FOR THE ALLIES, 1916 WAS A long, dark year. On the Western Front, the French army exhausted itself defending Verdun, and the British advanced doggedly into the mud of the Somme. Meanwhile, in the east, Germany gained ground against Russia in Poland, and marched through Romania in a matter of weeks. The human cost of the year’s fighting was absurd: a million French and German casualties at Verdun alone, half of these fatalities; similar numbers at the Somme, where the British army suffered fifty-eight thousand casualties on the first day of the offensive; more slaughter on a massive scale on the Eastern Front. The financial cost of the war was also rising and the Allied governments were running out of resources. It was becoming clear that borrowing from Wall Street was the only way to continue the war, and the American administration allowed the issue of both commercial credits and bonds to the British government. No sooner had this money left U.S. banks, than it was flowing back in; sales of wheat and munitions were quickly making America the world’s largest single market as well as “the banker, arsenal and warehouse for Britain and France.” By the midpoint of the war, U.S. trading with the Allied nations had quadrupled, and one third of the world’s gold was in the hands of American bankers.1 It was becoming clear that if politics did not draw the U.S. government to into the conflict, then economics would.
Late in 1916, President Wilson decided to use his financial ascendancy and the moral authority which he felt derived from his neutral position and his recent reelection to put pressure on the European powers to talk. In December 1916 and January 1917, a series of “Peace Notes” changed hands. Wilson wanted the European governments to clarify their political objectives as a first step toward a deal that would end hostilities, a deal to be arbitrated by a newly formed League of Nations. However, Wilson failed to recognize the extent to which his timing suited the agenda of the Central Powers—or at least was seen to do so by the Allies. Having given little ground on the battlefields through the year, Germany and Austria had the most to gain from a swift conclusion to the fighting. The stalemate on the Western Front was such that despite the appalling loss of life on both sides, the front itself had barely moved since November 1914, and Germany still occupied most of Belgium. Wilson also failed to see how sections of his rhetoric were expressed in terms which neither side could possibly accept. As Colonel House recorded in his memoirs, the underlying principle of Wilson’s plan for Europe was “the right of nations to determine under what government they should continue to live.”2 However, this principle of self-determination, such an unassailable idea from an American perspective, appealed neither to the German and Austrian autocracies, whose own peoples had no such right, nor to the colonial centers of Paris and London. If Belgium and Poland were to determine their own fate, what then for Ireland, for India, for Senegal, for Syria? Then, in his address to the Senate on 22 January, the president urged the world to accept “Peace without Victory,” a phrase which may have reflected Wilson’s sensible desire to avoid postsettlement recriminations, but was hardly a crowd-pleasing refrain. Page, in London, warned that this wording would alienate the Allies and suggested “Peace without Conquest.” Wilson went ahead regardless. Even now, he seemed to believe that a brokered peace was possible, but it was too late: Germany had already made two moves that would make retaliation inevitable.
On 9 January, while Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to Washington, was still talking up the possibility of a negotiated settlement, the generals Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenberg persuaded the kaiser to allow them to embark on a program of unrestricted warfare against shipping in the Atlantic. Their aim was to blockade British ports, and starve the nation into submission; the 1916 harvest had been poor, and Britain was more reliant than ever on imported grain. The German generals gambled that even if unrestricted marine warfare were to force the United States into the war, the nation would not be able to respond swiftly enough to make any decisive impact before Britain was brought to its knees in July. America was given just eight hours’ warning of the change of policy, which took effect on 1 February. Wilson severed diplomatic relations with Germany on 3 February, but characteristically he determined to wait for some overtly aggressive act before declaring war. Meanwhile, British Naval Intelligence had intercepted and deciphered a telegram, dated 19 January, in which Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign secretary, instructed the German ambassador to Mexico City to discuss the possibility of an alliance between the two nations should America enter the war. In the event of such an alliance defeating America, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona would be returned to Mexican rule. Japan was also to be invited to join the fray. To make matters worse, the coded message had been transmitted via several routes, including one via the State Department to the Germany embassy in Washington, thus riding roughshod over a courtesy which the U.S. government had extended to the Germans for the purposes of mediating peace, by allowing Berlin to correspond with its Washington embassy directly without using British-controlled cable routes. “Good Lord!” Wilson is reported to have exclaimed when told of the message and its mode of delivery—an unusually vociferous form of self-expression for this pious and methodical man.3 It was perhaps not a particularly friendly gesture toward America that British operatives had tapped this source, but the White House was grateful all the same. The British had hesitated to share the inflammatory message with Page in London for nearly a month, wanting first to check its authenticity, and then hoping perhaps that America would declare war before it was needed, thus allowing British intelligence to conceal their access to certain wire routes and ciphers. The Zimmermann message was deliberately leaked to the American press, where it fueled public enthusiasm for military action, although many people thought it was a hoax. Nevertheless, Wilson was still reluctant to ask Congress to declare hostilities. His Armed Ship Bill, licensing civilian vessels to carry weapons for self-defense, was facing a blockade of its own in Senate by a group of twelve senators led by Bob La Follette of Wisconsin, the most outspoken political opponent of the war. Privately, Wilson had some sympathy. If there was an alternative to fighting, he was willing to take it, even at the price of public unpopularity.
The second half of March, however, determined Wilson’s fate. On 16 March, news reached the White House of the March Revolution in Russia and the abdication of the czar. Two days later, Wilson received word that three American ships had been sunk, including the Valencia, which sank in seven minutes with the loss of fifteen of her crew. Wilson had consistently made national dignity a priority in his response to the war; so, when the U-boats struck, he could not back down without affronting his own dignity and that of the office which he held. As Patrick Devlin puts it, “the man who began by being too proud to fight ended by being too proud to keep the peace.”4 On the one hand, the sinking of the Valencia was the purposeful act of aggression without which Wilson had been reluctant to act, and as such provided a moral justification for war. On the other hand, the Kerensky Revolution, precursor to the more radical and violent Bolshevik Revolution in October, provided a political justification. Up to this point, fighting alongside Russia would have involved taking sides with the most autocratic of all the belligerents; but now that Russia appeared to be moving toward a more self-determined form of government, it was easier for Wilson to take the line that the Allies were fighting for representative government against the monarchist Central Powers—an argument popular among those on the liberal left, such as Grace Fallow Norton.5 Meanwhile, Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote to the president, noting that war now looked inevitable, or at least that they could no longer “successfully maintain the fiction that peace exists.” He also reminded him that a place on the battlefield would also mean a place at the negotiating table later. Wilson had consistently ignored Lansing’s advice for the past two years, so it is ironic that this letter urging “prompt, vigorous and definite action in favour of Democracy and against Absolutism” may have given him the final push towards a decision to fight.6
Wilson went to Congress on 2 April to ask for a vote on a war resolution, bringing all his idealism and all his eloquence to the task: “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no domination for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”7 It was one of the great presidential speeches, greeted by tumultuous applause and cheers—but Wilson did not feel triumphant. He is reported to have said later that evening, “Think what it was they were applauding. My message today was a message of death to our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.”8 The resolution was debated in both houses. Senate endorsed it on 4 April; the House of Representatives followed suit the next day. On 6 April, Easter Sunday, Wilson signed the resolution at the White House. Immediately, an aide rushed out to the lawn and semaphored to an officer in the Navy Department across the street. The signal was relayed across the nation and to every U.S. ship at sea: W-A-R.9
Thinking about these events from a literary perspective, it is fascinating to see how many of them were concerned with words, and with the ways in which those words exposed or entrenched the positions of those between whom they flowed: the misdirected diplomacy of Wilson’s war notes; his failure to grasp the difference it would make to settle for “Peace without Victory” rather than “Peace without Conquest”; the confidential letters and memoranda passed between Wilson and his advisers; the scrambled, ciphered, and intercepted language of the telegraph; the great eloquence of the president calling his nation to war. As Dos Passos would later point out in his analysis of Wilson’s actions, here was a man who had been brought up to a Presbyterian faith in the moral and spiritual power of language: “Like any oldtime Covenanter,” wrote Dos Passos, “Wilson believed in the efficacy of the word. By the right word men could be brought to see the light.”10 Unfortunately, in 1917, force and economics were speaking much louder than words. The sequence of events that brought America to war highlighted the limitations of language as a means to bridge ideological differences, or to unify fragmented perspectives. Certainly, the traditional constructions of political discourse proved inadequate for this task in the winter of 1916–17. Great orator that he was, even Wilson could not find words that would express with sufficient clarity and persuasion his vision of a world governed by principle and dialogue. Perhaps the language of authority could not halt the fighting because this very discourse had been discredited by its role in setting the war in motion. Rejecting the “German Note” of December 1916, which set out a basis for negotiation, the newly appointed British prime minister, David Lloyd George, gave a speech in the House of Commons pointing out that verbal guarantees from Germany held no value, because they had been comprehensively violated in the past. “The mere word that led Belgium to her destruction will not satisfy Europe any more.” he asserted. “We shall put our trust in an unbroken army rather than a broken faith.”11
The contexts were different, but the problems facing the politicians in 1917 of how to make language accommodate antithetical viewpoints, also beset anyone attempting to write the personal chaos of the war. Just as new military and diplomatic strategies were deployed in attempts to break the deadlock, so innovations of structure, narrative and tone increasingly came into play in the literature of the latter half of the conflict in an attempt to give voice to the chilling contradictions of life—and death—in the war zone. Among these innovations, the most striking are those which introduced new perspectives, as though their authors were in search of a vantage point from which the conflict could be seen to make sense, even while they felt that such a search might be futile. Revising her manuscript of The Forbidden Zone for publication in 1929, Mary Borden would articulate the difficulty of asserting an authorial point of view about the war: “To those who find these impressions confused, I would say that they are fragments of a great confusion. Any attempt to reduce them to order would require artifice on my part and would falsify them. To those on the other hand who find them unbearably plain, I would say that I have blurred the bare horror of facts and softened the reality in spite of myself, not because I wished to do so, but because I was incapable of a nearer approach to the truth.”12 It is a paradoxical, almost disingenuous statement, coming as it does in the preface to one of the most stylized accounts of the war in the English language. Borden’s text is nothing if not full of artifice, narrative manipulation, and effect. Even in their earliest manifestations, the fragments of perception which Borden assimilated into text were carefully crafted and arranged.13 Nevertheless, only by such means can she construct a version of the truth—a truth which she has already admitted to be out of the grasp of her language. As the following pages show, Borden’s account of her time at the Somme through the winter of 1916–17, which constitutes the second section of The Forbidden Zone, is dominated by her textual experiments in perspective, just as her letters and poems from 1917 were also focused on problems of observation and distortion.
