Showing posts with label Novels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Novels. Show all posts
Novels of the Great War: "War" by Ludwig Renn
Units:
Novels
Novels of the Great War: "Three Soldiers" by John Dos Passos
Units:
Novels
An interview with Tim Kendall about the poetry of the First World War
 |
| Wilfred Owen |
Q: Let's start with the definition of "War poetry". As far as
I know the English literature is only literature that "isolated" and
grouped some texts under a similar strong "label", even if all
countries developed their own war literature and poetry. Do you have a similar
opinion and, if so, why do you think this happened? Was there at that time a
kind of awareness of being a "war poet"?
A: The term ‘war poetry’ is an oxymoron: destruction and creation, ugliness and beauty. But, of course, war has been the subject of poetry as far back as we can trace. What made England different, in 1914, was the sense that poetry spoke urgently to our national identity. We were the nation of Shakespeare, of Henry V at Agincourt, and our civilisation was bound up with our literature: the greater the literature, the greater the civilisation. After all, we weren’t going to beat the Germans at music or fine art. So, to write a poem was, in some small way, to assert the very values which were under attack. Wilfred Owen told his mother that the only thing which would hold him together on a battlefield was the thought that he was defending the language in which Keats wrote.
Q: A conspicuous part of your studies and research is dedicated to First World World poetry. What brought you to these researches and could you illustrate your last book on this theme?
A: I was tutored by Jon Stallworthy at university. Jon was an immensely generous as well as a brilliant man, and he taught me to love war poetry. My latest book, Poetry of the First World War, is dedicated to Jon, who was the inspiration for so much of my work.
Q: Is there a particular initiative about war poetry (book, conference,
event, other) that you want to point out in this "centenary mood"?
A: A great deal of energy was expended in the run-up to the centenary, to ensure that the familiar myths of the war’s futility, of lions led by donkeys, etc., were challenged. But the national curriculum is a rough beast to resist, and Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War et al. have ensured that the simple narratives are firmly entrenched. What I’ve most appreciated about the recent treatment of war poetry is an acceptance and appreciation of poets who speak truths to this new kind of power: sometimes, they dare to say, war is enjoyable, enriching, exuberant, as well as dreadful, wasteful, unimaginably brutal. More than that, most of the British poets of 1914-18 believed that the War was necessary. This can come as a surprise to those readers who only knew Owen and Sassoon.
Q: Let's now move to First World World English novelists for a moment. Which
are still today the most popular novels and which are the novels that according
to your standpoint would deserve a deeper attention (or perhaps a rediscovery)?
A: I’m a Kipling obsessive, and I think that his stories in Debits and Credits and elsewhere stand above any other war fiction that I’ve read. But they’re not novels. Jacob’s Room is the book by Virginia Woolf to which I return. I’m not sure, though, that Kipling or Woolf qualifies as a neglected genius. I would make a special mention of Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, published half a century after the Armistice. That does get overlooked, for no better reason than that it’s commonly classed as a children’s novel. Let me also say that some of the finest prose about the War came from the novelist Mary Borden, who served as a nurse at the Front. The Forbidden Zone is a hybrid masterpiece: memoir, prose poetry, a collection of fragments.
Q:The First World War was paradoxically the last war with a large number of poets, then something has changed in the relation between war and poetry. Do you agree with such statement or do you think it is only an exaggeration?
A: War breeds poets. Every recent conflict provides a cue for the poetasters to wring their hands and indulge their sensitivities. They always want to tell us what we already know --- that war is bad --- but also that they feel this particular truth more acutely than the rest of us. I think of Anthony Hecht’s ‘fierce Strephon’, whose poetry denouncing the Vietnam War brought not only fame but considerable profit: ‘a fate he shared---it bears much thinking on--- / with certain persons at the Pentagon’.
Q: Generally speaking and according to your experiences, what do English students know and study about Italian, French, German, American (etc.) war poets?
A: Generally speaking, absolutely nothing. My own small attempt to improve the situation is to promote the work of the entirely unknown American poet John Allan Wyeth, whose sonnet sequence This Man’s Army is the great forgotten book of the War.
Q: I would love to end this interview with your personal choice, namely a
poem you would like to suggest to our readers. What do you propose us? And why?
Thank you.
A The war poem which hurts me every time is Keith Douglas’s ‘Vergissmeinnicht’: a painfully candid account of the mixed emotions (love, pity, hatred, curiosity, pride, shame, even sexual satisfaction) provoked by viewing a dead and decaying enemy. If you want a First World War poem, I’ll return to Wyeth, and his poem ‘Picnic’. Sassoon wrote that ‘The rank stench of their bodies haunts me still’, but that’s mere mood music compared with Wyeth’s account of what the dead smell like: ‘We drove through Bayonvillers---and as we ate / men long since dead reached out and left a smirch / and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam’. And the nonchalant payoff of his sandwich-munching companion as Wyeth remarks that the corpses ‘smell pretty strong’: ‘I’ll say they do, / but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.’
A: The term ‘war poetry’ is an oxymoron: destruction and creation, ugliness and beauty. But, of course, war has been the subject of poetry as far back as we can trace. What made England different, in 1914, was the sense that poetry spoke urgently to our national identity. We were the nation of Shakespeare, of Henry V at Agincourt, and our civilisation was bound up with our literature: the greater the literature, the greater the civilisation. After all, we weren’t going to beat the Germans at music or fine art. So, to write a poem was, in some small way, to assert the very values which were under attack. Wilfred Owen told his mother that the only thing which would hold him together on a battlefield was the thought that he was defending the language in which Keats wrote.
