has deemed Women in Love Lawrence’s most important Modernist novel, there is little agreement on its relation to history. Even Leavis, who located its finger on “the whole pulse of social England”, betrayed uncertainty regarding the chapter “The Industrial Magnate”: “In some moods, the account of the [industrial] process may very well strike us as something like the essential human history of the decades since Women in Love was written.” Dismissing this appeal to Lawrence’s powers of prophecy John Worthen concludes that the chapter, and by implication the novel, is “more concerned with myth than with history”; Graham Holderness chooses the expression “ideology” instead of myth.1 To an extent The First “Women in Love” shifts the traditional grounds of debate; composed in 1916, first as a manuscript between late April and late June then as a typescript between July and November, its historical scope is restricted to a much narrower set of events. In this year the war developed its distinctive character of industrialised massslaughter. Dividing the early period of enthusiastic war literature from the later period of disillusionment, 1916 consequently marks a general low in artistic production in Britain. Since 1915 much of the avantgarde had dispersed into the army, and those who remained at home were not producing art; avant-garde periodicals, performances and exhibitions declined, ceasing in 1916 when the museums closed. Speaking for other artists, in “A Day of Battle” from September Ford Madox Hueffer claimed to have witnessed “the most amazing fact of history . . . But there it stopped. As for explanation, I hadn’t any . . . There we were: those million men, forlorn, upon a raft in space.”2 Exceptionally, during this period Lawrence composed a novel which, he claimed, “actually 60

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 61

does contain the results in one’s soul of the war: it is purely destructive, not like the Rainbow, destructive-consummating” (iii. 143). Written during the ongoing traumatic circumstances of war, the novel sets down testimony in displaced fragments. Lawrence’s knowledge of psychoanalysis prevents the novel from ever being an unmediated abreaction of experience; he even simulated symptoms in his characters, as in the near-fatal confrontation between Hermione and Birkin. He also imposed a framework of analysis upon the characters, in which he combined his knowledge of Freud with the legacy of Decadence; however these two discourses are not entirely compatible, as demonstrated in the contrasting techniques of characterisation in Gerald and Gudrun. More successfully, through repetition and association the fragments tenuously combine into narratives relating violence between characters to details of industry, government policy, class and international relations. These fragments locate the novel not in civilian society as Leavis, Worthen and Holderness have done, but in a period of “total war”.

Naïve civilian and lone casualty Despite the firing of twenty million shells, with the death and maiming of 200,000 men on each side between 21 February and 23 June, the British were unable to advance on the Western Front. Sir Douglas Haig responded by directing the Somme Offensive on 1 July as a “knockout blow”: 1,732,873 shells were fired in the preceding eight days, then twenty divisions were sent over the top, only to be checked by barbed wire. Almost all of Haig’s expectations went unrealised; nonetheless, he concluded the justification of his strategy with the directive to “Maintain our offensive”. By the end of July Germany had suffered 160,000 casualties, and Britain and France had lost 200,000; the line had only moved three miles. Haig’s optimism persisted through to November by which time 600,000 men had been lost on each side; today we accept the judgement of historians such as John Keegan: “to the British, [the Somme] was and would remain their greatest military tragedy of the twentieth century, indeed of their national military history”.3 This interminable genocide was sustained by the belief in an ever imminent “breakthrough” and victory. The calls for peace among Allies in late 1916 and early 1917 failed in the face of alleged victories manufactured by generals and propagandists. Also, there was a lack of information about real conditions on the Western Front, and public opinion was dictated by hate and atrocity propaganda. Asquith

62

War Trauma and English Modernism

suggested a compromise peace after the death of his son but was countered by Lloyd George who would replace him as Prime Minister. Lord Lansdowne’s proposals for peace were opposed by the press and propagandists. As Peter Buitenhuis concludes, determination to continue the war was based upon the lost integrity of language.4 Trudi Tate appraises the value of war literature in its attempt to bear witness to the war: the artists’ challenge lay in overcoming the effects of propaganda, bogus statistics and inaccurate news stories which served to prolong and justify the slaughter.5 In this sense, the artists’ responsibility to represent history with accuracy made them answerable to the soldiers on the battlefield. The historical significance of The First “Women in Love” can be appraised by the extent to which it recovers integrity between language and these events in 1916. However, it is unlikely that Lawrence was any less deluded than the great majority of civilians. While living in Cornwall Lawrence’s impression of the war’s development became restricted to local observations, generalisations from his personal situation, letters, and press reports. Witnessing the enlistment of local men in February, for instance, he exclaimed that “the cursed war will go on forever” (ii. 520). It is impossible to estimate what he may have learned from friends in privileged positions such as Edward Marsh and the Asquiths, but his contact with them would have only been through letters, which discouraged the communication of politically sensitive information. Given his isolation in Cornwall, it is likely that press reports would have been crucial for Lawrence’s awareness of outside events. One clue as to which newspapers he would have been reading is from a letter of 9 July in which he commented on “the newspapers today: ‘Capture the trade – unite the Empire – à bas les autres’” (ii. 626). Most likely he was referring to The Sunday Times whose third page was devoted to “City Chatter”. This section reflects on the upsurge in economic optimism since the Somme Offensive with concurrent rises in the stock market; it gives glowering details of the record levels of colonial produce.6 The newspapers shared the information that their correspondents gathered, anyway, which resulted in a striking similarity in content, attitudes and imagery.7 From March to the completion of the manuscript of The First “Women in Love” in late June Lawrence believed that the end of the war was in sight. On 11 March he expressed certainty of future peace, predicting to Katherine Mansfield that “the war will end before next summer – before the summer that comes after this” (ii. 576). This letter coincided with an analysis of the situation at Verdun in The Times. Its war correspondent argued that despite increasing numbers in attack, the Germans

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 63

were being repulsed and suffering heavy losses. On the other side, the French were confident of shortening the war: “Everywhere the enemy’s great effort failed and, in the opinion of the very highest authority, the French remain masters of the field and the Crown Prince’s offensive has been brought definitely to a standstill.”8 Two months later on 24 May, halfway through the novel, Lawrence commented to Ottoline Morrell: “They are fighting hard again, in France, I see. But I feel that the war is nearly over” (ii. 608). Recently there had been appeals for negotiation to America as a possible mediator; each side made one-sided demands to make the other appear as the aggressor. The British were hopeful of a breakthrough in the Summer Offensives which, they believed, would empower them to dictate terms to Germany.9 Lawrence was not naïve enough to expect a truce, since fighting was as intense as before, and on 25 February he had expressed his belief in the impossibility of negotiation: “I loathe the old world – Asquith’s speech: about ‘Peace Talk’, etc.” Instead, it seems that he sympathised with British hopes of a decisive victory; having read the Berliner Tageblatt he believed that Germany has “passed through a violent crisis . . . So that the war, as it was, at all events, has come almost to an end” (ii. 557, 609). Like the great majority of civilians on both sides, he presumed that the continuation of intense hostilities augured a future victory of one side, not the indefinite perpetuation of conflict. The most crucial event for Britain in 1916, however, was the opening of the Somme Offensive on 1 July, only two days after the completion of The First “Women in Love” manuscript. Reports suggested that the offensive, while not being decisive, would eventually prove to be so: “Our Paris Correspondent says that ‘the Allied action in the north seals the defeat of the Crown Prince in the east.’ We believe this assumption, although perhaps a little premature, will in the end prove accurate.”10 On 4 July Lawrence echoed these sentiments in his certainty that “the war is not going to last much longer. It will end this year” (ii. 622). As in March, it seems that he believed the press reports which suggested that Allied victory was only a matter of time. Lawrence then was to an extent typical of civilians in 1916 as Robert Graves described them, talking “a foreign language; it was newspaper language”. Most veterans have since confirmed this situation, for instance former Private Norman Demuth testified in the Seventies that those at home “felt the war was one continual sort of casualty charge; that one spent all day and all night chasing Germans or them chasing us”.11 Lawrence was not in a position to see through the deluded optimism of the press and propaganda, and his novel does not offer us an

64

War Trauma and English Modernism

accurate presentation of the events on the battlefield. This achievement would only become possible in the following year with war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen who had the benefit of direct experience and hindsight. Yet perhaps Lawrence’s apparently docile following of press reports and propaganda was more of a willed denial, not so much of the real conditions of war in France, but of his own life, and of those around him. As we saw, the great affirmative vision at the end of The Rainbow left open more questions than it could answer, since the novel as a whole had failed to grasp the scale, technology and futility of contemporary warfare. Even by its completion Lawrence was losing conviction in the novel’s optimism. While predicting that “we shall have peace by the time this book is published”, he disclosed that “if I had my way, I would put off the publishing yet a while” (ii. 349). By 28 September, two days before publication of the novel, Lawrence had amended the copy for his sister Ada Clarke. The concluding paragraph, with Ursula’s sweeping vision of “the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven” (R, 459) was drastically reduced to a few terse lines of her mere personal conviction, reading in full: “And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the fight was to the good. It was not to annihilation, but at last to newness. She knew in the rainbow that the fight was to the good.”12 This subtle change hinted at the almost catastrophic impact of war upon Lawrence which was denied in The Rainbow. On 24 August he had complained that “I can’t get away from it for a minute: live in a sort of coma, like one of those nightmares when you can’t move.” The “nightmare” of war recurred, as “one of those horrible sleeps from which I can’t wake”. On 13 September he wrote that “I cannot get any sense of an enemy – only of disaster”, and on 1 October described his situation as “this God-forsaken little hole where I sit like a wise rabbit with my pen behind my ear, and listen to distant noises”. His fantasy of escape to “Rananim” only demonstrated his sense of hopelessness about England, without offering a viable alternative to it elsewhere. He continued to believe that he could escape from the “fighting line” in England to America, but was frustrated; in Cornwall on 2 February 1916 he explained that “I am incurably English. I seem as if I can’t leave it. But I feel like sulking in one of its remotest caves. I can’t go away” (ii. 211, 214, 219, 523). Perhaps in part from simulation by identifying with returning shell shock victims, Lawrence’s emotional apprehension of the war began to develop analogies with their direct experience. Shell shock emerged in

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 65

an environment of threats to the soldiers’ survival from indeterminate origins, which they could not objectify or respond to. Correspondingly, for Lawrence England became an environment of dangers within which he was powerless to defend himself. The traumatic blow, on top of the ongoing stress of war conditions, occurred when The Rainbow was banned in November 1915. Kinkead-Weekes remarks that “it is impossible to exaggerate the effect of this on Lawrence. He had been made to feel a contemptible alien in his homeland. He had lost his audience.”13 This event crushed Lawrence utterly, as he passionately confessed to Murry: Only, Oh, my God, the horrible hopelessness of life! We’ve got to face it out. I feel now pushed to the brink of existence, and there remains only to fall off into oblivion, or to give in, and accept the ruck: or some way out, as yet undiscovered. I feel absolutely run to earth, like a fox they have chased till it can’t go any further, and doesn’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do or how to go on: like a man pushing an empty barrow up an endless slope. I must own to you, that I am beaten – knocked out entirely. (ii. 500) January 1916 marked Lawrence’s lowest point in the war, during which he suffered an almost fatal bout of influenza accompanied by physical paralysis. He denied the organic causes of the illness because of his long-term dread of contracting tuberculosis; nonetheless, Maitland Radford, who had been commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps, diagnosed the illness as neurasthenia, and explained to Lawrence that “the pain and inflammation is referred from the nerves”. The main symptom that may have convinced Radford of this diagnosis was the paralysis that Lawrence suffered. At first his right side was numbed, then his left hand paralysed; perhaps echoing Radford, Lawrence referred to his paralysis as “all part of the game” (ii. 511–12, 515). Lawrence’s breakdown uncannily resembles the illnesses experienced by combatants at the front. Paralysis was one of the most distinctive symptoms of war trauma, as a definition of this illness emerged in 1915. In one of the first articles considering war “neurasthenia” in the British Medical Journal, 15 May 1915, the author focused upon the symptom of “a marked degree of rigidity of the limbs in most of the cases”, including “a hemiphlegic distribution affecting the left arm and leg”. He compared the condition to civilian cases of hysteria and concluded that the patients were “living through some past experience of a terrifying kind”.

66

War Trauma and English Modernism

Radford’s understanding of neurasthenia agreed with the terms of this report; he even echoed to Lawrence its prescription of “rest, quiet surroundings, and ample nourishment”. Robert Nichols, himself a victim of shell shock, retrospectively backed up Radford’s diagnosis, that Lawrence was suffering from “a nervous condition”.14 Perhaps following Radford’s medical opinion, Lawrence began to identify his illness as a reaction to the war: “the state of Europe simply kills me – sends me into frenzy after frenzy of rage and misery, so I get ill”. Physical paralysis represented the culmination of the soldier’s bodily expression of powerlessness, and it is this powerlessness that links Lawrence to him. As a physical retreat from reality against which the victim is defenceless, illness was accompanied by retreat into pathological narcissism; Lawrence also developed the callousness of the traumatised soldier, claiming that “I don’t care if sixty million individuals die: the seed is not in the masses, it is elsewhere” (ii. 524, 529). Hence from 1915 to the completion of The First “Women in Love” in mid 1916 Lawrence was both ignorant of the war, and psychologically one of its casualties. The novel is testimony of his private experience of war, and we face difficult questions in reading it as such. One is how far we can make correspondences between Lawrence’s personal trauma and the soldier’s experience of war conditions. A second is what reality can be located amongst the fantasy and self-therapy of fictional testimony.

Problems for the analyst and historian Lawrence was twice removed from the war, both psychologically like the traumatised soldier who was unable to grasp its magnitude, but also literally in only experiencing its repercussions from across the Channel. Paul Delaney acidly remarks on his self-involved response to the call-up of married men in 1916: “quite typically, Lawrence took the news much harder than the call-up of single men in January. Typically, also, his anger at Britain’s loss of liberty was directed more at France’s call for help than at their common enemy.”15 Even before completing The Rainbow Lawrence had been thrown into a crisis about himself and the war during his visit to Cambridge in late March 1915. Described by Lawrence as “one of the crises in my life”, he was shocked by the homosexual lifestyle of John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett and others; afterwards he suffered from a recurring dream of black-beetles that transformed into insects a month later when he saw soldiers at Worthing, whom he compared to “one insect mounted on another – oh God!” From this period onward he could “see only death and more

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 67

death, till we are black and swollen with death” (ii. 321, 331, 352). One can speculate that his fragile utopian alternative to war founded upon heterosexual relationships was unconsciously undermined by his latent homosexual tendencies. Also, Lawrence’s near-fatal influenza at the beginning of 1916 was part of a series of related illnesses marking critical moments of his life: first in 1901 following the death of his beloved elder brother from the same disease, then in 1911 when double pneumonia forced him to give up a career in school teaching and eventually become a full-time writer. Acute illness occurred when his sense of value as an individual was jeopardised: as son to his mother in 1901, teacher and fiancé in 1911, and perhaps most devastating, as artist in 1916. The relation of his health and identity to historical events cannot be securely determined. On the question of historical reality in literary testimony, we are beset by how Lawrence considered his novel to be another “world”. Advising Catherine Carswell in April as another victim of “neuralgia”, Lawrence wrote: “One has to withdraw into a very real solitude, and lie low there, hidden, to recover. Then the world gradually ceases to exist, and a new world is discovered, where there are as yet no people.” While writing the novel he claimed to be creating a new world: “When one is shaken to the very depths, one finds reality in the unreal world. At present my real world is the world of my inner soul, which reflects on to the novel I write. The outer world is there to be endured, it is not real – neither is the outer life” (ii. 594–5, 610). This alienation from the world in which Lawrence was writing has been crucial to debates upon the novel’s relationship to contemporary history. Worthen writes that “the more we understand Women in Love, the more it serves to alienate us from the society in which we are reading it and understanding it”. In taking us out of our present society the novel does not instead place us in the society of Lawrence’s time, from which ours has evolved, but in a “heightened consciousness” of individuals who “live in a different world”, a “world of modern consciousness”.16 Yet a modern consciousness can only be understood in the context of modern historical events, such as the war. Certainly, if Lawrence wrote while in a state of trauma, detached from the unendurable violence outside, “sulking in the remotest caves” of Britain and of his own consciousness, then the novel’s depiction of its historical moment of production is profoundly circumscribed. On the other hand, this dissociation from exterior events is an essential characteristic of war trauma and, as I shall argue, links Lawrence to the collective experience of its victims on the firing line. Shoshana Felman

68

War Trauma and English Modernism

explains the psychoanalytic principles in interpreting displaced material: “that one does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it; that speech as such is unwittingly testimonial; and that the speaking subject constantly bears witness to a truth that nonetheless continues to escape him”.17 We can explain in the following terms the paradox that Worthen struck upon: Lawrence’s dissociation from historical circumstances constitutes his, and others’, experience of history.

Structures of testimony It is instructive to compare a contemporary authority such as John Middleton Murry in his response to Sassoon’s poetry in 1918 and to Women in Love three years later. Murry asserted that Sassoon’s verse was “not poetry”, but “a cry”;18 likewise, he commented, “that [Lawrence] is an artist no longer is certain”. Where Sassoon’s language, for instance in the opening description of trench conditions in “Counter-Attack”, was “overwrought, dense and turgid, as a man’s mind must be under the stress and obsession of a chaos beyond all comprehension”, Women in Love was “five hundred pages of passionate vehemence, wave after wave of turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end”.19 Murry failed to recognise that Lawrence and Sassoon had not abandoned an aesthetic credo under the immense weight of historical events; instead, in Caruth’s phrasing, the “essential incomprehensibility, the force” of their works’ “affront to understanding” gave artistic expression to their age.20 If we read the novel as testimony, then instead of following a linear narrative from beginning to end we can read its development in terms of a therapeutic process of “working through” material from disparate and local fragments towards experience objectified into a larger narrative. We cannot locate a fully resolved narrative of recovery, especially since Lawrence was still undergoing the traumatic experiences of war after the novel’s completion; consequently even the largest structures retain a fragmentary form. The basic structures of the novel are displacement, through which a traumatic experience is symbolically expressed in a substitute image, and repetition, in which the author alongside the characters attempts to master traumatic experience belatedly. Lawrence wrote in the 1919 “Foreword” to Women in Love that “I should wish the time [of the novel’s setting] to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters” (WL, 485); in this sense he deliberately left the temporality

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 69

“unfixed”, so that displaced events not directly related to the setting can enter it. Some of Owen and Sassoon’s most powerful poetry displaces the war onto English soil. Sassoon hallucinated dead bodies on his return to England; in “Asleep” Owen imagined the dead lying on Winchester Downs. Responding to a pit explosion at Podmore Hall Colliery in January 1918, Owen admitted that it got “mixed up with the war at the end”.21 Mirroring Owen’s use of displacement, The First “Women in Love” is peopled by civilian characters for whom violence is as commonplace as it was for the soldier at the front. At Halliday’s flat in London Gerald observes the Russian Maxim’s body, reflecting that “a million more or less of these living bodies doesn’t matter”. By the Spring of 1917 when it sued for peace, Russia had suffered five and a-half million casualties.22 Birkin recurrently ponders over the “really beautiful thought” of the whole of humanity dying; for him London is “real death”, “the end of the world” (FWL, 67, 113, 49, 51). Violence punctures and severs the linear connections between events that are characteristic of the nineteenth-century novel. The war is outside any specific time or place; it lies in the past and the future, at home and abroad. The grand historical trajectory of The Rainbow ended in October 1905 and The First “Women in Love” picks up the narrative in 1910, when Ursula is twenty-six and Gudrun twenty-five. Early in the novel Hermione opens the debate about the building of Dreadnoughts, which was provoking a maritime rivalry with Germany; towards the end of the novel Gerald argues with Loerke about Italy and Tripoli, either referring to the occupation of Tripoli in 1911, or it being ceded to Italy in 1912. The novel is set in a Europe where Ursula and Birkin travel across the battle-lines of “ELSASS–LOTHRINGEN–Luxembourg, Metz–BASEL”, choosing Innsbruck from amongst the alternative destinations of Cologne and Berlin. Yet this world is also set deep into the war; the train stations in Europe are repeatedly described as “desolate” with “spectral people”. At the beginning of the novel Ursula and Gudrun imagine two conceited robins as “a pair of little Lloyd-George’s of the air”; Ursula echoes Lawrence’s opinion of the Secretary of State for War in 1916, that the comparison “was such a lie towards the robins, and such a defamation”. Political discussion at Breadalby turns to the resignation of the minister of education after adverse criticism, which perhaps reflects the resignation of Augustine Birrell in May 1916 after the Easter Rising in Dublin (FWL, 357–8, 242–3, 466). As in the therapeutic process of working through, many of these displaced fragments gather together through association with each other, to point towards the traumatic event. The drowning of Diana Crich at

70

War Trauma and English Modernism

the water party is a good example of this. Jumping in the water with a hand injured by machinery, Gerald seems “as if he belonged naturally to dread and catastrophe, as if he were himself again”, and Gudrun feels “she must jump into the water too, to know the horror also”. Afterwards Gerald repeatedly describes the reservoir as if it were no-man’s-land: “cold as hell, and room for thousands to be drowned, never a one knowing the other was there – you’d wonder how it is that so many are alive, why we’re all up here”. Birkin comments that “there are millions all alike. What does quantity matter – even in human lives – or deaths?” Then the draining of the lake sounds like the war front under shell fire, with “a heavy, booming noise of a great body of water falling solidly all the time. It occupied the whole of the night, this great steady booming of water, everything was drowned within it, drowned and dying. Ursula seemed to have to struggle for her life.” In its half-drained state it has “horrible raw banks of clay, that smelled of raw water”. The imagery of flooding and drowning suffuses the whole of the novel and implicates all of the characters: Hermione struggles “to gain control with her will, as a swimmer struggles with the swirling water”; Ursula feels she “was on a tiny little rock with the tide of destruction and nothingness rising higher and higher. . . . For the world desired this flood, it desired this universality of destruction”; Birkin repeatedly smashes the moon’s reflection on Willey Water into “a battlefield of broken lights and shadows” (FWL, 165–75, 93, 225, 228). Displacement of temporality in The First “Women in Love” is caused by the indeterminate yet dominating presence of the war. The novel’s temporality is alien to the past recounted in The Rainbow, but is also entrenched within that past. Birkin regards Will Brangwen, who had instilled in Ursula a religious vision of the world, as “a roomful of old echoes”. It is the challenge for the main characters to break from this past, as Ursula and Gudrun reflect upon Will at the beginning of the novel: “The sisters found themselves confronted by a void, as if they had looked over the edge.” Birkin observes that men “can’t break down the walls of the established tissue of knowledge, to give birth to new wisdom. They are futile. That is why the women abandon them, and they take to fighting and killing each other, and raking up old phrases.” The characters struggle to locate the “war”: it is neither in a present which they can break from, nor in a future which they can ward off; it is not a specific historical event that they can oppose through political action, or something within themselves that they can personally solve. At Willey Water Birkin intones to himself, “You can’t go away, . . . there

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 71

is no away. You can only withdraw upon yourself” (FWL, 236, 6, 139, 227). But even withdrawal is a symptom of the traumatic condition. Displacement is integral with the other temporal structure of trauma, and of the novel: repetition. As a traumatic event that resists ordering into consciousness in terms of cause and effect, the violence of war is repeated by characters in a belated attempt to master it, and to free themselves of it. All of Lawrence’s characters are trying to break from an inescapable fate. As we shall see later, the narrative of Gerald Crich’s relationship with Gudrun forms a series of repetitively destructive encounters. Through the recurrence of temporally displaced actions the characters re-enact the trauma of war, while struggling to understand its grip upon them. Concurrently, Lawrence questioned his own preconceptions about himself and the world in 1916. The most significant repeated displacement of The First “Women in Love” demonstrates the characters’ failure to understand this violence within themselves. Its first appearance follows a declaration of love from Birkin to Ursula: “And if we go wrong – I shall know – ich habe es nicht gewollt.” Birkin is echoing Kaiser Wilhelm’s address to the German people in August 1915; his following words, that “things go wrong in coming right – don’t they?” (FWL, 294) share the underlying sentiments of Wilhelm’s address, proven so wrong by the year of intervening events in which Lawrence wrote the novel. At the end of his relationship with Gudrun, Gerald repeats Birkin’s “ich habe es nicht gewollt”: “I didn’t want it, really,” was the last confession of disgust in his soul, as he drifted up the slope, weak, finished, only sheering off unconsciously from any further contact. “I’ve had enough – I want to go to sleep. I’ve had enough.” He was sunk under a sense of nausea. (FWL, 437) Gerald’s “I didn’t want it, really” transplants Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1915 address to the war’s projected end. This repetition displaces the significance of Wilhelm’s and Birkin’s words, exposing the potentially disastrous implications belied by them both. At the end of the novel Birkin in turn echoes Gerald while reflecting on his death, crying “I didn’t want it to be like this – I wanted him to be happy – I wanted him to be happy.” Ursula is “aghast” at Birkin’s “broken, shaken body” (FWL, 442), recognising his and Gerald’s shared will to death. Not even Birkin, as Lawrence’s alter ego, is able to understand or free himself from the “war” within himself.

72

War Trauma and English Modernism

The language of trauma Not only his own personal illnesses, but also links with the psychiatric community in England gave Lawrence access to the pioneering research on war trauma in 1916. Through his close friendship with the psychoanalyst Dr David Eder, Lawrence may have been aware of the earliest research into shell shock. Eder provided Lawrence’s strongest link to the community of British Psychoanalysis and the ideas of Freud; he discussed Freud with Lawrence in 1914, and they would continue to exchange ideas into the Twenties.23 As the medical officer in charge of the PsychoNeurological Department in Malta until the Spring of 1916 Eder was one of the first psychiatrists to diagnose war hysteria as a psychological condition, as he reported in “An Address on the Psycho-pathology of the War Neuroses” at the Malta Medical Conference on 9 April (published in the 12 August edition of The Lancet): “From the combatant’s point of view this has been described as industrial warfare; from the medical point of view it might be well characterised as nerve warfare, for an outstanding feature has been the large number of soldiers . . . who have suffered from what are very properly called functional disorders, with or without injury or organic disease.”24 Although it is unlikely that Lawrence would have met Eder in 1916 up to the completion of The First “Women in Love”, in a letter of 1 February he reported having been in contact with Barbara Low, Eder’s sister-in-law and later the author of writings on psychoanalysis, who could have communicated to him Eder’s research; also, it is very possible that Lawrence communicated with Eder over this period, since on 20 August he expressed hope of meeting Eder in London. The possible significance of Eder’s research for The First “Women in Love” lies in his analysis of how traumatic symptoms of conversion hysteria are manifested in a language of bodily actions. He described this process of displacement as “symbolic conversion” within the patients’ unconscious: “It must be remembered that we here are dealing with what is archaic and crude in the unconscious, with what links us, the heirs of all the ages, mentally with primitive man. In this lower culture there is, as you are aware, no clear distinction between words and the objects they denote. The utterance of the correct word, the power of the word, has a magical effect.” One of Eder’s examples is of a soldier whose back became stiff when the doctor ordered him to return to the trench immediately after a near-miss shell explosion; the soldier explained under hypnosis that “the doctor put my back up”.25 If a fixed relationship between signifier and signified, word and meaning, constitutes the rational language of consciousness, then trauma is articulated through a

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 73

language which conflates the symbolic and literal, as in dream imagery. “Symbolic conversion” substitutes the signified with a referent, a physical object, converting a metaphorical expression into a metonymy. This condition was very relevant to Lawrence’s traumatic symptom of paralysis in January 1916, which Eder interpreted in his patients as a means of avoidance of the scene of trauma. We can locate symbolic conversion in the language of The First “Women in Love”, for instance in the violent encounter between Hermione and Birkin at the end of Chapter III. This scene is emblematic of how Lawrence incorporated the war into the novel as a whole. In preparation for this encounter between Hermione and Birkin, Lawrence invested associations with Germany in her character. She is a “Kulturträger, a medium for the culture of ideas”: “All her life, she had sought to make herself invulnerable, unassailable, beyond reach of the world’s judgement”. As a “bearer of culture” she accumulates knowledge in the way that nations build up armaments, armies and fleets of battleships to ward off invasion, but also to invade others. Failing to impose her power over Birkin, she is “like a ship that has gone down”. Her desperate attempt to kill him with a paperweight bears a historical resonance, like a counterattack in which a multitude of lives is put at risk for the sake of a war aim: “A thousand lives, a thousand deaths mattered nothing now, only the fulfilment of this perfect ecstasy.” Her self-justification for her violence echoes the sentiments of warring nations, in the “conviction of righteousness, conviction of her own purity of spirit” (FWL, 12, 88, 94, 97). In setting the conditions for the “symbolic conversion” between language and reality, Lawrence described how the characters’ conscious intentions are alien to the unconscious impulses that drive their actions. Birkin visits Hermione’s boudoir with the ostensible purpose of getting “on good terms with her again” and yet unconsciously he is continuing their conflict. Hermione, more obviously, responds to Birkin with “dynamic hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the unconsciousness”; her mind is “a chaos, darkness breaking in upon it, and herself struggling to gain control with her will”. Imagining her condition as “like being walled up”, she achieves a “symbolic conversion” by literalising this image in Birkin: “Unless she could break out, she must die most fearfully, walled up in horror. And he was the wall. She must break down the wall – she must break him down before her, the awful obstruction of him who obstructed her life to the last.” What begins as a symbol for her state of being is converted into a literal reality. She attacks Birkin with a “jewel stone” while “purely unconscious in voluptuous ecstasy” (FWL, 92).

74

War Trauma and English Modernism

Birkin, “closed within the spell, remained motionless and unconscious”, maintaining Hermione’s conversion of symbol into reality. As she attempts to strike him a second time his response is peculiar in observing an apparently irrelevant detail: “Her arm was coming down again, the terrible hand clasping the ball of lapis lazuli. It was her left hand, he realised again with horror that she was left-handed.” Although we can relate this to a superstitious fear of left-handedness, it is difficult to explain why on the brink of being murdered, Birkin is horrified by Hermione’s left hand. This issue is examined in detail by Eder; he observed that far more right-handed soldiers suffered from hysterical symptoms in their left-hand than their right. Eder explained that “the left-sided manifestation [of hysteria] is a symbolic expression for ‘things are all wrong with me’”.26 Lawrence had experienced this symptom in January 1916. In the symbolic conversion of language the associations attached to expressions such as “left-handed” become their dominant, literal reality: Hermione’s left-handedness becomes commensurate with her murderous intent. In another case of symbolic conversion, when Birkin says “No you don’t, Hermione, . . . I don’t let you” (FWL, 93, 94), his words quell her aggression, putting her under a spell and physically protecting him. Afterwards Birkin gradually recovers from the trauma of their encounter, by falling into illness. At first he is numb to it, just as one of Eder’s cases was unaware of having suffered fifteen bayonet wounds since the pain would have immobilised him and resulted in his death.27 Alone and naked in a valley Birkin becomes aware of his own “madness”, rejecting “that sanity of the world” (FWL, 96); then on reaching a train home he becomes more and more ill, while his consciousness becomes aware of his injury that he sustained. This scene is instructive, not only because it demonstrates Lawrence’s knowledge of psychology, but because this knowledge qualifies him for the role of analyst, able to diagnose his own personal symptoms. In the novel at points he deliberately constructs a narrative of symptoms in his characters’ actions, as in this scene; elsewhere he is at least conscious of the meaning of his imaginative symbolism, even if, as his own testimony, its full meaning is outside his grasp. Lawrence’s clinical awareness reinforces the impulse within the novel of not merely abreacting traumatic material, but working through it towards interpretation.

The industrial battleground Given that the meaning of testimony is only partially grasped by its author whose understanding is supplemented by that of his listener,

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 75

displacement in The First “Women in Love” is manifested as a floating signifier which invites the reader to place it against a range of signifieds, or contexts. The novel takes on an epic scale both in terms of its complex development, and breadth of description from intimate relationships to world events. Immediately following the termination of the relationship between Birkin and Hermione, Lawrence initiated the relationship between Gerald and Gudrun, whose violence dominates the novel. Through displacement of phantasmagorical imagery more appropriate for a battlefield than a railway crossing, Lawrence suggested the psychological impact of war upon the characters which represent a whole civilisation. Presented by Birkin as “a soldier, and an explorer, and a Napoleon of industry”, Gerald shares many of the military and industrial aspirations of Anton Skrebensky. A militaristic strain runs through Gerald’s development, from boyhood during which “the days of Homer were his ideal, when a man was chief of an army of heroes, and spent his ten years encamped before the beleaguered city”, to manhood when “he must try war”, fighting like Skrebensky in South Africa (FWL, 204–5). Unlike Skrebensky, Gerald does not belong to the aristocracy, but to the upper middle-class; the South African War was just an early diversion before his true vocation in industry. As a representative figure of industry in the novel, he symbolises the industrial character of war in 1916. In the opening scene of Chapter IV, later renamed “Coal-Dust”, Gerald and Gudrun become aware of the relationship of power between them. Although set at a railway crossing, this scene includes cues which invite one to locate it in the war zone. First, there is an apparently incidental detail: “The one-legged man in the little signal-hut by the road stared out from his obscurity like a crab from a snail-shell.” The mutilated figure of the man is particularly significant in wartime Britain. Amputees had become a common sight in everyday life since Lawrence first observed one in May 1915; they were even paraded to encourage other men to enlist. By the end of the war there would be 41,000 amputees in Britain; Joanna Bourke notes that “throughout Britain – in every town and on every street – someone was affected”. The wounded became spectacles of fascination and dread in civilian society, a direct reminder of the real violence that was occurring across the Channel.28 Inverting this historical reality, the man presumably mutilated through an industrial accident can be interpreted as a figure on the front. The one-legged signal-man defensively stares out of his signal-hut onto the passing locomotives, with double armour of crab- and snail-shells.

76

War Trauma and English Modernism

This strange image evokes the figure of a soldier on watch at his sentry post, cowering before the shell-fire outside. In a characteristic temporal reversal of the novel, the man is afraid of the threatening environment beyond his hut, despite already being a casualty of it. This scene can also be compared to a drilling ground, in which Gerald trains his horse into submission. He resembles an idealised image of a cavalry officer, having “saluted” Ursula and Gudrun. Aside from the practical skills of handling weapons, the main objective of the drill was to impose upon recruits what an army handbook called “soldierly discipline – prompt and methodical obedience”, by turning individuals into a co-ordinated fighting force.29 Graves described the drill as “beautiful, especially when the company feels itself as a single being, and each movement is not a movement of every man together, but a single movement of one large creature”.30 Gerald draws the horse into “the grasp of his will”, to “master” it into an extension of his own body. However, if we interpret the railway crossing as a symbolic representation of no-man’s-land, then the noise of the locomotive engine connotes shell-fire. “Keen as a sword in his own inevitable conquest”, Gerald commands his horse to face it, like an officer commanding his subordinates on the front line: The sharp blasts of the chuffing engine broke with more and more force on her. The repeated sharp blows of unknown, terrifying noise struck through her till she was rocking with chaotic terror. . . . [She could not] escape from the mad clamour of terror that resounded through her, as the trucks thumped slowly, heavily, horrifying, one after the other, one pursuing the other, over the rails of the crossing. . . . back came the trucks rebounding on the iron buffers, striking like horrible iron cymbals, clashing nearer and nearer in frightful strident concussions. The mare opened her mouth and rose slowly, as if lifted on a wind of terror. Then suddenly her fore feet struck out, as she convulsed herself utterly away from the horror. (FWL, 98–9) In a very literal sense, this scene resembles the defensive strategy on the Western front up to 1916, of holding a rigid, impenetrable line of trenches. The first line was the only defensive line, while the second and third held reserves which would go up to replace the casualties. For instance, at the Somme, battalions of German troops were poured into the front line only to be decimated by British artillery. Later, this strategy was replaced by the “plane defence” in which the front line would be relinquished, then retaken by counterattacks from the other lines.31

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 77

The value of this reading, though, lies in the expression of the stress in holding the line against bombardment by shellfire. Even writers who directly experienced this situation often failed to describe it directly, instead resorting to vague comparisons. Richard Aldington in his novel Death of a Hero from 1929, for instance, initially admitted that “the whole thing was indescribable”, then slid across comparisons to a symphony, jazz and opera.32 Lawrence momentarily resorted to this imagery in appealing to the noise of “horrible iron cymbals”. A far more precise, and convincing, representation was achieved by Gerald Brenan in “A Survivor’s Story”: “The earth appears to rock and tremble. The air is filled by a persistent rushing sound, broken by the crash of explosions. The mind cannot think, the arms and legs tremble automatically.”33 Lawrence mirrored Brenan’s focus on the physical sensations of bombardment: while the force of the train resounds through the horse’s body, the animal is completely passive in its terror, only capable of futile reflex responses. However Brenan’s terse, literal description is restricted in comparison to Lawrence’s expression of the psychological impact of violence by presenting the train in terms of the terror it evokes in the horse. Herbert Read approached Lawrence’s effect more in his memoir In Retreat where he described how “the earth vibrated almost hysterically”, and even used animal imagery to describe how his company “grovelled like frightened, cowed animals” under shellfire from their own side behind.34 But perhaps the closest contemporary literary account of exposure to shellfire is in Robert Nichols’s “The Assault”. Lawrence read Nichols’s manuscript poetry in November 1915, and although it is unlikely that “The Assault” provides a source for this scene (it was composed in 1916), Lawrence could have received comparable reports of war conditions from Nichols on meeting him in military hospital, since all of his war poetry is based upon a very brief period of service in 1915. Entrusted with the order to enforce the men to advance towards the shellfire, Nicholls both mirrored the horse and Gerald: where the horse’s “paws were blind and pathetic as she beat the air”, after his initial fear Nichols experienced “Blindness a moment. Sick”; like Gerald in “the grasp of his will” and “will bright and unstained” (FWL, 100–1), he controlled his emotions where “Now beautifully my will grips / Soul calm and round and filmed and white!” Nonetheless, Nichols reached the same conclusion as Lawrence did in the scene, towards “Deafness. Numbness”, then sadism of killing: “Good! O good! / Cool madness”.35 Lawrence’s ambition lay beyond recording the psychological experience of trench warfare – after all, he could only imagine it with the

78

War Trauma and English Modernism

aid of accounts from participants such as Nichols. Instead the novel analyses the experience of war as a psychological condition within contemporary civilisation. Gudrun’s reaction to Gerald in this scene, which determines her subsequent relationship with him over the rest of the novel, is centred upon this concern: she follows the whole process of traumatisation from the horse’s disempowerment to identifying with Gerald’s sadistic power. However, Lawrence’s attempt to analyse the war is extremely ambitious since the aim of analysis is to formulate a solution, and in his case the problem was still unfolding.

Analysing war Alongside the novel, Lawrence’s series of philosophical writings during this period represent a recurrent effort to work through the shock of war, and envisage a cure to it. Their focus progressively shifted from imagining a solution, as in the central affirmative image of the poppy in “Study of Thomas Hardy”, towards analysing the problem in “The Reality of Peace” in 1917. This development reflected Lawrence’s withdrawal in face of the overwhelming and remorseless impact of war, but also his realisation that diagnosis must precede prescription. The transition from The Rainbow to Women in Love corresponds to this development, and the essays of “The Crown” in 1915 lie within it. Lawrence’s challenge lay in fashioning a discourse to analyse the war in psychological and cultural terms. Psychoanalysis at least offered him a model of the split between consciousness and unconscious, as we saw in the scene between Hermione and Birkin. A debt to Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is disclosed in Ursula’s speculation that “perhaps there was an unconscious will behind” Gerald’s childhood killing of his brother, and in Birkin disbelief that “there was any such thing as an accident. It all hung together in the deepest sense” (FWL, 41, 21). This disparity between conscious intention and unconscious action opened up the possibility of explaining how individuals were willing to kill and be killed for ideals of democracy and national sovereignty. Yet aside from offering a means of interpreting trauma symptoms, psychoanalysis was ill-prepared for interpreting the psychological causes of large-scale violence. Freud disclosed in 1915 that “we are unable to maintain our former attitude towards death, and have not yet found a new one”;36 he would later append the death drive to his theory of the libido. In his own theory Lawrence departed from

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 79

current ideas in psychoanalysis, developing in parallel lines with Freud on the subject of sadomasochism while relying upon tropes from nineteenth-century Decadent literature as focal points for analysis. Like Eliot, and Sassoon and Owen, Lawrence appropriated this literature by translating its diagnosis of the spiritual and emotional decline of a culture in modern peacetime into the literal death of individuals in modern war. He achieved this translation by combining Decadent ideas with a critique of industrial modernity, which as we have just seen in “Coal-Dust”, provides the material features of his vision of industrial warfare. Over the course of the novel Lawrence invoked the Decadent oppositions of nerves and sensuality, art and life, man and woman; he analysed these oppositions in terms of narcissism and the split between ego and unconscious to reveal a consequential violence of sensations, which concludes in death. Gudrun the artist is Lawrence’s archetypal “flower of mud” (a play on Baudelaire’s iconic title); sketching water-plants, she feels their “turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision, she knew how they rose out of the mud, she knew how they thrust out from themselves, how they stood stiff and succulent against the air” (FWL, 352, 106). Plants are a dominant motif in Decadent writing, for instance in Hothouses Maurice Maeterlinck like Gudrun identified with how lilies and lotuses raise themselves out of their corrupt source, “l’eau tiède” (“the swamp”). Also her vision of nature at war with itself, of plants “thrusting out their leaves at right angles, and having dark poisonous colours”, echoes des Esseintes hothouse plants in Huysmans’s A rebours, “all intermingling, crossing swords, creeses, or spears with one another, forming a mass of green weapons, over which floated, like barbarian battle-flags, flowers of crude and dazzling colours”.37 Gudrun transposes her eroticised vision of inner corruption and outer violence onto Gerald’s ostensibly healthy “body, stretching and surging with life, like the plants, stretching towards her, his hand coming straight forward like a stem” (FWL, 107) which sets the tone of their future relationship. Lamenting that “we are sick, that is for certain, made sick by progress”, Emile Zola explained that “The flesh has been weakened by the deep and repeated shocks with which the brain marks the entire organism. . . . This victory of the nerves over the blood has determined our customs, our literature, our whole period.”38 Gudrun desires from Loerke “an unbroken will reacting against her unbroken will in a myriad subtle thrills of reduction, the last subtle activities of reduction, carried out in the darkness of her, whilst the outside form, the individual ego,

80

War Trauma and English Modernism

was utterly unchanged” (FWL, 417). They are typical of what Paul Bourget identified as the Decadent preoccupation with forms of decomposition while the intellect differentiates sensations “with the precision of a prism breaking down light”.39 In this relation the ego dominates the body’s sensuality, and this power structure is mirrored in the precedence of Decadent art over life. In the philosophy of “l’art pour l’art” the highest aim of art was to trap the image of freedom in nature, in order to supersede nature. Baudelaire provided a model for successive generations in his aspiration to reproduce and fix in art the process of decomposition, ordering the chaos of nature through the despotic authority of art, for instance “Une charogne” which creates a pastoral out of the sound of maggots consuming a corpse: “ce monderendait une étrange musique, / Comme l’eau courante et le vent” (“this whole teeming world made a musical sound / Like babbling brooks and the breeze”).40 In her dress Gudrun is a self-created work of art, by means of which she wards off the threat of others, as in her famous exit from the Café Impérial. Furthermore, as sharers in “some black and symbolist knowledge belonging to Bel”, for Gudrun and Loerke “the temple of Art was their refuge, and the inner mysteries of sensation their sanctuary” (FWL, 414). Loerke’s fascination with industry as art combines the Decadent aesthetic and Gerald’s economic drive to control nature’s resources. Furthermore, this relationship is replicated in sexuality, of the male identified with intellect and art, imposing himself upon the female as body and nature. But in this sphere Decadent culture acknowledges the failings of its aesthetic values: instead of being a passive victim, the woman is Salome, Medusa or Mona Lisa, cold and enigmatic, even cruel and murderous. Lawrence cited Mona Lisa’s fixed, ironic smile as confirming how in love and war, “here is no consummation into death. Death leaves still further deaths” (RDP, 292). On publicly dissociating herself from Gerald, Gudrun is appropriately described as “a vivid Medusa”. Birkett explains that the woman of Decadence is the image of the male artist’s desire, while he creates her beauty; this desire inevitably destroys him because it lies in the unattainable ambition of bending the whole world to his will in art. Gerald ironically plays this artist’s role with Gudrun; he has already bent the material world of industry to his will but fails to master her, since as an artist she has already mastered herself through a system of “defences” (FWL, 415, 4, 346). This aspiration for intellect, art and male to dominate over their opposites is rooted in the prevailing psychological condition of Decadence: narcissism. The archetypal figure of this narcissism is Baudelaire’s dandy,

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 81

who with tenuous and exaggerated self-regard at turns repulsed and immersed himself in the threatening city. In his paper “On Narcissism: An Introduction” Freud wrote that “A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love.”41 Lawrence argued in “The Crown” that “the unconsummated soul, unsatisfied, uncreated in part, will seek to make itself whole by bringing the whole world under its one order, will seek to make itself absolute and timeless by devouring its opposite” (RDP, 267). He attributed narcissism to an anxiety of individual inadequacy, overcompensated by megalomaniac domination over the other. Gerald’s whole approach to the mines follows an exclusive formula: “first the resistant Matter of the underground; then the instruments of its subjection, instruments human and metallic; and finally his own pure will, his own mind”. For Gudrun other people are “finished, sealed and stamped and finished with” till she recognises the power of Gerald as “the wolf”, causing in her veins “a paroxysm of violent sensation” (FWL, 210, 10). At this moment her narcissistic will to dominate otherness is eroticised as sadism, and directed inwards as masochism. Both Lawrence and Freud recognised the need to account for the coincidence of sadism and masochism, while populations raged to kill and be killed. For Lawrence this process is caused by turning inwards of the libido. It violates the self while struggling to break outwards once more, till this violation becomes the only sensation, and pleasure, left to the individual who is cut off from outside reality: the heart would beat within him, beat and beat, grow louder and louder, till it was threshing the whole of his inside rotten, threshing him hollow, till his inside began to devour his consciousness. . . . this sensationalism, this reduction back, has become our very life, our only form of life at all. We enjoy it, it is our lust. . . . It became at last a collective activity, a war, when, within the great rind of virtue we thresh destruction further and further, till our whole civilisation is like a great rind full of corruption, of breaking down, a mere shell threatened with collapse upon itself (RDP, 275, 277). In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes of 1915 Freud was closest to Lawrence where he identified a secondary form of sadism as a form of masochism: “while these pains are being inflicted on other people, they are enjoyed masochistically by the subject through his identification of himself with the suffering object”.42 Lawrence gave the example of the soldier

82

War Trauma and English Modernism

who rapes his captive, to violate himself: “His cruelty-lust is directed almost as much against himself as against his victim. He is destroying, reducing, breaking down that of himself which is within the envelope” (RDP, 284). Lawrence compared the soldier to a list of nineteenth-century literary characters from Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky and D’Annunzio, concluding his diagnosis of violence in war in a Decadent imagery of sadomasochism: The enemy is the bride, whose body we will reduce with a rapture of agony and wounds. We are the bridegroom, engaged with him in the long, voluptuous embrace, the giving of agony, the rising and rising of the slow, unwilling transport of misery, the soaking-in of day after day of wet mud, in penetration of the heavy, sordid, unendurable cold, on and on to the climax, the laceration of the blade, like a frost through the tissue, blasting it. (RDP, 284, 290) In The First “Women in Love” Gerald is the bridegroom and Gudrun the bride, in “voluptuous embrace” of mutually inflicted agony. Their emotions are progressively desensitised by the coldness and laceration of each other’s response, towards a rapturous climax of emotional dissolution, leaving only bodily sensations, till these are exhausted also, and death ensues. In terms of the psychological theory of “The Crown”, Gudrun’s and Gerald’s primal narcissistic drive to master exterior reality has been redirected in adulthood upon their own impulses. Satisfaction is achieved through the ego’s supremacy by appropriating the libido’s energy, which is sexualised as masochism. This satisfaction is extended by sadistically appropriating the libidinal energies of others, till each partner is sadomasochistically exchanging sensual impulses for ego gains. Lawrence would invite his readers link this presentation of a destructive relationship between the sexes to the war front where each side exchanges casualties for territorial gains. Death is the final stage of Decadence, where the only pleasure that remains is to contemplate the end of all pleasure. Gudrun has “further to go, a further, slow, exquisite experience to reap, unthinkable subtleties of sensation to know, before she was finished”. While according with Lawrence’s psychological terms of analysis, her relationship with Gerald continues to mirror the structure of events in the war itself: “terrible” and “inconclusive” (FWL, 417, 428), it persists only because they are attempting to prove their freedom from each other’s power, by dominating each other.

