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Never Such Innocence Again

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Never Such Innocence Again Humanities Never Such Innocence Again lier works include Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (wherefore his son’s name is Sam; a daughter I am saying that there seems to be one domi­ is Rosalind, “from Shakespeare”). His attachment to nating form of modern understanding; that it is essen­ England, and his own front-line memories of war— tially ironic; and that it originates largely in the appli­ “WW II”— beguiled him into the years of research that cation of mind and memory to the events of the Great are evident in his new book. A Humanities Endowment War— Paul Fussell fellowship freed him for the actual writing. The result, in the words of the late Lionel Trilling, is “an original In Victoria’s long reign (1837-1901) the British Empire and brilliant piece of cultural history and one of the multiplied fourfold through what Kipling hymned as most deeply moving books I have read in a long time.” “the savage wars of peace.” These were fought by a The Great War and Modern Memory draws on a relatively small army officered from the English gov­ hoard of English literary and historical materials. These erning class— a class serenely convinced of its su­ had of course been heavily mined already, suggesting periority to the “ lower orders” at home and, by exten­ the temerity of an outsider’s sifting them again. But sion, to lesser breeds abroad. Fussell (rhymes with tussle) dug out unsuspected The pleasure-loving Edward VII had put his stamp gems, working them into a mosaic of the broadest on the succeeding decade, providing, in his funeral, erudition. If as an American he brought a certain de­ the hugely theatrical spectacle of royal pomp de­ tachment to the task, he was at the same time a parti- scribed by Barbara Tuchman as “the old world’s dying blaze of splendor.” Sober-sided George V assumed the throne, unruffled by wars in the Balkans and a coal strike at home, although sharing his ministers’ concern over Irish home rule and the German fleet. By 1914 the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (120,000 square miles, population 45 million) held sway over 12 million square miles of the earth’s surface and more than 400 million subjects. A corre­ IN THIS ISSUE spondingly pumped-up complacency permeated Eng­ OF HUMANITIES lish life, obscuring the lessons of the Boer War and enervating the army’s readiness to counter imperial rivalries then building to a flash point in Europe. Never Such Innocence Again—an account of “ The rest is history." Paul Fussell’s National Book Award Winner, The And more than history: how has the hellish 1914-18 Great War and Modern Memory— Page 1 experience of three million British casualties (over 27 I Had to Write About War— a biographical sketch million for all combatants) been assimilated, remem­ of the author, Paul Fussell— Page 5 bered, mythologized? With what effects on English Cezanne Exhibition in New York— NEH-spon- literature (read literature in English), and on the mind sored show of the painter’s late work— Page 6 and psyche of our own time, 60 years and a half- Popular Culture: Mirror of American Life— new­ dozen wars later? est of Courses by Newspaper to begin in January Such are the daunting questions plumbed by Paul 1978— Page 6 Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford Late Antique and Early Christian Art at Metro­ University Press, New York and London). Winner of politan Museum of Art— 500 works of art from the 1976 National Book Award in the “ arts and letters” Third to Seventh Century— Page 8 category, it is a work of scholarship that has earned Vico— an Italian Renaissance—an 18th century both critical success and a wide public sale—at philosopher rediscovered— Page 10 $13.95 a copy. A paperback edition has now been Every Hour a Stranger— Zora Neale Hurston, issued, at $3.50. folklorist and novelist, figure in the Harlem Ren­ Fussell is a professor of English at Rutgers Univer­ aissance— Page 11 sity, an authority on 18th century literature whose ear­ NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES □ VOLUME VII □ NUMBER 8 □ NOVEMBER 1977 san— a partisan of inarticulate troops caught up in By war’s end, as Hemingway was to put it in A Fare­ modern wars, and of those writers who have probed well to Arms (1929), "abstract words such as glory, for the truth of their experience. His book is dedicated honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the "To the memory of Technical Sergeant Edward Keith concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the Hudson, ASN36548772, Co. F, 410th Infantry, killed names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the beside me in France, March 