Q: A conspicuous part of your studies and research is dedicated to First World World poetry. What brought you to these researches and could you illustrate your last book on this theme?
A: I was tutored by Jon Stallworthy at university. Jon was an immensely generous as well as a brilliant man, and he taught me to love war poetry. My latest book, Poetry of the First World War, is dedicated to Jon, who was the inspiration for so much of my work.
 |
| Siegfried Sassoon |
A: A great deal of energy was expended in the run-up to the centenary, to ensure that the familiar myths of the war’s futility, of lions led by donkeys, etc., were challenged. But the national curriculum is a rough beast to resist, and Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War et al. have ensured that the simple narratives are firmly entrenched. What I’ve most appreciated about the recent treatment of war poetry is an acceptance and appreciation of poets who speak truths to this new kind of power: sometimes, they dare to say, war is enjoyable, enriching, exuberant, as well as dreadful, wasteful, unimaginably brutal. More than that, most of the British poets of 1914-18 believed that the War was necessary. This can come as a surprise to those readers who only knew Owen and Sassoon.
A: I’m a Kipling obsessive, and I think that his stories in Debits and Credits and elsewhere stand above any other war fiction that I’ve read. But they’re not novels. Jacob’s Room is the book by Virginia Woolf to which I return. I’m not sure, though, that Kipling or Woolf qualifies as a neglected genius. I would make a special mention of Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, published half a century after the Armistice. That does get overlooked, for no better reason than that it’s commonly classed as a children’s novel. Let me also say that some of the finest prose about the War came from the novelist Mary Borden, who served as a nurse at the Front. The Forbidden Zone is a hybrid masterpiece: memoir, prose poetry, a collection of fragments.
Q:The First World War was paradoxically the last war with a large number of poets, then something has changed in the relation between war and poetry. Do you agree with such statement or do you think it is only an exaggeration?
A: War breeds poets. Every recent conflict provides a cue for the poetasters to wring their hands and indulge their sensitivities. They always want to tell us what we already know --- that war is bad --- but also that they feel this particular truth more acutely than the rest of us. I think of Anthony Hecht’s ‘fierce Strephon’, whose poetry denouncing the Vietnam War brought not only fame but considerable profit: ‘a fate he shared---it bears much thinking on--- / with certain persons at the Pentagon’.
Q: Generally speaking and according to your experiences, what do English students know and study about Italian, French, German, American (etc.) war poets?
A: Generally speaking, absolutely nothing. My own small attempt to improve the situation is to promote the work of the entirely unknown American poet John Allan Wyeth, whose sonnet sequence This Man’s Army is the great forgotten book of the War.
 |
| Keith Douglas |
A The war poem which hurts me every time is Keith Douglas’s ‘Vergissmeinnicht’: a painfully candid account of the mixed emotions (love, pity, hatred, curiosity, pride, shame, even sexual satisfaction) provoked by viewing a dead and decaying enemy. If you want a First World War poem, I’ll return to Wyeth, and his poem ‘Picnic’. Sassoon wrote that ‘The rank stench of their bodies haunts me still’, but that’s mere mood music compared with Wyeth’s account of what the dead smell like: ‘We drove through Bayonvillers---and as we ate / men long since dead reached out and left a smirch / and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam’. And the nonchalant payoff of his sandwich-munching companion as Wyeth remarks that the corpses ‘smell pretty strong’: ‘I’ll say they do, / but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.’
Units:
Interviews,
Novels,
Poets
Novels of the Great War: "Contro-passato prossimo" ("Past Conditional: A Retrospective Hypothesis") by Guido Morselli
So, what happens if the war was won by the Central Empires and not by the Triple Entente plus the disloyal Italy? This is basically the plot of Past Conditional: A Retrospective Hypothesis. What is the masterpiece of engineer that allows the Austrians to flood rapidly the northern Italian valleys and the rest of the country changing forever the evolution of war and the future development of European politics? Where does this strategy come from? In other words, who is the author of this ingenious logistic plan called Edelweiss Expedition? And what comes later in a new European scenario where Walther Rathenau is the leader? And what about Russia and Lenin, Italy and Giolitti? As far as we know, this novel by Guido Morselli is an almost unique case of counterfactual history applied to the First World War years and able to enlarge its heuristic value to history itself. We can read it is as a totally renewed strategy and a deep revision of the historical novel which goes straight against fatalism, determinism and, at the end, against historicism.
Units:
Novels
Novels of the Great War: "Drei Kameraden" by Erich Maria Remarque
While examining
the First World War literature there are some titles and authors that always
emerge, no matter which country you’re from. Remarque’s Im Westen nichts
Neues is what we mean by this simple introduction. But one should never
forget that the result of the conflict had great echoes on literature also long
after the end of the war and relevant impact in the so called Entre-deux-guerres
period. And the name of Erich Maria Remarque was not mentioned by chance since
today reading suggestion is his novel Drei Kameraden first published in
1936 and written during the exile in Switzerland. This is not a book about the
Great War but it’s a novel about what came after it and it’s generated from a
kind of ghost image, from a perennial trauma shaping the minds of those who
spent the youth buried in the European trenches. This is the reason why we
consider for all purposes “Three Comrades” still a World War One novel. On the
contrary, we do not consider for instance the recent 14 by Jean Echenoz
a World War One novel. The novel by Echenoz represents simply the use of a war
subject in today literature and we are able to collect similar examples in
comics, arts, films while in Remarque’s case we’re still, with both feet, in
the climate originating from the conflict.
