The Conscientious Killer: Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting" Author(s): Marc D. Cyr Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 58, No. 1 (SPRING 2016), pp. 108-128 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26155346 Accessed: 22-03-2020 06:36 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Texas Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Texas Studies in Literature and Language This content downloaded from 54.228.195.183 on Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:36:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Conscientious Killer: Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting" Marc D. Cyr I Wilfred Owen is the best-known war poet in English-language literature, and "Strange Meeting" is arguably not just his most famous poem, but his best. Siegfried Sassoon, his friend and mentor, and the editor of the first fairly extensive collection of Owen's poems, judged it to be his "mas terpiece" (Siegfried's Journey 59), although his personal relationship with Owen, as well as with this poem in particular, may have influenced that judgment, and there are others who not only do not see "Strange Meeting" as Owen's masterpiece, but think all or parts of it are plain bad. Questions of quality aside, though, "Strange Meeting" holds a prominent, even pre mier, position in Owen's corpus because it is one of the cornerstones of the Owen hagiography that developed after his death, and that hagiography in return can, as Desmond Graham notes, lead us "to read Owen slackly, assuming that we already know what he is saying" (24). This essay examines the genesis of the poem and how knowing that process and the context in which it occurred can alter the way we read it. One alteration is to see that some, though not all, of the poem is indeed bad, but deliberately so. The argument here is that the postwar construc tion of Owen's life has possibly distorted readings of "Strange Meeting." Always read as an anguished argument against poets being combatants, it can be read, rather, as an argument that poets who would tell the truth about war must not only have experienced its "sharp end" firsthand but also be willing to kill in order to earn the abilitv to tell that truth. II In 1965, Wilfred Owen's brother Harold published Journey from Obscurity: Memoirs of the Owen Family. Two years later came Owen's Collected Let ters, co-edited by Harold. Only in 1974 was a full biography published, written by Jon Stallworthy. Since then, numerous biographies have come Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 58, No. 1, Spring 2016 © 2016 by the University of Texas Press DOI: 10.7560/TSLL58105 This content downloaded from 54.228.195.183 on Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:36:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Conscientious Killer in Owen's "Strange Meeting" 109 out, most notably Dominic Hibberd's excellent critical biography in 2002. Prior to the mid-1960s, though, readers had only Siegfried Sassoon's six paragraph introduction to his 1920 collection of some of Owen's poems, and then Edmund Blunden's essay-length "Memoir," included with his 1931 Owen collection and reprinted in C. Day Lewis's 1963 The Col lected Poems of Wilfred Owen. The bare outline presented of his life was this: lower middle-class and unable to afford university, Owen was, in Sassoon's words, "a rather ordinary young man, perceptibly provincial" (Siegfried's Journey 58). He was driven mad by war after five months in the lines, yet willingly returned to both his military and poetic duties, became a decorated hero, and was killed exactly one week before the end of the war against which he became the most famous protester. For readers, this outline was partly colored in by the accident of his publishing history—only four poems published while he was alive, another seven in 1919, sixteen more in 1920, no pre-Craiglockhart poems until 1931, no chronological ordering until 1973, no complete scholarly collection un til 1983—so that, as Mark Rawlinson puts it, "the poet was revealed to his growing public in a process which reversed his poetic development" (118). In short, he was a sudden Phoenix risen from the flames of war who became, to apply John Middleton Murry's phrase, a "martyr of art or life" (140). "Strange Meeting"—a first-person narrative of two soldier-poets en countering each other in hell, at the end of which it is revealed that the narrator killed the other—was integral to this canonizing vision. Indeed, Murry's description was his introductory comment on the poem, which he called "the mark of the martyr of art or life." He was reviewing, along with other poetry, the seven poems by Owen published by Edith and Osbert Sitwell in the 1919 Wheels. "Strange Meeting"—written, according to Stallworthy, between January and March 1918 and likely unfinished— led off this short selection, reader reception of everything to follow thus being shaded by the irony and pathos of this poem, in which the poet prophesies his own death. In 1920, Sassoon also printed it first in his edition of Owen's poems, as would Day Lewis in 1963. In 1931, though, Blunden placed it last rather than first, saying, "This unfinished poem, the most remote and intimate, tranquil and dynamic, of all Owen's imagina tive statements of war experience, is without a date in the only MS seen by the present editor; it probably belongs to the last months of the prophetic soldier's life" (in Kerr, "Connotations" 176). As Douglas Kerr comments, "[I]t seems to have been poetic instinct more than editorial reason that led him to place it as the culmination of Owen's work" ("Connotations" 176). However, it could also be that besides seeing it as the height of Owen's poetic achievement, Blunden took a cue from Sassoon's 1920 introduction, which he ends by quoting two lines from "Strange Meeting"—"Courage was mine, and I had mystery, / Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery .. (30-31)—saying, "Let his own words be his epitaph" (6). This content downloaded from 54.228.195.183 on Sun, 22 Mar 2020 06:36:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 110 Marc D. Cyr However, it was not only a thin biography, editorial judgment, and simple accident that influenced how Owen and his poetry, especially "Strange Meeting," were seen. When facts seemed likely to tarnish the leg end, sometimes they were deliberately omitted or improved upon. Harold Owen notes in Journey from Obscurity that after the poet's death their mother took control of his legacy and "built for herself an inviolable image—an image not only in the likeness of what she thought he was but one which she in her simple way so passionately wished him to be," so that "Wilfred must never be made to fit his poetry, always the poetry must be made to fit him—as she thought of him" (3.250). Harold, who knew "that the real Wilfred had diverged very far from [their] mother's conception" (3.249), was "almost startled" by how she could overlook the evidence before her (3.250). He also notes that the earliest editors of Wilfred's poetry—Edith Sitwell, Sassoon, and Blunden—"understood and were in sympathy with [her] ... at all times" (3.252). Harold himself is almost equally startling, as in his vehement denials that his brother was homosexual, likening him to a celibate Priest of Poetry who "eschewed any complications involving sex of any sort, thinking this would risk the lessening of his intellectual powers" (3.163). Perhaps more illustrative is that, as Dominic Hibberd has pointed out, although the citation for Wilfred's Military Cross decoration had been published along with hundreds of others in a newspaper in 1919, what most people have known is the version printed by Harold in the Col lected Letters (n. 580; this text is cited hereafter as CL). Harold found a copy of the original among Wilfred's papers, and someone—Hibberd presumes it was Harold—"typed out a new version, making it look as much like the original as possible but replacing 'inflicted considerable losses on the en emy' with 'took a number of prisoners.'" As Hibberd says, "The great poet of pity could not be thought, could not even be imagined, to have won a medal by slaughtering Germans" (Wilfred Ozven 439). Neither could the man who would convince his readers that he was telling the truth about war be considered a coward or insane. Hibberd notes that "[t]he least hint that an officer had been 'windy' was profoundly insulting during the war and for a long time after it," a point given cre dence by the fact that when his poems first came out, several reviewers felt able to dismiss them as the work of someone whose nerve had failed (Wilfred Ozven 471,305). The issue of his sanity may be why Blunden's 1931 "Memoir" fleets over the reasons he was invalided home, and why in the seven pages (165-71) covering his time as a neurasthenia patient, his doc tor and treatment take up one short paragraph.