Abstract
On November 13, 1918, Captain James Norman Hall, United States Air Service pilot, stole a copy of The Canterbury Tales from a makeshift prison library as he and three other American officers were escaping a detention facility in Landshut, Germany.1 No other prisoners had shown an inclination for the Middle English work and the German officer in charge had professed little proprietorship, so Hall, as the prison’s unofficial librarian, had already felt himself the volume’s rightful owner and expressed no remorse for leaving Germany one Chaucer volume shorter than it was when the Armistice was declared two days earlier on November 11. Hall carried the Tales with him as he and the three other prisoners boarded a train to Munich, bedded overnight at a small hotel, rode to Lindau, crossed Lake Constance to Switzerland, evaded detainment in Romanshorn, and finally reached Paris. Later, Hall’s Landshut Chaucer traveled with him when he made a final melancholy flight over the Western Front. Afterward, the volume also accompanied Hall when he went to Iowa, crossed the continent to California, sailed to Tahiti, traveled to Iceland, and finally returned to Tahiti, where he made his home at Papeete and remained until his death in 1951.2
I turned again to my Chaucer; but he, dead and “nayled in his cheste” long since, could not compete with the picture of the Cynical Sophomore, appareled in the bright colors of youth, beginning his pilgrimage to some doubtful, unknown shrine far down the years—and I close the book.
—”The Contributors’ Club,” The Atlantic Monthly March 1926, 424
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Notes
Thus, before World War I, the Atlantic had published alongside Hall’s own efforts to goad the United States into joining the Allied cause Randolph Bourne’s warnings “that all the Wilsonian cant about a holy war for democracy meant Americans would neglect their own democracy while fussing ineffectively over the affairs of others” (Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy [New Haven, CO: Yale University Press, 1987], 135).
James Norman Hall, Flying with Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930), 3. This is only one of many books and articles Hall published under the aegis of the Atlantic Monthly and its book press, including the popular historical fiction, Mutiny on the Bounty, coauthored with Charles Nordhoff in 1932, and his posthumously published autobiography, My Island Home: An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952).
Hall’s Flying with Chaucer, as well as his earlier Kitchener’s Mob and High Adventure, are not classified as fiction, though they share many of the characteristics of World War I fiction. See Chris Hopkins, “Beyond Fiction? The Example of Winged Warfare (1918),” in The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory, ed. Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 9–23.
Jeffrey Walsh, American War Literature, 1914 to Vietnam (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 13.
Colin Nicolson, The Longman Companion to the First World War, Europe, 1914–1918 (London: Longman, 2001), 269.
James Norman Hall, “Kitchener’s Mob,” Atlantic Monthly 117 (March–May 1916): 397–407, 565–73, 695–702.
In this effort, Hall joined a host of British literary luminaries who extolled the historical and linguistic ties between Great Britain and the United States in works addressed to Americans (Wayne A. Wiegand, “An Active Instrument for Propaganda”: The American Public Library during World War I [New York: Greenwood Press, 1989], 20–21).
The time lag was caused by bureaucratic snafus (Michael Carr, “United States Air Service,” in The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia, ed. Anne Cipriano Venzon [New York: Garland, 1995], 604).
How to keep the soldiers distracted while they awaited being shipped back to the states was a major logistical concern (now largely forgotten) for the military. Kathrine Gordon Brinley’s husband, Daniel, and their neighbor, Columbia professor John Erskine, were two of the many volunteers who served during World War I by operating USO-like stations and pseudo-universities. (See chapter 4 for more about Kathrine Brinley). For a personal account of these quickly mobilized and quickly forgotten efforts, see John Erskine, The Memory of Certain Persons (Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1947), 261–84, and My Life as a Teacher (Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1948).
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 314
Robert Wohl, “Introduction,” in The Lost Voices of World War I, ed. and comp. Tim Cross (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 8–10; and Robert Wohl, “Conclusion,” in Lost Voices of World War I, ed. and comp. Cross, 380–86.
Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment (New York: Bretano’s, 1922), 176
Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965), 168.
John H. Morrow, “The War in the Air,” in Researching World War I: A Handbook, ed. Robin Higham and Dennis E. Showalter (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 352.
T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 97–139.
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© 2007 Candace Barrington
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Barrington, C. (2007). Flying with the Poet. In: American Chaucers. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10748-0_4
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