Top 10 War Stories

Karl Marlantes, Vietnam War veteran and author of the semi-autobiographical novel Matterhorn, has shared his top ten war stories with The Guardian here.

It's no real surprise to see texts from the First World War dominate the list but what is interesting is the lack of entries from the war Marlantes participated in himself.

Perhaps those stories are too painful to re-visit, maybe the author wants to encourage those interested in Vietnam to read his book.  Or could it be the influence and impact that visual representations of the Vietnam War had on Marlantes.  As he states, in a previous piece also from The Guardian, "How can any modern novelist not be affected by the movies?"  The film nearest to his own experiences was Oliver Stone's depiction of warfare: "Only Platoon came close to getting it right".

I have not had a chance to read Matterhorn yet but hope to do so in the not too distant future.  The fact that it took 35 years to write and publish gives some indication of the trauma Marlantes must have experienced and the difficult journey he has subsequently been on to see his life's work realised.

It's also a good bet that the books on the top 10 list have provided some stylistc inspiration for the author as have, I'm sure, the more note-worthy films about the Vietnam War.

The relationship between written and visual representations, and the influence they have on each other, is a fascinating topic, but that's for another day...

Edward Thomas, His Pocket Watch and His Death

In the afterword to his fine book, Touch and Intimacy in First world War Literature, Santanu Das relates the sad details of the connection between the poet Edward Thomas, his pocket watch and his death:

The hands of this watch are fixed at 7:36 am, a timeless testimony to Thomas’s death by an explosion that left no visible marks on his body: a mute companion to the last, the clock had faithfully recorded the moment when its master’s heart stopped beating. 

Das then asks the question, why do objects like Thomas's pocket watch, preserved at the Imperial War Museum in its final state, marking the death of its owner, 'move and disturb us so much'?

He answers thus: '[t]hese objects not only congeal time but also conceal processes of touch’ and further, they

evoke the body of the user, traces of hands, quiescent but palpable. […] [T]hese objects have a precious, living quality for they are the archives of touch and intimacy – they have once held, protected or brushed against the bodies of their possessors in their youths or in the trenches and the hospitals, and through this intimate caress, these mute, insensate objects seem to have been touched to life, bequeathed with the very pulse of their owners’ being.

This final comment – the metaphorical animation of an ‘insensate object’ - is, perhaps, a step too far, nice though it is.  However, Das does make an intuitive and thought-provoking statement on our love and fascination with historical artefacts – not just from the First World War, but in general – and how these objects can, somehow, bring us into closer contact with the subjects of history, in this case a soldier and poet who lost his voice through his untimely death in the trenches. 

It is a simple and obvious point, but one that only occurs after you have read it.  There in lies its power.

Parading on the BBC

Parade's End Coming to the BBC

 An article from The Guardian and a blurb in The Times - both from earlier this year - reveal that the screenwriter and playwright Tom Stoppard (pictured) is currently working on an adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End to be shown on the BBC.

The Times states that Ford's quadrilogy will be split over five parts, The Guardian says it will be six.  I guess which one you believe might be down to your own political swaying.  Either way, much content will have to be cut out to fit in with the TV format.

For example, the majority of Parade's End is focalized through the eyes and minds of the characters who populate Ford's complex narrative and this is difficult to recreate on screen.  One of the consequences of Ford's approach is a fractured timeline where the narrative constantly shifts back and forth in time as the characters' contemplate the past while situated in the present events of the story.

What we may well see is a more straightforward approach - the end result becoming a social and historical period drama with events unfolding either in chronological order or with information filled in via flashbacks.

Whatever the outcome, I look forward to viewing the end results but can't help thinking that much of the complex psychological content of the novels will be lost in translation.  That said, it is good to see the First World War being given some screen time instead of being overlooked in favour of its younger (and somewhat Americanized) brother.

Hemingway on Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford in First World War uniform.  Picture obtained here.

In my previous post, I featured some comments made by Ford Madox Ford about Ernest Hemingway.  In the interest of equality, I thought it prudent to display some of Hemingway's thoughts on Ford.

The passage in question, entitled 'Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's Disciple', appears in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, written during the last years of his life.  However the events portrayed - a chance meeting between both writers in a Paris cafe - took place in the 1920's.

As Ford takes a seat at the table and orders a drink, Hemingway writes:

I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room, but this was the open air and the fallen leaves blew along the sidewalks from my side of the table past his, so I took a good look at him, repented, and looked across the boulevard.  The light was changed again and I had missed the change.  I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it, but it still tasted good.

