DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR, the American novelist Mary Borden ran a military hospital for the French army. In the summer of 1916, she was posted, at her own request, with a medical team to Bray-sur-Somme to support the British and French offensive taking place nearby. The wooden sheds which housed the operating theater and recovery wards were set up in a shallow valley between chalky hills which had been shelled into mud. Here they were supposedly sheltered from the view of the enemy, but when Borden climbed the slope, the landscape of the war zone opened out dramatically before her:
From the top of the hill I looked down on the beautiful, the gorgeous, the super-human and monstrous landscape of the superb exulting war.
There were no trees anywhere, nor any grasses or green thickets, nor any birds singing, nor any whisper or flutter of any little busy creatures.
There was no shelter for field mice or rabbits, squirrels, or men.
The earth was naked and on its naked body crawled things of iron.
It was evening. The long valley was bathed in blue shadow and through the shadow, as if swimming, I saw the iron armies moving.1
The opening of Borden’s poem “The Hill,” first published in 1917, voices a number of powerful contradictions. The scenery of the Western Front is brutal and yet compelling. It is stripped of all natural solace, and yet remains strangely beautiful. It is crowded with marching armies and roaring machines, and yet is lonely and silent. This is a world in which speech is redundant, and yet the writer bears witness to it in words. Borden’s language operates through paradox and contrast: the animal is juxtaposed with the human, the organic with the mechanical, the monstrous with the gorgeous. These conflicting elements, however, should come as no surprise. From its opening weeks, the First World War was a war of contradictions. Fought in defense of idealism and civilization, it quickly became the most incoherent and inhumane war in history. Supposedly about freedom, it was sustained by mass conscription and the suppression of free speech. These incompatibilities surface in the literature of the war, which is in itself something of a contradiction—the superb made out of the monstrous. There are also deep inconsistencies in our consumption of such texts. Generations of readers have approached the literature of the First World War through a series of illogicalities. We assert the futility of mass violence, but we sense that we are touching something profoundly human when we read about it. We refute militarism, but we privilege the combatant’s point of view. We hanker after immediacy and authenticity in accounts of the war, but we gravitate toward texts composed with hindsight, free from the ideological confusion and personal indecision of wartime. We insist on the centrality of the war as a defining historical event, but we dismiss those texts which engage too closely with politics as propaganda. We validate artistry, style, and a dispassionate command of form, but we want to be told the truth. Its seems that writing, or even reading, about the First World War is (pardon the expression) something of a minefield.
This book is about a group of American authors who observed the war in Europe between 1914 and 1918, and who wrote about what they saw. American writing from the First World War is not read as often as that from Britain or the other nations involved in the conflict, perhaps because it defies many established cultural preferences and misconceptions about war literature. The most significant texts are by those who did not fight, who openly voiced their political agendas across a range of positions, who believed in the power and the right of literature to sway public perspectives, but who also felt that observing was not enough of a response to the demands of war: one should also act. American cultural memory of the war tends to be focused through the work of “lost generation” writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, who actually had minimal exposure to frontline activities—Hemingway was an ambulance driver for only three weeks, while Faulkner and Fitzgerald never even got to Europe—and who did not write about it until the mid-1920s. Alternatively, readers often embrace the work of writers such as T. S. Eliot, H.D., or Ezra Pound, who were personally remote from the war, though alert to its effects, and who wrote about it obliquely. These writers are credited with inventing many of the literary techniques and stating the emotional positions which would come to be seen as central to the aesthetic agendas of twentieth-century writing. Cultural observers usually agree that the First World War was a catalyst for dramatic changes in the theory and practice of literature, painting, dance, music, and architecture. But if this is the case, then the mid-1920s seems somewhat late to be looking for the origins of traits which emerged so distinctly from the conflict: detachment, disillusionment, disparate perspectives, montage, irony, the renegotiation of gender, the disruption of time, the inadequacy of language. As this book argues, the really creative moment, the ignition spark of innovation, happened during the war through the work of writers such as Mary Borden and Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Grace Fallow Norton, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos. America’s neutral status in the early stages of the war allowed its authors and journalists an experimental and polemical freedom that was not available to British writers, whose publishing activities were curtailed by censorship from August 1914. It also quickened their sense of the war as a cultural rather than a sociopolitical event. American observer-participants of the war, unlike those of warring nations, could be intimately involved in its progress and yet remain detached from many of its urgencies. As this book shows, these wartime writers made many of the stylistic choices and innovations for which others would later be celebrated. However, those early texts which were produced in the context of political uncertainty and a climate of propaganda and censorship can be ideologically demanding for present-day readers, and often pose uncomfortable questions about the relationship between literature and politics. They do not, therefore, always sit easily within “modernist” agendas, which tend to value formal and stylistic concerns over issues of history and politics.
