"Everything would have been different" - reading Edward Thomas

As far as I can remember I had never read an Edward Thomas poem until recently.  How sad for me.  What a fine poet.  What a sad story.

Thomas worked as a hack writer – for example, “from 1900 to 1914 Thomas wrote ‘just over a million words about 1,200 books’” (Introduction, p. 12).  Yee-ikes.  His nature writing, or more accurately rural writing, is something well beyond hackwork.  I read Thomas in The Annotated Collected Poems (ed. Edna Longley, Bloodaxe Books, 2008) where the annotations dwarf the hundred pages of poems, mainly because of the long samples of Thomas’s good prose.

By good luck, Thomas became friends with Robert Frost just as North of Boston (1914) was published, and something in his creative organ was set off.  He began writing poems, lots of them, a couple a week in 1915, then maybe one a week in 1916.  For reasons that are a mystery, Thomas, at age 38 and this late in the war, volunteered to fight in France, where he was killed within a few months.  His first book, Poems (1917), was in press when he died.  His second was thus titled Last Poems (1918).

Strictly speaking, he is not a war poet – not a trench poet – since he did not write any poems while serving in France and only rarely addressed the war directly while in England.  The war is mostly a source of absence, the reason there are no young men in his countryside.  Sometimes he is explicit, as in this little poem:

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will never do again.

A year later he writes another version:

The Cherry Trees

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

In another poem from 1916, “At the team’s head-brass,” the poet talks to a ploughman, first “About the weather, next about the war” and then about the fallen elm on which Thomas is sitting.  Why has it not been removed – it is an obstacle for the plow:

‘Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead.  The second day
In France they killed him.  It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too.  Now if
He had stayed here we would have moved the tree.’
‘And I should not have sat here.  Everything
Would have been different.’

In a few early poems, Thomas sounds like Frost, but he soon only resembles Frost conceptually, both poets writing dialogue poems and poems about the woods and so on, both, to me, looking like modern children of Wordsworth, like a century of poetry had been leaped.

I will do another day of browsing through Thomas, just fir the excuse to quote more poems.

Poetry makes both better - Robert Graves, war poet

Robert Graves is an author I have barely read – until recently just his translation of The Golden Ass (1951) – but I have acquired the illusion that I know a lot about him because of all the magazine articles I have read about him.  Reviews of Graves biographies, and biographies of the many other famous people in his life, and who knows what else.  I knew that Graves had been severely injured in World War I – details in the memoir Good-Bye to All That (1928), which I have not read – but it had never sunk in that he got his start as a writer as a war poet.

His first two chapbooks, Over the Brazier and Goliath and David, are from 1916, the same year Graves suffered an injury at the Battle of the Somme.  Most of the poems appear again in his first book, Fairies and Fusiliers (1917).  That odd title is accurate, even in its ordering.  Poems about the experience men at war, gritty but ironic, slide over towards poems about a magic-tinged childhood, where if fairies and fauns are not quite real it is easy enough to imagine that they are.  Then the poems slide back to the trenches, simultaneously real but unreal.

The perfect example in a single poem is “Sorley’s Weather.”   Charles Sorley was a young poet killed in action in 1915.  His only book was published in 1916:

Sorley’s Weather

When outside the icy rain
  Comes leaping helter-skelter,
Shall I tie my restive brain
  Snugly under shelter?

Shall I make a gentle song
  Here in my firelit study,
When outside the winds blow strong
  And the lanes are muddy?

With old wine and drowsy meats
  Am I to fill my belly?
Shall I glutton here with Keats?
  Shall I drink with Shelley?

Tobacco’s pleasant, firelight’s good:
  Poetry makes both better.
Clay is wet and so is mud,
  Winter rains are wetter.

Yet rest there, Shelley, on the sill,
  For though the winds come frorely,
I’m away to the rain-blown hill
  And the ghost of Sorley.

