Abstract
Perhaps one of the most unsettling poems of the Spanish Civil War was written in 1937 by George Barker, a young British autodidact. Barker’s pronounced sympathies were with the Republic but, unlike poets such as Ralph Fox or John Cornford, he did not volunteer for the International Brigades, remaining in Britain. In ‘Elegy on Spain’ (1939) he gave a visceral reaction to a stark photograph of a five-year-old child killed in an air raid by Italian bombers on Barcelona. 1 The poem was first published in pamphlet form – with the photograph taken from the newspaper and stuck on the facing initial page. It is a potent and distressing image and was later used as part of the famous Republican poster which carried the slogan ‘If you tolerate this your children will be next’ as well as being sent to Virginia Woolf (who remarked rather acidly on it in Three Guineas (1938)). But Barker’s response, as he worked through tropes of blood, sacrifice, hope and futility, became obsessed with his distance from Spain and the mediated nature of suffering. Even the profoundly disturbing power of the photograph, as he rhymed ‘rupture’ and ‘rapture’ to capture blast wounds, could not elide the fact that it had become an abstracted icon. Other British poets writing about Spain while still in Britain also wove reports of the conflict into their poems. Jack Lindsay’s ‘Two Days’ (1939) responds to the defeat of the Republic in March 1939 and its sections are punctuated by transcribed news reports. It ends forlornly with the faith that ‘out of the newsprint blows this wind of hope’ rather than the expected image of the wind blowing the newspaper but this only becomes a squally signifier of distance and transience. 2
Questions of the distance between the poet and the battle, and what this means for their poetry, form the basis of Rachel Galvin’s outstanding News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945. This is a work that makes a significant contribution to rethinking the literature of the Second World War, but it also rightly complicates any neat periodisation as it begins with the Spanish Civil War and includes works written after 1945. It is a piece of elegant comparative criticism as it moves between works in English, French and Spanish with élan and brings a formidable knowledge of the specific traditions they emerge from.
Galvin’s choice of six major poets – César Vallejo, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Queneau, Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein – covers different nationalities, a wide range of poetic forms and a plethora of places on the political spectrum; yet this group is held together by a central subject. For, as she writes in the introduction, their ‘work grapples with the urgent dilemma of how to write a modern war poem that acknowledges how the civilian’s relationship to war is mediated through the press’ (p. 8). The different poets acknowledge this dilemma in dissimilar ways, but their ‘rhetorical strategies reveal an ethically motivated self-scrutiny about the uses of language in wartime’ (p. 9). This matters as such serious artfulness is a riposte to what has been termed ‘combat Gnosticism’ (p. 15), the idea central to some soldier–poets and some critical approaches to war writing, that only those who have physically experienced battle can write of it – a ‘flesh-witnessing’ (p. 15).
Galvin’s approach for each of her poets focuses rather on what she terms ‘meta-rhetoric’, the use of rhetorical tropes to signal the mediated nature and artifice of the text. Thus, the apparently solipsistic and dense poems of Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore, with their displays of literariness and evasions from direct reportage, begin to look very different, for in Galvin’s readings they acknowledge the mediation of conflict by the press and find a language of civilian response. In making such an analysis, News of War is a remarkably original work and brings together two different forces in current literary criticism: in tracing how rhetoric, whether meta- or not, is embedded, Galvin follows Katie McLoughlin’s Authoring War (2011); while in showing how poems are shaped by journalistic mediation, she echoes works exemplified by David Trotter’s Literature in the First Media Age (2013).
Auden had an especially complicated history as a civilian who wished, at points, to ‘play the reporter’, and he rightly merits two revelatory chapters. The first is on the late 1930s, including his time in Valencia in 1937, initially to work for a press bureau and then as a putative medic (a laconic comment at the time was that the injured soldiers should have been grateful that Auden never actually drove an ambulance). Galvin’s reading of Auden’s famous work ‘Spain’ (1937) is subtle, specifically as she incorporates material from his recently discovered 1939 journal. In the next chapter, Galvin elucidates a strange period of Auden’s life, the spring-summer of 1945. This was when, having been given the temporary rank of an army Major and dressed in a trim uniform, Auden was implausibly assigned to the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). After becoming, in his own words, ‘the first major poet to fly the Atlantic’ (p. 153), he was sent to the devastated cities of Germany and was tasked with reporting on what bombing did to civilian morale as well as to bricks and ferroconcrete. As a fluent German speaker, he toured through the American zone of occupation collecting oral testimony from civilians, ‘a kind of low-level spying’ as he called it (p. 153). The experience has previously been seen by critics as both too overwhelming and filled with nullity for Auden to use in his own writing, such as his laconic ‘we got no answers we didn’t expect’ summary from visiting Darmstadt (p. 154). Yet Galvin shows that his underrated poem ‘Memorial for a City’ (1949) is a response to particularities of encounters, a complicated version of eye-witnessing and a careful rejoinder to his own ‘Spain’.
There are many other superb discoveries, such as Galvin’s reading of Queneau (whom she has also translated) which tracks how French responses to the Munich Agreement kept resurfacing – but framed in very different ways – in his poems from 1938 to long after the war. The chapter on Stein does not swerve from her involvement with Vichy culture and shows why recent critics have rightly sleuthed through her contacts. But it also finds how slips and interruptions in language form render the experience of war into the very texture of Wars I Have Seen (1945), an ‘anti-newspaper’ as Galvin memorably terms it (p. 305). There is value in thinking about why poetry might have things to say that other forms cannot about war, the experience of war and especially the mediated experience of war. This value has specific historical relevance, for the ways that Anglophone war literature has been written about has changed radically, but it also has resonance with regard to more immediate conflicts. It is fitting, then, that Galvin uses her agile and angry epilogue to discuss contemporary American poets and their responses to a mediated war in Afghanistan and Iraq.