Literature and War #

This is a survey posting rather than an intensive period or author centered one. We hope to explore writers who have experienced war and felt compelled to write about it. What are the recurring motifs and threads in their experiences.

Most of the writers on war were ones who had participated in one. Aeschylus took part in the Battle of Marathon, in 490 BC where the Athenians repelled the Persians. Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War before writing War and Peace. The two world wars resulted in a prolific numbers of participants who needed to unburden their war time experiences by expressing them.

Writers like Wilfred Owen, Eric Remarque, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller poured out their pain into works of art.

War has been described as diplomacy by another means. Enoch Powell claimed “History is littered with wars that everyone knew would never happen”. Most wars are caused by lack of respect. Wars never determine who is right; they only decide who is left!

The Iliad #

The Trojan saga in the early Greek sources tells of the genocide of the Trojans, and the Greek poets explored some of the darkest impulses of human conduct in war. Man’s only purpose is to kill his enemy before he himself gets killed. The dogs of war are unleased to create an irresistible violence for the warrior blood pulsing to the drum beat of war. His own life is nothing, merely something willingly sacrificed to his mates and country. Both Achilles and Hector are acutely aware, their defeat and death are inevitable; to be faced with courage and valour.

Heroism didn’t mean perfection; rather extraordinary attributes of ability: Gilgamesh, Achilles and Odysseus. They appear to operate in a moral vacuum.

In Book IX Agamemnon sends Odysesus to bribe Achilles to re-enter the battle with enormous riches.

Achilles rejects all of Agamemnon’s offers of the rewards of war. He has seen the cost, he has counted the toll on his body, his soul, and his comrades and he finds them obscene.

Achilles no longer believes that death in battle is glorious and that honour is worth more than life.

Instead he speaks of injustice of losing Briseis , broken promises, and the futility of heroism when leaders act without integrity.

He points out the hypocrisy of the Achaeans who fight for a woman, Helen, but deny him the woman he loves. Agamemnon dishonoured him by dismissing his humanity.

Achilles rejects the whole ideology of warfare. The same reward awaits the coward and the brave; they both go down to death - the equaliser.

The theft of Briseis was a violation of the code that binds warriors to their king. This code is fragile, corruptible and hollow.

War is political; the leaders feed, while the soldiers bleed.

Men labor and die, but power remains with those that command.

This is not cowardice, this is moral disillusionment.

Achilles peels away the myth of war as noble sacrifice and sees the game of exploitation where valour is consumed by the leaders and discarded.

While fighters die, the Kings squabble over the spoils.

According to Robert Fagles, the 50 some Greek city states were continually at war with one another, sometimes as allies, other times as enemies. The permanence of war is echoed by Homer and Plato. We Achaeans, says Odysseus:

“the men who Zeus decrees, from youth to old age,
Must wind down our brutal wars to the bitter end
Until we drop and die, down to the last man.” (14.105 – 7)

More on The Iliad @: https://nebo-lit.com/history/homer-the-iliad.html

Plato writes:

“Peace is just a name. The truth is, by natural law, engaged in a perpetual undeclared war with every other city state”.

Athens, during the fifth century was at war on land and sea for more years than they were at peace. They fought Persia, allied with Sparta from 480 BCE, but in 460 fought with Sparta. After defeating Persia decisively, after 15 years of peace, in 431 began the Peloponnesian war against Sparta for 27 years, surrendering with the loss of her naval supremacy and ending democracy.

Aeschylus was Greece’s first extraordinary dramatist, who fought at Marathon, and later at the battle of Salamis. His is likely the first participant writer to write on war - his play Persians, a play unique among Greek tragedies in that it dramatizes recent history rather than events from the distant age of mythical heroes. He claims:

The first casualty in war is truth.

The Persians is set in the Persian capital, Susa where a messenger brings news to the Persian queen of the disaster at Salamis. The play attributes the defeat of Persia to Greek independence and bravery and to the gods’ punishment of Persian folly for going outside the bounds of Asia, and it ends with the return of the broken and humiliated Persian king, Xerxes.

Aristophanes, Lysistrata in 411 BC, dramatises a woman’s extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War between Greek city states by denying all the men of the land any sex, forcing the men to negotiate peace—a strategy, however, that inflames the battle between the sexes.

More @:

https://nebo-lit.com/war/war-and-women.html

Sophocles in Antigone poses the conflict of Natural jurisprudence and State Justice. If the state acts in an unjust way, what is your role as a patriot? Accept or resist?

Following Oedipus’ exile, his sons agreed to share the rule of Thebes, alternating in rule every year. However, after the first year, Eteocles refused to give up his power and drove out Polynices, his older brother, who fled to Argos,

Returning to Thebes, the sisters attempted to reconcile their quarrelling brothers—Eteocles, who was defending the city and his crown, and Polyneices, who was attacking Thebes. Both brothers, however, killed each other, and their uncle Creon became king. After performing an elaborate funeral service for Eteocles, Creon, decrees that her exiled brother Polynices, “an enemy of the state”, so his corpse is to be left outside on the hillside to be devoured by dogs and vultures, declaring him to have been a traitor.

Antigone is determined to obey the divine laws by giving her brother Polynices a proper grave on the simple moral point that “he is still my brother”.

When her sister, Ismene resigns with:

“It’s the law, what can we do? we have to follow it - we’re girls,"

Antigone asserts:

“but I will bury him: well for me to die in doing so. I shall rest, a loved one with him whom I have loved, sinless in my crime; for I owe a larger allegiance to the dead than to the living… But if thou wilt, be guilty of dishonouring laws which the gods have stablished in honour.”

Language of War #

Language is used more to conceal than to reveal. In no area do we use language in such a way as to deceive, except in love.

Propagandists are adept at using language for “perception management”; they often distort truth by misusing and abusing language. It is generally insidious grand scale subterfuge – attempting to cover up reality.

Apologists will use euphemisms to justify the actions of their armies while using the foulest pejoratives to stigmatise, vilify and demonise the actions of their enemies. History is redolent with examples of the abuse of language as a means to “win the hearts and minds” of their own or their enemy’s population.

Paul Daley objects to its ecclesiastical language (the “spirit” and the “fallen”, “loss” and “sacrifice”) that euphemises battlefield carnage, pervades. Those who challenge or question it are too often dismissed as vaguely seditious fringe dwellers, disrespectful of the dead.

Tony Abbott refers to soldiers as: “those who put themselves in harms way.”

More @: https://nebo-lit.com/language/text-types/Language-of-War.html

Romans and War #

The Roman Empire was established and expanded by continual warfare. Except for Egypt, it is the longest standing empire, largely because they knew how to win the peace by integrating its conquered peoples.

The earliest battles before 500 BCE were against local tribes - the Vosces, Sabines, Etruscans.

The early Romans needed brides and invited the Sabine men and women to a celebration, where they abducted the women.