The archaic “frorely” just means “coldly.”  The narrator is not a child, but he has written something close to a child’s poem about the comforts of reading poetry on a stormy night.  But the reader, the narrating reader, is also taken back to a different setting of mud, rain, and wind.  Perhaps the “rain-blown hill” in France is the reality of the speaker, and the study the fantasy.  They co-exist, somehow.

The next poem, “The Cottage,” repeats the idea more bluntly.  The poet is in a place where “Snug inside I sit and rhyme,” yet nothing, no weather or flowers or “magic keep me safe to rhyme,” since “Death is waiting by.”  The act of writing a poem during war is classically pastoral.  Death is in Arcadia, even; Death is everywhere.

Near the end of the collection, Graves again writes about reading poetry in “The Poet in the Nursery.”  He is a child, although a poet himself, “the youngest poet,” who finds a book “full of poetry” in a library while the “ancient poet” wrestles with his own work – “rhymes were beastly things and never there.”

The book was full of funny muddling mazes,
  Each rounded off into a lovely song,
And most extraordinary and monstrous phrases
  Knotted with rhymes like a slave-driver’s thong.
And metre twisting like a chain of daisies
  With great big splendid words a sentence long.

No hint of the war here.  Perhaps this celebration of the joy of poetry dates to some time before it.

This is, for all its necessary ugliness, a lovely book.

Death could drop from the dark / As easily as song – / But song only dropped - all Isaac Rosenberg poems become war poems

Isaac Rosenberg is now, inescapably, a “war poet.”  Rosenberg was killed in action in France in April 1918.  He was 27.  His great poetic achievements are a couple dozen poems about the war and soldiering, mostly written while Rosenberg was in the service, delivering barbed wire and sending poems off to Poetry magazine, which published “Break of Day in the Trenches,” with its “queer sardonic rat,” in 1916:

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies…
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?

But Rosenberg was not always a war poet.  He was a young post-pre-Raphaelite, a devotee of Keats, D. G. Rossetti, and some mishmash of 1890s poets, Francis Thompson, that sort of thing.  This sort:

These, my earth-sundered fantasy
On pillared heights of thought doth see
In the dark heaven as golden pendulous birds,
Whose tremulous wings the wind translates to words… (from “Night,” 1912)

Promising, although the most likely thing it promises, once he has shed some excesses – or really indulged them, is a good minor poet.  Or maybe a Romantic counterweight to the Eliot and Pound.

Rosenberg’s first chapbook, Night and Day (1912) is seen above.  There are “No symboled answers to my questionings,” the poet fears, but the poet’s job is to try.  Youth (1915) is better – more taut and grounded, even if the one war poem, “The Dead Heroes,” is almost abstract:

Flash, mailèd seraphim,
Your burning spears;
New days to outflame their dim
Heroic years.

I do not think of this one as a good poem, but it is a step towards the poems to come.  Rosenberg is preparing to meet that rat and to hear the larks along the “poison-blasted track” to camp:

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song –
But song only dropped…  (“Returning, We Hear the Larks”)

Or the lice in “Louse Hunting”:

See Gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness…

As with Pasternak and Akhmatova, the strong aspect of Rosenberg’s biography, colors everything about him.  I include his Jewishness, the side of Rosenberg I find most puzzling.  In poems like “The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Hordes” he uses imagery from the Hebrew Bible that only obliquely matches with what I understand of the war.  They are another kind of “symboled answers” that I do not know how to decode.  An exception is “The Jew,” a painful cry against prejudice:

Moses, from whose loins I sprung,
Lit by a lamp in his blood
Ten immutable rules, a moon
For mutable lampless men.

The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,
With the same heaving blood,
Keep tide to the moon of Moses.
Then why do they sneer at me?

The first stanza is especially fine, almost distracting me from the pointed end of the poem.

Although I tracked down more of his earlier poems, the 1922 Selected Poems is a good place to read Isaac Rosenberg. 

Karl Kraus, war writer - his misused language beautifies a misused life

Karl Kraus has become a World War I writer.  It is a strange fate.  The prophet was right, so his prophecy swallowed him.  Clichéd, thoughtless language really did lead to the apocalypse, or at least an apocalypse, a war that quickly became an inescapable nightmare.  The crazy guy with the “World Is Ending” sign was right.  At least metaphorically right.

