It's probably the approaching centennial, but something seems once again to be focusing cultural attention on World War I. My own recent interest, I suspect, has something to do with looking backward, which I seem to be doing more of these days. As I have already mentioned in previous comments about my current reading program, I have developed a rather serious fascination with the first half of the 20th century. The more I consider it, the more I think of it as an important formative era for those of us born in the 1940s. After World War II the world changed, perhaps unalterably, and we with it. As we have moved steadily away from that earlier era, we have lost touch with what it must have been like to live in that time. Lately, I have been trying to recover for myself some sense of British and American life as it was experienced in the years just prior to and after World War I, and then continuing through what was in many ways a long sequel leading to the conclusion that was World War II.
I started this most recent reading program with Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. Connolly was part of a generation that came of age after the first world war, but in Enemies of Promise he sums up much of the literary culture prior to the war and just after. He was writing just prior to the beginning of the second world war, publishing his book in 1938, but with a keen critical eye on the impact of the Great War on his own generation of authors and critics. There is a certain amount of gloom and cynicism that hangs over Connolly's assessment of literary culture in England, and perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent in America. Connolly mentions Hemingway's influence, as well as the importance of Edmund Wilson's critical judgments, especially in Axel's Castle. But although he acknowledges a larger context, Connolly's perspective is British, not American or continental. But in some ways what is most important about Enemies of Promise is Connolly's account of the impact of an English public school education on himself and his contemporaries, in his own case his years at Eton.
Next I read one of the most important books that came out of World War I, mentioned by Connolly (and others): Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That. Graves published his memoir in 1929, just prior to leaving England and his family to live abroad in Majorca with Laura Riding. The book is one of the best accounts of life in the trenches, but it is much more than that, covering Graves's youth, education (another public school, Charterhouse), and later efforts to establish himself as a poet and author. Graves knew many of the key literary figures in England and was early identified with the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. And when he went to Oxford after the war he became close friends with T.E. Lawrence and rented a cottage from John Masefield. But despite a wide circle of literary friends and acquaintances, Graves remained pretty much a party of one. Even his association with the other war poets was fleeting. For that reason he offers a useful perspective on literary life during that period; he offers a fresh perspective on English literary culture in the twenties, and does a good job of showing the influence of the war on English letters.
For still another view of this same period I turned to Nigel Nicolson's reflections on his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, in Portrait of a Marriage. Nicolson gives a very different version of the same period, just prior to and after World War I. The book offers alternating chapters of Vita's autobiography and a son's additions, clarifications, and further reflections on his parents' rather unusual union. While Harold Nicolson was never involved in the fighting, he was instrumental in diplomacy both during and (especially) after the war. Vita, on the other hand, was almost completely oblivious, not only to the fighting, but to her husband's role as diplomat and negotiator, seeing both the war and his service primarily as an inconvenience to her travel preferences, especially on the continent. While the book concentrates most of our attention on Vita's love affairs with Rosamund Grosvenor and Violet Trefusis and her later infatuation with Virginia Woolf. Nigel Nicolson nevertheless succeeds in pointing out that while he was contending, sometimes daily, with his wife's indulgences and indiscretions, Harold Nicolson was also seriously engaged in diplomatic missions and negotiations related to the armistice and founding of the League of Nations following the war. (Harold Nicolson's pubic school was Wellington; he sent his sons to Eton.)
After completing these more or less first person accounts of my subject, I've taken a bit of a detour to read Martin Green's Children of the Sun. Green is interested in the same period that interests me, roughly from the 1890s through the mid 1950s, but with a concentrated focus on the generations that came of age between the two world wars. His own take on the literary and artistic culture of that time is somewhat narrowly focused on the impact of the dandies and aesthetes, especially on the two figures of Harold Acton and Brian Howard, and their influence on English culture and society. Along the way he discusses a diverse selection of writers, artists, and socially prominent figures of that era, including many American and continental personalities. Thus he sketches the influence of Henry James and Diaghilev, as well as the fascination in all of the arts during this period with comedia dell'arte. Most importantly, from my point of view, Green demonstrates the effects of the Great War and of the importance of the English public schools for the writers and artists of that era.
However, while I enjoy reading critical interpretations, I'm more concerned to look at the works themselves. So I've decided to look next at some of the autobiographical works of George Orwell, a writer that Green was also much interested in before he turned his attention to the aesthetes and dandies.
More to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment