<html><head></head><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:13px"><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493"><span id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_14287">Dear Trudi Tate--</span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493"><span><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493" dir="ltr">It seems I owe Stuart another debt of gratitude for inspiring your message to the listserv and reminding us all of your wonderful essay on Woolf in your engaging and important collection <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11956">Silent Morning.</i></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493" dir="ltr"><i><br></i></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493" dir="ltr">With thanks and best wishes--<br></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493" dir="ltr"><font id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_14412"><font id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_14411"><font id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_14410"><font id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_14409">Karen Levenback</font></font></font></font></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493" dir="ltr"><br></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493" dir="ltr"><font><font><br></font></font></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493" dir="ltr"><font><font><br></font></font></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1505128238677_11493" dir="ltr"><font><font><br></font></font></div> <div class="qtdSeparateBR"><br><br></div><div class="yahoo_quoted" style="display: block;"> <div style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> <div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> <div dir="ltr"><font size="2" face="Arial"> On Friday, September 8, 2017 12:44 PM, Dr T Tate <tt206@cam.ac.uk> wrote:<br></font></div> <br><br> <div class="y_msg_container"><div dir="ltr">Thanks to Stuart for some very interesting reflections on the recent FWW <br></div><div dir="ltr">commemorations, and his thoughts about what hasn't been learned; or was <br></div><div dir="ltr">once known then lost again.<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">In case this is of interest: there's a discussion of VW on the Armistice <br></div><div dir="ltr">in my essay 'King Baby' in Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy, eds., *The <br></div><div dir="ltr">Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice* (Manchester UP); <br></div><div dir="ltr">2013 hardback; 2015 paperback). The essay is about how babies were <br></div><div dir="ltr">perceived at the end of the FWW, with some discussion of Woolf, <br></div><div dir="ltr">Mansfield and Bowen.<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">It also looks at the complaint during the FWW that war propaganda <br></div><div dir="ltr">infantilised citizens -- both Woolf and Freud talk about this.<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">---<br></div><div dir="ltr">Dr Trudi Tate<br></div><div dir="ltr">Clare Hall<br></div><div dir="ltr">Cambridge CB3 9AL<br></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="https://truditateblog.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">https://truditateblog.wordpress.com</a><br></div><div dir="ltr">www.literaturecambridge.co.uk<br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> ------------------------------<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Message: 2<br></div><div dir="ltr">> Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2017 10:19:46 +0100<br></div><div dir="ltr">> From: "Stuart N. Clarke" <<a ymailto="mailto:stuart.n.clarke@btinternet.com" href="mailto:stuart.n.clarke@btinternet.com">stuart.n.clarke@btinternet.com</a>><br></div><div dir="ltr">> To: <<a ymailto="mailto:vwoolf@lists.osu.edu" href="mailto:vwoolf@lists.osu.edu">vwoolf@lists.osu.edu</a>><br></div><div dir="ltr">> Subject: [Vwoolf] Commemorating the Great War & VWM91 (again)<br></div><div dir="ltr">> Message-ID: <<a ymailto="mailto:10EC8466E2374E04B4F03C3BDF6BEC3D@StuartHP" href="mailto:10EC8466E2374E04B4F03C3BDF6BEC3D@StuartHP">10EC8466E2374E04B4F03C3BDF6BEC3D@StuartHP</a>><br></div><div dir="ltr">> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Thanks to Karen Levenback, who points out the online availability of<br></div><div dir="ltr">> Clive Bell?s ?Peace at Once?, I have been reading it for the first<br></div><div dir="ltr">> time; and I have been rereading Bella Woolf?s ?Right against Might?<br></div><div dir="ltr">> (also available online, but I have a copy). This was stimulated by<br></div><div dir="ltr">> Hilary Newman?s discussion of those 2 short monographs.<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Hilary mentions that Bell is repetitive, but polemicists always are<br></div><div dir="ltr">> (e.g. Louise DeSalvo, Irene Coates). Woolf, however, is also<br></div><div dir="ltr">> repetitive: the destruction of Malines Cathedral is mentioned 4 times:<br></div><div dir="ltr">> pp. 10, 17, 19, 24.<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> However, Woolf is not really a polemicist: she assumes that her<br></div><div dir="ltr">> readers will accept what she says. Her short book is more like Harold<br></div><div dir="ltr">> Nicolson?s "Why Britain is at War" (1939), although her book lacks his<br></div><div dir="ltr">> book?s intellectual content. Also, while the footnotes are ?for the<br></div><div dir="ltr">> benefit of children who may read the book?, the text does seem to be<br></div><div dir="ltr">> addressed to young people -- or at least is written in a very simple<br></div><div dir="ltr">> way (she was after all mainly a children?s writer).<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <a href="https://archive.org/details/rightagainstmigh00wooluoft" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/rightagainstmigh00wooluoft</a><br></div><div dir="ltr">> <a href="https://archive.org/details/peaceatonce00bell" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/peaceatonce00bell</a><br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> ?Peace at Once? is perceptively accurate in some of its predictions<br></div><div dir="ltr">> and wrong in others. It is too rational, too intelligent. Bell says<br></div><div dir="ltr">> e.g. ?Is there any reason for supposing that under German rule an<br></div><div dir="ltr">> ordinary man would be so much worse off, morally and materially, that,<br></div><div dir="ltr">> to avoid it, it is worth doing and enduring what ordinary men are<br></div><div dir="ltr">> doing and enduring on three Continents and on the high seas?? He may<br></div><div dir="ltr">> well have been right in the context of 1915, but even now Brexit shows<br></div><div dir="ltr">> that that would not have been acceptable to ?ordinary men?.<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> By the way, Bell?s article ?Art and War? (referred to in the essay) is<br></div><div dir="ltr">> more easily found reprinted in his ?Pot Boilers?.<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Stuart<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 7:48 AM Stuart N. Clarke<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <<a ymailto="mailto:stuart.n.clarke@btinternet.com" href="mailto:stuart.n.clarke@btinternet.com">stuart.n.clarke@btinternet.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> I have begun to read VWB91 . . .<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Re Karen Levenback?s discussion of ?The Royal Academy? in VWM: in my<br></div><div dir="ltr">> selected essay collection, ?Street Haunting and Other Essays?<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Street-Haunting-Essays-Vintage-Classics/dp/009958977X" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.co.uk/Street-Haunting-Essays-Vintage-Classics/dp/009958977X</a><br></div><div dir="ltr">> I paired that essay with ?Thunder at Wembley? under the heading ?The<br></div><div dir="ltr">> British Empire?. In the limited notes at the end of the book, I did,<br></div><div dir="ltr">> however, add a new one about the blinded soldier over-raising his leg:<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> A letter from Harry G. Sparks in the Athenaeum,<br></div><div dir="ltr">> 12 September 1919, stated that he had ?seen hundreds of<br></div><div dir="ltr">> [gassed] men do exactly the same thing? in France and that<br></div><div dir="ltr">> the ?over-emphasis? was ?on the part of the man ? not on<br></div><div dir="ltr">> that of the artist?.<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> I think Sargent is a wonderful artist ? next week I shall be going<br></div><div dir="ltr">> to the exhibition in Dulwich<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <a href="http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2017/june/sargent-the-watercolours/" target="_blank">http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2017/june/sargent-the-watercolours/</a><br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> but I think the murals in the Boston Library are frightful (I?ve<br></div><div dir="ltr">> only seen repros).<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> ?Gassed? seems to me to be borderline ? it?s almost an awful mural,<br></div><div dir="ltr">> but it?s not.<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> ________________________<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> VWB p. 20<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Vernon ?Lee ?certainly ranked the press among the most culpable<br></div><div dir="ltr">> sustainers of the slaughter??