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 83

The limits of analysis As in The Rainbow, the ambition of Lawrence’s analysis, to yield a cure to war both for his self and for civilisation as a whole, was circumscribed profoundly by the unexpected scale of the war. The discourses from which he developed his formulation only fostered this problem. Birkett explains how Decadent writers created “imaginary solutions to real problems” of modernity, “building on a thin foundation of historical fact the edifice of outrageous but seductive lies which is their own fantasy”. Robert Jay Lifton notes how Freud “led psychoanalysis to survive World War I” by reintegrating the experience of death into his “sweeping instinctual structure” through the notion of narcissism which sexualises self-preservation.43 With narcissism underpinning his analysis of war Lawrence faced the same dilemma as Freud in whether to analyse violence as a defence against an inner drive, or an outside event. Gerald’s and Gudrun’s relationship enacts the disparity between Lawrence’s traumatised experience of the war, and his attempt to master it through analysis. Gerald’s history can be traced back to his sixth month with his nurse Mrs Kirk who “pinched his little bottom for him” (FWL, 196). More significant, of course, is the actual shooting of his brother during childhood. Gerald’s subsequent fate resembles that of Freud’s Tancred, compelled to repeat his unintentional murder of Chlorinda by slashing the tree which houses her soul. A belated series of defences to restore the integrity of his mind after the death of his brother, Gerald’s development accords with Freud’s account of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of recuperating the damage of an extreme event which has broached consciousness; Freud described how the mind deploys its resources in “every possible defensive measure” against this “invasion”.44 For instance, at the mines Gerald’s “sole idea, to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will”, is a displaced effort to reduce his unconscious guilt to his will. And yet, as we have seen in cases of trauma, he repeats his aggression in the attempt to repress his guilt, to establish order: “There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its way of destructiveness” (FWL, 210, 213). Even his boyhood desire to shoot the men on strike can be explained as a repetition of his original violent act, while attempting to redeem it through re-establishing order. At the end of the novel he feels that he has been “torn apart and given to Gudrun”, and yet she has only exposed this “wound, this strange, infinitely sensitive opening of his soul” (FWL, 411).

84

War Trauma and English Modernism

However in contrast to Gerald, Gudrun is the archetypal decadent without a history, only presented as a self-created work of art. Without a past to refer to, it is impossible to locate a traumatic experience which determines her character. Also, in “Coal-Dust” her behaviour contrasts with Gerald’s horse, as a symbol of the traumatised soldier. Forced into confrontation with industrial violence, the horse does not glory in the strength of its ego against the threat of death but is powerless before this threat. Consequently it is traumatised into psychological withdrawal. By contrast Gudrun’s response to the scene is more representative of the sadomasochistic fantasies of civilians about the war. More than any soldier, she resembles Kipling’s Mary Postgate who, indoctrinated by atrocity-mongering, revels in the death of a German aviator. The novel as a whole is ambivalent about the value of analysis for recovery. In “The Crown” Lawrence quoted D’Annunzio that “analysis presupposes a corpse”, but almost two years later in “The Reality of Peace” advocated self-analysis as the only path to cure: “When we understand our extreme being in death, we have surpassed into a new being” (RDP, 280, 34). Early in the novel Birkin advocates this latter position to Ursula: “It is horrible to know the last truths about ourselves and our sensations . . . But it has got to be done, if we are not going all merely to perish in the final glistening experience of death and killing.” And yet as Ursula notes, Birkin’s analysis is “purely destructive”, just as Lawrence characterised the novel under the pressure of war. Birkin’s position seems all too similar to Loerke who has reached “the rock-bottom of all life”. At the end of the novel Lawrence attempted to clarify the purpose of analysis. Disagreeing with Gudrun’s conviction, like Gerald’s, that “the only thing to do with the world, is to see it through”, Ursula argues that “one can see it though in one’s soul, long before it sees itself through in actuality. And then, when one has seen in one’s soul, one can try for something else.” Yet in prescribing “something else” Ursula becomes the mouthpiece of Birkin’s and Lawrence’s most abstract theorising: “I believe what we must fulfil comes out of the Unknown to us, and it is something infinitely more than love.” Unconvinced, Gudrun mocks Ursula in her “quest of Rupert’s Blessed Isles” (FWL, 119, 129, 393, 404).

The First “Women in Love” and history Finally, we return to the opening issue addressed in this chapter, and which concerns it as a whole: what is the relation of The First “Women in Love” to its historical moment of production, 1916? We have seen

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 85

the basic structures of testimony where Lawrence registered the emotional impact of war through depicting violence within and between characters. He attempted to impose a more general meaning upon these fragments through analytical discourses based upon psychoanalysis and Decadence. Yet the contradictory narrative structures of Gudrun’s decadent quest for sensation and Gerald’s desperate struggle to restore integrity to a traumatised self reflect the disparity between Lawrence’s self-belief as an author who could restore civilisation, and his testimony as a powerless victim of events. Instead, as we saw in the early version of “Coal-Dust”, in the novel testimony meets history where structures extend from the basic impulse of violence in characters to economics, society and politics. In the attempt to objectify trauma as historical event, Lawrence drew inspiration from a distant model of war writing, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, which he read from April 1916 onwards. It is significant that Birkin should protect himself from the blow of Hermione’s lapis lazuli “under the thick volume of Thucydides” (FWL, 94). For Lawrence, Thucydides was a model of the historian for his own time, “with the simplicity and the directness of the most complete culture and the widest consciousness” (ii. 592). In 424 Thucydides was exiled from Athens, which he considered laconically as providing him with “leisure to observe the affairs somewhat particularly”.45 Emulating Thucydides, Lawrence could take heart that his own internal exile offered him an impartial perspective from which to view the war as an international struggle for economic and cultural power. Yet Lawrence’s task of emulating Thucydides’s comprehensive vision of war prevented him from imitating the Greek historian’s simple and direct style. Writers such Erich Maria Remarque, Edmund Blunden, Herbert Read and Richard Aldington, used a first-person narrator, as in Thucydides’s History, who assures the reader of his direct experience and understanding of the events. However, the single perspective of these narrators fails to grasp the complexity of a modern world war in its various dimensions.46 Instead, to capture the impact of disorientation upon whole populations from the unprecedented scale and intensity of destruction, Lawrence mirrored this disorientation in his writing. This quality reverses the terms of the critical debate on the nature of history in the novel. It can be argued that Lawrence’s expression of his traumatised experience of the war did not preclude his understanding of it as a historical event; instead it is crucial to his understanding since it freed him from the presumption that he could make sense of the slaughter. Only a shattered subjectivity could record these disjointed, irrational events.

86

War Trauma and English Modernism

The two extremes of Lawrence’s writing, direct testimony of traumatic suffering and historical narrative, provide a response to the war that is transparently personal yet distanced in its objectivity. Gerald’s character development can be interpreted as an allegory charting the rise of German dominance in Europe.47 His management policies bear many analogies with Bismarck’s rejection of liberalism and establishment of German nationhood through a policy of conquest, centralisation and industrial growth. Like Gerald’s organisation of the mines, Germany’s industrial works were rationalised and integrated into huge cartels for greater efficiency and higher output. Together with the military hierarchy in government, industry monopolised political as well as economic power into a system whose unfettered expansion entered into direct confrontation with the interests of Germany’s European neighbours. German military and industrial power spilled over into the First World War, just as Gerald’s assertion of power leads to his destructive relationship with Gudrun. It is ironic that Gudrun should imagine Gerald as “freer, more dauntless” (FWL, 384) than Bismarck, since she is referring to Bismarck’s protracted siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, which Germany had intended to avoid through the ill-calculated Schlieffen Plan. However Lawrence’s novel is not merely a national allegory of Germany as the sole belligerent force in the war since Germany’s industrialisation provided the model of a war economy for its antagonists. While it had deployed conscripted men of military age since the Battle of Ypres in 1914,48 Britain struggled to meet its onslaught, and in doing so had to follow its example. The Liberal Asquith Government was charged with “unpreparedness for war” by the Conservatives, for its failure to direct the manufacture of sufficient ammunition and high explosives in 1915. Lloyd George swiftly became the “Gerald Crich” of Britain’s war economy by taking charge of the Ministry of Munitions, with the intention of establishing “a properly disciplined nation”. His advocacy of conscription was seen as a violation of the right of freeborn Englishmen to choose whether to take up arms, and was associated with Prussianism in how it enforced the direction of labour Directing Munitions; nonetheless in 1916 there was a growing section of the nation which called for more decisive, ruthless, committed leadership. Lloyd George exercised state authority to control production and determine priorities for what he called “an engineer’s war”, just as Gerald achieved his revolution through highly trained engineers. By 1917 the quality of British weapons was greatly improved with more mobile guns and effective shells. This development was effected by the conversion

Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 87

of peacetime industries to war purposes, including the creation of new national factories dedicated to producing armaments, and the diversion of scientists, managers and labourers into war-related activities.49 These historical events in Germany since its unification and in Britain during the war correspond more closely to the radical nature of Gerald’s revolution in the mines than the events in British industry at the beginning of the century, which Worthen and Holderness have previously focused upon. Lawrence’s displacement between peace and wartime in the novel can even be regarded as historically literal since Thomas Philip Barber, chairman of the Barber Walker mining company and historical model for Gerald, served as a Major throughout the war (FWL, 464). Furthermore, events during the war correspond to the novel in terms of how the working population reacted to them. Holderness’s crucial charge against Lawrence centres upon his depiction of the working class as servile to the modernisation of coal mining, which discounts them as participants in historical change. But the war economies in Britain, France and Germany exercised a remarkable discipline over their populations until 1918. Russia, of course, was an exception to this, collapsing with the revolutions in 1917, but this was mainly due to its relatively undeveloped industrial structure. Despite their position of power with the scarcity of labour, workers in Western Europe were convinced of the righteousness of their national cause, and an industrial truce was declared on the outbreak of war. In Britain the industrial and parliamentary sectors of the labour movement passed a resolution to terminate all industrial disputes. Working days lost through stoppages fell from an unprecedented 41 million in 1912 and 10 million in both 1913 and 1914, to 3 million in 1915 and 2.5 million in 1916. As Britain moved to a state of “total war” in 1916, unemployment became non-existent. Perhaps even more surprisingly, this loyalty at home was mirrored by the soldiers at the front up to the very end of the war.50

As a history of Europe at war, then, it can be argued that Lawrence’s description of Gerald’s revolution of the mines is an accurate account at all social levels, from the centralised, dictatorial role of the Governments, to the obedience of their populations: Gerald the industrial magnate can be regarded as a general, the Prime Minister, and towards the end of the novel, even the fallen soldiers. The violent confrontations between characters in The First “Women in Love” provide testimony of Lawrence’s traumatised experience of the

88

War Trauma and English Modernism

First World War in 1916. To give meaning to the novel’s abreactive fragments and his experience, Lawrence employed the discourses of psychoanalysis and Decadence to analyse them; however this approach is compromised by his self-appointed role as analyst to Europe as patient. On the other hand, by letting the fragments coagulate, binding violence to its historical circumstances, Lawrence began to convert the traumatic shock of war into a narrative that can be assimilated to consciousness and understood, if in a limited way. The war is an event which is not assimilated to a linear, rationalised temporality; it is both at home and abroad, in the present and a projected future. The boudoir, ski resort and railway crossing become no-man’s-land fought over between men and women. Attempting to escape from violence, while being unable to locate it within and outside themselves, they constantly re-enact it with each other. Instead of locating the first Modernist reaction to war in Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Eliot’s “Gerontion” from 1919, we can place Lawrence’s First “Women in Love” alongside the poetry of Sassoon and Graves in 1916. Lawrence provides a more immediate Modernist response to the war: not a triumph over history through the construction of the world in language, which Eliot and Joyce came to represent in the Twenties; rather, the individual’s submission to history, and acceptance of defeat, albeit without the direct experience of carnage witnessed by war writers. The First “Women in Love” is unique in offering us a comprehensive vision of the First World War in terms of the experience of an individual who was all but devastated by it.

4 Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land

In terms of literary history, Eliot’s development from his arrival in England in 1914 to the publication of The Waste Land in 1922 can be read as a triumphant passage: from isolated foreigner in an atmosphere of extreme patriotism to the most prominent writer in London; from poetry disordered by emotional excess to that which articulated and modernised Western culture since Homer. Throughout this period, however, Eliot’s personal life lurched from one crisis to another, culminating in a nervous breakdown. Substituting literary history with the clinical terms of Ferenczi, one could go as far as to posit correspondences between the stages of Eliot’s development and those of a dissociated personality: The content of the split-off ego is always as follows: natural development and spontaneity, protest against violence and injustice, contemptuous, perhaps sarcastic and ironic obedience displayed in the face of domination, but inward knowledge that the violence has in fact achieved nothing . . . Contentment with oneself for this accomplishment, a feeling of being bigger and cleverer than the brutal force; suddenly insight into the greater coherence of world order, the treatment of brute force as a kind of mental disorder.1 Eliot experienced a deluded sense of spontaneity in his brief courtship then marriage to Vivienne in 1915; he oscillated between protest and obedience to the conditions forced upon him by war, as expressed in the satirical but technically disciplined quatrain poems from 1917. The final stage of self-contentment and sense of insight into the brutal conditions of Europe at war was manifested in his critical writing from 1919 onwards and the completed version of The Waste Land. 89

90

War Trauma and English Modernism

During this last stage Eliot even identified a “dissociation of sensibility” in the civilisation which had brought on his inner dissociation. His concept mirrored the War Office’s diagnosis of war trauma as “psychical dissociation”, a “functional splitting of the personality”. Following the lead of Morton Prince’s Dissociation of Personality in 1906, military psychiatrists such as W.H.R. Rivers observed that “the suppressed experience does not remain passive, but acquires an independent activity of its own”, even carrying with it an “independent consciousness”. Charles Altieri notes that Eliot’s concept “made victimage heroic by posing the modernist poet as one who lives fully the deep contradictions plaguing the West since the seventeenth century”.2 Having displaced the cause of dissociation twofold, to history with the English Civil War, then from history to the literary “influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden”, Eliot could appeal to poets preserving and developing Tradition as an answer to a contemporary problem. Furthermore, through realising the “objective correlative”, they were singularly capable of realising a cure, to once more “feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose” (AWL, 198). Reflecting this dual subjection to and diagnosis of cultural trauma, Eliot utilised dissociation as a technique of analysis. Once again he followed clinical practice, of Pierre Janet’s dissociation of a fixed complex, to “demolish it stone by stone”.3 He derived from Rémy de Gourmont this critical technique, observing in 1918 that French critics “have developed standards and the skill in dissociation to a degree quite unknown in this country”.4 He also explained its creative potential, as in Beyle’s and Flaubert’s “dissociation of human feeling”: “The surface of existence coagulates into lumps which look like important simple feelings, which are identified by names as feelings, which the patient analyst disintegrates into more complex and trifling, but ultimately, if he goes far enough, into various canalizations of something again simple, terrible and unknown.” Here emotions within complexes were dissociated from each other by the “patient analyst”, in order to access and identify them. These writers dissociated feelings among “simple, terrible and unknown” material, which was already dissociated from the rest of their personality.5 The question that this chapter attempts to address is how Eliot’s poetry during and immediately after war articulates correspondences between his dissociated personality and Europe’s dissociated culture, and how it posits a solution to both. The war affected Eliot in the critical way that it did Lawrence; however, more than Lawrence, Eliot’s trauma is deeply bound up with his sexuality. Literary biographers have

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 91

focused upon his problematic relationship with Vivienne as the source of his poetry, but here I will suggest how his personal history was entangled with the history of his time. The crucial link is Verdenal, who tied Eliot’s experience of the war to his most intimate self. As with Lawrence, Eliot’s war trauma was not caused on the site of battle, but ironically was exacerbated by his absence from it: from the sense of impotence in his marriage, and his futile wish to redeem the loss of Verdenal.

1915–1916: “Hysteria” and silence Eliot’s sense of disorientation since the outbreak of war persisted into 1915. Confessing that “the war is very real and frightful to me”, his fear of it actually lay in how it did not manifest itself in any real sense to him. Marriage to Vivienne in June represented an alternative to volunteering for war, at least in how it oriented him in English society. Echoing the prevalent notion of military service as a man’s greatest challenge, he quoted the wife of his friend Jack Gardner that marriage was “the greatest test in the world”, “a test of the character [which] affects every action” (LG, 93, 107). It would plunge Eliot into a deeper experience of the war than he could have predicted: despite frustrating his ambivalent desire to volunteer, it entrapped him in a position of powerlessness and despair, which would ultimately link his psychological experience to the soldiers on the front. Also, as he disclosed in old age, it “brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land” (AWL, 8). Vivienne’s story, and the physical and psychological problems that beset her life, have been detailed in Carole Seymour-Jones’s biography. Diagnosed by her mother as having “moral insanity”, where feeling was in excess of intellect, Vivienne was prescribed potassium bromide from the age of sixteen; Stephen Spender retrospectively alluded to her “history of illness and ‘nerves’”.6 During his treatment at Lausanne in 1921 Eliot would recognise that he also suffered from a “lifelong affliction” of “emotional derangement”, and while Vivienne’s influence on him has been charted and speculated upon, we should bear in mind that the tortuous nature of their relationship was a product of their shared weaknesses. She endured his perennial attacks of sickness at night, only managing to be self-sufficient and high-spirited in his absence.7 It is difficult to judge whether they were projecting their own states of mind upon each other in their letters to his parents; for instance, in March 1917 she explained to his mother how he “was gloomy and depressed and very irritable and I knew he felt that life was simply not worth going on with”, and in a letter to his father from the previous week he excluded

92

War Trauma and English Modernism

any mention of his emotional state while describing how when Vivienne “worries she bleeds internally, in a metaphorical sense”. Her extremely subjective personality left her unable to distance and protect her inner self from a violent outside world, and she fostered Eliot’s tendencies towards this, to the point of their sharing clinical symptoms. In September 1916 he claimed that the dampness of their room in Bosham had aggravated her neuralgia and given him mild rheumatism in the left leg; at other times he was “contorted with rheumatism”. Together their symptoms would come to resemble those of traumatised soldiers; this could even occur through suggestion, for instance in November 1915 after hearing her brother Maurice’s stories from the trenches and witnessing the return of officers and men, she was “pretty well knocked out by it, and . . . had neuralgia in consequence” (LE, 176–7, 210, 132). In her history with Eliot we see a cycle of his anxiety and her neuralgia, their waiting for the war to end and yet still being caught in its nightmare after it had passed. The prose poem “Hysteria”, written in November 1915, reveals the impact of marriage upon Eliot, even how he associated Vivienne with the war. The narrator involuntarily participates in the woman’s convulsive laughter: I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. (CP, 32) The narrator sexually desires to penetrate the woman and subsequently loses himself inside her, physically and psychologically. Unlike identification where one forms an image of another within oneself, the speaker projectively identifies himself inside the woman as a defensive illusion of control over her and denial of his own powerlessness. Yet entering her also causes anxiety since her teeth evoke the male fear of castration. More specifically to Vivienne, their romantic and anarchic quality as “accidental stars” is combined with their opposing “talent for squaddrill”. This combination expresses how marriage to Vivienne provided Eliot with his own personal war conditions, and how he was a passive victim to them. Denying his own irrationality, he regarded Vivienne’s as the rule of law, an inverted discipline which regimented his life. Eliot consistently explained, or explained away, the problems of his marriage in terms of the war. The wedding was “hastened by events connected to the war”, since he was taking on the responsibility of financially supporting Vivienne in the wake of her family’s recently

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 93

straitened circumstances. However, he found it very difficult to honour this pledge to her, complaining to Conrad Aiken in August 1915, “What I want is MONEY! $! £!! We are hard up! War!” The problem was acute, as he confided to his father that “we are not planning how to make living easier: the question is how to live at all”. The couple’s financial problems made them dependent on Bertrand Russell; they borrowed his flat, which led to Vivienne’s affair with him. Her neuralgia continued over the winter and the following spring, and then throughout the autumn of 1916 (LE, 119, 126). In a rare confessional moment Eliot summed up the first year of his marriage as “the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive, but at least it is not dull, and it has its compensations” (LE, 166). The last note here is the pose of a sexually fulfilled newlywed, and echoes the Laforguian irony at the end of “Hysteria”: “I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end” (CPP, 32). However, just as Russell may have consummated Eliot’s marriage, leaving the suggestion in this letter an empty claim, so does the Laforguian twist in “Hysteria” fail to counter the intensity of terror of the first half of the poem. Throughout this period Eliot was usually “far too worried and nervous” to write poetry. Also, he noted, London’s literary scene was deserted since the departure of the Vorticists with whom he had first published, as well as Ford Madox Hueffer and T.E. Hulme. Eliot was caught in a vicious circle: the decline of literary periodicals by 1916 left him without a market to sell any of his poetry, and the consequent financial anxiety made him unable to devote his attention to poetry anyway. Also, Dori Laub explains the silence of survivors as due often to a belief that they have no right to speak up or protest.8 The anguish of his relationship with Vivienne was dwarfed by the suffering of soldiers, which he noted in the sharp decline of male students at his Yorkshire lectures. There was the example of Vivienne’s brother Maurice, as Eliot disclosed: “A boy of nineteen (for he had his twentieth birthday with us) who is quite used to the sight of disjecta membra and has spent nights when he couldn’t sleep in shooting rats with a revolver, he has made me feel comparatively immature” (LE, 162). Eliot demonstrated his need to match up to Maurice’s stoicism by giving him the manuscript of “In silent corridors of death” which presents a resolute pose: the speaker wanders through a hospital “alone / Without haste without hope without fear” since there is the bleak reassurance of “no moan / Of souls dying” (IMH, 93), only physical death.

94

War Trauma and English Modernism

Eliot’s difficult circumstances at least fathered an important draft fragment of The Waste Land, “The Death of the Duchess”, from about September 1916. Here the lack of prospect of publishing freed him to write deeply private, abreactive poetry which would contribute to the raw material of The Waste Land. As in his poetry of 1914, he looked backwards to face the present, to his previous poetry. Comparing people to hanging onions, “fingers on a table”, “dogs eyes” and “heads of birds”, the speaker’s failure to represent them at least qualifies him as their representative, asking “What words have we?” Human feeling is only suggested where “through lace curtains, the aspidistra grieves”, like a veiled widow or bereaved mother, but for whom? People “Discuss the evening’s news, and other bird things” – war, which was consistently at the head of every front page, is without meaning to civilians. The woman in the second half of the fragment is both the passive victim of “Portrait of a Lady”, and the more threatening figure of “A Game of Chess”. Following “Saint Sebastian”, sexual encounters continue to be sites of potential violence. Her relationship with the speaker already dead, they can only play chess, in which “The ivory men make company between us” (WLFT, 105, 107). The ivory figures representing the dead of war dominate their relationship, while they wait for their own death to be announced by the knocking on the door. In contrast to this poem, the impartial stance and precise language of Eliot’s newly completed thesis on Bradley provided a foundation for his incipient aesthetic impersonality, while it recorded his jettisoning of philosophy for literature. Moving beyond Bradley’s metaphysical approach, Eliot celebrated how the “true critic” establishes “truths of experience rather than of calculation” (KE, 167–8). Accordingly, his reactions to the war in his criticism attempted to reach above partisan sides. In a review of Philosophy and War by Émile Boutroux in October 1916 he dismissed how “the chapters on this war, and on the virtues of his nation, reveal all the conventional attitudes”.9 However, Eliot’s criticism occasionally exposes personal sentiments at odds with his philosophical approach. In a review of a biography of Charles Péguy in The New Statesman in October 1916, he betrayed how Verdenal continued to linger in his mind. He commented that Péguy’s death “is like the death of a friend”, and that “Péguy on the Marne is an essential part of this Péguy”.10 As editor of the influential magazine Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine and disciple of Bergson, Péguy’s fate was particularly poignant, reminding Eliot of his Paris year. Moreover as Eliot outlined in his extension lectures, Péguy had recently returned to the Catholic faith and adopted a fierce nationalism which led him to enlist on the outbreak of war, only to be shot five days later.

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 95

Similarly for Eliot, Verdenal in Gallipoli was an essential part of his Verdenal. A citation made two days after Verdenal’s death recorded that “Barely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend most of the night in the water up to his waist, in order to help with the evacuation of the wounded, thus giving a fine example of self-sacrifice.”11 Over the next few years death by drowning would become the motif which linked Eliot to Verdenal. It had already expressed fear and desire of death, the erotic loss of self and spiritual disorientation in “Prufrock” and “So through the evening”. In Eliot’s own case, the speaker in “Hysteria” loses himself in the cavernous being of the woman. In February 1915, a couple of months before meeting Vivienne, Eliot mused on the equally dissatisfying life-choices of family and solitude: “The idea of a submarine world of clear green light – one would be attached to a rock and swayed in two directions – would one be happiest or most wretched at the turn of the tide?” (LE, 96). In “Mr. Apollinax” from 1915 and 1916, this image expressed the fatalism of “Where worried bodies of drowned men drift in the green silence, / Dropping from fingers of surf” (CPP, 31). In turn it became associated with war. During a stay at Torquay with Vivienne in January 1916, a source for the couple’s situation in “The Death of the Duchess”, Eliot had noticed the “signs of war” (LE, 140) with torpedo boats searching for German submarines. Drowning was the means of death that Eliot feared for himself in the prospect of returning to America during the war. On 23 July 1915, a month after his marriage, and preparing to sail the next day, he wrote a letter to his father in the event of his own death. In a letter to his brother Henry in November 1916 he broaches the same issue, but what begins as an apparent concern for practical arrangements for Vivienne, becomes an obsessive reflection on the certainty of his own death: I am very anxious about [Vivienne’s] future in the event of my death. . . . Besides, your own interest, and besides the comfort it would be to have you here, it would be a great deal to me to know that there was someone near who would look out for Vivienne in case I died. . . . I must stop now. Always affectionately Tom. But whether you were here or not, I should like you to be the person to make yourself responsible for her in my stead. Will you do that? I want all of my family to take the sort of interest in her which would persist after my death; but I depend especially on you. (LE, 174)

96

War Trauma and English Modernism

The insistent repetitions of this letter are not in keeping with the usually controlled tone to his relatives. Instead it shows the influence of the two figures closest to him: he articulated most fully Vivienne’s psychological response to their situation, in her terror of losing Eliot to the war; also, he expressed a presentiment of his own possible death by drowning, partly of fear, but also of desire to escape from Vivienne, perhaps be reunited with Verdenal.

1917: engagement and impersonality 1917 brought Eliot a brief respite of optimism, with his employment at Lloyds Bank from March, then America’s entry into war on 6 April. From believing vaguely that “the war must end sometime”, and that “life here simply consists in waiting for the war to stop”, by late April he hoped “fixedly for the war to end in the autumn” (LE, 181, 188, 196). This re-engagement with events provided the psychological conditions for renewed creativity and the development of impersonality in life and art. In a letter to Eliot’s mother, Vivienne describes the effect of war on men, especially Eliot, with a remarkable insightfulness that is borne of her lack of detachment: The fact that America has declared war is rather terrible to me. I so dread that Tom might have, some day, to fight. And yet I think he would almost like to. You, over there, do not realise the bad and dreadful effect war has on the characters of young men (and old men). If they are nervous and highly strung (as Tom is, and also my brother) they become quite changed. A sort of desperation, and demoralisation of their minds, brains, and character. (LE, 192) Here Vivienne is strongly opposed to his mother, who was writing urgent newspaper appeals for American intervention, and even a war song for the Boston Herald.12 Eliot confirmed his longing to fight by welcoming America’s declaration of war as “the right thing”: I am pleased for several reasons, but chiefly because I think the war was so momentous as it was, that winding it up as a world war will be the best chance now for a satisfactory conclusion. I wish that our country might have a chance to refresh its memory as to what war really is like, – now that it is such a very vivid thing to Europe (LE, 193)

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 97

Here also is a veiled criticism of his mother, that while America could bring the war to “a satisfactory conclusion”, in doing so it would refresh its own memory of the horror of its Civil War. As if repeating his assurances to a “rather troubled” Vivienne, now suffering from neuralgia, rheumatism and catarrh, he declared that he would only go to war if “called out”. For the first time Eliot could believe that he was actively participating in the war, if only as a bank clerk at Lloyds. He explained to his father: “The foreign work is I believe the most interesting part of banking, especially at the present time, when one can from time to time see very big things happening in which one plays a small part without really knowing what is going on.” As an individual contributing to the great events that were beyond his personal control, he could begin to identify with the soldiers on the front. In July he boasted with an almost heroic pride to Eleanor Hinkley in America that “if I have not seen the battle field, I have seen other strange things, and I signed a cheque for two hundred thousand pounds while bombs fell about me”. He could imagine that America was the civilian territory, while Britain, and especially London, had become another line behind the front. He wrote to his mother as if he were a soldier to a naïve civilian, “you cannot realise what it is to live in the midst of alarms of war!”, then listed out the fiancé of one of Vivienne’s friends, his closest Oxford friend Karl Culpin and the brother of his instructor as recent casualties. Like a soldier writing home from the front, he anticipated what he would do, “when I come home from the war”. His identification with the soldiers was closest when comparing himself to his naïvely enthusiastic brother: “I see the war partly through the eyes of men who have been and returned, and who view it, even when convinced of the rightness of the cause, in a very different way: as something very sordid and disagreeable. That would be my spirit” (LE, 203, 210, 198–9, 203). The crucial point of all these statements is Eliot’s strain to play the role of the combatant, to conceal the truth of his own war experience as an ineffective non-combatant. The effect of Eliot’s changed circumstances, or at least his perception of them, was akin to the therapeutic process of the patient transferring psychological conflicts into the reassuring context of his relationship with the doctor: by simulating an empowered role in the war, Eliot could articulate his (avowedly former) sense of disempowerment. This attitude was complemented by composing in French through which, Eliot recalled, “I didn’t take the poems so seriously, and . . . I wasn’t so worried about not being able to write.” The use of French dissociated his creativity from his personal failings; it displaced him from Britain

98

War Trauma and English Modernism

to France, where his sense of alienation was linguistic not personal. Furthermore, he could imagine that he was making his own contribution to the war effort by reinforcing French culture against the German onslaught. The use of the quatrain contributed to this personal distancing since “the form gave the impetus to the content”. As “a sort of tour de force to see what I could do”13 it also strengthened Eliot’s ego which had been impotent in life, but was now masterful in its ability to order the expression of this life into such tight structures with precise language. For instance in “Le Directeur” Eliot’s poetic voice is both agonised sensibility and oppressively masterful virtuosity: he is able at free will to impose the disempowerment upon himself that he experienced in life, as in a therapeutic role play. These factors enabled him to present confessional material which could be published as impersonal poetic statements, unlike “The Death of the Duchess”; nonetheless, he censored this material by presenting a persona of himself that belonged as much to 1914 before the war began, as to 1917. “Lune de miel” and “Mélange adultère de tout” are remarkable for the candour of their self-disclosures, despite pre-war elements supplanting the material of Eliot’s suffering in war. Describing a disastrous honeymoon, “Lune de miel” is more generally concerned with Eliot’s sense of alienation from Europe: the couple plays out his experience of Europe immediately before the war, superficially sampling its cultural treasures while oblivious of the political implications of national difference. The newlyweds flit from the Netherlands to Ravenna, but unlike Eliot who was entrapped in Germany, on their return “auront vu la Suisse et traversé la France” (have seen Switzerland and crossed France). “Mélange adultère de tout” is Eliot’s most openly autobiographical poem charting his hotchpotch career from America to Yorkshire and London, and again his political naïveté regarding France and Germany. He imagined himself as a mock hero following the example of Lawrence of Arabia, wandering between Damascus and Omaha, memorialised by a cenotaph on the distant coasts of Mozambique. Both these poems are symptomatic of what they diagnose: while the characters glide obliviously across the complicated landscape of Europe and beyond, Eliot glides over the complications of his wartime existence. “Petit Epître” marks a transition to the quatrains in English by shifting emphasis from Eliot’s satirical self-portrayal to satire of those perceiving him, in the persona of Tristan Corbière. Scattered accusations include suspicions of German sympathies with the smell of “choucroute” (“sauerkraut”) and whether “Ici il cite un allemande?” (“Here, is he quoting German?) (IMH, 86–7). The following poems reach towards detachment

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 99

from Eliot’s circumstances, including the war. In the unpublished “Airs of Palestine, No. 2” the satire targets religion and journalism. “God shook the Cloud from East to West, / Riding the swat temperatures blast”, thus instigating war; subsequently the editor J.A. Spender like Moses “struck the living Rock” from which issued The Westminster Gazette. Through the newspaper’s war propaganda, readers “Cleansed and rejoiced in every limb, / And hate the Germans more and more” (IMH, 84–5). Read alongside “Airs of Palestine”, “The Hippopotamus” can be interpreted more specifically than as a satire on the tenuous link between the Church and ordinary men, since references locate these men on the field of war: The broad-backed hippopotamus Rests on his belly in the mud; Although he seems so firm to us He is merely flesh and blood. Flesh and blood is weak and frail, Susceptible to nervous shock The Allied war front, broad-backed and resting in the mud, seems firm to civilians at home, yet is only flesh and blood vulnerable to shell shock. Set in war, the satire on the Church is more precisely pointed, regarding its dubious role in providing spiritual compensation for the soldiers’ deaths. The hippopotamus “shall be washed as white as snow”, While the True Church remains below Wrapt in the old miasmal mist. (CPP, 49–50) Despite his revival of confidence in both life and art, these poems demonstrate how Eliot was still reluctant to express his deepest traumas regarding the war. In June 1917 he published five hundred copies of Prufrock and Other Observations with the dedication “To Jean Verdenal 1889–1915”. The dates indicate the loss of Verdenal as a casualty of war but also, alongside the poems collected, as belonging to Eliot’s early development. The description in “Tristan Corbière” of the “rayons de soleil, par une chaude après-midi” (“rays of light on a hot afternoon”) with the description of Lieutenant Loti “Comme au coin du boulevard une vielle ancienne grue” (“Like an old battered crane on the corner

100

War Trauma and English Modernism

boulevard”) (IMH, 88), eschews Eliot’s nostalgia for the officer Verdenal, which he later disclosed, of “a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens”. Besides this, Karl Culpin, Eliot’s closest friend at Oxford, was killed in May without being memorialised in his poetry. Nonetheless, these last two poems register how Eliot no longer felt himself outside history. By 1917, to be paralysed as an individual had become a collective experience: the only way for Eliot to find meaning in his apparently futile personal life lay in locating its relevance to the world beyond, and he achieved this by recognising the futility of that world. Out of this recognition he would formulate a notion of impersonality, which later took a very different form in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. Eliot first suggested this notion in a letter to his father on 1 March 1917: “It is some comfort to think of our difficulties as impersonal – that is, that thousands of other people, in a good many countries, are suffering worse from the same cause, and that the whole world is going to find living harder after the war.” He repeated these sentiments in late December, and anticipated communicating them to a wider public in the distant future: Besides, everyone’s individual lives are so swallowed up in the one great tragedy, that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimportant! . . . I have a lot of things to write about if the time ever comes when people will attend to them. (LE, 177, 242) As usual, he was trying to give his situation a positive form for his father: experience of “the one great tragedy” was far more important than personal experience. However, as he expressed to his mother, all personal experience was swallowed in the futility of this tragedy: Judging from American newspapers, the war seems to have affected the country not very seriously yet. I don’t mean that it is not the chief subject of interest, but that it is simply the chief subject of interest, and not the obsessing nightmare that it is to Europe. And we can’t make you realise three thousand miles away what all that means. Even with all your privations and difficulties. Your papers talk about the “fight for civilisation”, do they realise either what civilisation means or what the fight for it means? We are all immeasurably and irremediably altered over here by the last three years. (LE, 262)

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 101

Writing to his mother as “we”, Eliot believed that he represented all Europeans: there was no distinction in Europe between soldier and civilian: all were victims of war. These letters point to how as a poet Eliot would achieve impersonality by immersing himself in the futility of historical events, to articulate it from his own subjective, personal viewpoint. Impersonality for Eliot would represent the extinction of the individual in the face of overwhelming large-scale events, not a triumph over individual suffering to master one’s relation to them. This identification with the victims of war is expressed in “A Cooking Egg”, but with irony which undermines Eliot’s pretentions. Eric Svarny describes how the poem abstracts history into surfaces,14 yet this impression is due to Pound’s excision of the original third and fourth stanzas which suggest the speaker’s childhood with his nurse, in the disturbing impact of her slipper falling off: My self-esteem was somewhat strained Because her stockings had white toes. I wanted Peace here on earth, While I was still strong and young; And Peace was to have been extended From the tip of Pipit’s tongue. These lines evoke with subtle irony the megalomania of the infant, “still strong and young”, whose imperious self-esteem is disturbed by the observation that his nurse-cum-personal attendant has worn-out stockings. In his imagined omnipotence his wish for Peace on earth would extend from his nurse, who is also his pacifier. Eliot’s irony regarding these childhood views is mirrored by the adult speaker’s consciously absurd fantasies of the afterlife which will provide him with wealth, a femme fatale, spiritual guidance from a clairvoyant and saint, but most significantly in terms of the war, “Honour” with Sir Philip Sidney, Coriolanus, and “other heroes of my kidney”. At the end of the poem the speaker’s loss of his “penny world” with Pipit is identified with the loss of those in war: Where are the eagles and the trumpets? Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps. Over buttered scones and crumpets

102

War Trauma and English Modernism

Weeping, weeping multitudes Droop in a hundred A.B.C.’s. (IMH, 358–59) Vincent Sherry holds up the last two lines as an emotional climax in Eliot’s apprehension of the terrible loss in war. However the “weeping multitudes” are not soldiers but the civilians in teashops, which Christopher Ricks has identified as belonging to the “Aerated Bread Company”. This poem appeals to Eliot’s notion of impersonal suffering shared by soldiers and civilians, but which is subverted. His presumption of being a participant is matched by that of the speaker’s childhood self, and of militaristic chauvinism whose eagles and trumpets are buried in the Alps, along with Hannibal’s army.