Also relevant is that much of Kraus’s best writing is in one way or another about the war.  The two decades of writing leading up to it becomes background for The Last Days of Mankind.  Such are the vicissitudes of masterpieces.

Kraus’s first major response to the world war, an article he read in November 1914 and published in December, is titled “In These Great Times,” a horrible phrase taken from the newspapers, a phrase that is easy to mock:

… the times measure themselves and are astonished at how great they have become overnight.  But they have probably always been great, and I simply did not notice it.  Thus it was an optical fault of mine to perceive them as small.  (80)

I had planned to chew through this article for a post or two, but upon review I have discovered that it is so think and knotted, as rhetorically complex as Thomas Carlyle, that I am mostly baffled.  The argument is built of paradoxes:

Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent!  (71)

Perhaps the obscurity of detail helped keep Kraus out of prison.  He was the only major German-language writer to speak out against the war.  Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Hauptmann, Thomas Mann – all wrote and spoke enthusiastically in favor of the German and Austrian cause, at least for a time.  Arthur Schnitzler was wiser; he followed Kraus’s advice and was silent.  Only Kraus spoke in opposition, although the nature of his opposition changed and broadened as the costs of the war grew.

The main target remained the same, though.  Kraus’s greatest enemies were other writers, especially journalists (the line in quotations marks is from Antony and Cleopatra, a messenger’s response to Cleopatra’s anger over bad news.):

“Gracious madam, I that do bring the news made not the match.”  But the reporter does make the match, sets the house on fire, and turns the horrors he fabricates into truth.  Through decades of practice he has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself…  he has the reflected glory of heroic qualities at his disposal, and his misused language beautifies a misused life – as though eternity had saved its apex for the age in which a reporter lives. (76)

The cause of war – or at least this war – is unimaginativeness, which is caused by misused language.  This is a writer’s argument, a literary argument.  How many people could possibly find it convincing?  But it is not a paradox to Kraus, at least, and his anger at the press and the poets is real enough.

“In These Great Times” can be found in the 1976 Carcanet collection In These Great Times, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn.  The forthcoming Penguin Classics Kraus anthology is titled In This Great Time and Other Writings, so I will bet you one silver dollar that the essay will be in that book too.

removed his boot, shook out a pebble, and hobbled on again - England Invaded! Thousands Flee London!

More chronicling of what I didn’t know.  The War of the Worlds (1898) was not near the beginning of a genre, but merely earlyish, if the genre is not science fiction but English invasion literature, which was launched in 1871 by George Chesney, author of The Battle of Dorking.  Germans invade England; England resists; England triumphs - no, England is conquered!  I haven’t read it.  Sampling a page or two, it looks like a curiosity, literary wargaming.

Chesney is obviously responding directly to the Franco-Prussian War and the horrors of the Siege of Paris, fresh in the mind, or the newspapers, at the time.  Replacing the German or French army with Martians is not exactly a minor adaptation – the hundreds of subsequent stories of alien invasion could exist in ignorance of The Battle of Dorking, but not of Wells.  Sparkling Squirrel reminds me that one of the best, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), actually features invaders who are clever blends of the original Martians and the invasive weed they bring with them.

The strange experience, reading The War of the Worlds, was the feeling that I was reading a novel about World War I.  I’m thinking not so much of the poison gas attacks, although there are those, but of the extraordinary chapter I.16, “The Exodus from London,” which is almost generic, in the sense that it in no way requires invading Martians.  London will soon be attacked; an unprepared populace flees; the result is chaos and disaster.  I wonder if, sixteen or seventeen years later, Belgians fleeing Brussels, or refugees from any number of other cities in Europe, felt any déjà vu, if they thought “I’m living through that scene in War of the Worlds!”

They began to meet more people.  For the most part these were staring before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard, unclean.  One man in evening dress passed them on foot, his eyes on the ground.  They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw one hand clutched in his hair and the other beating invisible things.  His paroxysm of rage over, he went on his way without once looking back.

That’s pretty good.

A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy black frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed his boot - his sock was blood-stained - shook out a pebble, and hobbled on again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.

Also pretty good.  I guess we are used to scenes like this now, from movies, movies about wars and perhaps even alien invasions.  And for all too many people, all over the world today, from experience.  My imagination fails.  Thus the usefulness of fiction, of H. G. Wells.

Pushkin Street, Gogol Street, Lermontov Street - The Destruction of Galicia and literature

S. Ansky's tone in The Destruction of Galicia reminds me more than a bit of Chekhov. I suspect a direct connection to Chekhov's Sakhalin Island book, a report on a Siberian prison, but I haven't read it, so who knows. I am sure Ansky had I. L. Peretz's Impressions of a Journey through the Tomaszow Region in the Year 1890 (1891) on his mind. That one is nominally the report on a statistical survey of the countryside; it is extremely Chekhovian, even derivative, one could say. Peretz himself is actually a character in Ansky's book, in the earlier parts set in and near Warsaw.

What do I mean by tone? That Ansky's voice is professional, subdued, sometimes even a bit detached. His job is to stay calm, so that's what he does. He may express his frustration, anger, or sorrow, but he is writing with some distance. Of course, the most important part of the story is not his own. Ansky is bearing witness to a catastrophe. We're all too familiar with that genre, now.

Literature infiltrates the book:

"We walked around in the ruins for quite a while and I noticed something odd: In every corner of the burnt street, on the walls and on the destroyed houses, there were newly affixed signs on which street names were written in Russian letters. The Russians had given all the streets new, highly literary names: Pushkin Street, Gogol Street, Lermontov Street, I think there was a Turgenev Street, too. Apparently the victors didn't understand how cynical it was to call the horribly disfigured, fire-gutted streets after the greatest representatives of Russian culture, nor did they think it insulting to the memory of the great writers. The street signs left me with the same feeling as did the icons which the Christians put in their windows during the pogroms." (The Dybbuk and Other Writings, p. 180)

Since Ansky had recently been collecting folktales, he was always on the lookout for new ones, what we for some reason have taken to calling "urban myths." In Galicia and Poland, there were two sets of stories. One set was anti-Semitic, used to justify Russian depredations. For example, the Cossacks were riding through town, and everything was peaceful, until a Jewish girl fired at them from a second-story window. So the pogrom was merely retaliation. Ansky heard this story again and again, always with the girl in a second-story window. A lot of the stories involved Jewish spies, and telephones. All the Jews are spies for the Germans, or all the Poles, or both, and they all have telephones hidden away somewhere, with direct lines to the enemy.

The second set of stories are the Jewish ones, responses to the anti-Semitic stories:

"One version simply told how a number of Jews were hanged as a result of the telephone libel; other Jews would have been hanged too, were it not for a priest, carrying a cross, who appeared before the judge and testified that it was the Poles who were guilty. The priest's evidence proved to be correct; all the Jews were immediately freed and the Poles were hanged instead - sixteen in all." (p. 174)

Or the Jews caught in the cellar, on the telephone with the Austrians, turn out to be Poles in disguise. These stories are always from one or two or three towns over, absolutely true, none of us saw it, but we all heard about it.

The Beatrice Weinrich edition of Yiddish Folktales includes a few stories about Czar Nicholas I (enemy of the Jews), Emperor Franz Josef (friend of the Jews), Napoleon (complicated), or one of the Rothschild bankers, all typical, old-timey folktales, but updated with new heroes and villains. In the old story, the beggar who rewards the generous and punishes the stingy turns out to be the prophet Elijah in disguise; in the up to date ones he's Franz Josef. Some of the stories Ansky collects are about Austrian or Russian generals, ones who were known to be particularly anti- or philo-Semitic, inserted into the old stories.

"The most popular folktale among Jews was about two soldiers who confronted each other on the battlefield. As one stabbed the other, he was shocked to hear the dying soldier cry out, 'Shma Yisroel, Hear, O Israel.'... I heard many different variants of this folktale in at least eight or ten different localities - St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Warsaw, in short, every place where there were homeless Jews or soldiers. Most people thought that this was a factual account about real people, not a folktale. (pp. 175-6)

In the ellipses, Ansky mentions the story about the bride and groom who were murdered under the bridal canopy during the 1648 massacres, and buried together where they died - "in at least fifteen or sixteen shtetls I was taken to a grave near the synagogue where the bride and groom were supposed to have been buried." (175) This is Ansky's one hint in The Destruction of Galicia of what he was doing when he wasn't hauling money and medicine across a war zone.

He was writing a play, now the consensus choice for Greatest Yiddish Play. Tomorrow, I'll look at The Dybbuk.

War is a different matter - S. Ansky's The Destruction of Galicia

S. Ansky spent 1912 to 1914 travelling through the Jewish countryside in and near the Pale of Settlement, collecting Jewish stories, songs, traditions, and artifacts. The outbreak of war ended the expedition, but the next year he found himself back in the same area for a more basic reason: to bring relief aid to the Jews caught between the Russian and Austrian armies.

At the beginning of World War I, the Russians immediately overran Galicia, now part of Ukraine and Poland, at the time under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some elements of the Russian army, especially the Cossacks, deliberately destroyed every Jewish community they encountered. And this was before the fighting began, before the artillery shells began to fall. The Jewish towns in the region were unusually poor to begin with. After one of these pogroms, the survivors were left with nothing.

Later in the war, the army clamped down on these abuses in response to international pressure, and the Russians were eventually driven out of the area, although, in retreat, they were not much kinder to Russian Jews. The estimates of Jewish civilian deaths in the region range from 100,000 to 200,000, with half a million or more displaced people and refugees.

S. Ansky inserted himself right into the middle of this. Much of The Destruction of Galicia (1925), his memoir of the relief effort, involves trying to get transportation, racing from place to place with food and medical supplies. He also spends a lot of time arguing with officials, and attending meetings. This is modern, bureaucratized humanitarianism.

Ansky travelled in uniform (the cover of the paperback of The Dybbuk and Other Writings features a photo of Ansky in a Red Cross hat) and was, how to say this, highly assimilated, so he often "passed" as a Russian officer. That was one of the ways he got things done in the war zone. Another result is that Russians would confide in him. Here's an excerpt of The Destruction of Galicia, which I hope shows the literary quality of the book, something I want to write more about tomorrow:

“Our boxcars of medical supplies were hooked to a train carrying high-explosive shells, and off we chugged. In my heated freight car I found a young officer with an intelligent face, and we got to talking. There was something a bit odd about his rigid, dreamy stare and his habit of slowly weighing each word before he spoke. I wondered whether he was quite all right.

‘You know,’ he said as we got better acquainted, ‘you know when I was young I led a shameful life. I drank, I debauched, I beat the young soldiers, and I did other wicked things. Then I came across Leo Tolstoy’s What Do I Believe In. I read it and I was reborn. I became a completely different person. I even stopped eating meat.’

‘And yet you go to war, and you kill people,’ I said.

He sat awhile with a downcast head. At last he murmured with deep conviction: ‘War is a different matter. This war will renew the world; it will cleanse mankind of its dirt. For such a goal one can make the supreme sacrifice.’

Our train stopped three or four miles short of Tarnow because the approach to the station was being shelled. The station itself and the surrounding buildings had long since burned down. I had to reach town on foot. My belongings and the medical supplies would be driven in by automobile.” (p. 85, The Enemy at His Pleasure)

Johann Neugroschel for some reason titles his translation The Enemy at His Pleasure, a line from an Anna Akhmatova poem. I don't know why. I can guess.

I should also note that Ansky personally witnesses a fair number of horrible events, and documents many others. I think The Destruction of Galicia is a great book, a classic of humanitarianism, but I know it's not for everyone.