<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Cf. Jacob ?had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance.?<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> with an editorial in The Times in October 1914: ?The undergraduate<br></div><div dir="ltr">> who last summer was playing his pleasant games and making his pleasant<br></div><div dir="ltr">> little academic jokes, to whom the world was a charming if rather<br></div><div dir="ltr">> bewildering place, is now suddenly a man with a plain and glorious<br></div><div dir="ltr">> duty before him, a man like those Greeks who fought at Marathon and<br></div><div dir="ltr">> Salamis, like Aeschylus himself, the poet of the great age that was<br></div><div dir="ltr">> prepared for a victory in which he took part.?<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> ________________________<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> I suppose I was naive, but I had thought (hoped?) that from 2014 on,<br></div><div dir="ltr">> we would commemorate the pointlessness of WW1, and the emphasis would<br></div><div dir="ltr">> be on its folly and waste. Indeed, there was 3-part documentary-type<br></div><div dir="ltr">> recreation of the days leading up to the declaration of war, with the<br></div><div dir="ltr">> script using the actual words that politicians, the Kaiser, etc.,<br></div><div dir="ltr">> actually said or wrote. It was clear that Sir Edward Grey had no<br></div><div dir="ltr">> *grip* at all on events. I have subsequently discovered his employing<br></div><div dir="ltr">> that very word in his autobiography: ?In Austria, as in Russia, there<br></div><div dir="ltr">> was no head with direction and grip of affairs? (GREY, [Edward],<br></div><div dir="ltr">> Viscount, of Fallodon, K.G., "Twenty-Five Years, 1892-1916" (2 vols),<br></div><div dir="ltr">> London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925, ii. 32).<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Instead, the modern obsession with personalities, individuals and<br></div><div dir="ltr">> their reactions to events has obfuscated. Instead of condemnations<br></div><div dir="ltr">> and analyses of politicians and the military, we get stories about<br></div><div dir="ltr">> grandfathers and great-uncles who *never came back*, or, if they did,<br></div><div dir="ltr">> *never talked about what had happened to them*. Or their bodies were<br></div><div dir="ltr">> never found. Or descendants or other relatives who never knew them<br></div><div dir="ltr">> visit their graves or even just their names on the Menin Gate. And<br></div><div dir="ltr">> sometimes they weep quietly.<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Even more naively, I was shocked to hear:<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> ?Hundreds of thousands of Canadians crossed the cold, grey Atlantic<br></div><div dir="ltr">> to take a stand against tyranny and oppression,? said Prince Charles,<br></div><div dir="ltr">> speaking to a huge crowd gathered in sunny fields beneath a giant<br></div><div dir="ltr">> monument to the Canadians who died in World War I.<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/09/prince-charles-visits-world-war-one-battlefields-sons-justin/" target="_blank">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/09/prince-charles-visits-world-war-one-battlefields-sons-justin/</a><br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> On 11 November 2020 I hope I?ll remember this:<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Referring to the unveiling of the Cenotaph in Whitehall by George V<br></div><div dir="ltr">> on 11 November 1920, VW wrote: ?going down the Strand the night of the<br></div><div dir="ltr">> Cenotaph; such a lurid scene, like one in Hell. A soundless street; no<br></div><div dir="ltr">> traffic; but people marching. Clear, cold, & windless. A bright light<br></div><div dir="ltr">> in the Strand; women crying Remember the Glorious Dead, & holding out<br></div><div dir="ltr">> chrysanthemums. Always the sound of feet on the pavement. Faces bright<br></div><div dir="ltr">> & lurid [. . .] A ghastly procession of people in their sleep? (D2<br></div><div dir="ltr">> 79?80).<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> Stuart<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">> _______________________________________________<br></div><div dir="ltr">> <br></div><div dir="ltr">_______________________________________________<br></div><div dir="ltr">Vwoolf mailing list<br></div><div dir="ltr"><a ymailto="mailto:Vwoolf@lists.osu.edu" href="mailto:Vwoolf@lists.osu.edu">Vwoolf@lists.osu.edu</a><br></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf" target="_blank">https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf</a><br></div><br><br></div> </div> </div> </div></div></body></html>