Author: Andrew Frayn (Page 2 of 2)

Ten years after Versailles: Germany in the UK War Books Boom

6 October 2021 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

The year 1929 witnessed a worldwide economic devastation which coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles. In the year before, the tenth anniversary of the Armistice, a number of non-fiction books were published assessing the treaty and its impact, questioning the outcome of the Great War. Hermann Stegemann openly condemns the treaty in The Mirage of Versailles: “In the wildness of its design and the glaringness of its colours it shows that the World War has not resolved the world crisis, but has ended in blind confusion” (1919, p. 18).

Questions surrounding not only the treaty itself but the war-guilt clause and accusations of Germany’s sole responsibility for the war also came to a head. The Times reported the discontent felt with the treaty by the states accused. The below extract from The Times is one example of the reaction from both Europe and the US. Whether or not Britons had as strong a reaction towards Germany’s discontentment, there was an undeniable growing interest in the German experience of the war demonstrated by the increasing demand for translated German war books. During that same year, Erich Maria Remarque’s iconic Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was released and his portrayal of German soldiers as a ‘miserable, downtrodden pawn’ (Eksteins, 1980, p. 375) was met with a mixture of both sympathy and condemnation by British readers and reviewers. Assessments veered between seeing it as disreputable and exceptional; similarly, in Germany it was criticised from both political wings,: from the left, for not condemning war enough, and from the right, for criticising the German soldier.

Times Newspaper article of 29 June 1929 headlined "Austrian Sympathy with Germany"

“Austrian Sympathy with Germany”, The Times, 29 June 1929.

During the anniversary of the treaty and with the increasing popularity of Remarque’s German bestseller, the demand for German translations continued to grow. In the database of works of the War Books Boom that has been compiled for this project (which will be made publicly available via a DOI when a related academic article is published), 1930 sees over 50% of the translated works recorded coming from German originals; there is a steady increase in the number of texts translated from German, peaking, as with the boom itself, in 1930.

Alongside Remarque’s work, Walter Bloem’s World War I memoir Vormarsch (The Advance from Mons 1914: The Experiences of a German Infantry Officer), which was translated into English in 1930, was successful among British readers. Lieut.-Colonel F. E. Whitton claims it as the ‘most accurate war-book that has come out of Germany’ (Whitton, 1930). Similarly, Edwin Erich Dwinger’s The Army Behind Barbed Wire: A Siberian Diary (1930) was received with success, later praised for its ‘documentary style which embellished its truth value’ (Fritzche, 2012, p.111). It tells of Dwinger’s individual suffering and accusations towards the dehumanising impact of war. He writes about a dead body, stating that this man ‘is no longer a sapper from Hardberg called Meier or Muller, this winter, he is only Typhus Casualty Number 14324’ (Dwinger, 1930, p.121). The tales of the war’s devastation and trauma felt by German soldiers within these translations revealed to British readers the similarities between individual German experiences and their own.

Beth Campbell

(with edits by Andrew Frayn)

Bibliography

Dwinger, Erich Erwin (1930). The Army Behind Barbed Wire: A Siberian Diary. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Eksteins, Modris (1980). “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War.” Journal of Contemporary History, 15. 345-66.

Fritzche, Peter (2012). “Return to Soviet Russia.” In Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945, ed. by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, Alexander M. Martin. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 109-22

Whitton, F.E. (1930). “Five Books on the War.” The Bookman, vol.79, iss. 271 (December 1930), p. 223 <https://data.journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk/view?pubId=bp1000302143419301434_19301201_3089261pdf&terms=bloem%20whitton&tab=date>

Note on funding

This blog is part of a research project on The War Books Boom, 1928-30 led by Andrew Frayn. This was partly funded by Edinburgh Napier University, and funding for a cognate project came from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Beth Campbell’s work on this as an intern was funded by the Centre for Literature and Writing at ENU.

Project twitter account: https://twitter.com/warbooksboom

Early term inspiration

24 September 2018 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

Our incoming students to the English programme were lucky enough on their very first day to have an inspirational talk from Siân Bevan. Siân works for Edinburgh City of Literature, which is just one of the ways she uses her many skills. She talked to first years on the English and English & Film programmes about starting at university and careers in the Arts.

