Hello readers:
On June 28, as I imagine it, our nation heaved a collective sigh at the memory of that long-ago blunder we now call World War I. The consequences of The Great War have been manifold, but one that has affected me most personally is the wave of literature published in the post-war years (and a few accounts even earlier, mid-conflict) – memoirs, poetry, and novels that are a testament to the shock, the disillusionment, and also the spiritedness that the first industrial war inspired.
One of Ours, Willa Cather
One of Ours does not immediately scream war novel; its first half takes us on a pastoral tour of rural Nebraska, where the young Claude Wheeler is being groomed to take over his father’s farming operation. Claude is underwhelmed by the prospect of such a future, his dissatisfaction manifesting in a constant physical restlessness that leads others to look at him askance. I have always sympathized with Claude’s sentiments in these pages of the novel, having also felt at times that obscure but pulse-quickening anticipation of what else life might have to offer: “He would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain, – the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it!” When World War I rolls around in the summer of 1914, that purpose is at last discovered, and Claude ships out as a newly enlisted member of the US Army. It is a Gatsby-esque turn of events: we are endeared to Claude’s idealism despite the unworthiness of the cause at which it is directed.
Storm of Steel, Ernst Junger
Storm of Steel – the autobiographical account of young German officer Ernst Junger on the Western Front between the years 1914 and 1918 -is an anomaly within the canon of World War I literature. Despite the savagery he witnesses during the war (and, in fact, bound up with it), Junger finds something sublime in the experience – a transcendent naturalistic force that should be celebrated: “There was in these men a quality that both emphasized the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevalieresque urge to prevail in battle. Over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever bolder warriorhood.” Critics have cast Storm of Steel as a precursor to the Darwinian politics espoused in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but to do so is to pinhole a unique and important perspective on the First World War.
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises will always be, for me, the quintessential novel of World War I disillusionment. It all comes down to that final line, succinct and pointed as so much of Hemingway is: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” For those of us swept up in the illusory potential of Jake and Brett’s relationship, this line quickly cuts us down.
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway is another novel that urges us past our traditional conceptions of war literature. Woolf’s focus is not on the war itself, but on its tremors – those slight, yet significant reverberations sent echoing back to the home front, to the families, homes and societies left behind. She argues, convincingly, that the war’s web of trauma spreads farther than we might imagine, invading even the intimate domestic sphere occupied by Mrs. Dalloway.
Regeneration, Pat Barker
Following the lives of several British army officers suffering from shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, Regeneration provides an important portrait of the field of psychology as it was impacted by World War I. Several of Barker’s characters are based on actual historical figures present at the hospital at that time – the war-weary poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers, who pioneered treatments of post-traumatic stress disorder. My favorite poem to emerge out of the First World War, “Picture Show” (And still they come and go: and this is all I know – / That from the gloom I watch an endless picture-show), was written by Sassoon during his time at Craiglockhart.
That’s all for now. Make sure to stay tuned for future blog posts from yours truly, SWS.
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