Novels of the Great War: the short stories by Stefan Zweig
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| Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942) |
We recently had the opportunity to read in Italian a collection of four
short stories by the Austrian novelist, poet and playwright Stefan Zweig (Wien,
1881 – Petrópolis, 1942). All these stories are somehow related with the First
World War and were conceived during those years even if published some years
later. We will enlist in this post the four stories, giving evidence to their
original titles in German, in order to put the readers in the condition to
retrieve them in other Stefan Zweig’s books.
Units:
Novels
World War I Italian fiction. An interview with Giovanni Capecchi
There are very important poems which can help us understanding some aspects of the Great War. Take for example Ungaretti’s Il porto sepolto or, moving to England, Owen’s compositions. Nevertheless, I really think that works of prose remain the best handhold to understand that war and I mean both novels that originate from the immediate trenches experience (think about Un anno sull’altipiano by Emilio Lussu, - translated with the title of A Year on the High Plateau – which appeared 1938 (the cover of one of the several editions is beside) and yet one of the most important work on the topic) and diaries or memoirs. Not so renowned, but extraordinary works are Trincee (Trenches) by Carlo Salsa and Diario di un imboscato (Diary of a Draft Dodger) by Attilio Frescura.
The answer could be very long. I try to summarize it. What I personally like is when you can record a sort of friction between literature and history: during some crucial periods writers were able to narrate “live” better than historians or journalists did. In Italy this is exemplified by authors like Verga, De Roberto or Pirandello after the process of national reunification or like Bianciardi, Calvino, Ottieri, Volponi, Pasolini or Testori during and after the economical boom of the Sixties. The First World War was really a break between all what was before and what happened after. The Italian poets, a part from few exceptions, wanted the war for very different reasons. They went to the front and fought the war in the trenches. Except the cases of those poets who kept on celebrating the war as a welcomed event (among others Marinetti or d’Annunzio), most of them described a war that was very different from the one they had expected or even wished: the muddy motionless war of the trenches, of “moles” rather than of heroic fight on the open battlefield, the long war instead of the “blitzkrieg”, against a – mostly invisible – enemy. This does not mean that at the end they disavow the war, but for sure they started depicting the war as it really was, giving up the bombast of the first days. Actually their narration of the war was also a way to tell the human life, dominated by the shadow of death.
I spent some years reading literary texts and essays about the First World War. Reference books were those of Mario Isnenghi and, for Italian poetry, the anthology edited by Andrea Cortellessa (see cover beside this answer: the book edited by Andrea Cortellessa is probably the best anthology of Italian Great War poetry today available). But also the works of Fulvio Senardi, Fabio Todero, Marino Biondi and Franco Contorbia were important as well. Anyway, what eventually came out was that a study on Italian fiction about WWI was still missing in the panorama. I tried to fill the gap, trying to offer a book especially useful for the students.
The relationship could be described in this simple statement: each author has his personal war experience. Sometimes we are not allowed to considers their works as a reliable representation of the war - consider for example Carlo Emilio Gadda’s diary, Diario di guerra e di prigionia (see Gadda beside in the picture), that is rather the story of his neurosis. Anyway, some themes are recurring and above all the dramatic difference between the war they had imaged and the war they really lived. Other important themes are the journey toward the front (the railway stations, for example, and the discovery of the front) as well as the idea that the heroism of soldiers was not to be found in hating the enemies or in longing for bloody battles but in the capability of keeping one’s own place even despite the fear, and also the constant presence of death (for many of them “a question of centimetres”).
Writing as a therapeutic process, as a form of elaboration of traumas. How does this statement fit with the narrative of the Great War?
It goes without saying that narrating the war is an attempt to elaborate the trauma. But there’s an important point that has to be stressed. For many of these writers the war became the most important moment of their life or, like Giovanni Comisso wrote using a mathematical image, “the square root of life”. After what they experienced in the trenches, their life after 1918 cannot but be “mediocre”. And of course we cannot forget that the war gives evidence to the vulnerability of human life and its transience. Writing about the war means writing about the life itself.
Does the stylistic genre (diary, fiction, biographic report) adopted by the single authors affect the interpretation of the war?
Very interesting question. Each writer has its own opinion about the war and this opinion is not given once for all. This idea of war is destined to change in the years. But what I can say is that the idea of war emerges from what they wrote with a power that is somehow related to the form they chose (poetry, fiction, diary). Poetry of course drives to synthesis, a novel or a short story allow to dilute the vision of things thanks to their literary filters. Diaries or notepads register the first impressions without the time meditation that often exists between actions and the description that comes after.
What about the interconnection between authors, works and nations? Is it possible to look at the narrative of the Great War as a meta-discourse, as a collective work of interpretation, elaboration and remembering the war beyond the national divisions? From this point of view, does the category of "enemy" always work?
The category of “enemy” was the starting focus of my researches. I believe that what I demonstrate is a kind of evolution of the image of the enemy in soldiers’ minds. Before the war, the intervention propaganda depicted the enemy as a monster; in the trenches, during a first phase, we have the “invisible enemy” that soldiers kill without hesitation or afterthoughts. It’s when the enemy is under sight that soldiers see a neighbor and a brother who - like everybody - longs to come back home, thinks about kin and does not love the war. This represents a recurring topic that many authors describe and it’s also an attempt to detect a spark of humanity in the inhumanity of war. And we don’t have to forget that the feeling of brotherhood among combatants is in contrast with the distance between soldier and officials in the trenches on the one hand, and between them and the general headquarters – which were far away and out of danger – on the other hand: these latter, notwithstanding they were compatriots, became the real “enemy”.
On a worldwide level, which are the top three novels of the Great War according to your reading experience?