Siân wrote up her thoughts after the event on her own blog:

https://sianyb.com/2018/09/10/new-chapters-and-old-advice/

There are some useful thoughts here if you’re not a first year, too!

Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and John Quinn (lawyer and modernist collector).

Ford Madox Ford

11 October 2017 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

Ford and Aldington

As you’ll have seen in my previous post, there are a couple of authors with whom I’ve become particularly associated. Richard Aldington knew Ford Madox Ford well through the London modernist networks of the early years of the twentieth century. I find Ford a fascinating author. He loved storytelling, even at the expense of fact, which makes all the more impressive the achievement of Max Saunders in unpicking Ford’s life in his exhaustive, magisterial two-volume biography.

My favourite anecdote brings together the two authors I’ve mentioned; Aldington tells the story in his entertaining and engaging memoir Life for Life’s Sake (1941). Aldington was dining with his father and invited Ford, who proceeded to regale Aldington senior with stories of his childhood among the Pre-Raphaelites (Ford’s grandfather was indeed the painter Ford Madox Brown, and much of this was true). However, the mood of the dinner took a turn for the worse when Ford started to talk about how he met Byron, who had died almost fifty years before he was born…

Ford on TV

Christopher (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Sylvia Tietjens (Rebecca Hall) in the BBC/HBO Parade’s End (2013).

You might, perhaps have come across Ford in recent years if you’re a Benedict Cumberbatch fan – the big, shiny BBC/HBO miniseries (2013) of Ford’s great war novel tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-8) was striking and successful, scripted by the eminent playwright Tom Stoppard. (You can watch it via Box of Broadcasts.) Stoppard did a good job of adapting 840 pages of four novels into under five hours of prime time TV, although necessarily some liberties were taken. For example, Ford’s ending looks forward after the Armistice to an uncertain but hopeful future, while Stoppard ends, perhaps too neatly, with the fevered celebrations of Armistice night.

Parade’s End

It was, of course, my interest in the First World War that brought me to Ford and Parade’s End; I’ve a chapter on Ford and War in An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford, and he features in my book, too. The series tells us the intersecting stories of the protagonist Christopher Tietjens, his wife Sylvia Tietjens, his inamorata Valentine Wannop, and his brother Mark Tietjens. The characters represent the push and pull in the years between circa 1912 and 1920 between insistent mechanisation and modernisation, and older moral and ethical values that are coming to seem outdated. Christopher Tietjens insists on doing what he believes the morally right thing, even despite the potential damage to his own reputation and other practical considerations.

The Parade’s End novels use a form somewhat akin to stream of consciousness, although there are multiple consciousnesses represented. The narrative moves associatively between different protagonists and moments in time; these chronological changes are highlighted clearly in the recent Carcanet critical edition, which makes following the shifts easier than in the longstanding Penguin editions.

The Carcanet critical edition of Parade’s End.

Reading (about) Ford

I’m secretary to the Ford Madox Ford Society, which has a (usually) annual conference – I was sad not to be able to go this year, particularly as it was held in Montpellier! The society also produces a number of publications, including collections of critical essays, and senior members were responsible for the Carcanet Parade’s End and other reprints by that publisher.

Parade’s End is quite difficult as an introduction to Ford. His other very famous novel is The Good Soldier (1915), but for some alternative choices, why not start with his social commentary about England and the English (1905-7) (vol. 1 and vol. 2 available for free online), or his fascinating psychological novel A Call (1910)?

Let me know if you read any Ford, or would like to write about him!

Richard Aldington

19 September 2017 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

In the course of an academic career, you tend to become associated with particular ideas, topics and authors. This can often happen in part by chance – being in the right place at the right time. As many of you will know, my main research interest is in the First World War. It’s what I wrote my PhD on, and my monograph, along with all sorts of other publications.

In this and a subsequent post, I want to point you to a couple of authors who might not be familiar to you, but who I’m interested in, have worked on quite a bit, and am involved with author societies or other means of promoting their legacy.

