The Artist’s Dilemma: Truth, Process, and Form in the Great War Narratives of Robert Graves, Mary Borden, and David Jones Submitted by Suzanne Marie Steele to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English August 2016 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. i Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Professor Tim Kendall, Dr. Joseph Crawford, and Dr. Laura Salisbury, the University of Exeter Special Collections team, William Graves, and Richard Perceval Graves. I would also like to thank my eXegesis colleagues, Dr. Jaime Robles and Dr. Mike Rose-Steel for their creative inspiration throughout. Others I would like to acknowledge include my colleagues on the 1914FACES2014 project: Professor David H. Jones, Dr. Marjorie Gehrhardt, Ms. Cristina Burke–Trees (M.A.), and our French team leaders, Dr. Bernard Devauchelle, and Dr. Sylvie Testelin of the Institut Faires Face, Amiens, France. I would further like to thank the Durand Group of archaeologists and bomb disposal experts who took me under the battlefields of the Western Front. I would also like to thank the University of Exeter for the generosity of the international studentship award, and to acknowledge Dr. John MacFarlane of the Canadian War Artist Program for his sponsorship of me as a war artist, Master Warrant Officer (retired) Phil Quesnelle, and the 1st Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry for keeping me alive in Afghanistan. On a personal note, I would especially like to thank my daughter Ella Josephine-Marie Speckeen for her sacrifices, Ann and Zola Auld, and Jeffrey Hilberry, for their unconditional love and support of me and this work, Pam Steele for getting me to Exeter and keeping me there, and my extended family for their support. In England, Will Dyer, and the Reverend Janet Conway’s friendship and encouragement has been beyond any call of friendship duty and for this I am grateful. Finally, with eternal gratitude for her belief in me, I dedicate this work to my beloved mother, the late Eilleen Mae Steele (1926-2015), who encouraged me when I thought I could no longer continue. I so wanted you to live to see this. This is for you, Mom, thank you. 1 Abstract The Great War narrative has been the subject of wide scholarship but there have been no studies that have specifically focused on understanding the ethical and aesthetic struggles of the artist in war, the artist’s dilemma. The generation that experienced the Great War included many giants of twentieth- century intellectual, cultural, and political life, many of whom wrote personal narratives of their experiences. These narratives have contributed to shaping familial stories and the meta-narratives of nation states for generations— sometimes limiting a fuller understanding of the war. Through this thesis I aim to open the field of narrative investigation into a wider inquiry through applying what Brian Lande identifies as the ‘sensual and moral conversion’ (98) of the soldier in war, to the artistic actor in the theatre of war. The proposition is to identify and read beyond generic conventions, then to observe the process, the tasks, and the moral, psychosocial, and aesthetic dilemmas of the artist in the theatre of war. To do this, the work focuses on three robust texts of the Great War: Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That (1929), Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), and David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937). The project explores not only the nuance of creative witness, self-witness, and testimony, but proposes a fuller empathic engagement with the narrative within the social contract of war writing. After developing a model of the formal conventions which structure the genre of war writing, and building on the work of Max Saunders, Henri LeFebvre, and others, I have carried out close readings of the three authors’ Great War narratives and related works. With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses literary, artistic, historical, ethical, and sociological studies, and with extensive archival research, I propose to introduce another perspective on reading between the lines of Great War narratives. This perspective encompasses the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas that faced the artists of the war generation as they acted and reacted to war, a generation that shaped the intellectual, political, scientific, and artistic life of the twentieth century, and the lives of generations to follow. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. 1 Abstract ............................................................................................................... 2 Abbreviations ....................................................................................................... 5 List of Illustrations ................................................................................................ 5 Chapter 1. Introduction ........................................................................................ 6 1.1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 6 1.2 Conventions and the War Story ............................................................... 16 1.3 A Short Reading of ‘Unidentified’ ............................................................. 19 1.4 Organisation of the Thesis ....................................................................... 22 1.5 The Moral and Sensual Conversion of the Artist in War .......................... 25 1.6 Vocabularies of Self-impression in War ................................................... 28 1.7 The Battle of the Somme ......................................................................... 29 Chapter 2. ‘His Method of Truth’: Robert Graves and Good-bye To All That (1929) ................................................................................................................ 32 2.1 Introduction .............................................................................................. 32 2.2 Reconstruction of Self .............................................................................. 33 2.3 The Conventions at Work in Good-bye to All That ................................... 38 2.4 Ages of Autobiographical Experimentation, Ages of Truth ...................... 41 2.5 Dear Robert: ‘It Still Goes On’ .................................................................. 50 2.6 The Many Deaths of Robert Graves ........................................................ 59 2.7 The Long Apologia of Robert Graves ...................................................... 63 2.8 Truth and Lies .......................................................................................... 67 Chapter 3. Graves’s Technique of Truth ........................................................... 72 3.0 Introduction .............................................................................................. 72 3.1 The Spoken ‘I’: Letters ............................................................................. 72 3.2 ‘The Shout’ or Hearing Voices ................................................................. 74 3.3 Controlled Anxiety and Release of the Shout .......................................... 81 3.4. Song, Nursery Rhymes and Memory ...................................................... 86 3.5 Sound and Memory .................................................................................. 89 3.6 Lars Porsena ............................................................................................ 91 3.7 Box Office Failure .................................................................................... 95 3.8 The Heartbeat of the Matter ................................................................... 102 3.9 Conclusion ............................................................................................. 113 Chapter 4. Mary Borden through The Forbidden Zone ................................... 116 4.0 Introduction ............................................................................................ 116 4.1 The Conventions at Work in The Forbidden Zone ................................. 118 4.2 Beneath the Forbidden Zone ................................................................. 121 4.3 Dispatches from the Zone ...................................................................... 124 4.4 Defining the Zone ................................................................................... 128 4.5 A War Caught Between Ages ................................................................ 130 4.6 Stranger in a Strange Land .................................................................... 133 4.7 Time, Transformation, and the Things of War ....................................... 136 4.8 Man, Woman, or Just Plain Queer ......................................................... 149 4.9 Ward Wars ............................................................................................. 151 4.10 How Shall We Know Them? ................................................................ 161 4.11 Playing Dress-up, or Getting Ready for Theatre .................................