Un anno sull’altipiano by Emilio Lussu, Le feu by Henri Barbuse and Im Westen nichts Neues by Eric Maria Remarque. These are three novels where the autobiographic element is the key.
I stay on the second part of your question: Vent’anni by Corrado Alvaro is not known outside Italy and I think it could be interesting to translate it. In addition to this, Trincee by Carlo Salsa and Guerra del ‘15 by Giani Stuparich (see cover beside) could be promoted at an international level. And again La paura by Federico De Roberto, a short story that was translated into French. La paura is a great short story, written under the influence of a strong realism by a writer who did not take part in the war. This is an aspect that needs to be considered: we do not have only soldiers narrating the war, but also stories from behind the lines, from the military hospitals, from the offices (think about Aldo Palazzeschi, who, in Rome, still lives and suffers the war as a trauma). The distance from the front did not prevent Federico De Roberto from writing a masterpiece like La paura.
I know I repeat myself but this is my list: Un anno sull’altipiano by Lussu, Trincee by Carlo Salsa, Il porto sepolto by Ungaretti and La paura by De Roberto (beside in the image). These four books represent four different forms and namely the autobiographic novel, the diary, the book of poetry and the short story but also four books born in different time and space. Ungaretti and his “live poetry”, Salsa and the process of writing after coming back home starting from the notes taken during the conflict, Lussu and the late publishing of Un anno sull’altipiano in 1938, to keep distance from Fascist rhetoric and to demonstrate that the topic of First World War endures twenty years later, and finally De Roberto that, as we said, wrote a masterpiece far from the front.
Units:
Interviews,
Novels,
Poets
Luigi Pirandello and his "Berecche and the War"
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| Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) |
Luigi Pirandello is maybe one
of the most renowned and studied Italian writers of the XX Century and we guess
everybody can cite at least one of his pieces. Yet we may also suppose that not
so many had the chance to read his war novella entitled Berecche and the War
(Berecche e la Guerra). To this last we’d like to refer today, providing
maybe to our readers a suggestion for an upcoming reading. Pirandello wrote
this short novel at different stages, probably between 1914 and 1917,
publishing part of it as separate stories and part in another war novels (for
example in Frammenti di cronaca di Marco Leccio). He then collected all
the materials of Berecche and the War in 1934 for the definitive edition
in his Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) and organized
them into eight chapters. Like Pirandello, Berecche, the main character of the
short story, is a non-combatant – born after the wars for the unification of
Italy (which ended in 1861) and too old to fight in the WWI – who lives in
himself the tensions and violence of the time. He witnesses both the failure of
his ideals and myths on the broader political and social context of the
European growing tensions and experiences the effects of the conflict in his
private life, in his family.
Instead of offer here a
summary of the content – spoiling so the surprise of the reading – let’s rather
direct our attention to Pirandello’s introductory note, since it presents the –
not purely fictional – context of the whole story and gives therefore a key of
interpretation. The novella, states its author in the opening pages, was
composed “in the months preceding our (i.e. Italy’s) entry into the World War”
and describes not only the furious political debate between interventionists
and their adversaries, but also and above all the cultural, emotional and
psychological collapse of its protagonist, “a studious man educated like so
many others at that time in the German fashion, and especially in the
disciplines of history and philology”.
Already in the opening scene,
when Berecche in a beer-house in Rome listens to and discusses with his
fellows, who support Italy’s entry against its former allied the Austrian
Hungarian Empire, we are aware that the protagonist symbolizes an identity
based on nineteenth-century notions of method, order and discipline, an
education model deeply rooted in the German culture which was largely
prevailing in the cultural milieu of the Italian bourgeoisie. To quote once
again Pirandello’s opening note, for people like Berecche, Germany had “become
not just spiritually but also in their thoughts and feelings, as an intimate
part of their lives, their ideal native land”. Yet, their spiritual and
cultural Heimat was suddenly opposed to the duties toward the natural
and political homeland and depicted by 1914 as a leading military and
industrial power which endangered the world equilibrium.
We can suppose that Berecche
would have faced this political, social and cultural crisis thanks to his
skilled mind and refined culture, maybe he would have even found a personal
interior solution to the conflict between his admiration for the German culture
and the national loyalty which his friends and then the whole Italian society
was claiming. He would probably have found a solution if only this crisis
hadn’t upset also his familial and emotional life. His future son-in-law (a
native of the Trento region who refused to fight for his nation, the Austrian
Empire) and even his only son Faustino (a young student excited also by the
interventionist propaganda) suddenly enlisted in the Legione garibaldina
(the “Garibaldi legion”), a group of Italian volunteers – mainly from the left
interventionist wing – leaded by some Garibaldi’s grandchildren and that
supported the French Army on the western front already in 1914, i.e. before a
political decision for the military intervention of Italy was made.
Berecche and the War provides in this
connection not only an analysis of a conflict between the generations
(father-son) intensified by the general crisis of that crucial year for Italy’s
history, but also the emotional collapse of the protagonist. Overwhelmed by the
despair of the women (his wife and his older daughter) and racked by both the
remorse – for having been so hard with Faustino and his interventionist ideas –
and the dread of losing him under the German fire, Berecche’s previous identity
collapses: his principles are suddenly overturned and he proposes in the final
chapter to enlist, he too, and fight at his son’s side. And Pirandello does not
spare his characteristic humor in depicting the emotional breakdown in the
scene of Berecche’s riding school – to get ready for the cavalry action – and
his final ruinous fall – a humor which exacerbates the tension and disillusion
of the protagonist’s personal crisis.
