Some Desperate Glory (24 page)

Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.

How cold and late it is! Why don't they come

And put him into bed? Why don't they come?

W
ILFRED
O
WEN

 

 

Letter to Robert Graves

 

Dear Roberto,

I'd timed my death in action to the minute

(The
Nation
with my deathly verses in it).

The day told off – 13 – (the month July) –

The picture planned – O Threshold of the dark!

And then, the quivering songster failed to die

Because the bloody Bullet missed its mark.

 

Here I am; they
would
send me back –

Kind M.O. at Base; Sassoon's morale grown slack;

Swallowed all his proud high thoughts and acquiesced.

O Gate of Lancaster, O Blightyland the Blessed.

 

No visitors allowed

Since Friends arrived in crowd –

Jabber–Gesture–Jabber–Gesture–Nerves went phut and failed

After the first afternoon when MarshMoonStreetMeiklejohn
ArdoursandernduranSitwellitis prevailed,

Caused complications and set my brain a-hop;

Sleeplessexasperuicide, O Jesu make it stop!

 

But yesterday afternoon my reasoning Rivers ran solemnly in,

With peace in the pools of his spectacled eyes and a wisely

      Omnipotent grin;

And I fished in that steady grey stream and decided that I

After all am no longer the Worm that refuses to die.

But a gallant and glorious lyrical soldjer;

      Bolder and bolder; as he gets older;

      Shouting ‘Back to the Front

      For a scrimmaging Stunt.'

(I wish the weather wouldn't keep on getting colder.)

 

Yes, you can touch my Banker when you need him.

Why keep a Jewish friend unless you bleed him?

 

Oh yes, he's doing very well and sleeps from Two till Four.

And there was Jolly Otterleen a knocking at the door,

But Matron says she mustn't, not however loud she knocks

(Though she's bags of golden Daisies and some Raspberries in a box),

Be admitted to the wonderful and wild and wobbly-witted

      sarcastic soldier-poet with a plaster on his crown,

Who pretends he doesn't know it (he's the Topic of the Town).

 

My God, my God, I'm so excited; I've just had a letter

From Stable who's commanding the Twenty-Fifth Battalion.

And my company, he tells me, doing better and better,

Pinched six Saxons after lunch,

And bagged machine-guns by the bunch.

 

But I – wasn't there –

O blast it isn't fair,

Because they'll all be wondering why

Dotty Captain wasn't standing by

When they came marching home.

 

But I don't care; I made them love me

Although they didn't want to do it, and I've sent them a

      Glorious Gramophone and God send you back to me

Over the green eviscerating sea –

And I'm ill and afraid to go back to them because those

      five-nines are so damned awful.

When you think of them all bursting and you're lying on your bed,

With the books you loved and longed for on the table; and your head

All crammed with village verses about Daffodils and Geese –

… O Jesu make it cease …

 

O Rivers please take me. And make me

Go back to the war till it break me.

Some day my brain will go BANG,

And they'll say what lovely faces were

The soldier-lads he sang

 

Does this break your heart? What do I care?

Sassons

 

S
IEGFRIED
S
ASSOON

 

 

Crickley Hill

The orchis, trefoil, harebells nod all day,

High above Gloucester and the Severn Plain.

Few come there, where the curlew ever and again

Cries faintly, and no traveller makes stay,

Since steep the road is,

And the villages

Hidden by hedges wonderful in late May.

 

At Buire-au-Bois a soldier wandering

The lanes at evening talked with me and told

Of gardens summer blessed, of early spring

In tiny orchards, the uncounted gold

Strewn in green meadows,

Clear-cut shadows

Black on the dust and gray stone mellow and old.

 

But these were things I knew, and carelessly

Heard, while in thought I went with friends on roads

White in the sun and wandered far to see

The scented hay come homeward in warm loads.

Hardly I heeded him;

While the coloured dim

Evening brought stars and lights in small abodes.

