Orbits of a Mad Comet: Outsiderdom, Myths and Collective Memory in the Life and Works of Wilfred Owen Thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Thomas William Yuen Lok Bryden Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London 1 999,972 Words Abstract This thesis examines the work of Wilfred Owen in the context of his lifelong compulsion to present himself as an outsider possessed of elevated knowledge—as one who transcends the expectations of his social background and allies himself with groups who value esoteric knowledge. Though these tendencies have previously been noted by biographers and literary critics, this thesis posits that they are more influential on his poetry than has been previously observed, and explores the different outsider groups with which Owen aligns himself. This thesis also discusses Owen as an influential artistic figure alongside recent historical criticisms of myths about the First World War. As new perspectives on the conflict are explored, Owen’s place in collective memory has increasingly been questioned and criticized as limited, and the reasons behind this, as well as the validity of the central place Owen holds in the conception of the ‘War Myth’ are investigated. These two elements are connected by the central assertion of this thesis, which is that while it can be shown that Owen is disproportionately influential and provides only a limited, personal account of a very complex historical event, when his work and his personal philosophy are taken into account, Owen in fact presents himself as representational only of outsider groups that consider themselves separate and elevated. It therefore becomes apparent from his writing, correspondence and from the proclivities made apparent by the decisions he made in the course of his short life that he should not be considered as an everyman, nor as a spokesperson for all soldiers. This was neither his intention, nor an appropriate didactic use for his writing. Through this interpretation, this thesis asserts that in tandem with expressing caution when confronted with widespread acceptance of the myths of the First World War, the informed observer must also be cautious about accepting the myths about Owen himself. Abbreviations used in this thesis—also noted in WOCPF: Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments WOCL: Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters CWDC: Wilfred Owen: Complete Works: Delphi Classics POWO: The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. by Jon Stallworthy HOJFO: Harold Owen, Journey from Obscurity, abridged version JSWO: Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen, 2nd edn. DHTLY: Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: The Last Year DHANB: Dominic Hibberd, A New Biography DHOTP: Dominic Hibberd, Owen the Poet 2 Table of Contents Dedication and Acknowledgements ....................................................................................... 4 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 5 Chapter 1: The ‘War Myth’, and Owen’s Place Within It ................................................... 17 Wilfred Owen, Collective Memory and the Culture of Memorialization ........................ 44 Chapter 2: Societies and Separation ..................................................................................... 66 The Lonesome Genius: Poetic Glamour and Altered Perspectives ................................. 70 Perceptibly Provincial: Social Hierarchyor and Class Consciousness ............................. 92 Secret Men and a Certain Poetess: The Schism between Soldiers and Civilians .......... 120 A Crag of Superiority: The Class Dynamic between Officers and Men........................ 143 Narcissism; Injustice-Collecting; Rejection of Women; and Transference of Affection to male Equivalents: Alternate Approaches to Wilfred Owen’s Sexuality ........................ 154 A Member of the Sodomite Diaspora: Sexuality and Elevation .................................... 174 Teaching Christ to Lift the Cross by Numbers: Wilfred Owen and Christianity .......... 185 Chapter 3: Emblematic Iconoclast—the Changing Posthumous Reputation of Wilfred Owen .................................................................................................................................. 198 The Nation and Wheels: Early Appearances in Print..................................................... 209 Versions of Literary History: Re-examining 1914-1921 in Literature .......................... 226 Into the 1930s: Graves, Blunden, Isherwood and Auden............................................... 237 From Welland to Britten and Beyond: A Niche Expands .............................................. 255 Chapter 4: Myths and their Effect on the Legacy of Wilfred Owen .................................. 275 All Blood, Dirt & Sucked Sugar Stick: Wilfred Owen in Opposition to Modernism ... 288 Drawing Inspiration from his Beautiful Face: Myths of the Homosexual Officer ........ 305 Conclusion: Outsiderdom as Counterpoint to the Mythical Wilfred Owen ....................... 316 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 322 3 Dedication and Acknowledgements Dedication For Dominic Hibberd and Paul Fussell, both of whom in different ways are at the very centre of this thesis, and both of whom passed away during its writing. Their influence cannot be overstated, and nor can my gratitude to them. Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the help of a number of people. Thanks are due to my supervisor, Dr. Betty Jay, and my advisor, Dr. Finn Fordham; the annual input I received from Professor Judith Hawley was also of inestimable value. Thanks to all at the Institute of Historical Research and at the British Library, at the Oxford University English Faculty and the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. Thanks, too, to all who provided assistance at the Senate House, where I feel privileged to have worked and studied. Thanks also to Aimee Childs, Liz Gregory, Vanessa Peters, Charlotte Pit, Kara Yui, Luke Ray, Davina Iniss, Cat Apps, Karen Poore, Jun Xi and all the rest of my close friends for all your support, and of course to my loving family. Thanks to all who had the patience to teach me at Trinity College, Cambridge, particularly the late Professor Anne Barton, who is greatly missed. And thanks, of course, to Wilfred Owen himself, and all who have supported his legacy in the years since he wrote. 4 Introduction Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and trouble is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! -John Keats1 Owen stated that his subject was war, and the pity of war. This was his claim in the drafted preface intended for his first collection, which also contains his famous statement, ‘The poetry is in the pity.’2 While Owen did not write war poetry exclusively, this would have been a collection of war poems, and it is these poems that have earned Owen his reputation in the years since his death. This thesis sets out to establish Owen as one who idealised the position of an outsider, in spite of—and in many ways as a result of—the numerous ways in which he was a typical, unremarkable member of English society at the time he lived. The purpose of establishing this position is to gain new insights into Owen’s stature in the context of collective memory and myth. Owen as a literary figure occupies the peculiar space of being one of Britain’s best-known poets who at the time of his death was a virtual unknown, and whose reputation grew slowly over time rather than having an immediate far-reaching cultural impact. My proposition is that while indeed, ‘many of our ideas of First World War poetry have developed around the figure of Owen’,3 no current study of Owen’s influence on collective memory of the period is built upon a full understanding of his work or intentions, because he is most often considered either an authoritative spokesperson for the true 1 John Keats: Selected Letters, ed. by Robert Gittings and Jon Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.233. 2 The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. by Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), p.192, hereafter abbreviated ‘POWO’. 3 Santanu Das, ‘Reframing First World War Poetry: An Introduction’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. by Santanu Das (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2013), pp.3-34, p.17. 5 feelings of the suffering and generalised soldiers, or as a largely ignorant officer who was out of his depth in attempting to speak for all soldiers. My assertion is that neither position shows an appreciation for what a close reading of Owen’s work and a familiarity with his biography reveal, which is that what Owen prized was the position of an outsider, excluded from conventional British society by various innate qualities and esoteric knowledge. This personal philosophy influenced everything in Owen’s work, as well as his personal decisions before and during the war. Approaching him in this context raises new questions about Owen as a person, as a poet and as a historically representative figure, and questions his position as an ‘authority’ in the scenario expressed by Mark Rawlinson in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry: ‘Some historians fear that Owen has become, by default, the primary authority on 1914-18, the pointsman in literary criticism’s supposed