In Nicolas Poussin’s painting Rape of the Sabine Women, nearly all the women are shown resisting the Romans. The men, husbands and fathers, are shown trying to prevent the abduction, rape, and marriage of the women to the Romans. Women were viewed as property and the crime of their abduction was against their husbands and fathers. Although clearly apparent, the distress of the Sabine women is rarely emphasized by art historians.

https://www.heritage-print.com/abduction-sabines-1520-39884540.html

Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome who ordered the capture of the Sabine women, justified his deed by celebrating the Sabine women as the mothers of Rome who later became peacemakers between the Sabines and Romans.

The Romans ended up in a war with the Sabines, as they were obviously outraged that their women were forcibly taken by the Romans. After the allies of the Sabines were defeated, the Romans fought the Sabines themselves. By this time, the Sabine women had accepted their role as the wives of the Romans, and were quite distressed at the war between the two peoples. Finally, in one of the battles, the Sabine women stood between the Roman and Sabine armies, imploring their husbands on one hand, and fathers and brothers on the other to stop fighting.

According to Livy, the Sabine women placed the blame for the war on themselves and said that they would rather die than to see bloodshed on either side of their families. Affected by their speech, the Romans and Sabines concluded a peace treaty, and the two peoples were united under the leadership of Rome, hence further strengthening the city of Rome.

Spain took 200 years to control, while Gaul resisted Rome for many years.

Shakespeare and War #

Robert White Professor of English, The University of Western Australia writes:

In 26 of his 38 plays, Shakespeare includes a war in either foreground or background. In all these, anti-war invectives abound in epigrammatic phrases:

“O, war thou son of hell” (Henry VI, part 2); “the hideous god of war”; “war and lechery confound all” (Troilus and Cressida); “dogged war bristle[s] his angry crest / And snarleth in the gentle eyes of peace” (King John).

Soldiers are regarded by civilians as cruelly taking:

“our goodly agèd men by th’beards”

and indulging unbridled sexual violence in:

“Giving our holy virgins to the stain /Of contumelious, beastly, mad-brained war” (Timon of Athens).

For students and politicians used to reciting Henry V’s stirring “Once more unto the breach …” and “St Crispin’s Day” speeches before and after the battle of Agincourt, it is often assumed Shakespeare must support war and heroic values, epitomised in an “ideal king”.

However, the respective dramatic contexts undercut the King’s rhetoric. There are also strong arguments in the play that his invasion of France is illegal and unjustifiable, and he is guilty of war crimes, such as conscripting children, killing prisoners of war, and threatening a town with genocide. Soldiers are “bloody-hunting slaughtermen”. In “impious” war, bloody corpses are seen “larding the plain”.

Meanwhile, in other plays, some sympathetic and morally scrupulous characters condemn the tragic futility and violence of war. Hamlet meditates over a piece of worthless, depopulated scorched earth “wasteland”, over which “the imminent deaths twenty thousand men’ … [will] go to their graves like beds”, fighting “even for an eggshell” “which is not tomb enough and continent /To hide the slain”.

The saintly, pacifist King Henry VI quotes Christ’s words while brooding on the high moral ground of a hill overlooking battle in “civil butchery”, intra-family, mafia-like vendettas pitting families against each other and resulting in mutual slaughter of fathers and sons. In revenge plays such as Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, the cessation of one conflict is simply the prelude to the next in a succession ending only with the deaths of all antagonists, like today’s nightmare specter of a sequence of retaliatory nuclear strikes.

In Julius Caesar, “Havoc.” in battles of ancient times this cry was the signal that no quarter was to be given to prisoners.

Antony uses the language of hunting. (See lines 205-211)“let slip the dogs of war.” To “let slip” a dog was to release it from the leash when it was time to begin the pursuit. It has been suggested that “the dogs of war” are fire, sword, and famine, for in “Henry V” the poet says of the warlike king,

and, at his heels,
Leashed in like hounds, should Famine, Sword, and Fire
Crouch for employment.

An outspoken anti-war work Troilus and Cressida is widely acknowledged as among the most outspoken anti-war works of all time. It chronicles a squalid war waged over the forced abduction of a woman, who is regarded as little more than a symbolic trophy.

The prophetess Cassandra, speaking as much for future generations as her own, condemns the Trojan war, calling upon:

“Virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled old,
Soft infancy, that nothing canst but cry”,
to weep in protest at the “mass of moan to come”.

The fate of the “heroic” Hector in the play is ignominiously humiliating:

He’s dead; and at the murderer’s horse’s tail,
In beastly sort, dragg’d through the shameful field
… Hector is dead, There is no more to say.

So much for heroism.

Another brutally dismissive epitaph – “Let’s make the best of it” – is uttered over the corpse of Coriolanus, the most single-minded, professional soldier in Shakespeare’s canon. “Chief enemy to the people”, he is a sociopath and prey to violent outbursts of anger. More machine than man, his role resembles the modern arms industry, owing allegiance to no national state and selling weapons indiscriminately to either side of conflicts.

Having turned against Rome and then against his new associates in arms, Coriolanus is finally hacked to death unceremoniously by Volscians baying “kill, kill, kill…”

He is remembered as one who,

“in this city [Rome] …
Hath widow’d and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury”.

You can get Henry V from the left side-bar menu or from below:

More @: https://nebo-lit.com/drama/richard/Henry-V.html

Mother Courage and her Children #

Mother Courage and her Children remains a masterpiece, as a metaphor for life. Set in The Thirty Years War, 1618 - 1648, it becomes an anti-war play seen through the eyes of the little people, the forgotten victims. The messages also come through simple words of songs, especially the finale:

“The world will end and time will cease; and while we live we buy and sell; and in our graves we shall find peace, unless the war goes on in hell.”

The principal battlefields were the towns and principalities of Germany, which suffered severely. Many of the contending armies were mercenaries, unable to collect their pay. They began the “wolf-strategy”. The armies of both sides plundered as they marched, leaving cities, towns, villages, and farms ravaged. Ordinary citizens suffered the most. Its destructive campaigns and battles intermittently raged back and forth over most of Europe. At the end real Wolves actually inhabited most towns.

Bertolt Brecht uses alienation devices to distance us emotionally. It was Voltaire, who said:

“that life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.”

Brecht’s definition of tragedy:

to take from an event or character that which is predictable, self evident, obvious and to arouse surprise and curiosity.

Brecht regarded conventional theatres of illusion as soft thinking; a narcissistic romanticism, - a desire to use the theatre for escapism. The principle of Einfuhlung (empathy) was regarded as theatrical seduction which clouded the minds of the audience to the true issues. He tries to divorce the audience from sentimental involvement or engagement and detach, distance or alienate us from the characters on stage. We are not meant to identify or empathise with them, rather stand back and judge them critically.

By distancing, estrangement, detachment or alienation Brecht hopes to appeal to the mind and create a paradigm shift in our outlook on issues so that we will see things more clearly and change our mindset.

