‘Private Robert Dunsire said, after rescuing two comrades in no-man’s-land under fire, “Anybody would have done the same,”’ PAGE 24
Lives behind the lines
Strange Meetings: the poets of the Great War Harry Ricketts
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Whenever war is spoken of I find The war that was called Great invades the mind …
hus wrote the late Vernon Scannell, in one of his most memorable poems. It must be the same for many. The names and things of the 1914-18 business – Passchendaele, barbed wire, gas, poppies – are burned into our imagination of war. That this is so is at least partly because that war produced more good English poems than any other war in history. The poets who wrote them provide the
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subject for this book. It is not a work of conventional literary criticism or biography. What Harry Ricketts has done is to write an account of the poets by examining the occasions on which they met each other. So we have the well-known encounter between Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in a military hospital, but before that we have the less familiar encounter between Sassoon and Rupert Brooke, over kidneys and bacon at a breakfast given by Churchill’s secretary, Eddie Marsh. Later, there is a very poignant meeting
between Helen, the widow of Edward Thomas and the shell-shocked Ivor Gurney when she visited him in the asylum where he was incarcerated, and where he eventually died. Gurney never met Edward Thomas himself but he revered his work, and Ricketts tells how this meeting ended with Gurney running his fingers over a map of her husband’s walking expeditions provided by Helen, and saying softly that he had walked the same ways.
All this is designed to move us, and it does. Ricketts uses each meeting to demonstrate something of the characters of the poets involved. Thus we observe that, for more than one of them, at the deepest level the war never ended. The final encounter imagines the
conversation that ensued when Sassoon was persuaded to meet the artist-poet David Jones, in the early 1960s, towards the end of both their lives. I’m sure Ricketts is right to conclude that almost all the two old men had in common was their shared experience in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and that even here there must have been a gulf between Sassoon the officer and Jones
who had served as a private. Their shared Catholicism might have provided more of a bond than Ricketts allows, but otherwise one of the things this book brings out is the difference between the war as seen by officers, and how it seemed to the other ranks. It is tellingly observed that, while shell-shocked officers often suffered from stammering, privates were usually afflicted by mutism.
When there is little to go on by way of
direct report, Ricketts fleshes out his accounts of such meetings with what the participants had to say about each other later, in diaries or other forms. So we learn what Edward Thomas thought of Rupert Brooke from what he wrote about Brooke’s work and person (“a great girl”) in book reviews. Brooke becomes something of a running theme, as each of the other poets matches himself against him. Noticing that Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen were once stationed at the same training camp, Ricketts provides one wholly imagined meeting between them, and offers three possible versions of it, all of them true to the reserve that characterised both men. Among other poets studied are Charles
Mightier than the vote
John Wilson Croker: Irish ideas and the invention of modern
Conservatism 1800-1835 Robert Portsmouth IRISH ACADEMIC PRESS, 304PP, £40 ■ Tablet Bookshop price £36
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reviewer is potentially deadly. When John Wilson Croker’s unfavourable
review of Keats’ “Endymion” appeared in the highly influential Edinburgh Quarterly, Byron responded:
Who killed John Keats? “I,” says the Quarterly, So savage and Tartarly; “’Twas one of my feats.”
This literary howler may be Croker’s
major, if dubious, claim to fame, but there is more to him than that: in his time, he won equal fame as a Protestant pioneer of Catholic emancipation. As MP for Downpatrick, a fervent
Parliamentarian and a man of letters, he was Secretary to the Admiralty from 1808 to 1830. When the Oxford University electors rejected Peel’s new pro-Catholic stance, it
Sorley, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and Robert Nichols. Isaac Rosenberg’s Jewishness, however, set him apart in the trenches; while he was later admired by Graves and Sassoon, he seems never actually to have met a single poet of any consequence during his brief life. This is all the sadder if you believe, as I do, that Rosenberg was at least as gifted a poet as Owen. His most accomplished poems, such as “Break of Day in the Trenches”, or “Dead Man’s Dump”, have a power that carried them beyond their occasions. A poetic necessity speaks in him, not merely an impulsion by event. Ricketts doesn’t really know what to do with him, so contrasts him with the conspicuously insignificant Robert Nichols.
Strange Meetings is an unusual book which merits the attention of anyone who cares about poetry. The only factual mistake I noticed was that the author has Ted Hughes telling Graves that the latter’s White Goddess was the chief book of his “poetic consciousness”. He didn’t. What Hughes said was “poetic conscience”, a quite different thing. Robert Nye
was Croker who helped. He rebuked Oxford by recalling his kinsman Edmund Burke’s celebrated principle that the prime duty of an MP was to serve the national interest with his own judgement, not as a delegate instructed by the constituency. With Peel about to introduce the Emancipation Bill and Wellington, his friend, fellow Irishman and, by now, also in favour of it, the Irish Protestant bishops were resisting. Croker saw Archbishop Magee of Dublin
as a “Protestant Jesuit” and he wrote to warn Wellington that “an old friend of mine”, the Bishop of Ferns, would repudiate Magee. Meanwhile, rioting students at Trinity College attacked Daniel O’Connell’s home, although Croker in the Commons refuted an assertion that they were really opponents of the bill. In the event, the bill was passed by a huge majority. Croker’s suggestion, however, that there should be provision for Catholic clergy failed. Later, he and Wellington would “lament a lost opportunity for stabilising the country through salaried clergy and a modified concordat with the Vatican”. The only biography of Croker, by Myron
Brightfield, was published in 1940. Robert Portsmouth’s magnificently researched study is a splendid successor. Florence O’Donoghue
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