World War Two and the 1940S

World War Two in British Literature and “These years rebuff the imagination, as much by Culture being fragmentary as by being violent” (E. Bowen, 1942) “Being alone don’t count any more, nobody can “this tragedy is too vast, too ill-understood; it has be alone any more” (James Hanley: No Directions) clogged and stunned the imagination, and “ War now made us one big family” (Bowen, intellectual activity has been paralysed” (Rose HOD) Macaulay, 1946) Henry Moore’s Shelter Sketchbook (1943) “ Wariness had driven away poetry; from War cinema: Millions Like Us; The Gentle Sex hesitating to feel came the time when you no longer (about the ATS); In Which We Serve (Noel could” (E. Bowen, The Heat of the Day) Coward, David Lean, 1943); Henry V (Laurence “ this outrage is not important. There is no place Olivier) for it in human experience; it apparently cannot Documentaries: Fires Were Started (Humphrey make a place of its own. It will have no literature” Jennings) (E. Bowen: “Sunday Afternoon”) war artists (Evelyn Dunbar, Laura Knight, James Cyril Connolly (editor of Horizon): avoiding Carr, Mervyn Peake; Bert Hardy) “experiences connected with the Blitz, the shopping queues, the home front, deserted wives, deceived War literature: “Where Are the War Poets?” husbands, broken homes, dull jobs, bad schools, ‘ So far as I know, nothing of consequence is group squabbles” being written, except in the fragmentary form, V. S. Pritchett: conserving “the human fragments diaries and short sketches ... I can’t write with this in an iron age when human lives, what I feel and sort of business going on ... In any case I feel that you feel, are considered to be shameful.” literature as we have known it is coming to an end” “ Action is, after all, exciting rather than (Orwell) interesting” (Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones) “I feel as if I could not write again. Words seem to break in my mind like sticks when I put them down Soldier poets: Sidney Keyes (1922–43); Keith on paper. I cannot see how to spell some of them. Douglas; Alun Lewis (d. 1944); Henry Read; G. S. Sentences are covered with leaves.” (Stephen Fraser Spender’s diary) T.S. Eliot: Little Gidding; H. D.: Trilogy; Edith from Donald Bain’s ‘ The War Poet’: Sitwell: “Still Falls the Rain”; Rayner Heppenstall: We only watch, and indicate and make our “Instead of a Carol” scribbled pencil notes, We do not wish to moralize, only to ease Soldier writers: “war fiction” our dusty throats H. E. Bates: short stories as ‘Flying Officer X’; Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944) Cecil Day Lewis: “Where Are the War Poets?” Franklin and his crew: “To be accepted by the They who in panic or mere greed sergeants, to feel their unified confidence in him Enslaved religion, markets, laws, growing and opening wide at last to acceptance, Borrow our language now and bid was a great thing. It had given him something Us to speak up in freedom’s cause. higher than fear, the firm knowledge, never It is the logic of our times, expressed, that if anything should happen they No subject for immortal verse, would be together, for each other and of each other, That we who lived by honest dreams in whatever sort of end there might be.” Defend the bad against the worse. “He was far away from the war, from the bombs dropped by people like himself; from the shrivelled Sidney Keyes: “War Poet” life of war-time England and the drabnes and I am the man who looked for peace and found dustiness of bombed places” My own eyes barbed. “though French, she was close to his own world: I am the man who groped for words and found the world of being young on the edge of danger, the An arrow in my hand. experience of running your finger along the thread I am the builder whose firm walls surround holding things together and not knowing if or how A slipping land. soon the thread would break” When I grow sick or mad “Diana [Forester] and tea and England: all of them Mock me not nor chain me: like small and faintly unreal clouds, far distant and When I reach for the wind at the point of evaporation, on the horizon of the Cast me not down: present world” Though my face is a burnt book And a wasted town. “ And now the word itself [’avenged’], which in more ordinary days would have seemed violent and grandiose, seemed just and right. It was something which belonged ... to larger things than personal ‘Blast is an odd thing: it is just as likely to have hatred. It belonged to all little people, to all little, the appearance of an embarrasing dream as of honest, decent, kindly people everywhere.” man’s serious vengeance on man, landing you Bates:The Jacaranda Tree; The Purple Plain naked in the street or exposing you in your bed or (1947) on your lavatory seat to the neighbours’ gaze.’ Roald Dahl: Over to You (1945) “ War time, with its makeshifts, shelvings, Alexander Baron: From the City, From the deferrings, could not have been kinder to romantic Plough (1948), There’s No Home (1950), The love. The two discussed any merging of their postal Human Kind (1953); Dan Billany: The Trap; The addresses not more seriously than they discussed Cage (1943); Eric Knight: This Above All (1941); marriage – happy to stay as they were, afloat on this Gerald Kersh: They Die with Their Boots Clean tideless, hypnotic, futureless day-to-day” (E. (1942); David Holbrook: Flesh Wounds; Nigel Bowen, Heat of the Day) Balchin: The Small Black Room (1943); Walter Mollie Panter-Downes’s wartime stories Baxter: Look Down in Mercy (1952); Nicholas Evelyn Waugh: Put Out More Flags (1942) Monsarrat: The Cruel Sea (1951); Pierre Boulle: Blitz fiction Bridge on the River Kwai (1952) “ What’s odd is that it will seem so far away Lit of the Home front (wartime England) tomorrow morning. If anyone had told me five Edith Pargeter: She Goes to War (1943); J. B. years ago ... I wouldn’t have been so surprised Priestley: Daylight on Saturday: A Novel about an about the air raids, but I should never have believed Aircraft Factory (1943); Pamela Frankau: The that life could be so normal in between” (Barbara Willow Cabin (1949); Marghanita Laski: Little Boy Noble: The House Opposite, 1943) Lost (1949), To Bed with Grand Music (1946); William Sansom’s short stories (“The Wall”; Betty Miller: Farewell Leicester Square (1941); “Building Alive”); Phyllis Bottome: London Pride (1941); Monica James Hanley: No Directions (1943) “‘Do you Dickens: Mariana (1940), The Fancy (1943); ever ask yourself where all this is going to end, Eileen Marsh: We Lived in London (1942); Joyce wher’s it’s all leading to, you know, how it’ll end Dennis: Henrietta’s War (1939); Pamela Hansford sort of thing. Do you, ducksie?’ – ‘Afraid I don’t, Johnson: Winter Quarters (1943); Helen Ashton: dear. I just think – well, I’m breathing, and that’s Yeoman’s Hospital (1944); Dorothy Whipple: They something.” Were Sisters (1943) Henry Green: Caught (1943) Richard Roe, Arthur Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime stories (The Demon Pye Lover, 1945, eg. “Mysterious Kôr”) Inez Holden: Night Shift (1941); Doris Leslie: The Heat of the Day (set in 1942) „Uncounted, they House in the Dust (1942) [the dead] continued to move in shoals through the Journals, diaries, Mass-Observation city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard Richard Hillary: The Last Enemy (1942) or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this Keith Douglas: Alamein to Zem Zem (1944); tomorrow they had expected – for death cannot be Fitzroy Maclean: Eastern Approaches; George so sudden as all that ... The wall between the living Millar: Maquis and the living became less solid as the wall between Home front: the living and the dead thinned”. Vera Brittain: England’s Hour; Jan Struther: Mrs “[the houses] were shells: the indifference of their Miniver (1939); Nella Last’s War; Mrs Milburn’s black vacant windows fell on the scene, the Diaries movement, the park, the evening they overlooked Jan Struther: Mrs Miniver (1939) but did not seem to behold. This moment of Rose Macaulay: we also have to behave like walking to meet the houses seemed to have its place “jungle savages” instead of “twentieth-century men in no given hour of time – though across it, in and women”; the Nazis „forced us to adopt their contradiction, St Marylebone clock began striking shockingly bad manners. For war, of course, is as eight.” revolting an example of bad manners as can well be Graham Greene: The End of the Affair; The Third imagined” (journal, 1941) Man; The Ministry of Fear (1943) The aftermath