(delivered at the Literature, Film, and War Conference, SUNY, Binghamton)
MCMXIV
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark…
…the pubs
Wide open all day….
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines…
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the garden tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
– Phillip Larkin
This poem was written in the early 1960’s by Philip Larkin, a warning because the world once again seemed prepared to enter a catastrophic war by trotting out the worn rhetoric of World War I. The United States and the Soviet Union had recently brought the world to the edge of nuclear annihilation with the Cuban Missle Crisis. The British had almost started WWIII with the Suez Canal Crisis. The Arabs and Israelis were at war while the U.S. was preparing to escalate a war against a third world country that would result in 58,000 young Americans and millions of Vietnamese dead. Larkin begs us all not to be so naïve as to think war was somehow glorious, righteous, honorable, or even fun. He tells us don’t have the innocence again that once left eight million men dead on the battlefields of Europe during WWI.
The First World War began with a child-like innocence. Except for Hardy and a few others, much of the pre-war literature displayed remarkably light, almost celebratory, images of soldiers. Consider how Larkin mocks that language in his poem. “Grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark…”, of “…the pubs wide open all day…” , or “…thousands of marriages / Lasting a little while longer…”[i] as if war might in fact be a game played in some park before dinner each day.
The language that fueled the slaughter was abstract, vague and untenable. It isn’t literature. Such rhetoric only appears today during patriotic celebrations to incite people to follow an often-unjustifiable cause. As writers, our innocence has been eternally lost and poets, especially poets with combat experience, have a personal responsibility to avoid such language since we’ve become aware of its dangers. Now, this idea that poets became disillusioned after WW I, is certainly not a new one. Most of you are probably more familiar with some of the aesthetics behind this literary loss of innocence than I am. Philip Larkin was surely aware of the disenchantment with abstractions and romantic ideals in 1964. But, he sensed a need to remind us how we found ourselves in a position to be disillusioned, so we might not repeat the process and maybe it’s worthwhile to review it once again.
Europe of the early 20th century was peopled by romantics. The history books and literature were filled with the deeds of knights-errant, the self-sacrifice of Christian warriors on a quest, and the chastity of beautiful woman waiting to be rescued from evil.[ii] According to historian Paul Fussell, military tradition and the ritual of righteous war permeated the very fabric of British, French, and German society, and extended to their families who had immigrated to America. No one who lived in 1914 had reason to believe words like shell shock, desertion, mutiny, and mass destruction would be common phrases by 1918.
For the poets of WWI, the illusion created by abstract language quickly became dis-illusion. When Robert Graves writes “Here by a snow bound river/ in scrapen holes we shiver”[iii] or poet David Jones writes “so soon the darking flood percolates and he dies in your arms”[iv] or poet Isaac Rosenberg writes “A man’s brains splattered/ on a stretcher bearer’s face”[v] then words like glory, honor, and courage gave way to despair on a terrible scale. Innocence died. Consider this longer excerpt from, Dulce Et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen as he reflects on the experience of watching a comrade die from an enemy gas attack:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter at the cud
Of vile, in curable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.[vi]
The innocent ideal of dying coined by Horace and memorized by British schoolboys that it is somehow sweet and fitting to die for your country has become a lie. There is no glory when exhausted men crawl from filthy trenches to be slaughtered by machine gun fire. It takes no courage to lie in a wagon bed and choke on your own blood. Most importantly, there is no honor in furthering the illusion of righteous war once that illusion is shattered. It is a sentiment repeated by Ezra Pound in Homage to Hugh Selwyn Mauberly when Pound writes in the last stanza – There died a myriad/and of the best, among them,/for an old bitch gone in the teeth/for a botched civilization. Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms, turns on this point, and it is the same point Larkin makes forty years later when he says “never such innocence again.”
The few that lived through the carnage were never the same. They struggled with the knowledge that all they had been taught before the war was false without any understanding of the human animal’s capacity for savagery. Later, on reflection, this situation seems even worse, as in Edmund Blunden’s poem, 1916 seen from 1921:
Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughter, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hopes and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the gray rags,
The very books I read are there – and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags
Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbors here and I find none.
With such string gentleness and tireless will,
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub out speaks the living tree.[vii]
A combat weary veteran, Blunden is isolated, hears only “dismay” and is “dead as the men” he loved. The intensity of hope and fear that young men often express lays on the “old marshes” with abandoned rifles and discarded books, books of romantic poems and stories that he and many other young men read in order to stave off the reality of trench warfare. Again, historian Paul Fussell makes the point in his seminal book The Great War and Modern Memory that young soldiers often carried books full of poems either in their knapsacks or memorized in their heads. The rifles are the instruments that rendered the hope and glory of the books meaningless. Now, both images remain in Blunden’s consciousness, a reminder that “what once was mine is mine no more.”
