The Great War, Hysterical Men and the Modernist Lyric

Abstract

There is an accepted and established historical proximity between modernism and the 1914–18 engagement of forces from across Europe, the British Empire and North America that became known as the First World War, and the conflict features in the lives and texts of modernist writers: Ford Maddox Ford, Richard Aldington and e e cummings all wrote of their war experiences, while the stories in D. H. Lawrence’s England, My England and Other Stories (1922) are populated by returning soldiers, H.D. offers a personalised survivor’s war in Bid Me to Live(1960), Woolf examines the war as event and aftermath in Jacob’s Room (1922), and Mrs Dalloway (1925), and the battlefields of the Great War echo thematically and aurally throughout Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Possible articulations between the First World War and modernism have remained at the level of personal or thematic influence for some time, and it is only in the last decade that the contiguities of the cultural context of the war and the emergence of specific modernist forms and texts have come under close critical scrutiny. Many of these recent accounts have explored how language and communication and the boundaries and distinctions of the masculine subject were fundamentally disrupted by war, and the impact this had on the modernist texts that were produced out of, and after, the war.⁴

And it seemed that there was something less than death in these two dead and a something less profound than the meaning of the tomb, and the moving figures, hats in hands, seemed like strange, inhuman things crawling around a stranger, more inhuman hole, a pit filled with darkness and death, and yet somehow less melancholy and inspiring than the depths of a cistern that sound with the low droppings of rainwater.

(Djuna Barnes, 1918)¹

I got the war fever so badly that I’m working hard in a surgical hospital — an Italian surgical hospital! — entirely devoid of sentiment - entirely on the chance of getting near a battle field & hearing a lovely noise - I love my practical side... I am sure to express this experience soon — you have no idea what fallow fields of psychological inspiration there are in human shrieks & screams.

(Mina Loy, 1914)²

Against this ever rising tide of national enthusiasm, while immersed in this prodigious task, with some surprise with some surprise, with thousands of skilled stirrups with no dismay, with what is important with surprisingly great surprises, with some surprise and with no dismay, against this ever rising tide of national enthusiasm, the greatest enthusiasm no doubt, it echoed in the preliminary recitations. No I don’t.... The only prudent course now was to retreat north. Cruelly and in an obstinate fight. For a time the weather had been singularly tried so that the sun was won by the barometer and it did it shone. Now then. He clasped his now precious naturally heartless man.

(Gertrude Stein, 1914)³