[Vwoolf] Woolf on Armistice

Dr T Tate tt206 at cam.ac.uk
Fri Sep 8 12:44:34 EDT 2017


Thanks to Stuart for some very interesting reflections on the recent FWW 
commemorations, and his thoughts about what hasn't been learned; or was 
once known then lost again.

In case this is of interest: there's a discussion of VW on the Armistice 
in my essay 'King Baby' in Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy, eds., *The 
Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice* (Manchester UP); 
2013 hardback; 2015 paperback). The essay is about how babies were 
perceived at the end of the FWW, with some discussion of Woolf, 
Mansfield and Bowen.

It also looks at the complaint during the FWW that war propaganda 
infantilised citizens -- both Woolf and Freud talk about this.

---
Dr Trudi Tate
Clare Hall
Cambridge CB3 9AL
https://truditateblog.wordpress.com
www.literaturecambridge.co.uk


> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2017 10:19:46 +0100
> From: "Stuart N. Clarke" <stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com>
> To: <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
> Subject: [Vwoolf] Commemorating the Great War & VWM91 (again)
> Message-ID: <10EC8466E2374E04B4F03C3BDF6BEC3D at StuartHP>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Thanks to Karen Levenback, who points out the online availability of
> Clive Bell?s ?Peace at Once?, I have been reading it for the first
> time; and I have been rereading Bella Woolf?s ?Right against Might?
> (also available online, but I have a copy).  This was stimulated by
> Hilary Newman?s discussion of those 2 short monographs.
> 
> Hilary mentions that Bell is repetitive, but polemicists always are
> (e.g. Louise DeSalvo, Irene Coates).  Woolf, however, is also
> repetitive: the destruction of Malines Cathedral is mentioned 4 times:
> pp. 10, 17, 19, 24.
> 
> However, Woolf is not really a polemicist: she assumes that her
> readers will accept what she says.  Her short book is more like Harold
> Nicolson?s "Why Britain is at War" (1939), although her book lacks his
> book?s intellectual content.  Also, while the footnotes are ?for the
> benefit of children who may read the book?, the text does seem to be
> addressed to young people -- or at least is written in a very simple
> way (she was after all mainly a children?s writer).
> 
> https://archive.org/details/rightagainstmigh00wooluoft
> https://archive.org/details/peaceatonce00bell
> 
> ?Peace at Once? is perceptively accurate in some of its predictions
> and wrong in others.  It is too rational, too intelligent.  Bell says
> e.g. ?Is there any reason for supposing that under German rule an
> ordinary man would be so much worse off, morally and materially, that,
> to avoid it, it is worth doing and enduring what ordinary men are
> doing and enduring on three Continents and on the high seas??  He may
> well have been right in the context of 1915, but even now Brexit shows
> that that would not have been acceptable to ?ordinary men?.
> 
> By the way, Bell?s article ?Art and War? (referred to in the essay) is
> more easily found reprinted in his ?Pot Boilers?.
> 
> Stuart
> 
> On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 7:48 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/009958977X
>   I 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 that
>   the ?over-emphasis? was ?on the part of the man ? not on
>   that of the artist?.
> 
> 
>   I think Sargent is a wonderful artist ? next week I shall be going
> to the exhibition in Dulwich
> 
> 
> http://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. 20
> 
>   Vernon ?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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