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington has become a figure I’ve returned to throughout my academic career, since writing about him for my MA thesis (now longer ago than I would prefer to think about). He’s probably still best known as one of the original Imagist poets, along with H.D. (who was for a time his wife) and Ezra Pound; much of his poetry is available online for free at archive.org. I was particularly drawn, though, to his First World War novel Death of a Hero (1929). Angry, bitter, and sharply critical of the British literary and political establishments, Death of a Hero is a satire so brutal that it is often misunderstood. Aldington’s position, though, was that the brutality of the war should be matched by the form of writing about it. For him, to write in a polite and measured way about the conflict was fundamentally to misunderstand and misrepresent the experience of it. I’ve recently written an overview of his war poetry Images of War (1919) and Death of a Hero for a forthcoming Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War.

Death of a Hero was so confrontational and shocking that it was originally expurgated – Aldington worked with his editor at Chatto & Windus to remove sections that were thought likely to be unacceptable to a contemporary readership. The removed words, sentences and sections are indicated in the text by asterisks as Aldington wanted the reader to know where emendations were made. Sadly, the recent Penguin republished the expurgated text, which I thought a missed opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of Aldington’s prose; I’d recommend looking out for the unexpurgated version, which you’ll find in most 1960s paperbacks (published by Four Square and Sphere) and the 1980s Hogarth Press edition.

For information about Richard Aldington, you can look at the New Canterbury Literary Society Newsletter. Originally founded as a paper newsletter by the late Aldington scholar Norman T. Gates, I’ve recently “rebooted” it as a blog.

Please do let me know if you read any Aldington and want to talk about it some more!

Handsome man in cafe reading book. — Me, fifteen years ago. (Not really.)

Reading for Pleasure

29 August 2017 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

There will be plenty on this blog about the research that the department is doing – understandably! But I wanted to share with you a few things that I read (mostly) for pleasure over the summer while on holiday. For me, it’s important to read widely, and not only in the area that I research. Reading outside the area you’re most interested in can make you rethink productively things you already (think you) know. Admittedly, I found reading for pleasure much harder when I was a student (both an undergrad and a research student), but remembering why you enjoy reading can also make studying easier, too.

Having scanned my non-work bookshelves at the beginning of the year, I’ve been reading lots of contemporary women writers in an effort to address an unconscious bias. Two that I particularly enjoyed were by Irish authors.

Anne Enright’s The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, deals with the tragically early loss of a sibling. The narrator, Veronica, endeavours to make sense of Liam’s suicide by engaging with the complex, troubled and troubling history of her family. Enright movingly depicts the peculiar closenesses and distances that characterise family life, those feelings as true in the same room as when living hundreds or thousands of miles apart. I particularly enjoyed – if that’s the right word for this moving, tragic novel – the gradual unfolding of the family’s secrets, and the subtle but accessible style.

Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies, which won both the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2016, is an altogether different kettle of fish. Ryan Cusack is endeavouring to deal with the impact of his mother’s death, and his alcoholic father’s role as a low-level gangland pawn. None of this is made any easier by an over-attentive older neighbour, a prostitute searching for her disappeared boyfriend, and his own sometime career as a drug dealer. And none of that is helping his treasured relationship with his girlfriend Karine. McInerney’s prose is earthily authentic, pulling no punches, and the brisk pace of the novel makes it a good read.

Finally, on a more work-y note, I really enjoyed Richard Burton’s long biography of the late modernist poet Basil Bunting – all 608 engaging pages of it. Bunting led a remarkable life: a conscientious objector as he turned 18 at the end of the First World War, dissolute in Paris in the mid-1920s, a longstanding friend of Ezra Pound, a senior military diplomat in the middle east in the Second World War, and finally (re)discovered as a poet in the 1960s (and his sixties) thanks to the publication of his masterpiece Briggflatts (1965) and the patronage of the poets of the British Poetry Revival.

These were just the highlights. I hope you’ve managed to make some time to read for pleasure yourselves, too.

Andrew Frayn

Author: Andrew Frayn (Page 2 of 2)

Ten years after Versailles: Germany in the UK War Books Boom

Early term inspiration