Likewise, the young volunteer ambulance drivers John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings would find the conventional mode of linear narrative unworkable as a means for recording their impressions of the “great confusion,” which they were experiencing firsthand in their deployment among the first wave of Americans to arrive in Europe after Wilson’s declaration of war during the summer and autumn of 1917. As Malcolm Cowley wrote in his autobiography Exile’s Return (1951), so many future authors, including Ernest Hemingway, William Slater Brown, Robert Hillyer, Dashiell Hammett, William Seabrook, and Cowley himself, served as volunteer drivers in 1917 that one could almost view the ambulance services and the French military transport as “college-extension courses for a generation of writers.” (Alfred Kazin called the Norton-Harjes unit “the most distinguished of all the lost generation’s finishing schools.”)14 Cowley explains that such courses offered vital life instruction for inexperienced college graduates: “They taught us courage, extravagance, fatalism, these being the virtues of men at war; they taught us to regard as vices the civilian virtues of thrift, caution and sobriety; they made us fear boredom more than death.” These lessons could, perhaps, have been learned in any branch of the army. However, the endless hours of waiting, and the supportive status of driver, like that of nurse, instilled in these young minds “a lesson of its own,” something that Cowley termed “a spectatorial attitude.”15 Certainly, the work of these witness-participants is characterized by a fascination with the surface appearance of events, and a distinctively plain, unflinching tone, shorn of idealism and generalization. This is often described as a tone of “detachment,” which is curious, as it is at its most intense in those writers of the war who remained alert and analytical at the front. Consider for example Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat or William March’s Company K, both of which present uncluttered, matter-of-fact accounts of the battlefield, sometimes withering in their parody of military language. The frank, plain-speaking tone of these works is, perhaps inevitably, less evident in the work of writers such as Cather and Wharton, or the “high” modernists, such as Eliot, Pound, and H.D., who viewed events at a distance and with a higher level of abstraction—although these depictions of conflict also have a place and, very often, a beauty of their own. However, the persistent use of “detachment” as the hallmark of authentic experience in the war zone suggests that critical responses to eyewitness accounts of the war have somehow come at this issue upside-down, or at least with an oddly unregenerated set of assumptions about what would or should constitute the language of engagement. As the work of Borden, Dos Passos, and Cummings demonstrates, some sort of emotional containment was indeed required to continue functioning in the high-stress atmosphere of the military zone, but no one could really be a detached spectator in the theater of war. Simply to be there was to participate in some role, whether of violence, victimization, or complicity—sometimes all three, as Dos Passos’s fictional characters would so vividly discover. So, the tone that is often interpreted as detachment in war writing is perhaps better understood as a strategy evolved by veteran or volunteer writers to make sense of, or atone for, their intimate involvement in events. Those truly detached from the action, had no need for such a strategy. In the most inventive works of 1917–18, this need to negotiate personal involvement shapes a range of narrative perspectives—sometimes external to the self, sometimes obsessively internalized, sometimes juxtaposing two or more viewpoints. Like the cubist painters of the period, these writers saw that distortion and fragmentation could be more effective, perhaps even more honest, than traditional realist representation, and created a vehicle for conveying the political and moral contradictions of war. In so doing, they developed a set of narrative and poetic techniques, and a tone of quiet contempt, that would shape the writing of their generation.
This is the song of the mud,
The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin;
The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys;
The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the road beds;
The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of the horses;
The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone.
Mary Borden’s poem “The Song of the Mud” appeared in the August 1917 issue of the English Review alongside “The Hill” and “Where Is Jehovah?” under the heading “At the Somme.” Another poem, “Unidentified,” and the prose poem “The Regiment” also appeared in the same issue. These five works are startling pieces of writing, especially in the context of the midwar period; the content is harsh and the technique daring. Like “The Hill,” with which this book opened, “The Song of the Mud” articulates a world where human figures have become secondary details within a warscape that is elemental and mechanical, without color or hope or purpose. Traditional poetic form is abandoned as the crowding stimuli of the war zone jostle up against each other and spill out over the page in their desolation. It is tempting to imagine that Mr. Eliot, conscientious young banker at Lloyds, who kept up assiduously with the London literary magazines of the day, may have picked up a copy of the English Review on his walk to work, opened it over lunch, and had the beginnings of an idea. But it is perhaps safer to say that Borden’s poems, like La Motte’s Backwash of War, were among the earliest examples of works which explored the war from an angle which would later become familiar: stark, uncompromising, self-conscious, unconventional, focused on futility, incompatibility, and absurdity. From such a perspective the human self, so confidently expressed in earlier responses to the war, even when suffering or broken, becomes a doubtful and marginalized element within a world of random and unstructured events. Thus in “The Song of the Mud” the soldiers who flounder and drown in the mud of the battlefield have neither identity nor voice. Like the guns and the horses and the detritus of battle, they are merely objects in the landscape and will be consumed by that landscape, sucked down into the “thick bitter heaving mud.” Only the mud, active and ubiquitous, vital but not sentient, has agency or personality; but ironically only the homicidal mud also has the power to stop the fighting:
This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle.
The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome,
The slimy inveterate nuisance,
That fills the trenches,
That mixes in with the food of the soldiers,
That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts,
That spreads itself over the guns,
That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous lips,
That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells;
And slowly, softly, easily,
Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage;
Soaks up the power of armies;
Soaks up the battle.
Just soaks it up and thus stops it.16
While the layout and syntax of Borden’s poem are self-consciously like those of Whitman, this is no “Song of Myself.” The confident human identity of Whitman’s verse epic has vanished into the mud; consciousness is obliterated, and the song is soaked up into silence. For Borden, as for James and Norton, the words of war were haunted by silence, the silence of death, or the silence imposed by a force so pervasive and so final that it renders language pointless. This silencing of human action and expression was hardly what Wilson had in mind when he called for “Peace without Victory,” but as the war of attrition continued, it must have seemed to many as though the war would end by exhaustion rather than by decision. It must also have seemed as though the sinister, silent mud could be the only winner.
