Richard Luckett on a memorial to a war-poet
There can be no doubt that Wilfred Owen was a rat poet. The rear-guard action mounted by meats in his preface to the Oxford Book of _cidern Verse failed long ago, having done far et more damage to Yeats than it ever did to Owen. Y Owen himself remains an enigma: there is `11e irrefragable achievement of the thirty war 12eenls, considered, controlled, utterly confiu.,ent in their searing rhetoric, whilst outside that there is the shadow of the 'prentice work, most of which reads as though it had been written in order that it should be rejected by the egt itor of Georgian Poetry. At the beginning of 1 b.e war, writes Mr Stallworthy in his new "graphy*, Owen was an "aesthete, botanist, 1,10et, and Vicar's assistant" who had gone to ranee to teach English and try and sort out wthhat he would ultimately do in life. At home Cale„re was a tightly-knit, almost claustrophobi Y affectionate family, in which the father's oitter experience of the restrictions imposed on f.ersonal fulfillment by the necessity to earn a lying acted as a check on any high-flown ,,Inbitions, literary or otherwise. Equally, Mrs .‘,-;.!vert's intensity of feeling for her son — which wilfred by no means shunned and often effectively encouraged — acted as a constraint (s3r1 his emotional development and made him ke.te.rn Younger than his age. Yet when he was Cr ified, a week before the Armistice, at the Sing of the samhre canal, he was only Ilalf-wosay through his twenty-sixth year.
i b There was once a conventional format for the r°graphies of men killed in the Great War. antilies with the inclination and the means the gared letters and the accounts of schoolMasters and brother-officers, added suitably e13urgated portions of diaries or other fragr-`erits, and entrusted the editing to a friend or :lative with literary inclinations. The slim a°1,11Trie, limited to a hundred and fifty copies for private circulation only, would be `..'eriled with a suitable portrait-frontispiece of ti4.Sacrificial victim, proudly clad in barathea d. 'eh — together with the wearer — could be ce _Isrned from its bloom not yet to have exPerienced the trenches. The biographer of Wilfred Owen is faced with 'et° rather more difficult task. Had Owen henle from an upper or middle-class background Would in the way of things have been a souitable candidate for such a volume, whether srhnot he had written poetry. As the son of the that station-master it was an attention he might reasonably have hoped to avoid. b "ne finest of the English poets whose art was srnught to fruition in, and brutally circumgerria,b,..ed by, the Great War, a full-dress biofi;ITY was almost inevitable. But any potenb;"Lniographer faced substantial competition. th "is Journey from Obscurity Harold Owen, life Poet's artist brother, recounted Wilfred's We from his own privileged point of view. This rels an admirable solution artistically, since the ',ationships that played such a part in Owen's13`----&_.-itlging had their resonance in the structure
fred Owen: A Biography Jon Stallworthy ‘`-"tfora with Chatto and Windus £6,75) of the book, and the book itself, which was as much about the context of Owen's life, and about the life of the narrator, as about Owen in a narrow sense, had something of the fascination of a well-contrived novel. There was, in any case, a memoir by Edmund Blunden giving an account of. Owen in the war, and the publication of Owen's letters to his mother served as a documentary and autobiographical concordance to these records. Mr Stallworthy was helped in the preparation of his biography by Harold Owen, and he has been able to collect a certain amount of new material. Since he is engaged in the preparation of a complete edition of Owen's poems he has also been able to use Owen's drafts, and to offer a foretaste of a number of interesting (if minor) textual emendations. Nevertheless these advantages have not enabled him to circumvent the difficulties posed by his subject, and it is doubtful whether, even if Mrs Owen had disobeyed her son's instructions by failing to burn the sack of papers which she loyally destroyed on hearing of his death, this could have been a wholly successful book. Bad poetry is not transmuted because its author subsequently finds a subject and a language; sentimental family correspondence remains just that, even though we can discern in it traces of emotions and ideas that will emerge, transfigured, later on. The biographer's task is to describe rather than to exhibit, and does not, simply because he is a biographer, achieve exemption from the obligation to which every writer must own: that he should not be tedious. Mr Stallworthy implicity defends his methods when he attempts to explain the enigmatic aspect of Owen's career. Owen's talents, he suggests, emerged as much from the fortunate circumstances of his life as from the heat of .inspiration, the convenient chemistry of 'genius.' Owen had been prepared by his pre-War interests and enthusiasms for the experience that he was to undergo: "Botany and Broxton, Uriconium and Keats, his adolescent hypochondria, his religious upbringing and later doubts, all shaped him for his subject, as for no other." This is an interesting contention, though easily carried too far, as when Mr Stallworthy speculates that Owen may have had a homosexual tendency, and goes on to hazard a connection between this and the presentation of "boys killed in battle." To argue this way is to devalue Owen's humanity. But the basic proposition also embodies what is, at best, a half-truth, for we have no way of telling how Owen might have related other preoccupations to the experience of the front. The point that Mr Stallworthy does make, that is at once arresting and convincing, is that it is wrong to avoid Owen's literary preoccupations and to place them at a remove from naked experience. He shows that, in poems written before he knew anything of the realities of the War, Owen was toying with metaphors which are now widely taken to derive directly from his time in the trenches, and he also points out that one of the turning-points in Owen's poetic career was his reading of Barbusse's Under Fire. In other words, even after experiencing the horror of the trenches what he required, in order to see his way clear to an adequate expression of those experiences, was a literary stimulus.
Mr Stallworthy is at his best in discussing Owen's enthusiasm for Keats, and the list that he prints of Owen's books, with a great batch of scored and underlined school editions of Shakespeare, speaks for itself. Owen took both Keats and Shakespeare into his experience with a wholeheartedness that finds its echo in Keats' descriptions of his own, readings of Shakespeare. The parallel between Owen and Keats has been explored before: both reputations rest on a comparatively small body of poetry; there is in both poets the same sharp demarcation between poems which fail and . poems which, whilst having many elements in common with the failures, brilliantly succeed; Keats wrote against the choking tide of his consumption, Owen lived each day with the knowledge that his life expectancy, as a front-line subaltern, must be measured in weeks. To read Mr Stallworthy is to rediscover, briefly but vividly, just how apposite the comparison is, and to see it as something that must always strengthen the case of those who argue that to consider Owen simply as a 'War Poet' is to devalue his achievement.
In his successful poems Wilfred Owen achieves a balance between splendour of rhetoric and comprehensiveness of statement that, in this century, we can match only by turning to Yeats. "Was it for this the clay grew tall?" is a line which contrives to combine simplicity of language, complexity of reference and inevitability of cadence, and at the same time, by means of these things, to make a statement about the Great War to which there can be no answer. It is a sad irony that a quite proper ,response to the mature poems can so swiftly lead to the rehearsal of much that is worse than second rate. The Day Lewis edition of Owen will, no doubt, be superseded by Mr Stallworthy's projected volume. But one of its merits was that it served Owen by being concerned with what he accomplished, rather than with the gestation of his accomplishment. The chief value of Mr Stallworthy's biography, painstaking as it is, is that it confirms the accuracy of the Day Lewis introduction, the Blunden memoir, and the book by Harold Owen. It will no doubt appeal to those who feel the need to approach great poetry through uninspired biography. But it would have been a truer book had it conformed to the dimensions of the memorial accounts, from which Owen was debarred by birth, and doubly debarred by achievement.
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