1918: defeat In 1918 Eliot gained the experiences, and techniques for their expression, that would sustain his poetry up to The Waste Land. His fate ran parallel with and in opposition to developments on the war front: while Russia sued for peace and Germany advanced toward Paris during the Spring Offensives, he shared the exhaustion of the Allies; on the other hand his wife’s betrayal mirrored the US Navy’s rejection of him later in the year, which prevented him from sharing in the celebration of Allied victory. Eliot concluded 1918 with an assessment that echoed himself two years earlier: “This has been the most terribly exhausting year I have ever known, and one unfortunate event has crowded another.” Unlike in 1916 however there was no hint of connubial consolation. Regarding The Egoist as “practically the only publication . . . which makes no reference to politics or the war, . . . it can keep on its own way determined to assert the perpetual importance of other things” (LE, 291, 224), he dominated it as editor and contributor. However this only exacerbated his dissociation between his personal and literary life which was manifested in poetry of paralysing horror recorded and repressed through ground-breaking techniques. Having identified a “crisis” in the culture since “the work of four or five men who count has reached middle age”, in May 1918 Eliot called for the nation to develop its language and intelligence, and implicitly volunteered as one of the four or five important men of the younger generation.15 Eliot presented himself above partisan sides, responding in a January review where the writer called for punishment of those

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 103

responsible for the war: “he does not state whether any of the persons are to be found outside of Germany”.16 Also, Eliot began to clear Georgians and war writers from his fellow Modernists’ path to literary ascendancy. Filling up space in the Egoist, in a letter as Helen B. Trundlett, he ironically praised Brooke for purging himself of former coarseness “in the fire of the Great Ordeal which is proving the well-spring of a Renaissance of English poetry”; as Muriel A. Schwarz he criticised Lewis’s “slur upon the cheery philosophy of our boys in the trenches” in “Cantleman’s Spring Mate”.17 In 1918, while dismissing the Georgians for their insular national style, he judged that “Mr. Sassoon has a talent for satire, but for political rather than literary satire.”18 Eliot placed himself in a position to evaluate literature produced by war, for instance he judged that the treatment of the protagonist’s “sensations and ideas in the trenches” in Douglas Goldring’s The Fortune was secondary to “the presentation of the mind of English Society in August 1914”.19 With Pound, Eliot had practiced a satire upon the mind of English society in his poetry, if in a more sophisticated “international” style than Pound. However, while in 1917 Eliot’s rising literary fortunes were reflected and fostered by his improving personal circumstances, in 1918 his selfregard as a critic was all but schizophrenically dissociated from his personal life, especially with the discovery of Vivienne and Russell’s affair. The disparity between the two sides is most striking in how his criticism celebrated Russell, to the point of presenting him as a model to emulate. Asserting that Russell had “invented a new method”, and with it “a new point of view” and “style”, in October Eliot would transplant Russell’s philosophical methodology of “comparison and analysis” to criticism. He claimed that it needed “a man of genius who discovers a new method”, thus placing himself as Russell’s equivalent in criticism, even if Russell had been the genius who discovered his new critical method. Our understanding of Eliot’s personal development in 1918 is shrouded in uncertainty, which we can only present, not resolve. The first question is dating when Eliot discovered Vivienne’s affair with Russell. This event, as Ronald Schuchard has demonstrated, was the one disabling shock amongst the ongoing stress that Eliot suffered during the war. Schuchard believes that Eliot learned of it probably no later than December 1917 or early 1918, which seems to be contradicted by the three of them taking out a five-year lease on a cottage in Marlow in December 1917. The second question is when Eliot suffered from a consequent breakdown, which he described to his confessor William Force Stead as a “sense of dispossession I have known twice, at Marlow and at Périgeux”, and to John Hayward as mental

104

War Trauma and English Modernism

agony which verged on a loss of sanity. The one at Périgeux took place in August 1919, while the earlier, and therefore more significant, one in Marlow could have occurred any time after the lease there was taken out. This uncertainty of plotting events which were concealed at the time causes further uncertainty regarding Eliot’s situation during this period, and its impact upon his creativity. Apologising in October 1918 to Eliot’s brother Henry for not having written sooner, Vivienne seems on the verge of betraying the truth: “there is a lot we can’t tell, and life is so feverish and yet so dreary at the same time, and one is always waiting, waiting for something. Generally waiting for some strain to be over. . . . For months now, I have waited for T. to be settled.” It is ambiguous what Eliot needed to be settled about. Ostensibly in the letters it was his position in the US Navy. As a last attempt to grasp some self-determination in relation to the war, in August 1918 he applied for enlistment, to be passed for limited service, given his tachycardia and congenital hernia. On 26 October the American Navy Intelligence sent for him, only for him to return to his work at Lloyds on 9 November, two days before the Armistice. His failure to be accepted became the focal point of his anguish, as again Vivienne wrote to Henry in late November: “Poor Tom’s disaster over his Navy job very nearly did for both of us. It was indeed the last straw. I don’t know how we have weathered that storm.” Despite Eliot confirming in his letters the impact of his failure to enlist, we can question to what extent it, alongside oft-mentioned overwork at the bank (which nevertheless did not stop him writing a remarkable number of articles that year), was a screen for Eliot’s private horror of Vivienne’s affair with Russell. This notwithstanding, certainly he was anxious of rejection by the Navy, and of the dangers that could follow acceptance. Also, given his mother’s pressure to participate, the strain of applying was the only substitute for actual service that he could offer her, as he feebly wrote on 13 November, “the experiences I have been through have been paralysing . . . no one can say that I did not try my best to get into Army or Navy” (LE, 285, 303, 300–1). The point that we need to acknowledge is that, because of the lack of documentation available due to the Eliots’ need for concealment, our reading of their trauma of war in 1918 is fused indissolubly with their sexual history. Doctors treating soldiers often faced a similar uncertainty since the fidelity of the wife at home was one factor among many in establishing the aetiology of trauma sustained in the war zone.20 This uncertainty is most critical in Eliot’s poetry, with a neurotic tension between the emotional intensity of subject matter, and equally

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 105

intensive strategy for suppressing it. While his criticism was dissociated from his personal life, his techniques were dissociated from the subject of his poetry, expressing while repressing it. Charles Figley explains that “Victims and survivors are familiar in that they both experienced a traumatic event. But while the victim has been immobilized and discouraged by the event, the survivor has overcome the traumatic memories and become mobile.”21 From 1918 up to composing The Waste Land Eliot oscillated between survival and victimhood, and the difference between them is registered in the relative clarity of vision of his poetry. “Ode on Independence Day” and “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, composed in mid-1918 when Eliot could “hardly think or talk – only wait” (LE, 265), record both illness and healing in the midst of the traumatic event. The “Ode” is both indeterminately ambiguous and baldly confessional, reflecting how Eliot’s technique at turns repressed and failed to control his personal material. The poem actually did betray too much for Eliot to be comfortable with, causing him to exclude it from the American edition of Ara Vos Prec; worrying about his mother’s response to the poem, he considered cutting out the page of the copy of the English edition sent to her (LE, 441). Most of the poem follows word associations through sound, as in “Tired”, “Tortured” and “Tortuous” preceding each stanza, and the sibilance of the opening “Subterrene laughter synchronous / With silence”. This quality gives the poem a sense of danger of what each word will trigger through its associations. And yet, the choice of words in the isolated lines of emotional outburst also distracts the reader from an identifiable truth, since it is difficult to locate a context for them in the rest of the poem. Biographical criticism has often attempted to fix down the poem’s ambiguities onto supposed biographical certainties, however the ambiguity communicates the truth of Eliot’s experience, as far as we can understand it. The epigraph, added in 1920, retrospectively functions like his letters in using his rejection by the US Navy as a screen for private anguish. From Coriolanus, “To you particularly, and to all the Volscians / Great hurt and mischief”, on its own the epigraph addresses the reader, threatening him with hurt and mischief. In the play, however, Coriolanus is introducing himself, describing how in the past he harmed the Volsces, and reflects on the futility of these actions for his former country, upon which he now wishes hurt and mischief. This double meaning reflects Eliot’s struggle to position himself in history, threatening his readers with hurt and mischief, while pledging his alliance to them. With its full title “Ode on Independence Day, July 4th 1918”

106

War Trauma and English Modernism

the poem aggressively diagnoses contemporary history through Eliot’s personal circumstances, yet with acute uncertainty. The first stanza plays on the classical reference of the priestess who inhaled the mephitic vapours from a chasm beneath the temple of Delphi then communicated the words of Apollo to visitors from all Greek states. By contrast Eliot’s words are received with incomprehension, since the foetid vapours only yield hysterical laughter suppressed by silence. While we may question the proportional contribution of private and historical trauma in the “Ode”, we can at least read the ambiguity of aggression and victimisation as constituting Eliot’s trauma. The subject, both “tortured” and “tortuous”, is the aggressor smoothing his hair the morning after nuptials with “blood on the bed”, and victim to his bride as “succuba eviscerate”. The poem testifies to an indeterminate guilt and fear, lurking in the “Mephitic river”. In “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” allusions either open out to a generalised meaning that is nonetheless identifiable, and combine with each other into a narrative instead of cancelling each other out. Reflecting Eliot’s sexual apprehension of history, war is transposed to a brothel where Sweeney as doorman guards the “nightingales” from the clients. As Moody has pointed out, the man in “mocha brown” is probably a soldier dressed in khaki. Eliot’s exercise of spleen in his dehumanisation of the soldier is more extreme than perhaps anywhere else in his poetry. The soldier becomes a “silent vertebrate in brown” which “contracts and concentrates, withdraws”. Eliot is reducing him down to an organism, but also to a deployed army in the movement of contracting and concentrating as a unit, and withdrawing from the firing line. The spleen which had once described the individual’s reduction to reflex responses in the city of Baudelaire, here describes the soldier’s “war of nerves”. It can express potential sexual violence in the “murderous paws” of Rachel née Rabinovitch, who is perhaps a refugee from the Russian Revolution, or a symbol of Russia’s betrayal of the Allied cause. Eliot gives this dehumanisation a humorous turn with the ape-, zebra- and giraffe-like Sweeney. The only human presence is in the “gloomy” Orion and Dog, “veiled” like the grieving aspidistra in “The Death of the Duchess”. The atmosphere of burlesque comedy energised by the quatrain rhyme disavows, and ultimately betrays this intimated mourning; the smashed coffee-cup, one of the casualties of the brothel, is laconically described as “reorganised” on the floor. The confusion between aggressor and victim is played out between the prostitutes and soldier. He “sprawls at the window-sill and gapes”, but instead of him sighting the enemy, it is the waiter with oranges, figs and grapes. The soldier realises that the threat resides inside,

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 107

and “declines the gambit” with the women (it is not mentioned what is offered up as sacrifice for possible gain by either party), then leaves to look through the window from outside. Again the sense of threat is defused by comic imagery, while wisteria branches “Circumscribe a golden grin”. Like an anxiety dream whose censorship of threatening material fails, the poem’s levity is exhausted where it ends in a scene of unrelieved horror: The host with someone indistinct Converses at the door apart, The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid droppings fall To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud. (CPP, 56–7) The rhyme no longer fuels the humour, but registers the tonal shift with “door apart” and “Sacred Heart”. The shift occurs on the ambiguity of “host”, potentially referring to Sweeney, one of the prostitutes, or even the soldier given its archaic military meaning, but more critically, as sacrificial victim. Again echoing “The Death of the Duchess”, the figure “at the door apart” is Death, but following the movement of figures inside and out, it is unclear whether Death lies within or outside the room. The brothel switches to the “Convent of the Sacred Heart”, perhaps of the prostitute “nightingales” singing as Roman Catholic nuns devoted to Christ’s physical heart. Yet the memory of His sacrifice is betrayed as the scene opens out to “the bloody wood” of Agamemnon’s murder. The nightingales’ “liquid siftings” “stain the stiff dishonoured shroud”. They do not merely betray Agamemnon’s heroism, as Clytemnestra did in murdering him on return from Troy, but register his own dishonour in his violation of the city, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the betrayal of his avowedly honourable motives for prosecuting the war, supplanted by material gain. Here the allusions to Ovid, The Oresteia and Oedipus at Colonus evoke a notion of war across geography and history, which is rooted in Eliot’s private experiences. However, like those will follow, this poem begs the

108

War Trauma and English Modernism

question of how far Eliot could present an impersonal reflection upon contemporary historical betrayals of soldiers and ideals that was based upon his sexual betrayal by wife and friend.

1919: recuperating war Eliot’s “war conditions” would continue long after the Armistice was signed, especially since they were bound up with Vivienne’s ongoing affair with Russell. In December she reported to Eliot’s mother that he had “been worrying himself about his mind not acting as it used to do, and a feeling that his writing was falling off”. In her diary she described his reaction to his father’s death in January 1919 as “most terrible”;22 prevented from making good all of the disappointments of wartime, Eliot suffered “a sort of collapse” (LE, 309, 323). His condition would not improve significantly till well into the Twenties. In a letter of 7 November 1918, while complaining that “possibly in the course of time the army will discover that they need me to peel potatoes”, Eliot anticipated the revival of literary activity in London through Pound and Lewis, with the “hope that we can do something”. He regarded them, perhaps inaccurately, as the “only two men in England of my acquaintance, I believe, who have not in any respect allowed the war to demoralise them”. The following spring he consoled his mother, and himself, that there was “a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England” (LE, 291, 254, 331). Freed from the privations and impossible demands of wartime, yet without having recovered from them, Eliot aspired to conquer England’s culture for Modernism while remaining vulnerable to breakdown. One necessary aspect of Eliot’s project lay in dismissing the potential rival to Modernism of war poetry. Even the Sitwells whom he regarded as only “fashion”, were “much better stuff than the war poets”. Of the older generation, Kipling’s expression of “attitudes toward various aspects of the war . . . no more hang together than the verses of a schoolboy”.23 Reviewing in April The New Elizabethans by E.B. Osborn, a study of soldier writers killed in the war, Eliot described fascination with the youthful dead as a form of sentimentality, and argued that “their work is hardly more than a means of exploiting their charm, and in the charm is their danger”. In particular he criticised the editor for glorifying war as “a form of mysticism in action” by citing such sentiments as a dragoon’s that “One loves one’s fellow man so much more when one is bent on killing him”. Eliot extended this criticism to Brooke whom he regarded as only a throwback to Victorian ideals, not “really an

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 109

artist”. He concluded that “to a person of any real feeling, the heroes might have been all the more interesting had they been less articulate”. On one hand he pointed to the incommunicable horror of war, but on the other he criticised soldiers for lacking insight into the truth of war because like Brooke they were failed artists: Important truth comes to the young only in rare flashes of genius. There are no flashes; some of the men had a nice honesty in detail, in accounting for their lives in France – but not that great honesty of the general scheme, that superhuman honesty which is realized only by years of observation and thought and which constitutes the genius of middle age.24 Reflecting this stress on “superhuman honesty”, in “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry” from July, Eliot hailed Herbert Read’s Naked Warriors as “the best war poetry” because it was “honest”, “unpretentious”, “neither Romance nor Reporting”. While observing that Read was indebted to Lewis’s “visual” style, Eliot criticised him for a lack of “musical sense, in the production of tone”; there was only “a succession of effects of ideas and images, rather than the sharp and indefinable effect of the poem as a whole”, or of the “general scheme”.25 Eliot ascribed this defect in contemporary poetry to a lack of “tradition”. Observing how “most poets grasp their own time, the life of the world as it stirs before their eyes, at one convulsion or not at all”, he formulated the significance of tradition for “closing in upon” contemporary history, as in “The Method of Mr. Pound”: “when the entire past is acquired, the constituents fall into place and the present is revealed”.26 Eliot’s criticism of Read raised the dilemma between a visual style from direct experience of events and the musical creation of a general scheme. In another important essay from July, “Whether Rostand had Something about him”, Eliot questioned whether it was possible to achieve “superhuman honesty” to the exclusion of rhetoric. The problem of Edmond Rostand’s last book of war verse, as in the verse of Brooke and Osborn’s “new Elizabethans”, was that its rhetoric glorified action in the war. From his first “Reflections” in 1917 Eliot had asserted that contemporary poetry could eschew the abstract moralising of rhetoric through accents of direct speech and focus on commonplace object, as in Read’s visual “honesty”. Here, though, Eliot made a further distinction, not between rhetoric and poetry, but between different forms of rhetoric. He criticised poets who tried to avoid an “oratorical” rhetoric with a conversational style, since they applied it indiscriminately; instead, the poet

110

War Trauma and English Modernism

needed “infinite variations” of tone, such as developed by Shakespeare. Out of tradition the poet could refine his language to express a great variety of feelings, ideas and experiences which the “New Elizabethan” soldier poet, dominated by war experience and a sentimental rhetoric of heroism, was incapable of. In Shakespeare’s case, rhetoric was appropriate “when a character in the play sees himself in a dramatic light”.27 To summarise these remarks, then, Eliot found it easy to dismiss the war rhetoric of Brooke and others. But he also dismissed poetry that attempted to communicate the truth of war as failing in literary terms, Sassoon’s being of only political interest, and Read’s lacking a musical tone rooted in tradition. Eliot’s task as a poet lay in reversing the series of personal defeats experienced in wartime, to rise out of personal emotion into an impersonal mastery of it. On the one hand he attempted to achieve this by distancing himself from historical events to present a comprehensive “general scheme” of them with “superhuman honesty”. This way relates to the sense of detachment from war events that he projected onto the reviving literary scene in London, and that was exercised in his criticism. On the other hand, in “Gerontion” he attempted to present European civilisation through the personal voice of one traumatised by it, which was closely bound up with his personal experience. While his speaker is incapable of “superhuman honesty” regarding it, the poem itself claims to achieve this through laying bare Gerontion’s rhetorical dishonesty. However given the aspects of Gerontion personal to Eliot, the rhetoric is not always self-evident. We can speculate that in “Reflections” of 1919 Eliot was partly measuring the relative merits of his poetry against Read’s; in comparing the two we can assess the difference between a Modernist participant and non-participant in war. As a decorated soldier Read could afford in retrospect to damn his own loyalty to the war effort, comparing himself unfavourably to Judas: “I delivered my body to fear – / I was a bloodier fool than he.”28 Eliot presents a far more complexly ambivalent attitude to war: I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. (CPP, 37) Here Gerontion parodies war rhetoric by the comparison to the “hot gates” of Thermopylae where a few hundred Greeks resisted the onslaught of Persia, just as the Allied soldiers believed themselves to be preserving

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 111

the civilisation of Europe against the barbaric Hun. In this image, too, the relation between action in war and sex is introduced with the possible physiological symbolism of “hot gates”, just as “heaving a cutlass” has mock-overtones of virility. Gerontion waits for future rain although he has missed the warm rain, and fertile soil of the salt marsh. However the comparisons to ancient and Renaissance heroism convey an ironic tone towards the First World War, where instead of conquering through the salt marsh from the coast, men were decimated in the mud. “Bitten by flies, fought” is closer to historical reality, especially of the Dardanelles, and echoes the hapless couple in “Lune de miel”; the second “fought” has lost its reference to an identifiable subject and object, as in trench warfare. Here then Eliot is disclosing his sense of inadequacy in not having fought, while dismissing its rhetorical idealisation as by the “New Elizabethans”. The opening statement of the most authoritative section, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”, is more rhetorical than resounding since, consistent with the repression throughout the poem, Gerontion resists describing a knowledge of war. Read described how his protagonist Kneeshaw on entering the war front “felt himself / A cog in some great evil engine, / Unwilling, but revolv’d tempestuously / By unseen springs.”29 Eliot mirrors this notion of individual powerlessness in history with “Neither fear nor courage saves us”, yet without a context to explain it. Also the comparison of history to a sexually profligate woman, while enabling its analysis at a deep psychological level, reflects Eliot’s personal experience of war enmeshed in the circumstances of his marriage; as in the poems of 1918, his private anguish is relieved through a denunciation of historical events from which he was excluded. “Cunning passages, contrived corridors” picks up on the proposal of the Polish Corridor splitting Eastern Prussia from the rest of Germany; the reference is very topical, the term only first being coined in March, and prophetic since it became an important issue for reviving German nationalism from the Twenties onward. However, it cannot be determined to what extent sexual experience is being read in terms of history, or vice versa. One can speculate on interpretations that are almost universal, and particular to Eliot: “The giving famishes the craving” could be victory on the front fatally whetting the appetite for more; “Gives too late what’s not believed in”, could be peace; “gives too soon / Into weak hands” (CPP, 38) could be the responsibility of the leaders of new nation states. Or they could be a projection of Eliot’s frustrations with Vivienne onto an abstract notion of “history”. At the end of the poem Eliot allowed Gerontion a note of near-heroic reconciliation with history as a “Gull against the wind”, with a hint of

112

War Trauma and English Modernism

recovered sexual desire in the “straits / Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn”. The charge of cowardice as a non-participant is acknowledged, and redeemed through belated self-sacrifice of “White feathers in the snow”. Gerontion deprecates the limited significance of his words, while confident to act as representative for his readers and historical moment in his collective identity as “Tenants of the house, / Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season” (CPP, 39). However, it is an unsubstantiated gesture in comparison to Read’s “giant attitude” as his soldiers’ leader who is forced to “share in their doom”.30 We see, then, the difference between Read’s localised, visual “honesty” and Eliot’s wide-ranging musical “rhetoric”. Eliot attempted to compensate for the lack of direct experience which informs Read’s poetry, by reflecting more intensely on the elusive truth value of his experience, and by elaborating on it to analyse the general scheme of history. Yet personal experience of history as the point of reference in “Gerontion” is not so much ordered through a literary tradition of varying tones, as it is suppressed. The composition of The Waste Land would involve the struggle to release and work through this experience.

Redrafting the past Eliot’s drafting of The Waste Land over the course of 1921 included a process of changing vision, under the strong regulating influence of Pound’s editing. The core issue lay in Eliot’s appeal to a past that could provide a fantasy of escape from the present. In the “Elegy” from late 1921 he revealed his confused situation and feelings while heavily rewriting God’s reaction to the speaker for failing his dead wife, and by implication, the dead in more general terms: horror anger desire The His flames of pity and of ire passion (WLFT, 117) Horror, anger, desire, pity, ire, passion: Eliot had experienced all of these feelings in relation to the war, and in his troubled conscience believed himself to be the justifiable object of them also. The complexity of Eliot’s relation to his circumstances was expressed in his contrasting accounts of it in letters, which reflect the opposing personal anguish and impersonal perspective of The Waste Land. In one

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 113

instance he regarded himself as “a disinterested spectator of the struggles of others with war and peace”. On the other hand, while periodically denouncing the “bad peace” with the “Balkanisation” of Europe, he presented his work at Lloyds as bearing the burden of chaos in “dealing alone with all the debts and claims of the bank under the various Peace Treaties”. At another point he combined this sense of historical responsibility with personal entrapment: “As the world becomes worse to live in, every month, so the minutiae of existence seem to consume more time and energy; so many of the processes that were formerly almost automatic now demand the thought of a Field-Marshal planning a campaign.” Professional strains left him emotionally exposed, as he confided that “when I have private anxieties on my mind, it is too much”. In 1921 these resurfaced, first with the near-death of Vivienne’s father, which in turn exhausted her, then left both her and Eliot subject to illness till his collapse in September. He entered Aldington’s “home for neurasthenics” (LE, 469, 404, 557, 499, 581), along with the wartraumatised veteran Frederic Manning, then took extended leave and wrote The Waste Land. Verdenal was perhaps the most compelling choice for his poetic fantasy of escape since he belonged to Eliot’s most idealised year while providing a link with the war; however as a victim of the event which continued to dominate Eliot’s present, he could not offer a satisfying alternative. Eliot had perhaps been trying to conjure up Verdenal during séances with the mystic P.D. Ouspensky in autumn 1920. He took a nostalgic trip to Paris that December, while staying in the student lodgings which he had shared with Verdenal; however as he confided to his mother, “If I had not met such a number of new people there Paris would be desolate for me with pre-war memories of Jean Verdenal and the others” (LE, 536). Instead Eliot appealed to the more distant, and less personally charged, memories of the New England fishermen. The first draft of “The Burial of the Dead”, composed between April and May 1921, probably took a similar form to its final version, beginning with “April is the cruellest month” and ending with the quote from Baudelaire’s “Spleen”. Lawrence Rainey speculates that in late May Eliot added the new beginning of a night out set in Boston, after having access to a copy of Joyce’s “Circe”, whose ending it loosely resembles. In his essay “John Donne”31 Eliot presented Joyce as imagining a mythic “heroism” lost in war: “The heroic and sublime, banished as reality, we take back as myth: Mr. Bloom is Ulysses” (AWL, 332). In the new opening to “The Burial of the Dead” Eliot intended to emulate Joyce by imaginatively transforming the potential heroism of his own native

114

War Trauma and English Modernism

New England fishermen. In keeping with this intention the war apparently belongs to another continent, even period; there is only the detail of the German Club being shut, which would have been a more characteristic situation in wartime Britain. However, while having “nothing but admiration” for Joyce’s most recent work, Eliot felt the reservation that “I wish for my own sake that I had not read it” (LE, 562), since it resulted in him transgressing his principle that “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that form which it was torn, the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion” (SW, 106). The opening pub scene disrupted the cohesion of Eliot’s “musical” tone by being neither similar nor in contrast to the following disparate reflections on mortality and lost love in “The Burial of the Dead”. Instead its celebration of the excesses of urban life lay more directly in contrast to the denunciations of London: you kill and breed and feed daily life London, the swarming creatures that you breed Scampering Striving Huddled dazed the concrete and the Among half stunned beneath / between a heavy sky stunned Eliot probably wrote this early in his rest stay at Margate, having just escaped a breakdown in London. It seems that the strains built up since the war years had burst like a dam, where the draft presents London as a line behind the trench lines of the war. “Kill and breed”, replacing only “breed”, evokes a space which purposefully destroys its inhabitants. The choices of “half stunned”, “Scampering”, “Striving”, “dazed” and finally “Huddled” inhabitants between concrete and sky, together describe the psychological and physical conditions of an extremely hostile environment. As in “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, Baudelaire’s spleen of city experience has become ever more intensified to the point of describing something more extreme than the city itself. This tendency is underlined in the description of the “jerky motions” of these “poor cheap”, “huddled”, “tarnished”, “pavement toys” (WLFT, 37), where the puppet-like existence of the city dweller resembles the nervous tics of a shell-shock victim. Eliot’s indictment upon London borders on a tone of diatribe which Pound would exclude from the final draft of the poem. However, aside

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 115

from psychological pressures, it was vital that Eliot’s treatment be more extreme than warranted for his avowed subject; the counter-narrative of the New England fishermen is set against more than just the city of London, but against the whole of European civilisation at war. The imagery of “swarming creatures that you kill and breed and feed” links strongly to the demobbing scene in “A Game of Chess” of Lil almost having died in childbirth and prematurely aged by the medicine “to bring it off”. Albert’s job in the Transport Corps brings attention to this relation, exporting fresh soldiers and armaments, importing casualties. The two sections present London and the war front in conjunction with each other, producing and consuming life. Elsewhere in the drafts, the military aspects of London life are suggested in a discarded section of “The Fire Sermon” where Fresca inquires of one of her fellow socialites: “tell me all your manoeuvres; / And all about yourself and your new lovers”. Also, on the same page of “swarming” London is a picturesque description of Thames fishermen drinking like their Bostonian counterparts, accompanied by mandolin and the classical architecture of Wren’s Magnus Martyr church. During the last composing phase between November and December at Lausanne emerged “Death by Water”, which was crucial to Eliot’s intention in the poem of providing an alternative heroism and spirituality to that of London and Europe. As the sailors pass the northernmost islands, the narrative shifts from something specific to a fishing tale: So no one spoke again. We ate slept drank Hot coffee, and kept watch, and no one dared To look into anothers face, or speak In the horror of the illimitable scream Of a whole world about us. (WLFT, 58–9) The speaker and his mates face a horror that encompasses the whole world. At this point three sirens sing to the speaker and enable him to face the horror: A song that charmed my senses, while I was Frightened beyond fear, horrified past horror, calm, (Nothing was real) for, I thought, now, when I like, I can wake up and end the dream. (WLFT, 58–9)

116

War Trauma and English Modernism

Perhaps here Eliot suggested an answer to the horror that he and the world had undergone: instead of its extremity marking an unrecoverable state of trauma, it could waken one from the “dream” of living. The sailors sight what appears to be land “dead ahead”, “A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove”; they turn out to be correct that it is “Home and mother”, but only in the sense that they end their wandering of the sea, towards a spiritual return in death by colliding with an iceberg. The drowned “Who know only that there is no noise now”, would be able to “trace the painful, ideal meaning” of humanity which had been drowned out by the “noise” of the swarming city. The isolated line “Remember me”, only included in manuscript, is extremely poignant since there is no survivor for anyone to appeal to; instead, perhaps, it is addressed to the reader, or even to Eliot himself by a figure which haunts him. Pound’s immediate judgement of “Bad” shattered Eliot’s intentions in a stroke; only the figure of Phlebas was retained, alone to merely represent mortality, not heroism or even sacrifice preparing for renewal. The opening pub scene was also summarily dispatched. While mentioning the Dry Salvages in this draft of “Death by Water”, Eliot would only achieve his aim of mining childhood memories to provide a vision of heroism twenty years later in the third of the Four Quartets; the New England seamen would symbolise the soldiers of the Second World War, not an alternative to them. After The Waste Land had taken shape, it appears that Eliot tried to write some independent poems to fill out a potential volume. One of these, “Exequy”, suggests a turn away from the native heroism of New England back to the tragedy of Verdenal, and the war. Presenting himself as “A bloodless shade among the shades / Doing no good, but not much harm” there is at least the small consolation that in Eliot’s failure to enlist he did not harm anyone. The poem is structured in two parts like “Dans le Restaurant”, the second describing a figure of sacrifice like Phlébas. The speaker’s “Adepts”, perhaps privy to the secrets of Modernist culture, indulge in a festival of sex followed by fireworks or an Austrian waltz. In contrast to them, “more violent, more profound, / One soul, disdainful or disdained”, may attempt to bring renewal: Shall come, his shadowed beauty stained The colour of the withered year, Self-immolating on the Mound Just at the crisis, he shall hear A breathless chuckle underground. (WLFT, 101)

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 117

Rather than bringing renewal, though, his blood will add red to the leaves of autumn. The “Mound” could refer to sex, but also to the hill fortresses such as Verdun and the Marne upon which so many lives were wasted. This allusion to war is a first stage of transforming Phlebas to a victim of war, and to Verdenal himself.

A compromised cure Eliot emerged from his therapy with Dr Vittoz in December 1921, for the time being at least, able to control his powers of concentration against the constant enemy of dread. He commented that Vittoz was “not a psychoanalyst, but more useful for my purpose” (LE, 617), which was to reclaim his abilities rather than achieve self-illumination; Vittoz at least facilitated the latter through enabling him to compose the last drafts of The Waste Land. Eliot would explain his resistance to psychoanalysis in the “London Letter” of September 1922 on May Sinclair’s Harriett Frean where, “because the material is so clearly defined (the soul of man under psychoanalysis) there is no possibility of tapping the atmosphere of unknown terror and mystery in which our life is passed and which psychoanalysis has not yet analysed”.32 Harriett Frean, as Eliot read it, corresponded to Freud’s earlier technique of explaining to patients their condition, without them participating actively in its discovery. With Pound’s assistance in The Waste Land, Eliot attempted to reconstruct experience and give it meaning in a wider framework of culture, if in a fragmentary and unresolved form. In so doing the act of composition resembled more Freud’s collaborative notion of therapy to reclaim the victim’s self-responsibility as a survivor, if without him fully reintegrating himself and mastering his relation to the traumatic event. Freud describes illness after trauma as a self-initiated attempt to reconcile the dissociated portions of the ego; yet without the help of analysis “it ends often enough in a complete devastation or fragmentation of the ego”.33 As “editor-analyst” Pound salvaged Eliot’s illness-induced fragments. He rejected the New England seamen narrative, which formed a screen for Eliot’s remembrance of Verdenal; also, Eliot’s outburst upon “swarming” London immediately after his escape from there to Margate was rejected as “B––ll––S” (WLFT, 31), probably because of its generalised while opinionated perspective. In these cases Pound accorded with Freud’s technique of rejecting early success in therapy as an obstacle set up by the patient to preclude further analysis.34 Pound’s preference for comment-free details corresponded to abreaction which was close to immediate experience. Interpretation, as a means of the ego sublimating repressed impulses, did not take an expository form (that would

118

War Trauma and English Modernism

be performed by generations of critics); instead it could be suggested through arranging correspondences between these details and the fragments of cultural tradition. Pound’s excisions laid bare the underlying materials of Verdenal and the war, even if he did not recognise them. However Pound’s and Eliot’s priority lay in the aesthetically successful rather than the truth of personal experience, or Eliot’s psychological health; consequently interpretations of the poem range from it as an expression of recovery to one of continuing victimhood. Regarding The Waste Land as a document of recovery, critics such as A.D. Moody and James Olney have focused upon “nuclei” or “nodes” of experience surrounded by materials that thematise them into impersonal generalisations; the last sections move to a more general perspective to a new state of being. In a contrary reading, Ronald Bush follows from Hugh Kenner by identifying a neurotic dream structure of scattered victims: “when the dream censor is able to agitate and then shatter a fantasy that gets too close to the forbidden truth, the forces that initiated the fantasy start the whole struggle again”.35 The differences between these conceptions of the poem also reflect the complex process of therapy itself, simultaneously acting out and working through trauma. The poem lays out Eliot’s struggle between integration and repression of parts of his dissociated self. Immediately after his family’s visit in the summer of 1921, verging on breakdown, he told Aiken that “the material was there and waiting”, but he was unable to release it. Breakdown lowered the defences enabling composition in short sections; the repressed material could only be loosened locally, requiring associative motifs from cultural tradition to link and superimpose meaning upon it. As Eliot perhaps over-candidly claimed after decades of critical exegesis, “In The Waste Land, I wasn’t even bothered whether I understood what I was saying”;36 this freedom at least made possible the inclusion of elements which, while repressed, are included in a symbolised form. Eliot retrospectively described The Waste Land to Stephen Spender as a “dirge”. Spender hypothesised that “Death by Water” crystallises the “hidden elegy” in “Those are pearls that were his eyes” referring to the drowned Phoenician Sailor, whom we can now, albeit tentatively, identify as Verdenal. Eliot’s feelings to towards Verdenal are revealed in the full dedication preceding Prufrock and Other Observations in the Collected Poems of 1925; the title page of the Inventions of a March Hare Notebook also includes it, which Ricks dates to 1922 when Eliot sold it to John Quinn. Its quote from Purgatorio describes how Virgil upbraids his servant Statius for clasping his feet on their reunion since they are

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 119

both shadows. Statius replies: “Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our vanity, and treat the shadows like the solid thing” (IMH, 4). Eliot’s quotation, describing love that disavows death, reflects how he longed to compensate for the loss of Verdenal. He did so through an intense process of identification with him. Describing how “all identification begins in an experience of traumatic loss and in the subject’s tentative attempts to manage this loss”, Freud used this concept to account for how relatives survived the loss of loved ones in the First World War. The Waste Land expresses how, as a figure which fails to be integrated into a speaker’s integrated identity and remains an object of insatiable desire, Verdenal as the object of Eliot’s identification also marks the persistence of his traumatic loss.37 We can understand The Waste Land in these terms by considering the presence of melancholia caused by the anxiety of mourning what was forbidden. Freud defined the shared symptoms of melancholia and mourning as painful dejection, lost interest in the outside world and inability to love. Melancholia is caused by an object lost to consciousness through repression, while in mourning the loss is consciously apprehended, having occurred objectively in the world. In Eliot’s relation to Verdenal there is a complex combination of the two, since he first repressed his desires, then in mourning Verdenal’s death was forced to return his memory to consciousness while acknowledging his actual loss, as if for a second time. In melancholia the ego becomes poor and empty whereas in mourning the world does: in melancholia the libido is withdrawn to the ego, to identify it with the loss and thereby transform object-loss into ego-loss; in mourning the ego does the opposite, identifying with the lost figure as if to reclaim it, as a compromise for its loss in the world.38 Again the two conditions are present in The Waste Land where the emptiness of the world is expressed in the emptiness of the subjects through which it is voiced. Shoshana Felman writes that “the continued power of the silenced memory of genocide as an overriding, structuring and shaping force, may be, however, neither truly known by the survivors, nor recognized as representing, in effect, memory of trauma. It finds its way into their lives, unwittingly, through an uncanny repetition of events that duplicate – in structure and in impact – the traumatic past”.39 Verdenal and the dead of war form the ordering silence of The Waste Land. They are dissociated from the cultural narrative of the poem, just as Eliot dissociated his memory of them from his personal history as a successful critic of culture. Verdenal is all but lost within the complex, overlaid groups of other traumatic memories through metaphoric and metonymic

120

War Trauma and English Modernism

displacements that both elude and demand our interpretation. Our challenge lies in how to establish a relation between what can be known of Eliot with what remains unknown, in order to understand how his psyche and creativity are shaped by a history which they are unable to assimilate. Aside from inhabiting the figure of Phlebas, Verdenal’s presence haunts the hyacinth garden. The intrinsic significance of this passage is testified in Eliot’s response to Pound’s question mark against it: to integrate it into the rest of the poem Eliot added “I remember / The hyacinth garden” to the lover’s reply in “A Game of Chess”, but then withdrew it to preserve the original passage’s emotional integrity. The “hyacinth” of the ancient Greeks was different to the one known by this name today; they saw the letters “AI”, spelling out a cry of woe in its petals, and imagined it as a memorial to a young man loved and accidentally killed by Apollo.40 The quotations from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde have been traced to Verdenal’s love of opera, which he encouraged Eliot to share in. However they are more significant in conveying the lovers’ separation, between Ireland and Cornwall, then later in Act III when the mortally wounded Tristan in Brittany longs for Isolde to cross the Channel before he dies; “Oed’ und leer das Meer” (desolate and narrow the sea) from Act III, as Nietzsche pointed out, is extremely eloquent in expressing sexual longing. Tristan evokes associations of the dying soldier, separated by the Channel from his lover. The identity between the hyacinth girl and lover becomes confused, since the second part of the speech is no longer in quotation marks: I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. (CPP, 62) The condition of the speaker registers the symptoms of war trauma, caught between life and death in the withdrawal from reality. Eder listed the loss of sight and speech among the most common symptoms of soldiers’ “conversion-hysteria”; he regarded these symptoms as mimicry of unconsciousness, which in turn mimicked death. One of his patients declared “he would rather die than have to go through it all again”, while others identified with dead comrades.41 The ambiguity of voices throughout the hyacinth passage enacts this identification between

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 121

living and dead, Eliot and Verdenal, while they interchange roles as the hyacinth girl. The rest of part I provides further suggestions of the war, and of Verdenal. The second line mentions lilacs, which is perhaps the most direct reference to Verdenal, as Eliot in a “Commentary” of April 1934 recalled Verdenal “waving a branch of lilac” (C XIII, 452). The cruelty of April in breeding the lilac lies in how it mixes memory with desire; however, spring is only cruel to the speaker, lying under the earth, because he is a buried corpse, perhaps of the war, as a soldier or a representative of a way of life before the war. Even the words of Marie point back nostalgically to Eliot’s year with Verdenal since they are a reminiscence of his visit to Munich in 1911, where he had a conversation about sledding with Countess Marie Larisch (AWL, 77). Towards the end of “Part I” the war moves outwards from intimate, almost indecipherable references, to a generalised presentation understood in terms of a “tradition” of intertextual references. This is the structure identified by A.D. Moody and James Olney, and which resembles the therapeutic reintegration of materials through interpretation. However, in line with Bush’s reading, this process could also be a result of how identification is multiplied where anxiety signalling a libidinal threat causes it to shift from Verdenal to various victims of violence in sexuality and history, thus creating the dissociated, multiple perspectives of the poem. Anxiety fragments the narrative voice, while structuring the transitions between voices that form the poem as a whole. The generalisation of victimhood is both a product of repressive anxiety, and the sublimating interpretation of the ego. Again the traumatised combatant is identified with the civilian who is traumatised by exclusion from the field of battle. “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many” echoes the condition of the hyacinth girl’s lover, neither dead nor alive. Its contextualisation in the Inferno turns it towards the noncombatant since Dante was referring to those who refused to take sides in Inferno III 41–2: “né lo profondo inferno li riceve, / ch’alcuna Gloria I rei avrebber d’elli” (“Even Hell would not receive them, / For fear the damned might glory over them”). A speaker addresses Stetson, a modern man who participated in the Battle of Mylae during the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage; the temporal disjunction points to how Mylae and its modern equivalent were both trade wars. The corpse that threatens to sprout can be identified with the speaker at the opening of the poem – the dead of the First World War, or Eliot himself, reminded of his dead friend by lilacs.

122

War Trauma and English Modernism

The core experience of “A Game of Chess” is another victim, the neurasthenic wife whose “nerves are bad”, suggestive of Vivien. Between her insistent questions and commands is the reply: I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones. (CPP, 65) Eliot transposes the trenches back to an urban setting, and more specifically to a marital conversation. Vivienne’s condition bled into the generalised trauma of war, and her pathological hypersensitivity – “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?” – mirrors the soldier’s early state of trauma preceding the numbness experienced by the hyacinth girl’s lover. Her partner replies, echoing the lover: “Nothing again nothing.” The conversation points back to the hyacinth girl’s lover, and the drowned Phoenician Sailor. These personal references all but invite contextualisation in the war, while remaining repressed in the text. In earlier drafts the presence of war was more intrusive, with tales from “bloody ends” alongside the impotent “old stumps of time”; also they followed “The Death of the Duchess” where “The ivory men make company between us”, with the wind “Carrying / Away the little light dead people.” In the final version the couple’s conversation is placed between two sections, which offer to contextualise it. The first describes a woman who invokes the decadent trope of sexual threat: while medusa-like, her aggression is traced back to being a victim through the image of Philomel, whom “the barbarous king / So rudely forced”; she cries of her violation while “still the world pursues, / ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.” This image connotes the violence of war, with the victims’ cries being ignored while the violence continues. Also it implicates the poet as nightingale whose song is polluted by the relentless sordidness of reality, without the sister Procne’s revenge. The couple’s conversation is followed by a pub scene of women discussing their demobbed husbands, which places the male partner in contrast to the working-class soldier; the women are aligned to the wife and the figure of the first section in their sexual anxiety with the reference to Ophelia in “good night, sweet ladies” (CPP, 64–6). “The Fire Sermon” continues scattered references to sexual and military violence with “Mrs. Porter” from an Australian ballad at Gallipoli42 linking up with the nightingale imagery from “A Game of Chess”. Also there

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 123

is a fragment from a statesman, “My people humble people who expect / Nothing”, spoken by the megalomaniac patient Eliot himself on Margate sands, followed by a reminder of Mylae where “To Carthage then I came / Burning burning burning burning”. Eliot borrowed from St Augustine’s Confessions, “to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears”, and the Buddha’s fire sermon to imbue an image of carnage with purification of sin; in so doing he reflected his own private torment during the war, and following purgation. Also, through rearranging fragments Eliot constructs a vision of London as no-man’sland, to further develop the poem’s tendency towards the general. In the typescript the line “A rat crept softly through the vegetation” followed immediately the unrelated Fresca section of a socialite with literary pretentions. In the final version it is part of a chain of imagery: the “last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank”; “The wind / Crosses the brown land, unheard”, then becomes “a cold blast” in which the speaker hears “The rattle of the bones”; the rat creeps through the fingers of leaf on the bank, among “White bodies naked on the low damp ground”. The chain of images links up with “But at the back from time to time I hear” (CPP, 67–70) from Marvell, reintegrating the dead of war into Tradition. If there is an emotional development in The Waste Land, it would be from melancholy, which represses attachment to what was lost, to mourning which occurs under the influence of reality-testing, demanding separation from the lost figure.43 Nonetheless melancholia persists in terms of self-reproaches and self-reviling which culminate in a delusional expectation of punishment, especially death, as if to atone for what was repressed. The fractured subjectivity of the poem reaches towards an ambivalent development of detaching itself from the dead as in mourning, while identifying with them to will its own death. Caruth argues that at the core of stories of trauma is “a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival”.44 In the case of genocide there is the survivor’s profound guilt in the death of others seeming to be at the expense of his survival; he identifies with them, if not to reclaim them, then to be claimed by them. We can understand the melancholia of The Waste Land as inverted mourning, that is, instead of breaking from the dead, it longs to join them. In its final reduced version “Death by Water” urges those “who turn the wheel and look to the windward” to “Consider Phlebas”, that is, to turn from the melancholy

124

War Trauma and English Modernism

of repressed loss to the mourning of acknowledged loss, in order to detach themselves from it. However the opening of “What the Thunder Said” reverts back to melancholic identification with death: He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience (CPP, 71–2) The more repressed material Eliot had released by the final period of composing at Lausanne, the weaker his anxiety, and thus defences, became till he was able to produce “an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the conditions of automatic writing”. Critics have located this poetry mainly in “What the Thunder Said”, as if to claim for it integration, not between consciously arranged fragments, but in the organic flow of inspiration. Certainly a year after publishing the poem Eliot regarded the lines of the water dripping song as its only “30 good lines”, and the whole of “What the Thunder Said” as “not only the best part, but the only part that justifies the whole, at all” (WLFT, 129). Ten years later however he described these longer stretches in more ambivalent terms as “a sudden relief from an intolerable burden” “of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life” through “the breaking down of strong habitual barriers – which tend to re-form very quickly”. Thus release, however sustained, could be followed by repression. Also he noted that “we do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on” (UPUC, 144–5), since rather than incubating, the material had been lying repressed. Furthermore there is the issue of whether the rhythm towards renewal in “What the Thunder Said” is a product of Vittoz’s strict exercises of repetition which enable the will to master anxiety, instead of the release of impulses which once caused anxiety. These impulses interrupt the water dripping song with the return of the female voice from “A Game of Chess” asking “Who is that third who walks always beside you?” The figure of Verdenal returns as the Saint Narcissus figure, penitential of his narcissism while hooded and Christ-like, yet also portending future death along with “those hooded hordes swarming / Over endless [previously “Polish”] plains”. The concluding invocation to “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata” represents a final attempt to confront the figure of Verdenal, and his fellow victims in war. The question of “datta”, what has been given, launches back upon

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 125

Verdenal’s sacrifice in war, and perhaps of what was given in a moment of desire: My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries (CPP, 74) This private act of desire is more significant than actions mentioned in “obituaries” during war or peacetime, although it may too prove fatal. The address to a “friend” certainly discourages an interpretation of it as heterosexual. Again more significant is how the poetic ambiguity between personal and historical relates a romantic moment of crisis to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which an age of prudence could not retract. Like “datta”, the sympathy of “dayadhvam” also brings the repressed memory to consciousness in preparation for mourning; through thinking of the key to one’s prison, becoming aware of others, the speaker is able to “Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus”. Finally the self control of Damyata marks the point of breaking from the lost figure; however, perhaps Eliot enacts it through Vittoz’s exercises of will control rather than through religious faith. The speaker addresses the friend and broken Coriolanus: through control his “heart would have responded / Gaily, when invited, beating obedient / To controlling hands”. Control over emotion here is so complete, that it can only lead to repression, not integration. It does not extend to the actual departure of Verdenal which Eliot agonised over in the manuscript, with “You over on the shore / I left without you / There I leave you / Clasping empty hands I sit” (WLFT, 79); he chose to omit it in the final version. Alone on the bank, among the rats and corpses of “The Fire Sermon”, the speaker consoles himself with the question “Shall I at least set my lands in order?”, which places him in the centre of contemporary history with the dilemmas of the Versailles Treaty, and aligns him in literary tradition with King Lear, as well as tradition stretching back to the primordial Fisher King.

In the “London Letter” of April 1922 Eliot wrote that “The popularity of certain war poems was due, I think, to the fact that they appeared

126

War Trauma and English Modernism

to represent a revolt against something that was very unpleasant, and really paid a tribute to all the nicest feelings of the upper-middle class British public school boy.” It is unclear what Eliot was referring to: certainly the poetry of protest revolting against the war as “something that was very unpleasant”, yet with the “nicest feelings” of Brooke and other war poetry before 1916. Nevertheless in an indiscriminate but decisive stroke Eliot discharged the strongest rival to a resurgent Modernist poetry. Yet he confided to Aldington that his sensibility, and consequently The Waste Land also, was a product of “aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction. Nothing wrong with my mind – which should account, mon cher, for the fact that you like my prose and dislike my verse” (LE, 603). Hence to return to the complex issue of dissociation in Eliot which I outlined at the beginning this chapter, we can see that he at least to some degree acknowledged lifelong mental illness as the main source of his poetry, divorced from his intellect. In the August 1921 “London Letter” he attempted to justify this situation with regards to Dostoevsky’s “utilizing his weaknesses; so that epilepsy and hysteria cease to be the defects of an individual and become – as a fundamental weakness can, given the ability to face it and study it – the entrance to a genuine and personal universe”.45 Dostoevsky’s mental instability had been profoundly exacerbated by the shock of reprieve midway through a ceremony of execution for subversion, and in that respect was a symptom of Russia’s history of authoritarianism. The ambiguity for both Eliot and Dostoevsky though is whether their literary testimony is a product of events or congenital pathology, and the whole theorisation of trauma tends to confuse the two. Central to Freud’s developmental theory was how sexual disposition from childhood can determine later tendencies to hysteria, but this point threatened to sideline the relevance of psychoanalysis in treating the victims of war trauma; Freud managed to salvage this relevance by reintegrating the death experience into his instinctual theory, conceiving narcissism as a sexualised apprehension death.46 Eliot faced a comparable problem of making his hysteria-prone sensibility, the source of his poetic creativity, relevant to Europe’s experience of war. Despite his identification with Dostoevsky however, he could not sustain a commitment to the cultural value of his private anguish; in 1931 he confessed to Hayward that he had never been able to deliberately make use of his suffering, despite great efforts to do so; he was convinced that had he died five

Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 127

years previously, before his conversion, all his suffering would have only signified a waste of his life. Instead Eliot would rely upon the cultural principles that he had developed in the wake of war, especially “Tradition”. In these terms private experience in The Waste Land moves outward, to the city, the decadent archetype of the female, the working class pub scene/music hall, and wider historical events stretching back to ancient times, all presented through allusions to literary tradition, which in turn moves them further outward across the entire culture of mankind. In the final version the connection of the words to their original private experience is all but erased. However one questions to what extent these allusions locate the poem in “tradition”, since as Grover Smith notes, they often resemble mishearing rather than a literary alignment.47 Nonetheless this reintegration of trauma into a larger narrative is the classic aim of therapy, although for the historian it threatens to betray the uniqueness of the traumatic event. This betrayal is the compromise of therapy, and the compromise that The Waste Land offered its readers, while professing to move forward from the trauma which is not directly mentioned.