Like the prose sketches which make up part 2 of The Forbidden Zone, entitled simply “The Somme,” these poems, which also appeared in the concluding section of Borden’s war memoir in 1929, are based on impressions gleaned during the period in which she ran a hospital of evacuation of three thousand beds at Bray-sur-Somme between August 1916 and February 1917. After a brief period back in Belgium with her own unit, during which the hospital was both shelled and gassed, Borden traveled with Hôpital d’Evacuation 32 to Mont-Notre-Dame behind the Chemin des Dames in time for the Nivelle Offensive in early April. In June, Borden rejoined her original team at Rousbrugge, where she was awarded the Croix de Guerre with palm by General Pétain.17 She was later also made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. As though these constant shifts of location were not enough to unsettle Borden’s view of the war, her own personal life was also in turmoil. Sometime during the spring of 1917, she met Edward Spears, an English liaison officer to the French army, with whom she fell passionately in love. From April onward, they exchanged letters almost daily and met in Paris when they could, secretly at first, until Borden’s husband was told of the affair and the marriage finally collapsed in September. She was also gravely ill that summer, and for several weeks found herself in a hospital bed, experiencing the weakness and vulnerability that she had observed for so many months in her own patients. Spears later described her ailment as a lung infection developed after nursing a patient with gangrene; however, other letters suggest complications related to an unplanned pregnancy.18 It was an exhilarating and dangerous time, during which Borden reassessed her own emotional world as well as the course of the war around her. It is perhaps no surprise then that much of The Forbidden Zone, especially those sections conceived during the early months of her affair with Spears, should be so concerned with problems of perspective, and with the moral consequences of redirecting one’s point of view. Although part 1 of the text, “The North,” does not exactly flinch from presenting the sights of war in honest terms, “The Somme” and the poems which follow go even further, not only replicating the external impressions of war, but also probing the processes by which these impressions are gathered and expressed. As noted in Chapter Two, Borden’s division of her material in The Forbidden Zone was not chronological but geographical, and the fascination with perspectives in the prose and poetry connected to her time at Bray-sur-Somme corresponds to the different quality of the landscape. In the flat coastal plains of Belgium, views are hard to come by, and are quickly interrupted by obstacles. Ellen La Motte describes the compound at Rousbrugge as “surrounded by a thick, high hedge of prickly material. … What went on outside the hedge, nobody knew. War presumably.”19 Consequently in “The North,” the only points of wide-angle perspective within Borden’s narratives are man-made and impersonal: the enemy airplane whirling in the sky above Dunkirk; the observation balloon like “an oyster in the sky, keeping an eye on the Germans,” or the disembodied, bird’s-eye view of the regiment marching. In contrast, the varied contours of the Somme, with its ridges and valleys (which made it such difficult terrain through which to advance), offered vantage points and vistas from which the panorama of the war was laid out for the observing individual like a theater. To look down from the top of the hill, as in Borden’s poem “The Hill,” is to assume a position of command, of tactical advantage; it is also to become a spectacle or even a target for others. This uncertainty about who is watching whom is re-created in “The Somme” through the narrative positioning of Borden’s sketches, each of which presents a contrasting view of events.
The opening section, “The City in the Desert” reverses the narrative strategy of “Belgium,” the opening section of “The North.” Instead of playing the role of guide, here the narrator begins with a series of questions: “What is this city that sprawls in the shallow valley between the chalk hills?” Why are there no children?—the narrator would like to know. Where are the cafes? What is the “distant booming” like waves breaking in the distance? Who are the silent old men who walk to and fro with heavy bundles? And, more importantly, what are they carrying?
You say that these bundles are the citizens of the town? What do you mean? Those heavy brown packages that are carried back and forth, up and down, from shed to shed, those inert lumps cannot be men. They are delivered to this place in closed vans and are unloaded like sacks and are laid out in rows on the ground and are sorted out by the labels pinned to their covers. They lie perfectly still while they are carried back and forth, up and down, shoved into sheds and pulled out again. What do you mean by telling me that they are men?20
Here, the use of the second person goes beyond a simple address to the reader. The implied reader (“you”) is credited with knowledge which the narrator is unable, or perhaps unwilling to articulate. One outcome of this tactic is an extended moment of dramatic irony, in which the reader understands all too well what is being described, while the narrator is still apparently perplexed. Thus, the recognition of the scene as the site of a military hospital is slowed just long enough for the reader to gain a sense of the incomprehensibility of these images, and to interrogate their own assumptions and complacencies.
No sooner has Borden established this perspective, than she destabilizes the viewpoint of the text again. In “Conspiracy,” the narrative voice speaks from a position of knowledge, even authority—though the moral standpoint that is voiced here is not exactly conventional. As though showing a novice or a distinguished visitor around the wards (a role Borden fulfilled countless times throughout the war), the narrator announces: “It is all carefully arranged. Everything is arranged. It is arranged that men should be broken and that they should be mended. … Ten kilometres from here along the road is the place where men are wounded. This is the place where they are mended.” But this mending of the soldier takes the form of a sinister conspiracy by the military and medical staff: “We conspire against his right to die. We experiment with his bones, his muscles, his blood,” writes Borden. “To the shame of the havoc of his limbs we add the insult of our curiosity and the curse of our purpose, the purpose to remake him.”21 This “conspiracy” to keep the man alive while he may be of use to the army, not only voices Borden’s unease at her own collusion with the machinery of military procedures and regulations; it also dramatizes the absurdity of a situation in which men have the status of disposable items, and dares the reader to respond with a refusal to accept this reality. Six pages further on, in “Paraphernalia,” the narrating voice is repositioned once more. Like “The City in the Desert,” this section places the “you” of the narrative in an active role: “you” are the nurse, fetching blankets and jugs of hot water, handling bottles and syringes, giving injections in a bustle of futility that cannot hold back the “miracle” of death that is about to claim the wounded man. The voice of this section, full of incomprehension at the details of medical care, is nevertheless capable of interrogation and judgment: “What have you and all your things to do with the dying of this man? Nothing. Take them away.”22
As though these contradictory voices have silenced one another, the section which follows, “In the Operating Room,” dispenses with narrative voice altogether. After a brief note describing the scene, there is only dialogue, as though the text has suddenly become a play. Three surgeons at work on three different operations—an amputation, a bullet-ridden lung, and an abdominal shrapnel wound—give orders to the nurses, discuss the day’s events, talk over the plans for a new attack, and look forward to their dinner, amid the cries and complaints of the patients, for whom a trip to the operating room is anything other than routine:
NURSE: Three knees have come in, two more abdomens, five heads.
OFFICER (THROUGH THE WINDOW): The Médicin Inspecteur will be here in half an hour. The General is coming at two to decorate all amputés.
1ST SURGEON: We’ll get no lunch to-day, and I’m hungry. There, I call that a very neat amputation.
2ND SURGEON: Three holes stopped in this lung in three minutes by the clock. Pretty quick, eh?
3RD SURGEON: Give me a light, some one. My experience is that if abdomens have to wait more than six hours it’s no good. You can’t do anything. I hope that chap got the oysters in Amiens! Oysters sound good to me.23
The terse, barely connected exchanges between the speakers in this drama create an effect of disjunction, which works very much like a small-scale model of The Forbidden Zone as a whole, batting the reader from viewpoint to viewpoint. Like the disparate attitudes and genres of Wharton’s Book of the Homeless, Borden’s montage of styles and forms—both in this section and throughout the book—presents a flickering, unstable view of reality, which makes any complete or coherent response to events impossible. The use of dramatic form also creates an oscillation, for the reader, between aural and visual expression. Borden had her own ambitions to write for the stage, and in the summer of 1917 was trying to get one of her own plays The Falconbridge Scandal, produced in London.24 However, the insertion of a section of extended dialogue into a largely narrative text which is essentially designed to be read but not read out, is very different from a script intended for performance. The directions are intrusive, the clash of genres ironic. In this passage, Borden borrows a technique from Herman Melville, who lapses into dramatic form at several points in Moby Dick (1851), most famously in chapter 108—aptly enough also a scene about an amputated leg, where the ship’s carpenter fits Ahab with a new stump made out of whalebone, as they discuss what makes a man. Experimentalist she might be, but no one could accuse Borden of not locating her own work within the tradition of the American classics. In her text, as in Melville’s, the reader is drawn into the scene, as though observing events firsthand without the usual mediating viewpoint of the narrator. However, the reader also experiences an absurdist sense of alienation, as the visual cues on the page insist that this is only a text after all.25
This collision of speech and text, and the dislocating effect of one upon the other, may have been one of the outcomes of Borden’s reading of Gertrude Stein’s works through the winter of 1916–17. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas relates that Borden “was very enthusiastic about the work of Gertrude Stein and traveled with what she had of it and volumes of Flaubert to and from the front.”26 However, Borden’s own response to Stein was not merely that of an admiring reader, it was also technically shrewd, comparing her literary method with the distortions of telegraphic communication and the multiple perspectives of contemporary art. Borden wrote to Stein: “In Tender Buttons, you are writing in pure code. I don’t know your cypher—I’m not in the secret—but I would like to have the key. Oh yes, I’ve an intense desire to possess the key. It seems to me that your treatment of subjects is more mysterious than that of painters such as the so-called cubists—because language is only partly writing, the rest is talking, and talking and writing upset each other in people’s minds.”27 Stein’s work relies heavily on the interaction of spoken and written language, often replicating on paper the incoherencies and inconsistencies of talk. Likewise, the format of “In the Operating Room” shows how written and spoken language “upset each other,” allowing the scene to be conceived as a vivid reality, or as a cynical pastiche—or both at once. Of course, the word conspicuous by its absence in this section of The Forbidden Zone is theater, which is both another term for “the operating room” and a description of the imagined performance—whether a tragedy or a comedy it is difficult to tell. Either way, there is something uncomfortable about the mix of intimacy and detachment which this form creates. As in Stein’s writing, or in the paintings of Picasso or Gaudier-Brzeska, Borden is experimenting with a “cubist” kind of literary perspective which allows simultaneous views of facets of reality that ought to exclude each other. As Margaret Higonnet points out, this kind of double vision is common in the work of First World War nurses, because it creates a self-defensive humor and allows an exploration of conflicting moral perspectives: “Cubist techniques,” writes Higonnet, “expose aspects other than the heroic face of war; they make it possible to show not only the public, frontal side of medical practice in wartime, but also the back side that is normally concealed.”28 Nevertheless, offering such sights for observation is also problematic; throughout The Forbidden Zone, Borden is evidently troubled by the way in which the wounded soldiers become spectacles and curiosities, displayed to generals, medical students, and readers alike. It is part of the deep humanity of her book that she challenges the reader’s glib fascination with dismemberment, deformity, and trauma, and directs our attention to the individual lives and viewpoints behind these. Sooner or later, what she requires of her reader is the imaginative shift of perspective that will create empathy.