Modernism, like many other cultural labels, turns out to be somewhat evasive when put under any kind of scrutiny. As a marker for a particular movement in literature between 1910 and 1930, concerned with self-expression, form, fragmentation, and with the self-consciously new, it was not in common usage until the 1960s, when it was, ironically, projected onto what was by then already old.2 In disciplines such as architecture or music, the term covers different characteristics including functionality or atonality; in some, such as anthropology, it is more often connected to period than to style or an existential perspective. Wherever it appears, it is difficult to gloss. As Susan Stanford Friedman notes, any cultural movement that finds its mainspring of identity in a rebellion against the past is always going to struggle to define itself independently of that past: “Modernity’s grand narratives institute their own radical dismantling. The lifeblood of modernity’s chaos is its order. The impulse to order is the product of chaos. Modernism requires tradition to ‘make it new.’ Tradition comes into being only as it is rebelled against.”3 However, even this critical passage harks back to an earlier expressive tradition. With its aphoristic syntax and its paradoxical reasoning, it sounds almost like something Oscar Wilde might have written in the 1890s—which is not inappropriate. For all its self-vaunted newness, there are many, many elements in “modernist” literature that have their roots firmly in the aestheticism of the late Victorian period, and in the burgeoning fascination of writers, thinkers, and scientists of that era with questions of subjectivity, perspective, artistic value, and the unreliability of language. Human events never take place in a vacuum. So, while the First World War can certainly be seen as some sort of cultural watershed, the attitudes and techniques that are often ascribed to it do not appear without context or precedent. For now, suffice to say that modernism is a deeply problematic term, and one that is increasingly unhelpful as a means of identifying or evaluating certain literary traits, or of understanding history. While many concepts and devices which have been grouped under that heading are discussed at length in this book, the term itself is used sparingly and usually appears in quotation marks.
So, whether writing, reading, or analyzing, it seems that one cannot approach the literature of the First World War except through a forest of contradictions. This book also will, no doubt, contain some of these contradictions. Nevertheless, the contradictions built into the process of writing about war are worth thinking about because they raise questions that lie at the heart of all literature. How can words summon up that which is long absent? How does one create out of loss—and why? How should one read the lives of the past, real or imagined? These questions are especially hard to ignore in the context of war writing, because however highly one values aesthetic experience or self-expression, the story of how individual lives and social groups are torn apart by violence, and of how humanity persists even in such extremes, demands our attention. In the same way that war strips humanity down to its basic constituents, war writing calls the reader’s attention to the fundamental function of literature, which is to tell us something we need to know. How we read the texts of war will define the ways in which we read all other texts. The writers who are the focus of this book and their works, therefore, are not just interesting as some sort of missing link in the development of literary taste and style—though that is certainly a part of it. They are important because they narrate a powerful human story, and because they continue to insist that the writer can do so much more than simply stand back and watch.
In April 1917, America readied itself for war. For two and a half years, the nation had warily observed the conflict that was engulfing Europe and the Middle East, apparently determined to remain detached. President Woodrow Wilson declared that America should offer the example of peace. There was such a thing, he said, as being “too proud to fight.”4 There were also compelling reasons, political and economic, for keeping on good terms with all the warring nations, and avoiding the upheaval and expense of intervention. Right up until the early weeks of 1917, Wilson had hoped that his administration might broker a negotiated end to the bloodshed. War did not come naturally to this thoughtful and idealistic man; he believed passionately in international arbitration. Yet America’s neutral stance was dramatically abandoned on 2 April when Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress to call for a declaration of war against Germany. “It is a fearful thing,” he told a hushed chamber, “to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.” U-boat harassment of Atlantic shipping, and an incipient threat to America’s own borders in the shape of German efforts to forge an alliance with Mexico, had driven Wilson to the conclusion that he had no other option. He wrapped political inevitability in the language of moral crusade: “The day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”5
Ostensibly, Wilson spoke for America, a nation united in support of justice and democracy. In reality, he spoke to a deeply divided society—and he knew it. In the days following his speech, the Senate and the House of Representatives overwhelmingly backed military action, leading to a formal declaration of war on 6 April. Yet public opinion was starkly polarized, ranging from the pacifism of left-wing labor movements, such as the International Workers of the World (IWW), to powerful manufacturing and financial interests, who saw in the war an opportunity to assert the dominance of the American economy. Sympathy for the plight of occupied Belgium was high in some quarters, especially among the East Coast middle classes. Many college-educated Americans with cultural affinities and family ties with Britain, France, or Italy campaigned long and hard for financial and military aid for the Allies. Some had already volunteered for military service with British, French, or Canadian forces, or for humanitarian roles with varsity-sponsored ambulance units or as nursing staff. In 1914, however, 9 million American citizens considered German their first language, and a further 15 million were of German descent.6 With a national population approaching 100 million, these numbers meant that nearly one in four American residents saw themselves, to a greater or lesser degree, as German. Some of them, perhaps, noticed the irony that seemed to escape Wilson’s audience in Washington, that the climax of his speech borrowed its authority from the words of the great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther in 1521, “Here I stand. I can do no other”—words originally spoken by a German in Germany.7 Many German-Americans, like their Irish and eastern-European neighbors, had very different ideas from Wilson about where the moral high ground lay. Thousands of them, perhaps as many as half a million, crossed the Atlantic in the early stages of the war to serve with the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. America’s massive influx of immigrant labor since the 1870s may have been a key factor in the astonishing industrial and economic growth the nation had witnessed in recent decades. But this same diversity also made the political consent required for war difficult to manufacture.