5 Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties

We have now the hosts of weary, clamorous, unsatisfied dead to appease by our living. If we cannot appease them we shall go on dying until somewhere, in some unknown people, life can start afresh. Which brings us to Fenimore Cooper and the Red Indians. (Studies, 208) In this anticipatory “post-war” statement from the first version of Studies in Classic American Fiction between late 1917 and mid 1918, Lawrence tried to position the living in relation to the dead, and to envisage a future beyond the war. Yet the incongruity of the second line with the rest of the passage indicates that he had formulated the problem facing Europe in 1918, without realising a solution. The period 1918 to 1939 has been increasingly regarded not as the “interwar period”, but as a continuation of what Eric Hobsbawm calls “the thirty-one years’ world war”. John Keegan writes: “A child’s shoe in the Polish dust, a scrap of rusting barbed wire, a residue of pulverised bone near the spot where the gas chambers worked, these are as much relics of the First as of the Second World War.” He explains that the rise of “totalitarianism was the political continuation of war by other means”:1 the Great War set an unprecedented example of total, industrialised warfare, while damaging the rational and liberal civilisation of the European enlightenment in terms of respect for principles of constitutionalism, rule of law and representative government. In the 1920s, following the break up of the Central European Empires into various potentially volatile republics, the conditions were set for a political “experiment” in democracy. Within these fragile democratic states flourished the ideologies 128

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 129

that would polarise Europe as a whole into the warring extremes of fascism and communism in the Thirties, culminating in the Second World War. In the Twenties the most important impulse that would bind these various right-wing elements was the memory of the First World War, in particular the attitude towards settling the score against the victorious Allies who had crippled Germany with the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Paul von Hindenburg, who later became instrumental in Hitler’s rise to power, conceived the “stab in the back” theory of Germany’s defeat, which the Nazis would later offer to rectify. Hitler recalled in Mein Kampf hearing the sound of gun-shots while attacking a Communist meeting: “The heart almost rejoiced again in the face of such a renewal of old war experiences.”2 In 1918 Lawrence was exceptional in his intuition of this historical trajectory, of how “if there is no peace for [the dead], there is none for us. They return home to us, thronging home to us from over the seas, entering our souls and filling us with madness, ever more and more madness” (Studies, 208). Three years later, discussing the two opposed strains of internationalism and nationalism in Europe, he concluded that “the hate accumulates everywhere. It means war ahead: not love and peace” (iii. 680). Having alternated since 1915 between convictions that war would end imminently and that it would never end, he maintained the latter belief with grim certainty well into the Twenties. David Garnett recalled Lawrence on Armistice Day declaring that Germany would soon rise again and destroy Europe; furthermore, there was a “sombre joy in the tone in which he made these fierce prophesies of evil”, suggesting that Lawrence was relishing the possibility of future war. Although not entirely trustworthy, John Middleton Murry confirmed this impression, that Lawrence “repudiated the War, because he had some deep sense of kinship with the War”.3 Certainly there is a recurring militaristic strain in Lawrence’s writing after the war, which I will examine here. Even in Sea and Sardinia, composed December 1920, he repudiated the Sicilian men’s expectation of “full-blown sympathy” for their privations in the war: “however the great god Mars may have shrunk and gone wizened in the world, it still annoys me to hear him so blasphemed” (SS, 50). This tendency in Lawrence follows from his adoption of the prevailing war ideology in 1915 while composing The Rainbow. However unlike critics of Lawrence such as Bertrand Russell, we need not contextualise his war nostalgia in that shared by National Socialists. An example closer to home can be found in the war poet,

130

War Trauma and English Modernism

Siegfried Sassoon. In his fictionalised autobiography, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, he recalled confessing his attitudes to W.H.R. Rivers at Craiglockhart: “Yes; my mind was in a muddle; and it seemed that I had learned but one thing from being a soldier – that if we continue to accept war as a social institution we must also recognize that the Prussian system is the best, and Prussian militarism must be taught in schools.” Despite their very different experiences of the war, Lawrence and Sassoon shared a similar position towards it: both suffered from “an anti-war complex”, as Rivers defined it, which, paradoxically, caused in them moments of extreme militaristic rage. Having been brought up in the aristocratic values of personal valour, Sherston becomes “angry with the war” because of it having no place for them. He concentrates on taking his revenge: “I went up to the trenches with the intention of trying to kill someone. It was my idea of getting my own back.” In a very powerful scene, the first German he touches in the war is a beautiful, dead eighteen-year-old whom he lifts out of the mud; immediately afterwards, one of his own men is killed beside him, and he feels the accumulating desire “to kill someone at close quarters”.4 He is upset by the death of both men, and his response is to cancel out his intimate encounter with the German through another intimate form of contact, the face-to-face killing of another soldier. In Sassoon we see the psychological complexity of someone who was deeply opposed to the war, but only found “peace”5 by participating in it. To understand this contradictory condition, as Lawrence shared it, we need to go beyond the simplistic correlation between militarism and fascism. Towards the end of his career Sándor Ferenczi coined the term “traumatic imitation” as a subject’s tendency to repeat upon others the traumatic violence inflicted upon his or herself; I shall use his research as the basis for my approach to understanding Lawrence’s attitudes to the war. Ferenczi reflected in his Clinical Diary how “the evil in people lives on, as it were, in the minds of those who have been ill treated (one may think of blood feuds, which go on for generations)”;6 here we also may think of wars. In the previous chapter we diagnosed Eliot’s condition throughout the war period in terms of Ferenczi’s dissociation. In traumatic imitation there is a “splitting of the self”, or dissociation, between the side that suffers, and another side which identifies with the aggressor. Traumatic imitation is both a consequence of the violent act upon the victim, and a defence mechanism against it. Ferenczi described the belatedness of the defence as “an attempt to make a sustained injury not have happened”. One attempts to understand the aggressor in order to avoid

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 131

injury, even though it is already too late. Hence, Sassoon attempted to counter the overwhelming meaninglessness of the war after the equally traumatic encounters with the dead enemy and comrade; he submitted to its meaninglessness, and became its master by identifying with its imperative to kill. Traumatic imitation is a way of denying that the trauma occurred; meanwhile it continues to dominate the victim’s psyche. Ferenczi explained: “This suffering person protects himself, by forming wish-fulfilling hallucinations, against any insight into the sad reality, namely, that the evil, alien will is occupying his entire psychic and physical being (being possessed).”7 This insight can help us to understand Lawrence’s persistent expressions of sympathy for the war: they were attempts to deny his suffering during the war, while he continued to be possessed by it. His resistance to the war was expressed as wishful participation in it. Certainly, one can empathise with Lawrence’s longing for England to be vanquished, since it had been more of an enemy to him personally than Germany. As he would recount in “The Nightmare” of Kangaroo, after the traumatic circumstances of composing The First “Women in Love” in early 1916, he was subject to bodily examinations for conscription, then perhaps most significantly his cottage at Zennor was by searched by the CID in October 1917 and he was ordered to leave. In the midst of these events was the constant suspicion of being observed by locals, police and government agents. Then in late 1918 the frenzied campaign of huge demonstrations and petitions against enemy aliens would have affected Frieda particularly. Richard Aldington observed a crowd’s hostile reaction to Lawrence’s idiosyncratic physical appearance in 1919, reflecting that “there was no place for him in that rather sinister post-war world. Either he must escape from it or it would crush him.”8 Aldous Huxley described Lawrence’s life as continuous convalescence, and in the post-war period he suffered both from physical illness and mental wounds.9 In a rare disclosure in his letters on the long-term effect of war, he confided in June 1924 that the war had changed him forever and the post-war situation had pushed this change even further (v. 50); either the wounds deepened rather than healing or, more positively, his resistance to war became a more dominant, and perhaps integrated, aspect of his personality. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud outlined his therapeutic approach to trauma by distinguishing between repetition and remembrance of the experience. Repetition of the trauma only signals its continuing power over the subject. It is the therapist’s aim to enable the patient to channel the neurosis into memory while

132

War Trauma and English Modernism

re-enacting the trauma symbolically: “[the therapist] must get [the patient] to re-experience some portion of his forgotten life, but must see to it, on the other hand, that the patient retains some degree of aloofness, which will enable him, in spite of everything, to recognize that what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of a forgotten past.”10 The patient, then, consciously observes his own subjection to the trauma in order to distance and liberate himself from it. Like Eliot composing The Waste Land drafts, throughout the Twenties Lawrence would repeat in his writings the traumatic material of the war, progressively to recognise it as belonging to the past; however, as with Eliot, Lawrence would fall short of a full recovery.

Locating trauma In The First “Women in Love” Lawrence had described a pre-war world where the “bitterness of war” was metaphorically present; in Aaron’s Rod war persists after the Armistice in a realistic sense. After the frustrated visions of “The Reality of Peace” in 1917, the following spring Lawrence compared himself to the pregnant Catherine Carswell, with “the weary bowel-burden of a kind of contained murder which I can’t bring forth” (iii., 231); the belaboured composition of Aaron’s Rod from October 1917 to May 1921 reflects its traumatic content more than its realistic frame does, in terms of an indeterminable relation between past, present and future, and characters as scattered victims of war. Temporal displacement does not structure the narrative, as in Women in Love, but the characters’ consciousness. Where in the earlier novel the choice was either between death or fulfilment, here the characters are unable to realise either; where the recurrence of violence had bound together the narrative, feeding off the horror of war, here violence occurs in isolated moments within a general situation of psychological and historical emptiness of peace as the absence of war. The novel begins on Christmas Eve 1918: “the War was over, and there was a sense of relief that was almost a new menace. A man felt the violence of the nightmare released now into the general air.” Where previously violence could be located, or projected onto, the battlefield, now it only exists within individuals, like a mustard gas that is both inhaled and exhaled. Even “good-will” is regarded as “self-righteous bullying, like poison gas!” People’s voices re-echo “like a shell”. The novel charts Aaron Sisson’s attempt to escape this reality, whether in his marriage or English society. However even after escaping, with half

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 133

a litre of Chianti in Florence, he recognises that “the war was so near, but gone by” (AR, 5, 25, 15, 188). The persistence of war is most vividly recorded in the characters who fail to relate themselves to the war or to progress forward. In this respect Aaron’s Rod mirrors The Waste Land in its landscape of scattered victims. The war has killed the little market of Aaron’s mining town, but the inhabitants crowd there as before. Aaron’s bohemian acquaintances in London are also stuck: “All the men, except Aaron, had been through the war in some way or other. But here they were, in the old setting exactly, the old bohemian routine.” This situation prevails across Europe, including Florence where the shops lie empty. Jim Bricknell, a cavalry officer, is how one would imagine Skrebensky after the war: he has a compulsion to eat or fall in love, to provide the illusion of substance as a human being. Captain Herbertson, who has “been through the very hell of war”, repeats it: “talking war” incessantly he “rattled away, rather spasmodic” like a machine-gun on the point of overheating, then “skirmished” away from it. Angus, a former officer whom Aaron meets in Florence, describes how “We’re shattered old men, now, in one sense. And in another sense, we’re just pre-war babies” (AR, 57, 113, 193). Finally there is the Marchesa, not a direct participant, yet “the war seemed to take her life away”; refusing to sing, she cannot bear chords since they remind her of the mass coordination of soldiers. The future is beyond most people’s vision and capacity. There are vague apprehensions of future conflict, and aspirations for revolution. Lilly, who seems least victimised by war, at the end of the novel provides the shock of insisting on the necessity of “military power” (AR, 182) for order, till his speech is interrupted by an explosion. Here Lawrence introduces his readers to the problem that will define the next two decades of history, and the last decade of his relation to it. The overlapping of historical actuality and Lawrence’s alternative to it is characteristic of his writings during the protracted course of composing Aaron’s Rod, including The Lost Girl, “Education of the People” and Mr Noon. In The Lost Girl Alvina’s relationship with Ciccio is both threatened by, and part of the war. Almost as a mock alternative to the declaration of war in August 1914, Dr Mitchell proposes marriage to Alvina on the same day. Alvina rejects him, and it is implied, the war, for Ciccio. The effect of Ciccio’s presence upon her makes the atmosphere of wartime London seem only distracting: “It was strange to feel the seethe of war and dread in the air. But she did not question. She seemed steeped in the passional influence of the man, as if in some

134

War Trauma and English Modernism

narcotic.” Their unhindered journey across Europe is in sharp contrast to the stalemate on the Western Front, which is highlighted by their brief meeting with Geoffrey at the Gare de Lyon, who “had already seen some hard service, and had a wild, bewildered look” (LG, 290, 295). And yet just as the characters of Women in Love travelled across Europe while engaged in a private war, her relationship with Ciccio is also part of the “convulsion” of war: She had brushed, as it were, the fringe of the terror of the war and the invasion. Fear was seething round her. And yet she was excited and glad. The vast world was in one of its convulsions, and she was moving amongst it. Somewhere, she believed in the convulsion, the event elated her. The contest between Alvina and Ciccio is a brutal one. At first it appears that she represents his spoils “in those wild early days of war. He was the one victor, arching stealthily over the vanquished north.” When it turns out that she has no dowry to offer him, he exacts retribution by raping her, forcing her submission to him. Then her experience of Italy is comparable to a soldier’s on the Western Front: the landscape is “annihilating the Englishwoman”, and she “began to feel she would die, in the awful comfortless meaninglessness of it all” (LG, 298, 289, 314, 319). Finally, the war at large interrupts their personal war. She hopes that they can escape together to America, until Italy declares and he is forced to join up. Even then, he appeals to the probable rejection by the authorities of her plan to have a child in England, which she interprets as his threat to “crush” her. The novel ends with him leaving for war, she reassuring him that “I love you, even if it kills me”, and the question left hanging: “Was she to bear a hopeless child?” (LG, 336–8). This intermixing of sexuality and war is replicated In “Part II” of Mr Noon, composed between December 1920 and February 1921. Battalions of soldiers periodically march past Gilbert and Johanna, foregrounding the issue of his choice between her and them. He tries to resolve the dilemma by stressing the conflict inherent in a sexual relationship. At one point he strides “manfully”, musing that “No, damn it all, what was the good of love that wasn’t a fight!” Their relationship is compared to the German shelling of Rheims Cathedral, where “It flung [Gilbert] smack through the cathedrals like a long-shotted shell.” The issue appears to resolve itself in favour of his relationship with Johanna to the exclusion of militarism when she tries to shatter Gilbert’s illusions about its glamour, and the narrator chides him: “As if there were not

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 135

sufficient dead eyes of insentience in the world, without his wishing to escape from the sacred magnetism of desire” (MN, 173, 137, 211). And yet, at the end of the novel, his relationship once more becomes identified with the violence of the war: We don’t now what is outside – we can never know till we get out. We have therefore got to fight and fight and fight ourselves sick, to get out. Hence the Germans really made a right move, when they made the war. Death to the old enshrouding body politic, the old womb-idea of our era! This glorifying of the war is inexplicable, given how it virtually destroyed Lawrence. This fact is suggested when Gilbert witnesses “squadron after squadron of blue infantry thresh heavily, with that awful German rhythm of march”, and condemns the “rampant Germanism”, “insulting militarism”, “militaristic insolence and parvenu imperialism” which is “all worked up deliberately” (MN, 291, 144, 159–60). In Mr Noon Lawrence was taking the therapeutic step of reviewing his past experience of the military since his visit to Germany in 1912, in order to begin to analyse it. The prevailing militarism makes Gilbert feel “guilty of something – perhaps of being a mere civilian” (MN, 168), and this admission points to the reasons for Lawrence’s profound ambivalence to the military, before, during and after the war: he hates the way it makes him feel guilty as an outsider, but he also wants to appease this guilt by becoming a part of it. Furthermore, it is not only guilt that draws Gilbert to the soldiers, as we see at Trier: Was it possible the banal tune could come out with such a terrible, ponderous, splendid heart-stroke, stroke after stroke welding the deep heart into black iron! Men’s voices in terrifying martial unison, like some great tolling bell. . . . Strange! Something seemed to knock at his consciousness – something he refused to admit. Wherever he was in Germany, the soldiery made a deep impression on him. But he did not take them quite for real. . . . And for some reason, fear knocked also at this inner consciousness, though he would not admit it. They were handsome, on the whole, the cavalry: so strong, so healthy looking, powerful, with that strange military beauty which one never saw in England. . . . So clatter-clatter-clatter he watched them retreat, and looked after the strong retreating backs. Ah, the man’s world! The fighting world.

136

War Trauma and English Modernism

This passage oscillates between a series of oppositions. The rhythm of the marching song is banal and mechanical, but instead of the iron suggesting something inhuman and industrial, in the form of a cathedral bell it evokes a religious unity and communality. Also, Gilbert is deeply affected by the presence of the soldiers, but cannot admit it, cannot see them as “real”. On one side he is afraid of them, on another he is attracted to their “strange military beauty”. His “envy” either expresses a desire to identify with them, or perhaps conceals a homoerotic desire for them, as in the later description of a cavalryman’s “strong body”, “handsome” neck and “strong, heavy-muscled legs” (MN, 176–7, 208–9). While in Aaron’s Rod Lawrence presented a generalised state of trauma and in The Lost Girl acted out the confusion of his sexual vision with the violence of war, in Mr Noon he began to analyse this traumatic imitation in terms of Ferenczi’s formulation, as a belated attempt to resist the war’s former possession of every aspect of his existence.

A war to end all wars In a Europe teetering between bitterness of the Versailles Treaty and apparent cooperation of the League of Nations, Lawrence himself was divided between participating in a future revolutionary “death struggle”, and a “resurrection” that would be “harder even than death” (iii., 649, 694). While exposing in fiction his personal apprehension of the legacy of war, he focused his essays on working through it. Yet he continued to display the symptoms of Ferenczi’s trauma victim, of “wish-fulfilling hallucinations” that deny the sad truth of defeat at the hands of the aggressor. From the first drafts of Studies in Classic American Literature to “Memoir of Maurice Magnus” his thought revolved from absolute opposition to war, then opposition within the terms of the war – only to find that this demanded submission to them – then return to absolute opposition. Avowing that “I place my hopes of the world on these essays” (iii., 270), in the first drafts of Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence appealed to a global utopia before the Flood, of a “universal mystic language” and “one profound sensual-real knowledge”. In 1919 he located the remnants of this world in the “great sensual-mystic civilisations” of the Pacific, and turned the ocean into an equivalent for the fields of the Western Front, “surcharged with the blue ghostly end of immemorial people”, which “rolls also latent with all the unborn issues of the coming world of man” (Studies, 169 289, 335–6). In a similar, if more pragmatic vision, of the first four essays of “Education of the People”,

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 137

initially written during the first month after the Armistice, he envisaged educators as “priests of life” (presumably including artists like himself), who would act as the “leaders” of society. However, on taking up this project again in 1920, Lawrence’s vision of the “educators” dramatically shifted. First, he identified “the great class of workers” as the reservoir for a new social hierarchy, but not to change the structure of that hierarchy, since individuals would rise to be “the masters of industry, and probably, the leading soldiers”. His priority was to abolish “the fleshpots of the old fat peace” and anticipate “the new stage” initiated by the war. His programme of “education” mirrored Sassoon’s advocating of the “Prussian system”, with the gymnasium is the most important space where his “warriors” would be trained. Lawrence advised the teachers to “egg them on, and look on the black eye and bloody nose as insignia of honour, like the Germans of old. . . . And praise the wounds. And praise the valour that will be killed rather than yield.” At this point, though, he was still careful to distinguish his values of “the real war, the real fight” from those of the World War. In fact he set them in direct opposition to each other: But let us keep the real war, the real fight. And what is the fight? It is a sheer immediate conflict of physical men: that, and that best of all. What does death matter, if a man die in a flame of passionate conflict. . . . – But to be blown to smithereens while you are eating a sardine: horrible and monstrous abnormality. Lawrence’s “fight” is “a primary physical thing . . . not a horrible obscene ideal process, like our last war” (RDP, 107, 115, 159). However, the distinction between them would prove difficult to sustain. The split in Lawrence’s thinking is more fully developed in Fantasia of the Unconscious, composed a year later. Recapitulating his position in the early drafts of Studies, it appeals to a glacial period remembered in symbols: “We have to get back to the great purpose of manhood, a passionate unison in actively making a world.” However, it also picks up the thread from “Education of the People”: “The war was really not a bad beginning. But we went out under the banners of idealism, and now the men are home again, the virus is more active than ever, rotting their very souls.” “Idealism” is, as before, “mental consciousness” which in terms of politics includes “world-brotherhood and international love and Leagues of Nations”. Accordingly, boys should “be soldiers, but as individuals, not machine units. There are wars in the future, great wars, which not machines will finally decide, but the free, indomitable life spirit.”

138

War Trauma and English Modernism

His “education” would prepare “a whole new way of life, a new society” with leaders who “relieve the followers for ever of the burden of finding a way” (FUPU, 110, 87, 19, 88); there would be no newspapers since these followers would not need to learn to read. This authoritarian position actually reversed the position of the first essays of “Education of the People” where it was implied that the priest-like “educators” were artists, including Lawrence of course; now a literary intelligentsia is left obsolete by a “leader” whose power is presumably dependent on military coercion. Yet Lawrence’s argument begins to unravel upon itself, and to suggest very different polemics. He acknowledged his impotence as a writer who was unread by his targeted audience, then in the same movement twisted the argument back upon itself to present his potential role of power as a “leader”: And me? There is no danger of the working man ever reading my books, so I shan’t hurt him that way. . . . I would like him to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life. (FUPU, 115–17) Lawrence presented himself in opposition to technology, which would turn “the problem of the future” into “a question of the strongest poison-gas”. Yet having capitulated to the apparently remorseless logic of events following the war, he wryly commented that the destruction of humanity by technology “is a very sure way out of our vicious circle”. Morbidly revelling in this grim prospect he even suggested that “we could throw the pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for the inventors of poison-gas”. In the following chapter he recognised the extremity of this reverse tendency where his attempt “to find a way out of the vicious circle . . . ended in poison-gas” (FUPU, 143–5). Furthermore, his programme of training boys to be soldiers in a society directed by the will of a leader could share in this prospect. And so we pass through a revolution in Lawrence’s circular alternative to the cycle of war between nations: from choosing the “ideal” of life, he postulated his own role in educating the people to pursue it, only to find that he was ousted from this role by a leader empowered by military force. Having passed through this circle, Lawrence returned to his opening post-war statement in the first version of Studies in Classic American Literature, answering and redeeming the “dead souls”: How this all is, and what are the laws of the relation between life and death, the living and the dead, I don’t know. But that this relation

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 139

exists in a manner as I describe it, for my own part I know. And I am fully aware that once we direct our living attention this way, instead of to the absurdity of the atom, then we have a whole living universe of knowledge before us. . . . Whilst concerning the universe of Force and Matter we pile up theories and make staggering and disastrous discoveries of machinery and poison-gas, all of which we were much better without. (FUPU, 152) In one sense this represents a return to his apprehension in 1918 of perpetuating violence, but it is also extremely prescient, both in terms of his response to the war over the course of the Twenties, and in terms of the historical events that stretch out beyond his life, as a consequence of splitting the atom. All he could counter this vicious circle with was his final option, individual resistance: “never give in, but be alone” (FUPU, 147), however this cancelled out his opening utopian vision of united humanity. Lawrence perhaps made his most significant steps forward during this period in the explosive ending of his introduction to Memoir of Maurice Magnus. At first he dismissed Magnus’s supporting “the spiritual Allied cause” from the relative safety of Africa as typical of civilian xenophobia remote from the battlefield. Then in a leap of logic he equated Magnus’s “vile experiences” of personal humiliation with experiences of war, as trauma: There are certain things which are so bitter, so horrible, that the contemporaries just cannot know them, cannot contemplate them. – So it is with a great deal of the late war. It was so foul, and humanity in Europe fell suddenly into such ignominy and inhuman ghastliness, that we shall never fully realise what it was. We just cannot bear it. Lawrence hailed Magnus as a non-participant above the soldiers who died: “they were more publicly heroic, they won war-medals. But the lovely terrified courage of the isolated spirit which grits its teeth and stares the horrors in the face and will not succumb to them, but fights its way through them, knowing that it must surpass them: this is the rarest courage.” While conceding that “Magnus went where I could never go”, by displacing the trauma of war onto private experience, Lawrence was able to formulate a programme of recovery from the war that was applicable to himself: humanity can only finally conquer by realising. It is a human destiny, since Man fell into consciousness and self-consciousness, that

140

War Trauma and English Modernism

we can only go forward step by step through realisation, full, bitter, conscious realisation. This is true of all the great terrors and agonies and anguishes of life: sex, and war, and even crime. Lawrence’s displacement from the soldiers to Magnus betrayed his own complex war trauma as a non-participant. Furthermore, Lawrence was prescribing a realisation of the full horror of war before he had actually embarked on it; consequently his apprehension of war was coloured by the manic defence of omnipotence, that if he could realise its impact then he could abolish it: “The diabolic mechanisms are man’s and I am a man. Therefore they are mine. And I smash them into oblivion. I am at war! I, a man, am at war! – with these foul machines and contrivances that men have conjured up” (MM, 96, 99–102). Here he repeated his appeal to the resistance of the individual in Fantasia. Again he was prosecuting his private war on war, internalising its violence while trying to expel it from himself. Lawrence could only begin this process of realising the horror of war in Europe by departing from it. Having dismissed Europe as a “dead dog which begins to stink intolerably”, his departure in 1922 was inflected with a sense of future return, of one day “saving Europe” (iv., 114, 219).

Self therapy in Kangaroo Kangaroo presents the contradictory nature of Lawrence’s reaction to the war in the Twenties at its most complex and intensely realised. In Australia the war has been absorbed into domestic life, as souvenirs and memories from a distant land. The bullet once lodged in Jack Callcott’s jaw is “now a mantelpiece ornament”, a bungalow is named “Verdun”, and a memorial is compared to “an old milk-can someone had set down and forgotten: or a bran new milk-can” (K, 24, 191). Australia, then, is like a therapist’s couch, a semi-neutral space that invites Lawrence’s protagonist Richard Lovatt Somers to revisit his past, while remaining at one remove from it. Re-enacting his traumatic imitation of war in the semi-autobiographical figure of Somers, Lawrence struggled within the therapeutic process of acting out and working through it. “The Nightmare”, true to the form of traumatic flashback, is outside the novel’s narrative set in Australia, while forming its core. Somers describes how “deep in his unconscious had lain this accumulation of black fury and fear, like frenzied lava quiescent in his soul”. This eruption occurs after his tense encounters with the socialist leader Willie Struthers, then the right-wing Ben Cooley: Struthers’ insistent probing

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 141

reminds Somers of the wartime medical examinations; Cooley grasps Somers, and transforms into “a great thing, a horror”, as if he were a personification of the war itself. Somers’ terror of Cooley, “If he came near enough to touch – !” (K, 260, 211), reprises his feelings of being physically violated during his final examination. Through this scenario Lawrence acted out his horrific experience of war in terms of the pure “horror” of Cooley. However, the effect of fictionalisation is critical in Kangaroo. “The Nightmare” is such a classic case of traumatic recall that one may suspect it was invented as such by Lawrence; after all, he could have known its characteristics from David Eder. Alongside this possibility is the issue of dividing the supposedly factual material of the “Nightmare” and the fictionalised events of Somers’ encounters with Australia’s political scene, since the latter is the trigger for the former. Cooley’s reference to Struthers, that “a bite from a hyena means blood-poisoning” (K, 207) is imported into the traumatic recall of “The Nightmare” and repeated in a variety of forms. Could an actual flashback of Lawrence’s be triggered by the imaginary experiences of Somers? Perhaps through imagining a scenario of a fictional character, Lawrence could identify with the character to trigger traumatic recall in himself, as a role-play technique common in therapy. As an instance of acting out trauma, the truth value of “The Nightmare” is not available to its narrator, or to its author despite his self-objectification as the narrator. In Caruth’s terms, the trauma is outside experience and therefore representation; it cannot be ordered into a narrative of space and time, of subjects and objects. Linear cause and effect are replaced by repetition, geography by the absent or omnipresent. Instead of a physically tangible reality, the trace of trauma lies in the emotional affect expressed in language. The affect in “The Nightmare” is “fear”, and it is ever present. Somers describes how during late wartime England was immersed in a “true and deadly fear of the criminal living spirit”, “a reign of Terror” throughout which “the torture was steadily applied” by the governing class. If there is a centre of fear, it is London: “the war news always coming, the war horror drifting in”, London became “a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors”, “nothing but war, war” (K, 212, 216, 230). London, along with Bodmin, Zennor and the Midlands, are not so much geographical places, as figures of an obsessive tic which structures the narrative. It begins with the journey to the first examination at Bodmin, then a description of London, then back to the journey to Bodmin, then Zennor, then the second examination at Bodmin, then

142

War Trauma and English Modernism

to the Midlands, then London again, then Zennor, then London, then the Midlands, then London, then the Midlands. The narrative can only break off by Richard and Harriet escaping from Britain. The journeys from one to place to another are subsumed in the general fear of war, to the point that they seem to be the same journey. On the train to Bodmin, in “the lost corridors of hell”, the “men howled as if they were going to their doom, helplessly, ghastlily”; on the bus from the Midlands to London the colliers make “the wails of a dying humanity” in a “ghastly trailing song, like death itself” (K, 215, 229–30). Somers describes how, as the colliers “tore their bowels with their singing, they tore his”. Since trauma cannot be pinned down in material or representational terms, it infectiously spreads through testimony, of which the colliers’ singing is an example. For Caruth infectiousness is the essence of trauma’s historical significance, beyond the individual’s pathology. Trauma cannot be objectively identified in traditional historiographic terms, instead its ontological force exists in how it pervades the psyches of individuals, and whole populations. In the following retrospective chapter to “The Nightmare”, “‘Revenge!’ Timotheus Cries”, Somers generalises his personal trauma to the whole world: “if the fire had suddenly erupted in his own belly it would erupt one day in the bellies of all men. Because there it had accumulated, like a great horrible lava pool, deep in the unconscious bowels of all men” (K, 230, 261). From a particular historical event, the trauma becomes a force within history causing the Russian Revolution and Easter Uprising in Ireland, and future upheaval in India. However, within the process of acting out there is no independent frame of reference by which to observe the traumatic event since it has broken down the ego’s defences. Consequently it becomes difficult to locate the significance of the trauma for Somers-as-Lawrence: for instance, the avowed global reach of Somers’ impulse for revenge could also be diagnosed as a symptom of megalomania. After all, the core of his war trauma is expressed in a moment of supreme illumination, which includes an almost comical sense of disproportion: Masters of life, as they were masters of steam-power and electric power and above all, of money-power. Masters of money-power, with an obscene hatred of life, true, spontaneous life. Richard Lovatt knew it. They had looked into his anus, they had put their hand under his testicles. (K, 256) The last sentence is so incongruous that its resistance to rationality assures its truth value as testimony. On the other hand, it betrays the

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 143

very personal terms of Somers’ trauma, in comparison, say, to a neardeath experience on the Western Front. In reaction to this impasse, “The Nightmare” simulates the therapeutic struggle between repetitive acting out of repressed material as if it were a present experience, and working over and through this material with Somers’ moderate detachment to recognise it as belonging to the past. One of the anomalies that reflects this struggle is between the two descriptions of the first medical examination at Bodmin. The first description is apparently neutral. However, in the process of working through there is a compulsion to return to this event by the probing of the narrator’s “inner therapist”, in order to release some undisclosed but insistent anxiety associated with it. The second description brings more attention to itself through the complexity of its attitudes. On one side Somers is relieved that “he was out, he was free”, yet there is the “ignominious word Rejected”; still, “glad he was, and in some mysterious way, triumphant”, but then the men where he lives would “be horribly ashamed of their physical ignominy if they were labelled unfit”. He replies in his own mind that his body is fragile, but “very strong”. A clue to what is repressed lies where Somers later implausibly ascribes his second rejection to the authorities’ perception that “he would be a firebrand in their army, a dangerous man to put with any group of men” (K, 220–1, 231). It appears that he is denying a sense of inadequacy and powerlessness, not from being conscripted into the war but from his rejection by the authorities. This is the displaced manifestation of Lawrence’s war trauma: he was rejected from service, so decided not to serve. His and Somers’ “triumph” lay in being able to preserve their freedom. Somers imagines that the other conscripts bewailed “not the death in front” but “the surrender of their old beliefs, and all their sacred liberty”. This statement also displaces his sense of guilt, in arguing that the death of those who passed the examination is not as important as the threat to liberty, which he eventually will lose in Cornwall. Apart from a sense of personal inadequacy, Somers feels “a dreary misery, knowing how many brave, generous men were being put through this slaughtermachine of human devilishness”. He suffers from a distortion that Eliot presented in The Waste Land, a sense of guilt from responsibility for the atrocities he witnessed. Somers in turn denies this distortion by implying that he could have saved the conscripted men if they had followed his lead: “If men had kept their souls firm and integral through the years, the war would never have come on” (K, 215, 221). To compensate for his sense of inadequacy he claims to be too integral and firm as an individual to serve; if others had acted likewise then the war would have avoided becoming a disaster. This argument answers his guilt.

144

War Trauma and English Modernism

The main strategy that Somers employs to displace his guilt is internalising the war, to be a participant. Hence London, not Flanders, becomes the centre of war. He is quick to mention that during the Zeppelin raids he “was never afraid”, unlike the rest of the civilian population. “The spirit of the war” comes “in advancing waves”, as if it were the divisions of an attacking army. He even transposes the war from the front to the home: “We hear so much of the bravery and horrors at the front. Brave the men were, all honour to them. It was at home the world was lost” (K, 216, 217). From having been rejected, Somers transforms himself into a potential war hero. The rest of the “Nightmare” can be read as a tragic story of Somers’ war heroism. He imagines in Cornwall that “he was getting the better of the military canaille”, and when he and his wife are ordered to leave he lashes back at the officers through his contemptuous expression: “they were just things, obeying orders. And his eyes showed that. The young officer wanted to get out.” Afterwards he feels paralysed, and can only bring himself to leave by resolving to fight the authorities and eventually return. At this point too he feels he has been “killed”. His single-handed “combat” against the authorities becomes more desperate at the final examination, with the pathetic image of him sitting naked in his jacket while feeling that “from his heart, from his spine went out vibrations that should annihilate them – blot them out, the canaille, stamp them into the mud they belonged to” (K, 244, 247, 255). Lawrence-as-Somers’ trauma, then, lies in a repressed sense of helplessness and guilt from not being able to contribute to the war effort – the inverse trauma of the soldier’s on the front. Somers compensates for these feelings with the fantasy of being a hero, but as his personal war develops over the course of successive military examinations, the fantasy is strained to breaking point, in the great disparity between the physical harm incurred and his corresponding distress. In unconsciously retelling this fantasy, Somers is acting out the trauma, having loosened the repressed memory without objectifying it, but this process is combined with glimpses of insight where he works over and through the trauma. The testimony of “The Nightmare” conceals as much as it betrays about Lawrence’s trauma during the war, and partly serves to perpetuate the split within him between that which suffered, and that which imitated the threat in order to survive it. Like Eliot’s compromised self-healing in The Waste Land, Lawrence does not appear to have freed his alter ego Somers of the trauma of war: his “revenge” upon it, like Sassoon’s, could be interpreted as much as a continuation of his symptoms of

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 145

traumatic imitation, as a release from them. This outcome agrees more with Ferenczi’s findings, that following an apparently successful session of abreaction, “after a few hours everything is as it was before; the following night brings another nightmare, and the next session another attack”.11 He explained this impasse as due to the failure to integrate the split parts of the victim’s personality, and in the case of Somers we can see the continuing split between the part which suffered the war, and the part which identified with it to survive, without reconciliation between them. However, there is at least a partial development in Somers’ relationship with his neighbour Jack which fictionalises Lawrence’s ongoing relation to the war. Jack is both an emotionally damaged war veteran, and model for Lawrence’s “fighter” for life. In his call for “a set of chaps with some guts in them, who’ll obey orders when they find a man who’ll give the orders” he echoes Lawrence’s sentiments in “Education of the People” and Fantasia of the Unconscious. A veteran obsessed with the war such as Jack can be a model of a way forward in the post-war period, because he provides a conduit by which Somers can identify with militarism, and no longer be its passive victim. Yet Jack directly repeats the actions of the British authorities upon Somers during the war by accusing him of being a spy. At a more extreme level, he demonstrates the brutal reality of what Lawrence had imagined in his gymnasium of schoolboy warriors; Jack describes his exploits during the fight at the Labour meeting, that killing is “just as natural as lying with a woman” (K, 91, 319). Towards the close of the novel Somers reflects upon what positive purpose he could direct his “rage” and “revenge”; he concludes that “the greatest revenge on the lie is to get clear of the lie”, that is, of the ideals that authorised the war by asserting his autonomy as an individual. In this sense, we see the development of responses to the war in Kangaroo mirror that from Fantasia of the Unconscious to Memoir of Maurice Magnus: a military society dominated by a leader is first posited as an answer to the ideologies that fuelled the war, but this proves merely a lapse back into these ideologies, leaving the individual with the sole option of relying upon his or her resources to get clear of them. This is the revenge borne out of Lawrence’s rage against the war, which can possibly break the cyclical violence in history.

A holy war? Describing himself as “a sort of human bomb”, Somers consoles himself that “some men have to be bombs to explode and make breaches in the

146

War Trauma and English Modernism

walls that shut life in” (K, 163, 165). However Jack Callcott and Ben Cooley are also human bombs, and in Europe men of their kind such as Mussolini and Hitler were exploding onto the political scene. The problem lay in how to distinguish between these modes of violence, of whether they only destroy the walls that shut life in, or destroy that life as well. While predicting a second “great war” in 1925 (Studies, 103), in The Plumed Serpent Lawrence would continue to struggle to conceive a war that could yield a renewal of life. The inspiration for the Studies in 1918 had been in Lawrence’s perception of America as an escape from Europe suffering its death-throes in the war. However in the final version of 1922 to 1923 Europe has become almost as much a victim of the settlers in America as the native Indians are, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s appeal for money from the Court of France in aid of the War of Independence. Just as American white values of democracy have been set in opposition to the values of the native race, so too have they defined America in opposition to Europe: “Democracy in America is just the tool with which the old mastery of Europe, the European spirit, is undermined. Europe destroyed, potentially, American democracy will evaporate. America will begin” (Studies, 19). The First World War, in which Europe has destroyed itself through emulating America’s citizen as the “little ideal, or automaton”, is the climax of this “slow attrition”. And yet, white America is destroying itself also, like a soldier attempting to cross no-man’s-land, “tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines”. And like the American Indians, a dying Europe has the opportunity to lash back at the capitalist and democratic ideals of white America: “Now is your chance, Europe. Now let Hell loose and get your own back” (Studies, 30–1). In this statement Lawrence used a violent language that could be construed in terms of a literal war. Furthermore his projected “vast death-happening” for America’s transformation into “the next real thing” (iv., 398) could be imagined in literal terms. In May and June of 1923 he attempted to unleash the “revenge” of the “aboriginal demons” of Mexico in Quetzalcoatl, and in the process of revising this novel as The Plumed Serpent from November 1924 to February 1925 he transformed an apparently local fictionalisation of Mexican society into a novel that weds the American Indian and the European races to avenge their gradual decimation by white America’s capitalist and democratic ideologies. This change was precipitated by his return to England, France and Germany between December 1923 and March of the following year. His experience of Europe was generally

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 147

negative, except for a few impressions. England belonged to “the dead of ones previous existence” (iv., 545). His “Letter from Germany”, though, represented a country on the brink of revival. Germany had forsworn reconciliation with a rationalist France, and recent hyperinflation had undermined its “old peace-and-production hope”, drawing it eastwards towards the “savage polarity of Tartary” (MinM, 149). In his private correspondence to Koteliansky in February he shed the fatalistic tone of the “Letter” about Germany’s possible military resurgence for an optimistic one: Germany is queer – seems to be turning – as if she would make a great change, and become manly again, and a bit dangerous in a manly way. I hope so. . . . there is a certain healthiness, more than in France, far more than in England, the old fierceness coming back. (iv., 574) In another letter written ten days later he commented that in “the middle of Asia there is the old evil destructive centre, now about to rouse again and work on us – particularly Europe” (iv., 586). He was aware that the violent impulse threatening in Germany was from the same source of its violence in the war, and he recognised it as “evil”, yet he preferred it to the “dead” atmosphere of England because at least the dead in Germany were being roused to vengeance. Lawrence’s “Epilogue” to Movements in European History, written back in America in the autumn of 1923, replayed the contradictions between his peaceful utopianism and acknowledgement that future war was, if not necessary for regeneration, then historically inevitable. For the last thousand years European civilisation has been “the growing tip on the tree of mankind”, but then “the war came, and blew away forever our leading tip. Now we are directionless” (MEH, 256–7). This image, following from his idea of the “glacial age” when all mankind was of one civilisation, is optimistic in terms of appealing to the fundamental unity of all the races, but its organic imagery is also deterministic in denying a future direction for Europe as the growing tip. The future tip, presumably, or new leading bud from a side socket, will emerge in America. Furthermore, this tree imagery is not consistent; it shifts to a metaphor of Europe as a virgin forest whose young trees have competed for light and are now choking one another, making future war inevitable. This image is more historically informed since Germany’s industrial expansion and increasing need for resources were the main economic cause of Europe’s political instability. So on one side, Lawrence affirmed the peaceful unity of mankind as a tree that must establish a new growing

148

War Trauma and English Modernism

tip, and on the other asserted that as a group of contending trees, the nations of Europe were bound to renew the war. Towards the end of The Plumed Serpent, while still debating with herself whether to marry Cipriano and submit to the Quetzalcoatl religion, Kate follows Lawrence in the “Epilogue” by imagining “the days, perhaps, before the glacial period”, when “seas were only great lakes, and the soft, dark-eyed people of that world could walk around the globe”. The aboriginal races of America belong to this “pre-flood world”, as opposed to the “mental-spiritual world” of white America which, Kate muses, will probably “quickly wither. A great death come” when these two worlds are mixed (PS, 414). She will contribute to this “great death” peacefully by marrying Cipriano. Ramón tries to reconcile this vision with Lawrence’s of nations as contending trees: Leagues and Covenants and International Programmes: Ah! Cipriano! it’s like an international pestilence. The leaves of one great tree can’t hang on the boughs of another great tree. The races of the earth are like trees, in the end they neither mix nor mingle. They stand out of each other’s way, like trees. Or else they crowd on one another, and their roots grapple, and it is the fight to the death. – Only from the flowers there is commingling. And the flowers of every race are the natural aristocrats of that race. Ramón is answering “the gleam of a Holy War” in Cipriano’s eye, to conquer other nations through the power of his army, and to impose his religion upon them. Ramón’s alternative vision of the races as trees which do not encroach upon each other’s space resolves Lawrence’s image of contending trees by replacing the image of mankind as one tree with many trees of different races, whose flowers will commingle, as in the “natural aristocrats” Kate and Cipriano. Thus Lawrence through Kate and Ramón presents a peaceful alternative of regeneration to his forebodings of war. However Ramón depends on Cipriano’s army to be successful; he goes to his labouring men “while Cipriano sat down to his correspondence, and his military planning” (PS, 248–9). Lawrence imagined Cipriano as a warrior for the post-war era. He addresses his men, “always with the same cry”, as if they had graduated from Lawrence’s gymnasium in “Education of the People”: “We are men! We are fighters! “But what can we do?

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 149

“Shall we march to simple death? “No! No! We must march to life.” (PS, 361) When a holy war against the Catholic Church breaks out Cipriano prosecutes Lawrence’s alternative strategy to the trenches of the First World War: For us, no trench and cannon warfare. My men are no cannon-fodder, nor trench-dung. Where cannon are, we must move away. Our hundreds break up, and we attack where the cannon are not. That we are swift, that we are silent, that we have no burdens, and that the second strength is in us: that is all. We intend to put up no battle-front, but to attack at our own moment, and at a thousand points. (PS, 366–7) It is worth bearing in mind that this strategy is a primitive form of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in the Thirties, which created pockets of entrapped and immobilised enemy fronts through groups of tanks, dive-bombers and motorised artillery. Like Hitler too, Cipriano shares with the commanding generals of the First World War a lack of concern for the number of men killed in his religious war, as he answers Kate’s inquiry about the casualties from the recent rebellions: “Yes! Some! Not many, no? – Perhaps a hundred. We can never tell, no? Maybe two hundred – ” He waved his hand vaguely. Where the First World War was fought for a Christian ideal, Cipriano fights for a religious ideal, declaring that “Ramón is more than life. More than life” (PS, 308–9). After Cipriano personally executes some rebels, he forces Kate to submit to him through possessing her sexually, at which point she can only respond, “Why should I judge him? He is of the gods.” She voices Lawrence’s uncertainty about the historical implications of his vision, immediately referring to Cipriano as “the strutting little soldier” (PS, 394, 399), yet later choosing to remain in Mexico as his wife. As we can see, despite the realisation of horror and promise of recovery in Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent replicates the “vicious circle” of

150

War Trauma and English Modernism

Fantasia of the Unconscious: attempting to conceive a future clear of the legacy of the war, it “ends in poison-gas”.