And Hemingway continues:

The afternoon had been spoiled by seeing Ford [...].  I was trying to remember what Ezra Pound had told me about Ford, that I must never be rude to him, that I must remember that he only lied when he was very tired, that he was really a good writer and that he had been through very bad domestic troubles.  I tried hard to think of these things but the heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence of Ford himself, only touching-distance away, made it difficult.  But I tried.

Talk about being brutally honest.  In my opinion, both in terms of what Hemingway says about Ford's character and what it reveals about his own personality, this autobiographical sketch, filtered through the distance of passing time (and after Ford's death), is cathartic for Hemingway in its open, confessional style.  

Ford on Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway: passport photo from 1923

I came across an extract taken from the New York Evening Post Literary Review from 3rd January 1925 that I found interesting. It appears in the excellent collection, edited by Max Saunders, of War Prose by Ford Madox Ford (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999, pp 219-221).

It contains some of Ford's thoughts on Hemingway and his sparse writing style:

Mr Hemingway [...] writes like an angel; like an archangel: but his talk - his matter - is that of a bayonet instructor.

Ford also provides an example of Hemingway's prose that is worth re-producing (I thought it might be from Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises however, it wasn't published until 1926/7. Perhaps it is from one of his short stories - if anyone knows where it's from I'd be pleased to know):

The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung onto the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out and he lay in the sand and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can't have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he could not get the sword in. He could hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull-ring....

First things first: how long is that second sentence without containing any punctuation! And where are the adjectives! In relation to the above, Ford writes:

That is very marvelous writing. If the American Father and Mother will just for a moment withhold their protests against the blood on the sand, they will realise that they now possess an incomparable picture and that that picture has been presented with almost fewer words than is believable.

It's not difficult to reach the conclusion that, in 1925, Ford was a great admirer of Hemingway's approach to writing. I wonder if the feeling was reciprocal....

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker (2008) is an incredibly tense film about the current war in Iraq that is filled with intense moments of action.

By turning her attention to one facet of the war - following the (mis)fortunes of a specialist bomb disposal unit in the U.S. Army - director Kathryn Bigelow is able to keep the plot focused but, at the same time, is able to explore some of the larger themes associated with modern warfare. Although on the periphery, these themes are what lingered in my mind after the film had ended.

Of particular interest were: how defective military hardware can be responsible for the loss of lives; the difficulty of dealing with feelings of guilt and culpability when a comrade is killed in action; and the alienation a soldier feels when attempting to re-integrate into life at home after a tour of duty has ended.

The first point is pertinent at this time due to the media attention in this country (Britain) upon the substandard equipment being supplied to our troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is alarming to see that this issue affects the American military as well.

At the same time, and of interest on an academic level, is the parallels that can be drawn between the events portrayed in Bigelow's film and those captured by writers who fought in the Great War.

For example, in Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy, Parade's End, Christopher Tietjens blames himself for the death of one of the soldiers under his command, O Nine Morgan. If Tietjens had granted the man home leave then death may have been avoided. Later, Tietjens experiences hallucinations about the dead soldier's eyes.

And in Siegfried Sassoon's poem, 'Repression of War Experience', we are told that the soldier who is the subject of the poem is 'quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home; / You'd never think there was a bloody war on!' The tone of these lines makes it clear that even on leave, the war weighs heavily on the combatant's mind.

Siegfried Sassoon Collection Now Online

I received the following email through my subscription to the World War One literature google group and it revealed some excellent news:





The First World War Poetry Archive is pleased to announce that the Siegfried Sassoon collection is now live at:


http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/sassoon


This draws from collections at Oxford, Cambridge, New York Public Library, and the Harry Ransom Center. The primary focus is on manuscript variants of Sassoon's 'war poetry' contained in the collections 'The Old Huntsman', 'Counter-Attack', and 'Picture Show'.You are free to use the images for educational purposes (see http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/permitteduse.html).


In effect this represents the last collection that will be going live,as part of the project. The funding for this two-year initiative came from the Joint Information Systems Committee as part of their Digitisation Programme.


Please feel free to pass this on,


The First World War Poetry Archive Team

University of Oxford





What this means is that an incredible resource just got even better. I am sure that access to this material will benefit many researchers and anyone with a keen interest in literature, the First World War, or Siegfried Sassoon himself.



It may even save some people the time and money needed for a costly research trip!