So, for many months before America officially entered the First World War in April 1917, it had been engaged in a war of words. It was not just political parties or ethnic groups who took sides in this tussle. The nation’s neutrality had been a key topic of debate in the press and among the academic and literary classes since the war began in August 1914. On the one hand, respected cultural figures such as the educationalist John Dewey and the journalist Walter Lippman writing in the pages of the New Republic magazine laid out their Progressive hopes that the war would create an opportunity to reshape not just American society, but the whole world, for the better. Like many others, they believed the war would sweep away old political structures and hierarchies, clearing the way for “the prospect of a world organisation and the beginnings of a public control which crosses national boundaries and interests,” as Dewey expressed it.8 On the other hand, writers such as H. L. Mencken (another American with a German surname) and the cultural critic Randolph Bourne voiced dismay at the apparent appetite for violence among so many of America’s intellectuals. In the radical magazine the Seven Arts in June 1917, Bourne expressed outrage that “college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature” should play such an active role in justifying military intervention: “A war made deliberately by the intellectuals! … An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness!” Others, he wrote, would find it hard “to understand this willingness of the American intellect to open the sluices and flood us with the sewage of the war spirit.”9
Bourne’s inclusion of “practitioners of literature” in his list of warmongers was not just for rhetorical effect. Fiction, poetry, and song, along with film and the visual arts, played prominent roles on both sides of the cultural debate about the war. From pacifist lyrics, such as those of Alfred Bryan and Al Piantadosi’s popular song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” which sold 650,000 copies in 1915, to Alan Seeger’s wistful anticipation of his own death at the front in his poem “Rendezvous,” and Grace Fallow Norton’s powerful evocations of mobilization in rural France, verse was one of the key vehicles of emotional and ideological response to the war. Ninety anthologies of war poetry were published in America between 1914 and 1919, many sold in aid of war-related charities.10 Newspapers also carried poems engaging with the war, from the pro-interventionist Boston Globe to the skeptical New York Call, as did mainstream periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and the more radical, small-circulation magazines such as the Seven Arts or the Masses. In a climate of political uncertainty, poetry had many virtues, not least that it was quick to write, cheap to publish, and attracted less stringent censure than other genres. As Mark Van Wienen observes in his work on American popular poetry of the war, many magazines and newspapers continued to publish a mix of “patriotic” verse with poems calling for peace or questioning government policy, even after April 1917. Such poetry was often presented in the formally conventional style of “genteel” verse, which many critics now perceive as unrepresentative and remote from the urgent, modern energies of the second decade of the twentieth century. Yet, it remained a powerful vehicle for partisan debate and political dissent in an increasingly restrictive publishing environment.
Writers of fiction and prose also found that the conflict in Europe threatened to engulf their personal and imaginative lives. Over the four years of the war, books by writers as diverse as Owen Wister, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Dorothy Canfield were full of the themes of war: adventure and heroism in France; social unrest and the fear of German spies at home; the thrill of romance in a time of death.11 There were more politically inflammatory works too, such as The Conquest of America (1916), by Cleveland Langston Moffett, who wove real-life diplomatic figures, including Wilson and his cabinet, into a grisly and alarmist counterfactual account of an invasion of the eastern seaboard. The plot was designed to demonstrate the need for military preparedness and to celebrate America’s technological ingenuity. One military encounter leads to 113,000 German soldiers being trapped in ditches, doused in American petroleum, and burned to a crisp on the outskirts of Baltimore; the final decisive battle, fought at sea, is won after Thomas Edison invents a mechanism for an airborne guided missile.12 At the other end of the literary spectrum, James—the ageing, exiled novelist, who usually remained aloof from political debate—wrote a series of reflective yet passionate essays on the conflict, the echoing guns of which he could hear at his home across the English Channel in Rye. James visited wounded soldiers and became a fund-raiser for the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps in France—the same corps in which many young intellectuals and artists including Cummings and Dos Passos would enroll later in the war. In the end, James was so frustrated by Wilson’s reluctance to join the war that in 1915 he renounced his American citizenship and became a British subject.
For American writers who chose life in France the war was more than an abstract principle: it was a daily reality, and a number threw themselves into war-related activities. Wharton, now permanently settled in Paris, used her diplomatic and society connections to arrange visits to the front, which she wrote up for an American public eager for firsthand information from the battle scene and for pitiful accounts (some genuine, some less so) of suffering by Belgian refugees. She also persuaded her distinguished set of literary and artistic contacts to contribute to The Book of the Homeless (1916), a luxury-edition volume of poems, pictures, and fragments of writing and music on the theme of the war, sold in aid of her own refugee charity. Borden, the beautiful and sophisticated Chicago heiress and romantic novelist, left her home in London’s Mayfair to run her field hospital, an experience which would prompt her haunting book The Forbidden Zone (1929). In 1916, Gertrude Stein, whose home was the hub of American intellectual life in Paris, bought a Ford automobile so that she could deliver medical supplies to hospitals; later she would take a number of American “doughboys” under her wing. Staying in France somehow made Stein feel more, rather than less, American. She would write afterward that “the war was so much better than just going to America. Here you were with America in a kind of way that if you only went to America you could not possibly be.”13 Meanwhile, Stein’s friend the drama critic Mildred Aldrich shot from obscurity to fame with A Hilltop on the Marne (1915). In this memoir, narrated as a series of letters, Aldrich and her aged French housekeeper live at the front during the First Battle of the Marne in 1914, overlooking the war zone from a rented farmhouse, charting the impact of the conflict on the lives of those around them. One day, Aldrich encounters a troop of German cavalry in the lane outside her house. A few days later, the British arrive, and her home with its panoramic view of operations is briefly transformed into a military command center. Another friend of Stein’s, the nurse Ellen La Motte, offered the reading public less palatable impressions of the war. La Motte’s book, The Backwash of War (1916), an eyewitness account of several months spent working in Mary Borden’s hospital, offered few political opinions, but unflinchingly presented the traumatic human cost of the conflict in all its pathetic absurdity: dehumanizing injuries, military complacency, gangrene, and shell shock. The book was later withdrawn by its publisher under government pressure. “Truth, it appears, has no place in war,” La Motte remarked grimly.14
