Some Desperate Glory Read online

  Over the next year and a half, until Frost returned to the United States with his wife and children, the two writers were often together, usually in Dymock. The Frosts were living there in poverty, alongside Abercrombie, Drinkwater and Gibson. To the American, the landscape’s dereliction and its often destitute inhabitants were shocking. British farming had suffered from free trade and the huge influx of cheap American and Canadian wheat. Wages had scarcely gone up since 1870, making lives more like the grimmer parts of Hardy’s novels than the nostalgic yearning evident in Siegfried Sassoon’s memories of the pre-1914 Weald of Kent, in Ivor Gurney’s beloved Cotswolds or in Rupert Brooke’s ‘hearts at peace under an English heaven’.

  Robert Frost felt that Thomas should write poetry, of the kind that Frost wrote, where each word – and the sound of each word – conveyed a sense of natural speech. The atmosphere of Dymock and its poets encouraged friendship; the Georgians, although not the outspoken Frost, were soft in their manners and their verses, gentle and polite.

  In February 1914 Edward Thomas received a grant from the Royal Literary Fund. By the spring he was staying at Dymock with the Frosts or in rented rooms with his own family or in a cottage taken by Eleanor Farjeon, whose love for Edward was encouraged by Helen as it soothed him. In March, Thomas came to breakfast in Marsh’s rooms and it was a failure, the host thinking that the poet was sour, superior and critical of the food. Thomas wrote an admiring review of Frost’s collection North of Boston, some weeks after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo. They spoke of moving to the United States with their families, to farm together in New England where the Frosts had lived, and failed, before crossing the Atlantic. Edward Thomas was cycling from Steep to Dymock with his son when war was declared.

  A new feeling came, stimulated by war, a suspicion of foreigners and the search for spies. The police round Dymock were anxious about a Mr van Doorn who was said to be staying with the weird poets. There were rumours that Frost had been singing German songs. Were Germans so different, or so much worse, than the British whose faults Edward Thomas knew too well? He believed in a version of England. His patriotism was for the land, for what he’d seen or imagined of it and its history.

  Since Marlborough and Cambridge (which he’d left without taking a degree), Siegfried Sassoon’s life had become a perpetual holiday, a private income letting him do more or less what he wanted. His most successful poem, The Daffodil Murderer, a parody of John Masefield, had been praised by Edmund Gosse and Edward Marsh and received some reviews but sold few copies. Convention and timidity had manoeuvred him into a life of fox-hunting, cricket, the writing of sweet, privately printed verse and buried homosexuality.

  Through Marsh, Sassoon had met two Georgian poets – W. H. Davies and the ‘absolutely delightful’ Rupert Brooke, who’d patronized him – but Georgian Poetry had none of Sassoon’s poems in it. He left London in July 1914, returning to Kent and his mother to wait for the next hunting season. Perhaps he should enlist in the peacetime army and become a cavalry officer; then suddenly war was at hand. The newspapers foretold British involvement, and this must change his life. While playing in a two-day cricket match at Tunbridge Wells, Sassoon saw telegrams arrive at the ground summoning officers to their regiments.

  He recalled the absurdly amateurish training he had received in the Officer Training Corps at Marlborough and thought how near Kent, his home, was to the coast and the Continent. Could it all soon be burned and plundered? Was a new barbarism imminent? The enemy was the Germany of the Kaiser and his generals, not that of Schumann and Richard Strauss, whom he’d seen at Drury Lane. Soon the newspapers were reporting crimes of inhumanity previously unimaginable to a secluded British gentleman. Sassoon had no doubt that he wanted to defend the Weald from this. He enlisted in the army as soon as he could.

  Robert Graves saw an opportunity. Graves had been dreading going to Oxford in October; the new war would at least delay that. At Harlech, on holiday with his family, he decided to enlist. He wrote a poem promising revenge for the enemy’s burning of Louvain in Belgium in late August.

  Another survivor left no record of how he spent that summer. Ivor Gurney never wrote an autobiography, perhaps because he wished to write new poetry and music or because his last years were too tormented by madness.

