[Vwoolf] Commemorating the Great War (& VWM91)

Sun Sep 3 09:19:55 EDT 2017

Sargent before the War and Woolf
I thought of Stuart and "Gassed" and my Miscellany issue on Woolf, Bloomsbury, and the GreatWar when I read this review of Sargent's Painted Ladies in the Gilded Age----before the War.
Cheers on Labor Day--Karen Levenback
A Panorama of the Gilded Age, Seen Through Sargent’s Art

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A Panorama of the Gilded Age, Seen Through Sargent’s Art
 By Amy Bloom In “Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas,” Donna M. Lucey depicts the glittering world of the late-19th...  |   |

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    On Wednesday, August 30, 2017 7:49 AM, Stuart N. Clarke <stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com> wrote:

 I have begun to read VWB91 . . . Re Karen Levenback’s discussion of “The Royal Academy” in VWM: in my selected essay collection, “Street Haunting and Other Essays”https://www.amazon.co.uk/Street-Haunting-Essays-Vintage-Classics/dp/009958977XI paired that essay with “Thunder at Wembley” under the heading “The British Empire”.  In the limited notes at the end of the book, I did, however, add a new one about the blinded soldier over-raising his leg: A letter from Harry G. Sparks in the Athenaeum,12 September 1919, stated that he had ‘seen hundreds of[gassed] men do exactly the same thing’ in France and thatthe ‘over-emphasis’ was ‘on the part of the man – not onthat of the artist’. I think Sargent is a wonderful artist – next week I shall be going to the exhibition in Dulwichhttp://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2017/june/sargent-the-watercolours/but I think the murals in the Boston Library are frightful (I’ve only seen repros). “Gassed” seems to me to be borderline – it’s almost an awful mural, but it’s not.________________________ VWB p. 20Vernon ‘Lee “certainly ranked the press among the most culpable sustainers of the slaughter”’ Cf. Jacob “had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance.”with an editorial in The Times in October 1914: ‘The undergraduate who last summer was playing his pleasant games and making his pleasant little academic jokes, to whom the world was a charming if rather bewildering place, is now suddenly a man with a plain and glorious duty before him, a man like those Greeks who fought at Marathon and Salamis, like Aeschylus himself, the poet of the great age that was prepared for a victory in which he took part.’________________________ I suppose I was naive, but I had thought (hoped?) that from 2014 on, we would commemorate the pointlessness of WW1, and the emphasis would be on its folly and waste.  Indeed, there was 3-part documentary-type recreation of the days leading up to the declaration of war, with the script using the actual words that politicians, the Kaiser, etc., actually said or wrote.  It was clear that Sir Edward Grey had no *grip* at all on events.  I have subsequently discovered his employing that very word in his autobiography: “In Austria, as in Russia, there was no head with direction and grip of affairs” (GREY, [Edward], Viscount, of Fallodon, K.G., "Twenty-Five Years, 1892-1916" (2 vols), London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925, ii. 32). Instead, the modern obsession with personalities, individuals and their reactions to events has obfuscated.  Instead of condemnations and analyses of politicians and the military, we get stories about grandfathers and great-uncles who *never came back*, or, if they did, *never talked about what had happened to them*.  Or their bodies were never found.  Or descendants or other relatives who never knew them visit their graves or even just their names on the Menin Gate.  And sometimes they weep quietly. Even more naively, I was shocked to hear:“Hundreds of thousands of Canadians crossed the cold, grey Atlantic to take a stand against tyranny and oppression,” said Prince Charles, speaking to a huge crowd gathered in sunny fields beneath a giant monument to the Canadians who died in World War I.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/09/prince-charles-visits-world-war-one-battlefields-sons-justin/ On 11 November 2020 I hope I’ll remember this: Referring to the unveiling of the Cenotaph in Whitehall by George V on 11 November 1920, VW wrote: ‘going down the Strand the night of the Cenotaph; such a lurid scene, like one in Hell. A soundless street; no traffic; but people marching. Clear, cold, & windless. A bright light in the Strand; women crying Remember the Glorious Dead, & holding out chrysanthemums. Always the sound of feet on the pavement. Faces bright & lurid [. . .] A ghastly procession of people in their sleep’ (D2 79–80). Stuart_______________________________________________
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