The U.S. government’s determination to control cultural production was a strong indicator of the power of literature to influence public opinion in time of war—or it indicated, at least, the government’s fear of that power. Just a week after declaring war on Germany, Wilson established the Committee on Public Information, a formidable operation costing 5 million dollars, which at its height employed 150,000 workers, to market what its flamboyant front man George Creel called “the American idea,” an image of national identity that equated patriotic loyalty with support for the government’s military objectives.15 Promoting this image was not just a matter of massaging the facts in newspaper reports, or even of suppressing material which, like La Motte’s Backwash, was “damaging to the morale.”16 The CPI also generated artistic and journalistic content, making innovative use of the new media of cinema and radio. It sponsored art exhibitions, such as the nationwide tour of Louis Raemaeker’s vividly anti-German war cartoons in 1917 to venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. It liaised with Hollywood about the production of films with anti-German plotlines. It organized the distribution of war posters and xenophobic pamphlets. It crammed donated newspaper advertising space with calls for the public to preserve food supplies and to buy Liberty Bonds to help fund the Allied war effort.17 A group of 328 writers and artists, including Vachel Lindsey, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Hamlin Garland, formed a syndicate known as the Vigilantes, pledging to support the work of the CPI by producing patriotic work to order during the course of the war. As Harold Lasswell would point out in his 1927 study of First World War propaganda, age-old methods of whipping up tribal feeling may have been replaced in this war by more subtle and apparently more civilized means. But the objective of awakening a deep and irrational hatred and fear of the enemy remained as primitive as ever: “In the Great Society it is no longer possible to fuse the waywardness of individuals in the furnace of the war dance. … Talk must take the place of drill; print must supplant the dance. War dance lives in literature and at the fringes of the modern earth; war propaganda breathes and fumes in the capitals and provinces of the world.”18
The “furnace of the war dance” would reshape America. The First World War brought profound and far-reaching change to its military and political machinery and to its social and economic structures. In June 1916, the American army numbered 107,642 men, ranked seventeenth in the world, with a Marine Corps of 15,500 men and a National Guard of 132,000.19 The United States considered itself a peaceful nation with little need for a large standing army. However, by the time of the Armistice in November 1918, 24 million Americans had registered for the draft, 4 million were in uniform, and over 2 million had traveled to France, including two hundred thousand African-Americans and thirty thousand women. Around 1.4 million of these saw action at the front. Of these, 205,000 returned home maimed or wounded, 50,280 were killed in battle, and a further 27,618 died in the accidents, suicides, and epidemics that the war brought in its wake.20 Thousands also died of Spanish flu in army camps and troopships without ever reaching France.
This swift and widespread mobilization of the general public was matched by an expansion of government bureaucracy into new areas of private and corporate life. The massive hike in the federal budget from $0.75 billion in 1916 to $19 billion in 1919 was not just the result of soaring military expenses, but also of new war-related government agencies, such as the U.S. Food Administration, which promoted food conservation, and the Bureau of Investigation, which carried out surveillance of foreign nationals and disruptive labor agitators whose activities threatened (or were alleged to threaten) the supply of food and weapons.21 However, the biggest social change brought by the war was the acceleration of industrial growth. The gross national product, which had hovered around $36 billion between 1910 and 1914, shot up year after year to $91 billion by 1920. And it was not just the amount of manufacturing that was changing; it was also the style. Although time and motion studies such as Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911) had already embedded the idea of assembly-line production in certain areas of industry, including Henry Ford’s automobile empire, the war would make such methods increasingly widespread as the practices of the battlefield and the factory overlapped.22 Small repetitive tasks assigned to each worker, carried out with discipline toward a greater collaborative end: these were the signs of the militarization of civilian life, which Wilson and many others like him had feared. On the eve of his historic speech on 2 April, he had told his friend Frank Irving Cobb, editor of the New York World: “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.”23
The changes which war brought to American national life were pervasive and enduring. The wave of Progressive optimism with which the war began quickly gave way to despair as the reality of the conflict and the frustration of its aftermath took hold. The war shifted the balance of power from state to federal government, and swept away a set of social conventions that had lingered on since the end of the previous century. It altered attitudes to immigrants, to women, and to race relations—not always for the better. It inflated wages and prices, and curtailed civil freedoms. For those who served in the forces or aid agencies, it provided a defining personal experience, physically and emotionally devastating for some but empowering for others—especially those who might never otherwise have left their hometowns, including many African-Americans and low-paid white workers. It also brought long-term hardship to the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who came home to find that their jobs were gone and the government had nothing to give them.