Only if we can look at Courage’s behaviour in that light can we make sense of her. She loses all three of them in dreadful circumstances, but from the beginning she sees her duty as protecting them. One son, Eilif, runs away to join the battle against her will and of course is killed; the second son Swiss Cheese is executed for stealing the pay box; and the mute daughter Kattrin is shot as she tries to warn the town about an impending siege by banging a cricket bat against a corrugated iron wall, the only way she can communicate.

Kattrin’s fate may be an allusion to Ovid’s reference to an Athenian princess, Philomel, in Greek mythology raped and deprived of her tongue by her brother-in-law Tereus, avenged by the killing of his son. Tereus cut off Philomel’s tongue to prevent her telling the story of rape. She filled all the desert with inviolable voice when she is changed into nightingale in The Waste Land by Eliot.

But even after the loss of all her children Mother Courage picks up her cart and keeps on going, living and partly living. She has changed, and even after she has lost her children, her main reason for living, she progresses from being the Great Mother to the Great Survivor, heroic in an even more universal sense. It’s about survival, not necessarily of the fittest, but of the toughest.

Themes in Mother Courage #

1. Anti- War, Pacifism. The play attempts to portray the futility of war by depicting its senseless devastation and brutality. The war machine is a death mechanism that exempts no one, not even the generals.

2. Capitulation: Under a war or any crisis mentality people willingly give up their rights because of fear. They become craven, acquiescent, compliant, servile, submissive and subordinate. This is a crass device used by corrupt politicians to control the masses.

3. Anti-heroic mockery. We can not identify with any of the main actors.

Civil War #

The prominence of civil war is nothing new in world history. For at least 2000 years civil war has been the most frequent form of collective human conflict. It has also been among the most ferocious.

In the first century BC, at the height of Rome’s civil wars, about a quarter of all male citizens aged between 17 and 46 were in arms. About 1700 years later, probably a greater proportion of England’s population died during the civil wars of the 1640s than perished in World War I. Two centuries later still, the military death toll in the US Civil War was six times larger, relative to size of population, than the casualty rate in World War II.

Most major conflicts are now civil wars, conflicts fought within states not between them. In 2006, the last year for which we have an accurate count, there were 32 civil wars in progress, from Afghanistan to Sudan. And since 1989, 115 of the world’s 122 wars have been civil wars rather than international wars, though many of these civil conflicts have also drawn in outside powers.

The costs of civil war are still mounting. Development economists have recently put a lot of energy into calculating the impact of civil war and have come up with some hair-raising conclusions. The average cost of a civil war, in terms of lives and income lost and productive resources squandered, is almost $US60 billion ($61.8 billion). With roughly two new civil wars starting every year in the past half-century, that makes an annual price tag of about $US120 billion. To put this in perspective, that’s more than the developed world spends on aid to developing countries each year.

For more on the English civil war see:

https://nebo-lit.com/history/Road-to-Democracy.html#the-english-civil-war-1640---49

John Milton #

Milton can be viewed as a chronicler of the tensions, conflicts, and upheavals of 17th-century England during the Civil War; Cromwell’s time as Lord Protector, the trials of the republicans and the restoration of the Monarchy by Charles II.

After 1642 Milton gained notoriety in England and abroad as a propagandist for Parliament, a strong advocate of republicanism and popular sovereignty, and a fervent admirer of Oliver Cromwell

The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) urges the abolition of tyrannical kingship and the execution of tyrants. The treatise cites a range of authorities from Classical antiquity, Scripture, the Fathers of the Church, political philosophers of the early modern era, and Reformation theologians, all of whom support such extreme—but just, according to Milton—measures to punish tyrants.

Milton accuses Charles I of hypocrisy; cites Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard, duke of Gloucester, in Richard III, indicating how treachery is disguised by the pretense of piety.

Like Cromwell, Milton believed his mission was to usher in the kingdom of God on earth. While he loathed the concept of the ‘divine right of kings’, Milton was willing to submit himself to God in the belief, in Benjamin Franklin’s words, that “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God”.

In 1660 Milton wrote a treatise The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.

The poem with its insistence on political freedom has influenced readers embedded in revolutionary struggles in America, France, Haiti, and elsewhere.

When Milton began Paradise Lost in 1658, he was in mourning. It was a year of public and private grief, marked by the deaths of his second wife, memorialised in his beautiful Sonnet 23, and of England’s Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, which precipitated the gradual disintegration of the republic. Paradise Lost is an attempt to make sense of a fallen world: to “justify the ways of God to men”.

When Paradise Lost was published in London in 1667, Milton had fallen out of favour. Just months before the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in May 1660, he had published a pamphlet denouncing kingship. Now Milton was scorned, his writings were burned, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London – only narrowly escaping execution after the intercession of a fellow poet, Andrew Marvell.

Following the death of Oliver Cromwell, with the Restoration of Charles II in 1661, in a new court, John Cooke was tried and found guilty of high treason for his part in the 1649 trial of King Charles I, even though as solicitor-general he was simply doing his job. John Cooke, with 8 more regicides, was hanged, drawn and quartered, his privates cut off on 16 October 1661 at Charing Cross.

The Charge of the Light Brigade #

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson I

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

II

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

III

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred.

IV

Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

V

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

VI

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

The Crimean War (1854 - 56) was fought to prevent Russian access to the Bosporus and Dardanelles.

59 years later the Gallipoli campaign assisted Russia attempting to gain access to the Bosporus and Dardanelles.

Other 19th century British Wars:

• Britain’s last great foreign expeditionary campaign was 1815 - Battle of Waterloo - Duke of Wellington.
• After the Napoleonic wars, Britain faced a number of wars against insurgents in their own Empire.
• Colonial uprising occurred in Afghanistan 1839 - English routed twice,
• China - Opium Wars 1842 and 1862,
• India several uprisings, 1857
• Ned Kelly in Australia 1880’s
• Louis Riel in Canada 1870 - 1885

Most high commanders had their commissions bought.

Lord Lucan, Lord Cardigan and Lord Raglan all incompetent.

It is about the charge of the light brigade at the battle of Balaclava during the Crimean war. The light brigade was a unit of British cavalry intended to harass fleeing enemies and scout enemy positions. Just prior to the charge the leader of the light brigade Lord Cardigan had received orders to attack a battery of artillery in retreat from Lord Raglan. A task which was common for light cavalry. The order was carried through Captain Louis Nolan. Nolan’s delivery of the order was not verbatim therefore was misunderstood by the leader of the Light Brigade and they began their attack on the wrong position.

A well fortified valley with Russian artillery and riflemen covering three flanks.

The light brigade began its charge and Captain Nolan realizing his folly attempted to redirect the charge by running out in front of the light brigade, but he was struck by a cannon ball and killed before he could stop the charge. The light brigade ran the gauntlet under withering artillery and rifle fire and eventually reached the back of the valley. They routed the artillery men, but their position was untenable so they retreated back across the valley for a second time. The routed Russians returned to their guns and opened fire again. The light brigade lost 402 of its 600 man outfit in the ordeal. The charge and the poem that accompanied it details the bravery of the men who continued out the charge despite knowing the battle was doomed and keeping order despite losing most of its officers in the mayhem.

