Belated Witness - Cathy Butler

It’s a strange thing about the literature of the First World War. We can all probably name some of the writers that conflict brought to fame: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and the rest. All of them soldiers, many of them dead by November 1918. And all poets, of course. But where are the great prose works of the Great War? The first ones that spring to my mind at least are Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933). All, note, published a decade or more after the Armistice. It seems strange, doesn’t it, that – contrary to Wordsworth’s dictum about poetry being “emotion recollected in tranquility” – it was the poetry that was written during the event, and the prose so much later? 

I’m aware, of course, that all this is a large and woolly generalization. Some important First World War poetry was written long after the event, such as David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937); and of course there were novels and short stories prior to 1929; but the names I’ve mentioned are the ones that seem to have lasted. It’s as if prose authors’ experience of the war needed time to settle into a form in which they felt sufficiently sure of themselves and their own feelings to set it down. A period of quarantine, as it were.

This train of thought was started by a question that cropped up while I was writing a piece about female children’s authors in the decades after 1945. I knew (and more-knowledgeable friends have since confirmed) that during the Second World War itself there had been numerous children’s books with a contemporary wartime setting. Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School fled first from Nazi-held Austria to Guernsey and thence to Britain during the war years. Biggles took on Hitler’s airmen just as he had the Kaiser’s. William Brown encountered air raids and evacuees, and even The Beano introduced wartime characters (most infamously Musso da Wop – He's a Big-a-da-Flop). But, as with the First World War, once VJ day passed the well of wartime fiction dried up. A couple of books with wartime settings appeared in 1946, including Noel Streatfeild’s Party Frock, about a girl who is sent a beautiful frock from America but has no chance to wear it because of the general austerity; but I suspect these were already being written before peace was declared. After that there’s very little, at least from British writers. True, in 1956 The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier’s classic story of European refugees, was published; and around the turn of the 1960s boys’ comics like War Picture Library and The Victor started featuring stories from the Second World War on a regular basis, with Germans who could be relied on to shout things like ‘Achtung, Schweinhund!’ and ‘Hände hoch!’. (Such comics were of course primarily read by children with no personal memory of the war itself.) However, I’m not aware of any Second World War children’s novel by a female British author being published in the twenty years after 1946 – which seems remarkable, if true (and please let me know if it’s not).

Finally, in the late sixties and early seventies, those authors who had been children during the war began to produce their own novels, mostly about the Home Front. There are lots of these, many of them excellent. Some of the best are Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed (1969), Susan Cooper’s Dawn of Fear (1970), Jane Gardam’s A Long Way from Verona (1971), Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971), Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (1973), Robert Westall’s The Machine-Gunners (1975) and Alan Garner’s Tom Fobble’s Day (1977). Like the books by Hemingway, Graves and Brittain, many are autobiographical or semi-autobiographical in nature.

Looking at this very brief and even more unscientific survey of the literature of the two world wars, I’m struck as much by the absences as by the books themselves – by the fact that such cataclysmic events apparently cannot be turned immediately into fiction, whether because to do so would in some way trivialize the suffering (but why should that be?), or because they were too overwhelming and all-encompassing to submit to the peculiar discipline art demands – to the filtering, the selection, the transmutation of chaotic real-world experience into some kind of half-confabulated order. And what is true of wars is likely true of other traumas, too. We write of them only when we can, which may be decades after the event. That’s why some of us, I’d guess, become children’s writers. To bear our own belated witness.