But we are revealing far too
much about this novella, so just read it. Berecche and the war enable
you to enjoy fully Pirandello’s narrative genius and at the same time to
approach the Great War from another perspective, that from below, from the
subjective point of view and the private feelings of an old retired, a non
combatant history professor, who far from being an isolate and exotic case
represents at least a shade among the countless interior – both emotional and
cultural – fronts of conflict that WWI opened in the daily life of the normal
people.
Units:
Novels
Novels of the Great War: "The Return of the Soldier" by Rebecca West
Units:
Novels
Novels of the Great War: "Men in War" by Andreas Latzko
Andreas Latzko personifies in some way the geographical, cultural and religious melting-pot of the old Austrian Hungarian Empire at the eve of the WWI: son of a Magyar father and a Viennese mother, he grew up as a baptized Catholic of Jewish origins. At the start of the conflict, in autumn 1914, Latzko served at the Isonzo front, where he contracted malaria and suffered various nervous disorders. His experience at the “Hell on the Isonzo” reached his climax, as referred by his friend the French pacifist Romain Rolland, when the young Latzko witnessed the death of a group of soldier blown in smithereens by a grenade. This occurrence struck him deeply: although initially he seemed to be involved nor physically neither psychologically, only few days later he had a sort of psychical collapse when a rare steak was served to lunch. He started to refuse all food and was finally temporarily discharged from the army in 1916. Latzko tried to recover in Davos, where he underwent psychiatric treatment. Here he wrote his book Men in war. Refusing then in December 1917 to return in service in Northern Hungary, Andreas Latzko settled down in Switzerland where he corresponded with other exiles and pacifists such as Stefan Zweig and Romain Rolland.
The six stories collected in Menschen im Krieg first appeared anonymous between 1916 and 1917 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and in other newspapers, were then published as a book in Zürich by Max Rascher in October 1917. Even if it was banned in Germany and Austria – where it nevertheless circulated illegally – Men in War was immediately translated in French and English. The Italian version dates back instead to the 1920s. During the last years of the conflict and in the post-war period the book enjoyed an enormous success.
Some of the stories describe the life at the front from different point of views. The first one, for example, entitled Der Abmarsch (Off to War), is set in a small Austrian village in autumn 1915 and reports the psychological breakdown and insanity of an unnamed lieutenant, who gives voice to the first criticism not only against the war and those who made it happen, from politicians to generals, but also against the insanity of the civil society, here symbolized by the women who applaud their men into battle only to support a patriotic demagogy. It is not hard to see in this pages of Latzko the same disenchanted sentiment of Wilfred Owen’s poem The Send-Off. Another sort of insanity is that of an old military commander, protagonist of the 3rd story Der Sieger (The Victor): he enjoys his safe comfort behind the front line while simple soldiers fell in the carnage he has ordered. Madness and disillusion are intersected also in Heimkehr (Homecoming), reporting the returning from the Russian front of the Hungarian soldier Johann Bogdán, disfigured and embittered during the war and abandoned by his lover. Other two stories - Heldentod (A Hero’s Death) and Feuertaufe (Baptism of Fire) – focus the lens on the trench experience as a death-space and record the last hours of simple soldiers, disclosing how each one feels and judges his death for a senseless war in a personal way. It is however Der Kamerad (The Comrade), the 4th story in the book to represent vividly the author’s own experience at the front. The chapter offers in fact a monologue of an officer hospitalized in Gorizia, where also Latzko spent some time before leaving for Davos. This alter-ego of the author describes in his insanity the psychical collapse under the atrocity endured on the Isonzo front and presents his madness as the only and most reasonable, most human reaction to the war.
Although today almost disappeared from the list of the WWI literature, this six stories collected in Latzko’s Men in war offer a choral description of the foolishness of the Great War, disassembling it as a prim in disparate - sometimes surreal, sometimes grotesque - images and demolishing so every “aesthetics” of propaganda and nationalism, to recall Kraus’ judgment. In reading this pages we feel as disarmed witness in front of the voices of the protagonists, in front of their suffering which eschew any rational or historical explanation. Madness becomes therefore the desperate response of the human being against the war, the ultimate denunciation of the reason in its abdication. And this is at the end the legacy of this work, the reason why it deserves to be revaluated and to be read and listened: Latzko and his work raise a madness-scream, which remember us how not to be driven insane by violence, death and injustice, pretending to feel good and still be reasonable are the real insanity of the Great War and of all the conflicts that we witness also today.
The Poets and the World War: Camillo Sbarbaro and an Unexpected Image of the Warfare
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| Camillo Sbarbaro |
It's an unexpected image of war the one we find in many Italian poets who took part to the conflict. No hurry, no violence but emotions recollected far from the front. We find this in Diego Valeri or in Camillo Sbarbaro (Santa Margherita Ligure 1888 - Savona 1967). At the war outbreak in 1915 Sbarbaro volunteered in the Red Cross and in 1917 he was enlisted in the Italian Army. We have traces of his experience at the front in the places of the Veneto region (see also the poem we have chosen). During the war years he wrote one of his most recalled book, Trucioli, that was published in Firenze in 1920. Sbarbaro is one of the most interesting poets of the Italian twentieth century but perhaps he is not included into any canon. He is probably better renowned and respected worldwide for his passion for lichens. Actually he became an expert in the knowledge of these special organisms and gave his contributions in terms of studies and collection to the international community and to important museums. He was also excellent translator from Greek and French (Flaubert, Huysmans, Green, Stendhal, Zola). Among the poems he dedicated to the war time we chose the following set in Romano di Ezzelino, not far from the city of Vicenza (we will come back to this city with a similar poem by Diego Valeri). In the same period, in a village next to Romano di Ezzelino, Borso del Grappa, there's a young American writer trying his first experiments in writing. His name is John Dos Passos (One Man's Initiation and Three Soldiers can be listed in the novels of the Great War, even if they are not his masterpieces).