First newspaper war - instigated and reported on - two week delay.

Horses versus Cannon.

The poem illustrated the British army’s stubborn insistence on using cavalry over cannons and tanks - even after World War I. Reports urging change were censored. In the 1930s, as Hitler built his 36 tank divisions, the British army ordered that the Tank Brigade should be disbanded and never reassembled.

Field-Marshal Lord Slim:

‘‘There are no bad regiments, only bad officers.”

Allan Clark remarked:

“The troops were Lions; Lions led by Donkeys”.

Medals

Medals awarded by Queen Victoria to the survivors - 200 +

• George Bush and Queen Elizabeth II awarded Howard, Blair and Bush Freedom Medals for the Iraq War - 2003.

In Catch-22, Yossarian is awarded a medal to cover-up a mistaken attack.

Aristotle claimed that,

“The superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness”.

Poet laureates are expected to write in the national interest so Tennyson is indirect and restrained.

The poem elevates the heroism of the individual soldier over the officers.

Sound Effects #

There is not a specific rhyme scheme in the poem. However, some lines rhyme for the sake of resonating with the military atmosphere. Hence it is a blank verse poem.

It is the repetition of hundred, blundered, wondered, thundered, sundered that creates a spell.

also: rely, why and die, - shell, well and hell air, bare, there smoke, broke, stroke

The metrical composition

There are different kinds of feet, such as the trochee, the spondee, the dactyl, the iamb, and the anapaest. These indicate various formations of stresses in syllables.

“Dactyl,” derived from the Greek for finger, metrically indicates one long and two short syllables.

The metrical foot most recognised by English-language readers is the iamb, its unstressed-stressed beat pattern thought to resemble the natural cadence of English speech. Walking, heart beat, waves on shore…

Listen: I-amb-what-I-amb.

While his sonnets observe a precise rhyming pattern, Shakespeare has his actors speak in blank verse – unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs).

This rhythmic predictability helps players remember dialogue, but beyond practical benefit blank verse exploits profound possibilities.

Metre is central among poetic formulae for fixing words in communal memory.

There are different kinds of lines – hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter and so on – whose names indicate the number of feet a line contains.

The most common is iambic pentameter

Tennyson mixes the trochaic and iambic meter in the poem. There are some anapestic feet and spondees too in the poem. The metrical pattern of the poem reflects the sound of the military footstep. The poet uses short lines to intensify the sound of the poem.

However, on the whole, the poem is written in dactylic dimeter, with each line containing two dactyls (DUM-da-da). This rhythm resembles the movement - galloping of horses, reinforcing the poem’s theme.

Additional metrical variations, such as masculine endings, add to the sense of chaos and urgency.

Stephen Crane #

The American Civil War

Crane’s writing, as when he points out how much Crane’s tone of serene omniscience depends on the passive construction of his sentences. But when he implies that Crane is original because he summons up interior experience in the guise of exterior experience—makes a psychology by inspecting a perceptual field—he is a little wide of the mark. This is, after all, simply a description of what good writing does: Homer and Virgil writing on war were doing it, too. (We are inside Odysseus’ head, then out on the Trojan plain. We visit motive, then get blood.) What makes Crane remarkable is not that he rendered things felt as things seen but that he could report with such meticulous attention on things that were felt and seen only in his imagination. Again and again in his novel, the writing has the eerie, hyperintense credibility of remembered trauma—not just of something known but of something that, in its mundane horror, the narrator finds impossible to forget:

The men dropped here and there like bundles. The captain of the youth’s company had been killed in an early part of the action. His body lay stretched out in the position of a tired man resting, but upon his face there was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an ill turn. The babbling man was grazed by a shot that made the blood stream widely down his face. He clapped both hands to his head. “Oh!” he said, and ran. Another grunted suddenly as if he had been struck by a club in the stomach. He sat down and gazed ruefully. In his eyes there was mute, indefinite reproach. Farther up the line, a man, standing behind a tree, had had his knee joint splintered by a ball. Immediately he had dropped his rifle and gripped the tree with both arms. And there he remained, clinging desperately and crying for assistance that he might withdraw his hold upon the tree. The wounded man clinging desperately to the tree has the awkward, anti-dramatic quality of something known.

“Red Badge” has this post-traumatic intensity throughout The impulse of Crane’s fiction is strictly realist and reportorial: the battle scenes in “Red Badge” feel like nightmares out of a surrealist imagination, with an excision of explanation and a simultaneity of effects, because that is what battles must be like. The result is almost mythological in feeling, and mythological in the strict Greek sense that everything seems foreordained, with no one ever master of his fate. We live and die by chance and fortune. This symbolic, myth-seeking quality of Crane’s writing gives it an immediacy

The Irish Civil War

The Scots and the Irish have been a problem for centuries. Even the Romans failed to conquer their independent spirit and finally Hadrian resorted to building a wall to keep them out.

William the Conquerer claimed success, yet successive Kings and Queens continued to struggle with “The Irish Problem”.

Much of this was caused by double dealing. Before WWI, England had agreed to Home Rule for the Irish but because of the war England reneged on this promise. Many of the Irish did not support England in the European war.

This resulted in continued wide spread insurrection, especially in Easter 1916 and the Black and Tan uprisings from 1919.

W.B. Yeats wrote poems like Easter 1916 and The Second Coming on this.

https://nebo-lit.com/poetry/yeats/Yeats-Easter-1916-analysis.html

https://nebo-lit.com/poetry/yeats/Yeats-The-Second-Coming-Yeats.html

Perhaps the continued conflicts with English imperialism is why Irish writers became so prolific, producing four Nobel Prize winners. Notable ones include Sean O’Casey, Bernard Shaw, ….

Bendan Behan Quotes:

It’s not that the Irish are cynical. It’s that they have a lack of respect for anything and everybody.

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

I only take a drink on two occasions - when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.

I am a drinker with writing problems.

They took away our land, our language, and our religion; but they could never harness our tongues.

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.

Many Irish writers left Dublin because of a repressive censoring state, and certainly the great Irish modernists, like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, got out of Dublin to Paris.

But now, and for the last several decades, Ireland has very much cosied up to its writers and marketed them and celebrated them — and funded them.

As his country’s most prominent poet, Seamus Heaney struggled to reconcile his vision of poetry with the Troubles tearing the Irish apart. He didn’t ignore incidents of violence and injustice but, rather, grappled with them, shaping reality into an image of a better world. “On the one hand, poetry is secret and natural, on the other hand it must make its way in a world that is public and brutal,” Heaney wrote in The Guardian. A good poet—a responsible poet—would hold both truths in mind. Maggie Doherty The New Yorker

Heaney is noted for his restrained dispassionate approach.

