WWII inspired Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning
The coming of VE Day and VJ Day each year is always poignant.
The numbers who took part in the fighting, and who still survive, have diminished to a heroic few. The numbers of books about the Second World War, however, continue to swell. Most of these books, in so far as I’ve sampled them, are stultifyingly boring and badly written.
Indeed, I know only one true masterpiece, written in English, about the war – Alan Clark’s Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45 (1965). Whereas his earlier book The Donkeys destroyed the reputation of the British top brass in the First World War and, in its caustic analysis of the battles on the Western Front, inspired the musical Oh! What a Lovely War, Barbarossa is not about Britain at all.
It describes two truly magnificent armies. In its sense of the sheer dreadfulness of what they underwent, it bears comparison almost to The Iliad itself.
Clark was one of the few who kept alive the reputation of the poet Keith Douglas (1920-44), killed at 24 on the beaches nine miles south of Bayeux on 9th June 1945.
His understated and clever poetry is probably the best ‘war poetry’ written by anyone on active service, in that conflict – though, of course, T S Eliot was in London during the Blitz and did duty in the fire service.
That inspired much of the fiery imagery of ‘Little Gidding’, and the unforgettable scene of a London street, totally deserted after a bombing raid, and after the German plane had flown home:
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue/ Had passed below the horizon of his homing...
Douglas and Eliot are certainly better poets than most of those associated with the First World War. I’d be happy never to read again Siegfried Sassoon’s rhyme about everyone suddenly bursting out singing.
Am I alone in being unimpressed by the maudlin and not very skilful Wilfred Owen, with his clunkingly obvious verses about dwelling on the corpses of the young ? As for Rupert Brooke’s one corner of a foreign field being forever England, I’m afraid that’s a ‘Pass the sick bag’ one in my book.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to dwell on the two world wars and the literature they did, and did not, inspire.
One reason the Second World War did not inspire even the kitsch rhymesters of the Edward Thomas or Siegfried Sassoon level is that many of the writers, such as W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood, had skedaddled, rather than doing anything so risky as to fight for their country.
Poor old Mrs Auden, the poet’s mum, was neighbour to some friends of mine during the war and would assure them, with pathetic implausibility, ‘Wystan’s in America, but I believe he’s doing wonderful work for the allies’.
Still, for those writers who were prepared to ‘do their bit’, it hoicked them out of their cushy ruts and routines and offered them a whole new set of experiences.
Two of the best novelists of the 1930s, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, would still have left behind them an impressive body of work had they been killed in action in 1940. But Waugh’s Brideshead and his Sword of Honour trilogy are surely among the best things he wrote, if not the best.
As for Powell, whenever I reread A Dance to the Music of Time, finished 50 years ago, as his great-granddaughter Hope Coke writes in this issue, it strikes me that the three novels set in the war are the best of the sequence.
Unlike Waugh, who fought in Crete, Powell had the experience of very many servicemen – of ‘active’ service being pretty boring and inconsequential.
What his three war novels convey so convincingly is the effect the war has on everyone – from the civilians who live through the Blitz or, as in the case of Lady Molly and pals, die in it, to the Welsh bank manager, Gwatkin, who is dreaming heroic dreams, in part inspired by a boyhood reading of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.
Those who accuse Powell of being such a snob that he interested himself only in the upper classes or London bohemia overlook the sympathy and accuracy with which he depicts Gwatkin, Corporal Gwylt or the alcoholic Bithel running the mobile laundry.
If my generation had been shaken up by a war, we might have written better books – though they might have been not so much inspired by active service as simply, as Powell did, soaking up the atmosphere of wartime.
Good as Powell and Waugh are, their books as war stories are not as impressive as the work of one who never saw active service. In The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, Olivia Manning (1908- 80) wrote six short novels that nearly stand comparison with War and Peace.
Her protagonists Guy and Harriet Pringle work for the British Council in Bucharest before the war, and then, with relentless German successes, push their way into the Balkans and North Africa and are able to take ship to Egypt.
The Egyptian novels in the sequence are quite extraordinary, given the fact that Manning never fought in a battle.
The pathos and excitement of living through the war, and having no power to dictate its fortunes, are conveyed by Manning quite magnificently.