Stages of recovery in the Lady Chatterley novels Compared to the insights glimpsed in Kangaroo then relapse into repression in The Plumed Serpent, the multiple rewriting of Lady Chatterley’s Lover forms a series of therapeutic “sessions” in which Lawrence progressively worked through his war trauma. In September 1929 he reflected on the symbolism of Clifford’s paralysis, that “when I began Lady C. of course I did not know what I was doing – I did not deliberately work symbolically. But at the time the book was finished I realised what the unconscious symbolism was” (vii., 477). This self-raising to consciousness equates with what Lawrence had advocated in Memoir of Maurice Magnus, and testifies to his psychological healing in the midst of terminal illness. One example of this rewriting is the image of the hill in Wragby whose trees were cut down during the war, symbolising a lost generation. In Version 1 Connie admires the young trees and bluebells surrounding them as a symbol of nature’s regeneration. In Version 2 the hill becomes the focus of a profoundly ambivalent valediction for a lost England; then Clifford wishes that “we had enough strong men to form a small aristocracy, and put the rest back into slavery, where they belong” (FSLCL, 240–1). In the final version Lawrence omitted both of these passages while elaborating their themes. Clifford describes his wish to preserve the grounds of “old England”, despite his family having only owned the grounds privately for two hundred years, and their being “an old, old thoroughfare coming across-country”. Lawrence showed far more subtly the anachronistic position in which Clifford sets himself as the preserver of old England, and fed it into the novel’s main story: Clifford expresses a longing for a son as another “link in a chain” (LCL, 43) while Connie gestates her own vision of the future on one of the tree stumps. But there are also more general trends of developments between the novels which mark Lawrence’s progressive attempt to envision a future for Britain after the war. Compared to the others, Version 1 from 1926 is suffused in imagery of war which entraps the characters, denying them their conscious belief that they are responding to their immediate circumstances and living in the present. Parkin is a reincarnation of the male lead in “The Virgin and the Gipsy”, composed at the beginning of 1926. The gipsy “had been through the war”, almost dying of

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 151

pneumonia (like Lawrence); when he saves Yvette from the flood he “commanded ferociously, the savageness of the war on him” (VG, 58, 72). Similarly, at night Parkin wraps himself in a soldier’s blanket, and patrols the forest, “taking his gun”. Connie is attracted to him “because he was at war with everybody”, notwithstanding that “he was at war, really, with Clifford and herself, as much as with the poaching world”. Her relationship with Clifford reaches the state of “open warfare. Open warfare, open warfare, if there must be war!”, because of his imposing ego upon her; an alliance with Parkin seems viable, even if “with him it would be the clash of wills, and a certain brutality”. She observes him about to summon some poachers: “The son of man goes forth to war! She smiled to herself grimly” (FSLCL, 43, 31, 53–4, 58). Lawrence’s challenge, which he had struggled with in the previous eight years, was to find a way of being not entrenched in the war. This problem is evident in Connie’s desire for a child. Clifford reflects on it as one of the “consequences of the war”: “I suppose it’s natural, and it’s no use trying to go against nature. The war should have taught us that. – All right, my dear, breed!” Yet her desire for Parkin is the basis of her, and Lawrence’s, disavowal of the war: “If men had believed in the immortality of the body, they would never have made that war, or any such war.” Nonetheless, her relationship with Parkin is still immersed in the terms of war. When she leaves for France, she feels like a girl waiting for her lover to return from the front, and while he is away in Sheffield she notes the August Bank Holiday pass, as the declaration of war. He responds aggressively to her reference to him as her “lover”: “‘Fucker!’ he said, and his eyes darted a flash at her, as if he shot her.” What was intended as a violent insult, though, is reformulated as an expression of their new life together, as Connie responds, “What does it matter if you fuck me, as you call it? – when you know I want you to! And you want to yourself, don’t you?” Later in the novel when he asks what they should do if anyone sees them naked outside, she answers laconically: “We’ll shoot them” (FSLCL, 67, 83, 106–7, 148). Version 1 ends unresolved. Parkin’s work as a lorry driver in Sheffield is partly a nostalgic gesture towards the war, since he chooses to work with his mate in the war. His desire to remain secretary for the communist league reveals his adherence to the class conflict that Lawrence saw as a continuation of the war. The characters are immersed in the terms of war, so that any action that seems to break from it is only a struggle from within it. In the Second Lady Chatterley Lawrence attempted to subvert the monopoly of the war’s consequences upon present society by foregrounding the problematic relation between men and women, and

152

War Trauma and English Modernism

between the classes, which somehow emerged concurrently with, but independently of the war. Just after writing the novel, in April 1927 he asserted that the gulf between classes was wider than between nations (LEA, 35). However, this shift of emphasis did not free up Connie and Parkin from the war, as he writes to her at the end of the novel: “I shouldn’t care if the bolshevists blew up one half of the world, and the capitalists blew up the other half, to spite them, so long as they left me and you a rabbit-hole apiece to creep in, and meet underground like the rabbits do” (FSLCL, 564). In the final version Lawrence’s solution for Connie and now Mellors is by far the most decisive. He followed from the previous version by placing their relationship within the framework of post-war society, but extended this by analysing the traumatic effects of war at both personal and social levels, as when Connie reflects upon Clifford’s condition: And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is, really, only the mechanism of reassumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst. (LCL, 49) Clifford appears to have recovered psychologically from his war experience by taking up the career of a writer; consciously he seems to function as before, but his “affective self” or soul is gradually paralysed by the trauma. His paralysis spreads to Connie, just as the trauma of war has seeped into all levels of society: So it seemed to her everywhere. The colliers at Tevershall were talking again of a strike. And it seemed to Connie there again, it was not a manifestation of energy, it was the bruise of the war, that had been in abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of unrest, the stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep – the bruise of the false and inhuman war. It would take many years for the living blood of the generations to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood, deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope. (LCL, 50)

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 153

The solution to the war’s consequences, then, cannot come out of the war, but must come from outside of it. Mellors is, like Parkin, still a soldier who wraps himself up at night in an army blanket and patrols the forest at night with his gun. And yet his past lies in contrast with Parkin’s, whom we assume directly served at the front. Mellors also volunteered in 1915, but crucially was assigned to India where he worked as a blacksmith for the cavalry. There is a very telling difference between the way that Mellors and Parkin respond to Clifford when his motorised chair malfunctions. Connie notices that Parkin is both a mechanical soldier and a free individual: “Parkin stepped smartly aside, automatic as a soldier forming fours. But once apart from the chair, he stood with his feet wide, in the peculiar lounge of a man who does not stand at attention” (FSLCL, 92–3). In the final version Mellors appears to Connie as “a free soldier rather than a servant” (LCL, 47). In the final version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, then, Lawrence began to extricate his vision of the future from the terms of the war. Despite this Mellors only rejects “the stupid, dead-handed higher authority that made the army dead” (LCL, 276), while appealing to a past aristocratic hierarchy that Lawrence had appealed to with Skrebensky, and more recently Cipriano. Like Skrebensky, for instance, Mellors enjoyed a close relationship with his colonel who promoted him to a lieutenant. As in The Rainbow Lawrence’s alternative to the war was based upon an anachronistic idea of an aristocratic military code of the individual “fighter”, one that was rendered redundant by the war. This reservation aside, while Lawrence was composing the final version of the novel he rejected a military solution to Britain and Europe’s social divisions. Writing in February 1928 to Rolf Gardiner, who had been inspired by The Plumed Serpent to establish a similar religious/ military hierarchy in Europe, Lawrence observed that “even the German Bünde, I am afraid, will drift into nationalistic, and ultimately, fighting bodies: a new, and necessary form of militarism. It may be the right way for them. But not for the English. . . . the English are older, and weary even of victory.” Instead, “what we need is reconciliation and atoneing”. A month later, reflecting on The Plumed Serpent, he acknowledged that “the hero is obsolete, and the leader of men is a back number. After all, at the back of the hero is the militant ideal: and the ideal militant, seems to me also a cold egg.” Still, he averred, “in a way, one has to fight. But not in the O Glory! sort of way” (vi., 258–9, 321). Following this caveat, in the article “Is England Still a Man’s Country”, published November 1928, Lawrence appealed to the traditional view of England as “a fighting country, though never a military country” (LEA, 141).

154

War Trauma and English Modernism

In the last years Lawrence’s resilience as an individual waned in comparison to his art; for instance in August 1928 he hoped that Lady Chatterley would “explode and let in a bit of air”, while admitting that he felt “a bit feeble and a poor rage” (vi., 513). Since the attack of pneumonia in January 1916 his physical illness had been intertwined with the psychological wounds of war. Whenever illness struck he wanted to move on, since he projected his condition onto his environment; in August 1929 he conflated an atmosphere of hopelessness in Germany with his mood that he would die there. Finally, he projected his terminal condition onto history. In the essay “We Need One Another” from October 1929 he confidently asserted that “the conquering hero business is as obsolete as Marshal Hindenburg”; he also rejected “the pathetic boys who wrap themselves in the egoistic pathos of their sufferings during the late war” (LEA, 300). However despite his empowered position as an essayist, at the same time he confessed in a letter to his sister-in-law Else Jaffe: “I believe Germany would kill me if I had to stay long in it. Now it has killed Stresemann – whom will it not kill? – everybody except the Hindenburgs and the old women in the Stifts” (vii., 509–10). Aside from the bitter sideswipe at Else’s seemingly indomitable mother, Lawrence presented himself as a victim of rising nationalism in Germany, identifying with Gustav Stresemann who had successfully negotiated for long-term peace; as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Hindenburg would prove a decisive figure in Germany’s military resurgence, especially by appointing Hitler as Chancellor in 1933. Then, having regarded the root of his sickness as rage against Europe since the beginning of the war, with only a couple of months to live Lawrence faced defeat: “I feel my life leaving me, and I believe it’s this old moribund Europe just killing me” (vii., 617). In an article on Lawrence in 1928 William Roberts criticised the “verbose obscurity” of a stanza from what would later be entitled “The Reality of Peace. 1916”: What is it that is internecine that is locked By very fierceness into a quiescence Within the rage? We shall not know till it burst Out of corrosion into new florescence. (CP, 160) Lawrence responded to Roberts that the poem could only be understood in the context of “the war – what was it inside one’s breast that

Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 155

went so tight locked and numb, with weird hostility, then, in the horrors? – well, I don’t know even now: but it was some savage spirit of life which babbled a bit in Fantasia, but which still hasn’t made itself explicit” (vi., 400). Here Lawrence corroborated my thesis of his development from the advent of war to his death. First, particularly in The First “Women in Love” “verbose obscurity” articulates an historical traumatic shock, obscured in the depths of the unconscious. Then, as I have demonstrated throughout this chapter, the repressed shock periodically erupted as traumatic imitation throughout the post-war period. Even after the vision of “touch” realised in Lady Chatterley’s Lover it still had not made itself explicit, and among the populations of Europe it would continue to pose a threat.

6 Trauma Transfigured: “The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding

If in his last years Lawrence partially restored his own psyche devastated by war, Eliot promised restoration to an entire culture by very different means and with different consequences. Lawrence’s novels did not shy from mentioning the war as the evil from which they turned, and while he repeated its violence in a series of abreactive discharges, he progressively distinguished this violence from his projected state of recovery. The Waste Land shared Lawrence’s abreaction of horror and impotence, however it also anticipated Eliot’s alternative development by not disclosing the relation of these feelings to the war. In Eliot’s later works the horror would subside into impotence, to be redeemed as spiritual resignation and martyrdom. Eliot’s project in the Twenties consisted of a two-pronged attack: to reconstruct European unity from its cultural roots, and sideline the trauma of war into historical insignificance. However his position is more complicated than Lawrence’s since the return of the repressed did not only threaten him in memories of the First World War, but also in its historical manifestation as the Second World War. Hence during the Thirties he was subject both to traumas of the past, and of an anticipated future. His alternative narratives of literary Tradition and religious transcendence were accompanied by reminiscence of the past which enabled him to anticipate the future; but since memories of the previous war threatened him with their associated feelings of powerlessness, he turned to more benign memories to instil courage in himself, and escape into wish-fulfilment. Compared to Freud’s criteria for successful therapy where “all the obscurities of the case are cleared up, the gaps in the patient’s memory filled in, the precipitating causes of the repressions discovered”,1 Eliot’s aim in his poetry was to transcend personal history, not objectify it. 156

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 157

Again, as for Lawrence, we have to consider the implications of distortion through fantasy in the act of creative writing. Integral to his testimony, Lawrence’s distortions were a means of surviving trauma by what Dori Laub refers to as “breaking the frame” of one’s powerlessness.2 Distortion was part of the process of working over traumatic material, towards working through it. Eliot’s focus, though, was not to that end, but rather to sacrifice his personal experience for “Tradition”, and later God. In a purely therapeutic sense, his attitude can be compared to Pierre Janet’s technique of curing the patient by substituting the traumatic material with a benign alternative narrative – as opposed to Freud’s emphasis on the patient’s recovery through acknowledging experience. In these terms Eliot is liable to the charge of what Robert J. Lifton calls “false witnessing”. Lifton explains that, instead of becoming a “survivor” by witnessing and testifying to the death of others, the false witness denies the anxiety of death within himself, imagining that he has mastered it. For instance the National Socialists denied the dead of the First World War by attempting to reverse the war’s outcome in the Second; on the other side, having stopped the slaughter of the First World War, Pétain gave false witness to this act by capitulating ignominiously to the Nazis and unconditionally giving in to their demands. Dominic LaCapra stresses the ethical importance, not only for the individual victim but for society as a whole, of accurate testimony as a publicly accessible collective memory to guide a legitimate polity for the future. Cora Kaplan defines true “witnessing” as an act which prompts an ethical response in the listener; it transforms the listener’s view of the world by taking on the victim’s subjectivity, and responsibility for their suffering.3 Eliot’s lack of involvement in the subjectivity of the victims of his time has been observed by Hugh Kenner, A.D. Moody, Ronald Bush and Lyndall Gordon. This failing is apparent in “Notes on the Way” of 1935, an important series of exchanges with A.A. Milne on war. He reasoned through Milne’s unconditional pacifism: “I do not see how you can condemn War in the abstract unless you assert (a) that there is no higher value than Peace; (b) that there is nothing worth fighting for; and (c) that a war in which one side is right and the other wrong is inconceivable.” A week later Milne responded that “Mr. Eliot’s thoughts on war give nobody any clues as to what he really thinks about it. . . . I do not even know if he would be glad to wake tomorrow into a warless world.” His criticism was just, to an extent, as was Eliot’s riposte: “If everyone felt about war as Mr. Milne does, I am convinced that we should never have war; if everyone thought as he does, I do not know

158

War Trauma and English Modernism

what would happen.”4 The complexity of the issue was matched by the complexity of Eliot’s attitude; however his attitude was not concerned simply with avoiding war, but with understating the cost of war in terms of suffering. This would become clear a couple of years later when he abandoned his requirement for a morally uncompromised peace by dismissing the Spanish Civil War as “the perfect opportunity for extremists of both extremes”, and cynically ascribing the destruction of Guernica to “the Basques’ own allies, their shady friends in Catalonia” (C, XVI 670). In private writings Eliot’s detachment, or more appropriately, his dissociation from the victims of his time is even more blatant, especially during the Second World War. In September 1940 he wrote to Virginia Woolf that “I imagine you and Leonard peering at air battles through the telescope, and perhaps organising a tea and blankets post for Rodmell.” This letter, alongside others, seems completely out of touch with Woolf’s actual feelings, since she had resolved to commit suicide with her husband if the Germans invaded, and eventually did so alone in 1941. We can imagine her response to Eliot in the sarcastic tone of a diary entry for 9 November 1939: “Oh yes, Tom for the week end: more supple, less caked and rigid than of old. His teaching he told me, is that one improves with age. I suppose the working of the divine spirit which as usual he adored at 8 on Sunday morning. Last night we listened to the ravings, the strangled hysterical sobbing swearing ranting of Hitler at the Beer Hall.” Perhaps even more striking, though, are Eliot’s letters to his closest confidante during the war, John Hayward. To judge from their correspondence, the turning of the war in 1943 signified little more than the prospect of them resettling in London, as he wrote in January 1944 of being appalled by thought of making arrangements while Americans and other foreigners remained there, and others swarmed back from the provinces.5 However, we cannot interpret Eliot’s statements at face value, especially to Hayward who could read his tone of levity. For instance, glimpsing the early impact of war in 1940 with the closure of his favourite soap supplier on the Burlington Arcade, Eliot bewailed that it signified the beginning of the end, since he already found it difficult to acquire his favourite bath powder. His levity had protected him from futile tragedy during the First World War, and continued to do so in the Second. His mock-optimism to Woolf was at worst a feeble gesture in the face of her remorseless depression. Unable to fully recover from bronchitis in April 1941 he confided to Hayward that alongside the war

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 159

in the Mediterranean and the London blitz, Woolf’s demise especially depressed him, more than he had realised at the time of her death.6 As we shall see, detachment is one of Eliot’s defences against a threat he could not avert, and like his call for religious transcendence in the face of annihilation, it does not leave him entirely unscathed: the failings of these defences provide testimony to his traumatic experience of both wars. These failings are the focal point of this chapter.

Disillusion and illusions In his “Last Words” for The Criterion in 1939 Eliot described post-1918 disillusionment as also “a period of illusions” (C, XVIII 271) since there remained a belief in reconstructing the devastation caused by war, instead of merely bracing for its recurrence. The Waste Land was assimilated into this climate of opinion by testifying to a cure, at best, in progress, one that exposed residues of dissociation and repression among patches of reintegration. “The Hollow Men”, published in 1925, recapitulates The Waste Land in these respects, aspiring to reintegration while leaving its wounds exposed. Eliot’s literary ascendancy in the early Twenties had been a form of personal compensation for his impotence during the war, and he was still afflicted by this memory; Aldington recalled an incident in 1923 where Eliot pledged to join the British army in the next war, and “worked himself up almost to blood-heat in a fine frenzy of patriotism”. The Criterion instead fulfilled both needs by consolidating the “Modernist experiment” (and Eliot’s place in it), while articulating and enacting his reconstructive project for Europe, at least in terms of its literary culture. The first twelve months of the periodical, certainly, were remarkable for their European contribution, with Ernst Robert Curtius accompanied by Herman Hesse, Luigi Pirandello, Ramón Gomez de la Serna, Julien Benda and Paul Valéry, complemented by J.M. Robertson on Flaubert and Roger Fry on Mallarmé. The Criterion enjoyed a tiny but influential circulation in Europe, while Eliot stressed its affiliation with other European journals by concluding each edition with reviews of them. His most politically significant essay published in The Criterion during this period, “The Function of Criticism” in 1923, imposed the principles of “Tradition” as “European” “classicism” onto criticism, society, and international politics. Concluding that the importance of French culture lay in its “more mature prose” (SE, 26–8), his solution to social and political disorder was cast in terms of Europe, while the problem

160

War Trauma and English Modernism

was not – there was no mention of the problems already arising from the terms of Versailles, of France and Belgium’s occupation of the Ruhr Valley since January 1923, the resulting German passive resistance, and hyperinflation with the collapse of the Mark. However the strain upon Eliot of advocating his vision of cultural reconstruction in The Criterion threatened to drive him to another breakdown. After the first year the European contribution to The Criterion soon declined, and the reviews of foreign periodicals were dominated by American ones. “The Hollow Men” would demonstrate the disparity between Eliot’s cultural aspirations and his poetic abreactions. Its germ was a fragment that Pound rejected from the drafts of The Waste Land, “Song for the Opherion”. The second half of this fragment includes the complex of emotions and imagery that were central to the war experience expressed in The Waste Land: Is it a dream or something else When the surface of the blackened river Is a face that sweats with tears? I saw across the sullen river The campfire shake the spears Waiting that touch After thirty years. (WLFT, 98–9) As in “the Hyacinth girl” passage of The Waste Land, the guilt and anxiety of Eliot’s sexual and war traumas are merged. The “blackened river” reflects the face of the betrayed partner, or perhaps a reflection of the speaker himself in his guilt-driven identification with the partner; the river also separates the speaker from the encamped army on the other side. The personal note of “after thirty years” places this firmly (too much for a completed work by Eliot) in a biographical context. Eliot rejected much of this material in the final version of “The Hollow Men”, partly supplanting it with a different style which emerged as the poem’s opening chant of “We are the hollow men”. The tone of this material introduced the more objectified quality of the poem, whose use of “we” confirmed the poet’s involvement, but generalised it to a generation, or a whole civilisation. Here the state of trauma, disclosed through a disembodied testimonial confession in The Waste Land and “Song for the Opherion”, is objectively represented as the “Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” Compared to the ambiguous impersonality

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 161

of the diverse voices populating The Waste Land, the ironic wryness of “Alas!” denotes detachment that is not merely self-diagnosis but a diagnosis of society at large, in keeping with Eliot’s social project in The Criterion. This change of tone was complemented by a thematic element glimpsed in The Waste Land, and which would characterise the rest of Eliot’s most significant poetry: redemption. A central method of achieving this lies in recasting the traumatised condition of lost sense, action, speech and thought as transcendence of the ego and physical being, as humility before a higher entity, God. This process is suggested in the poem’s fourth section: Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death’s twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men. (CPP, 85) The traumatised “empty men” long for the ideal vision of the eyes of the betrayed and dead, as the “perpetual star” and “multifoliate rose”. This vision will only be realised in the final line of Little Gidding, where “the fire and rose are one”. For now, “The Hollow Men” can only conclude that “the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper”: the “bang” that had taken place in the previous decade will not end the world, but its repercussions in the helpless survivors will. Alternatively, in this poem of disillusion and illusion, the end of this “world” may be marked by the birth of a whimpering child, if perhaps once more as “Christ the tiger” of “Gerontion”.

Democracy, fascism, remembrance, or religion? By Eliot’s own timeframe in “Last Words”, “The Hollow Men” was completed at the close of post war “illusion”. Nevertheless by the end of the decade in Europe the Pact of Locarno was still adhered to, since Germany continued to pay reparations, and the Rhineland was evacuated by 1930; there was ostensible optimism with the signing in 1928 of the Kellogg–Briand Pact by fifteen states renouncing war as an instrument of national policy, and pledging disarmament. Disillusionment

162

War Trauma and English Modernism

was mainly focused upon national politics where the impact of the strain of post-war conditions was most evident, hinting at future problems for Europe as a whole. With faltering parliamentary politics there was a temptation to revert to nationalism through emerging right-wing parties. Alternatively, at the centre of current debates about the future of Europe was the question of the legacy of war: many writers advocated remembrance of its horror to discourage its recurrence. Having naturalised as a British citizen in 1927 Eliot shifted focus from pure literary criticism to political commentary, but he dismissed the legacy of war in any terms. Instead as a convert to the Church of England he took guidance from theology to envisage a new personal, social and political order. In a 1927 “Commentary” Eliot revived his formerly assertive tone of the first years of The Criterion by setting the question of “how Europe can be organised”,7 yet The Criterion was already failing as an instrument for answering this question. He posited for Britain the role of “via media” between the Latin and Germanic races, and as Empire between Europe and the rest of world (C, V 194) but questioned whether enough British people believed in European culture. Elsewhere he criticised the International Institute for Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations for its “lack of coherence, of any unifying idea”. In its stead he called for “real intellectual co-operation . . . created by the state of mind of men of letters” who were “aware of the vital problems of European civilization as a whole” (C, V 1). There was the dilemma, as he analysed it retrospectively in The Unity of European Culture of 1946, between maintaining political openness to include the widest diversity of voices, and asserting a political perspective that could be influential in the political scene. The more The Criterion opened up to a broader range of contributors, the less cohesive it became, consisting of “the various, divergent or even contradictory opinion of a widening group of individuals in communication” (C, V 2). At the root of this indecision lay the situation in domestic politics. Despite consistently holding power, the Conservatives proved largely ineffective, only seeking stability instead of delivering a policy. The General Strike of 1926 was ended promptly with a commitment to reorganise industry. However no reorganisation followed, only a 1927 statute declaring sympathetic strikes illegal; there was no programme for general unemployment, or aid for ailing agriculture. Nothing was done to implement the Locarno Pact either. After the Conservatives’ defeat at the General Election in May 1929 Eliot half-ironically praised them for “a history which an agile mind at any time can manipulate into a tradition”;

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 163

yet by January of the following year he declared them “defunct” (C, VIII 579, IX 183), along with parliamentary politics in general. In the April 1929 “Commentary” Eliot dismissed the General Election as the “usual waste of time, money and energy”, advocating that the country should be governed by those who “best write and speak its language”. The alternative to democracy would be a kind of literary fascism, since in his view writers “are all worried about politics, and they all incline in the direction of some kind of fascism”. He was in favour of overt dictatorship if it provided a “responsible” “strengthening of public authority”, unlike democracy. More perceptively, he recognised that “hidden in many breasts, is a craving for a regime which will relieve us of thought and at the same time give us excitement and military salutes”, and that the only distinctive thing about Fascism is “this comfortable feeling that we shall be benevolently ordered about” (C, VIII 378–80, VII 98–9, VIII 288). At the core of Eliot’s general attitude to contemporary history was his uncertainty of its causality. On the one hand, which he would reiterate in the Thirties, he analysed causes of modern war exclusively in terms of economics and finance. Adapting the principles of literary criticism to politics, he believed that peace could be preserved by “intelligent vigilance and independent criticism”. On the other hand, in a “Review” of 1927 he disclosed that “the politics of the future is determined largely by blind or unconscious forces – forces which give us greater and greater anxiety” (C, VI 5, 71). This last sentiment is especially pertinent because it runs against all of Eliot’s political efforts as critic and editor in the Twenties, yet betrays the vacillations endemic to them. Crucial to his deepening anxiety about the “unconscious forces” of history was his denial of their source in the war. The late Twenties saw the “war boom” of books headed by Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. These books would inspire the social commitment of Thirties Modernism, and threatened to upstage the Modernist revolution of 1922. Poised between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, the literary “war boom” reflected the belated resurfacing of trauma, and the anxious anticipation of future trauma. The anxiety that Eliot and his contemporaries were experiencing was from a sense of powerlessness in national and international politics, similar to what they had endured during the war. As we shall see, anxiety, and the need to remember the past, would become more acute in perceptions of European relations throughout the following decade. In the immediate moment, books recording the horror of war conflicted with the political implications of Eliot’s conversion. Anglo-Catholicism

164

War Trauma and English Modernism

would play a central role in his answer to the series of crises that followed in the Thirties, but other writers appealed to the memory of war as warning against future conflict. One of the most important spokesmen for remembrance of the war was Herbert Read, writing in The Criterion. In 1930, to the question “what does it all amount to, this fuss about the war?” Read answered that “if there still remains a desire to defend or excuse modern war, then there exists a fundamental divergence in ‘values’ which cannot be resolved by argument”. A few months earlier in The Criterion Eliot’s protégé H.M. Tomlinson commented on the silence about the war and ongoing anxiety about its recurrence; he advocated reading about war in detail to avoid this recurrence (C, VIII 764, 768, 405, 407). Although obviously open-minded in including the opinions of Read and Tomlinson in the “tendency” of The Criterion, Eliot strongly disagreed with them. While advocating “intelligent criticism” of politics to prevent war, he downplayed the value of mere “desire” for peace. In the January 1930 “Commentary” he made his strongest statement dismissing the value of remembrance of the war: All that we have is confusion of voices in popular discussion, exaggerating the importance of various details. Perhaps the most significant thing about the War is its insignificance; and it is this insignificance which makes it so acutely tragic. Perhaps fear of war is now rather an incentive, than a preventative, of war. It is easy to convince people of the horrors, and of the harm that war does; but it is at least as important to convince them that it does no good, and has no grandeur, and that “the sense of glory” has other, and only other, means of expression. (C, IX 183) Eliot dismissed “popular” remembrance of war along with the confusion of democracy. His arguments were, however, as confused as the other voices he criticised. He claimed that the “insignificance” of war caused it to be “acutely tragic”, yet its insignificance could only make it at most absurd; its tragedy lay in the suffering inflicted upon those involved, which for Read was its significance. The argument that fear of war could be an incentive to repeat it is even more implausible; Eliot seems to argue that any mention of war, even negatively, threatens to encourage its recurrence. Here is the core of Eliot’s confused reaction to war in the late Twenties, that is, to repress it, to dismiss it as “insignificant”.

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 165

Eliot’s alternative to Read’s remembrance was twofold. Earlier in this “Commentary” he mentioned how the “Five Reviews Award” reflected a “community of interest”: “And without such intellectual community and co-operation of different organs in one body all peace pacts, world congresses, disarmament discussions, and reform leagues appear merely to be concerned with the body and not with the soul”. Of course, this competition was powerless against political events as they would unfold, and it was never repeated. As a literary journal The Criterion was proving ill-suited for political activism: on reverting the journal from a monthly to a quarterly in 1928, which marked the beginning of its irretrievable decline, he pledged without great conviction that opposing “the general speeding-up of modern life” made it “ahead of the times rather than behind them” (C, VII 290). Eliot’s more important alternative to remembrance was suggested in his statement “that ‘the sense of glory’ has other, and only other, means of expression”: for Eliot that means would be in worshipping God. He subsumed the memory of war in his narrative of European cultural history, where religion offered the promise of redemption, and cure. “Tradition” would become orthodoxy. In the Clark Lectures of 1926 the Reformation of the sixteenth century now marked the transition to Europe of 1914, since Protestantism led to Nationalism, especially in Germany. Alongside John Donne, Eliot praised lesser writers such as Richard Crashaw in representing the “mind of Europe” and Abraham Cowley for his “catholicity of culture” (VMP, 74–5, 161, 185). In the monograph of 1929 Dante was hailed as the most universal poet, and “first a European”, since his medieval philosophy was from Europe and his allegory of clear visual images “a universal European method”. Tying in this narrative directly to the war, Eliot described the Treaty of Versailles as the culmination of Europe’s collapse through nationalism after Dante (SE, 238–43). In these generalised terms the role of religion in the crises that would befall Europe over the next decade was yet to be formulated. Eliot suggested a possibility in his 1929 broadcast on Donne, in whose time “a priest from Rome was regarded with as much suspicion, and was indeed in much greater danger at times than a Russian communist emissary is now”.8 Religion then could be an active player, perhaps against Protestant Germany, or the atheist Soviet Union. Eliot’s approval of Machiavelli’s concern with the “moral forces” of warfare conducted by citizen soldiers in the cause of “order” (FLA, 45–6) suggested a turn from the present liberal consensus of demilitarisation, anticipating the

166

War Trauma and English Modernism

rearmament of nation states in reaction to the economic and political crises of the Thirties.

Forgetting and redeeming the time Published complete in April 1930 while the world reeled from the stock market crash, Ash Wednesday had been composed and published piecemeal since 1927. Consequently the poem reflects a range of Eliot’s attitudes to religion during those years, of what it could realise, and man’s failings in achieving these ambitions. In particular, the poem reveals the limitations of Eliot’s uncompromising answer in his prose to the legacy of the war, of religious aspiration to the exclusion of historical remembrance. At its most assertive moments Ash Wednesday incorporates the past, as a record of anxiety, terror and frustrated desire, into a religious narrative where the significance of these feelings lies in man’s renunciation of them to prove his adherence to God. However, memories continue to resurface throughout the poem, to expose apparent transcendence as hopeless resignation. Critics tend to stress the difference between The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday, from lyrical remembrance of the dead to union with an ideal other, dramatics of the self to impulse of devotion, visionary realisation of immediate experience to verbal playfulness, metaphor to abstraction, and open fragments to inflexible structures. Yet it needs to be borne in mind that these differences are emergent strategies, just as Eliot’s recent conversion was, against the problems of his personal history and Europe’s history which had remained largely unchanged since the end of the war. Part II, first published as “Salutation” in the Saturday Review of Literature in December 1927, is the core religious vision of the poem, chiming in with Eliot’s most assertive views of the role of religion in contemporary history. But instead of representing the poem’s concluding statement, chronologically the dream sequence of Part II is the beginning. Ronald Bush compares this section to “The Fire Sermon” beginning “A rat crept softly through the vegetation”.9 As we saw, this passage with “White bodies naked on the low damp ground” suggested the carnage of war, while being reintegrated into the “Tradition” of other writers concerned with mortality such as Marvell. In Ash Wednesday the formerly secular diversity of literary Tradition is replaced by a more homogeneous religious tradition, centred upon the Bible and Dante. Where the psychological immediacy of the dream was at least partially tempered by allusions to literary texts in The Waste Land, here it is completely sacrificed for the religious vision of the “higher dream”.

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 167

The opening address to the “Lady” is closely related to Dante’s Vita Nuova, especially the dream of his heart being consumed by Beatrice; the juniper-tree alludes to Elijah’s appeal to die in Kings, and the cool of the day to when God searched for Adam after the Fall. The detachment of the speaker from his bodily self resists psychological explanation because it is so consummately achieved, and religious interpretation is invited instead. The state of being achieved in this part of Ash Wednesday is possible because the Lady’s “goodness” and “loveliness” qualify her to honour the Virgin, unlike the women of The Waste Land who were at turns victims and threatening figures of desire. Her purity causes the bones to “shine with brightness”: Let the whiteness atone to forgetfulness. There is no life in them. As I am forgotten And would be forgotten, so I would forget Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. (CPP, 91) Here “forgetfulness” can be equated with Eliot’s attitude to the war in his prose: the remains of the dead are cast to the winds, since their lives were only significant in being sacrificed for the “higher dream”. “Forgetting” is not achieved by therapeutically working through the loss, but can only be sustained while one is “devoted, concentrated in purpose”; turning from the significance of life on its own terms, the speaker is bound to God. Following the logic of The Waste Land where “all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias”, the Lady takes on the role of Tiresias who “perceived the scene and foretold the rest”; she is “Calm and distressed / Torn and most whole / . . . Exhausted and lifegiving.” But here, instead of personifying a Tradition which perceived and foretold its own decline, the Lady is identified with the Divine as the “single Rose” which “Is now the Garden / Where all loves end”. The concluding section of Part II realises the historical potential of this transfiguration: Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other, Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand, Forgetting themselves and each other, united In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye

168

War Trauma and English Modernism

Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance. (CPP, 92) These lines recall the concluding “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” which invited the vision of The Waste Land to be read as both symptomatic of, and an alternative to, the vision of Europe set out in the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Read politically, “this land” as Europe has been divided by lot with disastrous consequences. For veterans such as Herbert Read the bones of the war dead recognised neither division nor unity, as in Owen’s “Strange Meeting” where the former enemy of a dead soldier intones him to “Let us sleep now. . .”. However, the bones in Ash Wednesday lie in the “quiet of the desert” which previously awaited the rains of regeneration in The Waste Land. The absence of life in Ash Wednesday is without the tragedy of death, since the desert can be equated with the “Garden / Where all love ends”. Eliot’s point, that the dead share their “inheritance” of God’s blessing, is similar to Owen’s Christian one; characteristically, though, while Owen reached this truth through witnessing death in war, for Eliot the religious truth is based upon the intrinsic vanity of life. This point represents the most complete resolution in Ash Wednesday, the full realisation of Eliot’s religious “higher dream”, while the rest of the poem provides a full confession of his religious soul. Part I enacts Eliot’s practice of praying, as he once demonstrated to Woolf, by leaning forward and bowing in “the attempt to concentrate, to forget self, to attain union with God”.10 The ambiguity of “hope”, in whether the speaker does not wish to turn again or has given up wishing for it is betrayed in the later variation of “Because I cannot hope again”. The tension between voluntary renunciation and enforced deprivation is lost in the appeal to religious philosophy, which runs on inconclusively. The first manuscript draft expresses a more remorseless repetition in an almost desperate act of concentration, without the more detached philosophical statements of “Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice” and “Teach us to care and not to care”. Also it is without the concluding appeal to God to “Pray for us sinners”. The tone of the manuscript suggests the anguish behind the disclosure that “I pray that I may forget”, in contrast to the ease of the speaker in Part II who “would forget / Thus devoted”. A similarly uncertain direction characterises the rest of the poem, instead of reaching Dante’s Paradise, as Eliot had intended. In Part III

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 169

there is a momentary lapse in forgetting the past when the core personal traumas which drove Eliot to religion, the memory of Verdenal and his marriage with Vivien, surface as traces, inextricably fused: Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair. (CPP, 93) Despite climbing upwards, “beyond hope and despair”, the speaker can only appeal repeatedly, “Lord I am not worthy”. In the last two parts the momentum of II and IV, to “Redeem the time, redeem the dream”, is dissipated, perhaps from Eliot’s doubt in the strength of his fledgling faith to redeem the past. V appeals to “the veiled sister between the slender / Yew trees”, the Lady now like the wind redeeming time, for “those who wait / In darkness”, and “are terrified and cannot surrender” to God. Eliot is referring to the general anxiety of people at this time, from ongoing international negotiations to the immediate impact of the stock market crash, although he presents these problems in terms of original sin, of people “spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed”. The rhythm towards concentration upon God loses its forward momentum and instead repeats itself aimlessly, especially where rhymes dissipate into repeated words: “silence . . . islands . . . mainland . . . rain land . . . day time . . . night time . . . right time . . . right place . . . place of grace”, and so on. These lines are supposed to convey a vision of world unity, but the flaccid rhythm betrays a lack of conviction. The final part returns to the beginning of the poem, without its resolve, and without the resolution of Part II. Despite the feeble disclaimer, “(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things”, the speaker looks towards the “seaward flying / Unbroken wings”, and again to the memory of Verdenal: And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices (CPP, 98) It is perhaps a crowning irony that Ash Wednesday as testament to the early years of Eliot’s conversion should end with a reference to Verdenal. In so doing, it disproves Eliot’s case in his prose for religion as an alternative to remembrance of those lost. The poem, symptomatic of the general climate of the time, concludes poised between a confession

170

War Trauma and English Modernism

of impotence and prayer for forbearance, “to care and not to care”, “to sit still / Even among these rocks”.

Impotence turned martyrdom Discussing the “inevitable” “collapse” of civilisation in 1929, Stephen Spender asked Eliot what form it would take: “‘Internecine warfare,’ he answered. Puzzled by this, I pressed him for a more precise answer. He said: ‘People killing one another in the streets’.”11 Eliot’s forebodings were vivid in literal details, but ignorant of the political form the “collapse” would take, whether between classes or nations. The decisive crisis of the Thirties turned out to be international. The depression was certainly a contributory factor since Liberal and democratic regimes in Europe were ousted by right-wing governments which sponsored programmes of public works, rearmament and military conscription to relieve unemployment. The last Disarmament Conference in July 1932 adjourned in failure. The rise of fascism in Germany took place with incredible speed: on 30 January 1933 Hitler was made Chancellor and by July his rise in Germany was completed through the suppression and dissolution of all other parties. He indicated later that year the future ramifications for Europe of his rise to power by withdrawing Germany from the Disarmament Conference and League of Nations in October. Since Eliot initially believed that the future crisis would take place within society, he was reluctant to denounce fascism which seemed to offer a form of stability that democracy was failing to do. The unfinished “Coriolan” is symptomatic of his vacillation. He satirised the fascist rally for its unregenerate materialism by listing the ridiculous scale of military resources and presenting the dictator as a mock messiah. Yet Eliot placed his spiritual alternative to the spectacle of materialism in the figure of the dictator himself: “the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent. . . . At the still point of the turning world” (CPP, 139–40). The poem on the one hand shows how people are deluded in looking towards fascism as a new religion, but the description of the dictator is completely dissociated from the rest of the scene in its poetic style, leaving him untouched by the satire. Eliot changed his attitude only when it became evident that fascism was incompatible with Christianity; he observed in The New English Weekly March 1935 that “anyone with the merest smattering of theology” would recognise Oswald Mosley’s ideas as “not only puerile but anathema”.12 In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Eliot still held literature’s role as the “highest point of consciousness” which could provide a

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 171

“safeguard against barbarism”. Yet while accepting I.A. Richards’s prognosis that “the Hindenburg Line to which the defence of our traditions retired as a result of the onslaught of the last century will be blown up in the near future”, Eliot did not share his conviction that “poetry is capable of saving us” since Richards avoided the critical relationship between poetry and religion (UPUC, 15, 124, 126). While stating his belief “that all our problems turn out ultimately to be a religious problem”,13 he only stopped short of discarding literature in favour of religion. In 1932 he delegated editorial responsibilities of The Criterion. A sign of his parting of religious and literary historical narratives is discernible in a broadcast delivered in April 1930, “The Minor Metaphysicals: From Cowley to Dryden”: In our own time there is a chasm of isolation between living men and women who belong to the pre-War and the post-War period; but no greater difference than that between the writers of the time of Charles I and the Commonwealth and the writers of Charles II and William and Mary and Queen Anne. When I speak of the peculiar seriousness of the pre-Restoration I am not thinking of one side rather than another: I include Milton, and Bunyan and Baxter as of that age, as men who knew the beauty of life and the possibility of martyrdom and sacrifice for a cause. And I sometimes wonder whether the generation succeeding my own may not be also a generation which has lost faith in lost causes.14 In “The Metaphysical Poets” the “dissociation of sensibility” was implicitly a product of the Civil War, since Milton’s Latinate style split off the language of poetry from the use of language in speech. Here, though, the stylistic difference between Milton and late Metaphysical poets is irrelevant compared to their shared commitment to a religious cause, and in this respect they are similar to the generation which died in the First World War. In advocating the central importance of religion Eliot sought to revive the faith that had sent volunteers to sacrifice their lives in war. In “Catholicism and International Order” of 1933, while citing Catholicism as the “only practical answer” to the problem of international relations by abolishing competition for resources that led to war, he also suggested the role of Catholicism if war proved inevitable. He pointed out that war, despite bringing out “natural virtues, is on the whole degrading”, yet given his aversion to unconditional humanitarianism, “in face of any naturally horrifying phenomenon like war we must measure the suffering, direct and indirect, against spiritual goods

172

War Trauma and English Modernism

which may come of suffering” (EAM, 134, 132). He had been more explicit the previous year in “Christianity and Communism”, labelling Communism “the Russian religion”. In order to combat it, he appealed to the strength of belief held by people before the Restoration, and the First World War: “If we are incapable of a faith at least as strong as that which appears to animate the ruling class of Russia, if we are incapable of dying for a cause, then Western Europe and the Americans might as well be reorganised on the Moscow model at once.”15 Eliot explored how the Church could offer resistance to the threat of foreign militarism in The Rock of 1934, which is hardly more than an abstract manifesto, and Murder in the Cathedral from the following year which at least tests its possibilities in a historically distant setting and ritualised style. Recapitulating from “Gerontion” the symbol of the “decayed house” as Europe, the audience in The Rock is addressed as sitting “helpless in a ruined house”. However, as in his prose, Eliot asserted the “insignificance” of the war’s legacy upon contemporary civilisation and stressed the centrality of “Evil and Sin”, including “sloth” and “lechery”. This opened up the possibility of accepting war on certain terms, that is, if it safeguarded religion: “we are encompassed with snakes and dogs: therefore some must labour, and others must hold the spears” (CPP, 152, 158). Eliot was most audacious, and provocative, in how he borrowed from Pound’s denunciation of the war in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”: Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later . . . some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some pro patria, non dulce non et décor In the corresponding section of The Rock the Chorus promises to “take heart for the future, / Remembering the past”, but instead of the First World War it remembers the Crusades: Some went from love of glory, Some went who were restless and curious, Some were rapacious and lustful.

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 173

Many left their bodies to the kites of Syria Or sea-strewn along the routes; Many left their souls in Syria, Living on, sunken in moral corruption; . . . Not avarice, lechery, treachery, Envy, sloth, gluttony, jealousy, pride: It was not these that made the Crusades, But these that unmade them. (CPP, 162, 63) The repetition of “Some” in remembrance of the different motives of the participants most obviously echoes Pound, and Eliot followed his switch to the participants’ subsequent anguish and corruption, but not to disillusionment; instead he appealed to his audience to “remember the faith that took men from home”. This inversion of “Mauberley” is all the more curious since in the “Introduction” to the 1928 edition of Pound’s Selected Poems Eliot appraised it as his best poem, “a document of an epoch” and “a ‘criticism of life’”. Eliot’s economic solution for preventing war was very similar to, if not borrowed from, Pound’s economic theory; however, in this section of The Rock perhaps Eliot was reacting to Pound’s dismissal of religion in his scheme for Europe, which he criticised in the New English Weekly in 1934. The significance of this section on the Crusades in terms of Eliot’s attitude to war is evident in “Notes on the Way”: I am not prepared to admit that the nominal motives (which were probably in part the actual motives) of a great many participants in the Crusades were wrong. I do not see how at the time anything could have checked me from a whole-hearted support of the Crusades, except such knowledge of the human heart as would lead one to anticipate what did happen; for actually, of course, the Crusades turned out a thoroughgoing disgrace to Christian Europe.16 This statement sums up the ambivalence of Eliot’s attitude to war, as expressed before in his link between the faith of people before the Restoration and before the First World War. Like the Crusades, the war was at the very least a “thoroughgoing disgrace” for Europe, but given the religious fervour involved, Eliot could only imagine giving both whole-hearted support, just as he demanded faith for self-sacrifice against the threat of Soviet communism.