Perhaps most importantly, by the end of the war, Americans felt differently about themselves and others. With Europe exhausted emotionally and financially, America was suddenly the world’s strongest economy and main creditor, but the changes were about more than money. Wilson’s stated purpose of going to war to make the world “safe for democracy” had also given the nation a new sense of itself as a diplomatic player, a powerful arbitrating presence on the international stage, a role that it would relish and expand in decades to come.24 The CPI’s marketing of “the American idea” had imposed a new model of national identity on the many racial and ethnic groups within the country. Increasingly, the establishment called for Theodore Roosevelt’s ideal of “100 percent Americanism”—total assimilation in the melting pot society. “We insist upon one flag, one language, one undivided loyalty to this nation and to the ideals of this nation. … We accept no substitute for Americanism. We insist that all our people must be Americans and only Americans,” he wrote in 1918.25 But this rhetoric simply masked a deep cultural confusion about the ethnic, social, and sexual changes which the war had fueled. It is no coincidence that the titles of several studies of the impact of the war characterize this historical moment as a loss of innocence.26 After 1918, this was a nation less willing to identify with the virginal “Christy Girls” and hopeful young men of wartime recruiting posters, and more likely to be drawn to the overtly sexualized glamor of Hollywood, the New York flapper girls of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz world, or the rugged, cynical, outdoor masculinity of Ernest Hemingway’s novels. Historians of the period argue about whether these changes signaled a sudden rupture with the past or were simply an acceleration and intensification of social trends that had been operating long before the war began. But these same historians do not dispute that the First World War left the nation transformed—although hardly in the shiny, positive ways that the Progressive intellectuals had envisioned in the spring of 1917. By the end of the war, America was a modern, urban, materialistic society and a powerful player on the international stage, but its social divisions were deeper than ever. It was not long before many were looking back to the prewar years with nostalgia as a golden era of American life.
And yet, despite the intensity of the changes it brought, the First World War rarely figures in contemporary American culture. Unlike the Civil War (still within living memory in 1914), or the other major conflicts of the twentieth century, including the Second World War and the Vietnam War, America’s role in the 1917–18 conflict occupies a rather obscure corner of the collective memory. Even though there have been a number of fine historical studies of the subject, it has never quite captured the public imagination. We rarely encounter the American experience of the First World War in fiction or film. Many Americans don’t know what happened, or why, and are not especially interested to find out. “Well, you know, it wasn’t really our war,” an American friend said when I told him I was writing this book. To an extent this is true. Compared to the casualties of the European nations, America’s losses were minor. Britain lost nine hundred thousand troops, France lost 1.3 million, Germany 1.6 million and Russia 1.7 million. In the face of such numbers, words do not express much. Nor was the emotional investment of most American citizens as extensive as the government liked to believe. Although the CPI and the cultural forces which it mustered were highly successful in manufacturing public acquiescence for the war, acquiescence is not enthusiasm. The draft created an illusion of widespread national commitment to the cause, but in reality it was seen by many as a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,” a distant conflict across the ocean, led from the top by capitalists and intellectuals out of touch with the practical realities of most people’s lives. This was especially true of the South. Still struggling with the racial divisions and economic hardship left over from the Civil War, many Southerners blatantly dodged the draft or left home to find protected work in the munitions factories of the industrial North.27 For those at the front, any expectations of military glory and democratic progress swiftly evaporated among the daily indignities of war: the digging of latrines, the petty regulations of army life, the horrific injuries inflicted by shell bombardment, and the desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the woods and fields of the Meuse-Argonne. In the aftermath of the conflict, as the economic gulf between rich and poor widened, as the Treaty of Versailles failed to deliver more enlightened systems of government in Europe, and as Wilson failed to persuade Congress to join the League of Nations, it must have seemed that the noble ideals and rhetoric had come to nothing. The war brought victory, of a sort, but in many ways it felt more like defeat—and this feeling lingered. A number of historians record that, for decades, the overriding response of Americans to the memory of the war was a vague sense of “shame.” Meirion and Susie Harries note that many “wanted to turn their backs on the war almost from the moment it ended.”28 Others, however, wanted to remember and to write. The question was, how could one write about a war that had defied expression?
In the manuscript of Ernest Hemingway’s war novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), there is an unnumbered page which did not appear in the published version of the book. On this page is a typed quotation from a newspaper interview which Henry James gave to the New York Times in the spring of 1915, as the extent and brutality of the war in Europe was becoming clear: “One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one’s thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; … and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.”29 Hemingway’s novel about a young volunteer ambulance driver in northern Italy in 1918 is still the best-known American book about the First World War. Its sharp, metallic style and forthright exploration of violence, sexuality, and disillusionment in the war zone made Hemingway a celebrity, and his novel a classic—although it has to be said that not everyone these days appreciates his handling of politics and personal relationships. Michael Reynolds, Hemingway’s biographer, suggests that James’s words were originally intended as an epigraph to the novel. If this is the case, they would have suited very well. Reflecting on his experiences, Hemingway’s hero Frederic Henry muses on the pointlessness of trying to speak about the war in the terms handed down by previous generations: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. … There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all that you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”30 Hemingway was not always very enthusiastic, or even very polite, about James and his novels. Indeed, the stylistic and tonal differences between the two appear at first glance to demonstrate the changes that the First World War brought to literary culture: on the one hand, James, elegant, interiorized, digressive, wordy; on the other, Hemingway, bitter, terse, particular, raw. This new cynical voice is often understood as a rupture with the values of the past caused by the conflict of 1914–1918, as the rebellion of the impatient, war-weary young against the banal idealism of their elders. So, it is something of a surprise to find Hemingway looking back to James in 1915 for an articulation of the ways in which the war devalued language and determined the need for new ways of thinking and writing about reality. It is impossible to know if Hemingway came across James’s newspaper interview casually in the late 1920s, while he was writing the book, or if he read the article in 1915 and through it was inspired to sign up as an ambulance driver as soon as he was old enough.31 Either way, it is curious to see the ways in which James’s words haunt Hemingway’s novel like the ghosts of language which the passage calls up.