Ironically, the section which most effectively achieves this shift of viewpoint is the one which deals most poignantly with the loss of vision, “Blind.” This is one of the sections which Borden added to the text in 1929 as she prepared it for publication with Heinemann, and the stable first-person narrative which suddenly appears in this and the following two sections suggests that the distance of time and the commemorative act of writing have given a sense of control, if not yet closure, on the scenes which she describes. However, this impression of control is belied by the sensory and emotional turmoil which is the subject of the piece. “Blind” describes the reception hut of the hospital on a distressingly busy night in November 1916. Four hundred wounded men lie on stretchers, as twelve operating tables work at full tilt, and the orderlies and nurses come and go. Nevertheless, as the narrator admits, she was happy there, fulfilled by a sense of action and agency. Borden’s language appeals to all five senses in this extended descriptive passage: the sounds of the guns and the howling wind outside; the smells of blood and mud; the taste one dare not imagine of the amputated knee nearly served up by mistake as a pot roast; the touch of her hand on the pulse of the living patient or on the cold skin of the dying; the continual assault of difficult visual images. Amid this welter of sensory impressions, the narrator’s role is that of triage, a newly developed process in which hopeless cases were sorted out from those who had a chance of survival. Triage can also be read as a metaphor of narrative method, as Borden looks back on her disordered memories and images, sorting and selecting this one, but not that one, saving some for commemoration and burying others—but this is not necessarily as detached a process as it may seem. In “Blind,” triage is shown as an active, even an intimate, element of medical care: “It was my business to sort out the nearly dying from the dying,” the narrator says, describing how she moves among the wounded, feeling for a pulse here and checking a temperature there.29 However, her visual skills often prove more useful to her in this situation than any of the other senses: “Sometimes there was no time to read the ticket or touch the pulse,” she writes, “I could look down over the rough forms that covered the floor and pick out at a distance this one and that one. I had been doing this for two years, and had learned to read the signs.”30 Here the observer’s viewpoint, looking down from a height once more as in “The Hill,” gives the narrator a sense of command over events, choosing some but not others for the operating room, giving the fatal double dose of morphine to the hopeless case. In the world of the hospital, to see is a powerful form of agency and engagement. In contrast, the title of this chapter, “Blind,” highlights the isolation of the single wounded soldier, shot through the eyes, who because of his heavy bandages cannot hear the noisy activity around him and calls out for the nurse, believing that he has been left alone in the dark. At this, the narrator responds with a jolt of emotion, as though it is she who has been blind up to this moment: “I seemed to awake then. I looked around me and began to tremble, as one would tremble if one awoke with one’s head over the edge of a precipice.” The soldier’s question has prompted the narrator to readjust her focus, to shift to a perspective that accommodates the enormity and particularity of what is happening around her. In her distress, she runs to the nurses’ cubicle and hides her face in her hands, blotting out all vision, until the orderlies come with kind words and hot coffee, appealing to her through other senses: hearing, touch, smell, taste.
It is a powerful piece, the climactic scene of Borden’s book. Its attention to the processes of watching, reading, observing, or absorbing unwelcome sights, shows Borden’s intelligent awareness of the power of sight, not just as a means of gathering impressions, but also as an engagement with events, as an element of care, and as an extension of the self into the surrounding reality. In the hospital, as on the page, perspective is never passive, but is continually at work, shaping events and altering judgments. To see is also to feel; even to be blind is to have a perspective. And in a war which was persistently defying resolution or expression, diligence to an individual perspective, or even to a set of contradictory perspectives, was fast becoming the only viable form of intellectual and artistic integrity. Borden would return to the war as a theme and as a backdrop to her fiction several times in her later work, most notably in Jericho Sands (1925) and Sarah Gay (1931). She would return to the war in other ways too. Spears, who had struck up a friendship with Winston Churchill in 1915, became a close political ally of Churchill’s and served as an MP between the wars. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was sent to Paris to liaison with the French government, and helped General Charles de Gaulle to escape to London as the Germans invaded in 1940. Borden, unwilling to stay at home in a crisis, set up and served with another mobile field hospital, which operated initially in northern France and then on campaign with the Free French Army in North Africa, before returning to Britain to resume her successful career as a novelist. She was, from any perspective, a remarkable woman.
Multiple perspectives came naturally to John Dos Passos. Born to privilege and culture, he yet learned very early to see himself as an outsider to American society. The illegitimate son of a successful New York lawyer of Cuban-Portuguese extraction and an upper-middle-class single mother from Washington, his upbringing was a continual negotiation of shifting identities: as the “adopted” son of his real mother; as a regular “guest” at his own father’s house; as a much younger sibling to two half-brothers, one on either side of the parental arrangement; as a second-generation immigrant in America; and for much of his childhood as an American boy in Europe. He even had a different name for the first fourteen years of his life: Jack Madison. When his mother, Lucy Sprigg Madison, finally married John R. Dos Passos in 1910 after the death of his wife, young Jack could finally take on his own father’s surname—but for a long time was too shy to use it.31 It is no wonder that Dos Passos spent so much of his adult life fascinated by or working in the theater; his whole childhood had been one long succession of performances.
On graduating from Harvard in 1916, Dos Passos set about finding a foothold in the treacherous publishing world. As a student he had helped to edit the Harvard Monthly, a role that had brought him into contact with an ambitious literary set including Edward Nagel, Robert Hillyer, Stewart Mitchell, and E. E. Cummings. They read T. S. Eliot’s early poems and admired cubist art in Wyndham Lewis’s Blast; they discovered The Yellow Book and D. H. Lawrence. They also printed one another’s work, and in the months following graduation, Mitchell collated an anthology of selected poems from the best contributors, Eight Harvard Poets, including Cummings and “Dos,” as he was known to his friends. Dos Passos’s now widowed father put up the money to underwrite its publication. Harvard friends also found him an opening to write an article for the New Republic, in which he berated the state of American literature as lacking “dramatic actuality,” bound in “the fetters of the ‘niceness’ of the middle-class outlook.”32 But Dos Passos was complaining about his own social situation as much anything else. Like many young men of his age and class, having behaved responsibly enough through school and university, he was now eager to for a broader experience of the world. The obvious option was to see something of the fighting in Europe, primarily as a means of glimpsing “life”—the politics of the conflict seemed like a secondary consideration. He would write in later years: “I respected the conscientious objectors, and occasionally felt I should take that course myself, but hell, I wanted to see the show.”33 All the same, he deplored the war and the Rooseveltian ideal of a militarized, “prepared” society. As he wrote to a younger school friend Rumsey Marvin, who had spent the summer vacation in a training camp, “When you have an army you immediately want to use it—and a military population in a government like ours would be absolutely at the mercy of any corrupt politician who got into the White House, of any millionaire who could buy enough newspapers.”34 Nevertheless, Dos Passos also recognized the war as a fact of life, as “a human phenomenon which you can’t argue out of existence.”35 Desperate as he was to get a look at it, there was more curiosity than fervor in his enthusiasm. Initially, he volunteered with Herbert Hoover’s Belgian Relief Fund as a translator. His French was excellent, courtesy of his itinerant upbringing, but he was not yet twenty-one years old, and the organization turned him away. Next, he tried to volunteer as an ambulance driver, but he was dangerously shortsighted and didn’t know how to drive. His father talked him out of it; he also put up the money for his son to travel in Spain, studying architecture as a possible future career. Dos Passos came of age during that Spanish trip—in more ways than one. Two weeks after his twenty-first birthday, his father died suddenly of pneumonia. Suddenly, he was no longer John Dos Passos, Junior, and there was no one to stop him heading to the front.
He sailed home mid-February 1917 at the height of the tension of the early days of the German blockade of French ports, reading Henri Barbusse’s explosive novel Le feu (1916) as he traveled. “The book moved me to frenzy,” he wrote, “but already I’d seen enough of wartime France to discover other sides to the story.”36 Other sides, plural not singular, were what interested Dos Passos even at this stage, not simply a binary system of allies and enemies, rights and wrongs. He arrived in New York to discover that his father had left him money and debts in about equal measure. By mid-June, with America now fully at war and engaged in the processes of conscription, censorship, and militarization, he headed back to France with the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. It was just in time. Not only did he narrowly avoid conscription, but his outspoken opinions about America’s stance on the war, about organized labor and the possibility of revolts in France might well have landed him in prison under the terms of the Espionage Act which came into force five days before he sailed. This act made it an offense to “cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States,” or to send by mail any items that were covered by this clause.37 Not many of Dos Passos’s letters from 1917 and 1918 would have escaped censure under these terms. More damagingly, he had been keeping what the authorities would have regarded as very poor company. As he wrote to Marvin two weeks before sailing: “My only amusement has been going to anarchist and pacifists meetings and riots—Emma Goldman, etc. Lots of fun I assure you. I am thinking of becoming a revolutionist!”38 All through his life, Dos Passos would identify with the political underdog—a trait which he ascribed to his own sense of social alienation—though his sense of who the underdogs were in society would shift from decade to decade throughout his life.