15, 1945.” Fussell, a dates.” platoon leader, age 20, was severely wounded by the “The idea of endless war as an inevitable condition same shell-burst. of modern life,” Fussell writes, “would seem to have Early in The Great War there is a quotation from become available to the imagination around 1916,” Henry James, writing to a friend the day after the when the British army “fully attained the knowledge British entered the war on August 14, 1914: of good and evil at the Somme.” The Great War traces The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood the struggle to express that knowledge in the works of and darkness . is a thing which so gives away Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, the whole long age during which we have supposed Wilfred Owen and other mole-like denizens of the the world to be . gradually bettering, that to have Western Front. to take it now for what the treacherous years were The progress is from innocence to irony to disillu­ all the while really making for and m eaning is too sion. In the lowered estimate of man, what had been tragic for words. “ too tragic” is recalled in Graves’s Goodbye to All Words, to be sure, poured forth— in recruiting post­ That (1929) as farcical and preposterous. From this, ers, communiques, propaganda, censored press re­ as Fussell points out, it is a short step to modern ports and letters, diaries, journals. These were followed apprehensions. For example, there is Durrenmatt’s ob­ by the studied reconstructions of historians, and of servation that "tragedy presupposes guilt, despair, novelists, poets, and writers of memoirs. But James moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense of responsibility,” was right. The victor in the Great War was war itself, in the absence of which "comedy alone is suitable to soon to break out again in Spain as prelude to the us.” And there are the “paranoid melodramas” of bloodshed of 1939-45 and more recent nightmares. Mailer, Heller, and Pynchon where— at last— the full lexicon of the obscene and absurd in war is given vent. Few shared the Jamesian sense of doom in 1914. In Imperial War Museum General Plumer, King George V, and Field Marshal Haig a release from boredom, English crowds cheered the declaration of war with hectic appetite for a quick, brave adventure. (Waterloo had been a mere three days' fighting.) Censorship hid the early defeat at Mons, and no one could believe that the huge stale­ mate in trenches stretching from the Channel through Belgium and France to the Swiss border— already fixed by the first Christmas— would last four more years. C. E. Montague, in Disenchantment (1922), recalls how in 1915 All the air was ringing with assurances. France to be saved, Belgium righted, freedom and civilization to be re-won, a sour, soiled, crooked old world to be rid of bullies and crooks. What a chance! The plain recruit . said to himself that for once he had got right in on the ground-floor of a topping good thing . which exactly matched a Rupert Brooke sonnet of those early months: Now, God be thank’d who has match'd us with His hour, And caught our youth and waken’d us from sleeping . Fussell traces the failed attacks of 1915 which were later stigmatized in the Official History as a “ useless slaughter of infantry.” Volunteers being no longer suffi­ cient to fill the ranks, conscription was introduced at the New Year. What followed (July-November 1916) was “a vast ironic catastrophe” costing 400,000 British casualties: "The Somme affair . was the largest en­ gagement fought since the beginnings of civilization.” It was “the end of illusions about breaking the line and sending the cavalry through to end the war.” What Blunder) recalled as “a sad scrawl of broken earth baggage brought to the trenches. and murdered men” was a serious blow to respect for Compared to the imagined heroics, sufferings, and the regular army command, which began the attack consolations of this canon, the brute realities of the with greatly superior forces. Ahead lay Passchendaele war proved all-but-indescribable. (The idiom of “The (370,000 British casualties) and other bog-battles; the Waste Land” was not yet at hand.) The “ presence and entry of the Americans; the German advance and col­ authority” of this literature was, however, inescapable, lapse of 1918. and Fussell shows how writers drew upon it through All this but a half-day’s journey from London. inversions, understatement, and caricature— in a word, □ □ □ through irony, satiric or demonic. Irony-assisted recall, Reviewing The Great War, C. P. Snow reflects that intensified by the dishonesties of official history, was “ a world which thought itself civilized had never imag­ the mode of reconstructed first-hand testimony.
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