World War I #

Questioning of war began after the brutal bloody religious wars from 1530’s. After the Thirty Years War, 1618 - 48, The Treaty of Westphalia made a feeble attempt to encourage diplomacy rather than bloodshed.

After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, The Congress of Vienna came up with the concept of balance of power - the five powers of Europe were to be of equal strength not to threaten war.

The mass slaughter of millions of young men in their prime shocked the sensibilities of most rational people but excluded politicians who imposed the most draconian terms on Germany imaginable, - The Treaty of Versailles, guaranteeing future strife.

Virgina Woolf #

She speculates about the change in the kind of conversations people had before World War I, and the kind of poetry they wrote, and observes that a drastic change has taken place.

To answer the question of that lack, the narrator shifts the scene to a similar luncheon party, before the war, in similar rooms—“but different.”

The romantic views of a Tennyson or a Rosetti no longer seem possible in the post-war era; the difference being that that earlier poetry “celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps).”

War Poets #

WWI marked a seismic shift in how we viewed heroic death. The classical depiction is tragic, but celebratory; willingly and joyfully sacrificing yourself for a greater cause.

Confronted, suddenly and starkly with the senseless and meaningless slaughter of thousands who died “like cattle”, in the face of industrialised war, a new immersive picture emerged of the brutal ugly non-heroic nature of young men needlessly giving up their lives because the Generals had little idea of the real conditions and consequences of their war strategies.

For Wilfred Owen see:

https://nebo-lit.com/poetry/Wilfred-Owen/Anthem-for-a-doomed-Youth.html

https://nebo-lit.com/poetry/Wilfred-Owen/Dulce-et-Decorum.html

All Quiet On The Western Front #

Erich Maria Remarque - of French extraction, his family immigrated to Germany at the time of the French Revolution. At the age of 18, he joined the German Army directly from school. During the war his mother died of cancer and most of his friends were killed.

Told from the German point of view, it describes the horror and pitilessness of how war is prosecuted throughout the world. He depicts the banality of the military command, the fate of a generation of young men, and their genuine comradeship.

see:

https://nebo-lit.com/war/all-quiet-on-western-front.html

American War Veterans #

The Last Days of Innocence by Meirion & Susie Harries. During World War I, more than 116,000 Americans died and more than 200,000 were wounded. In the immediate aftermath of that war, American literature was permeated with disillusionment:

*“As for the [American] survivors [of World War I], those neither killed nor seriously wounded, at the Armistice 1,980,654 men were in Europe, in transit, or in Russia. Another 1,689,998 were in camp in America. Getting home was the only thought in most men’s minds. … When the veterans finally did reach home, they looked for some recog­nition of what they had achieved, some understanding of what they had en­dured; but time after time they were disappointed. After the welcome parades, they returned to their hometowns – to find, very often, that their jobs were gone. The special employment offices simply could not cope with the lines of veterans looking for work….

“All around them, men who had stayed at home in war industries com­manded what seemed like remarkable wages. The returnees were faced with astonishing price rises – food, clothing, and home furnishings all at nearly double the prices they remembered – and a government that appar­ently grudged them any help in meeting the bills. The veterans of earlier wars could look to their war bonuses to give them a start in their new life. But this administration was determined to avoid the colossal expenditure of the past, and there was violent argument in Congress over the appropri­ate reward for veterans’ services. Not until 1924 would any allocation of bonuses be finally agreed on, and no actual payments would be made until 1945.*

“Veterans’ bitterness found its way into some of the best and most en­during writing of the period. Some older writers, such as Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and others who had helped but not fought, still found it possible to revel in the romance of war, and the popular conceptions of heroism and adventure died hard. But for those who had been to Europe with the AEF or the ambulance services, such as John Dos Passos, e e cummings, and Ernest Hemingway, a far more typical reaction was to find creativity in anger, cynicism, and a kind of licensed rebellion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald #

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the story of a mid westerner adventurer, Jay Gatsby, who falls in love with a southern belle, Daisy, during World War I, but when he returns much later, finds her married to a rich privileged Tom Buchanan.

Gatsby, is a Midwesterner, a self-made millionaire, and a habitual loner, armoured against all attempts to invade his emotional privacy.

Quotes:

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can! ”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

“I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money … and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Who knows the effect on Fitzgerald of the war. Fitzgerald’s personal life was tumultuous, marred by alcoholism, Zelda’s mental health issues and financial debt.

Following several failed suicide attempts, in 1940 he died of a heart attack, believing himself an abject failure and his career a total write-off. His most recent royalty cheque had been for $13.13. He was 44.

Plumes - Laurence Stallings #

The scarred veteran, it was felt, was entitled to speak his mind. The writing of Laurence Stallings, who had lost a leg after injuries received at Belleau Wood, was powered at this stage, before nostalgia took a hand, exclusively by rancor. In his novel Plumes, the protagonist is obsessed by the secret treaties signed by America’s allies, all the time ’trying to face the fact that he threw himself away [in] … a brutal and vicious dance directed by ghastly men. It was the tragedy of our lives that we had to be mutilated at the pleasure of dolts and fools.'

“In Company K, William March attacked one of the standard texts of the old value system in his grotesque burlesque of an official letter of condolence:

Your son Francis, died needlessly at Belleau Wood. You will be interested to hear that at the time of his death he was crawling with vermin and weak from diarrhea. … A piece of shrapnel hit him and he died in agony, slowly. … He lived three full hours screaming and cursing. … He had nothing to hold onto, you see: He had learned long ago that what he had been taught to believe by you, his mother, who loved him, under the meaningless names of honor, courage, patriotism, were all lies.”

The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917-1918 Meirion & Susie Harries Random House 1997 page(s): 453-457

President Hoover’s most bastardly act was his response to the WWI’s Veterans demand for their entitled money for time served. When the Veterans staged a five-week camp out, Hoover declared them a communist front and mobilized tanks and infantry to attack them. 54 were injured, and 134 were arrested.

This prepared the seed bed for Americans demonizing Communism, while many supporters of Hitler’s Nazis, like Charles Lindbergh, were openly condoned.

Hemingway #

Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath Spring 2006, Vol. 38, No. 1 Prologue Magazine By Thomas Putnam

Technique

“Hemingway was at the crest of a wave of modernists,” noted fellow centennial panelist and book critic Gail Caldwell, that were rebelling against the excesses and hypocrisy of Victorian prose. The First World War is the watershed event that changes world literature as well as how Hemingway responded to it.

Hemingway and other modernists lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization. One of those institutions was literature itself. Nineteenth-century novelists were prone to a florid and elaborate style of writing. Hemingway, using a distinctly American vernacular, created a new style of fiction “in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly.”

Hemingway often used scenes that he had witnessed as well as his own personal experience to inform his fiction. Explaining his technique 20 years later, he wrote, “the writer’s standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make of it an absolute truth.”