  Gurney was, like Edward Thomas, born a town boy, growing up in Gloucester, the son of a tailor and a powerful mother. Like Isaac Rosenberg, he passed the war as a private soldier; like Rosenberg, he had two arts, in his case music and poetry; like Rosenberg, he was helped by the influence of others; unlike Rosenberg (but like Blunden), his best work came after the war.

  Gurney’s musical gifts were encouraged at Gloucester Cathedral’s choir school. The cathedral organist Dr Herbert Brewer gave him a good grounding but may have sensed the contempt the boy felt for Brewer’s own dull compositions as the organist never mentions Gurney, by then a published poet and composer, in his memoirs. After 1911, when he arrived at the Royal College of Music, Gurney quickly gained a reputation. Marion Scott, a fellow student, noticed ‘the look of latent force in him’, particularly the eyes, bright behind spectacles, ‘of mixed colouring’, which ‘Erasmus once said was regarded by the English as denoting genius’. She thought this boy ‘must be the new composition scholar from Gloucester whom they call Schubert’.

  Already suffering from mental illness, perhaps inherited from his mother’s unstable family, and brought near to a complete breakdown in 1913, Ivor Gurney found London a trial – but Gloucestershire could heal. A letter describes a spot where the Forest of Dean, the Severn, the Malvern Hills and the Cotswolds could be seen together. ‘London is worse than ever to bear after that.’ The best hope seemed to be the suffragettes: ‘let us hope that the Militants will blow it up soon’.

  In July and August 1914, Gurney was probably on holiday in the place that he loved, the country near the medieval city of Gloucester. Dymock was not far away and the poets there fascinated Gurney when a friend spoke of them. He may have gone to readings at the Poetry Bookshop in London, but was too shy to introduce himself to anyone, certainly not to Edward Marsh, who helped him later.

  Like Sassoon and Thomas, Gurney fashioned a country of his own that could make even the trenches bearable.

  God, that I might see

  Framilode once again!

  Redmarley, all renewed,

  Clear shining after rain …

  In 1913 came the mental collapse and, a year later, a whimsical poem in the style of Hilaire Belloc, before the war, and memories of war, released true poetry. Gurney tried to enlist early on – as Brooke, Graves and Sassoon did – but was turned down because of bad eyesight. He wished to do what he thought of as his duty, to Gloucestershire rather than to England. Ivor Gurney hoped also that the army might restore the balance of his mind.

  Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney were free of the English public-school world, whereas Edmund Blunden stayed loyal to it all his life.

  The son of schoolteachers, Blunden grew up in a village in Kent that perpetually glowed in his memory. He can seem a typical Georgian, with his love of cricket, rural life and villages – and he featured in Marsh’s later anthologies. But Siegfried Sassoon was right when he told him, ‘Your best poems have a spontaneity which is priceless,’ reaching beyond the Georgian movement’s more genteel side. Blunden did, however, write often about his childhood, prompting doubts as to whether the sun had really been so golden or the convolvulus so white and miraculous before 1914. He had a passion for country lore, for Kent and Sussex dialect words learned originally during the ‘golden security’ of King Edward’s reign. Leaving this village world to board at Christ’s Hospital school was painful; ‘farewell the bread-and-butter pudding and toasted cheese round Cleave’s fume-emitting stove, farewell the hours as volunteer teacher in my mother’s school, farewell the solos in St Peter and St Paul, and those midnights on the frozen ponds in naked hop-gardens under bobbetty-topped pollards and tingling
stars!’ Edmund Blunden used such memories constantly, sometimes as a contrast with what came later, as in the post-war poem ‘The Midnight Skaters’ where ponds become possible graves as potential victims dance on their frozen surface, chancing death as in the trenches.

  Christ’s Hospital changed Blunden’s life. ‘C.H. was never out of Edmund’s mind,’ a contemporary wrote later, ‘or if it was, the slightest reminder, a name, an allusion, would bring it back.’ For Blunden, it was a school of poets and writers – of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, George Dyer, Edmund Campion and William Camden – and he read all these and could quote from them.