At the front, Dos Passos found himself assigned to Section 60, near the Voie Sacrée, the road to Verdun, in defense of which so many French lives had been lost the summer before. But at least he had good company: two friends from Harvard, Robert Hillyer and Frederik van den Arend, were in the same section. They served twenty-four hours on and twenty-four hours off, a system that alternated days of stress and occasional carnage with others of recovery, boredom, and the idyllic appreciation of nature. The three friends found an abandoned garden beside a bombed-out house, where the smells of honeysuckle and roses mingled with a faint whiff of poison gas. It offered a contemplative retreat from “the crowded choking scramble” of the hours of duty. They sat in the arbor, lay on the grass, or sheltered from passing shells under the concrete fountain. To fill those hours, Hillyer and Dos Passos started writing a novel about a lad from Boston, Martin Howe, who would grow up to be an ambulance driver in France. But the best thing, Dos Passos felt, about the deserted garden was that the old backhouse was still intact, allowing an escape from the “slippery planks over stinking pits” of the military latrines. “The Boche seemed to have an evil intention about them,” he recalled, “as soon as you squatted with your pants down, he would start to shell.” The secret backhouse offered a “halcyon contrast,” where one could think and reflect.39 An old outhouse in the war zone hardly makes a glamorous starting point for a literary imagination, but in many ways it was a suitable emblem both for Dos Passos’s youthful rejection of middle-aged and middle-class proprieties, and for his subsequent frustrations with literary and political establishments. He was never afraid to take his writing to places that many would prefer not to discuss. When Paul Elmer More later described Manhattan Transfer (1925) as “an explosion in a cesspool,” he was unwittingly accurate in locating a key image at the root of Dos Passos’s conception of authorship.40 But the scatological was only one element of a broader confrontation with bodies and their functions and frailties, which faced the young Harvard graduates in their wartime roles.
In mid-August, Dos Passos and his section saw service in support of a French offensive near Verdun. He wrote to Marvin that he was in “the hottest sector an ambulance ever worked.”41 He had been gassed and shelled, and his ambulance was “simply peppered with holes.” However, like Borden, he felt a sense of exhilaration and freedom in the midst of the action. He was much happier at the front, he asserted, than “in America, where the air was stinking with lies & hypocritical patriotic gibber.” His experiences already suggested to him that the Germans were no worse than the French and that the common soldier on either side was equally capable of atrocities or good humor. “In fact,” he wrote, “there is less bitterness about the war—at the front—than there is over an ordinary Harvard-Yale baseball game.”42 However, Dos Passos, like so many others, was self-censoring his letters home. His own diary for the same period revealed a much darker set of fragmented impressions:
The grey crooked fingers of the dead, the dark look of dirty mangled bodies, their groans and joltings in the ambulances, the vast tomtom of the guns, the ripping tear shells make when they explode, the song of shells outgoing, like vast woodcocks—their contented whirr as they near their mark—the twang of fragments like a harp broken in the air—& the rattle of stones & mud on your helmet—
And through everything the vast despair of unavoidable death of lives wrenched out of their channels—of all the ludicrous tomfoolery of governments.43
The listed phrases and the dashes all suggest that these were memories too raw to be contained in standard syntax or punctuation—although he was already determined that he would find a literary use for these images. There were other impressions too: gassed horses with blood pouring from their nostrils; truckloads of drunken, desperate French soldiers heading to slaughter at the front; the interminable mud. One day, Dos Passos caught himself calmly eating a tin of sardines while “some poor devil of a poilu” was having his leg amputated at the other end of the dressing-station. “God knows I was still morbidly sensitive to other people’s pain, but I had learned to live in the world and stand it,” he would reflect years later.44 He was not exactly detaching from events—otherwise he would not have noticed the French soldier’s plight or sensed the incongruity of the situation—but the young intellectual had clearly found the means to cope mentally with the intensely physical environment of the front.
In September 1917, the Norton-Harjes Corps, like the American Field Service, was taken over by the Medical Corps of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). This handover was far from smooth. Richard Norton was unconvinced that the U.S. army understood the terms under which most of his staff had volunteered, or the day-to-day practicalities of running the service. Colonel Jefferson Kean, the officer charged with taking over, retaliated by complaining to General Pershing, head of the AEF that Norton was “underhanded and unpatriotic,” and a bitter feud opened up between the two men that dragged on for months.45 Dos Passos was present at a ceremony at the corps’ base at Remicourt, at which Norton handed over command. “Picture the scene,” he instructed his friend Arthur McComb,
Mr. Norton has just finished his very modest speech ending with the wonderful phrase “As gentlemen volunteers you enlisted in this service and as gentlemen volunteers I bid you farewell.”
What a wonderful phrase “gentlemen volunteers,” particularly if punctuated as it was by a shell bursting thirty yards away which made everyone clap on their tin helmets and crouch like scared puppies under a shower of pebbles and dust. Thereupon, to be truthful, the fat-jowled gentlemen lost their restraint and their expression of tense interest (like that which is often seen in people about to be seasick) and bolted for the abris.46
Dos Passos’s comic sense was clearly intact, despite his recent experiences, although his dislike of military authority had, if anything, intensified—but his grudging admiration for Norton and his values also hinted at the conservative side of his own nature that would become more pronounced in later years. Like the vast majority of Norton’s “gentlemen volunteers,” Dos Passos refused to transfer to military command, and signed up instead to work with the American Red Cross as an ambulance driver in Italy. He headed south in November, and was stationed at Bassano with Arend, and two more Harvard friends, Dudley Poore and Jack Lawson. They worked there through the winter and spring of 1918. Their duties were less stressful than they had been at Verdun, though there were still plenty of wounded soldiers to carry. On a run to a Red Cross station at Schio, Dos Passos met a young American volunteer named Ernest Hemingway, who would turn up again in Paris in the early 1920s. The Harvard friends explored Italy during their time off, and Dos Passos continued the story he had begun with Hillyer, which he planned to call “Seven Times Round the Walls of Jericho.” He also wrote plenty of letters to friends about his growing disgust for the war. When some of these fell into the hands of Red Cross officials in the spring of 1918, Dos Passos fell under suspicion: these days, one was either pro-war or pro-German. Eventually he was summoned to Red Cross headquarters in Rome and given a dishonorable discharge. Furious, he returned to Paris and attempted to clear his name and reenlist, but only succeeded in getting himself into more hot water with the American military administration. Determined as he was to see the war through, his only option was to go home and get drafted. Volunteering at a base hospital shortly before he sailed, he was given the job of carrying buckets full of amputated limbs from an operating room. “Who could hold on to dogmatic opinions in the face of those pathetic remnants of shattered humanity?” he wrote fifty years later. “The world, somehow, never seemed quite so divided into black and white to me after that night.” A few days later he sailed for New York. He sat in his cabin and “wrote and wrote.”47
The book he drafted on board the Espagne would be published in 1920 under the title One Man’s Initiation: 1917. It was largely a reworking of the fourth and final section of the Great Novel which he had begun with Hillyer at Verdun and had continued on his own in Italy. The story charts the experiences of Martin Howe, a young volunteer ambulance driver in his first few weeks at the front, as he sloughs off his Boston idealism. Episodic and impressionistic, this semi-autobiographical novel fictionalizes a number of the places and events which Dos Passos recorded in his letters and diary from the summer of 1917: the hidden garden with the fountain; drinking wine in the school master’s garden as truckloads of men head to the front; a five-hour gas attack; reciting poetry under shell fire. There is little that resembles a conventional plot, rather a succession of disjointed occurrences, and an ever-changing stream of minor characters, leading many readers to discount the presence of any organizing principle behind the book’s structure, other than “a purposeful approximation of the chaotic nature of the war experience.”48 In the 1940s, Alfred Kazin described the book as “callow” and as “flaky and self-consciously romantic,” a judgment that has been repeated many times in different forms. Kazin saw Dos Passos’s romanticism as Emersonian in character, the overflow of “a conscientious intellectual self” that is “too much the conscious political citizen.”49 This charge probably did not embarrass Dos Passos overmuch, given his affinity with Emerson and his intellectual legacy in the work of other empirical thinkers such as William James.50 Nor would Dos Passos have minded being accused of taking an interest in politics and citizens, a position he regarded as a strength not a weakness of his work—though it has won him few admirers in recent decades. Nevertheless, One Man’s Initiation displays more control of form than many critics allow. There are indeed signs of authorial inexperience, and he overbalances in his handling of the politics of the war—but more importantly there are already in this first published novel traces of the innovative devices that in the 1930s would craft the mass of material of the U.S.A. trilogy into such a cathedral of narrative architecture. As in The Forbidden Zone, the seemingly randomized impressions of this novel are controlled by the authorial concern with elements of perspective. The novel is narrated by a third-person voice that is generally aligned with Howe’s point of view, though at certain times it seems to be outside him, or to simply record visual impressions of shape and color, as when New York recedes into the distance behind the ship, sliding “together into a pyramid above brown smudges of smoke standing out in the water, linked to the land by the dark curves of the bridges.”51 At other times, the narrative is nothing more than a register of sound, notating exchanges of dialogue without descriptions, or barely even interjections to say who is speaking. Like Borden’s scene “In the Operating Room,” these conversations, often running at cross-purposes, function like small-scale models of the larger text, seemingly disparate, yet constructed to dramatize the difficulties of communicating across the political and ideological barriers which are so much harder to negotiate than those of nationality. These dislocated voices allow Dos Passos to explore the “other sides” of the war, not just to project the contradictory political opinions of the revolutionary French soldiers against the platitudes of the enthusiastic American relief workers, but also to offer nuanced approaches of irony, wit, reverence, disgust, poignancy, enthusiasm, courage, resignation—sometimes within one single character. Character, as an organizing principle of text, breaks down somewhat under this method—though whether this is a sign of Dos Passos’s authorial inexperience, or an early indicator of his willingness to deconstruct identity as he would do more blatantly in his later works is a moot point.
One of the reasons Martin Howe seems at times flimsy as a center of narrative consciousness is that he experiences this full range of responses as the book progresses, while at other times he barely responds at all. He careers from one incident to another with little evidence of the kind of maturation or growing sense of agency one might expect from a novel of “initiation.” Nevertheless, the reader is inescapably immersed in the viewpoint of Howe—a character whose very name poses a question about the war, although this is significantly a question that is about method rather than motive. Dos Passos is not quite so callow as to structure his book around the question of why the war is happening (a tactical error committed by many older, experienced writers who should have known better), rather around the issue of how the individual is to survive it. To intensify the reader’s experience of identification with Howe’s perspective, the novel begins and ends in present tense. This strategy is also used briefly at certain charged moments throughout the text, such as the end of chapter 4, as Martin watches the card game during a bombardment, or at the end of chapter 6, as he cradles an injured man in the back of the ambulance: “Pitch dark in the car. Martin, his every muscle taut with the agony of the man’s pain, is on his knees, pressing his chest on the man’s chest, trying with an arm stretched along the man’s leg to keep him from bouncing in the broken stretcher.” The immediacy of this physical encounter is brutally snapped by the sudden return to past tense, as the empathy of hope is broken on arrival at the hospital in the very next lines: “‘Needn’t have troubled to have brought him,’ said the hospital orderly, as blood dripped fast from the stretcher, black in the light of the lantern. ‘He’s pretty near dead now. He won’t last long.’ “52 The tactile emphasis on the pressure of body on body provides an echo perhaps of the author’s reading of Barbusse in early 1917, but the self-conscious manipulation of the narrative perspective is Dos Passos’s own. His handling of voice in this short novel clearly figures forward to his later, more accomplished works such as Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A., where “The Camera Eye” sections juxtapose multiple perspectives and deliberately blur the boundary between fiction and fact. If Howe’s experiences represent any kind of initiation, it is as an observing consciousness, as one who sees that his role is not to intervene or influence events—an attempt which would be futile given the scale of the war—but to function as a register of impressions. Kazin was probably right to sense an Emersonian strand within this work, as Howe’s development in the book is toward that of the all-seeing “transparent eye-ball,” a narrative position which in Dos Passos’s later work will evolve further into the modernized and mechanized eye of the camera.53 The novel’s attention to matters of light and dark, of shadows and reflections, suggests that Dos Passos is already thinking in these cinematic terms. His technical decisions about the format of the text are partnered by the content of its closing scenes. Howe’s encounter, in the penultimate chapter, with the man who by candlelight cuts shoelaces from the leather boots of dead men is both macabre and redemptive, the cobbler’s task both grisly and creative. Howe offers no judgment, and pays his six sous for the laces. Meanwhile, the revolutionists Merrier, Lully, Dubois, and Chenier, who had seemed to offer the hope that one “needn’t despair of civilization,” are wiped out in a single shell attack. “Everybody’s dead. You’re dead, aren’t you?” says the mortally wounded soldier in the closing scene. “No, I’m alive,” replies Howe, though the present-tense narrative and the surrounding context offer no guarantee that this will last for long.54
One Man’s Initiation is an apprenticeship piece, though one which clearly bears the hallmarks of the craftsman’s later skill. Its lack of formal or philosophical resolution, a trait it shares with both La Motte’s The Backwash of War and Barbusse’s Le feu, is no doubt a symptom of the fact that, like these other texts, it was written while the war itself seemed like it might never end. Strategies for creating closure in such narratives had not yet evolved, and would remain troublesome even for much later writers who had the advantage of hindsight. Hemingway once admitted that he drafted thirty-nine alternative endings for A Farewell to Arms (1929).55 Many readers still find his final choice problematic. That Dos Passos, in the thick of events, should have produced a text which, despite its flaws and immaturities, still strikes a plausible and perceptive tone suggests that here was a formidably shrewd observer in the making, one who understood that twentieth-century culture both artistic and political would be governed by the use and the analysis of perspective. In 1919, the London publisher Allen and Unwin agreed to publish the text on the condition that Dos Passos tone down the strong language and underwrite the publication costs out of his own pocket. The book appeared in October 1920. After six months, the firm reported sales of sixty-three copies.56 Obviously, this was not how the reading public wished to remember the war. By this stage, however, Dos Passos was already at work on another novel.
On 7 April 1917, the day after America declared war against Germany, the young Harvard graduate E. E. Cummings wrote to his mother that he was hoping to avoid conscription. He added, “I don’t know why I talk of this pseudo ‘war’ as I have no interest in it—and am painting and scribbling as ever.” Within two weeks, however, he had abandoned his bohemian life as a writer and painter in New York, and signed up with the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. Like his friend Dos Passos, he was determined to stay out of the army, but also wanted to see the show: “Hope the war isn’t over before I get there,” he wrote. It wasn’t—although as things turned out, he would see it from a very strange angle.57 On the boat to France in May, Cummings struck up a friendship with another young volunteer, William Slater Brown, and by a series of mix-ups, the pair found themselves separated from the rest of their contingent on arrival in Paris. In the end, they spent five weeks in the city, ostensibly waiting for uniforms, but in reality living as only young Americans in Paris could live—eating, drinking, sightseeing, and flirting with two streetwalkers whom they befriended. Whether, for Cummings, this liaison ever went further than a boyish holiday romance is unclear, but it certainly fired his passionate imagination, and prompted him to see French life and culture from a point of view unsanctioned by Ambulance Corps management.58 Cummings and Brown were eventually posted to a quiet section near Noyons. They transported injured soldiers from hospital to hospital, and were occasionally sent up toward the front, but the endless inspections and washing of ambulances were hardly what they had signed up for, and the military-style discipline sat uneasily with these self-assured college men. They developed a particular dislike for their chef de section, Mr. Anderson, who frankly did not think much of them either. Mostly, they preferred the company of the French cooks and mechanics, and through these contacts they got wind of the rumors of revolt spreading through the French army like wildfire in the summer of 1917. Brown’s letters home on this subject caught the eye of the military censor, and both young men were arrested in mid-September on suspicion of sedition. After a series of cells and railway carriages, Cummings asked where he was being taken, and he heard the response “Mah-say.”59 But he wasn’t going to Marseilles as he imagined; he was bound for La Ferté-Macé, a small town in Normandy, where he would be held at a detention center until December, when intense diplomatic pressure from the U.S. embassy would eventually secure his release. Brown, who was latterly transferred to a prison, would likewise be freed a few weeks later.60
In La Motte’s turn of phrase, therefore, what Cummings saw in France was not the front but the “backwash” of the war, and this, in part, determined the viewpoint from which he would write about it. However, as Cummings’s letters home show, even before his arrest he was already predisposed to take a sardonic and truculent approach to the whole conflict. When he came to set down his impressions of the months at La Ferté-Macé after his discharge from the army in 1919, he would describe the project as the “Story of the Great War Seen From the Windows of Nowhere.”61 Later on it would be published as The Enormous Room (1922), but the working title (one of many) better conveys the conflicting perspectives within the text. Given the range of nationalities and social classes which Cummings encountered in captivity, he had more basis than many to his claim to be telling the “Story of the Great War.” The camp de triage (a “sorting camp”) also provided Cummings with a kind of existential nonspace from which the world could be observed—very usefully for an emerging artist—beyond the bounds of nationality, social groupings, family expectation, and literary conventions. Even the genre of the text is dislocated; despite its autobiographical tone and content, Cummings himself referred to it as a novel. La Ferté-Macé was “Nowhere” in another sense too; for many weeks no one among the American authorities in France knew where Cummings was. At one point his father was informed that he was dead.
From this unstable and disenfranchised position, Cummings is able to see the war less as a military engagement and more as a wide-reaching human event with absurd and tragic consequences. Alongside Cummings’s own story, The Enormous Room also records the individual instances of lives pointlessly disrupted by bureaucracy and political paranoia. There is Monsieur Auguste, the Parisian munitions worker arrested “because he was a Russian”;62 The Holland Skipper, arrested for resisting arrest; Joseph Demestre, the Wanderer, whose exotic gypsy family, brightly and gorgeously dressed, follow him into captivity; Zulu, the silently eloquent Polish Farmer; The Man Who Played Too Late, jailed for being a member of a band which played on past closing time; the prostitutes Celine, Lena, Lily, and Renée—the list goes on. As far as Cummings can see, most of his fellow prisoners have been arrested because the official point of view is incapable of perceiving or tolerating their essential individuality. Indeed, Cummings’s central objection to the war, as both a military and a personal event, is its denial of the validity of the unique perspective. In a period of total war, in which the civilian population becomes an extension of the official armed forces, the individual must align with the objectives and expectations of the state—or face punishment as an enemy. Given this stark choice, Cummings would much rather be on the side of those who value their individuality and assert their freedom of consciousness, even if this means going to jail. This position governs the apparently inverted logic of the book, in which Cummings experiences his imprisonment as a release from the constraints of conformity. On his first night in the cells at Noyons, he rejoices in having been set outside of the disciplinary system of the ambulance unit and having thereby regained his own perspective: “An uncontrollable joy gutted me after three months of humiliation, of being bossed and herded and bullied and insulted. I was myself and my own master.”63 This defiant refusal to endorse the values of “le gouvernement français” (or even to give it capital letters) also extends to how Brown and Cummings feel about their incarceration at La Ferté-Macé. On arrival, Cummings asks his friend if they both have been arrested as espions: “‘Of course !’ B said enthusiastically. ‘Thank God ! And in to stay. Every time I think of the section sanitaire, and A. and his thugs, and the whole rotten red-taped Croix Rouge, I have to laugh. Cummings, I tell you this is the finest place on earth !’”64 This clash of perspectives between the individual and the system—including those at home whose complicity fuels the ideology of war—affects how the inmates view not just their own situation within the walls of the Enormous Room, but also the abstract values of society outside it. When the German prostitute Lena has been put in solitary confinement in the cabinot for sixteen days, defiant despite the cold and the damp and the lack of proper rations and the worsening cough which racks her body, Cummings questions more than just the running of the war: “I realized fully and irrevocably and for perhaps the first time the meaning of civilization. And I realized that it was true—as I had previously only suspected it to be true—that in finding us unworthy of helping to carry forward the banner of progress, alias the tricolour, the inimitable and excellent French government was conferring upon B and myself—albeit with other intent—the ultimate compliment.”65 “Civilization,” from the perspective of “Nowhere,” is nothing to celebrate. Inside the camp de triage, the rhetoric of war is exposed as a shabby thing indeed; ideals and governments are merely vacuous expressions, and only the experience of the individual is valid. When the young seaman Mexique is asked for his opinion of the war, he replies concisely, “I t’ink lotta bullshit,” a response which, Cummings decides, “absolutely expressed my own point of view.”66
The author, however, is not content to merely relate his political and moral judgments; what makes The Enormous Room worth reading is that, like the poet he is, Cummings must enact his point of view through language. Indeed, the strangeness of Cummings’s prose language is one of the most distinctive elements of this book, evident from the opening pages, where one quickly realizes that there is something funny about the punctuation, and that the syntax of many of the sentences is unbalanced. This trait intensifies at certain moments of keen perception or heightened emotion throughout the book, such as the glimpse of the figure of Christ on a wayside crucifix in the moonlight on Cummings’s night march with the gendarmes from the station to La Ferté-Macé: “Who was this wooden man ? Like a sharp black mechanical cry in the spongy organism of gloom stood the coarse and sudden sculpture of his torment ;the big mouth of night carefully spurted the angular actual language of his martyred body. I had seen him before in the dream of some medieval saint, with a thief sagging at either side, surrounded by crisp angels. Tonight he was alone; save for myself, and the moon’s minute flower pushing between slabs of fractured cloud.”67 As with the broken, yet eloquent form on the crucifix, Cummings’s own language in The Enormous Room is both “angular” and “actual,” full of unexpected pairings and unorthodox uses of words, which surprise the reader into perception. Like Borden’s stylized prose, which employs a similar range of verbal distortions and adjustments, Cummings’s language works like poetry, drawing the reader’s attention to the mode of expression as firmly as to that which is expressed. It is, of course, as a poet that Cummings is now best known, although his experimental oeuvre also included drama, prose, and visual art. His first commercially printed work was a set of eight poems in the collaborative volume Eight Harvard Poets, which was published while he was in captivity in the fall of 1917. Even in these early poems, many of his stylistic characteristics are evident: the playfulness with form, the delight in disrupting standard patterns of verse, the breaking up of individual words across lines, and the playing with white space on the page as though the poem were an abstract painting. Indeed, Cummings was skilled with both pencil and paintbrush, and for most of his life described himself as an artist rather than an author. As with Stein’s “cubist” writing, Cummings’s work regularly exploits the interplay between aural and visual language, inviting the reader to see the text anew, as well as to hear it in some inner ear. Much of the comedy of The Enormous Room—and some of its pathos—is created in the movement between these two modes of language, and the new, unconventional conceptual space which this movement opens up. Or to put it another way, the visual strangeness of the text forces an adjustment of focus in line with the moral and political adjustment that Cummings requires of his reader. Commas and periods are displaced, with a space before them rather than after; dialogue is denoted sometimes by dashes, sometimes by quotation marks, sometimes by neither or both. Capital letters mark out noises, emphases, objects of sarcasm or ridicule—but there is often a method within this typographical madness. Mr. Anderson is always designated as “A.” with a period, because he is bound by convention; Brown is designated as “B” without punctuation, because he is not. The definite article for the nicknames of Cummings’s fellow prisoners is usually given a capital T because they have definite personalities; the names of the guards are presented with a lowercase t because they do not. Foreign words are not italicized, but run into the English of the text and out again, not always very correctly—nor is Cummings’s French always very polite. Phonetic spellings exaggerate the sense of dislocation and incomprehension. On arrival at La Ferté-Macé, an official repeats the word “KEW-MANGZ,” an “extraordinary dissyllable” which is baffling to Cummings, until he realizes it is his own name. “MAY-RRR-DE à la France !” shouts Jean Le Nègre for one entire afternoon.68 In his later poems, the inventive layout of text is used to generate newness of perception; words are fractured, interrupted, conjoined, relocated into margins or to the bottom of the page, startling the reader into seeing them, or hearing them, as though for the first time. The enduring popularity of Cummings’s work would eventually make this kind of playfulness with text a very familiar feature of twentieth-century poetic expression.69 However, the startling thing, or one of the startling things, about The Enormous Room is how quickly one gets used to Cummings’s idiosyncratic system; after a chapter or two, the displaced commas, periods, and colons seem standard, the capital letters comic rather than unsettling, the French interjections—which one may or may not understand—simply part of the verbal landscape. All that is required from the reader is a shift of perspective, a willingness to accept a new system that runs counter to expectation. Consider the irony, therefore, of the fate of the first edition of the text, in which all Cummings’s punctuation had been “corrected” by a helpful typesetter, the French phrases translated, and the strong language expurgated—changes hastily approved in proof by Cummings’s father, to the exasperation of the author, who was traveling in Europe with Dos Passos when the book came out.70 The original layout of the manuscript was partially repaired in later editions, but not fully restored until the 1970s. Typographical conventions, it seems, die as hard as social and political ones.
Cummings not only messes with the rules of verbal expression in The Enormous Room; he also disrupts the progression of narrative time. The narrator describes his time in the detention center as “like a vast grey box in which are laid helter-skelter a great many toys, each of which is itself completely significant apart from the always unchanging temporal dimension which merely contains it along with the rest.” He explains this phenomenon for the benefit of those “who have not had the distinguished privilege of being in jail.” To the prisoner, especially to one whose sentence is indefinite, events can no longer succeed each other, as he or she must give up thinking about the past and the future in order to retain the ability to cope with the present: “whatever happens, while it may happen in connection with some other perfectly distinct happening,” he writes, “does not happen in a scale of temporal priorities—each happening is self-sufficient, irrespective of minutes months and the other treasures of freedom.”71 Obviously, this collapse of time creates a difficulty about how to tell a story in a setting without sequence. One solution to this problem is the temporal play that Cummings creates within the text by his use of a double narrative perspective. Not only does he recount what happened, he also voices the moment of writing, thus creating two narrative selves for the reader to deal with. “If he ever reads this history,” he says of Mexique, “I hope he will not be too angry with me.” Or of Surplice: “His eyes opened. I have never seen eyes since.”72 In both instances the reader is reminded that what is being experienced is a highly manufactured and subjective text. Cummings the narrator also creates moments of dramatic irony by jumping forward in time to relate information out of sequence. The reader, for example, knows that Brown will be going to Précigné, the permanent prison, several chapters before he knows himself, casting a poignant shadow over all the comedy of the later sections of the book. Time may not be moving neatly forward in this text. However, it is carefully manipulated to control the reader’s perspective and to open it up to new experience.