As a correspondent, Hemingway chronicled the outbreak of wars from Macedonia to Madrid and the spread of fascism throughout Europe. Although best known for his fiction, his war reporting was also revolutionary. Hemingway was committed above all else to telling the truth in his writing. To do so, he liked being part of the action, and the power of his writing stemmed, in part, from his commitment to witness combat firsthand.

According to Seán Hemingway, his grandfather’s war dispatches “were written in a new style of reporting that told the public about every facet of the war, especially, and most important, its effects on the common man, woman, and child.” This narrative style brought to life the stories of individual lives in warfare and earned a wide readership. Before the advent of television and cable news, Hemingway brought world conflicts to life for his North American audience.

Much of the literature decrying World War I came from British poets, many of whom perished in battle. To appreciate the stance that Hemingway took, according to Gail Caldwell, one has to understand how revolutionary it was in light of the Victorian understanding of patriotism and courage. “If you look at Hemingway’s prose and the writing he did about war, it was as radical in its time as anything we have seen since.”

Hemingway and World War I #

During the First World War, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to serve in Italy as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. In June 1918, while running a mobile canteen dispensing chocolate and cigarettes for soldiers, he was wounded by Austrian mortar fire. “Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red,” he recalled in a letter home.

Despite his injuries, Hemingway carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety and was injured again by machine-gun fire. For his bravery, he received the Silver Medal of Valor from the Italian government—one of the first Americans so honored.

A Farewell to Arms #

A piece of shrapnel from the battlefield where Hemingway was wounded during World War I. Had the enemy mortar attack been more successful that fateful night, the world may never have known one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Conversely, had Hemingway not been injured in that attack, he not may have fallen in love with his Red Cross nurse, a romance that served as the genesis of A Farewell to Arms, one of the century’s most read war novels.

Hemingway kept the piece of shrapnel, along with a small handful of other “charms” including a ring set with a bullet fragment, in a small leather change purse. Similarly he held his war experience close to his heart and demonstrated throughout his life a keen interest in war and its effects on those who live through it.

In “Soldier’s Home,” Howard Krebs returns home from Europe later than many of his peers. Having missed the victory parades, he is unable to reconnect with those he left behind—especially his mother, who cannot understand how her son has been changed by the war. “Hemingway’s great war work deals with aftermath,” stated author Tobias Wolff at the Hemingway centennial celebration. “It deals with what happens to the soul in war and how people deal with that afterward.

No American writer is more associated with writing about war in the early 20th century than Ernest Hemingway. He experienced it firsthand, wrote dispatches from innumerable frontlines, and used war as a backdrop for many of his most memorable works.

Recuperating for six months in a Milan hospital, Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American Red Cross nurse. At war’s end, he returned to his home in Oak Park, Illinois, a different man. His experience of travel, combat, and love had broadened his outlook. Yet while his war experience had changed him dramatically, the town he returned to remained very much the same.

After living for months with his parents, during which time he learned from Agnes that she had fallen in love with another man.

“The way we write about war or even think about war was affected fundamentally by Hemingway,” stated Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., another speaker at the Hemingway centennial. In the early 1920s, in reaction to their experience of world war, The Sun Also Rises features Jake Barnes, an American World War I veteran whose mysterious combat wounds have caused him to be impotent. Unlike Nick Adams and Howard Krebs, who return stateside after the war, Barnes remains in Europe, joining his compatriots in revels through Paris and Spain. Many regard the novel as Hemingway’s portrait of a generation that has lost its way, restlessly seeking meaning in a postwar world. The Hemingway Collection contains almost a dozen drafts of the novel, including four different openings—examples of a burgeoning, hardworking, and exceptionally talented young novelist. His second novel, A Farewell to Arms, is written as a retrospective of the war experience of Frederic Henry, a wounded American soldier, and his doomed love affair with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley.

Though World War I is more backdrop than cause to this tragedy—Catherine’s death in the end is brought about through childbirth not warfare—the novel contains, as seen in the following passage, a stark critique of war and those who laud it:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice. . . . We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

For Whom the Bell Tolls. #

Despite his sympathies for the Loyalist cause, he is credited for documenting in this novel the horrors that occurred on both sides of that struggle. The novel’s protagonist, Robert Jordan, an American teacher turned demolitions expert, joins an anti-fascist Spanish guerrilla brigade with orders from a resident Russian general to blow up a bridge.

For author Gordimer, what is remarkable about the novel (which she describes as a cult book for her generation) is that Jordan takes up arms in another country’s civil war for personal, not ideological, reasons. In the novel, Hemingway suggests that Jordan has no politics. Instead, his dedication to the Republic is fueled, in Gordimer’s words, by a “kind of conservative individualism that collides in self-satisfaction with the claims of the wider concern for humanity.” Jordan dedicates himself to a cause and is willing to risk his own life for it.

e.e. cummings #

THE ENORMOUS ROOM E.E. Cummings Introduction by Nicholas Delbanco

Before he had published any of the syntactically daring poetry that would bring him fame, E.E. Cummings wrote a singular and enduring novel about his experiences during the First World War. In 1917, Cummings volunteered to serve in one of the ambulance corps organized to aid the struggling French army. After arriving in the field, Cummings and his friend William Slater Brown began to write irreverent letters home that detailed military mismanagement. Attracting the ire of censors, Cummings and Brown were interrogated, arrested, and held for months in a military detention camp, where they lived with other detainees in a single large room.

First published one hundred years ago, The Enormous Room is at once a raucous bildungsroman, an absurdist critique of moronic military administration, and an audacious work of formal experimentation. Though grimly attentive to the sensory and material details of incarceration, The Enormous Room goes, as introducer Nicholas Delbanco writes, “against the grain of most prison literature,” transforming a dreadful situation into a work of exuberant mischief and wild lyrical invention.

“The canonical works of the First World War are most frequently concerned with the squandered lives of young men, yet Cummings’s report invaluably expands the reader’s grasp of the catastrophe. . . . [A] sincere and biting critique of those responsible for the conflict, which rings as true now, in the book’s centenary year, as it did then.” —Kathleen Rooney, TLS

World War II #

John Hershey #

Jane Mayer, Staff writer The New Yorker

John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” was the first unvarnished account by an American reporter of the nuclear blast that obliterated the city. Hersey’s prose was spare, allowing the horror to emerge word by word. A man tried to lift a woman out of a sandpit, “but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.”

The detonation buried a woman and her infant alive:

“When she had dug herself free, she had discovered that the baby was choking, its mouth full of dirt. With her little finger, she had carefully cleaned out the infant’s mouth, and for a time the child had breathed normally and seemed all right; then suddenly it had died.”

Hersey’s candor had a seismic impact: the magazine sold out, and a book version of the article sold millions of copies. Stephanie Hinnershitz, a military historian, told me that Hersey’s reporting “didn’t just change the public debate about nuclear weapons—it created the debate.”