Similarly, when the peace and prosperity of the 1950’s lulled Americans into a false naiveté, causing a monumental memory lapse regarding the insanity of war, this country slipped into the fourteen-year quagmire of Vietnam. Initially, those of us raised on John Wayne movies and the exploits of Audie Murphy charged forward like Wilfred Owen and Edmund Blunden had done fifty years before. In our arrogance and delusions of a glorious war we were willing to sacrifice all for the idea that freedom is synonymous with Americanization. Infantrymen, who served with the U.S. Army in the late- 1960’s in Vietnam wrote the following two poems. The first is from Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa:
“You and I Are Disappearing”
The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak
she burns like a piece of paper.
She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.
We stand with our hands
hanging at our sides,
while she burns
like a sack of dry ice.
She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker’s cigar,
silent as quicksilver.
A tiger under a rainbow
at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rainforest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.[viii]
One of the main differences between this poem and Dulce Et Decorum Est lies in Komunyakaa’s lack of an emotional arc. Where Owens comes to the epiphany that the romantic ideas of war he’s been taught are a lie, Komunyakaa suffers from no such illusion. His poem is a straightforward description of a horrible event that ends with a cynical religious allusion, a burning bush “driven by a godawful wind.” It lacks the discovery that Owens’ poem makes and the reason is not because one poem is superior to the other. Owens seeks resolution, understanding, closure. Komunyakaa describes what is. He begins the poem by accepting man’s inhumanity to man and acknowledging that he must constantly carry the burden of that lack of innocence. “The cry I bring down from the hills/ belongs to a girl still burning/ inside my head. Had this statement appeared later in context, we might have been able to argue that the poet has his romantic illusions shattered as he discovers that war involves the indiscriminant slaughter of innocent people. However, Komunyakaa’s tone from this point forward in the poem is so matter-of-fact, as if he already expected what he saw.
Five years after the fact, Blunden remained embittered in 1916 seen from 1921. Bruce Weigl, a Vietnam veteran had put twenty years between himself and his war when he wrote the title poem for his famous collection Song of Napalm. Does the old saying “time heals all wounds” apply to the wounding of innocence? Evidently not, if we can believe Weigl:
After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding,
we stood in the doorway watching horses
walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill.
We stared through the black screen,
our vision altered by distance so I thought
I saw a mist kicked up around their hooves
when they faded like cut-out horses away from us.
The grass was never more blue in that light
more scarlet; beyond the pasture
trees scraped their voices into the wind,
branches crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire
but you said they were only branches.
Okay. The storm stopped pounding.
I am trying to say this straight: for once
I was sane enough to pause and breathe
outside my wild plans and after the hard rain
I turned my back on the old curses.
I believed they swung finally away from me…
But still the branches are wire
and thunder is the pounding mortar,
still I close my eyes and see the girl
running from her village, napalm
stuck to her dress like jelly, her hands
reaching for the no one
who waits in waves of heat before her.
So I can keep on living,
so I can stay here beside you, I try
to imagine she runs down the road
and wings beat inside her till she rises
above the stinking jungle and her pain
eases, and your pain, and mine.
But the lie swings back again.
The lie works only as long as it takes
to speak and the girl runs only as far
as the napalm allows until her burning tendons
and crackling muscles draw her up
into that final position burning bodies
so perfectly assume. Nothing
can change that, she is burned behind my eyes
and not your good love and not the rain-swept air
and not the jungle-green pasture
unfolding before us can deny it.[ix]
In this poem, no matter how hard the poet tries to distort the image of the girl burning to death into a pleasant scene of horses and fields and trees so he can turn away from the old curses, “the lie swings back again” and the pastoral security is gone forever. Metaphorically that scene is innocence. Weigl tries his utmost to find it, but any attempt is merely self-deception. “The lie works only as long as it takes to speak…” It is not as if he wants to remain tortured by his memories, disillusioned and alienated from all he loves, but just as when Komunyakaa in the midst of a napalm attack comes down from his hill of innocence with the “girl still burning” inside his head, so Weigl must carry another dead girl who is burned behind his eyes forever.
The overwhelming advances in killing technology, the stupidity of leadership, the de-sanctification of human life, the greed and arrogance, the dissipation of morality, the nationalistic fervor, and the language that poets and respected writers used to describe these things as justified before and during the early part of WWI, all played a role in destroying our cultural innocence. It remains dead today.
Art is the illusion of reality. The better the illusion, the better the art. It seems to me to be a recurring task of the poet to remind us all in the most accurate terms possible of the realities of war – the power of the individual and the responsibilities that entails – even if no one listens.
Here, Bullet
By Brian Turner, 3rd Stryker Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division – Iraq
If a body is what you want
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.
[i] Larkin, “MCMXIV” in The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 19.
[ii] Fussell, The Great war and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 22.
[iii] Graves, “To Robert Nichols” in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin Group 1979), 121.
[iv] Jones, “In Parenthesis” ibid. 180.
[v] Rosenberg “Dead Man’s Dump” ibid. 222.
[vi] Owen, “Dulce Et Decorum Est” ibid. 193.
[vii] Blunden “1916 seen from 1921” ibid. 112.
[viii] Komunyakaa, “You and I Are Disappearing” in Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1996), 306.
[ix] Weigl, “Song of Napalm” in Song of Napalm (New York: Atlantic, 1988), 27.
Jim McGarrah, Author 