of war Rowe; “War is very like a bad dream in which Charles Williams: All Hallows’s Eve (1945) familiar people appear in terrible and unlikely Rose Macaulay: The World My Wilderness (1950) disguises” “all this scarred and haunted green and stone and “ He moved like a bit of stone among the other brambled wilderness lying under the August sun, a- stones – he was protectively coloured, and he felt at hum with insects and astir with secret, darting, times, breaking the surface of his remorse, a kind of burrowing life, received the returned traveller into evil pride like that a leopard might feel moving in its dwellings with a wrecked, indifferent calm. harmony with all the other spots on the world’s Here, its cliffs and chasms seemd to say, is your surface.” home; here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world, and Tom Paulin: The Invasion Handbook (poetry, 2002) here your feet are set; here you find the irremediable barbarism that comes up from the Holocaust fiction: D. M. Thomas: The White Hotel depth of the earth” (1981); George Steiner: The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H (1981); Bernice Rubens: Brothers Longer treatments from the fifties and sixties (1983); Anita Brookner: Latecomers (1988); János Evelyn Waugh: Sword of Honour trilogy (Men at Nyíri: Battlefields and Playgrounds (1990); Martin Arms; Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Amis: Time’s Arrow (1991), Zone of Interest Surrender) (2014); Elizabeth Russell Taylor: Tomorrow Anthony Powell: The Valley of Bones; The (1991); Ian McEwan: Black Dogs (1992); Rachel Soldier’s Art; The Military Philosophers (1960s; Seiffert: The Dark Room (2001); Lisa Appignanesi: vols. 7-9 of Dance to the Music of Time) Losing the Dead (1999), The Memory Man (2005), Olivia Manning: the Balkan trilogy (1960s), the Lucy Ellmann. Man or Mango (1999); Linda Grant: Levant trilogy (1970s-1984) Guy and Harriet The Clothes on Their Backs (2008). Pringle Novels by Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt, Elaine Feinstein + the fiction of W. G. Sebald World War Two in later literature Robin Jenkins: The Cone Gatherers (1955) Holocaust poetry. Karen Gershon; Geoffrey Hill: Gabriel Fielding: The Birthday King (1973); The Triumph of Love; Tony Harrison: Prometheus. Richard Hughes: The Fox in the Attic; The Wooden Shepherdess; Holocaust drama: Peter Barnes: Auschwitz (1978, William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954) the second installment of double bill entitled Beryl Bainbridge: An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) Laughter); Martin Sherman: Bent (1979); C.P. Nina Bawden: Circles of Deceit (1987) Taylor: Good (1981); Edward Bond: Summer Alan Sillitoe: Key to the Door (1961); John Fowles: (1982); Jim Allen: Perdition (1987); Howard The Magus (1966) Brenton H.I.D. (1989); Julia Pascal: Holocaust J. G. Farrell: The Singapore Grip (1978) Trilogy (1990-2); , Sue Frumin; Diane Samuels: Anthony Burgess: Earthly Powers (1981) Kindertransport (1993); David Edgar: Albert Speer William Boyd: An Ice-Cream War (1982) (2000) Jessie Kesson: Another Time, Another Place (1983) J. G. Ballard: Empire of the Sun (1984) Stan Barstow’s trilogy set in a wartime Yorkshire town: Just You Wait and See (1986); Give Us This Day (1989); Next of Kin (1991) Nigel Williams: Star Turn (1985); Maureen Duffy: Change (1987); Penelope Lively: Moon Tiger (1987); Pat Barker: The Man Who Wasn’t There (1988); Graham Swift: Out of This World (1988); Julian Barnes: Staring at the Sun (1988); Allan Massie: A Question of Loyalties (1989); Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient (1992); Louis de Bernières: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) Sebastian Faulks: Charlotte Grey (1998); Zadie Smith: White Teeth (2000); Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001); Michael Frayn: Spies (2002); Robert Edric: Peacetime (2002); Andrea Levy: Small Island (2004); Adam Thorpe: The Rules of Perspective (2005); Sarah Waters: Night Watch (2006); A.L. Kennedy: Day (2007); Anna Richards: Little Gods (2009); Lissa Evans: Their Finest Hour and a Half (2009); Simon Mawer: The Glass House (2010); Peter Ho Davis: The Welsh Girl (2010); Adam Foulds: In the Wolf’s Mouth (2014); Tim Pears: In the Light of Morning (2014)