Hemingway, of course, could write about the war with the benefit of hindsight. His novel is an answer to James’s question about what it will be possible to say when the tide of war recedes—but it is not the only one. Most of the major writers of the 1920s and 1930s on both sides of the Atlantic—and many, many more forgotten ones—found something to say about the conflict. Those who had observed it recorded it in a remarkable range of genres: poetry, fiction, memoirs, biographies, histories, letters, spy-thrillers, romantic potboilers, hair-raising tales of battle and survival. Not all of these were as bold or as brutal as A Farewell to Arms. Others—such as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929) and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)—were more so. The language and the imagery of the war, the pity and futility, the absurdity, the physicality, the incompetence, and mechanized destruction, found their way into the imaginative fabric of the modernist era, and thence into patterns of culture and consciousness that have shaped our own. In 1967, Stanley Cooperman could write: “In a very real sense we are all creatures of World War I, both in aesthetic and political terms. The great authoritarian movements of our century; the experiments in art and literature against all forms of rhetoric; the triumph of technological civilization—these things were then new, and they were the raw material for art.”32 It could be argued that this holds as good today is it did a half-century past—though other ways of locating significance in the literature of the First World War have surfaced in the decades since Cooperman was writing. The question of how closely we can really identify with works written about events a hundred years ago will, naturally, come up in later chapters. For now, suffice to say that the war and the texts which emerged from it are often seen to have a seminal place in the cultural consciousness of the Western world.
This book is about how the war first imprinted itself onto the patterns of American writing. It has become a commonplace to assert that the innovative forms and devices of postwar writing evolved in response to the despair and disillusionment engendered by the war. However, as Vincent Sherry notes, such statements are often little more than “a sort of ritual invocation,” and it can be hard to find any detailed inquiry or “rational elaboration” about the channels through which these unfamiliar patterns of thought and language were embedded so enduringly into literary culture.33 One of the reasons for this paucity, especially in an American context, is that very few people start looking early enough. Sherry’s own work focuses on the emergence of these traits in the work of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound in the 1920s. However, these writers had no direct experience of the war, and could only absorb its most vivid themes and motifs through the words and pictures of others. For example, Eliot’s letters suggest that his “rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones,” in The Waste Land (1922), originated in the horror and fascination he felt at his brother-in-law Maurice Haigh-Wood’s descriptions of life at the front.34 Meanwhile, A Farewell to Arms, hailed as so unconventional—which it certainly was in terms of tone and moral daring—also repeated and mimicked forms of war writing which had become almost hackneyed by the late 1920s, especially eyewitness memoirs by ambulance drivers and nurses which had emerged in the hundreds during and after the war. So, yes, the images and vocabulary of the war were in the air in the years after the war, but they had not simply drifted across the cultural landscape—like a poison gas, perhaps—without means of transmission. Hemingway, clearly, was shrewd enough to look back to Henry James in 1915 in search of a point at which something new in literature was born out of the hurt of war; but few critics have done likewise.
If we are to take seriously the idea that literature, and ways of reading that literature, are shaped by real, historical events, such as those of the First World War, then it seems important to locate key moments and writers in that sequence. As Paul Fussell reminds us, the literary scene in English of 1914 is almost impossible for present-day readers to imagine: “There was no Waste Land. … There was no Ulysses, no Mauberley, no Cantos, no Kafka, no Proust, no Waugh, no Auden, no Huxley, no Cummings, no Women in Love or Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” One read the great Edwardian novelists, such as Hardy, Kipling, and Conrad, and “frequented worlds of traditional moral action delineated in traditional moral language.”35 In writing this book, one of my aims has been to look far enough back into that prewar literary world to rediscover the shock and the thrill of watching it transform into something much more like that of our own time. It is easy to forget how quickly this happened: there are only a few months between the death of Henry James in the spring of 1916 and the publication of La Motte’s The Backwash of War in the fall. Conceptually, it seems much longer. Nevertheless, this transition was not clear-cut, and there are many lines of continuity that run through the narrative of change. James, for example, was profoundly aware that the literary world would be irrevocably altered by the war, and was open to the possibility of new ideas and techniques emerging from it. Stein was radical and inventive before the war; Wharton maintained her measured prose after it. Nevertheless, this book aims to map that shift of balance from the old to the new, as it was experienced and expressed by American writers close to the war in Europe in the years 1914 to 1918. It goes in search of early glimpses of disillusionment, irony, and fragmentation, so enthusiastically taken up by later writers as valid responses to the war, but it also seeks to understand the sense of social and political responsibility that led many writers to use their work or their reputations for purposes that seem with hindsight to be beyond the remit of the artist, or to hark back to Victorian standards of public duty. It explores how the work of these writers was received in the volatile publishing context of the war, and it asks, not only what literature gained by this sudden shift of priorities, but also what it lost.
