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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. 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Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. 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Why write about war?
By ANDY OWEN.
Many books about war written by veterans have been openly autobiographical, such as Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That or autobiography disguised as fiction — thinly disguised in the case of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on The Western Front or heavily disguised like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. In his introduction to Good-Bye to All That which covered his service in World War I, Graves claims he had written the book for three reasons:
Beneath the jovial claims Graves makes I got the sense that the writing of it provided a form of therapy for him, breaking down his war experience in to separate chapters, giving him a chance to make sense of the chaos he had experienced. Graves was severely traumatised. He described being haunted by ghosts and nightmares for years after the war. Writing may have helped Graves say good-bye to some of these ghosts, even if it also meant he had to say goodbye to a number of close friends who he had served with him, such as the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who objected to many of the details Graves claimed as facts.
He comments in the preface that “[This book] will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” Speaking for the generation of men of which he was part Remarque claimed, “We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men; we are crude and sorrowful and superficial–I believe we are lost.” All Quiet on the Western Front was not Remarque’s way of saying good-bye to his wartime experiences. He revisits some of the characters in a sequel (The Road Back), but it is clear that he is attempting to confront and make sense of the traumatic experiences he and his fellow young men experienced on the Western Front. Maybe for Remarque it was too painful to do this through autobiography.
Ambrose Bierce echoed a similar sentiment to Remarque when he said he saw it as his job in both his fiction and non-fiction to ‘cultivate a taste for distasteful truths. And … most important of all, endeavour to see things as they are not as they put to be’. According to US historian Drew Gilpin Faust he was the most significant American writer to fight in the Civil War experiencing nearly four years of combat. He too was haunted all his life by what he described as persisting ‘visions of the dead and the dying’. Bierce began to publish fiction in the 1880s as well non-fiction based on his experiences. His writings about the war are often cited as the beginnings of modern war literature and as a major influence on Hemingway.
I found it easier to talk about Iraq through fiction. To do otherwise would not have been too painful.
II found it easier to talk about Iraq through fiction. To do otherwise would not have been too painful. I didn’t experience the levels of trauma experienced by Remarque, Graves or Bowlby. For me fiction provided a greater sense of freedom. Having written both fiction and non-fiction about war I feel the differences in this genre can be less important — after all, ultimately what I cover in both the novel East of Coker and the non-fiction All Soldiers Run Away are stories of people in extreme circumstances reaching breaking point and trying to pull themselves back together again. Writing a biography is not the same as writing an autobiography. In a way it is an exercise of fiction, especially when you have no access to the subject as I did not have with Alan Juniper, the subject of All Soldiers Run Away. I had extensive conversations with his daughter that built up a picture of what Alan was like. I had some experience of the situations I found out he was in. I would then have to imagine how he might have felt in the same way you try to get inside the head of the characters you create in fiction. When writing fiction the process is similar but it is often putting words and feelings from real people into fictitious characters. There is a strong sense this is what Remarque did and not just his own words into the mouth of the narrator. Maybe I am also not brave enough. It takes courage to do this through non-fiction. There is an expectation, particularly from those who have not experienced combat that people act heroically. Yet, soldiers are all too human. They get scared, angry and psychologically damaged in the brutal extremes of conflict. Bowlby deserves particular praise for his bravery in his honesty as do Alan’s family.
There is another reason that Remarque may have preferred fiction and that is that it takes the story from the specific to the universal. An autobiographical approach tells one individual’s experience no matter how relatable. There would have been many soldiers who survived the Western Front on both sides that could have felt Remarque’s narrator was based on them. Remarque publicly stated that he wrote All Quiet on the Western Front for personal reasons, not profit. He wanted to give a voice to a generation impacted by the war. Throughout war literature this is a common theme: trying to bridge a gap of understanding between those who fought and those who did not. War writers have long tried to explain to those back home, whilst often also claiming that no-one who was not there can really understand. Walter Benjamin claims in his essay ‘The Storyteller’: ‘Men came back from World War I, not richer but poorer in communicable experience.’ This doesn’t stop some from trying.
As Remarque’s narrator visits his home on leave he finds that the town has not changed; however, he finds that he does ‘not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world.’ He feels disconnected from the townspeople. His father asks him ‘stupid and distressing’ questions about his experiences, not understanding ‘that a man cannot talk of such things.’ An old schoolmaster lectures him about strategy while insisting that he and his friends know only their ‘own little sector’.
GRAVES ALSO NOTES a disconnect: ‘England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war madness that ran about everywhere… The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language.’ For me this gap in understanding was a prime motivation to write East of Coker. In it the narrator, a veteran of the Iraq conflict, tells us:
Bridging the gap of understanding between those who involved and those not has become an act of justification to remove the stain of the political folly from those on the ground in the failed attempts to quash insurgencies and build nations.
I am in the latter camp: my experiences compelled me to write about what I saw. Graves, after seeing the carnage of the front and what he perceived to be criminal mismanagement of the war by the senior commanders, found the unquestioning patriotism of those back home misguided. Many of the World War I and II writers and poets saw it as their duty to explain to those back home the horrific loss of life was not to be celebrated. It was a failure of humanity no matter which nation claimed victory — a sentiment most famously expressed in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est‘. In more recent conflicts public sentiment has been less supportive. Bridging the gap of understanding between those who involved and those not has also become an act of justification to remove the stain of the political folly from those on the ground in the failed attempts to quash insurgencies and build nations. Some of the writing emerging from the Chechnya conflict, such as Arkady Babchenko’s One Soldier’s War seems to also have this aim. As much as the World War II writers distanced themselves from how their generals fought the war and the public’s enthusiasm to feed the war machine with their young men, modern writers from Vietnam to Iraq have distanced themselves from the politicians who decided, initiated, then continually interfered with the war.
