Under Siege

I just finished reading Robert Hewison's Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939-45 (1977). It's a book I would recommend to anyone interested in British literature and culture in the period leading up to and during World War II. Hewison does an excellent job of sketching in important political and cultural background, including some of the key personal relationships among the literary figures, especially the role of editors and publishers like Cyril Connolly at Horizon, John Lehmann at Penguin New Writing, and T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber. While much of his attention is directed toward the war years covered in his subtitle, Hewison explains the significance of writers who established themselves earlier, especially the generation from the 1930s, including Orwell, Auden, Spender and others.

What is striking is the story Hewison tells of the impact of war on art and culture, going far beyond literature to include music, painting, photography, and theater. Of course, the greatest impact was the advent of nightly air raids, the London blitz, which closed many art venues and replaced them with blackouts and a nightly search for shelter from the bombs. One result was that many artists fled the city and took their shows on the road, but significant numbers stayed behind and carried on the best they could, often with the help of volunteer and government support. It may come as a surprise to some that the British Arts Council was a direct heir of the CEMA, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which was originally funded in the 1930s by a grant from Edward Harkness, an American millionaire.

But regardless of government assistance, which some, like Connolly, felt was potentially more an impediment than an aid to creativity, all of the arts suffered to a lesser or greater extent from the war, either through the interruption of performances and publication, or even more likely from the loss of creative talent to the military and the civilian war effort. Hewison points out that the horrors of war were keenly felt by the writers of fiction and poetry. Novels became exceedingly difficult to write and complete amid the distractions of war, and poetry sometimes seemed inadequate to the task of conveying the emotions, even as more and more of those caught up in the experiences of war turned to poetry as an outlet.

While there were more readers than ever and the demand for books and printed matter was growing, publishers were hampered by strict quotas on wood pulp and paper, even as the blitz destroyed the vast majority of books already printed and stored in publishers' London warehouses. But more affecting than the economics of literary life during the war, was the toll it was taking on writers' confidence. The depression they felt over the destruction of life and property and normal human feeling shattered their confidence that something good might eventually come from the war and all of the sacrifices demanded of those who might survive. Some, such as Cyril Connolly and George Orwell, among others, felt that literature itself would be another victim of the war, or at any rate anything resembling the literary life as they had come to understand it.

What struck me most as I read Under Siege was the sense of despair and foreboding felt by so many writers and artists, and ordinary people for that matter. Those who experienced the effects of the war, including the preparations for what many felt was inevitably an eventual invasion by Germany, lost hope in the future and felt betrayed by their own past, not only by the ineptitude of their elected political leaders, but also by their own misguided or misplaced beliefs and faith in various progressive and revolutionary movements. It is difficult now, looking back from the perspective of the final victory, to recapture that despair, but Hewison does a good job of explaining its origins and its effects on morale.

Moreover, those effects lingered for many even after the victory over Germany, when it seemed that the war against Japan might drag on for another two years. And the advent of the atomic bombs that brought a swift end to the war were little comfort to those who had actually lived through the horrors of total war waged against the civilian populations of Europe. It is worth reading this book to attempt to recapture some of that sense of loss that accompanied the end of the conflict. Arthur Koestler attempted to describe it in several of his essays, as did Orwell in his political prose and eventually in 1984. To a great extent we still inhabit that postwar world, even if we are not always aware of the source of our own malaise.

Something important and valuable in Western culture was destroyed during World War II, especially for those who experienced it directly. Most Americans who did not actually engage in the fighting felt that loss only at a distance. Terrible as the death camps and fire bombing of civilian populations were, they were experienced vicariously not directly by American civilians. Perhaps we got a better glimpse of those horrors on September 11, 2001, but only just a glimpse of what that kind of violence can do to a nation's confidence and faith in the future. We sometimes refer to Literature as one of the humanities, but there is little to celebrate in the sort of humanity associated with the wanton violence and efficiency of modern warfare. I think that was the source of the despair felt by so many writers and artists at the end of World War II. They had seen something in humanity that was beyond artistic imagination, but in fact was nevertheless very real, very awful, and very likely the inevitable future of the human race.

I wonder now if that isn't why so much contemporary literature has turned to fantasy, to comic books and vampires and zombies, super heroes and wizards who can overcome the forces of darkness. Or on the other hand there is the appeal of historical fiction or classics such as Jane Austen. We enjoy the escapism of such literature because it allows us to dwell in an earlier age or to pretend that reality isn't any more to be feared than those phantoms of the past or of our imaginations. But does that really work? Can we really ignore what is going on all over the world, not to mention all over these United States? The demons of humanity are not imaginary, they are very real, and here in America most of them are also armed with very advanced weapons. But it's not the guns that kill, it's the corruption of the imagination, the warping of the human spirit by the realization that violence and death are now normal and an acceptable way of life.