The short poem is a picture taken in tranquillity, but at the lines 3 and 4 there's probably the secret of such poems: the surprise (almost astonishment) of being alive after all the atrocities of war.
SLOW RAGS OF FOG
Slow rags of fog
and ash of olive trees.
Almost struggling to believe
you live.
And the rain is like
a sad maiden's lullaby;
for the lying body
the land, a cot.
Romano di Ezzelino, 1918
STRACCI DI NEBBIA LENTI
Stracci di nebbia lenti
e cenere d'ulivi.
Quasi a credere stenti
che vivi.
È la pioggia una ninna-
nanna di triste fanciulla;
al corpo che giace
la terra, una culla.
Romano di Ezzelino, 1918
(Translation by World War I Bridges)
Novels of the Great War: "Der Baron Bagge" by Alexander Lernet-Holenia
Novels of the Great War: "The enormous room" by E. E. Cummings
Even if he is best known as a poet, Cummings is also the author of this “hybrid novel”, both autobiographical and fictional. The book is in fact based on his personal experience on the Western front, where he served as an ambulance driver in France. Questioned about a friend of him - William Slater Brown, in the book simply “B”, whose pacifistic attitude aroused suspicions - Cummings supported him. Both were therefore arrested in summer 1917 and sent to La Ferté-Macé, where they arrived few days after the commission that had to review also their case had left. Cummings and his friend were stuck till the next meeting of the commission in November. Meanwhile, they lived in an "enormous room" with other detainees, in foreseeable dreadful conditions. Cummings, thanks to the intervention of his father, was finally released and came back home in January 1918.
The interesting in this novel is not mainly the plot, nor the autobiographical or fictional content. The enormous Room is more a sort of diary, a telling of the day-to-day lives, and above all a description of different people in the camp. Cummings' skill in connecting physical aspect and personality, in revealing the one through the other, makes this novel a manual of portraiture, as testified by the accurate description of the Delectable Mountains, four characters that Cummings and B encountered in the French detention camp.
His portraiture skill is however placed on the background of the WWI. The novel is thus a sort of eye directed towards the Great War from a very special point of view: not that of the soldier at the front, not that of the civil society at home, rather that of the “suspected traitor” behind its home front. It describes somehow the administrative idiocy which affects people’s life, restricts personal freedom and reduces human beings to objects (no matter if useful objects to fight at the front or useless – even dangerous – objects to keep in prison); it reveals how the relation with the governments has changed in the first decades of the 20th century under the pressure of the growing nationalisms. It also discloses the climate of suspicion which pervaded Europe during WWI (let’s think about the desertion or riot episodes and, on the other hand, the pervasive propaganda and censorship machine to control information and behaviors).
Novels of the Great War: "Heeresbericht" by Edlef Köppen
Edlef Köppen was an educated soldier and we all know the importance to analyze the boost toward the war and war's impact both on intellectuals and on the common infantryman. It's not a matter of discrimination of the two categories of soldiers, which entered and ended the war with different motivations and positions.Take for example the Italian case of Renato Serra and his peculiar interventionism in the long debate that came before the Italy's entry into the war in May 1915. And take the expetations and feelings of those thousands of men abondoning the countryside for the trenches. The studies of the First World War should one day treat the impact of the war on the these two clusters of combatants, before and after the war, because both human courses are extremely meaningful for a better understanding.
Secondly Köppen represents an almost unique case of a soldier fighting from day one to the end of the war. He was both on the West and on the East fronts. He got wounded in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and the effects of the injury can be considered the cause of his early death in 1939, when he was almost 46. He knew what we call today the war insanity and was interned in a psychiatric hospital, when the war was close to an end.
After the war, he was particularly active in the publishing and radio broadcasting industries. When in 1930 Heeresbericht came out, it only could be considered a menace by Nazi movement (this is the reason why the novel was sequestered already in 1933 for the its unfriendly contents and tone). The novel is built on an original frame and Köppen was able to wedge the fragmented reality of the war years into compelling stories: bulletins, speeches, pages of his diary coexist in one of the richest novel that the aftermath brought to light. The pioneering approach to narration, along with the outcomes of the New Objectivity of the Weimar years and its suffocated democratic wails, were the starting point of the journey of this unfortunate yet important First World War book.
We wrote about this book in English, but an English translation is still missing. English speaking readers should think about it...
Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End": Modernism and the First World War. A conference at the University of London (and a BBC adaptation)
 |
| Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) |
Largely considered one of the best novel of the Twentieth century (W.H. Auden among the others) and one of the finest about the Great War (Anthony Burgess), the tetralogy of Parade's End (Some Do Not . . ., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up and Last Post the four titles coming out from 1924 and 1928) will be the leitmotif of the upcoming international conference to be held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, from the 27th to the 29th of September 2012. The topic seems to be hot, since an adaptation from this tetralogy, a BBC miniseries scripted by Tom Stoppard, was recently aired. From what we can learn from The Guardian, the adaptation has generated a "tipically British debate". Probably the adaptations from Parade's End cannot compete with the book. It happens. Anyway, coming back to the conference, for further information you can visit the dedicated website. To contact the organisers, Rob Hawkes and Ashley Chantler, please use this email address.
www.twitter.com/fordmadoxfordie
www.facebook.com/groups/fordmadoxfordies
Here you can download the program which is posted also below.
Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End:
Modernism and the First World War
Day 1: Thursday 27 September
11:00-11:30 Registration and Tea/Coffee
11:30-13:00 Panel 1
Christos Hadjiyannis (Institute of English Studies) – ‘Ford Madox Ford, T. E.
Hulme and the First World War’.
Rob Spence (Edge Hill University) – ‘Ford and Lewis: The Attraction of
Opposites’.
John Attridge (University of New South Wales) – ‘Englishness and Taciturnity
in Parade’s End and Andre Maurois’s Les Silences du Colonel Bramble’.
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:00 Keynote Address
Adam Piette (University of Sheffield) – ‘War and Division in Parade’s End’.
15:00-15:30 Tea/Coffee
15:30-17:00 Panel 2
Seamus O’Malley (City University of New York) – ‘All That is Solid Turns to
Mud: Parade’s End and the Liquidity of Landed Relations’.
Austin Riede (North Georgia College and State University) – ‘“Cleaned, Sand-dried
Bones”: Christopher Tietjens, Vera Brittain and the Anodyne of War’.
Isabelle Brasme (Université de Nîmes) – ‘Articulations of Modern Femininity in
Parade’s End: Womanhood as a Projective Space for Ideological
Ambivalences’.
17:30-19:30 Parade’s End: A Celebration
Q&A session with special guests including the BAFTA award-winning director of
the BBC/HBO adaptation of Parade’s End, Susanna White, and Rupert Edwards,
producer/director of Who on Earth Was Ford Madox Ford? A Culture Show Special.
Launch of the new Carcanet critical editions of Parade’s End, followed by a wine
reception, kindly sponsored by Carcanet Press and Oxford University Press.
Day 2: Friday 28 September
09:30-11:00 Panel 3a
Dominique Lemarchal (Université d’Angers) – ‘When I is Others: Parade’s End
and the Impossibility of Autobiography’.
Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College) – ‘“Rossetti”, “Better Far” and Overcoming the
Pre-Raphaelite Inheritance in Some do Not… and The Good Soldier’.
Sara Haslam (Open University) – ‘“Hops, cannon, kettles and chimney backs”, or
From Conversation to Humiliation: Parade’s End and the Eighteenth
Century’.
Panel 3b
Christopher MacGowan (College of William and Mary) – ‘William Carlos
Williams and Parade’s End’.
George Wickes (University of Oregon) – ‘Hemingway’s Literary Godfather’.
Joseph Wiesenfarth (University of Wisconsin-Madison) – ‘Death in the Wasteland:
Ford, Wells and Waugh’.
11:00-11:30 Tea/Coffee
11:30-13:00 Panel 4a
Michael Charlesworth (University of Texas at Austin) – ‘The View from Montagne
Noir: Ford’s Panoramic Metaphor in No More Parades, No Enemy and It
Was the Nightingale Compared to Works by J. R. R. Tolkien’.
Liz Hodges (Merton College, University of Oxford) – ‘Sight and Scale in Parade’s
End’.
Alexandra Becquet (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) – ‘Structure and
Memory in Parade’s End: (De)Composing the War’.
Panel 4b
Barbara Farnworth (University of Rhode Island) – ‘The Self-Analysis of
Christopher Tietjens’.
Erin Kay Penner (Rothermere American Institute) – ‘Swearing by Ford’.
Paul Skinner (Independent Scholar) – ‘Tietjens Walking, Ford Talking’.
13:00-14:30 Lunch
14:30-16:00 Panel 5a
Max Saunders (King’s College London) – ‘Sexuality, Sadism and Suppression in
Parade’s End’.
Sarah Kingston (University of Rhode Island/University of New Haven) – ‘“Sick
bodies are of no use to the King”: Insomnia in British Literature of WWI’.
Karolyn Steffens (University of Wisconsin-Madison) – ‘Freud Madox Ford:
Parade’s End, Impressionism, and Psychoanalytic Trauma Theory’.
14:30-16:00 Panel 5b
Tom Vandevelde (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) – ‘“Are you going to mind the
noise?” Mapping the Soundscapes of Parade’s End’.
Nathan Waddell (University of Nottingham) – ‘Ford Madox Ford’s Musical War’.
Angus Wrenn (London School of Economics) – ‘The World-Ash and Groby Old
Tree: Wagner and the Hueffers’.
16:00-16:20 Tea/Coffee
16:20-18:00 Film Screening – Part 1 of the 1964 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End, starring Judi
Dench.
19:30 Conference Dinner (Location TBC)
Day 3: Saturday 29 September
10:00-10:40 Round-table discussion with the editors of the new Carcanet critical editions of
Parade’s End: Max Saunders (King’s College London), Joseph Wiesenfarth
(University of Wisconsin-Madison), Sara Haslam (Open University), and Paul
Skinner.
10:40-11:00 Tea/Coffee
11:00-13:00 Panel 6
Eve Sorum (University of Massachusetts-Boston) – ‘Empathy, Trauma, and the
Space of War in Parade’s End’.
Meghan Hammond (New York University) – ‘Modernist Empathy in Ford’s Last
Post’.
Gene M. Moore (Universiteit van Amsterdam) – ‘Impressionism as Therapy’.
John Benjamin Murphy (University of Virginia) – ‘“The ’ind legs of the elephink”:
Pantomime, Prophecy and Tosh in Parade’s End’.
13:00-13:40 Ford Madox Ford Society AGM
13:40-14:40 Lunch
14:40-18:00 Film Screening – Parts 2 & 3 of the 1964 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End.
www.twitter.com/fordmadoxfordie
www.facebook.com/groups/fordmadoxfordies
Here you can download the program which is posted also below.
Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End:
Modernism and the First World War
Day 1: Thursday 27 September
11:00-11:30 Registration and Tea/Coffee
11:30-13:00 Panel 1
Christos Hadjiyannis (Institute of English Studies) – ‘Ford Madox Ford, T. E.
Hulme and the First World War’.
Rob Spence (Edge Hill University) – ‘Ford and Lewis: The Attraction of
Opposites’.
John Attridge (University of New South Wales) – ‘Englishness and Taciturnity
in Parade’s End and Andre Maurois’s Les Silences du Colonel Bramble’.
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:00 Keynote Address
Adam Piette (University of Sheffield) – ‘War and Division in Parade’s End’.
15:00-15:30 Tea/Coffee
15:30-17:00 Panel 2
Seamus O’Malley (City University of New York) – ‘All That is Solid Turns to
Mud: Parade’s End and the Liquidity of Landed Relations’.
Austin Riede (North Georgia College and State University) – ‘“Cleaned, Sand-dried
Bones”: Christopher Tietjens, Vera Brittain and the Anodyne of War’.
Isabelle Brasme (Université de Nîmes) – ‘Articulations of Modern Femininity in
Parade’s End: Womanhood as a Projective Space for Ideological
Ambivalences’.
17:30-19:30 Parade’s End: A Celebration
Q&A session with special guests including the BAFTA award-winning director of
the BBC/HBO adaptation of Parade’s End, Susanna White, and Rupert Edwards,
producer/director of Who on Earth Was Ford Madox Ford? A Culture Show Special.
Launch of the new Carcanet critical editions of Parade’s End, followed by a wine
reception, kindly sponsored by Carcanet Press and Oxford University Press.
Day 2: Friday 28 September
09:30-11:00 Panel 3a
Dominique Lemarchal (Université d’Angers) – ‘When I is Others: Parade’s End
and the Impossibility of Autobiography’.
Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College) – ‘“Rossetti”, “Better Far” and Overcoming the
Pre-Raphaelite Inheritance in Some do Not… and The Good Soldier’.
Sara Haslam (Open University) – ‘“Hops, cannon, kettles and chimney backs”, or
From Conversation to Humiliation: Parade’s End and the Eighteenth
Century’.
Panel 3b
Christopher MacGowan (College of William and Mary) – ‘William Carlos
Williams and Parade’s End’.
George Wickes (University of Oregon) – ‘Hemingway’s Literary Godfather’.
Joseph Wiesenfarth (University of Wisconsin-Madison) – ‘Death in the Wasteland:
Ford, Wells and Waugh’.
11:00-11:30 Tea/Coffee
11:30-13:00 Panel 4a
Michael Charlesworth (University of Texas at Austin) – ‘The View from Montagne
Noir: Ford’s Panoramic Metaphor in No More Parades, No Enemy and It
Was the Nightingale Compared to Works by J. R. R. Tolkien’.
Liz Hodges (Merton College, University of Oxford) – ‘Sight and Scale in Parade’s
End’.
Alexandra Becquet (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) – ‘Structure and
Memory in Parade’s End: (De)Composing the War’.
Panel 4b
Barbara Farnworth (University of Rhode Island) – ‘The Self-Analysis of
Christopher Tietjens’.
Erin Kay Penner (Rothermere American Institute) – ‘Swearing by Ford’.
Paul Skinner (Independent Scholar) – ‘Tietjens Walking, Ford Talking’.
13:00-14:30 Lunch
14:30-16:00 Panel 5a
Max Saunders (King’s College London) – ‘Sexuality, Sadism and Suppression in
Parade’s End’.
Sarah Kingston (University of Rhode Island/University of New Haven) – ‘“Sick
bodies are of no use to the King”: Insomnia in British Literature of WWI’.
Karolyn Steffens (University of Wisconsin-Madison) – ‘Freud Madox Ford:
Parade’s End, Impressionism, and Psychoanalytic Trauma Theory’.
14:30-16:00 Panel 5b
Tom Vandevelde (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) – ‘“Are you going to mind the
noise?” Mapping the Soundscapes of Parade’s End’.
Nathan Waddell (University of Nottingham) – ‘Ford Madox Ford’s Musical War’.
Angus Wrenn (London School of Economics) – ‘The World-Ash and Groby Old
Tree: Wagner and the Hueffers’.
16:00-16:20 Tea/Coffee
16:20-18:00 Film Screening – Part 1 of the 1964 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End, starring Judi
Dench.
19:30 Conference Dinner (Location TBC)
Day 3: Saturday 29 September
10:00-10:40 Round-table discussion with the editors of the new Carcanet critical editions of
Parade’s End: Max Saunders (King’s College London), Joseph Wiesenfarth
(University of Wisconsin-Madison), Sara Haslam (Open University), and Paul
Skinner.
10:40-11:00 Tea/Coffee
11:00-13:00 Panel 6
Eve Sorum (University of Massachusetts-Boston) – ‘Empathy, Trauma, and the
Space of War in Parade’s End’.
Meghan Hammond (New York University) – ‘Modernist Empathy in Ford’s Last
Post’.
Gene M. Moore (Universiteit van Amsterdam) – ‘Impressionism as Therapy’.
John Benjamin Murphy (University of Virginia) – ‘“The ’ind legs of the elephink”:
Pantomime, Prophecy and Tosh in Parade’s End’.
13:00-13:40 Ford Madox Ford Society AGM
13:40-14:40 Lunch
14:40-18:00 Film Screening – Parts 2 & 3 of the 1964 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End.
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