 

When on a sudden, ‘Crickley' he said. How I started

At that old darling name of home! and turned

Fell into a torrent of words warm-hearted

Till clear above the stars of summer burned

In velvety smooth skies.

We shared memories

And the old raptures from each other learned.

 

O sudden steep! O hill towering above!

Chasm from the road falling suddenly away!

Sure no two men talked of you with more love

Than we that tender-coloured ending of day.

(O tears! Keen pride in you!)

Feeling the soft dew,

Walking in thought another Roman way.

 

You hills of home, woodlands, white roads and inns

That star and line our darling land, still keep

Memory of us; for when first day begins

We think of you and dream in the first sleep

Of you and yours –

Trees, bare rock, flowers

Daring the blast on Crickley's distant steep.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

AFTERMATH

 

 

 

A
T THE ARMISTICE,
the emotion of 1914 seemed far away, after so much pain and so many deaths, and a huge change in the perception of war. That first enthusiasm could easily be shown as absurd. Were Rupert Brooke's poems now merely a symbol of distant naivety?

At first it seemed as if Brooke's war would survive well, partly because Eddie Marsh was quick to build a shrine with the 1918
Collected Poems
and memoir. In March 1919, a tablet was unveiled at Rugby – the place to whose values he'd returned at the end – in the form of a medallion of Brooke's head, looking eager and very young, on a wall of the enormous Victorian chapel. The commander of the doomed Gallipoli expedition, General Sir Ian Hamilton, gave a eulogy, underlining the political significance of those 1914 sonnets. Brooke, Hamilton said, had had every gift – ‘youth, charm, beauty, genius' – and ‘had it in his magic pen' to show ‘the significance of the Dardanelles to the people of the empire'. Instead he'd died ‘not with the shout of victory ringing in his ears, but for nothing – so it may have seemed – ah, but not so really', for his pen had ‘already ennobled the theme' of war.

After the Somme and Passchendaele, these words came from a dead world. Soon the criticism, the mocking, began. Yet some, like Graves, Nichols and Sassoon, stayed admirers, at least of the idea of Brooke. In the 1920s, Virginia Woolf told a friend that she didn't think much of the poems and perhaps this ‘ablest of men' had been more suited to public life than to writing. Rupert Brooke might have become Prime Minister for he had ‘such a gift with people, and such sanity and force'. This seems unlikely; and Brooke has remained a poet. ‘The Soldier' is perhaps the best-known sonnet of the twentieth century. The poems still sell, even if, as with Byron, much of the interest is in the romance of the poet's life. Brooke's version of war seems increasingly a distant curiosity.

Siegfried Sassoon was put up against Rupert Brooke, as a realist who understood war's tragedy. In peacetime, however, Sassoon lost his anger. Heinemann published a selection of his war poems in 1919, which sold well, with critical opinion divided: the
Nation
writing of ‘A great pamphlet against the war', and the
London Mercury
of mere ‘journalism'. In April 1919, Sassoon's ‘Everyone Sang' conveyed hope for freedom and change, not wholly realized by the poet. Propelled by his fame, and by mentors like Marsh and the priapic Cambridge musicologist Dent, Sassoon began a decade of guilt-ridden socializing and sex, briefly at Oxford before becoming literary editor of the
Daily Herald
and, billed as a hero poet, following Nichols on a lecture tour of the United States. Awkward in the public gaze, yet craving praise, he reverted to private publication of his poems. His post-war satires had too blunt an edge, or were too mild, even if influenced by the poet's new left-wing views. Eventually Sassoon found a quiet lyricism which he stuck to for the rest of his life.