174

War Trauma and English Modernism

Following the logic of Eliot’s “conversion” of traumatised paralysis into spiritual transcendence in Ash Wednesday, martyrdom was the mode of combat of the soldier of God in The Rock, and was celebrated to the point that the purpose of building the Church was to prepare for future martyrdoms: “if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps / We must first build the steps” (CPP, 167). The Rock proved an artistic failure in its rhetorical use scriptural language; its vision of building the Church in the modern world is devoid of the inner feeling of loss in The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday. It also marks the point that Eliot most seriously risked being a “false witness” to the past and present. Eliot’s following theatrical production Murder in the Cathedral is far more searching than The Rock in its attempt to envisage how this idea of a church militant can be realised – even if only in allegorical terms. The objective of the play’s narrative is to transcend anxiety in history through the act of martyrdom. Becket’s achievement lies in converting the Chorus’ paralysed sentiment of “We do not wish anything to happen” into the willed self-renunciation of Ash Wednesday Part II. He accepts the incomprehensibility of history, and his moral responsibility in it, resolving to transcend it: I know that history at all times draws The strangest consequence from remotest cause. But for every evil, every sacrilege, Crime, wrong, oppression and the axe’s edge, Indifference, exploitation, you, and you, And you must all be punished. So must you. I shall no longer act or suffer, to the sword’s end. (CPP, 258–9) In his following Christmas sermon he redefines “Peace” in a spiritual sense, which includes “torture, imprisonment, disappointment, to suffer death by martyrdom”. Christians should rejoice in the birth of Christ alongside the death of martyrs because each one is “the instrument of God” (CPP, 261). Following the sermon, the Chorus embellishes upon the significance of martyrdom, as if rectifying the seasonal imagery of The Waste Land: The peace of this world is always uncertain, unless men keep the peace of God. And war among men defiles this world, but death in the Lord renews it,

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 175

And the world must be cleaned in the winter, or we shall have only A sour spring, a parched summer, an empty harvest. (CPP, 263) Becket’s sermon on martyrdom has calmed their anxiety, since they believe that peace with God maintains peace in the world – which is false logic since peace with God may involve any amount of human conflict and suffering. The absolute distinction between “war” and martyrdom is made, at least in their consequences, if not actually in how they are manifested. Based on these shaky distinctions, martyrdom offers the answer to the question set by The Waste Land, of renewing life, and by implication healing war trauma, through spiritual means. The Chorus is persuaded of this, following Becket’s example, to make the absolute distinction between martyrdom and death in war: For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ, There is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it Though armies trample over it (CPP, 281) Nonetheless Murder in the Cathedral has a very limited practical application in its presentation of history and psychology. For instance, in the course of martyrdom the character of Becket displays an unconvincing combination of psychologically accurate details and transcendence of them. Furthermore, the play leaves unanswered how Becket’s martyrdom can renew the land and bring “Peace”, or what notion this “Peace” could consist of in Eliot’s own time.

Anxiety and remembrance Religion alone, then, could not provide an adequate solution to political realities in the Thirties. In “Thoughts After Lambeth” of 1931 Eliot was uncertain about what practical role religion could take in the midst of the world’s “experiment” for “civilized but non-Christian mentality”: “we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse . . . to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide” (SE, 387). At what point would the collapse of non-Christian values be distinct from the suicide of the world? Perhaps the suicide would take place first.

176

War Trauma and English Modernism

The solution of martyrdom that he proffered failed on two counts: it did not provide a means of survival, and in such irreligious times there was little guarantee of witnesses to the significance of one’s sacrifice. Eliot later summed up the action of Murder in the Cathedral: “A man comes home, foreseeing that he will be killed, and he is killed” (PP, 80) which, aside from the poetry, is perhaps all that his agnostic audience would have understood. This political crisis would become more urgent in the second half of the Thirties. After the Saarland was reunited with Germany under terms of Versailles in January 1935, the Treaty could offer nothing more to Hitler. In 1936 Germany occupied the Rhineland and proposed demilitarisation of borders with France and Belgium; the League unanimously found Germany guilty but did not act. The imperative to intervene against the rise of fascism progressively intensified with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July and Mussolini’s declaration of the Rome–Berlin Axis later in 1937. Murder in the Cathedral is most compelling in how it creates the atmosphere of the anxiety of these years, rather than its solution. The Priest’s question of “war or peace?” is answered by the messenger that “this peace / Is nothing like an end, or like a beginning.” The Chorus as the Women of Canterbury expresses the “great fear of some inconceivable disaster”: We have all had our private terrors, Our particular shadows, our secret fears, But now a great fear is upon us, a fear not of one but of many, A fear like birth and death, when we see birth and death alone In a void apart. We Are afraid in a fear which we cannot know, which we cannot face, which none understands, And our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, our selves are lost In a final fear which none understands. (CPP, 242, 244) Here Eliot is exceptional in his psychological precision. The “testimony” of the Women of Canterbury expresses the psychological damage of anxiety, as Freud and other psychiatrists have described it. If anxiety repeats the affect of a previous trauma which was overwhelming then the subject is not prepared, but thrown back into his former

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 177

helplessness, disabling him in reacting to the immediate danger at hand. This “neurotic” anxiety from the libido threatens to unbind the ego’s protective shield, and repeats the previous effects of the trauma. Eliot conveys this situation in the image of the Women’s brains being “unskinned” like onion layers. The Women attempt to find correspondences between their earlier “secret fears” and this “great fear”, but its scale makes it qualitatively different from anything they know, and consequently impossible to imagine. The only comparable trauma is in having “seen the young man mutilated”, presumably in a previous war, but this does nothing to reassure or prepare them for the future. Indeed, remembrance of previous trauma struck Eliot in After Strange Gods where he transposed the consequences of war in Europe onto his American mid-Western audience: “The Civil War was certainly the greatest disaster in the whole of American history; it is just as certainly a disaster from which the country has never recovered, and perhaps never will: we are always too ready to assume that the good effects of wars, if any, abide permanently, while the ill-effects are obliterated by time.” A “southerner” brought up in St Louis, of New England family, Eliot had personally experienced the divisions inherited from the Civil War. As with the Women of Canterbury, this memory did not enable him to formulate a preventative of future war, since his notorious answer was to not be “invaded by foreign races”, especially free-thinking Jews, since “Tradition” was “of the blood”, a single race (ASG, 16–18, 30). Yet remembrance remained the only alternative strategy to religion in enduring anxiety. In his conclusion to the Harvard lectures delivered 1932 to 1933 Eliot asked “Why, for all of us, out of what we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others?” He acknowledged that “faded poor souvenirs of passionate moments” “may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer”. His example of “an old woman on a German mountain path” (UPUC, 148) most likely pertains to Eliot’s brief stay in Marburg in 1914, affecting unconcern with the local peasant girls while war brewed – perhaps the memory expresses longing for a bygone Germany, but the age and remoteness of the woman discloses its hopelessness. Eliot’s reminiscences were diametrically opposed to the religious imperative of Ash Wednesday to “forget”, and in this respect they represent a psychological need to escape from the mounting political pressures outside, pitched against the uncertain resistance of his faith. In a broadcast of March 1932 he discarded his suspicion of psychoanalysis in relation to religious disciplining of the soul, advocating that people

178

War Trauma and English Modernism

“should be fearless in searching out, and confessing (if only to themselves) their hidden desires and motives, and that they should use this knowledge for self-improvement”. He maintained the reservation that “psychology is an indispensable handmaid to theology; but, I think, a very poor housekeeper”.17 In Burnt Norton he attempted to order the hidden desires and motives in his memories within a religious framework, as preparation for an uncertain future. Parts I and II of Burnt Norton present alternative modes of being; one is in terms of secular remembrance, the other in a religious metaphysic. The dream imagery of Part I was taken from a section of Murder in the Cathedral which the director Martin Browne had requested Eliot to add in order to give the scene more poetic intensity. It was spoken by the Priest after Becket has resisted the Second Tempter, as a meditation on “the passage we did not take”, in other words, on Becket’s renunciation of a secular life, either in terms of sensual pleasure or political power. In this sense then, the beginning of Burnt Norton is a reflection upon the emotional existence that Eliot had renounced through religious conversion. It acknowledges the presence of fantasy in memory, especially of childhood imagined as an age of wish-fulfilment, where “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage we did not take.” While reminiscence in The Waste Land represented an attempt to grasp what was lost, here it is working the opposite way, as an anxious anticipation of what may be lost; also it offers an alternative past which could avert these future losses. Consequently, images are reassuring and unsettling, palpable and elusive. They raise a lost figment of the imagined past, only to snatch it away: There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. (CPP, 171–2) The, presumably, adult figures are the source of the child’s protection and anxiety in representing moral authority and threatening to depart “over the dead leaves”. The bird directs the speaker to leave, since “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” Given that the music

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 179

is unheard, the eyebeam unseen and the flowers look as if looked at, is the scene reality or fantasy? The section concludes that this uncertainty points to the “present”, which points to an uncertain future. Part II turns from the ambiguities of memory to a pseudo-religious presentation of material existence in which Eliot alludes most directly to immediate historical concerns: The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars Appeasing long forgotten wars. (CPP, 172) The passage these lines belong to describes a unity from the circulation of the blood to the movement of the stars; predatory nature, of “the boarhound and the boar”, is “reconciled in the stars”. The force of this vision relies upon its pastiche of George Chapman’s Seven Penitential Psalms: Raise, Lord, my sin’s inveterate scars, And take thy new-built mansion up in me: Though power fails, see my will’s sharp wars, And let me please even while I anger thee. In a broadcast of 1930 Eliot praised this passage for having “not a simple melody, but a complicated harmony of feeling” in its oppositions of “raise” and “inveterate”, “fails” and “sharp”, “please” and “anger”, all resolved though God’s grace. Eliot regarded this complexity of feeling as belonging to the seventeenth century’s “equilibrium and parity” of “great theologians, great men of devotion, and also great scientists”, which he hoped for in his own time.18 The concluding lines of Part II convey the intersection between material and spiritual realities, including the place of “horror” within them: “at the still point of the turning world . . . In the completion of its partial ecstasy, / The resolution of its partial horror.” However, Eliot’s promise in this section of Burnt Norton is fairly modest since the First World War could hardly be included among “long forgotten wars”. Tracing this passage back to Murder in the Cathedral, the imagery echoes the Women of Canterbury’s description of fate “woven into everyone’s lives”, assuring their recognition of Becket’s act of martyrdom, while also reflecting how the destructiveness of an event can infectiously spread through a community.

180

War Trauma and English Modernism

The next two parts of Burnt Norton describe the negative alternatives to what Eliot has just attempted to convey in Part II, the disavowing of the religious where “that which is only living / Can only die”. The urban population lacks spiritual meaning, and consequently a meaningful memory; it regards “Time before and time after / In a dim light”, without reminiscing upon “transient beauty”, or renouncing it by “cleansing affection from the temporal”. The imagery of these “men and bits of paper” will return in the blitz of Little Gidding where they will be transfigured through death. Without spiritual direction, in Burnt Norton they suffer the anxiety of whether beneath the earth in the Underground, the roots of the sunflower and clematis, or “Chill / Fingers of yew” will reach out to grasp them. This confusion of life and death is halted by a momentary flash of a kingfisher’s wing, “light to light” and held in the viewer’s memory, “At the still point of the turning world” (CPP, 174–5). The final part of the poem both subverts the assertions that precede it, and organises them towards a conclusive statement. Eliot undercut the consolatory statement of “the trilling wire in the blood” appeasing past wars, by distinguishing “the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts” from the “stillness” of the “pattern” itself: physical and spiritual realities cannot be integrated as easily as presented in Part II. In attempting to marry the two, “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden”. He reformulated the synthesis once more, invoking the support of a religious and cultural Tradition with St John’s imagining God “in the figure of the ten stairs”, Dante in Paradiso on love as “the cause and end of movement”, and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, “undesiring / Except in the aspect of time”. However memory itself, “of the hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage”, cannot be integrated into this religious construction: it is only “Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after” (CPP, 175–6). Burnt Norton expresses a core contradiction of Eliot’s thinking in the Thirties, between a need to regress from the hostile present to wishfulfilment of childhood, and repudiation of this regression as only escapism. He attempted to integrate the fantasy of memory into religious aspiration, but failing to do so, religion represented escapism in another form. There are moments, such as the image of light reflecting on the kingfisher’s wing, where memory mirrors a religious apprehension of the present; however they cannot be sustained, or formulated in language.

From post-war to pre-war In The Family Reunion Eliot tried most strenuously to mediate between personal memory and faith to ward off future disaster. The avenging

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 181

Eumenides periodically confront the protagonist Harry Monchensey over his past, demanding appeasement like Hitler in his provocative acts of military aggression in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The overt subject of the play is trauma, no longer obscured by ambiguous literary allusions or theology, although they add form to the narrative. Harry describes the history of his condition: I felt, at first, that sense of separation, Of isolation unredeemable, irrevocable . . . Then the numbness came to cover it . . . The degradation of being parted from my self, From the self which persisted only as an eye, seeing. . . . And then I had no horror of my action, I only felt the repetition of it Over and over. When I was outside, I could associate nothing of it with myself, Though nothing else was real. (CPP, 330–1) Each stage of the trauma is demarcated, in Dante’s manner, as a different “hell”. Yet this religious gloss does not interfere with the psychological explication: withdrawal from the outside world into a defensive narcissism; dissociation from one’s experiencing self and paralysis; passivity to the recurrence of trauma while it is both completely outside of oneself, and inside. In diagnosing the characters’ conditions Eliot relied on psychology not theology. Like The Waste Land and the poetry that gave testimony to Eliot’s experience of the First World War, in The Family Reunion personal and public trauma are entangled with each other. Having split from Vivienne in 1932, he disclosed in a letter to John Hayward which seems to provide raw material for some of Harry’s speeches, that he felt haunted and dreamt of being Orestes chased by the Furies.19 His associations of Vivien with the general traumatic stress of the previous war is registered in the status of Harry’s wife as “permanently missing” (CPP, 289), like so many casualties of that war. Eliot wrote to Hayward a year later that he was suffering from various kinds of nightmare, all of which caused him to identify with Orestes. Europe also was coming to resemble Orestes, pursued by the right-wing militaristic ghosts of the previous war. Harry’s uncle Gerald, a former colonial soldier, admits that his generation hasn’t left the younger “such an easy world to live in” (CPP, 287). Harry explains his condition

182

War Trauma and English Modernism

as being more than merely personal, or psychological, when he criticises the other characters for dismissing his “delusions”: First of all, you isolate the single event As something so dreadful that it couldn’t have happened, Because you could not bear it. So you must believe That I suffer from delusions. It is not my conscience, Not my mind, that is diseased, but the world I have to live in. (CPP, 295) Here Eliot recapitulated his argument in “Religion Without Humanism” of 1930 that psychoanalysis only treats the individual when the whole of humanity is sick; as Harry puts it, “Were they simply inside / I could cheat them perhaps with the aid of Dr. Warburton” (CPP, 327). Harry is critical of how others isolate the traumatic event to deny how its effect seeps into individuals, society and culture. The Chorus, representing society at large, by turns utters banalities like the other characters in the play, and truths on Harry’s level of awareness: The agony in the curtained bedroom, whether of birth or of dying, Gathers into itself all the voices of the past, and projects them into the future. . . . There is nothing at all to be done about it, There is nothing to do about anything, And now it is nearly time for the news We must listen to the weather report And the international catastrophes. (CPP, 329) Its sense of paralysis before the onward march of international catastrophes is a very accurate reflection of general attitudes in Britain during the late Thirties. However, the Chorus’s insight into the presence of past violence being projected onto the future is the core insight of the play, and it is Harry’s task to search among his memories in order to avert future disaster. Within the imagery of the play there is reminiscence back to The Waste Land, but this only yields a continued state of powerlessness, not the empowering myth of order that critics had imposed upon the poem.

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 183

In particular there are many references to “The Burial of the Dead”. The older generation of ladies echoes Marie in the wish to “go south in winter”, but instead of sharing her once liberated aristocratic lifestyle across Europe’s borders before the war, south is inhabited by “military widows” drinking “strong cold stewed bad Indian tea”, both remnants of war and colonialism. Harry refers to spring as the “ache in the morning root”, asking, “Do not the ghosts of the drowned / Return to land in the spring?” – a final allusion in Eliot’s oeuvre to Verdenal. Echoing the half-formulated pledge at the end of the poem, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?”, Harry acknowledges his inability to do so while his private trauma forms part of a global condition: it begins to seem just part of some huge disaster, Some monstrous mistake and aberration Of all men, of the world, which I cannot put in order (CPP, 285, 310, 326) Only earlier manifestations of trauma can be found in The Waste Land, not liberation from it. Eliot went further into the past, supposedly to locate the root of future disaster, but perhaps instead to bypass the root in the First World War. Harry’s quest into his past is to appease the avenging Eumenides. Through his fantasy-laden memories, where “what did not happen is as true as what did happen”, he realises he has been “wounded in a war of phantoms, / Not human beings” in which his mother wished him to replace his father and both he and his father wished to possess Agatha instead of his mother. The Eumenides reappear once more, and Harry resolves that “my business is not to run away, but to pursue” (CPP, 307, 335, 339). Yet the underlying issue remains the deceptiveness of memory: are reminiscences of childhood the root of present danger, or are they an escape to a reality of wish-fulfilment? While Eliot concluded Harry’s liberation from past trauma, the future traumatic impact of war was approaching at terrifying speed. In the midst of Hitler’s invasion of Austria in March 1938 Eliot wrote to Sir Thomas Browne on the need to rewrite the play, yet that events threatened to undermine its contemporary relevance.20 Where Murder in the Cathedral, set in the Twelfth Century, could suggest action required in contemporary circumstances through Becket’s brutal murder, The Family Reunion in its contemporary setting did not. Eliot’s audience for the premiere in March 1939, when Hitler took over Bohemia-Moravia as

184

War Trauma and English Modernism

a German protectorate and began making coercive proposals to Poland, would question whether Harry’s pursuit of the Eumenides resembled Neville Chamberlain’s flying visits to Munich the previous September, or a declaration of war. Agatha is most suggestive about the action required by counselling Harry that “we cannot rest in being / The impatient spectators” but “must learn to suffer more”, which Eliot prescribed in the first wartime Quartet, East Coker. Like departing soldiers, she tells Mary that they “must all go, each in his own direction”, to meet again “in the neutral territory / Between two worlds” (CPP, 327, 343). The mystical language reflects Eliot’s reluctance to avoid prescribing the action required for the time. The remaining uncertainty of the conclusion forced him to suggest to Michael Redgrave who first played Harry, that “I think he and the chauffeur go off and get jobs in the East End.”21

Preparing for war While The Family Reunion was premiered Eliot reflected in the lectures of The Idea of a Christian Society on the shock of events following the Munich agreement: “the feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment. . . . if I share the guilt of my society in time of ‘peace’, I do not see how I can absolve myself from it in time of war, by abstaining from the common action.” This reaction to events, he disclosed, “formed the starting point, and must remain the excuse, for saying what I had to say” in these lectures. Since democracy was too weak to resist political extremism, his solution lay exclusively in Christianity: “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin” (ICS, 64, 73–4, 63). To replace the all but defunct League of Nations he proposed a “Universal Church”, in which each national church was part of, and answerable to, the universal; in the meantime, Christian martyrdom offered a means of waging war. Eliot attempted to realise this religious programme in the last three Quartets. The complex meaning of the later Quartets is suggested by Eliot cancelling the statement that they were “primarily patriotic poems” from his essay “The Three Voices of Poetry”.22 Still shamed by the disappointments of 1918 he longed to be regarded as a participant in the war; in an interview in The Star in February 1938, “The Soul of a Poet”, Arthur Lawson wrote that “during the War he served in the US Intelligence Department”23 – one can only presume that Eliot was the source of this fabrication. In responding to contemporary events the Quartets follow

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 185

the development in Eliot’s poetry during the previous twenty years, of anxiety to remembrance, or to dissociated impotence then transcendence. In East Coker complacent appeasement is rejected for repudiation of a treacherous material existence, and answered by the call for “humility” in the continuing active struggle within this existence. Dry Salvages reverts to distant memory to avert the remorseless impact of present horror, but a sense of powerlessness begins to give way to dissociation from it. In Little Gidding there is the unprecedented ambition to bring everything together: Tradition, religion and the war effort. Yet this is achieved at great cost, of dissociating from the horror of war and identifying with destruction as a means of transcendence into spiritual reality. East Coker was written in the first two months of 1940, and published in the New English Weekly on 21 March, Good Friday; as Helen Gardner recalled, “its words ‘And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse’, seemed prophetic at that time of waiting, the period of war that was not war”.24 Agatha’s advice to Harry, that “we must learn to suffer more”, had developed concrete meaning. Since the British declaration of war on 3 September 1939, Poland had capitulated to Germany and USSR; the “Phony War” began, with French troops on the Maginot line and British reinforcing near the Channel. The danger was already present at sea, however, with the battleship HMS Royal Oak sunk in Scapa Flow, the reintroduction of the convoy system for merchant ships and a full-scale blockade on Germany. East Coker has an intense consistency of mood that relates closely to its period of composition and publication, moving from a sheer sense of dread of material reality, that “in my beginning is my end”, to the preparation for unavoidable selfsacrifice in confronting this reality, where “in the end is my beginning”. The anxiety and dread in East Coker had not been as pervasive and extreme in Eliot’s poetry since “Gerontion” and The Waste Land. The sense of revolt from material reality is not merely from a retrospective religious viewpoint; the speaker intends to shock the reader into revulsion, presenting the rise and fall of houses (including “houses” as families) into the earth as “already flesh, fur and faeces”. Eliot’s imagining of his sixteenth-century precursor Sir Thomas Elyot’s quaint, bucolic vision of dancing and coupling is cut down to the brute facts of “Eating and drinking. Dung and death”. The immediate sense of anxiety underlying this revulsion arises in the equally abrupt return to the present where “Dawn points, and another day / Prepares for heat and silence”; the speaker looks out to the Atlantic, not towards a space of freedom as his ancestors once did, but towards an unknown threat. He is “here / Or

186

War Trauma and English Modernism

there, or elsewhere” (CPP, 177–8), in a permanent state of distraction, but also at the “beginning” of an unforeseeable encounter. Part II addresses the threat suggested in Part I, reflecting upon its representation. Eliot deliberately used imprecise metaphorical language to describe “constellated wars . . . in a vortex that shall bring / The world to that destructive fire”. Most directly, he parodied the mystical vision of Part II of Burnt Norton to expose the complacent notion of the apparent unity of the cosmos “appeasing” past wars, just as Chamberlain had attempted to “appease” Hitler. The voice changes abruptly to a seemingly personal one for which “the poetry does not matter”, then recounts the sense of shock and disappointment over the Thirties: “It was not (to start again) what one had expected”. The poem disparages the “quietvoiced elders”, perhaps referring to the senior British politicians whose “wisdom” was “useless in the darkness into which they peered”. The argument becomes broader, more philosophical upon each “shocking” “moment” where “We are only undeceived / Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.” Then the philosophical becomes universal where everyone is powerless before mortality, since the “houses” and “dancers” are “all gone”; but this sense of doom is countered by the equally universal “wisdom of humility: humility is endless” (CPP, 178–9). Thus, moving from personal confession Eliot introduced the Church’s answer to mortality, particularly in war: he was both suffering supplicant and administering priest to his readers. Part III moves in two directions, deeper into the source of anxiety, while forward to the religious solution. It begins with a direct outburst: “O dark dark dark”. The potential victims are listed out: statesmen, industrialists and even “eminent men of letters” including Eliot himself “all go into the dark”. The sense of paralysis and futility, of the lost “motive of action”, indicate a pressing crisis in terms of the unknown future on the advent of war which has yet to be waged. The absolute presence of mortality, though, becomes a note of reassurance to individuals, since all are potential casualties, whether in war or peace: “we all go with them, into the silent funeral, / Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.” The movement from individual to universal is inverted in Part II, switching to the individual experience of being “still” while waiting in “the darkness of God”. Since waiting in this anticipated war was inevitable, Eliot resolved to “wait without hope”, “wait without love”, “wait without love”, “so the darkness shall be light” and revive the “dancing” in “stillness” (CPP, 180). However, the apparent identity between his individual self and a universalised readership is betrayed by the interjection “You say I am

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 187

repeating / Something I have said before”. This moment of insecurity is followed by the most apparently authoritative, didactic section of the poem, citing the negative route to God of St John of the Cross. In contrast to Ash Wednesday where this philosophy was presented as a prayer, Eliot re-ascended the pulpit to sermonise his readers. He tried to ease the awkwardness of his position by self-consciously renouncing his claim to authority. His message is presented in the tour de force lightness of the following lyric, with its conspicuously banal imagery of Christ as “wounded surgeon” and Adam as “ruined millionaire”, then Part V begins with a reflection on his difficulties as a poet, “trying to learn to use words” (CPP, 181–2). At his most uncertain point in relation to his audience, Eliot made his strongest case for identifying with the war effort: And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. . . . There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seems unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. (CPP, 182) Here Eliot presented his own failings with language, and with his audience, as a common element that linked him to this audience, since they were all struggling to articulate and solve the crisis that they have been thrown into. While the conscripted male population under forty years faced a physical struggle to confront the enemy, his struggle was internalised, with the “shabby equipment” of his mind against its own “inarticulate” limitations. “Feeling” as the “general mess” of the war zone fought over by “squads of emotion” is a confusing analogy, but significant in reversing the disavowal of personal emotion in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: by asserting his personal place in the historical event Eliot appealed to his personal emotions in the effort of his composition. However, the series of analogies went much further in “the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again”: while his readers and the population as a whole waited helplessly before

188

War Trauma and English Modernism

a future military onslaught and possible occupation by the enemy, Eliot was already attempting to reclaim Europe as cultural territory. Eliot articulated a climate of desperation, while guaranteeing commitment to the cause in his dismissal of “twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres”. He concluded the poem from this position with a set of values to adhere to in the prosecution of war: “home”, or patriotism, is the departure point of one’s action. Beyond the paralysis of waiting, he and his fellow countrymen would move “Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion” (CPP, 182–3). Action in the darkness would bring people into a deeper communion with each other and with God, and so Eliot implied, into a purgation through which they could overcome their terror of mortality. This is to anticipate Little Gidding; for the most part the intense anxiety and strained rhetoric pervading East Coker betray Eliot’s “modest” “hope”, as expressed in a letter from early 1940, to “keep alive aspirations which can remain valid throughout the longest and darkest period of universal calamity and degradation”.25 Dry Salvages differs from the objectless anxiety of East Coker in responding to the experience of death during war; it brings this experience to a similar transformation of universalised mortality and agony, but without the focused (or forced) religious conclusion of East Coker. Its sea imagery alludes to the central event for Britain in 1940, the evacuation of Dunkirk between 26 May and 4 June. The possible capture of stranded troops would have left Britain helpless before German invasion, given that Paris was occupied by 13 July. However, the rescue of 338,226 soldiers was held in the minds of British people over the course of the rest of the year, throughout the “Battle of Britain” which warded off Germany’s planned invasion, and the Blitz which features in the last Quartet. Churchill hailed the evacuation as a “miracle of deliverance” from defeat to the continuing effort to fight; Eliot’s vision of deliverance in Dry Salvages is from particular suffering to its transcendence, but in accordance with patriotism, only achieved while maintaining the war effort. In imagining the threat from sea Eliot was thrown back upon the reserves of his memory, both as an escape and as a resource of corresponding dangers to prepare him psychologically. However, memory did not enable him to distance himself from the threat, to represent and thus cope with it. The river represents the primal menace of nature, “waiting, watching and waiting . . . keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder / Of what men choose to forget”. The threat of

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 189

death lies within and outside us, just as “the river is within us, the sea is all about us”. The sea, from something that contains traces of our earlier nature, is also a site of war which “tosses up our losses”, including “the gear of foreign dead men”. The presence of death within the seas, of “the tolling bell . . . rung by the unhurried / Ground swell” is “older / Than time counted by anxious worried women / Lying awake”, trying to “piece together the past and future”. Eliot recapitulated the lamentation from part II of East Coker on the shock of events, since “the past is all deception; / The future futureless”. Yet memory only confirmed that the future could not be adequately prepared for (CPP, 184). Where memory has failed, religion again is resorted to. In Part II the remorseless imagery of endless, “soundless wailing”, “drifting wreckage, / The prayer of the bones on the beach, the unprayable / Prayer” is incorporated into a religious framework of meaning in the “calamitous annunciation”. Yet religion also seems to fail to provide consolation: instead of the serene humility of East Coker, numbness emerges where “emotion takes to itself the emotionless / Years of living among the breakage”; in war there is no alternative to the “trip that will be unpayable / For a haul that will not bear examination” (CPP, 185–6). The conclusion of Dry Salvages betrays the growing strain of war upon Eliot, to write affirmative poetry for a nation desperately warding off invasion and defeat. Following Agatha’s advice to Harry that “we cannot rest in being / The impatient spectators”, Eliot suggested enlightenment through compassion for others, in whom we discover “moments of agony”; he developed this idea in his interpretation of Krishna to Arjuna on the importance of our sphere of being at the point of death, “which shall fructify in the lives of others”. The symbolism of seafaring and war come together in the correspondence of “voyagers” and “seamen” with “Arjuna / On the field of battle”. However the subsequent offhand reference to the “distress of nations and perplexity / Whether on the shores of Asia or in Edgware Road” seems to disregard the suffering of war victims. Once more Eliot proffered the model of the martyr for those “who are only undefeated / Because we have gone on trying”, and who are content “if our temporal reversion nourish . . . The life of significant soil”. Through transcending fear in the “unattended / Moment” victims could achieve the state of being that he struggled to convey at the end of Burnt Norton, where “the impossible union / Of spheres of existence is actual” (CPP, 188–90). This momentary glimpse of “Incarnation” in the midst of utter despair will dominate Little Gidding.

190

War Trauma and English Modernism

Trauma as incarnation We see from East Coker to Little Gidding a changing focus upon the war effort strengthened by religious faith, to war (regardless of its outcome) as a means of fulfilling a religious vision. Despite being completed in September 1942, the material for Little Gidding was taken from 1940 like Dry Salvages. America’s involvement in December 1941, the sieges on Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow, and the news filtering through of racial extermination in Eastern Europe, do not figure in it. Instead the development that it registers lies in the religious message of “Incarnation”. In the 1941 essay “Towards a Christian Britain” Eliot wrote that “a Christian Britain demands sacrifice from all” which “is beyond our power as human beings, and this knowledge should bring not discouragement but a greater hope”. Instead external events would bring it to pass, through “prophets” “who have lived through the mind of [the] dark age, and got beyond it”. “Getting beyond it” did not entail survival, but as indicated by Eliot’s example of Charles de Foucauld who died in Africa while living a Christian life: “there is no higher glory of a Christian empire than that which was here brought into being by a death in the desert”.26 Eliot was not merely reprising imagery from The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday, but alluding to the desert war in North East Africa and the Middle East where Britain was struggling to defend its colonial resources against Rommel’s onslaught. Eliot completed the first rough draft of Little Gidding in June 1941 but it took him over a year to finalise the presentation of his religious vision. Following the conclusion of Dry Salvages in its alternation between black despair and the call for martyrdom, the strain upon Eliot lay in the conditions of war which both denied and necessitated this vision. He confessed to Browne in October 1942 that it was difficult to justify agonising between choices of words and rhythms in the midst of wider historical events.27 In accordance with Eliot’s strategies of psychological survival over the previous twenty years, apparent transcendence in his vision was a last line of defence against the threat of external violence. In Little Gidding he transposed the traumatised apprehension of the blitz into a transcendental vision of reality, then even went so far as to identify the enemy bombers as the deliverers of God’s purification. The war becomes an explicit presence in Part II, set in London after an air raid: Ash on an old man’s sleeve Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 191

Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended (CPP, 192) Eliot testified that the material of this stanza “came out of” his experience of fire-watching on the roof of Faber and Faber: “During the Blitz the accumulated debris was suspended in the London air for hours after a bombing. Then it would slowly descend and cover one’s sleeves and coat with a fine white ash. I often experienced this effect during long night hours on the roof.” Yet there is a tension between physical reality and the religious symbolism imposed upon this scene. The actual physical link with the dead, of “Dust inbreathed”, is connected as “ash the burnt roses leave” to the “dust on a bowl of rose-leaves” from the philosophical reflection of mortality in Burnt Norton. Eliot even had to change this line from “dust” to “ash” in the first draft to make the link to Burnt Norton less obvious, and the scene less descriptively vague. “Where a story ended” in its play on the “storeys” of a building is an exceptionally euphemistic way of describing death. Elsewhere in the lyric he cancelled lines which spell out the idea of Purgation, with “fire” of sinful desire equated to fire of the bombing: Fire without and fire within Shall purge the unidentified sin. This is the place where we begin.28 Moody compares this statement to how the destruction of London by fire was viewed in The Rock as preparation for the building of an invisible church of Light. The rest of Part II is perhaps the key to Little Gidding where, for Moody, “the poet is saved” by “communication with the dead” as “the timeless mind of Europe” and “authority of Tradition” brought into agreement with religious orthodoxy. Moody lists out the poets alluded to: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Johnson, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold, Henry James, Laforgue, Mallarmé, and Yeats, all “merged in the one ultimate and universal mind, that of the conscious dead”, to articulate Eliot’s core religious principle of humility.29 However, to be “saved” as a witness of his time Eliot also needed to communicate with the nameless dead of war, which he only covertly achieved in The Waste Land. Moody argues that the language introducing this section is deliberately imprecise in its physical description, to prepare the reader for

192

War Trauma and English Modernism

Incarnation. However, there is more at stake than the religious message since this section was subject most to revisions throughout the year of revising after the first complete draft. Eliot was describing traumatic experiences of being on fire watch while suffering from emotional and physical exhaustion, with repeated feverish colds and bronchitis. In a letter from April 1941 to Hayward he attributed his ongoing feeling of languor to a conviction that aside from terror at the prospect of Germany’s victory, civilisation was bound to collapse irrespective of the war’s outcome.30 In realising his aim “to present to the mind of the reader a parallel . . . between the Inferno and the Purgatorio . . . and a hallucinated scene after an air-raid” (TCC, 128) Eliot utilised the psychological condition of the speaker’s trauma to provide the appearance of spiritual unity. Both the speaker and ghost are without individual volition, “compliant to the common wind” like the metallic sounding dead leaves; in their “dead patrol” as fire-watchmen their “meeting nowhere, no before and after” is not in a state of spiritual transcendence but of estrangement from the overwhelming and remorseless violence that they have witnessed. The speaker’s personality is split off from itself, “knowing myself while being someone other”, but this dissociation from individual self is a basis for the unity of the following vision, since the figures are “Too strange to each other for misunderstanding”. The conversation follows the themes of Parts II of East Coker and Little Gidding, of the unpredictability of events, the frustrations and failings of old age, but in terms of the “Tradition” of the “Mind of Europe”. As in the previous poems, the moral leads to religious deliverance, but here the “refining fire” is physically real in the setting of the “disfigured street” (CPP, 193–5). This section of Part II is perhaps the most ambitious extended passage of poetry that Eliot wrote, aspiring to the reconciliation of literary tradition and religious orthodoxy with the brutality and horror of history. However the fulfilment of this ambition is only borne out by the rest of the poem, by whether it can present convincingly the vision of “Incarnation”. Part III includes Eliot’s most all-encompassing vision of “Tradition” of the dead, not only of the great writers in history which it had been restricted to after the First World War, but of all who are subject to the blind forces of history: If I think, again, of this place, And of people, not wholly commendable, Of no immediate kin or kindness, But some of peculiar genius,

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 193

All touched by a common genius, United in the strife which divided them . . . Why should we celebrate These dead men more than the dying? (CPP, 195–6) Here the dead of the Second World War are hailed as of “common genius” alongside those of “peculiar genius” whom Eliot celebrated in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; he directly granted them at least as much importance as the individuals who contributed to the national culture. He expressed most clearly this “piety towards the dead, however obscure” in an essay of 1945 on the relation between generations in an ideal community (NTDC, 44). However, the setting of the passage in Little Gidding is ambiguous, either London of the Blitz or Little Gidding of seventeenth-century religious martyrs. Eliot transposed contemporary conflict onto the seventeenth century, yet instead of distant tradition overlaying the present, they are coexistent. The large-scale carnage is not an unspeakable horror as it was in The Waste Land, but a “symbol” of the religious values of liberation from material existence: We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us – a symbol: A symbol perfected in death. (CPP, 196) It is uncertain what this “symbol” means; the only answer offered is the following religious incantation that “All shall be well” if our motive is purified by our beseeching to God. The religious vision of the Quartets is built upon the spirit of community, held together by the adversity of war, yet afterwards Eliot dismissed this spirit as “the same harmony and docility among the survivors of a shipwreck adrift in a lifeboat”. Instead, he proposed, “the kind of unity with which I am concerned is not expressible as a common enthusiasm or a common purpose: enthusiasms and purposes are always transient” (NTDC, 51). To George Seferis he wrote that while in the shelter “I would feel the need to get out as quickly as possible, to escape all those faces gathered there, to escape all that humanity.”31 Despite memorialising the dead of the blitz alongside the dead of “Tradition”, then, this gesture is perhaps lacking conviction, especially since Eliot identifies the bombs that kill them as God’s “tongues of fire”.

194

War Trauma and English Modernism

Indeed, the vision of Little Gidding does not merely strain to conceal the poet’s emotional disengagement from the victims of contemporary history. Instead it betrays a condition more extreme, identification with the aggressor, where “The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror” (CPP, 196). The “tongues” of fire, related to the tongues of the dead, declare the “discharge”, which in its legal association implies that the bombs will release the war’s victims from original sin, and life. Eliot did not shy away from the shocking implications of this statement, following it with “Who then devised this torment? Love.” There is no distinction between “either fire or fire”, of man’s violence and God’s wrath. Here Eliot was closest to the sentiments he expressed in The Rock, of regarding martyrdom as necessary for the Church’s foundation. He was also closest to Lawrence while he had attempted to wrest himself from the internalised violence of the First World War. But instead of working through this condition as Lawrence did, Eliot was forced to submit to the renewed trauma of the Second World War. Little Gidding states that “Every poem [is] an epitaph”; we may question this poem’s adequacy in providing an epitaph for the dead of war, as Eliot did on its completion. In “A Note on War Poetry”, as if to justify the vision of the Quartets, he wrote that The abstract conception Of private experience at its greatest intensity Becoming universal, which we call “poetry”, May be affirmed in verse. (CPP, 202) Yet by contrast in “T.S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime” he asserted that “You cannot understand war – with the kind of understanding needed for writing poetry – or any other great experience while you are in the midst of it; you can only record small immediate observations.”32 Much like his critical writings in the wake of the First World War, after completing the Quartets Eliot concentrated on cultural reconstruction, as if to practically realise the vision of the Quartets. Once more it was ambiguous whether his project represented a triumph over the cost of war, or a traumatised denial of it. Underlying his assertiveness lay deep pessimism, as betrayed in the statement that “I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that we have no culture” (NTDC, 19). In “Leçon de Valéry” of 1946 he

“The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 195

quoted the writer upon whom he had modelled his project of reconstruction through The Criterion, and whose verse he had admired in the Twenties as a model for ordering feeling, that now “L’Europe est finie”: There is a sense in which we may continue to hope that this is not true; and as we must continue to act and to speak, continue to protest against stupidity and evil and to applaud intelligence and excellence, we must continue to behave on the assumption that it is not true. But there is one other sense in which it is certainly true, and always true, for the creator of art. My language is finished, for me (and for a poet, his language represents his country, and Europe too) when I have come to the end of my resources, in endeavouring to extend and develop that language.33 This statement amounted to a confession that in retiring from poetry Eliot was accepting the cultural death of Europe; his prose only represented an ethical resistance to persisting “stupidity and evil”. The Quartets, as his last poetic words, appeared as a definitive statement of affirmation of Europe’s culture in the midst of destruction. Yet far from representing the consummation of his career as a poet, they were his last strained statement before historical circumstances silenced him permanently, in accordance with Adorno’s prohibition of poetry after Auschwitz. One final case may help us to interpret Eliot’s relation to war, or at least to recognise its complexity which resists definitive interpretation. In June 1944 Geoffrey Faber’s flat and office, where Eliot usually stayed during the week, was blasted in a German air raid; this event is the closest that Eliot came to being a victim of war, since he was only absent by chance in order to catch up on sleep at Faber’s home in the country. Two letters, one to John Hayward, the other to Mary Trevelyan, expressed the range of his feelings. To Trevelyan he conveyed his profound shock at the event, confessing that under normal circumstances he could make himself feel faint just by closing his eyes and imagining himself on the edge of a precipice; in this instance he could not come to terms with his apprehension of horror and evil. He disclosed that by nature he felt anxiety, and was ashamed of this; nonetheless he believed that people could not penetrate beyond his façade of detachment which characterises both his writing and his life.34 This letter testifies to the private Eliot that I have attempted to expose beneath the range of defences in his writing. The letter to John Hayward, on the other hand, presents the defences alongside the

196

War Trauma and English Modernism

horror. Eliot initially claimed that he was partly glad that the flat was spoilt since he had felt uncomfortable sleeping there. He then launched into a tone of abject horror on returning from the bombed flat to his country retreat at Shamley; he compared its atmosphere to the bombed flat when a Pekinese dog’s eye popped out during medical treatment, and predicted that he would always feel disturbed in the presence of dogs of this breed.35 Here, as in “Saint Sebastian”, The Waste Land and Little Gidding, Eliot’s feelings of terror before history are displaced onto an alternative scenario; he avoided repressing the trauma, instead converting it into a form which did not threaten him directly. Nonetheless in his poetry and prose the traces of Eliot’s terror of war are preserved for us as his readers, and his witnesses.

Conclusion: The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism

The final question I wish to address is why Lawrence’s and Eliot’s fortunes differed so greatly in British culture between the two world wars, and continue to in the present. As a cultural era Modernism has been judged by Eliot’s achievements and failings, rather than by Lawrence’s – whose failings are considered more strictly his own. I want to examine this issue by laying stress on the legacy of these wars in the formation of what has been often called the “age of Eliot”, not the “age of Lawrence”.

The rise of Eliot As we saw in Chapter 5, Lawrence devoted his post-war years to reconciling the dead of war with the living, from the first drafts of Studies in Classic American Literature in 1918: “The only thing to do is for each man to remember his dead. . . . My dead is neither above nor below, nor everywhere. My own dead, whom I have loved and love, is with me, within me, here, now, at one with me, and not elsewhere.” In the “Foreword” to the project, written in 1920, he addressed the issue of America having no tradition – “How thankful she ought to be!” For Lawrence “real continuity” lay “not between Europe and the new States, but between the murdered Red America and the seething White America”. The memory of the dead of the First World War was displaced onto the murdered natives, who represented a means to “a surpassing of the old European life-form” (Studies, 207, 381, 384–5). In 1919 Eliot provided his own statement upon “the dead” in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. By focusing upon the continuity of a cultural “tradition” he envisaged a way of bridging the historical gap of the war, and of symbolically resurrecting its dead. He wrote 197

198

War Trauma and English Modernism

regarding the artist: “You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” The “dead”, associated at this time with the victims of war, here became the tradition of past writers, and through continuing this tradition the artist could bring them into a “simultaneous existence” with himself, which in turn could bridge the terrible gap of the war, piled up with millions of other voiceless dead (SE, 14–15). Lawrence looked towards an alternative where “souls that find in death itself a passionate consummation return to us appeased, and add the beauty and richness of their presence to us”; Eliot instead envisaged how the survivors and dead could give life to each other by linking up a tradition. Lawrence’s notion of “death” as “passionate consummation” of the soul offered renewal, as in a natural cycle; in his theory of impersonality Eliot suggested a symbolic identification between the living and dead. In Chapter 4 we saw how Eliot transformed his numbness towards the incommunicable suffering of the war into an aesthetic impersonality crucial to the Modernist style, as embodied in The Waste Land. Through impersonality the artist could mimic the self-sacrifice of soldiers by undergoing “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”. Then through this voluntary renunciation of his individual life he would revive them symbolically: “he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (SE, 17, 22). Through enacting this principle of impersonality in his published writings Eliot was able to restrict the war to a concealed presence. This difference was crucial for Eliot’s and Lawrence’s respective positions in Modernist literature: Eliot presented himself as the figure who survived the war intact and able to preserve the cultural tradition intact, while Lawrence repeatedly exposed his wounds in the hope of finding a cure. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot advocated a process which both commemorated and resurrected the dead, but one which also denied their memory through its ambiguous imagery since the poet ostensibly linked the present generation back to the dead artists, not the soldiers. Read in these terms, though, The Waste Land could achieve this ambivalent form of atonement for contemporary readers: a remembrance of the past, while turning to the future. One of the most important notions that Eliot popularised in the Twenties was the “Mind of Europe”. Partly borrowed from Paul Valéry, who was attempting to manage a cultural equivalent to the League of Nations, the Mind of Europe was the contemporary manifestation of

The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism 199

Eliot’s “tradition”, from Homer onwards. While complementing the illfated League of Nations, it suggested an alternative to the post-war political situation ratified by the Treaty of Versailles, which only postponed the recurrence of hostilities twenty years later. In terms of the Mind of Europe, then, The Waste Land was read as a mosaic of Europe’s cultural fragments; while it decried the futility of “shoring” its “fragments against the ruin”, its supposed poetic unity offered a vision that left behind the desecration of war, to a Europe whose political and economic differences could be stabilised by its commonly rooted cultural heritage. Writing in 1926, Allen Tate perhaps understood most the complexity of Eliot’s appeal to “tradition”: “arranging the past when the future seems to him only vaguely to exist, is in some respects particularly fortunate. It has enabled him to bring to England, in his poetry, the sense of a contemporary spiritual crisis, which shell-shock had already rendered acute.” Hence in relating English poetry to European tradition Eliot both had imported the trauma of war and “contemplated order” which could be extended to the whole of criticism and culture: “Tradition and the Individual Talent presupposes a continuity of traditional culture as literature. The baroque agony of the poetry in the corresponding period was preoccupied, however, with the anarchy which he has subsequently rationalized and for which he has proposed as remedy the regime of a critical dictatorship, in The Function of Criticism.”1 The Waste Land would become known as the model of classical Modernism and of a unified European cultural tradition, while throughout the inter-war period Lawrence’s Women in Love was largely misunderstood and ignored. This is not to say that Eliot’s poem was understood while Lawrence’s novel was not; rather, Eliot had provided a critical discourse by which to interpret his poem in a certain way, while Lawrence’s own critical writing, such as “The Crown” and other wartime essays, was not satisfactorily placed by his readers in dialogue with his novel. E.M. Forster commented at Lawrence’s death that he had still not found “his own public” – the “general public” thought him improper and did not read him, while “a special public” regarded him as a god but could not agree upon how he should be worshipped.2 There was a wealth of insights into his techniques by such readers as Rebecca West, Edwin Muir, Bonamy Dobrée and Desmond MacCarthy, but a disparity of judgements regarding the value of his oeuvre, since he lacked a community of readers. They could praise his “imagination” and “genius”, but not his artistic method. Even Eliot can be included among the disparate, half-comprehending members of Lawrence’s readership. In his review of Aaron’s Rod in 1922

200

War Trauma and English Modernism

he referred to Lawrence as “the most interesting novelist in England”; in particular, the Italian Marquis’s confession to Aaron about his problems with his wife impressed Eliot most, as being “governed by a creator who is purely creator, with the terrifying disinterestedness of the creator”. One can speculate that Eliot’s “terror” was caused by identifying his own marriage to Vivien with the Marquis’s marriage. However, Eliot dealt with this disturbing impression in 1927 by arguing that despite the Marquis’s situation having “never been set out with such accuracy or completeness before . . . when you read on, you feel that Mr Lawrence has not grasped the meaning, that indeed its meaning, whatever it might mean for us, is meaningless for Mr Lawrence”.3 Over the rest of the period Eliot would continue to suppress this “revealing” of his inner life, by dismissing Lawrence as lacking conscious control, being fixated upon sensations (and his mother), and “heretical”. In the next two sections I will examine how the legacy of the First World War had a more negative effect upon Lawrence’s reputation than Eliot’s. I will focus on three of the most prominent writers on Lawrence between the wars: Richard Aldington and John Middleton Murry in the Twenties, and F.R. Leavis in the Thirties. All of their defences of Lawrence were overshadowed by Eliot: he picked up on Aldington’s celebration of Lawrence as a “heretic” to exclude him from the orthodoxy of classical Modernism. He discredited Murry’s philosophy of Romantic individualism which celebrated Lawrence, and set the critical seal of approval on Murry’s final denunciation of Lawrence. Finally, he provided Leavis with a critical approach and standards, which Leavis by turns rejected and utilised in his presentation of Lawrence as Eliot’s alternative in Modernism.