In order to navigate around this lack of narrative linearity, the bulk of Cummings’s text is made up of a sequence of character sketches, verbal parallels of the pencil sketches with which he filled his notebooks during his weeks in captivity.73 To give his text cohesion and direction, Cummings places his figures within the landscape of John Bunyan’s religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. Six of the novel’s thirteen chapters carry titles that refer to Bunyan’s text, and throughout the book there are multiple references to the journey of Christian from the City of Destruction, through the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair, via Doubting Castle to the Celestial City. Cummings’s midnight moment at the foot of the cross also acquires an extra resonance in this context. The dapper, yet fearsome directeur of the camp is “Apollyon,” and the commission of “Three Wise Men” who decide the fate of Brown and Cummings are mocked not just for their disparity to the Magi of the Christmas story, but also for their similarity to “Mr Worldly-Wiseman” in Bunyan’s fable. Since it was published, readers of The Enormous Room have disagreed about whether Cummings’s use of Bunyan’s text was pragmatic or redemptive.74 Either way, it seems clear that Cummings, like Norton, recognized the status of The Pilgrim’s Progress as a text with powerful cultural and moral capital in post-Puritan America, but also as a text subject to a diversity of applications and interpretations. This was a disruptive strategy. Cummings’s use of the language of The Pilgrim’s Progress destabilized sentimental readings of Bunyan’s text, by emphasizing its brutality and rediscovering its relevance to modern-day injustices, but also unsettled any single reading of his own narrative by introducing multiple (and often contradictory) levels of association and symbolism. Like Cummings’s disruptive use of language, this use of textual allusion deliberately refracts the text, forcing the reader to do the work of rationalizing the conflicting surfaces displayed. Here is another verbal cubist at work. Naturally, this also opens the text up to misinterpretation. As Marilyn Gaull has pointed out, the problem of how to read The Enormous Room is nowhere more evident than in Edward Cummings Senior’s introduction to the first edition, which demonstrates his determination to read his son’s book as a text about the sanctity of liberty, patriotism and the cause of France, apparently unaware that these “habitually conditioned attitudes” are pilloried and rejected at every opportunity throughout the text which follows.75
But just because a text has been misunderstood, this does not mean that it is incomprehensible. Baffling as it was to early readers, complex and multi-layered as it still seems today, The Enormous Room is far from being a solipsistic text, which has nothing to express except its own mode of expression. The overwhelming tendency in criticism of technically innovative poetry and prose over the past century has been to focus on the play of signification, in preference to that which is signified; to approach the modernist text as a “speech-act” which creates its own meaning, rather than as a purposeful medium of communication between author and reader. Texts which invite this “locutionary” approach, or which stand scrutiny under these terms have long enjoyed a cultural ascendency over those which betray evidence of any utility or social sympathy.76 “All art,” as Oscar Wilde said, “is quite useless”—a statement which has often been taken to mean that anything useful cannot truly be art.77 This critical tendency, of course, tells us more about recent modes of reading than about original modes of writing. It also goes some way to explain why certain experimental texts about the First World War found themselves so consistently disregarded within literary canons, both formalist and historical-cultural, in the decades following the war. How, for example, would one apply the common theoretical distinction between texts whose composition is worthy of structural and linguistic approaches and those whose content is suited to historical interpretation, to works such as Borden’s The Forbidden Zone or Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, which stubbornly insist on keeping a foot in either camp? It is much easier to look past these texts to something like Eliot’s The Waste Land, or H.D.’s Sea Garden, for confirmation of learned orthodoxies about the division of aesthetic merit from political intent, innovation from conscience, lyrical individualism from community—although even here such divisions are not nearly as clear-cut as one might expect.78
As earlier chapters of this book demonstrate, strict battle lines between modernists and genteel writers, between art and propaganda, between formal analysis and cultural history, between idealism and disillusionment, between style and politics, are both artificial and anachronistic, and are inadequate to illuminate or understand many of the war’s most powerful literary products. Cummings’s war writing is particularly resistant to such categorizations—partly because he was so mercurial in his allegiances and opinions. Nevertheless, despite his technical virtuosity and the intensity of his individualistic lyricism, there is yet an appeal in his work to a set of values beyond art and beyond the self. These are by no means the normative social values of his nation and class, although they do have a Transcendentalist and Emersonian quality, like those of Dos Passos. Cummings’s ideals are original—in the sense of being old and atavistic, as well as new and uniquely personal, carved from his own experience. But this does not mean that they had little to contribute to the context of the era in which they were crafted, or that they have nothing to say today. As Tim Dayton argues, the lyric subjectivity of Cummings’s war poetry, so often cast as a withdrawal from the collective struggles of society, makes more sense when read in the light of Theodor W. Adorno’s defense of the lyric voice as a dynamic element in the relationship between individual and society. Dayton interprets both Cummings’s “satirical negation” of the clichés of wartime society, and his “lyrical affirmation” of the individual’s right to speak as “moments in a vital discursive struggle, in which he contests the meaning of the Great War, very much a matter of public concern.”79 Thus “my sweet old etcetera” and “next to of course god america i” derive their caustic humor and their impact from the political and poetic culture in which they are embedded. This can also be said of The Enormous Room, which takes evident delight in exploding the conventions of the newly emerging genre of the war memoir, and which presents the struggle for self-expression and freedom of conscience—perhaps the most compelling parallel that Cummings invokes with the imprisoned figure of John Bunyan—as the real war within the war. This struggle is not political in that, almost by definition, it cannot be conducted on behalf of the individual by any organization or proxy. Conversely, it is profoundly political in the broadest sense, because the outcome of this never-ending struggle has far-reaching implications for the kind of society in which we live.
This focus on freedom of thought and expression explains Cummings’s admiration for the four fellow inmates whom he designates “The Delectable Mountains.” Named after the uplands in The Pilgrim’s Progress, from which Christian and Hopeful catch their first glimpse of the Celestial City through a “perspective glass,” these figures allow the narrator of The Enormous Room to shift his perspective sufficiently to glimpse something worth struggling to reach.80 Foremost among this group is Zulu or Zoo-loo, who prompts one of Cummings’ earliest articulations of a concept that would govern much of his artistic vision throughout his writing life: “is.” “There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort—things which are always inside of us and in fact are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them—are no longer things; they, and the us which they are, equals A Verb ° is.”81 For all his careful and playful proliferation of voices and perspectives in The Enormous Room, Cummings articulates here an Emersonian reliance on the self, and on a felt state of individual being. “Modernist” though this passage is, both in its linguistic expression and in its essential subjectivity, there is none of the distancing that Cowley saw as the outcome of the “spectatorial” attitude of the eyewitness to war. Zulu does not speak any language that Cummings can understand, but must communicate through signal and expression, thus allowing a level of intimacy not possible through the conventions of language. Here, as in Borden’s “Blind,” watching is about much more than simply spectating, and perspective collapses into immediacy, as the universal “is” becomes visible in the eloquent gestures of this unlikely existential hero.
The tension between the lyric voice of the individual and the social network within which this voice must speak comes to the fore in the closing stages of the narrative, in which Cummings suddenly finds himself, ejected from the camp de triage, briefly accommodated in a Paris hotel, and then shipped home on a comfortable liner. As his father’s notes make clear, Cummings’s survival of and escape from the French penitentiary system was only partly due to his philosophical resistance to injustice, but also owed much to interventions by family, friends and officials, including Richard Norton.82 Edward Cummings Senior wrote directly to President Wilson, invoking the rights of “American citizenship” and the anguish of Mrs. Cummings as causes for intervention. That the U.S. embassy in Paris subsequently took measures to secure the release of both Cummings and Brown suggests that this letter played its part to some purpose. However, these external views, even where they cut across the apparent cynicism of the text, only serve to affirm Cummings’s fundamental commitment to a multiplicity of perspectives. Like the dysfunctional community of the camp de triage at La Ferté-Macé, society at large is composed of the diverse and the particular, people who, however insignificant, gifted, or disruptive, nevertheless may contain the “spark of God”—as Dos Passos termed Cummings’s test of human worth. Thus the final image of The Enormous Room, in which the returning consciousness is absorbed into the disjointed landscape of New York, provides a destination—though emphatically not a conclusion—in which the self-aware individual must return and be repositioned as but one perspective among the multiplicity of standpoints within a city so complex that it cannot be reduced to simple syntax: “The tall, impossibly tall, incomparably tall, city shoulderingly upward into hard sunlight leaned a little through the octaves of its parallel edges, leaningly strode upward into firm hard snowy sunlight ; the noises of America nearingly throbbed with smokes and hurrying dots which are men and which are women and which are things new and curious and hard and strange and vibrant and immense, lifting with a great undulous stride firmly into immortal sunlight …”83 For all his cynicism, Cummings carefully closes his text with a statement redolent with the lively potential of humanity. The “hurrying dots” of the men and women on the quayside, whose lives are so “new and curious and hard and strange and vibrant and immense,” are doubled and reflected in the hurrying dots of the ellipses placed at the end of the passage, both words and punctuation powerfully suggest that this experience of war has been for Cummings but the beginning of perception.