Music Making As Emotional Care Negotiating Trauma, Expressional Norms, and Politics in Wartime France
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1 Music Making as Emotional Care Negotiating Trauma, Expressional Norms, and Politics in Wartime France Enclose within oneself violent emotions, deep sorrows, and invol- untary urges. Disdain the language of a man who seeks to exteri- orize what he feels and to touch others with what he suffers. — Maurice Maréchal1 On October 6, 1914, just two months after France began sending soldiers to the front, the Paris Conservatoire– trained cellist Maurice Maréchal wrote these words in his war diary. In the same entry, Maréchal revealed that his argument for silent suffering emerged from reading Alfred de Vigny’s Servitude et grandeur militaire, an 1835 collection of essays reflecting on French military service.2 In the fall of 1914, Maréchal penned a series of diary entries reflecting on life on the front lines. Often in the same or adjacent entries, he described brutal trench war- fare and its injuries, as well as the feelings elicited from music making, writing in one case that, after a friend “made music for me again this afternoon, I am so happy to grasp, to sense the poetry, and the intense melancholy, of these minutes at the end of the day.”3 Maréchal articulated in his diary a problem faced by many World War I soldiers: how to cope mentally and emotionally with the violent and often traumatizing sights and sounds of the war. Should feelings about one’s experiences be expressed to others publicly or kept to oneself? How should such feelings be expressed? What does one do with the physical, emotional, and psy- chological discomforts that often arise in the wake of grief and other difficult or traumatizing experiences? Maréchal suggests in his diary that while certain 1 Maurice Maréchal, October 6, 1914, in “Carnets de guerre,” in Deux musiciens dans la grande guerre, ed. Luc Durosoir (Paris: Tallandier, 2008), 223– 344; 238: “Renfermer en soi les émotions violentes, les chagrins profonds ou les élans involontaires. Dédaigner le langage d’un homme qui cherche à outrer ce qu’il sent et attendrir sur ce qu’il souffre.” 2 Maréchal mentions having read Vigny’s Servitude et grandeur militaire in the same diary entry of October 6, 1914, cited in the preceding, in fn. 38 in “Carnets de guerre,” 238. 3 Maréchal, October 11, 1914, in ibid.: “Cloëz m’a refait de la musique cette après- midi, et je suis tellement heureux de comprendre, de sentir la poésie, la mélancolie intense de ces minutes de la fin du jour.” Resonant Recoveries. Jillian C. Rogers, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780190658298.003.0002 40 Resonant Recoveries forms of emotional self- expression should be avoided, feelings resulting from lis- tening to music were— at least sometimes— permissible and desirable. Sociocultural norms in wartime France prevented many people from feeling comfortable with telling others about the traumas they had faced. In fact, many soldiers who fought in World War I came to understand their experiences on the front lines as completely unfathomable to anyone who had remained on the home front.4 In some cases, this difficulty of speaking openly about trauma led to the eventual development of safe and caring communities in which people could articulate their feelings, or in which they found solace and solidarity with those who had faced similar experiences of grief and trauma. Many small, informal kinship networks of this kind formed during and after World War I, especially among soldiers and their families.5 For others, however, speaking or writing about their experiences and feelings remained difficult or even impossible, per- haps even exacerbating feelings of social isolation and shame that frequently accompanied trauma.6 In some instances, the inability to discuss their trauma 4 Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 13– 64; Stéphane Audoin- Rouzeau, Men at War, 1914– 1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1992). 5 Jay Winter has written about the kinship networks that developed between families who had lost loved ones in the war and the people who might assist them in finding out what had happened to them in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), see chapter 2, “Communities in Mourning.” Sarah Cole has addressed relationships between soldiers in Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Michelle Meinhart addresses relationships be- tween music, mourning, and kinship networks in British contexts in “Memory and Private Mourning in an English Country House during the First World War: Lady Alda Hoare’s Musical Shrine to a Lost Son,” Journal of Musicological Research 33, no. 1–3: Music and the Great War (2014): 39–95. Stéphane Audouin- Rouzeau has also noted this phenomenon among soldiers, which he termed “groupe primaire,” in “L’épreuve de feu,” L’Histoire 225 (October 1998): 41; and Sandrine Visse has utilized Audouin- Rouzeau’s concept to discuss musician- soldiers in “Les ‘concerts’ au front pendant la Grande Guerre: Entre engage- ment dans le conflit et vie artistique en marge,” in La Grande Guerre en musique: Vie et création musicales en France pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale, eds. Florence Doé de Maindreville and Stéphan Etcharry (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014), 27–50; 30. The wartime phenomenon of marraines de guerre— women who became “mothers” to soldiers they “adopted” during the war offer another type of alternative kinship; see Carol Mann, Femmes dans la guerre (Paris: Pygmalion, 2010) and Susan R. Grayzel, “Mothers, marraines, and prostitutes: morale and morality in First World War-Era France,” The International History Review 19, no. 1 (1997): 66–82. I have also addressed musicalized fictive kin networks in French interwar musical contexts in Rogers, “Ties That Bind: Music, Mourning, and the Development of Intimacy and Alternative Kinship Networks in World War I- Era France,” in Music and War: From French Revolution to World War I, ed. Etienne Jardin (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016), 415–433. Although I address instances of musi- cally inflected wartime kinship throughout this book, I focus on this in the book’s conclusion. 6 Connections between trauma, shame, and isolation in World War I contexts will be elabo- rated throughout this chapter, but a few texts that address these connections include Louis Crocq, Les Blessés psychiques de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008), 7–14, 171– 172; Gregory M. Thomas, Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France, 1914– 1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 124– 145; Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence— From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 20–23; Jay Winter, War Beyond Words, Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 172– 202; Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (New York: Routledge, 2008), 53– 56. Music Making as Emotional Care 41 forced people to live for years to come in a continual state of hyperarousal— the so- called “fight or flight” mechanism— that may have included flashbacks, nightmares, and other triggering experiences.7 In this particular wartime context, many musicians understood music as an expressive medium that offered them a certain amount of plausible denia- bility: performers, composers, and listeners could deny that the songs they played, hummed along to, sang, or wrote were about their own feelings, even if they (secretly) were.8 My goal in this chapter is to demonstrate how grief, trauma, and their unspeakability became intertwined with understandings of music as a consolatory medium, particularly within the context of wartime politics and expectations. The first half of this chapter addresses the social and political pressures to keep silent about trauma that French citizens experienced during and after the war. After articulating the importance ofpudeur — a type of modesty that had become a historical and cultural norm in France by the early twentieth century—I show how silence became an especially prominent response to grief and trauma during World War I in musical public and private spheres. Through close readings of French medical and psychology texts, obitu- aries and funeral accounts in Parisian newspapers, and musicians’ correspond- ence and diaries, I demonstrate that trauma and personal grief often remained inexpressible within a nationalistic and patriotic culture that considered heroic masculinity— a stoic bravery in which fear, anxiety, and exhaustion played no role— the sine qua non of French citizenship. Contemporary ideas about the he- reditary nature of trauma, alongside notions of its social contagiousness among medical and military officials, led to a culture of heroic masculinity that repressed and ignored traumatic experience and symptoms. The silencing of expressions of trauma in musical milieus mirrored the French state’s investment in suppressing widespread accounts of trauma among front-line fighting forces. Despite these attempts to prevent French citizens from talking about trauma, music offered a powerful means by which to cope with traumatic experiences. In the second half of this chapter, I illustrate some of the ways that soldiers and 7 For more on hyperarousal and other common symptoms of trauma, see Herman, Trauma and Recovery, in particular her chapters “A Healing Relationship” (133–154), “Safety” (155–174), and “Remembrance and Mourning” (175– 195). 8 Music as a plausibly deniable expressive medium has been addressed in other contexts: Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 51; Robert Fink, “Desire, Repression, and Brahms’s First Symphony,” in Music/ Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, ed.