Writers in the Great War

Press, 25 February 1978, Page 17

Writers in the Great War

The Great War and Modern Memory. By Paul Fussell. 363 pp. $5 (paper).

Wilfred Owen: A Bibliography. By Jon Stallworthy. 333 pp. $6.55 (paper). Both Oxford University Press.

(Reviewed by A. J. Curry) These two books, the first about the "Great Vvar” of 1914-18 and the second about one of the Great War’s major poets, were first published in 1974 and 1975. Their reappearance in a paper format is welcomed, for both are excellent examples of their kind. Paul Fussell, Professor of English at Rutgers University, and the author and editor of many books on literature, has produced a book which is a fascinating combination of literary criticism and social history. Using as his base the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, Fussell has examined with critical insight the literary means by which

the Great War has been remembered. To this end he has made a close study of the classic memoirists of the war: Siegfred Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden, and the war’s major poets: David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen. But Fussell has not confined his study to major figures of literary importance; the views of the ordinary man, represented in the amateur memoirs lodged in the Imperial War Museun , are compared with the views of his more literary contemporaries. From this study has emerged what Fussell describes as . . the origins of what some future ‘medievalist’ may call ‘The Matter of Flanders' and Picardy’.” Every war, writes Fussell, is ironic because “ ... its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke

Francis Ferdinand and his Consort had been shot.” Fussell’s examination of that war’s ironies, its myths, and its literary resources, and how and why it should so impress itself still on modern memory is an original piece of historical and literary research. Seven days before the guns fell finally silent on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen was killed in the crossing of the Sambre Canal. He was 25 years of age. Jon Stallworthy’s biography of Owen is an engrossing account of the poet’s short life. Although primarily biographical in intention, it is not just a simple account of a life. Stallworthy’s treatment, especially of Owen’s early attempts to write poetry, is sympathetic and often illuminating. This edition reproduces the many illustrations and facsimile manuscripts of the original edition, and should be the standard biography for many years