There could have been, no doubt, other ways of approaching these issues; there is certainly no shortage of material to work through. When I began to take a serious interest in American writing of the First World War, over a decade ago, I was continually assured by more experienced researchers (and by one much-decorated novelist) that there wasn’t any. How wrong they were. In the end, the difficulty was not finding enough texts worth reading, but finding sensible ways to focus attention on a small enough group of writers and texts to give any sense of depth and progression.36 As I read, however, the group of writers at the heart of this study emerged distinctly from their surroundings, for reasons which appeared at first unsettling and have over time become positively disruptive. The most surprising thing about this group was that it did not contain any frontline combatants. “First World War literature” was for so long equated with the output of the soldier-poets from the trenches of the Western Front, that any other definition of the genre seemed almost disrespectful. Over recent decades, however, other perspectives on the writing of the war have evolved; approaches concerned with gender, class, and race; with the impact of the war on women, civilians, and colonized nations; with the role in the war of noncombatants, especially medical personnel; and with the home-front literature of the war, written as popular entertainment or powerful political comment. As I discuss below, many of these studies have offered illuminating glimpses of how the war reached far beyond the theaters of combat to affect the lives of millions. In so doing they also opened up the category of war literature to bewilderingly wide criteria. Nevertheless, the soldier’s account is often perceived to have an authenticity, and often a deep note of pity, that other viewpoints cannot match. American soldiers who saw action on the Western Front wrote some powerful, brilliant books about the war: Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat (1923), John W. Thomason’s Fix Bayonets (1925), and William March’s Company K (1933)—to name but a few. Nevertheless, the dates of these novels tell their own story. America was not prepared for war when it entered the conflict on the Allied side in April 1917, and it was not until May 1918 that the American Expeditionary Force was playing an effective role at the front. By early November, the war was over. During that time, American troops were involved in key engagements and took heavy losses along the front line. Those close enough to the action to be gathering powerful impressions had little time for writing until after the war. Even if they had had the chance to write up their experiences, they would not have been allowed to use them; between January and October of 1918, U.S. military personnel were legally forbidden from publishing any kind of literary or journalistic output, and the content of wartime publications was heavily censored. In the postwar reactions of relief and distaste, these same writers also had difficulties finding publishers until the mid-1920s. For a project concerned with the intersection of experience and language in the earliest phases of American writing about the war, it became apparent early on that the soldier’s perspective would be of only limited help.
There were, however, many Americans who watched and participated in the war without rifle and pack between 1914 and 1918, and who did not wait until it was over to speak out. They worked through a complex range of responses in that period, from euphoria to abject desolation, and their stories of how optimism gave way to disgust and resignation, but also to a newfound respect for individual points of view, can be seen to encapsulate the story of the war itself. While a large number of writers and publishers appear in the chapters that follow, the central focus of this book is on seven selected authors who saw the war in Europe at close quarters, and on the texts which they wrote, or had at least partly drafted, before the Armistice in November 1918. These writers were all self-conscious literary artists, who had published in other arenas before observing the war, and who responded to it by going in search of new forms of expression and new expressions of form, in which to catch the vividness of their experience. These experiences were vivid. As I am interested in finding out how literature and history speak to each other, I have concentrated on writers who were much more than observers. All seven felt that words were not enough for this war, and that artistic response had to be matched by action, though that action took many different forms: James, the fund-raiser and hospital visitor; Wharton, the aid-relief worker; Norton, the tentative political activist; Borden and La Motte, the nurses; Cummings, the reluctant volunteer and political prisoner; and Dos Passos, the ambulance driver and then enlisted soldier. This grouping may seem strange. I hope so—because it cuts across a number of the familiar categories and binary opposites within which writing of the war is more usually understood: modernist, conservative, pacifist, interventionist, male, female, young, old, canonical, obscure. However, I also hope that as the book unfolds, this selection will come to make sense. These writers overlapped and intersected in curiously entangled ways; several of them knew each other and worked together or shared publishers. The most unlikely pairings also found common ground both politically and artistically, suggesting that these familiar critical categories have not proved adequate for defining the American writing of the war—which may be one of the reasons why it is so often marginalized. If there is a single unifying characteristic linking these seven writers, it is that all of them developed a view of the artist in wartime as one who should not only observe, but as one who can, perhaps even should, intervene in events, in ways that many other contemporary writers, including the conscientious objectors of the Bloomsbury set in London, staunchly refused to do. Postwar aesthetic ideals, often defined by those writers who did not participate in the conflict, tended to valorize nonparticipation (in many different forms) as artistic integrity. Thus, the intensely personal and autobiographical nature of many of the American texts generated by the war is, I suspect, one of the reasons why these works have drawn comparatively little critical attention throughout a century which has often derided life-writing as mere journalism.