The Twenties: Richard Aldington and John Middleton Murry Richard Aldington and John Middleton Murry were Lawrence’s most prominent advocates in the period immediately after the war, and during his lifetime. Crucially, their memory of him during the war was pivotal in their interpretation of his works, although later Murry denied the role of the war in his development. Both identified Lawrence as a figurehead of an opposing Modernism to that championed by Eliot, and identified Lawrence’s “personality” as the antidote to Eliot’s stress on impersonality. Aldington had been a central figure in English Modernism before the war as a member of the Imagist group with Ezra Pound and H.D.

The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism 201

He carried the baton of editorship of The Egoist from Pound, to H.D., who then passed it on to Eliot. Then he supported Eliot as assistant editor during the establishment of The Criterion in 1922, and set up a committee to launch the appeal for a £300 annual fund for Eliot to free him from Lloyds Bank. His critical writing in the early Twenties, too, celebrated Eliot as the best poet of Modernism, alongside Joyce as the best prose writer. However partly due to personal grievances, by the early Thirties in “Stepping Heavenward” Aldington was satirising Eliot as “Cibber”, an American historian who comes to London and through relentless careerism becomes the dominant force in its intellectual life, later being posthumously beatified by the Pope. Aldington had reached a crisis in his career after serving on the front from 1916; his turning to Lawrence anticipated the direction he would take as a writer. In particular, he wanted to avoid imitating Joyce’s style, which Eliot encouraged. He regarded the learned satire of Joyce’s imitators as “a tremendous libel on humanity”, in contrast to his experience of comradeship in the front lines.4 In his uncompromising individuality Lawrence wrote with a personal voice that expressed the humanity that had been exposed, and obliterated, in war. Aldington’s most important contribution to Lawrence’s status in this period was his first monograph of the author, written in 1927 and published in 1930. He hailed Lawrence as “a great living example of the English Heretic”, in a “tradition” that followed Shakespeare. Aldington was reacting against Eliot’s project over the Twenties to establish a “classical moment” in literary culture (C, II 232). Yet if Aldington’s Lawrence provided an individual heresy against Eliot’s dogma, he could not provide an alternative centre of culture, because his individualism was so absolute that it formed another dogma only applicable to himself: “unless [Lawrence] is in a minority of one, he cannot fulfil his task of shattering standards of values and asserting the strength of at least one man to think for himself and to be himself”.5 Aldington did not want Lawrence to be an alternative cultural centre to Eliot but to dismantle Eliot’s monopoly, to make space for himself to dissent also. This reservation is evident in his claim for Lawrence’s authority as a civilian writing about the war: He knows how tragically imbecile it all was as any soldier and, without the soldier’s experience, he has learned the true horror of the world. In fact, he is almost too acutely conscious of it, a little hysterical about it, a little subject to frissons d’horreur at memories of Mexico, and not sufficiently aware that if we continue to live we must accept the horror as one of the conditions.6

202

War Trauma and English Modernism

While lauding Lawrence for possessing the unique authority of a noncombatant writer to express the character and consequences of the war, at the same stroke Aldington took away his authority, accusing him of hysteria – or put more simply, of not recovering. If Aldington’s defence of Lawrence had negative consequences for his reputation, these were dwarfed by John Middleton Murry’s “betrayal”. As a professional critic and editor of the Adelphi, the rival literary periodical to The Criterion, Murry was Lawrence’s most prominent advocate in the Twenties, but failed him threefold. First, he celebrated Lawrence in terms of a philosophy of romantic individualism which failed to do justice to him; second, his philosophy was discredited by Eliot; third, he condemned Lawrence in the act of defending him. During the Twenties as editor of the Athenaeum Murry rivalled Eliot in the post-war reconstruction of a literary culture. Like Eliot he focused on the failings of the immediate poetic tradition in England, but instead of developing a “Tradition” as a prescriptive, actively shaping force upon individual creativity, Murry described the combined efforts of individual isolated writers. Murry focused upon Sassoon’s inability “to surmount the disaster of his own experience” as due to the failings of the poetic tradition that he had inherited in articulating the disaster of war; like Eliot, he looked to the French example, but specifically in terms of this problem. While Eliot and Murry collaborated in the Athenaeum immediately after the war their notions of tradition overlapped, but over the following years they would become polarised in Murry’s formulation between Classicism and Romanticism, the latter of which Murry presented Lawrence as the primary representative.7 Having witnessed its effects on Lawrence in Cornwall, the war played a crucial role in Murry’s vision of him. It also turned Murry into a lifelong pacifist, since he had helped Siegfried Sassoon draft “A Soldier’s Declaration” in 1917. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, it is ironic how his appraisal of Sassoon’s poetry and Women in Love overlapped, without him recognising the war as their common subject matter. Yet only a year after reviewing Women in Love Murry became Lawrence’s most vocal advocate, by relating his later work to the war. Under the spell of Fantasia of the Unconscious and Aaron’s Rod, he set out the literary scene and placed Lawrence at its head: For, at the present time, one tremendous division is beginning to manifest itself in the heart of English literature – the division between those for whom the European War was a crucial and revolutionary experience and those to whom it was merely one more

The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism 203

uncomfortable and tragic event in the series of events which is human history. Although not named, Eliot was the most representative figure of the latter, more popular group of writers, “whom [the war] drove into a sort of furious cynicism”. Of the former, Murry avowed that “Lawrence is indubitably the most remarkable”. Like Aldington, Murry presented Lawrence’s articulation of the war as setting him above Joyce’s achievements: “Aaron’s Rod is the most important thing that has happened to English literature since the war. To my mind it is much more important than Ulysses. [. . . Lawrence] has survived his own exasperation against the war”.8 Crucially, then, Lawrence did not merely express the anguish of the victims of war, but as a survivor represented one of the “forerunners of a new kind of men, and a new phase of human consciousness”. Murry saw this possibility in the philosophy of Fantasia, and in Studies in Classic American Literature, but above all, “in [Lawrence] himself, . . . He is the only one who has something new and living and true and of the first importance to express”.9 Murry’s most important point, like Aldington’s, lay in stressing Lawrence’s personality and “life” as expressed through his writings. This assertion revealed Murry’s dissatisfaction with the lack of direct intervention in contemporary problems of Eliot’s critical and creative persona. As the decade progressed, however, Murry became more and more alienated from Lawrence, and undecided whether he (and the rest of civilised men) had failed him, or the other way round, especially in the case of The Plumed Serpent. His attitude was partly subject to his progressive marginalisation in English criticism, while Eliot took the central ground in the Criterion. Where Murry’s reading of Fantasia had inspired an espousal of “life” in the Adelphi, Eliot reacted in “The Function of a Literary Review” of 1923 to “the insidious catchword: ‘life’” (C, I 421). Eliot’s dismissal of “Mr Middleton Murry’s Synthesis” of Romantic and Classical tendencies in October 1927, marked the end of Murry’s rapprochement with him, and of his claim to rival him. Murry’s rejection of Lawrence became a means of insinuating himself back into the critical mainstream, especially in his monograph Son of Woman. It opens with a vision of Lawrence as a Christ-like figure of “love”, but concludes with a denunciation of him as a betraying Judas. Murry’s strategy for undermining Lawrence’s value lay in repeatedly wresting away the historical context of his writing, namely, the war: Lawrence will make us believe, and believe himself, that it was the War which changed him. If there had been no war, Lawrence’s

204

War Trauma and English Modernism

destiny would have been essentially the same. By the time he was twenty-six his fate was decided: the irreparable had happened. “The irreparable” here was Lawrence’s fixation on his mother, as narrated in the fate of Paul Morel. According to Murry, Lawrence actually courted persecution during the war to rationalise his sexually induced revulsion of others: “it may have confirmed and made inveterate his appetite towards disintegration and death, his mood for loathing and hatred for all mankind. But both were manifest long before, and long before the war.”10 Murry substituted the role of war in Lawrence’s development with a personal “destiny” and “fate”. He then reversed his former celebration of Lawrence as the most important writer affected by the war who could offer a way forward from it. He read The Rainbow exclusively in terms of “The Crown”, a “doctrine of complete disruption and denial of the unity of man”; he suggested that both were written before Lawrence’s traumatic experience of war, and instead were a consequence of his relationship with his mother. Murry still avowed that Lawrence did change while writing Women in Love, but only in terms of at first resisting then submitting to his latent tendency to dissolution. In presenting his submission to dissolution as a triumph, Lawrence “plays Judas to humanity”.11 Thus, Murry concluded his own betrayal of Lawrence.

The Thirties: F.R. Leavis Published a year after Lawrence’s death in 1931, and only a few months after Aldington’s comparatively slim monograph, Son of Woman was very damaging for Lawrence’s status in English Modernism, especially given Eliot’s praise of it in the Criterion as “definitive”. In his campaign for Lawrence throughout the Thirties, Leavis addressed this “offence” perpetrated by Murry. Yet he was caught in the problem of how his other most highly regarded Modernist, Eliot, seemed to turn a blind critical eye to Lawrence. This problem became more critical in the wake of Eliot’s most extreme denunciation of Lawrence in After Strange Gods. Furthermore, as a critic Leavis had been most deeply influenced by Eliot. The Sacred Wood had taught him “what the disinterested and effective application of intelligence to literature looks like”, and in particular the dictum that “when you judge poetry it is as poetry you must judge it, and not as another thing”.12 In New Bearings in English Poetry Leavis identified Eliot as the most important contemporary poet; in fact, he presented the book as “an

The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism 205

acknowledgement, vicarious as well as personal, of indebtedness to a certain critic and poet”. His reading of The Waste Land accorded with approving reviews of the poem in the early Twenties, and reinforced the image of it as part of Eliot’s whole cultural product in his criticism and editing of the Criterion: The unity the poem aims at is that of an inclusive consciousness: the organization it achieves as a work of art is of the kind that has been illustrated, an organization that may, by analogy, be called musical. It exhibits no progression: I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me – the thunder brings no rain to revive the Waste Land, and the poem ends where it began. For Leavis, the “inclusive consciousness” managed to incorporate the whole of the contemporary world, and by implication, “the Mind of Europe”, through a musical technique. Yet Leavis struggled with the question of the poem’s “lack of organizing principle, the absence of any inherent direction”.13 He concluded that the musical technique provided organisation, however, it only served to express the lack of “progression”, of rain to revive the Waste Land as contemporary society. Despite this reservation regarding The Waste Land, Leavis habitually referred to Eliot as the leader of “this Age”.14 Leavis’s whole interest in literature was deeply affected by his formative years as a medical orderly on the Western Front. He suffered from chronic indigestion, insomnia and a general speech defect – all clearly symptoms of war trauma, and his mental health remained precarious over the following decades.15 John Harvey recalled how Leavis was unable to speak for a month after being shunted all night in cattle trucks crowded with the wounded and dying, and under constant bombing. Raymond O’Malley commented on Leavis’ “massive detonations” of mood, and speculated how the war contributed to them: “What especially wore him down, added to direct suffering, was vicarious suffering – the need to witness, without the possibility of protest, agonised deaths attributable to stupidity-in-office. His struggle towards recovery was never completed.” Further proof that Leavis never recovered from the war is provided in a letter to Michael Tanner in 1977, when he was eighty: I joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. Stinking blankets and lice, and always a job that was too much for me. But after the bloody Somme

206

War Trauma and English Modernism

there could be no question for anyone who knew what modern war was like of joining the army. I didn’t want to come home, and couldn’t communicate with my father – whom I loved. . . . I’d listened (e.g. in the Somme salient) to the barrages, tormented by concern for the men on both sides.16 Leavis refused to take leave during the war, partly out of a sense of responsibility to the soldiers, but also to avoid returning home to communicate his experiences to his father, who died in 1919. In this letter he maintained a similar absolute conviction of the terrible conditions, with a reluctance to communicate them by using the clichéic “bloody Somme”. Then, like a trauma patient he switched to another subject, only to be drawn back into the testimony through the associative link of “talking about myself”. As Anne Samson writes in her monograph on Leavis, “one can only guess at the impact of such a continual exposure to the pain, mutilation and death of those he tended”.17 Like Eliot, Leavis avoided direct reference to the war in his criticism. Eliot’s approach to cultural reconstruction in the Twenties suited his own approach to recovering from the war through literature. Also like Eliot, his silence offered an ambivalent form of atonement, in contrast to Lawrence. For him Modernism always took precedence over war literature as the contemporary mode of representation; in 1932 he wrote as if war poetry was dead, and consigned Owen and Sassoon to a post-Edwardian romanticism.18 Nonetheless throughout his whole career Leavis attempted to compensate for this silence about the war through a consistent denunciation of the modern civilisation which had produced it. Samson explains that his “intellectual despair, matched by raw event, seemed to find its ground in the mud of Flanders and the convulsions of capitalism”.19 In the Thirties he continuously invoked the state of “crisis”, but erred in his diagnosis of its causes. His myth of a lost “organic community” failed where the more Leftist intellectuals identified class divisions and economic breakdown, but also failed to identify the war as the crucial originating event. Instead, he chose to follow Eliot’s diagnosis of the “dissociation of sensibility”. Also like Eliot, Leavis resisted taking a political stand in the Thirties against the rising tide of fascism, as the tone of Scrutiny was resolutely anti-war, while resigned to war’s probability.20 However, the futility embedded in The Waste Land, and the related lack of political power of Eliot’s campaign to bring unity to the “Mind of Europe”, left space for the figure of Lawrence to enter Leavis’s Modernist

The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism 207

canon. Lawrence’s anger from the war also found a correspondence in Leavis’ repressed rage. Leavis followed Aldington’s characterisation of Lawrence as the combative heretic against Eliot’s resigned orthodoxy. As for Murry and Aldington, Lawrence’s “life” provided Leavis with an alternative to Eliot’s “impersonality”. In his first essay, “D.H. Lawrence”, he claimed that “If we find [Lawrence] great, the supreme importance of his books is perhaps that they assure us that he existed.”21 Lawrence’s “life” and “personal” presence offered a hope that Eliot could not. Reviewing Aldous Huxley’s edition of Lawrence’s letters Leavis explained that, while “the plight, not merely of England, but of the Western and Westernizing world generally, is that recorded in The Waste Land”, “Lawrence’s greatness is that, while unsurpassed in awareness of the plight, he was yet able to believe in the possibility of escape”.22 This distinction echoed Leavis’s evaluation of The Waste Land in New Bearings in English Poetry, that it was mired in the futility of the plight it described. Yet Leavis still needed to resist the tendency of reducing Lawrence down to a biographical “personality” who disregarded artistic form, as Murry and Aldington had done. Eliot’s sympathetic review of Son of Woman had convinced Leavis that Lawrence and Eliot were culturally antagonistic, but it had also raised the stakes by implicating Leavis in Lawrence’s supposed negative influence. Leavis’s wife Queenie thought that Eliot was referring to Leavis when writing that “had [Lawrence] become a don at Cambridge his ignorance might have had frightful consequences for himself and for the world, ‘rotten and rotting others’”.23 This tension reached a climax in the early Thirties when Leavis attempted to supplant Eliot with Lawrence, either by using Eliot’s critical terms or by writing in direct opposition to them. For instance, in “D.H. Lawrence and Professor Irving Babbitt” of December 1932, which began with a denunciation of Eliot’s review of Son of Woman, Leavis was most aggressive in attempting to topple Eliot through Lawrence. Reformulating Eliot’s principle of “Tradition”, Leavis claimed that Lawrence represented “concretely in his living person, the essential human tradition”. Exposing Eliot’s “orthodoxy” as too “abstract” against the “centrifugal impulse of heresy” and “rot”, Leavis advocated Lawrence’s “religiosity” as something beyond Murry’s Rousseauistic belief in mankind or Aldington’s principle of individuality, both of which had been discredited by Eliot in the Twenties.24 However, this notion of “religiosity” was to remain vague in Leavis’s reading of Lawrence, and followed both Murry and Aldington in excluding Lawrence from the common experience of history, including the war and its consequences. Instead, Lawrence was the solitary

208

War Trauma and English Modernism

representative of Leavis’ “organic community”. For instance, Leavis quoted Lawrence’s letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith during the war, “this England, we very English people, will at length join together and say, ‘We will not do these things, because in our knowledge of God we know them wrong’”.25 Instead of being an example of Lawrence’s tragically enduring belief that the participants of war would voluntarily put down their arms, Leavis read this letter as an example of Lawrence’s belief in escape from the “plight” of mechanical progress. Ultimately, Leavis could not integrate the aggressive, mankind-hating figure, traumatised by war, into his vision of Lawrence. So, instead of historicising Murry’s psychologically sick Lawrence, Leavis simply edited him out. Crucial to this tendency was Leavis’s attitude to Women in Love. He shared Aldington’s and Murry’s attitude to it, as a work of merely “a keen diagnostic interest”, not of historical interest. In the final account, Lawrence’s experience of the war, as a civilian articulating his agony, could not enter Leavis’s “sympathetic consciousness” as a silent participant. Eliot’s oblique recording of the war was more sympathetic for Leavis.

Eliot as a poet of war While Lawrence’s oeuvre was progressively dissociated from war, Eliot’s became retrospectively associated with it. Four Quartets was read as a cultural contribution to the Second World War, itself regarded as supplementing the slaughter of its predecessor with a rationale of establishing long-term peace in Europe. The Waste Land concealed the presence of the First World War, to present itself as a statement of recovery; Four Quartets exposed the torment of the Second as a statement of ongoing endurance. Together these poems sealed Eliot’s cultural ascendancy for the post-war period. However in the Thirties Eliot’s apparent rise to dominance seemed already on the wane. His appeal to Anglo-Catholicism and wavering position in relation to the rise of fascism detracted from his value as a cultural leader. On the one hand his turn to religion was regarded by Conrad Aiken and Mark van Doren as restricting his formerly experimental poetic techniques. Then there was the question of how this religious worldview shed light on contemporary events. Edward Shillito, for instance, recognised correspondences between the Canterbury of Murder in the Cathedral and Moscow and Munich of 1935, yet noted that “there is still the question before us how the two kingdoms are to be related, the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace; the state and

The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism 209

the church; the prince and the spiritual ruler; the law of man and the law of God”.26 The Rock, concerned with the preservation of churches in the midst of threatening international conflict, would have made that answer seem even more elusive. In the act of composing the wartime Quartets these tensions between the religious, cultural and historical were resolved, or at least quelled under the pressure of desperate historical circumstances. As a fire warden in London Eliot had the authority of historical experience; consequently in the Quartets the presence of war was not suppressed, but for the sake of morale its human cost was. East Coker began the trend of linking Eliot’s presentation of the Second World War with the First, and with Eliot’s earlier achievements, to give them meaning in terms of the current struggle. J.P. Hogan in 1942 reflected how Eliot’s statement, “the poetry does not matter”, echoes Owen: “Above all [East Coker] is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the Pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity.” Hogan then proceeded to relate this quality to Eliot’s Modernist principle of impersonality, that in concentrating on historical events, Eliot “speaks as a man who has transcended the limitations of the ego, who has denuded himself of personality”. In a similar trend, the previous year James Kirkup had read the sentiment of humility in East Coker as following The Waste Land in an organic development from despair to acquired patience; in 1943 he focused on how this humility predominates in Little Gidding, as an acceptance of the process of death which submerges one’s attachment to country, history or freedom. While “the meaning of the poem, related to recent events, becomes even more terrible, as we watch helplessly and with the ‘conscious impotence of rage’ our own disintegration”, for Kirkup it was redeemed by this expression of humility in “the lovely fourth part” beginning with “The dove descending breaks the air”.27 This image of the German fighter bomber as a dove heralding Incarnation, which I examined in Chapter 6 as a symptom of Eliot’s war trauma, is a transformation so audacious that for the most part it escaped critical damnation. The Jesuit Father E.J. Stormon referred to it as part of Eliot’s “most perfect lyric”, since it realised Eliot’s vision of Incarnation in the midst of human destruction: “This is the consummation of history, for the individual, the race, the material universe.” At the other extreme Forster criticised it as a “homage to pain . . . endorsed by the schoolmaster and sanctified by the priest”. However, a more representative attitude can be seen in Edwin Muir who observed that “something more was needed, one feels, to make us accept the descent of the Pentecostal fire on the generalised spectator . . . But this is an

210

War Trauma and English Modernism

incidental criticism.” Perhaps one can understand why this shocking vision was embraced, or merely accepted, by readers during and after the war when suffering was an inevitable “choice of pyre or pyre”, to be endured more patiently as redemption by fire. John Xiros Cooper comments that “in the era of the Gestapo and the NKVD . . . there were many readers who would not only allow the poem to carry them with it, but who also hungered for it”.28 An outsider before and during the First World War, then acceptance as surgeon to a culture’s wounds in the Twenties, relative decline in the Thirties, finally in the post-war period Eliot achieved unchallenged cultural authority. In Little Gidding he apparently had incorporated the historical victims of war into his literary and religious visions. His lobbying for the “Mind of Europe” may have failed previously, but the German intelligentsia at the end of the war was receptive to his essays and radio broadcasts, for instance Die Einheit der Europäischen Kultur. In Britain he was regarded as a model of stoic resilience and in Europe as a unifier of cultural values amongst the destruction of civilisation. His honours culminated in 1948 with the Order of Merit and Nobel Prize. Cecil Day Lewis, who in 1934 had asserted that “when we turn from Owen’s work to Eliot’s we turn from irony to cynicism, from anger to exasperation, from wounds to nerves, from the love of living to the will to die”, praised the Quartets for “supplying our loss with words of comfort” and saying “all that need be said about committedness”. Auden, who had superseded Eliot as the leading poet of the Thirties in England, then emigrated on the advent of war, paid homage to him in 1948: it was you Who, not speechless from shock but finding the right Language for thirst and fear, did much to prevent a panic.29 By contrast, without Eliot’s cultural networks and status as a survivor of terrible yet necessary conflict, Lawrence was criticised for obsessive repetitions, didacticism, aggression, and even fascist sympathies. As I have argued, these qualities were partly a consequence of his Modernist innovations in articulating characters’ inner consciousness, under the pressure of the First World War. Where Eliot presented himself as cured of his wartime traumas by playing the role of doctor to his adopted national culture, Lawrence had exposed his traumas and thus lacked the authority to perform the same role. Looking beyond both wars,

The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism 211

Leavis presented Eliot outside any doctrine,30 and Lawrence outside the potential constrictions of personality, as simply, “Novelist”.

Reflecting upon Modernist literature, and its interpretation as part of a cultural epoch when civilians progressively became as likely casualties of war as soldiers, this book has presented Lawrence and Eliot as survivors who testify to the psychological experience of war. We recognise the crucially differing experiences of civilians and soldiers, alongside their shared impotence in the face of large-scale industrial warfare. We also share their impotence in witnessing others as victims, including civilians abroad and even in our own country. We share the impotence of the onlooker like Eliot and Lawrence, but also we see in them the ongoing stress of war upon civilians in areas of conflict. Alongside the enduring of conflict, there is the legacy from the battlefield to the psyche of veterans and civilians, replicating violence in everyday life, politics and culture.

Notes Introduction 1 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring (London: Bantam, 1989), 118; Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), 42; Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (London: Hutchinson, 1950), 125–6; Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (London: Bodley Head, 1990), 101. 2 Vincent Sherry, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 76, 81. See James Campbell, “Interpreting the War” for a useful summary of the critical reception of war writers, to which I am indebted here. 3 Vivien de Sola Pinto, Crisis in English Poetry (London: Hutchinson, 1951), 142; Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet (London: Duckworth, 1998), 402; Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002), 352. 4 Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-attack and Other Poems (London: Heinemann, 1918), 57. 5 David Roberts, Out of the Dark (Burgess Hill: Saxon Books, 1998), 139. 6 Wilfred Owen, War Poems and Others (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 97; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 309. 7 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Caldar & Boyars, 1967), 145; C.E. Montague, Disenchantment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922), 157; Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), 292; Denis Winter, Death’s Men (London: Allen Lane, 1978), 110. 8 Denis Welland, Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), 21; Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), 52; Sassoon, Counter-attack, 13; Owen, War Poems, 79. 9 Hibberd, Wilfred Owen, xvii; Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 155, 187, 196, 283; Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 372, 421, 366. 10 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1975), 131. 11 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land Vol. 2 Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 260, 308–14. 12 Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2003), 7. See also Introduction. 13 Sherry, The Great War, 17. 14 Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester University Press, 1998), 10. 15 Vincent Sherry, “[Review of ] Modernism, History and the First World War”, Modernism/Modernity, 7.1 (2000), 174–5. 16 Tate, Modernism, 106. 212

Notes 213 17 Hynes, A War Imagined, 158–9, 167; The Soldier’s Tale (London: Penguin, 1997), 4, 12, 30. 18 Hynes, A War Imagined, 167. 19 Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (London: Pimlico, 2002), 30–1. 20 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (London: Penguin, 1991), 281. 21 Eric Leed, No Man’s Land (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 41,30, 31, 34, 36, 6, 8, 132–3. 22 Aldington, Death of a Hero, 127. 23 Isaac Rosenberg, The Collected Works (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), 103. 24 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire (London: Verso, 1997), 6, 154; Leed, No Man’s Land, 164, 181–2; Shephard, A War of Nerves, 33. 25 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms (London: Macmillan, 1995), 17; Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (Oxford University Press, 1993), 228–9; Owen, War Poems, 63, 162. 26 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (London: Pimlico, 2002), 85; Rosenberg, The Collected Works, 248; Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 116–17; Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 168–9. 27 Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet, 368. 28 Rosenberg, Collected Works, 239. 29 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 119; Sassoon, Counter-attack, 1; Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 69. 30 Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 6–7, 180; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 108–9. 31 Montague, Disenchantment, 1; Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End (London: Penguin, 1982), 618; Sassoon, Memoirs, 407; Trevor, The Myriad Faces of War, 709. 32 Shephard, A War of Nerves, 40. 33 Leed, No Man’s Land, 183–5; Owen, War Poems, 86. 34 Sherry, The Cambridge Companion, 39–40; Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 146–7. 35 Owen, War Poems, 88, 74; Sassoon, Collected Poems, 62, 17. 36 Sassoon, Collected Poems, 69, 77–8, 86; Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 208–9. 37 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford University Press, 1970), 146. 38 John Cassidy, Algernon C. Swinburne (New York: Twayne, 1964), 77; Owen, War Poems, 81; Algernon Swinburne, The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne,Vol. I (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904), 11. 39 Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale, 19, 55. 40 Graves, Good-bye to All That, 155. 41 Owen, War Poems, 68; Dominic Hibberd, Owen the Poet (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), 68. 42 Shephard, A War of Nerves, xxi. 43 Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 184.

1 Modernism in Crisis: The Rainbow 1 Percy Lubbock, The Letters of Henry James II (New York: Octagon, 1970), 398, 462.

214

Notes

2 Wyndham Lewis, ed., BLAST No. 1 (London: Bodley Head, 1914), 32; BLAST No. 2 (London: Bodley Head, 1915), 3. 3 Lewis, BLAST No. 2, 25; Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), 99. 4 See Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), xv; see Donal Lowry, ed., The South African War Reappraised (Manchester University Press, 2000), 204; Pakenham, The Boer War, 247; see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 45. 5 See Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring (London: Bantam, 1989), 116–17; see Edward Speirs, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester University Press, 1992), 184, 182, 185. 6 See Pakenham, The Boer War, 20–1, 24, 64, 67, 80, 112. 7 See Speirs, The Late Victorian Army, 96, 22, 104, 106; see Speirs, The Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1980), 248–9. 8 See Speirs, The Late Victorian Army, 71, 97, 103, 289. 9 Ibid., 91, 60, 322. 10 Ibid., 155–6. 11 Pakenham, The Boer War, 109–10. 12 See Speirs, The Late Victorian Army, 59. 13 John Keegan, The First World War (London: Random House, 1998), 144; see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 48, 122–5, 129; Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 125. 14 Samuel Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale (London: Penguin, 1997), 33, 41, 42; Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), 47. 15 See Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale, 43; Graves, Good-bye to All That, 99, 174. 16 See Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 44, 48; see Keegan, The First World War, 212; see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1975), 30; Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale, 56–8; see Eric Leed, No Man’s Land (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 30–6. 17 F.R. Leavis, D.H. Lawrence, Novelist (London: Pelican, 1995), 126, 130; Graham Holderness, D.H. Lawrence (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Humanities, 1982), 186; Kinkead-Weekes, “The Sense of History in The Rainbow”, 121, 133. 18 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 155. 19 Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 34; Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 113, 136. 20 See Kinkead-Weekes, “Introduction” to The Rainbow, xli. 21 Lewis, BLAST No. 2, 33. 22 See Leed, No Man’s Land, 39, 42, 70, 56, 55; See Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight, 21. 23 Ray Monk, “The Tiger and the Machine: D.H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 26.1 ( June 1996), 231; Daly, “D.H. Lawrence and Labour in the Great War”, Modern Languages Review, 89.1 ( Jan. 1994), 24. 24 Leavis, D.H. Lawrence, 169; Holderness, D.H. Lawrence, 188; John Worthen, D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1979), 79.

Notes 215

2 Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915 1 Jessie Pope, Jessie Pope’s War Poems (London: G. Richards, 1915), 15, 41. 2 Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 5. 3 T.S. Eliot, “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry IV”, Egoist, VI ( July 1919), 39. 4 Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 80. 5 Henri Bergson, Œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 635, 322. 6 T.S. Eliot. A Sermon (Cambridge University Press, 1948), 5; Shiv K. Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (London: Blackie, 1962), 154. 7 See Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality, 23–32. 8 James Miller. T.S. Eliot (Pennsylvania University Press, 2005), 146, 116. Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel (Oxford University Press, 1999), 29–30. 9 See Nicholas Hewitt, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 23. 10 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire (London: Verso, 1997), 125. 11 Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford University Press, 1977), 40. 12 Erik Svarny, “The Men of 1914” (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988), 55. 13 Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12 (London: Penguin, 1991), 89; “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 10 (London: Penguin, 1991), 326; David Montague Eder, War-Shock (London: Heinemann, 1917), 10. 14 Sigmund Freud, “Lecture 25: Anxiety” (1917), Penguin Freud Library vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1991), 441–2; Eder, War-Shock, 10; Sigmund Freud, “Lecture 14: Wish-fulfilment” (1917), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1991), 252. 15 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms (London: Macmillan, 1995), 61. 16 See Nicholls, Modernisms, 53; Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (Oxford University Press, 1993), 44–5. 17 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (London: Penguin, 1991), 88.

3 Testimony as History: The First “Women in Love” 1 F.R. Leavis, D.H. Lawrence, Novelist (London: Pelican, 1955) 206, 169; John Worthen, D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1979), 89; Graham Holderness, D.H. Lawrence (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Humanities Press, 1982), 209. 2 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (London: Bodley Head, 1990), 65, 101–2, 106. 3 John Keegan, The First World War (London: Random House, 1998), 298, 304, 307–8, 312, 316, 314, 319, 321, 321. Stuart Sillars, Art and Survival in First World War Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), 51; Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), 336.

216

Notes

4 Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), 141–2, 145. 5 Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester University Press, 1998), 5, 43. 6 The Sunday Times, 9 July 1916, 3. 7 Sillars, Art and Survival, 14. 8 The Times, 11 March, 6. 9 The Times, 8 May, 8. 10 The Times, 3 July, 9. 11 Robert Graves, Good-bye to all That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 283; Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War (London: Ebury Press, 2002), 169. 12 Mark Kinkead-Weekes and John Worthen, “More about The Rainbow”, DHLR, XXIX/3 (2000), 15. 13 Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 282. 14 The British Medical Journal, 1915, 833–5; Edwin Nehls, D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Vol. I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957–9), 331. 15 Paul Delaney, D.H. Lawrence’s Nightmare (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), 235. 16 Worthen, D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, 90, 100. 17 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (London: Routledge, 1992), 15. 18 Jon Glover and Jon Silkin, The Penguin Book of First World War Prose (London: Penguin, 1990), 344. 19 Ronald Draper, D.H. Lawrence (London: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 168–70; Glover and Silkin, The Penguin Book of First World War Prose, 345; Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 153. 20 Caruth, Trauma, 153. 21 Wilfred Owen, War Poems and Others (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 87. 22 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring (London: Bantam, 1989), 176. 23 See John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), 287; Kinkead-Weekes, D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 788–9. 24 The Lancet, 1916, 264. 25 Ibid., 265. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), 56, 33, 35; Tate, Modernism, 96. 29 Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 248. 30 Eric Leed, No Man’s Land (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 56. 31 Ibid., 102–3. 32 Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), 373. 33 George Panichas, ed., Promise of Greatness (London: Cassell, 1968), 47. 34 Herbert Read, In Retreat (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 13, 34. 35 Robert Nichols, Ardours and Endurances (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918), 37–41. 36 Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12 (London: Penguin, 1991), 79.

Notes 217 37 Maurice Maeterlinck, Hothouses, trans. Richard Howard (Princeton University Press, 2003), 54–5; J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1959), 101. 38 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms (London: Macmillan, 1995), 46; Patrick McGuinness, Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle (University of Exeter Press, 2000), 5. 39 Nicholls, Modernisms, 59. 40 Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (Oxford University Press, 1993), 60–1. 41 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (London: Penguin, 1991), 78. 42 Sigmund Freud “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915) Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (London: Penguin, 1991), 126. 43 Jennifer Birkett, The Sins of the Fathers (London: Quartet, 1986), 4; Caruth, Trauma, 129. 44 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (London: Penguin, 1991), 293, 301–2, 298. 45 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (London: Penguin, 1972), 357. 46 See Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight (Manchester, Carcanet, 1996), 197. 47 See Carl Krockel, The Politics of Influence: D.H. Lawrence and Germany (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 48 Keegan, The First World War, 141. 49 Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 195, 202, 215, 211, 220, 410, 412, 450. 50 Holderness, D.H. Lawrence, 211; Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 221, 401, 405; Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 175.

4 Eliot’s War Poetry: “Hysteria” to The Waste Land 1 Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 19. 2 Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 57; W.H.R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious (Cambridge University Press, 1922), 71, 73, 76; A.D. Moody, ed., The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 192. 3 Pierre Janet, Psychological Healing I (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925), 676. 4 T.S. Eliot, “Studies in Contemporary Criticism, II”, Egoist, V (Nov./Dec. 1918), 131. 5 T.S. Eliot, “Beyle and Balzac”, Athenaeum, 4648 (30 May 1919), 392–3. 6 Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow (London: Constable, 2001), 11, 14, 17. 7 Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, 78. 8 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (London: Routledge, 1992), 7. 9 T.S. Eliot, “[A review of ] Philosophy and War”, International Journal of Ethics, XXVII (Oct. 1916), 128. 10 T.S. Eliot, “Charles Péguy”, New Statesman, VIII (7 May 1916), 20. 11 T.S. Eliot, Letters Vol. 1, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 20. 12 Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years, 82. 13 Graham Clarke, ed., T.S. Eliot: Critical Assessments I (London: Christopher Helm, 1990), 78–9.

218

Notes

14 Eric Svarny, “The Men of 1914”, (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988), 98. 15 T.S. Eliot, “Observations”, Egoist, V (May 1918), 69. 16 T.S. Eliot, “Recent British Periodical Literature in Ethics”, International Journal of Ethics, XXVIII ( Jan. 1918), 273. 17 T.S. Eliot, “Correspondence”, Egoist, IV (Dec. 1917), 165. 18 T.S. Eliot, “Literature and the American Courts”, Egoist, V (March 1918), 39. 19 T.S. Eliot, “Short Reviews”, Egoist, V ( Jan. 1918), 10. 20 Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (London: Pimlico, 2002), xviii. 21 Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 62. 22 Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 1984), 55. 23 T.S. Eliot, “The Post-Georgians”, Athenaeum, 4641 (11 Apr. 1919), 171; “Kipling Redivivus”, Athenaeum, 4645 (9 May 1919), 298. 24 T.S. Eliot, “The New Elizabethans and the Old”, Athenaeum, 4640 (4 April 1919), 134–6. 25 T.S. Eliot, “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry IV”, Egoist, VI ( July 1919), 39. 26 T.S. Eliot, “The Method of Mr. Pound”, Athenaeum, 4669 (24 Oct. 1919), 1065. 27 T.S. Eliot, “Whether Rostand Had Something about Him”, Athenaeum, 4656 (25 July 1919), 665–6. 28 Herbert Read, Naked Warriors (London: Art and Letters, 1919), 33. 29 Ibid., 31. 30 Ibid., 40. 31 T.S. Eliot, “John Donne”, Nation & Athenaeum, XXXIII, 10 (9 June 1923), 331–2, p. 332. 32 T.S. Eliot, “London Letter”, Dial, LXXI (Sep. 1922), 330. 33 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 13 (London: Penguin, 1991), 321. 34 Sigmund Freud, “Lecture 28: Analytic Theory” (1916), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1991), 506. 35 A.D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 80; Moody, Cambridge Companion, 8; Bush, T.S. Eliot, 63. 36 Clarke, Critical Assessments I, 115, 83. 37 Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 38–40. 38 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (London: Penguin, 1991), 252, 254. 39 Felman, Testimony, 65. 40 Michael North, ed., The Waste Land (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 6. 41 David Montague Eder, War-Shock (London: Heinemann, 1917), 54. 42 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land Vol. 2 Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 312. 43 Sigmund Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 10 (London: Penguin, 1992), 333. 44 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7. 45 Eliot, “London Letter” (1922), 331. 46 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 129. 47 Grover Smith, T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 30.

Notes 219

5 Working Through: Lawrence in the Twenties 1 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (London: Abacus, 1994), 22; John Keegan, The First World War (London: Random House, 1998), 3, 8. 2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1940), 145. 3 Edwin Nehls, D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Vol. I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 497, 280. 4 Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 655, 518, 276, 274–5, 346. 5 Ibid., 541. 6 Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 59. 7 Ibid., 105, 177, 135. 8 Nehls, A Composite Biography, Vol. I, 508. 9 Ibid., Vol. III, 172. 10 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (London: Penguin, 1991), 19. 11 Ferenczi, Clinical Diary, 169.

6 Trauma Transfigured: “The Hollow Men” to Little Gidding 1 Sigmund Freud, “Analytic Theory” (1917), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1991), 506. 2 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (London: Routledge, 1992), 62. 3 Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 140; Dominick LaCapra, Writing History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 95–6; Ann E. Kaplan, Trauma Culture (London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 123. 4 T.S. Eliot, “Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, XVI (12 Jan. 1935), 34; A.A. Milne, “T.S. Eliot’s Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, XVI (19 Jan. 1935), 95; T.S. Eliot, “Mr Milne and War”, Time and Tide, XVI (26 Jan. 1935), 124. 5 Berg Collection; Virginia Woolf, A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary (London: Hogarth, 1990), 463; Hayward Collection, Kings College Library, Cambridge. 6 Hayward Collection, Kings College Library, Cambridge. 7 Jason Harding, The Criterion (Oxford University Press, 2002), 208. 8 T.S. Eliot, “The Prose of the Preacher: The Sermons of Donne”, Listener, II (3 July 1929), 23. 9 Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 1984), 139. 10 Allen Tate, ed., T.S. Eliot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), 59. 11 Stephen Spender, T.S. Eliot (London: Fontana, 1975), 117. 12 T.S. Eliot, “The Church and Society”, New English Weekly, VI (21 March 1935), 482. 13 T.S. Eliot, “Christianity and Communism”, Listener, VII (16 March 1932), 382. 14 T.S. Eliot, “The Minor Metaphysicals: From Cowley to Dryden”, Listener, III (9 May 1930), 642. 15 Eliot, “Christianity and Communism” (1932), 383.

220

Notes

16 Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), 20; T.S. Eliot, “Modern Heresies”, New English Weekly, V (3 May 1934), 71–2; T.S. Eliot, “Notes on the Way” (1935), 34. 17 T.S. Eliot, “The Search for Moral Sanction”, Listener, VII (30 March 1932), 446. 18 T.S. Eliot, “Thinking in Verse: A Survey of Early Seventeenth-Century Poetry”, Listener, II (12 March 1930), 442. 19 Hayward Collection, Kings College Library, Cambridge. 20 Houghton Library. 21 A.D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 174. 22 Ibid., 203. 23 The Star, February 1938, Arthur Lawson, “The Soul of a Poet”, 1. 24 Bernard Bergonzi, T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1969), 128. 25 Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s New Life (Oxford University Press, 1988), 110. 26 T.S. Eliot, “Towards a Christian Britain”, in The Church Looks Ahead (London: Faber & Faber, 1941). 27 Houghton Library. 28 Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), 166, 168. 29 Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 252. 30 Hayward Collection, Kings College Library, Cambridge. 31 Gordon, Eliot’s New Life, 129. 32 T.S. Eliot, “T.S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime”, Common Sense, XI (Oct. 1942), 351. 33 T.S. Eliot, “Leçon de Valéry”, Cahiers du Sud, 276/278 (1946), 76–7. 34 Houghton Library. 35 Hayward Collection, Kings College Library, Cambridge.

Conclusion: The Legacy of War upon the Legacy of Modernism 1 Michael Grant, T.S. Eliot Vol. I (London: Routledge, 1982), 242. 2 David Ellis and Ornella de Zordo, D.H. Lawrence Vol. 1 (London: Helm Information, 1992), 157. 3 Ibid., 253–4. 4 Richard Aldington, Literary Studies and Reviews (London: Allen & Unwin, 1924), 198, 200. 5 Richard Aldington, D.H. Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), 12. 6 Ibid., 23–4. 7 David Goldie, A Critical Difference (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 2, 31, 33, 48, 60. 8 Ellis, D.H. Lawrence Vol. 1, 119, 112. 9 Ibid.,121. 10 John Middleton Murry, Son of Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931), 47, 130. 11 Ibid., 135.

Notes 221 12 Ian MacKillop, F.R. Leavis (London: Allen Lane, 1995), 18. 13 F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), 9, 87–8, 81. 14 MacKillop, F.R. Leavis, 149. 15 Ibid., 106. 16 Denys Thompson, The Leavises (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 171, 58, 139. 17 Anne Samson, F.R. Leavis (University of Toronto Press, 1992), 1. 18 MacKillop, F.R. Leavis, 45. 19 Samson, F.R. Leavis, 7. 20 Francis Mulhern, The Moment of “Scrutiny” (London: Verso, 1981), 81, 82, 85. 21 Ellis, D.H. Lawrence Vol. 1, 330. 22 H. Coombes, ed., Penguin Critical Anthologies: D.H. Lawrence (London: Penguin, 1973), 269, 268. 23 Ellis, D.H. Lawrence Vol. 1, 256. 24 Coombes, D.H. Lawrence, 280. 25 Ibid., 269. 26 Michael Grant, T.S. Eliot Vol. I (London: Routledge, 1982), 329. 27 Ibid., Vol. II, 451, 456, 413, 505, 507, 509. 28 Ibid., 587, 589; Ronald Bush, D.H. Lawrence, 226; Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot Vol. I (Oxford University Press, 1984), 503; John Xiros Cooper, T.S. Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23. 29 Ellis, D.H. Lawrence Vol. 1, 173; Cooper, T.S Eliot, 45, iix. 30 Cooper, T.S. Eliot, 114; Paul Murray, T.S. Eliot and Mysticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 39.