A
nother motivation running strongly through war literature of all ages is the desire to bear witness to the events unfolding. Throughout history battles often dictated the fate of nations, and before that whole civilisations. The first war literature, from the Iliad to Beowulf and the Scandinavian sagas, or even before, was arguably also the first histories. The first war literature was as much history as it was literature, and correspondingly many of the first histories we have were stories. In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five the witnessing of one particular historical event of immense destruction (the fire-bombing of Dresden), provoked a desire to ensure it was remembered even when the culture would rather have forgotten. In Shakespeare’s play Henry V, Henry’s speech on the eve of the battle of Agincourt reveals another dimension to the idea of bearing witness:
The military owns how you will be remembered. Step out of the system and you will be forgotten; stay and do your duty and we will remember you.
IT IS NOT just the fact that these happy few would be enshrined in history by taking part in history, but also that the survivors would be duty-bound to remember the fallen as part of a ‘band of brothers’. Remembrance is a complex concept in the military that all veteran writers must be aware of. As a veteran you feel duty bound to carry on the memories of those you have served with. The idea engrained in modern military thinking is that no fallen soldier is ever forgotten. As a veteran writer even subconsciously you cannot desert that duty. When writing about Iraq I did not feel this need as much as those who witnessed wars in which casualty rates were so much higher. Every soldier who died was recognised and reported on. When writing about World War II, in All Soldiers Run Away, and I was faced with unfathomable numbers of losses, I felt obliged to look up every death – often recorded in war diaries as just OR KIA (other rank killed in action) – on the Commonwealth Graves Commission website. I listed the name, age and family details of each life who witnessed the end of my story’s arc. We are narrative creatures and we care very much about the end of the story. We want to others to know our end and we want to know what happens at the end of our loved ones’ lives. This is something the military is aware of and uses for cohesion. It owns how you will be remembered. Step out of the system and you will be forgotten; stay and do your duty and we will remember you.
From this follows the idea that these stories need to be written by eyewitnesses, by people who were actually there experiencing it. This is called: ‘combat gnosticism’. This extends past literature, as philosopher Cecile Fabre says:
This demonstrates that at least for some readers they are looking for ‘descriptive, evocative content’ that will allow them to have an as-close-to-the-frontline experience as possible. This would suggest the author must have legitimacy through experience.
The Iraq war does have more literature written by Iraqis, such as Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (even though the novel was originally written in Arabic, Sinan had been US-based since leaving Iraq in 1991), but much less than that written by soldiers such as myself whose visit to the country was a blink of an eye in the ancient land where writing began. In terms of legitimacy am I allowed to write about the Iraq war? Is my understanding of the conflict enough? Did I experience enough trauma?
If we restrict those who have served to being able to write about conflict we would lose some of the greatest war literature. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is but one obvious example. Leo Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Austerlitz in War and Peace contains a vivid description of the impact of the fog of war on one of the main characters, Nikolai Rostov. Fabre notes that; “Tolstoy shows, with extraordinary power and clarity, precisely how unclear things are. Rostov doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know whether the shadows he sees moving are Russian soldiers, or French soldiers about to kill him. It’s one of the most vivid literary passages I’ve ever read about war.” The book is obviously of significant worth for far more than its descriptions of the battlefield. It uses the losses the war causes to examine loss more generally. He uses the extremes of war to examine morality, free will and the chaos of our lives. It is in extremes we often learn about ourselves. Placing characters in extremes allows us to explore the limits of the real world. Gilpin Faust notes of the nineteenth-century American poet, Emily Dickinson, that “war provided Dickinson with inexhaustible material for her metaphysical speculations.” The extremes of war also change wider society. Its impacts are felt by those who do not go to the front. It does not take someone who has been to the front to reflect on these.
The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined claims our species is getting less violent. One reason put forward for this decline is the increase empathy which ‘prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests with our own.’ Pinker puts increased empathy down to a more connected world, in part due to the spread of the written word through the development of the printing press and latterly the Internet. Reading other’s stories helps us see them as people. It helps us understand their pain. Writing about war can help those who have not witnessed it understand the pain it causes.
Maybe it is an act of faith to believe the human animal can ever move beyond the inherent flaws in its nature. But writing is an act of hope.
War still persists. Pinker has his critics. The philosopher John Gray believes human progress is an inherited religious myth, reformed as a scientific myth, as technological progress is confused with moral progress. Maybe it is an act of faith to believe the human animal can ever move beyond the inherent flaws in its nature. But writing is an act of hope. Putting finger to key is act of faith. You hope to be read, you hope to be understood. The odds are often against both. So, whether it’s allowing those who have suffered in war to find therapy in its retelling, writing about war to close the gap of understanding between those who have gone ‘over there’ and those who have not, or using war as a setting to speculate about our wider condition, we should maybe keep writing about war to ultimately have the hope that we will be helping to one day put an end to it.
♦
Andy Owen served in the Intelligence Corps of the British Army, reaching the rank of Captain. He completed operational tours in Northern Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is the author of the biography of a Second World War deserter, All Soldiers Run Away: Alano’s War (2017), and a novel, East of Coker. Twitter: @owen_andy.
Author’s note: ‘All royalties from the sales of East of Coker and All Soldiers Run Away to http://timebank.org.uk/‘
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