This has been a week when a kind of unplanned and unexpected serendipity of coherence has emerged from the reading we have been doing. I use the plural because Joan and I, in addition to whatever we happen to be reading on our own, usually are also slowly working through a book we are sharing aloud. We share it, but she does the work of the actual reading, both on account of personal preference and vocal mellifluousness. We are just now in the midst of a wonderful read that I could recommend to anyone: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig.* Zweig, an excellent and once popular Austrian writer, was born in 1881 and died in Brazil (along with his wife) by suicide in 1942. A highly cultured European cosmopolitan Jew, he left an autobiography that is, among other things, a pained lament for the shocking barbarism of the European wars that had destroyed the old Europe of his youth and his fevered dreams.
As the topic of literature war is of course a prominent, indeed dominant subject and spiritual theme. On almost any reader’s list of the world’s greatest novels, Tolstoy’s War and Peace is likely to appear at or near the top. I myself would put it right at the pinnacle, but I shall not spend any effort justifying my judgment here, except to say that I regard the title itself as brilliant. To the extent that all art holds up its mirror to life, war and peace are what human history, and therefore the lives of those men and women who made history or simply endured or suffered it, has chiefly consisted of. In the Western literary traditions with which we are familiar war can be said to have had a paramount role. The Greek Iliad and the Latin Æneid, the most obvious inspiration of the vernacular epics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, have their narrative origins in ancient myths of an Ur-conflict, the Trojan War. Hence Beowulf, hence the Song of Roland. Did not Horace himself, the ur-guru of literary critical theory, say that the Trojan War is the only right subject of the ambitious poet?
The First World War (still often called the “Great War” despite being eclipsed in many categories of horror by the Second) had a profound literary posterity, brilliantly discussed in the important work by the late Paul Fussell, a personal acquaintance of mine: The Great War and Modern Memory. Zweig was in no sense a military historian. I should describe him as an acute aesthetic commentator. Perhaps in fact he regarded “historical” perspective as no part of his task. But he did see in the war the obscene negation of all the positive impulses of the old European culture, a disaster not merely apocalyptic but also incomprehensible.
Life forces upon us unexpected Jungian synchronicities. Why else should I have happened by chance this week to see a brief moment of the English “Antiques Roadshow”—a mere snatch of the program--which featured a book once owned by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the most tragic of the young English poets lost in the First War. It was a book preparing a young confirmand for the sacrament of confirmation and a first Holy Communion, given to him by his parish priest . Those who know Owen only or mainly through such terrifying poems as “Dulce et decorum est”—the line comes from Horace, It is sweet and fitting [to die for one’s country]--may be startled to discover in their youthful author a pious Anglican ‘teen-ager still wholly innocent of the horrors of blasted bodies and rotting flesh. The chief impression left on my mind by this glimpse of fairly recent history was that war, which has so often been the subject of great poets, has also been the death of poets. The episode ended as all of us hope that episodes on the “Antiques Roadshow” should end. The expert evaluator informed the gobsmacked current owner of this rather battered pious and pedestrian religious handbook that he was the unknowing possessor of a small fortune.
As an Austrian Zweig was expected, indeed practically required, to hate with a gem-like intensity the military leaders of the enemy, and to hate especially Lord Grey “the perfidious British Foreign Minister.” This the humane and cosmopolitan Viennese poet was incapable of doing, as hating was not his thing. But his fellow Germanophone dramatist Ernst Lissauer gave German-speakers literary leadership in this field with his wildly popular “Hymn of Hate for England”. “Disastrously,” write Zweig, “it was soon obvious how easy it is to set the forces of hatred working, for here the stout, deluded little Jew Lissauer was anticipating Hitler.”
Quite indirectly, Lissauer sent me back to Barbara Tuchman, two of whose brilliantly written works (The Guns of August and The Proud Tower) were published in a single volume in a splendid Library of America edition edited by Margaret MacMillan, herself an eminent scholar of the Great War. This book is on my own shelves, and I actually found it—far from the only possible result of my searching for one of my books. The Proud Tower is one of those books whose title, if it doesn’t quite say it all, manages still to say a whole lot. Zweig was a secular Jewish intellectual unlikely to turn to semi-theological explanations for historical developments. I, as a Christian scholar of medieval European literature, am under fewer constraints in doing do. Pride, superbia, was in the old European thought the mother of all sins; and it was in plentiful supply in all the royal houses of Europe as the Old World hastened to its definitive end. I do not think I am abusing Tuchman in saying this, for the title of her work is a clear allusion to the biblical Tower of Babel, a canonized emblem of absurd human presumption. The first section of Tuchman’s Proud Tower is entitled “The Patricians”, and it begins with a Who’s Who of the high and the mighty Englishmen who formed “the last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition…”—the British Cabinet in 1895. I cannot quote this brilliant beginning to Tuchman’s book at length. It is about twice as long as this blog essay. But I can give you a glimpse. Among the Cabinet officers was the Lord President of the Council, “a Duke [of Devonshire] who owned 186,000 acres in eleven counties whose ancestors had served in government since the Fourteenth Century, who had himself served thirty-four years in the House of Commons, and three times refused to be Prime Minister.” One wonders what this fellow would have thought of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est” and the flower of Albion’s youth marching blindly through a gas attack, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags…”
*originally first published in German as Die Welt von Gestern (Zurich, Wiliams Verlag, 1942), trans. by Anthea Bell (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), pp. 472.
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