  Christ’s Hospital was quite different from Grenfell’s Eton, Brooke’s Rugby, Graves’s Charterhouse or Sassoon’s and Sorley’s Marlborough. Boys paid much reduced fees, often no fees at all, for the requirement to be of ‘honest origin and poverty’ banished social exclusivity. Leigh Hunt wrote of his time there in the eighteenth century that a boy had ‘no sort of feeling of the difference of one another’s rank out of doors. The cleverest boy was the noblest, let his father be who he might.’ The uniform – a long blue coat and yellow stockings, resembling a partly disrobed clergyman – marked its difference, as did the names of the classes and categories of pupil (Little Erasmus and Great Erasmus, Deputy Grecians and Grecians) and its nickname of ‘Housey’.

  Edmund Blunden excelled there. He loved the cricket, played fives and rugby, learned calligraphy, spent hours in the school library and had his first published poem printed in the school magazine. When he left Christ’s Hospital, he had already published two small books of privately printed verse: one of translations from the French, the other charming, old-fashioned poems about nature.

  In July 1914 he was in the school’s compulsory Officer Training Corps, impressed by the ‘deep gentleness’ of Field Marshal Sir John French, who a month later would be the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, when French inspected them. Later Blunden saw the Corps as contributing to the ‘old lie’ of desirable sacrifice, of war as a chivalric contest rather than random killing. In 1914, however, it seemed fun, except when a master said, ‘it looks as though within a month the whole of Europe will be at war’. Blunden stayed at the school for another year, becoming head boy and winning an Oxford scholarship, the crown of his Bluecoat years.

  Wilfred Owen also waited to join up. When war broke out in August 1914, he was in France and looked on the fate of his countrymen with a certain detachment. ‘I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of this deflowering of Europe,’ Owen told his mother. ‘While it is true that the guns will effect a little useful weeding, I am furious with chagrin to think that the Minds which were to have excelled the civilisation of ten thousand years are being annihilated – and bodies, the product of aeons of Natural Selection, melted down to pay for political statues.’ There was no conscription in Britain. ‘I regret the mortality of the English regulars less than that of the French, Belgian, or even Russian or German armies: because the former are all Tommy Atkins, poor fellows, while the continental armies are inclusive of the finest brains and temperaments of the land.’

  Wilfred Owen had come to France in September 1913. First he taught in a language school in Bordeaux, then as a tutor to the Léger family. Madame Léger had been his pupil in the language school, her husband was a teacher of elocution, and they invited the young Englishman to join them at their holiday home in the Pyrenees. The Légers introduced Owen to Laurent de Tailhade, the first poet whom he knew well. The photograph of Wilfred with the elderly Frenchman, a follower of Baudelaire and the symbolists, looks like a parody of a disciple with his ‘cher mâitre’, as the young man looks down at the book he and Tailhade hold together. Laurent Tailhade has a hand on Owen’s shoulder; the scene might come from the 1890s, from the crimson world of the decadents. Another photograph has Wilfred in a bow tie, winged collar and dark suit, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, arms protective across his chest, sitting with Madame Léger, listening to a lecture given outdoors by Tailhade. Owen looks dandyish and absorbed; the date is some three weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. Although Tailhade had been a pacifist, at the end of 1914 the elderly poet volunteered for the French army.

  All this is far from Owen’s beginnings. He was the eldest of three sons of a railway official who lived first near Oswestry in Shropshire, then at Birkenhead, where Wilfred went to school at the Birkenhead Institute, then at Shrewsbury, where he attended Shrewsbury Technical School. There was an evangelical atmosphere, imposed particularly by Owen’s strong mother Susan, which must have brought silent conflict as he became aware of his homosexuality.

  Each parent thought also of a past that had faded into disappointment. Tom Owen claimed to be descended from a sixteenth-century baron, a sheriff of Merionethshire; Susan, whose father was Mayor of Shrewsbury, had hoped in vain that the Mayor’s will would leave her family much better off. Birkenhead, with its slums and docks, was not where they wanted to be. The Owens were respectable. When teaching in Bordeaux, Wilfred said that he was the son of a baronet.

  The Church seemed a possible life; Owen read the Bible each day, dressed up as a clergyman, took mock services and went to work as an unpaid assistant to the vicar of Dunsden, a village near Reading, where he failed to win a scholarship to London University. Encouraged by his mother, he’d started to write poetry at an early age. A cousin, Leslie Gunston, was also a poet. Owen showed Gunston his work, much influenced by the romantics, particularly Keats.