Until then, she explained, President Harry Truman had celebrated the attack as a strategic masterstroke, “without addressing the human cost.” Officials shamelessly downplayed the effects of radiation; one called it a “very pleasant way to die.” Hinnershitz said, “Hersey broke that censorship.” He alerted the world to what the U.S. government had hidden.

Soon after “Hiroshima” was published, the influential Saturday Review ran an editorial condemning “the crime of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” America’s military establishment tried to quell the outrage with a piece in Harper’s by Henry Stimson, a retired Secretary of War. The article—ghostwritten by McGeorge Bundy, a future national-security adviser—claimed that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan had averted further war, saving more than a million American lives. Kai Bird, a co-author of “American Prometheus,” the definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, told me that this pushback was specious: “Bundy later admitted to me that there was no documentary evidence for this ‘million’ casualty figure. He just pulled it out of thin air.”

Hersey’s report helped transform The New Yorker. Although the magazine had published dispatches from brilliant war correspondents, including Janet Flanner, it was still widely considered a weightless amusement. “Hiroshima” marked a new, more serious era. It also changed journalism. For many reporters of my generation, “Hiroshima” was a model of what might be called the ethical exposé. It was built on rigorous reporting and meticulously observed details, and, through its quiet, almost affectless voice, the reader became another eyewitness.

Hersey’s narrative approach was deceptively simple. Threading together the stories of six survivors, he described the destruction from their perspective, which implicitly made the point that nuclear warfare posed an unconscionable threat to humanity. People usually think of investigative reporting as relying on obscure documents and dry financial data. But Hersey, whose 1944 novel, “A Bell for Adano,” won a Pulitzer, showed that to truly affect readers such reporting must be paired with literary craft and be propelled by a sense of urgency.

Lord of the Flies #

William Golding was born in 1911, in Cornwall, England. Although he tried to write a novel as early as age twelve, his parents urged him to study the natural sciences. Golding followed his parents’ wishes until his second year at Oxford, when he changed his focus to English literature. After graduating from Oxford, he worked briefly as a theater actor and director, wrote poetry, and then became a schoolteacher. In 1940, a year after England entered World War II, Golding joined the Royal Navy, where he served in command of a rocket-launcher and participated in the invasion of Normandy.

Golding’s experience in World War II had a profound effect on his view of humanity and the evils of which it was capable.

Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of English schoolboys marooned on a tropical island after their plane is shot down during a war. Though the novel is fictional, its exploration of the idea of human evil is at least partly based on Golding’s experience with the real-life violence and brutality of World War II.

Free from the rules and structures of civilization and society, the boys on the island in Lord of the Flies descend into savagery. As the boys splinter into factions, some behave peacefully and work together to maintain order and achieve common goals, while others rebel and seek only anarchy and violence. In his portrayal of the small world of the island, Golding paints a broader portrait of the fundamental human struggle between the civilizing instinct—the impulse to obey rules, behave morally, and act lawfully—and the savage instinct—the impulse to seek brute power over others, act selfishly, scorn moral rules, and indulge in violence.

Golding employs a relatively straightforward writing style in Lord of the Flies, one that avoids highly poetic language, lengthy description, and philosophical interludes. Much of the novel is allegorical, meaning that the characters and objects in the novel are infused with symbolic significance that conveys the novel’s central themes and ideas.

In portraying the various ways in which the boys on the island adapt to their new surroundings and react to their new freedom, Golding explores the broad spectrum of ways in which humans respond to stress, change, and tension.

The whole situation on the island could be a reflection of world events. It happens when the whole world is engaged in the brutal savagery of war.

Samuel Beckett #

J M COETZEE writes:

In June 1940 Paris was occupied by German forces. Although he was a citizen of a neutral country, Beckett offered his services to the French Resistance. In 1942, fearing imminent arrest by the Gestapo, he and his wife fled Paris and found refuge on a farm near Roussillon in Provence. Although Beckett had already been at work on Watt when they left Paris, the bulk of the book was written in Roussillon. In 1945, after the war had ended,

After WWII, something shifted in Beckett. Perhaps it was the silence he had witnessed. Perhaps it was the absurdity of Europe in ruins. He began writing exclusively in French, a language he said forced him to write “without style.” It was in French that he wrote his masterpiece, Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot), completed in 1949.

At the heart of Beckett’s work is a deep concern with time, memory, and identity. His characters are often suspended in uncertainty, unable to act, yet unable to stop thinking. They cannot escape their own thoughts, but those thoughts bring no clarity.

This is not nihilism for its own sake. Beckett was not simply saying that life is meaningless. Rather, he was asking how we go on living even when meaning slips away.

Norman Mailer #

The Making of Norman Mailer

The young man went to war and became a novelist. But did he ever really come back?

A precis of an article from David Denby in The New Yorker, December 19, 2022.

The Naked and the Dead is the work of a fiercely ambitious man fleeing an identity as a “nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn”.

General Douglas MacArthur landed with an enormous invasion force on the Philippine islands; Mailer, as a rifleman for more than a year. Mailer described those who survived as a little crazy, and physically messed up—some with open ulcers from jungle rot.

A letter to his first wife, Bea chronicled what he saw:

Right before us was a destroyed Japanese armored half-track and a tank. The vehicles were still smoldering, and the driver of the half-track had half fallen out, his head which was crushed from one ear to the jaw lay reclining on the running board, and the pitiful remaining leg thrust tensely through the windshield. The other leg lay near his head on the ground, and a little smoke was still arising from his chest. Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away with a great hole in his intestines which bunched out in a thick white cluster like a coiled white garden hose. . . .

After a half hour or so we descended to the road, and mounted the Jeep again. As we drove along the road the destruction was complete. Fragments of the corrugated steel from the warehouses had landed everywhere, and the wreckage formed almost a pattern on the road. Everything stunk, and everything, the road, the wreckage, the mutilated vehicles had become the two colors of conflagration—the rust red and the black. The whole vista was of destroyed earth and materiel—that battlefield looked like a hybrid between a junk-yard and a charnel house; it was perhaps the ugliest most dejecting sight I have ever seen. You wished acutely for rain, as the quick hand-maiden to time.

“The Naked and the Dead.” The impressions are fresh: war meant the destruction of the body’s unity, the collapse of physical structure, color, intactness.

The book received rave reviews and was an overnight best-seller, remaining on the Times list for more than a year. 1948

“The Naked and the Dead” is set on the fictional island of Anopopei, an irregular kidney-shaped blob in the Pacific with trackless vegetation and withering wet heat—and also thousands of Japanese defenders, though they hardly figure in the novel.

It chronicals the day-to-day lives of fourteen soldiers in a reconnaissance platoon, who find themselves trapped between the obsessions of two pathological egotists—the island commander, General Edward Cummings, a MacArthur-like military intellectual who thinks that men can be controlled only through fear (“the natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety,” he says), and, at the platoon level, Staff Sergeant Sam Croft, a nerveless warrior who “could not have said . . . where his hands ended and the machine gun began.” For Croft, killing seems a natural expression of his being. In a limited way, he’s intensely admirable.