Bibliography Eliot: primary texts “Beyle and Balzac”, Athenaeum, 4648 (30 May 1919), 392–3. “Charles Péguy”, New Statesman, VIII (7 Oct. 1916), 19–20. “Christianity and Communism”, Listener, VII (16 March 1932), 382–3. “The Church and Society”, The New English Weekly, VI (21 March 1935), 482. “Correspondence”, Egoist, IV (Dec. 1917), 165. “Kipling Redivivus”, Athenaeum, 4645 (9 May 1919), 297–8. “Leçon de Valéry”, Cahiers du Sud, 276/278 (1946), 74–80. The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume I. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1988. “Literature and the American Courts”, Egoist, V (March 1918), 39. “London Letter”, Dial, LXXI (Sep. 1922), 329–31. “The Method of Mr. Pound”, Athenaeum, 4669 (24 Oct. 1919), 1065. “The Minor Metaphysicals: From Cowley to Dryden”, Listener, III (April 9 1930), 641–2. “Modern Heresies”, New English Weekly, V (3 May 1934), 71–2. “Mr Milne and War”, Time and Tide, XVI (26 Jan. 1935), 124. “The New Elizabethans and the Old”, Athenaeum, 4640 (4 April 1919), 134–6. “Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, XVI (5 Jan. 1935), 6–7. “Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, XVI (12 Jan. 1935), 33–4. “Observations”, Egoist, V (May 1918), 69–70. [A review of] Philosophy and War, International Journal of Ethics, XXVII (Oct. 1916), 128. “The Post-Georgians”, Athenaeum, 4641 (11 Apr. 1919), 171–2. “The Prose of the Preacher: The Sermons of Donne”, Listener, II (July 3 1929), 22–3. “Recent British Periodical Literature in Ethics”, International Journal of Ethics, XXVIII ( Jan. 1918), 270–7. “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry IV”, Egoist, VI (July 1919), 39–40. “The Search for Moral Sanction”, Listener, VII (30 March 1932), 445–6. A Sermon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. “Studies in Contemporary Criticism, II”, Egoist, V (Nov. / Dec. 1918), 131–3. “Short Reviews”, Egoist, V (Jan. 1918), 10. “T.S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime”, Common Sense, XI (October 1942), 351. “Thinking in Verse: A Survey of Early Seventeenth-Century Poetry”, Listener, II (12 March 1930), 441–3. “Towards a Christian Britain” in The Church Looks Ahead. London: Faber & Faber, 1941. “Whether Rostand Had Something about Him”, Athenaeum, 4656 (25 July 1919), 665–6.

222

Bibliography 223

Eliot: secondary texts Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot: A Life. London: Penguin, 1993. Allan, Mowbray. T.S. Eliot’s Impersonal Theory of Poetry. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1974. Asher, Kenneth. T.S. Eliot and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Bergonzi, Bernard, ed. T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets: A Casebook. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1969. Bergonzi, Bernard. T.S. Eliot. London: Macmillan, 1972. Bush, Ronald. T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Clarke, Graham, ed. T.S. Eliot: Critical Assessments I & IV. London: Christopher Helm, 1990. Cooper, John Xiros. T.S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Crawford, Fred D. Mixing Memory and Desire: The Waste Land and British Novels. London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982. Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Brighton: Harvester, 1987. Gardner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. London: Faber & Faber, 1978. Goldie, David. A Critical Difference. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s New Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Grant, Michael. T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage Vols. I and II. London: Routledge, 1982. Gross, Harvey. The Contrived Corridor: History and Fatality in Modern Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1971. Harding, Jason. The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lamos, Colleen. Deviant Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Leavis, F.R. New Bearings in English Poetry. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot. London: Methuen, 1965. Kumar, Shiv K. Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel. London: Blackie, 1962. Manganiello, Dominic. T. S. Eliot and Dante. Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Mason, H.A. “Eliot’s ‘Ode’ – A Neglected Poem?” Cambridge Quarterly, 19:4 (1990), 303–5. Mayer, John T. T.S. Eliot’s Silent Voices. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Miller, James E. T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 2005. Miller, James E. T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land. London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978. Moody, A.D., ed. “The Waste Land” in Different Voices. London: Edward Arnold, 1974.

224

Bibliography

Moody, A.D., Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Moody, A.D., ed. The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1994. Murray, Paul. T.S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of Four Quartets. Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1991. North, Michael, ed. The Waste Land. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Olney, James, ed. T.S. Eliot: Essays From the Southern Review. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Rainey, Lawrence. Revisiting The Waste Land. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. San Juan Jr., E., ed. A Casebook on Gerontion. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1970. Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Seymour-Jones, Carole, Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. London: Constable, 2001. Sharpe, Tony. T.S. Eliot: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan, 1991. Shusterman, Richard. T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Smith, Grover. T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Spender, Stephen. Eliot. London: Fontana, 1975. Stead, C.K. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. London: Hutchinson, 1964. Sultan, Stanley. Eliot, Joyce and Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Svarny, Erik. “The Men of 1914”: T.S. Eliot and Early Modernism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988. Tate, Allen, ed. T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967.

D.H. Lawrence: secondary texts Primary texts for D.H. Lawrence are contained in the List of Abbreviations. Aldington, Richard. D.H. Lawrence. London: Chatto & Windus, 1930. Coombes, H., ed. Penguin Critical Anthologies: D.H. Lawrence. London: Penguin, 1973. Daly, Macdonald. “D.H. Lawrence and Labour in the Great War”, Modern Languages Review, 89.1 ( Jan. 1994) 19–38. Delaney, Paul. D.H. Lawrence’s Nightmare. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979. Draper, Ronald P. D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. London: Barnes & Noble, 1970. Ellis, David. D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Ellis, David and Ornella de Zordo, eds. D.H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments Vol. 1. London: Helm Information, 1992. Fernihough, Anne. The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Bibliography 225 Holderness, Graham. D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Humanities Press, 1982. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Rainbow. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark and Worthen, John. “More about The Rainbow”, DHLR, XXIX/3 (2000). Krockel, Carl. The Politics of Influence: D. H. Lawrence and Germany. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Leavis, F.R. D.H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Pelican Books, 1955. Monk, Ray. “The Tiger and the Machine: D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 26.1 ( June 1996), 205–46. Murry, John Middleton. Son of Woman. London: Jonathan Cape, 1931. Nehls, Edwin, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957–1959. Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1979. Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. London: Allen Lane, 2005.

War: primary texts Aldington, Richard. Death of a Hero. London: Chatto & Windus, 1930. Arthur, Max. Forgotten Voices of the Great War. London: Ebury Press, 2002. Ford, Ford Madox. Parade’s End. London: Penguin, 1982. Graves, Robert. Good-bye to All That. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. Glover, Jon and Jon Silkin, The Penguin Book of First World War Prose. London: Penguin, 1990. Manning, Frederic. Her Privates We. London: Peter Davies, 1930. Milne, A.A. “T.S. Eliot’s Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, XVI (19 Jan. 1935), 95. Montague, C.E. Disenchantment. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922. Nichols, Robert. Ardours and Endurances. London: Chatto & Windus, 1918. Owen, Wilfred. War Poems and Others. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973. Pope, Jessie. Jessie Pope’s War Poems. London: G. Richards, 1915. Read, Herbert. Naked Warriors. London: Art and Letters, 1919. Read, Herbert. In Retreat. London: Hogarth Press, 1925. Rosenberg, Isaac. The Collected Works. London: Chatto & Windus, 1984. Sassoon, Siegfried. Counter-Attack and Other Poems. London: Heinemann, 1918. Sassoon, Siegfried. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber & Faber, 1972. Sassoon, Siegfried. Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 2002.

War: secondary texts Bergonzi, Bernard. Heroes’ Twilight. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996. Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. London: Reaktion Books, 1996.

226

Bibliography

Buitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987. Coetze, Frans and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee. Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995. Dyer, Geoff. The Missing of the Somme. London: Phoenix Press, 2001. Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. London: Bantam Press, 1989. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land Vol. 2 Sexchanges. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the Poet. Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1986. Hibberd, Dominic. Wilfred Owen. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002. Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Abacus, 1994. Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Bodley Head, 1990. Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier’s Tale. London: Penguin, 1997. Keegan, John. The First World War. London: Random House, 1998. Leed, Eric J. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Lowry, Donal, ed. The South African War Reappraised. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pakenham, Thomas. The Boer War. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979. Panichas, George A. ed. Promise of Greatness: The War of 1914–1916. London: Cassell, 1968. Parfitt, George. Fiction of the First World War: A Study. London: Faber & Faber, 1988. Roberts, David. Out in the Dark: Poetry of the First World War in Context and with Basic Notes. Burgess Hill: Saxon Books, 1998. Sherry, Vincent, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Sherry, Vincent. “[Review of] Modernism, History and the First World War” Modernism/Modernity, 7.1 (2000), 174–5. Sherry, Vincent. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Silkin, Jon. Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Sillars, Stuart. Art and Survival in First World War Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1987. Speirs, Edward M. The Army and Society 1815–1914. London: Longman, 1980. Speirs, Edward M. The Late Victorian Army: 1868–1902. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. London: Penguin, 1972. Vansittart, Peter. Voices from the Great War. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.

Bibliography 227 Welland, Dennis. Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. London: Chatto & Windus, 1978. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet 1886–1918. London: Duckworth, 1998. Wilson, Trevor, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986. Winter, Denis. Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War. London: Allen Lane, 1978.

Other primary texts Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Henri Bergson, Henri. Œuvres, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. Ford, Ford Madox. Letters of Ford Madox Ford. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf, II. Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1940. Huysmans, J.-K., transl. Robert Baldick. Against Nature. London: Penguin, 1959. James, Henry. The Letters of Henry James Volume II. Ed. Percy Lubbock. New York: Octagon Books, 1970. Laforgue, Jules. Poems of Jules Laforgue. London: Anvil Press, 2001. Lewis, Wyndham, ed. BLAST No. 1.London: Bodley Head, 1914. Lewis, Wyndham, ed. BLAST No. 2.London: Bodley Head, 1915. Lewis, Wyndham. Blasting and Bombardiering. London: Calder & Boyars, 1967. Lewis, Wyndham. Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career up-to-date. London: Hutchinson, 1950. Maeterlinck, Maurice, trans. Richard Howard. Hothouses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pound, Ezra. Selected Poems. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977. Swinburne, Algernon. The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Vol. I: Poems and Ballads. London: Chatto & Windus, 1904. The Star, February 1938, Arthur Lawson, “The Soul of a Poet”, 1. The Sunday Times, 9 July 1916. The Times, 11 March, 8 May, 3 July 1916.

Psychological theory Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Eder, Montague David. “An Address on the Psycho-Pathology of the War Neuroses”, The Lancet (12 August 1916), 264–8. Eder, Montague David. War-Shock: The Psycho-Neuroses in War Psychology and Treatment. London: Heinemann, 1917. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. London: Routledge, 1992. Ferenczi, Sándor. The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi. Ed. Judith Dupont. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

228

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. 1 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. 10 On Psychopathology. London: Penguin, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. 11 On Metapsychology. London: Penguin, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. 12 Civilization, Society and Religion. London: Penguin, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. 13 The Origins of Religion. London: Penguin, 1991. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995. Janet, Pierre. Psychological Healing: A Historical and Clinical Study. London: Allen & Unwin, 1925. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. London: Rutgers University Press, 2005. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Rivers, W.H.R. Instinct and the Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922. Shephard, Ben. A War of Nerves. London: Pimlico, 2002. Stonebridge, Lyndsey The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Vittoz, Roger. Treatment of Neurasthenia by Teaching of Brain Control. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911.

General studies Aldington, Richard. Literary Studies and Reviews. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1999. Bersani, Leo. Baudelaire and Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Birkett, Jennifer. The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870–1914. London: Quartet Books, 1986. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. London: Secker & Warburg, 1993. Cassidy, John A. Algernon C. Swinburne. New York: Twayne, 1964. Clements, Patricia. Baudelaire and the English Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Collie, Michael. Jules Laforgue. London: Athlone Press, 1977. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land Vol. 2 Sexchanges. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Hewitt, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hiddleston, J.A. Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Holmes, Anne. Jules Laforgue and Poetic Innovation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Kritzman, Lawrence D., ed., The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Bibliography 229 Levenson, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lloyd, Rosemary, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lubbock, Percy. Letters of Henry James II. New York: Octagon, 1986. MacKillop, Ian. F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism. London: Allen Lane, 1995. McGuinness, Patrick, ed. Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. Miller Lane, Barbara and Leila J. Rupp, eds. Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Documentation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978. Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of “Scrutiny”. London: Verso, 1981. Murry, John Middleton. Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995. Nolte, Ernst. Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism. Munich: R. Piper, 1965. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Pinto, Vivien de Sola. Crisis in English Poetry. London: Hutchinson, 1951. Samson, Anne. F.R. Leavis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Smith, Stan, The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Sutton, Michael. Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. New York: Dutton, 1958. Thompson, Denys. The Leavises: Recollections and Impressions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Weber, Eugen. The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Woolf, Virginia. A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary. London: Hogarth, 1990. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. London: Pimlico, 2002. Wright, Anne. Literature of Crisis 1910–22. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Index Agadir Crisis, 54–5 Aiken, Conrad, 50, 55, 93, 118, 208 Aldington, Richard, 9, 85, 126, 131 as advocate of Lawrence, 200, 201–2 as central figure in English Modernism, 200–1 and comparison of conflict in city and trenches, 10 and Death of a Hero, 10, 77 and First World War, 4 and “Stepping Heavenward”, 201 Alfands, Lieutenant Anthony, 11–12 alienation, 10 and Eliot, 98 and Lawrence, 67 Altieri, Charles, 90 anxiety, 20 and Eliot, 53, 54, 56, 57, 176–7, 185–7 and Freud, 20, 54, 56 and Lawrence, 20 and response to, 11 and trauma, 54 Asquith, Lady Cynthia, 208 Asquith, HH, 61–2 Auden, WH, 210 Barber, Thomas Philip, 87 Baudelaire, Charles and “A une passante”, 50 and “Au lectueur”, 14 and centrality to Modernist culture, 11 and ennui, 14, 15 and experience of the city, 11, 12, 14 and influence on Eliot, 50–1 and “La Cloche fêlée”, 17 and “La Destruction”, 12 and “Le Démon”, 12 and “Les Sept Vieillards”, 14, 50 and mediation of shock, 12–13 and narcissism, 80–1

and sadism, 17 and survival strategies, 11 bayonet, in war poetry, 3–4 Benda, Julien, 159 Benjamin, Walter on Baudelaire, 11 and shock, 13 Bergonzi, Bernard, 2 and descriptions of death in war poetry, 5 Bergson, Henri, 47 Birkett, Jennifer, 83 Birrell, Augustine, 69 Blunden, Edmund, 9, 85 Bourget, Paul, 80 Bourke, Joanna, 75 Boutroux, Émile, 94 Brenan, Gerald, 77 British Army and changes in First World War, 31 and decimation of professional army in First World War, 30–1 and Lawrence’s depiction of, 28–9, 30 British Expeditionary Force (BEF), 30–1 Brooke, Rupert, and English patriotism, 25 Browne, Martin, 178 Browne, Sir Thomas, 183 Buitenhuis, Peter, 62 Bush, Ronald, 118, 121, 157, 166 Campbell, Gordon, 36, 39 Campbell, James, 6 Carswell, Catherine, 67, 132 Caruth, Cathy, 68, 123 Chamberlain, Neville, 184 Chapman, George, 179 Churchill, Winston, 188 cities and Baudelaire, 11, 12, 14 and Eliot, 49–51, 114, 115 and Modernism, 11, 12

230

Index 231 Cooper, John Xiros, 210 Cowley, Abraham, 165 Crashaw, Richard, 165 Culpin, Karl, 97, 100 Daly, Macdonald, 40 Dante, 55, 121, 165, 167, 181 Davidson, John, 55 Davis, Paul, 19 death, and descriptions in war poetry, 5 Decadence, 9 and art’s precedence over life, 80 and death, 82 and decomposition, 80 and Eliot, 56–7, 58–9 and Lawrence, 58–9, 79–80 and narcissism, 57, 80–1 and Owen, 13–14, 18 and psychological tropes of, 14 and Romanticism, 14 and sadomasochism, 17, 82 and Sassoon, 13–14 and sexuality, 80 Delaney, Paul, 66 democracy, and post-war period, 128–9 Demuth, Norman, 63 direct experience, and aesthetic of, 9, 13 Disarmament Conference, 170 displacement and Lawrence’s The First “Women in Love”, 68–71, 74–5 and Owen, 69 and Sassoon, 69 dissociated personality, 89 dissociation, and Eliot, 90, 97–8, 102, 103, 126 Dobrée, Bonamy, 199 Donne, John, 165 Doren, Mark von, 208 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 126 Dunkirk, 188 Eder, MD, 10, 54, 72, 120, 141 and symbolic conversion, 72–3 Eliot, TS, 1, 108 and “A Cooking Egg”, 101–2 and “A Game of Chess”, 115, 120, 122

and “A Note on War Poetry”, 194 and After Strange Gods, 177 and “Airs of Palestine, No 2”, 99 and alienation, 98 and allusive poetry, 55 and American Civil War, 177 and Anglo-Catholicism, 163–4 and anticipation of death, 95–6 and anxiety, 20, 176–7 and Ash Wednesday, 22, 166–70: historical potential of transfiguration, 167–8; political reading of, 168; religious vision of, 166–8; uncertain direction of, 168–9 and “Bacchus and Ariadne 2nd Debate between the Body and Soul”, 47–8, 52 and Baudelaire, 11, 13, 50–1 and Bergson, 47–8 and bombing of Faber’s flat, 195–6 and Burnt Norton, 21, 178–80: alternative modes of being, 178; conclusion, 180; contradiction in Eliot’s thinking, 180; disavowal of religion, 180; material existence, 179; reminiscence, 178–9 and “Catholicism and the International Order”, 171–2 and “Christianity and Communism”, 172 and cities, 13: treatment of, 49–51, 114, 115 and collapse of European civilisation, 170 and comparison with Read, 110–12 and contradictions in writings, 46 and “Coriolan”, 170 and The Criterion, 159, 160, 162, 164, 165, 171 and critical opinion of, 208–10 and criticism of contemporary poetry, 108–10 and criticism of Georgians, 103 and criticism of late Romantics, 18 and criticism of war poets, 103, 108–9, 110, 125–6 and cultural crisis, 102–3

232

Index

Eliot, TS – continued and cultural reconstruction of Europe, 156, 159–60, 162: pessimism over, 194–5 and cultural trauma, 90 and the dead, 197–8 and “Death by Water”, 115–16, 118–19, 123–4 and Decadence, 56–7, 58–9 and detachment, 157, 158, 159 and disorientation, 11, 91 and dissociated personality, 89, 90: displaced causes of, 90 and dissociation, 126: personal and literary life, 102, 103; as technique of analysis, 90; from victims of his time, 157, 158; writing in French, 97–8 and distancing from historical events, 110 and “Do I know how I feel?”, 50 and Dry Salvages, 21, 188–9: conclusion, 189; Dunkirk, 188; experience of death during war, 188; religion, 189; sea imagery, 188–9 and East Coker, 185–8: anxiety and dread, 185–6; consistency of mood, 185; identifying with war effort, 187–8; prophetic nature of, 185; religious solution to anxiety, 186–7; values for prosecution of war, 188 and The Egoist, 102, 103 and “Elegy”, 112 and ennui, 16 and exchanges with Milne on war, 157–8 and “Exequy”, 116–17 and false witnessing, 157 and The Family Reunion, 21, 180–1: core insight of, 182; deceptiveness of memory, 183; references to The Wasteland, 182–3; trauma, 181–2, 183; uncertainty of conclusion, 184 and financial problems, 93 and “First Debate between the Body and Soul”, 51

and First World War, alternatives to remembrance of, 165: American entry into, 96–7; confused feelings about, 44, 45; dismisses value of remembrance of, 164; feels actively involved in, 97; futility of, 100–1; identification with soldiers, 97; identification with victims, 101; imagined contribution to, 98; impact of, 96; reaction to, 91; recovery from, 22; rejected by US Navy, 102, 104; relation to, 20; repression of, 22; stress of, 21 and forgetting, 20–1 and Four Quartets, 116, 184: affirmation of Europe’s culture, 195; response to contemporary events, 184–5 and “Gerontion”, 20, 110–12 and guilt, 19, 20, 45 and historical sense, 44 and “Hysteria”, 21, 53, 92, 93, 95 and The Idea of a Christian Society, 184 and immediate experience, 52–3 and “Imperfect Critics”, 18 and impersonality, 45, 94, 96, 100–1, 112–13, 198 and impotence, 156 and “In Silent Corridors of Death”, 93 and inability to use personal suffering, 126–7 and Inventions of a March Hare, 118 and Knowledge and Experience, 49, 52, 94 and Laforgue, 46, 49 and “Le Directeur”, 98 and “Leçon de Valéry”, 194–5 and literary development of, 89 and Little Gidding, 22, 161, 190–4: ambiguous setting of, 193; Blitz, 190–1, 192; emotional disengagement, 194; humility, 191; identification with aggressor, 194; incarnation, 190, 191–2; poets alluded to, 191; religious vision of, 190, 193–4; speaker’s

Index 233 trauma, 192; spiritual unity, 192; tradition, 192–3; war and fulfillment of religious vision, 190 at Lloyds Bank, 96, 97, 113 and “Lune de mile”, 98 and marriage, 89, 91: entrapped by, 91; on first year of, 93; impact of, 92; impact of war on, 92–3; nature of relationship, 91–2; sexual history, 104; shared clinical symptoms, 92; splits from Vivienne, 181; Vivienne’s affair with Russell, 21, 102, 103, 104, 108; as war condition, 92 and martyrdom, 174–5, 176 and “Mélange adultère de tout”, 98 and mental illness, 126 and the Mind of Europe, 198–9 and Modernism, association with, 197: position in, 198, 208–11 and “Morning at the Window”, 53 and “Mr Apollinax”, 95 and Munich agreement, 184 and Murder in the Cathedral, 172: anxiety, 176–7; Eliot’s summary of, 176; martyrdom, 174–5 and nervous breakdown, 89, 103–4, 108, 113, 118 and “Notes on the Way”, 173 and “Ode on Independence Day”, 22, 105–6 and pacifism, 157–8 and personal crises, 89 and personal development, 46 and “Petit Epître”, 98 as poet of war, 208–11 and political commentary, 162–3 and political ideas, attitude towards contemporary history, 163: attitude towards fascism, 170; literary fascism, 163; role of religion, 165–6 and post-1918 disillusionment, 159 and post-war reputation, 210 and post-war revival of literary activity, 108 and pre-1915 poetry, 49–59: anticipation of war, 54–5; anxiety, 53, 54, 56, 57; Baudelaire’s

influence, 50–1; Decadence, 56–7; ignorance of events, 55–6; immediate experience, 52–3; narcissism, 57–8; preparing for war, 53–8; sadomasochism, 56; significance of, 49–50; traumatic reaction to the world, 51–2; treatment of the city, 49–51; war psychology, 56–8 and “Preludes III”, 52 and Prufrock and Other Observations, 99, 118 and “Prufrock’s Pervigilian”, 52 and psychoanalysis, 182: discards suspicion of, 177–8; resistance to, 117 and reconciling dead of war with living, 197–8 and redemption, 161 and “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry”, 45–6, 49, 109, 110 and religion, 22: advocates central importance of, 171; Crusades, 172–3; martyrdom, 174–5, 176; resistance to foreign militarism, 172–3; role of, 165–6, 171, 184; uncertainty over role of, 175 and “Religion Without Humanism”, 182 and religious transcendence, 21, 156, 159 and retirement from poetry, 195 and rhetoric, 109–10 and The Rock, 22, 172–3: martyrdom, 174 and satirical poetry, 44–5, 98–9 and “Second Caprice in North Cambridge”, 51 and self-contentment, 89 and sexuality, 90–1 and sidelines trauma of war, 156 and “Silence”, 51 and Spanish Civil War, 158 and survival and victimhood, 105 and survival strategies, 11 and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”, 16, 105, 106–8 and symptoms of trauma, 21

234

Index

Eliot, TS – continued and “TS Eliot on Poetry in Wartime”, 194 and “The Burial of the Dead”, 113–14, 183 and “The Burnt Dancer”, 54, 55 and “The Death of St Narcissus”, 20, 57–8 and “The Death of the Duchess”, 94, 95 and “The Engine”, 53 and “The Fire Sermon”, 115, 122–3 and “The Function of Criticism”, 159–60 and “The Hippopotamus”, 99 and “The Hollow Men”, 159, 160–1: objectified quality of, 160–1; origins of, 160; redemption, 161; war experience, 160 and “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, 48, 52 and “The Love Song of Saint Sebastian”, 20, 55, 56–7 and “The Metaphysical Poets”, 171 and “The Method of Mr Pound”, 109 and “The Minor Metaphysicals”, 171 and “The Three Voices of Poetry”, 184 and therapy, 117 and “Thoughts After Lambeth”, 175 and “Towards a Christian Britain”, 190 and tradition, 90, 109, 110, 127, 156, 159–60, 165, 192–3, 197–8: complexity of appeal to, 199; Mind of Europe, 198–9 and “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, 2, 44, 45, 100, 197–8 and traumatic imitation, 22 and “Tristan Corbière”, 99–100 and The Unity of European Culture, 162 and “Up Boys and at ’em”, 44–5 and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 170–1 and Verdenal, 46–9, 91, 95, 113, 118–19, 120–1, 124–5 and The Waste Land, 16, 20, 22: contextualisation in the war, 122; as document of recovery, 118;

draft fragment of, 94; drafting of, 113–16; Eliot’s assessment of, 118, 124; emotional development, 123–4; in The Family Reunion, 182–3; hyacinth passage, 120–1; interpretations of, 118; intertextual references, 121, 122–3, 127; melancholia, 119, 123–4; Mind of Europe, 199; as model of classical Modernism, 199; mourning, 119, 123–4; multiple perspectives, 121; neurotic dream structure, 118; personal references, 122; private experience, 127; reconstructing experience, 117; therapeutic reintegration of materials, 121; traumatised civilian, 121; Verdenal, 118–19, 120–1, 124–5 and “What the Thunder Said”, 124 and “Whether Rostand had Something about him”, 109 Eliot, Vivienne, 89, 91 and affair with Russell, 102, 103, 104, 108 and illnesses of, 91, 92, 97 and impact of war on men, 96 and neuralgia, 92, 93 and relationship with TS, 91–2 and splits from TS, 181 ennui, 14–15 and nature of, 15 and war trauma, 15 Erikson, Kai, 23 Faber, Geoffrey, 195 false witnessing, and Eliot, 157 fascism and Eliot’s attitude towards, 170 and imperative to intervene against, 176 and rise in Germany, 170 Felman, Shoshana, 67–8, 119 Ferenczi, Sándor, 21, 145 and dissociated personality, 89 and traumatic imitation, 34, 130–1 Figley, Charles, 105

Index 235 First World War and casualties, 61 and changed nature of war, 31–2 and defensive strategy, 76 and failure of peace calls, 61–2 and impact of, 128 and inter-war debate on legacy of, 162 and Modernism, 1–2 and newspaper coverage of, 62–3 and remembrance of, 164 and Somme Offensive, 61, 63 and “stab in the back” theory of German defeat, 129 and war economy, 86–7 and war ideology, 39 Ford, Ford Madox, 9, 14 Forster, EM, 199 Foucauld, Charles de, 190 Fournier, Henri-Alban, 54–5 Franklin, Benjamin, 146 French, Sir John, 31 Freud, Sigmund and anxiety, 20, 54, 56 and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 83, 131–2 and death, 78 and developmental theory, 126 and ego ideal, 58 and identification, 119 and illness after trauma, 117 and Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, 81 and masochism, 81 and melancholia, 119 and mourning, 119 and narcissism, 83 and “On Narcissism”, 58, 81 and sadism, 81 and sadomasochism, 81 and successful therapy, 156 and therapeutic approach to trauma, 131–2 and “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”, 53–4 and trauma, 10 Fry, Roger, 159 Fuss, Diana, 34 Fussell, Paul, and The Great War and Modern Memory, 6

Gardiner, Rolf, 153 Gardner, Helen, 185 Gardner, Jack, 91 Garnett, David, 66, 129 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 38 General Strike (1926), 162 Germany and reoccupation of Rhineland, 176 and rise of fascism, 170 and Rome-Berlin Axis, 176 and “stab in the back”, 129 Goldring, Douglas, 103 Gomez de la Serna, Ramón, 159 Gordon, Lyndall, 50, 157 Gordon, Maj-Gen Charles, 27 Gourmont, Rémy de, 90 Graves, Robert, 63 and battalion losses, 31 and enlistment of, 25 and limited experience of war, 5 and military drill, 76 Grenfell, Julian, and war, 31 Haig, Sir Douglas, 61 Harvey, John, 205 Hayward, John, 103–4, 126, 158, 181, 192, 195 HD (Hilda Dolittle), 7 Henley, William Ernest, 40 Hesse, Herman, 159 Hibberd, Dominic, 18 Hinckley, Eleanor, 97 Hindenburg, Paul von, 129, 154 Hitler, Adolf, 129, 146, 154, 170, 176, 183 Hobsbawm, Eric, 128 Hogan, JP, 209 Holderness, Graham, 32 and Lawrence’s The Rainbow, 42 and Lawrence’s Women in Love, 60 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 60, 93 Hulme, TE, 1, 93 Huxley, Aldous, 131, 207 Huysmans, J-K, and A rebours, 17 Hynes, Samuel, 8–9, 18 and aesthetic of direct experience, 9 and The Soldier’s Tale, 8: British Army, 31

236

Index

Hynes, Samuel – continued and A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture, 8 impersonality, and Eliot, 45, 94, 96, 100–1, 112–13, 198 Jaffe, Elsie, 154 James, Henry, and impact of First World War on, 24 Janet, Pierre, 90, 157 Johnson, William, 15 Joyce, James, 1, 201 Kaplan, Cora, 157 Keegan, John, 30, 61, 128 Kellog-Briand Pact, 161 Kenner, Hugh, 118, 157 Keynes, John Maynard, 66 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 32, 36, 65 Kirkup, James, 209 Kitchener, Lord Herbert, 25, 27, 30 LaCapra, Dominic, 157 Laforgue, Jules, 46, 49 Lansdowne, Lord, 62 Laub, Dori, 93, 157 Lawrence, DH, 1 and Aaron’s Rod, 132–3, 136: Eliot’s review of, 199–200; persistence of war, 132–3; traumatic content, 132 and alienation, 67 and analysis of war, 75–8 and anticipates Second World War, 128, 129 and anxiety, 20 and authoritarianism, 137–8 and awareness of conditions of modern warfare, 32–3 and breakdown of, 21, 65–6, 67 and confused loyalty, 25 and Decadence, 58–9, 79–80 and distortion, 157 and divided attitude towards post-war world, 136 and “Education of the People”, 133, 136–7: programme of education, 137; role of educators, 137

and “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani”, 33, 58 and England as fighting country, 153 and “England, My England”, 40–1: excludes death by bayonet, 4; as postscript to The Rainbow, 40 and Fantasia of the Unconscious, 137–8: authoritarianism, 138 and The First “Women in Love”, 21: alienation during writing, 67; ambivalence over value of analysis, 84; analysis of war, 75–8, 79; composition of, 60; critical reactions, 68; Decadence, 79–80; displacement, 68–71, 74–5; dissociation from historical circumstances, 67–8; epic scale of, 75; exposure to shellfire, 76–7; as first Modernist reaction to war, 88; fragmentary nature of, 61; historical scope of, 60; historical significance of, 62; imagery, 77; incorporation of war into, 73; language of trauma, 72–4; limits of analysis, 83–4; narcissism, 81; nature of history in, 84–7; psychological analysis, 78–82; purpose of analysis, 84; questions his own preconceptions, 71; repetition, 68, 71; sadomasochism, 82; symbolic conversion, 73–4; as testimony, 68; as testimony of his experience of war, 66; violence, 69 and First World War, anticipates early end of, 62, 63, 64: Britain’s reasons for entering, 27; identification with, 38–9; impact on, 6, 131; impressions of development of, 62, 63–4; internalises violence of, 34; overwhelmed by, 33; reaction to, 33–4, 34–5, 64; recovery from, 22; relation to, 20; removal from, 66; social disintegration, 39; stress of, 21; traumatic effect of, 33, 64–6; traumatic imitation, 34 and German nationalism, 154 in Germany, 25

Index 237 and guilt, 19–20 and homosexuality, 66–7 and hostility towards, 131 and illnesses of, 67 and internationalism, 129 and “Is England Still a Man’s Country”, 153 and Kangaroo, 20, 140–5: contradictory reaction to war, 140; effect of fictionalisation, 141; fear, 141–2; generalisation of trauma, 142; guilt, 143–4; internalising the war, 144; medical examination, 142, 143, 144; militarism, 145; personal trauma, 142–3; rejection for military service, 143; “The Nightmare”, 131, 140, 141–2, 143, 144; therapeutic struggle, 143; traumatic imitation, 144–5; traumatic recall, 22, 140–1; war hero fantasy, 144 and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 22, 150–4: class and gender relations, 151–2; consequences of war, 151, 153; final version, 152–3; imagery of war, 150–1; multiple rewriting of, 150; Second Lady Chatterley, 151–2; traumatic effects of war, 152–3; unconscious symbolism, 150; Version 1, 150, 151; vision of the future, 150, 153 and leaves Europe, 140 and “Letter from Germany”, 147: German resurgence, 147 and The Lost Girl, 22, 133–4, 136 and masochism, 81 and Memoir of Maurice Magnus, 22, 136, 139–40: recovery from the war, 139–40 and militarism, 129, 130, 135, 138, 145, 153: ambivalence towards, 135–6 and Modernism, position in, 198, 199 and Movements in European History, 147–8: inevitability of future war, 147; tree imagery, 147–8

and Mr Noon, 133: ambivalence to military, 135–6; violence of war, 134–5 and narcissism, 58, 81 and nationalism, 129 and “New Heaven and Earth”, 33, 58 and organic growth, 34 and paralysis of, 65 and persecution of, 21 and personal and impersonal visions of war, 35–40 and physical conflict, 137 and The Plumed Serpent, 22, 148–50: holy war, 149; militarism, 22; military strategy, 149; peaceful regeneration, 148; revenge on American ideologies, 146; war and renewal, 146 and political ideals, 39–40, 42 and post-war illness and mental wounds, 131 on post-war situation, 128, 129 and psychological analysis of war, 78–82: limits of, 83–4 and psychology, knowledge of, 72, 74 and Quetzalcoatl, 146 and The Rainbow, 20: banning of, 65; Britain’s reasons for entering First World War, 27; comparison of South African War and First World War, 26–8, 30; conclusion, 40–2, 64; contradictions in, 35; decline of British dominance, 30; democracy, 28, 30; emotional pain, 25–6; historical anachronisms, 30–2; impersonal violence, 37–8; individualism, 28–9; nature of the army, 28–9, 30; obedience, 29; personal and impersonal visions of war, 35–40; response to First World War, 33; treatment of history, 32; treatment of violence, 26 and reconciling dead of war with living, 197, 198 and resentment of women’s wartime empowerment, 6

238

Index

Lawrence, DH – continued and sadism, 81 and sadomasochism, 81–2 and Sea and Sardinia, 129 and Studies in Classic American Literature, 22, 128, 129, 138–9, 197: American democracy, 146; Europe’s revenge on America, 146; global utopia, 136; inspiration for, 146 and “Study of Thomas Hardy”, 35, 39, 78 and survival strategies, 11 and symptoms of trauma, 21 and technology, 138 and “The Blind Man”, 8 and “The Crown”, 36, 78, 81, 84, 199 and “The Prussian Officer”, 25 and “The Reality of Peace”, 78, 84, 132, 154–5 and “The Thorn in the Flesh”, 25 and “The Virgin and the Gypsy”, 150–1 and traumatic imitation, 21–2, 34, 65–6, 131, 144–5, 155 and violence and repression of erotic desire, 25 and “We Need One Another”, 154 and “With the Guns”, 20, 32–3, 35 and Women in Love, 26: aim in writing, 2; ignored and misunderstood, 199; “Industrial Magnate” chapter, 60; relation to history, 60 Lawrence, Frieda, 25 Lawrence, TE, 39 Lawson, Arthur, 184 League of Nations, 136, 162, 170, 176 Leavis, FR, 32, 200 as advocate of Lawrence, 204, 206–8 and Eliot’s The Waste Land, 205 and experience of war, 205–6 and Lawrence’s The Rainbow, 42 and Lawrence’s Women in Love, 60 and praise of Eliot, 204–5 and war trauma, 205–6

Leavis, Queenie, 207 Leed, Eric J, 38–9 and war neurosis, 10 Lewis, Cecil Day, 210 Lewis, Wyndham, 9 and BLAST, 24–5: depiction of war, 38 and cause of war casualties, 3–4 and First World War, 1, 24–5 and problems of representing war, 25 liberalism, and Modernism as critique of, 6 Lifton, Robert Jay, 83, 157 l’Isle-Adam, Villiers de, 17 Lloyd George, David, 62, 86 Locarno Pact, 161, 162 Lorrain, Jean, 17 Low, Barbara, 72 Luckhurst, Roger, 23 MacCarthy, Desmond, 199 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 165 MacNiece, Louis, and Owen’s influence, 2 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 79 Mallarmé, Stéphan, 13 Manning, Frederick, 9, 113 Mansfield, Katherine, 62 Marsh, Edward, 9, 62 Maurras, Charles, 48, 49 melancholia, 119 Michelet, Jules, 14 Milne, AA, 157 Milner, Sir Alfred, 28 Modernism and aesthetic of direct experience, 9, 13 and alienation, 10 as critique of liberalism, 6 and Eliot’s position in, 197, 198, 208–11 and First World War, 1–2 and Lawrence’s position in, 198, 199 and mediation of shock, 12–13 and war writing, 2: critical debates over relationship, 6–9; shared culture, 9–13

Index 239 Monk, Ray, 39–40 Montague, CF, 4, 14 Moody, AD, 106, 118, 121, 157, 191 Morrell, Lady Ottoline, 39, 42, 63 Mosley, Oswald, 170 mourning, 119 Muir, Edwin, 199, 209–10 Murry, John Middleton, 33, 129 as advocate of Lawrence, 200, 202–3 and alienation from Lawrence, 203 and Eliot’s criticism of, 203 and fails Lawrence, 202 on Lawrence’s Women in Love, 68 and pacifism, 202 and rejection of Lawrence, 203–4 and Sassoon’s verse, 68 Mussolini, Benito, 146, 176 narcissism, 80–1 and Eliot, 57–8 and Lawrence, 58, 83 nationalism, and inter-war period, 129, 154, 162 Nicholls, Peter, on Baudelaire, 12 Nichols, Robert, 13, 66, 77 Olney, James, 118, 121 O’Malley, Raymond, 205 Osborn, EB, 108 Ouspensky, PD, 113 Owen, Wilfred, 1, 3 and “Arms and the Boy”, 3 and “Asleep”, 17–18 and combatant/non-combatant divide, 9 and Decadence, 13–14, 18 and depersonalisation, 16 and direct experience, 13 and displacement, 69 and “Dulce et decorum est”, 5 and “Exposure”, 12 and guilt, 19 and imagery of, 18 and limited experience of war, 5 and “Mental Cases”, 18 and Modernist appreciation of reality, 18 and pathological ennui among soldiers, 15

and resentment of women’s wartime empowerment, 6 and Romanticism, 16 and “Strange Meeting”, 18 and Swinburne’s influence on, 17–18 and “The Dead-Beat”, 16 and “The End”, 18 and “The Last Laugh”, 16 Pakenham, Thomas, 30 Péguy, Charles, 48, 94 Pétain, Henri-Philippe, 157 Pinto, Vivian de Sola, 2 Pirandello, Luigi, 159 Poe, Edgar Allan, 55 Pope, Jessie, 45 Pound, Ezra, 1 and Eliot’s inversion of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”, 172–3 and Eliot’s The Waste Land, 112, 114, 116, 117 Praz, Mario, 17 Prince, Morton, and Dissociation of Personality, 90 Quinn, John, 118 Radford, Maitland, 65 Rainey, Lawrence, 113 Read, Herbert, 9, 85, 110 and comparison with Eliot, 110–12 and Eliot’s criticism of, 109 and remembrance of war, 164 and In Retreat, 77 Redgrave, Michael, 184 Remarque, Erich Maria, 85, 163 repetition, and Lawrence’s The First “Women in Love”, 68, 71 Richards, IA, 171 Ricks, Christopher, 55, 102 Rivers, WHR, 10, 11, 90, 130 Roberts, William, 154 Robertson, JM, 159 Romanticism, and Decadence, 14 Rosenberg, Isaac, 6, 9, 10–11, 12 Rostand, Edmond, 108–10 Russell, Bertrand, 34, 39, 93, 103

240

Index

sadism, 17 sadomasochism, 17 and Eliot, 56 and Lawrence, 81–2 Samson, Anne, 206 Sanders, H, 38 Sassoon, Siegfried and “A Working Party”, 16 and authenticity, 3 and combatant/non-combatant divide, 9 and The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 130 and “Counter-attack”, 16, 68: description of death, 5 and “Dead Musicians”, 16 and desire to kill, 130 and displacement, 69 and doubts political impact of his poetry, 16 and essence of war poetry of, 2–3 and guilt, 19 and “How to Die”, 16 and influence of Decadence, 13–14 and “Lamentations”, 16 and limited experience of war, 5 and militarism, 130 and Murry on, 68 and rejection of Modernist poetry, 1 and “Remorse”, 3 and resentment of women’s wartime empowerment, 6 and Romanticism, 16 and shock of war, 13 and “Suicide in the Trenches”, 16 and tedium of war, 14 and “The General”, 13 and “The Investiture”, 16 and traumatic imitation, 131 and treatment of loss, 16 Schuchard, Ronald, 103 Second World War, 128–9, 185 Seferis, George, 193 Seymour-Jones, Carol, 91 shell-shock, 15, 65–6 and causes of, 9–10 Sherry, Vincent, 102 and The Great War and the Language of Modernism, 6–7

Shillito, Edward, 208 shock, and mediation of, 12–13 Silkin, Jon, 2 Simmel, Ernst, 15 Sinclair, May, 117 Smith, Grover, 127 Somme Offensive, 61, 63 Sorel, Georges, 48 Sorley, Charles Hamilton, 25 South African War (1899–1902), and Lawrence’s The Rainbow, 26–8, 30 Spanish Civil War, 176 and Eliot on, 158 Spender, JA, 99 Spender, Stephen, 91, 118, 170 Stead, William Force, 103 Stormon, EJ, 209 strangeness, and war writing, 18 Stresemann, Gustav, 154 Svarny, Erik, 52, 101 Swinburne, Algernon, 1, 17–18 Symons, Arthur, 17, 55 Tailhade, Laurent, 14 Tanner, Michael, 205 Tate, Allen, 199 Tate, Trudi and Modernism, History and the First World War, 7–8 and value of war literature, 62 testimony, and ethical importance of accuracy, 157 Thucydides, 85 Tomlinson, HM, 164 trauma and anxiety, 54 and mediation of shock, 12–13 and origins of idea of, 10 and psychasthenics, 54 and transmission of, 23 and traumatic imitation, 21, 130–1: Eliot, 22; Lawrence, 21–2, 34, 65–6, 144–5, 155; nature of, 34 see also shell-shock; war trauma trauma theory and dangers of, 23 as powerful tool, 22–3 Trevelyan, Mary, 195

Index 241 Valéry, Paul, 159, 198 Verdenal, Jean, 20 and Action française, 48, 49 and Bergson, 47 and Eliot, 46–9, 91, 95, 113, 118–19, 120–1, 124–5 and idealism, 47 and philosophical and cultural attitudes, 46 and volunteers for military service, 49 Versailles Treaty, 129, 136, 165, 176, 199 Vittoz, Roger, 117, 124, 125 war trauma and broken-down soldier, 19 and conditions for fostering, 11 and detachment from world, 15 and ennui, 15 and Lawrence’s knowledge of, 72 and neurasthenia, 65–6 and paralysis, 65 and psychological toll of trench warfare, 11–12 and recognition as psychological condition, 72 and shell-shock, 9–10, 15, 65–6 and social aspect of, 19 and symbolic conversion, 72–3: Lawrence’s The First “Women in Love”, 73–4 and War Office’s diagnosis of, 90 see also trauma

war writing and bayonet in, 3–4 and combatant/non-combatant divide, 2–3, 9 and communication of battlefield experience, 2 and descriptions of death, 5 and Eliot’s criticism of, 103, 108–9, 110, 125–6 and inaccuracy of depictions of war, 2–5 and inter-war boom in, 163 and mediation of shock, 12–13 and Modernism, 2: critical debates over relationship, 6–9; shared culture, 9–13 and patriotic poetry, 2 and strangeness, 18 Welland, Denis, 5 West, Rebecca, 199 Wilson, Trevor, 14–15 Wiltshire, Harold, 9–10 Winter, Denis, 4 witnessing, 157 women, and resentment of wartime empowerment, 6 Woolf, Virginia, 12, 158, 159, 168 Worthen, John, 43 and Lawrence’s Women in Love, 60, 67, 68 Wright, Barbara, 15 Yeats, WB, 2 Zola, Emile, 79