Robert Graves too went to Oxford, where he'd been about to go in 1914. He lived with Nancy and their child on Boar's Hill and saw Edmund Blunden, who was also at the university, Graves noting the other poet's drinking, shakiness and emotional talk of the trenches. It was at the
Daily Herald
that Sassoon first met Blunden, who'd sent him some poems, mostly set in the Kentish landscape, thus beginning what was for both of them a vital, if unequal, post-war friendship. Blunden's post-war poetry had two main themes: loving evocations (Georgian in style, often quaint in language) of a passing country world and an obsessive remembering of the trenches. Even ‘Almswomen' of 1920 – set in a sweet English village – shows the war's shadow in a lament about death's separation. As early as 1918, Blunden began a prose memoir.

A gap opened between those who'd fought and those who hadn't. Before 1914, Britain and the new art of continental Europe had been getting closer; now, for many, the Continent meant death, obliteration and, even in peace, rumours of chaos. Some – mostly non-combatants like Eliot, James Joyce and Pound – still looked to modernism, to abstract art, to writing without clear narrative, whereas Sassoon and Blunden, even the more adventurous Graves, stuck to tradition, often yearning for an imagined, calm past. They had tried to tell of war's reality, Wilfred Owen writing that ‘every word, every figure of speech must be a matter of experience' and ‘I don't want to write anything to which a soldier would say No compris'. Owen had known nothing of Eliot or Pound.

Ivor Gurney's gentle father died in May 1919, and Ivor quarrelled with his strong-willed mother and scarcely spoke to his brother Ronald. Gurney's genius didn't impress the hard-working Ronald, who'd also fought in the war. He saw in Ivor only selfishness, arrogance, self-indulgence, even malingering.

Gloucestershire was what Gurney had dreamed of, in hospital and in France. How could he leave it again? ‘Crickley Hill' shows how a name could set off rapturous memories. But in peace the old places couldn't work enough magic against deepening depression and, like many landscapes, they were perhaps better in memory or in dreams. He rejoiced, however, in his friend Will Harvey's return from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany; and at a concert at Stroud, where Harvey read and sang his poems and Gurney played the piano, a member of the audience thought Ivor ‘wonderfully normal and well'.

Gurney stayed with the Harveys, happier away from his family, then worked briefly on a farm. In May 1919, he went back to London, to take up his scholarship at the Royal College of Music and study under Ralph Vaughan Williams. There was hope that a new London life, some success and the end of the war might help.

Ivor Gurney's second collection,
War's Embers
, came out in 1919. It didn't sell well, perhaps because Gurney was still unknown in the little magazines that were then important in literary life. Escaping from home and family while at the Royal College of Music, he revived old friendships in or near London. Like many of those who fought, Ivor Gurney felt anxious and lost in a civilian world, as ‘The Interview' and ‘Laventie', written in 1921–2, show. ‘After War' is about rest out of the line rather than a new peacetime life. His music and poetry went on bringing back the war. ‘The Silent One' is about the distance, suggested in the accent and absurd courtesy, between a polite public school officer and his men.

Gurney got a job in the income tax office in Gloucester with Marsh's help, but his bad breakdown made such work impossible. His family endured further threats of suicide, garbled stories of interior voices, a refusal to eat or to sleep, rages and abuse of his brother Ronald for being crazy enough to work.

In September 1922, Ronald Gurney wrote despairingly to Marion Scott. The family couldn't cope. Ivor Gurney entered asylums, first in Gloucester, then in Kent; and after December 1922 he never saw Gloucestershire again. Poems and music still came, sometimes published or performed, and there were still admirers like Marion Scott and the composer Gerald Finzi. The asylum poems go over the past, as in ‘It is Near Toussaints', ‘The Interview', ‘The Bohemians', ‘First Time In' (remembering his battalion's welcome into the trenches from the Welsh troops, how the Welsh songs had never sounded more beautiful than ‘here under the guns' noise') and ‘Memory', written between 1922 and 1925. ‘War Books' declared that he'd written from ‘heart's sickness', to escape hunger or the worst of the war and to bring back the Cotswolds. Ivor Gurney recalled the ‘needing and loving-of-action body' that he'd been. The war could seem preferable to a grim present, even if his life had been at risk.