[PEN-L:392] On WW1 writings

[valis <valis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth Paul Meyer further:
> There are supposed [to be] some great memoirs from 'the Great War.'

The angels' own RH Tawney has a real-life account called "The Attack, and
other papers" that's worth anyone's time.

Robert Graves's "Goodbye To All That," which includes the scandal of the
Battle of the Somme, is still scriptural on WW1, and for good reason.

> Siegfried Sassoon's one of the best known as well as
> some great literature including recently Pat Barker's Trilogy

Of which I read the first part, Regeneration, about 3 years ago.
This is a very great piece of writing.

> and a novel called Birdsong (have forgotten the author).

Sebastian Faulks.  He had published a few novels earlier,
but Britain simply ate up Birdsong and made him famous.
It's very much about class issues.

If I have a memory left, the interwar expatriate man of letters
Gerald Brenan (South from Grenada and other fine books about Spain)
has some WW1 reminiscences in A Life of One's Own, the first installment
of his autobiography.


Few writers were as totally shaped by WW1 as Olof Stapledon (1886-1950),
whose unique genre one either gets into or doesn't.  In particular,
look into Last Men in London and decide his meaning for yourself.
The war's influence was expressed most prosaically in Talking Across
the World (Robert Crossley, ed.), a good selection from a 2000-letter
wartime correspondence between Stapledon and Agnes Miller ("my Beatrice"),
the Aussie cousin to whom he had gotten engaged in 1913.

A pacifist, Stapledon spent the war's duration in Belgium and northern
France, where he drove a succession of Quaker ambulances through the
thick of combat.
Curiously enough, Stapledon's obvious heroism went completely unperceived
by his bride-to-be and her father, both of whom frequently aired their
rather conventional opinions on the only honorable course to take in war
and his presumed shirking of it: since he wasn't killing, he wasn't
really participating.  Nevertheless, they married shortly after Agnes
arrived in England, early in 1919, and lived together near Liverpool
until Stapledon's death, raising two children along the way.

Perhaps someday people will write stapledons, as they now write novels;
until then I'll say that there are writers and there is Stapledon.

                                                                   valis