Writing to Bea, Mailer described his creation of Croft as

“an archetype of all the dark, bitter, inarticulate, capable and brooding men that America spawns.”

When Mailer worked on the book, right after the war, jubilation was a large part of the national mood—a cheerfully militant atmosphere of gallant warriors and sleeves-rolled-up citizens fighting Fascism in “the good war.” During the war and just after, Hollywood movies portrayed the democratic unit—an ethnically mixed platoon or bomber crew—as a vessel of a great national cause. But Mailer writes without the slightest elation over American victory and Japanese defeat, and his platoon is less a common cause than a group of ornery, banged-up soldiers hoping to survive.

Mailer expressed contempt for powerful men bereft of human understanding. He was attracted to violence as an exploration of personal will, while despising authority in any institutional form.

The over-all emotion of the novel is one of futility. Accident, not strategy, rules.

Cummings and Croft could be seen as incipient postwar American Fascists, highbrow and lowbrow, but both of them wind up stymied. The book asks, What is the point of endless effort and repetition? Is persistence life’s only meaning?

The postwar celebratory mood was shadowed by disillusionment and absurdism. As Mailer was bringing out “The Naked and the Dead,” in 1948, Samuel Beckett was in Paris writing “Waiting for Godot.”

As a war novel, Mailer’s book looks back to Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895), with its confused, even incoherent battle scenes—all smoke and noise—and forward to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961), in which the war and Army bureaucracy are rendered as a malign joke, dissolving any possible purpose into contradiction.

The coarseness of the soldiers’ thoughts and speech shocked some readers in 1948, though now it seems to us the way men in combat have always talked. As we discover in lengthy, bristling flashbacks, many of the men had been knocking around in Depression America, working on farms, in stores, in ordinary jobs, or not working much at all.

Vaguely rebellious yet defeated, they are callous and cynical about women, and routinely contemptuous of “Yids” and “Izzies.” These hard-luck guys have little purpose in their lives. Lieutenant Hearn, a Harvard graduate like Mailer, appears, at first, to be the hero of the novel, a liberal in revolt against his wealthy family. But Hearn is unfocussed and diffident, pulled by his own narcissism into confrontations with General Cummings that will destroy him.

This war book has some courageous fighters and some generous acts, but it has neither heroes nor innocents. Unlike “the youth” in “The Red Badge of Courage,” no one has any illusions to lose.

For all Mailer’s hard knowledge of failure, his prose is little like that of his hero, Hemingway.

On a bad day, a soldier will know every wretchedness of skin, lungs, arms, legs, bowels, kidneys.

“The Naked and the Dead” is repetitive but at times very moving; the men carrying the stretcher reach a state, beyond exhaustion, in which “they were reduced to the lowest common denominator of their existence,” and meet it with acceptance.

As Mailer’s letters to Bea reveal, he was shocked by the corrupted materiality of jungle war: the spilling corpses, the breakdown of physical integrity. But his writing about the living male body amounts to a full-throated humanist response: the body under stress is heroic, living in its wholeness, with consciousness remaining intact, even when vibrating with pain.

At the same time, “The Naked and the Dead” is surprisingly delicate in feeling. The rare moments of solidarity among the men give way to scraped emotions and anger, followed by distance and bitter hurt.

Mailer cecomes disillusioned by postwar America—the desire for “security,” the endless consumerism, and what he took to be the country’s humiliating spiritual mediocrity.

He had made himself into a novelist in the Pacific, and now he brought the war home, fighting on two fronts—against what he disliked in himself and against those menaces of the nineteen-fifties, “conformity” and “adjustment.”

He acted out his rebellion in a continual performance with phallus, fists, booze, and sustained ass-in-chair writing sessions—a pressure at times noble, at times foolish, and certainly rough on other people as well as on himself. He became an egotist of a peculiarly self-afflicting sort, both calculating and spontaneous, provoking many blows, all of them deserved, all of them welcomed. For the author of “The Naked and the Dead,” the truce never arrived. ♦ David Denby - NYT.

Joseph Heller #

Heller flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier over Italy during WWII. While he appeared to settle down into ordinary life, it was characterised by surface anger resulting in a divorce and estrangement from his daughter. It took 15 years for him to write about his war experiences and to do so he resorted to an absurdist novel - Catch-22.

More @: https://nebo-lit.com/novel/heller/heller-catch-22.html

Kurt Vonnegut #

“Slaughterhouse-Five” is a book about the Second World War, Vietnam is also a presence in its pages, and people’s feelings about Vietnam have a good deal to do with the novel’s huge success. Eight years earlier, in 1961, Joseph Heller had published “Catch-22” and President John F. Kennedy began the escalation of the United States’ involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. “Catch-22,” like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” was a novel about the Second World War that caught the imagination of readers who were thinking a lot about another war.

Kurt Vonnegut does not see war as farcical. It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye. Black humour is one way of coping with ineffable horror. Vonnegut is a sad-faced comedian.

As a prisoner of war, age twenty-two, , Vonnegut was in the famously beautiful city of Dresden, locked up with other Americans, where pigs had been slaughtered before the war, and was therefore an accidental witness to one of the greatest slaughters of human beings in history, the firebombing of Dresden, in February of 1945, which flattened the whole city and killed almost everyone in it.

So it goes. (a refrain used whenever death occurs)

Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” is humane enough to allow, at the end of the horror that is its subject, for the possibility of hope.

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Larry Heinemann, an American Vietnam veteran turned novelist writes:

“We were the unwilling, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful”

“The war in Gaza is one of the most egregious, deadly and ruthless wars waged on a people of our time. It is an orchestrated massacre of Palestinian people. It is purposeful ethnic cleansing.”

• Christopher Lockyear, MSF secretary general

J.D. Salinger #

The Catcher in the Rye, was in Salinger’s backpack when he landed on Utah Beach in 1944. He continued to write while he was fighting and while in hospital for battle stress.

People were dying all around him.

Holden finds death to be an inevitability, but doesn’t really care about the dying itself; instead, like everything else in his life, he focuses on what he perceives to be the dishonesty in others. They will “lay flowers on his stomach” and then “go someplace nice for dinner,” the implication being that they don’t actually care about remembering the dead but instead are simply making themselves feel better with a meaningless gesture. Death, therefore, is just another thing that the “phonies” will use to show others how much they care, while in reality the death – even of someone like Allie, who Holden genuinely loves – means nothing to them.

The Catcher in the Rye didn’t just succeed. It struck a nerve that no one saw coming.

Holden Caulfield spoke in a voice people had never heard in a novel—raw, cynical, honest. Teenagers saw themselves in him. Adults were horrified. It was banned, worshipped, and passed around like a secret.

But for Salinger, the fame was unbearable.

He wanted the writing, not the noise.

So he disappeared. No interviews. No book tours.

He spent the rest of his life in near silence. That’s the cost, sometimes—creating something true enough to shake the world. It shakes the creator, too.