American writing from the First World War has not, however, gone entirely under the radar—although certain writers, such as Grace Fallow Norton, have come close. Just at the point that the public seemed to be ready to read about the war again in the late 1920s, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression which followed focused American attention on struggles closer to home. As canons of twentieth-century writing began to form in the midcentury, American war writing was increasingly sidelined. Authors such as Thomason or Boyd, for whom the war was a central theme, found themselves excluded from critical debates which focused largely on questions of form and style. A number of writers with a stake in the war, including Willa Cather, Archibald MacLeish, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, were admired primarily for their engagement with other subjects closer to home. Certain texts from the First World War, especially those by Hemingway, Cummings, and Dos Passos, were acknowledged as important within the oeuvres of single writers, but often more as formative experiences on the route to something more accomplished. Comparative approaches to the work of two or more writers, or considerations of American First World War writing as a distinctive body of literature have been extremely rare, although Patrick Quinn’s The Conning of America: The Great War and Popular American Literature (2001) and Keith Gandal’s The Pen and the Gun (2010) have both demonstrated in recent years how fertile this field can be. For many decades, British and Commonwealth critics and editors were more interested in their own rich legacy of war writing, viewing American perspectives on the war (if at all) through the eyes of the “London modernists,” such as Eliot, Pound, or H.D.37 Ironically, perhaps, the book that still remains the most influential critical study on either side of the Atlantic about the literature of the war was written by the American scholar Paul Fussell. The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) reread the war as a cultural and intellectual event, asserting that its images, tropes, and core narratives provide the founding myths of the modern consciousness. For Fussell, “anxiety without end, without purpose, without reward, and without meaning is woven into the fabric of contemporary life,” and all postwar literary production, from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (published in 1973, as Fussell was writing) is clouded by the shadow of the parapet and the barbed-wire fence.38 But, because Fussell made little mention of any American literature that tackled the war directly, he compounded the illusion that there wasn’t any—or at least that there wasn’t any worth reading. This perception is now changing, as an increasing number of researchers, often with interests in women’s writing, popular fiction, or social history, explore the social impact of American war narratives and make connections between different authors’ treatments of themes such as race, domesticity, and the labor movement.39 Studies in the history of nursing have also drawn attention to the powerful material written by medical personnel both during and after the war.40 Meanwhile, the years 1914–18 often figure vividly in specific chapters in the literary biographies of individual authors, though such texts, naturally enough, take an episodic approach, and often have little space to explore literary methods.
Nevertheless, two such biographies are among the books that have been indispensable in the writing of this book. Alan Price’s painstakingly researched study of Edith Wharton during the years of the war, The End of the Age of Innocence, details her extraordinary humanitarian efforts throughout the war, via an impressive paper trail of letters and diaries, without ever losing sight of her identity as a writer. Jane Conway’s biography of Mary Borden, A Woman of Two Wars, which emerged midway through my own research, provided answers to a number of puzzling questions, and illuminated the life of this remarkable woman. Several other texts have rarely left my desk in recent years. Arlen Hansen’s cultural history of the ambulance services, Gentlemen Volunteers, draws so widely and so carefully from the dozens of literary texts produced by ambulance drivers, both during and after the war, that it is in many ways also a work of literary analysis. Van Wienen’s study of the political poetry of the American home front, Partisans and Poets, recovers a wealth of forgotten primary material, and demonstrates the interplay between poetry and public life during the war in ways that interrogate many aesthetic assumptions about the uses of literature. Finally, Mark Whalan’s study American Culture in the 1910s offers a persuasive reading of the war as an integral part of America’s social history, not a distant, disruptive event that was soon forgotten, but an integral element of public and creative life, which was evident not only in literature but also in the photography, music, popular entertainment, and business practices of the decade. My own book is very different from all of these studies, yet is a much richer thing for having rubbed shoulders with them. In truth, there is not, as yet, a single volume which provides a satisfactorily comprehensive study of the American literature of the war—and there may never be. As I will argue later on, the war itself could only be apprehended through a sequence of multiple perspectives, and its literary output may fall under the same rubric.
There are so many things to say in a book about the First World War, that the question of how to order them is not simple. This book is both biographical and analytical. I am serious enough about history to believe that what happens to writers makes a difference to what and how they write—which is not the same as saying that they are always writing about their own experiences, or that their work is completely determined by circumstance. I also believe that writers have the potential to shape the pattern of history, both as it unfolds and in retrospect, as we look back through their eyes, although this process is also subject to the actions of publishers, governments, critics, and public taste. This, however, is not a history book, although it does attempt to give enough context to make sense of the artistic response to events which is its main subject. This is a book about the relationship between words and actions, about the writer and how he or she experiences reality and transforms this into art, and about the means that the literary artist uses to coax the reader into a particular understanding of life. Consequently, this study moves forward through chapters which deal with the years of the war in sequence. Some dislike this sort of deference to Time; personally, I think there is no point arguing with him. Taking things roughly in order is by no means an avoidance of dealing with key themes and relationships. Indeed, many interesting patterns have come more sharply into focus by looking synchronically at several writers at different stages of the war. For example, the early cultural obsession with abstract values, especially “civilization,” in 1914, and the humanitarian impulse of 1915 seem logical even laudable in their time, although in retrospect they can appear overidealistic or complicit with military objectives. Likewise, the freedom of American writers to express politically controversial and graphic descriptions of the war emerges as a powerfully distinctive element of American war literature, especially when set against the more heavily censored output of British and European writers. The sudden repression of such voices in America after April 1917 is also striking, as is the swift movement of American writers toward dislocated perspectives and points of view which negate the political and military discourse of war almost as soon as that discourse has been invented. The development of individuals diachronically is also notable. For example, James’s and Wharton’s writings about the war have often been dismissed as “propaganda,” but viewed on a timeline, it quickly becomes clear that their opinions were developing rapidly in response to what was happening, that these writers were often more measured than others around them, and that their early belligerent and optimistic reactions should not be taken as their last words on the conflict. Both came to complex and unsettled positions on the war, and both did so when complex and unsettled positions were not much in vogue. By the end of the war, attitudes of resignation and compromise are evident across the work of a range of writers, as are images of creativity and communication. The First World War may have “used up” the words of the past, but there were authors who found new words and new rhythms of language and put them to use. This is the story of that search.