  Shocked by how little a religious revival at Dunsden was concerned with the village’s poverty, Owen left the parish in 1913, failed for a scholarship to Reading University and seemed to be on the edge of a breakdown. His father had already taken him to Brittany on a holiday in 1908 and 1909, to let Wilfred practise his French. So, in September 1913, with his parents’ support, Owen went back to France.

  In France he found sophistication, freedom and possibly (although there’s no evidence) sex. These months were probably the happiest of his life. But a puritan upbringing still made him flinch at strong artistic feeling. ‘I love music,’ Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from Bordeaux in May 1914, ‘Violin first, Piano next, with such strength that I have to conceal the passion, for fear it be thought weakness…’

  Owen had his first glimpse of war’s reality on a visit to a French military hospital in Bordeaux in September 1914. In Bordeaux he was at the centre of French life, for the government had moved there from an endangered Paris. The French army, still dressed in red trousers and bright-blue jackets and capes, had charged across the eastern frontier into Alsace and Lorraine and suffered terrible casualties. The hospital was in a former lycée where he was taken by a doctor friend. A classroom had become an operating theatre, the ink-stained floor now a ‘chamber of horrors’. ‘German wretches’ lay there, treated exactly the same as the French patients. Owen drew some wounded limbs to show his brother Colin what war was like – a crushed shin bone of a leg, a holed knee, a skull penetrated by a bullet, feet covered in dried blood. The young Englishman – still only twenty-one – reported, ‘I was not much upset by the morning at the hospital; and this is a striking proof of my health.’ As yet he had no plans to return to England.

  News of war spread across Britain’s empire, Isaac Rosenberg hearing it in Cape Town. Rosenberg’s first collection – Night and Day – had been privately printed in 1912 by a sympathetic Jewish printer, the poems influenced by Keats, Shelley and Francis Thompson. Blake and Milton were also there in the sense of an implacable God. Although the shy, stammering Rosenberg was a difficult beneficiary, benefactors helped him, including the writer (and later translator of Proust’s last volume) Sydney Schiff and a Mrs Cohen, who persisted even after Isaac and she had quarrelled. In Eddie Marsh’s spare bedroom, Rosenberg’s painting Sacred Love – of a girl and a boy in a clearing in a wood – impressed a guest for whom it ‘glowed with a strange, dream-like intensity, reminiscent of Blake – a lovely vision’. T
he work’s mysterious scene showed that its creator had a different imagination to that of the other poets who were lining up for the trenches.

  Marsh had helped Rosenberg to get to South Africa. He paid for a second privately printed book of poems, to be called Youth, which did not come out until 1915. To Marsh, obscurity was a demon and Rosenberg admitted his own lack of traditional technique. He didn’t fit easily into the new art scene. Roger Fry’s 1910 post-impressionist show and Bomberg’s cubism were quite different from his poetic realism. ‘I dislike London for the selfishness it instils into one,’ he told a friend, ‘which is a reason for the peculiar feeling of isolation I believe most people have in London. I hardly know anyone whom I would regret leaving (except, of course, the natural ties of sentiment with one’s own people); but whether it is that my nature distrusts people, or is intolerant, or whether my pride or my backwardness cools people, I have always been alone.’ Rosenberg thought of going to the United States or Russia, where he had relations. But his sister Minnie had settled in South Africa with her husband so it seemed an easier destination. The Jewish Educational Aid Society paid for the voyage.

  In South Africa, Rosenberg may have had an affair with an actress. He found that there was some interest in lectures which he gave on art. But Cape Town’s dazzling light and landscape faded for him and a letter to Marsh reveals contempt for the materialism and the whites (he scarcely seems to have considered the Africans) ‘clogged up’ with ‘gold dust, diamond dust, stocks and shares, and heaven knows what other flinty muck. Well, I’ve made up my mind to clear through all this rubbish.’ Soon he was yearning for home, for intelligent appreciation of his poetry, as the poem ‘The Exile’ shows: