Marina MacKay

Modernism and World War II by Marina MacKay

Introduction: modernism beyond the Blitz 1. Virginia Woolf and the pastoral Patria 2. Rebecca Wests anti-Bloomsbury Group 3. The situational politics of Four Quartets 4. The neutrality of Henry Green 5. Evelyn Waugh and the ends of minority culture Coda: national historiography after the post-War settlement Bibliography.

Introduction: British Fiction After Modernism

One answer to the question raised by this collection — what happened to British fiction after modernism? — might be: not much. The literary gardens of the West, in Cyril Connolly’s frequently quoted phrase, closed in the 1940s: ‘ “Nothing dreadful is ever done with, no bad thing gets better; you can’t be too serious”.’1 By 1947 writers had little left to push against, let alone experiment with. ‘You don’t think’, Elizabeth Bowen wondered in an exchange with V.S. Pritchett and Graham Greene, ‘you don’t think it possible that things these days may be almost too propitious?’2 In the new post-war consensus there was no room for the social and political isolation that had been so crucial, albeit in different ways, for the modernist novel. For a generation who were about to never have had it so good, the omens for a productive literary tension were never so bad. As their island shrank, mid-century writers became more domestic and domesticated. ‘The Novel No Longer Novel, 1945–1960’, was the less than flattering title Malcolm Bradbury gave to his chapter on this period in The Modern British Novel (1993).3 The period covered in the next chapter is so dull it cannot even inspire a literary pun: ‘The Sixties and After: 1960–1979’.

Modernist Nostalgia/Nostalgia for Modernism: Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh

“Do you know, when I first came to him he thought Matisse was a plage,” scoffs the modernist poet Mark Members in The Acceptance World, the third novel in Anthony Powell’s postwar sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time (123). Members is explaining to the narrator, Nick Jenkins, how his former employer, the Galsworthyesque novelist St. John Clarke, has suddenly been converted to modernism—in the 1930s, when modernism is becoming a thing of the past. “So there he goes,” remarks another character: “Head-first into the contemporary world” (29). This essay discusses two of modernism’s differently untimely admirers, lifelong friends Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, and aims to describe what modernism meant to these mid-century novelists whose major works, Brideshead Revisited (1945) and A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75), share an insistently retrospective orientation too easily assimilated into the real-life conservative politics of their authors. In the context of modernism and nostalgia, what is particularly interesting about these retrospective projects is that by the time of writing, “modernist nostalgia” was not a mode novelists could unthinkingly reprise, but, rather, modernism itself had become something to be nostalgic for.

Anti-State Fantasy and the Fiction of the 1940s

This essay argues that the wartime institutionalisation of emergency governmental powers and the expectation of their continuance under a post-war socialist administration led to a pervasive anti-statism indistinguishable from anti-Communism in the mid-century British novel. Focusing on less-read dystopias of the period, Rex Warners The Aerodrome (1941) and C. S. Lewiss That Hideous Strength (1945), I argue that these conservative novels are best understood as extreme iterations of a more widespread anxiety about the potentially totalitarian elements of a centralising and technocratic democracy at war.

War poetry in the USA

In 2003, Harvey Shapiro edited an anthology called Poets of World War II as part of the American Poets Project published by The Library of America. In his introduction he expresses his regret that “common wisdom has it that the poets of World War I - Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg - left us a monument and the poets of World War II did not” (p. xx). Given Americas late entry into the war in 1917, little of the monumental poetry of the Great War was written by Americans. Shapiro writes, “The American poets of World War I - John Peale Bishop, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Alan Seeger - were too few to constitute a group” (p. xx). This imbalance in the poetic production of war poetry should have been redressed in World War II, although here a different set of impediments intervened. Paul Fussell suggests two reasons why the war produced more silence than poetic expression. The first was the sheer magnitude of violence and the level of cruelty produced by the war. “Faced with events so unprecedented and so inaccessible to normal models of humane understanding, literature spent a lot of time standing silent and aghast.” The second was that redemptive notions of patriotism, heroism, and even elegiac sentiment had been effectively exhausted by World War I. “It is demoralizing to be called on to fight the same enemy twice in the space of twenty-one years, and what is there to say except what has been said the first time?” Fussell writes. And yet poetry was produced in response to World War II, including a wide range of American poetry, as Shapiros anthology demonstrates. Taken as a whole, these poems exemplify another reason why their response to World War II has not achieved the same public visibility and cultural significance as the poetry of the Great War.

Marabou Stork Nightmares: Irvine Welsh's anthropological vision

It has been suggested that the internal divisions in the notion of ‘Scottishness’ have led Scotlands Enlightenment writers to approach the nation with an ‘anthropological’ and ‘anthologising’ vision. In this article, I argue that we can see such a tendency in the work of the contemporary novelist Irvine Welsh, whose second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares, dissects the masculinist tribalism of Scottish underclass culture. In performing the anthropological activity of observing and recording, Welsh anthologises Scotlands linguistic multiplicity and yet, through first person narrative, draws attention to the act of narration, the event of speaking which renders futile the possibility of detachment. Narrative complicity becomes paralleled with Scotlands guilty political history.

‘Resentments’: the Politics and Pathologies of War Writing

Late in his famous memoir If This is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi recounts how he finally had the opportunity to exercise his expertise as a chemist, which may have saved his life by sparing him hard labour in the deadly cold of a Polish winter. His chemistry examination over, Levi is returning to the camp with the Kapo Alex, a German career criminal: The steel cable of a crane cuts across the road, and Alex catches hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter, he looks at his hand black with thick grease. In the meanwhile I have joined him. Without hatred and without sneering, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, if someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and [the chemist] Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.2 Methodically, obliviously and humiliatingly, Alex wipes his filthy hand on a convenient human rag: a deeply characteristic Nazi act in its evidencing of what by this stage is an instinctive contempt for a Jewish man, even (or especially) one who has just demonstrated abilities far above those of the thug Alex. Yet the act is less obviously chilling than most of the enormities Levi and his generation recounted. Indeed, when Levi ends the anecdote with the declaration that ‘on the basis of this action, I judge him’, not only does he nail Alex and his kind to their old crimes but also dares the reader to categorize ‘the poor brute’ Alex’s crime as a petty instance of Nazi guilt, and the ‘judgment’ as driven by resentment.