The 14 best Second World War novels — chosen by William Boyd and Max Hastings
Let's begin with an intriguing thought experiment: the celebrated writers of the First World War contrasted with those of the Second, writes William Boyd. The essential writers of 1914-18 — the Great War — might be judiciously considered as, for instance: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney and Charles Sorley. Whereas the 1939-45 conflict produces names like Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen, Vasily Grossman and Hans Hellmut Kirst, for example.
The first group contains only poets; the second is all novelists. How can this schism, this paradox between the two art forms be explained? Why was poetry the chosen means of literary expression in the Great War and the
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New Statesman
2 hours ago
- New Statesman
We are all Mrs Dalloway now
Photo byEveryone has cracks; we hear that's how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she wanted 'everything – love, children, adventure, intimacy, work'. In her masterpiece Mrs Dalloway, published a century ago, she wanted 'all inner feelings to be lit up'. But so much light meant so many cracks. Virginia Woolf is now such a large figure in global literary culture that she has at least 15 full-length biographies. But Mark Hussey's new Mrs Dalloway is a biography of a novel by Woolf, relaying its conception, execution and propagation. Hussey is Professor of English at New York's Pace University, and we believe him when he tells us Woolf is 'my favourite writer': he has published several books on her, and includes a charmingly domestic photo of his personal Dalloway stash, piled 20 editions high, which he started over 50 years ago. By scholarship's best guess, Dalloway's scene – 'life; London; this moment of June' – is 11 June 1923. For the last eight years, with Woolf's reputation higher than ever, a 'Dalloway Day' has been celebrated, with tours of Woolf's London led by the Virginia Woolf Society. The festivities will be particularly exuberant this year, the centenary of Dalloway's publication. Walkers will see Bloomsbury and Westminster in all the 'absorbing, mysterious… infinite richness' Woolf imbued them with, 'as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious'. The amusements may sound little more than a short walk around central London. But so, really, might the book's plot. In the story, a politician's fashionable wife, Clarissa Dalloway, gives a fancy party, and a traumatised young veteran of the First World War, Septimus Warren Smith, kills himself after his doctors neglect him. Hussey is correct that, asked what the book is about, one might answer 'not much.' But, of course, for Woolf it was all about what was happening inside her characters. In that way she was of her modernist cohort, trying to find her artistic bearings after the moment 'on or about December 1910', as she put it, when 'human character changed'. To Woolf, to Joyce, to Proust, there had been what Hussey calls 'a fundamental shift in relations' between subject, object, and the nature of reality. What Woolf called Edwardian writing was futile just as describing a house's exterior was futile to convey the soul who slept inside. If art was to answer the 'astonishing disorder' of modernity, it had to directly penetrate conscious experience. It was an ambitious project, but Woolf felt confident. She had brought off two fairly conventional novels, and her more daring third, Jacob's Room, had attained wide praise. She felt she could write freely, and that she at last knew 'how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice'. Or, putting it another way, that she was 'beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain'. Her voice was her mental mechanism, however flawed that mechanism. Woolf had had to stay in a private nursing home after a severe breakdown that came a year after the marriage from which she wanted everything. A few months later, chance alone her saved her from death, after she took a deliberate overdose of Veronal (a sleeping aid). And two years after that she had suffered another severe breakdown. But with her confidence and reputation waxing, she felt 'madness is terrific… in its lava I find most of the things I write about'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Readers liked in her what she liked in those she read: what she called 'queer individuality'. So the project was to inspect her self as it shattered and reconstituted. No humans were 'as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes'. Instead they were 'splinters & mosaics', and art should show them as such. A plane broken to pieces and put together again became a mosaic, and thereby turned particular, beautiful, and more interestingly refractive. At one point in the novel, Clarissa Dalloway is seen mending her dress. To do full justice to her 'queer individuality', she devised for Mrs Dalloway a 'queer & masterful' design. For it, she had 'almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity.' So she devised Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, who would show 'the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side' and who, as in a long-held idea for a play, would only ever 'almost meet – only a door between – you see how they just miss – and go off at a tangent, and never come anywhere near again'. But they did come near again. The problem we all know, visible in the book and its author's life, is that the separation did not hold. Sanity went into insanity, life went into death. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse. Clarissa does not commit suicide, but was originally intended to, and it may be telling that one early reader mistakenly believed she had after finishing the book. Septimus, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, who fought to defend Shakespeare's England, does kill himself, and gives lie to the vision of art as individualisation. If the war launched Woolf's project, it also undermined it. Compare Woolf's artistic vision of splinters and mosaics, of lively Clarissa mending her dress, with her thoughts when visiting a relative, wounded during the First World War, in his hospital ward. She felt 'the uselessness of it all, breaking these people & mending them again'. It is hard to say what differentiates life-giving art from death-giving war. In one letter, Woolf described the War in artistic terms, as 'the preposterous masculine fiction'. Septimus is a traumatised veteran, but if any character has 'queer individuality' it is he. And he grows 'stranger and stranger', more and more alone, by allowing himself to think too much. The modernists thought leaving 'description' for 'insight' would help them ascertain truth; in fact it destroyed it. They were not writing, as they thought, after Einstein and Freud, but after their closer contemporary, Werner Heisenberg, the quantum physicist who found that electrons refused to be fixed under observation. So did the modern self, inspection only creating uncertainty. Woolf was closer than she knew on writing in her essay 'Modern Novels' that consciousness is an 'incessant shower of innumerable atoms'. The self-attention they hoped would achieve stability in fact wrecks it. The more you look, the less you know. Woolf's own metaphor was a 'tunnelling process', which allowed her to 'tunnel behind the façade of objective appearance' and reveal consciousness. But efforts to light up anything can only ever illuminate a new, deeper darkness. There is nothing at the back to reach. Clarissa feels 'the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone'. The best option might be to turn back while you still can. The generic life Woolf feared, inert and inartistic, 'mute & mitigated, in the suburbs,' may be preferable. Septimus loathes his boorish physician Dr Holmes, and Woolf loathed the psychiatrists she based him on. But it is hard to dismiss his insistence that introspection offers no delivery from itself, and his prescription that what Septimus really needs is to stop thinking about himself and become occupied by external things. To do so would certainly be to neglect his individuality, but the depths of his individuality killed him. Perhaps he should have joined the dull masses. The bores were right. In a preliminary, more frivolous appearance, the character of Clarissa Dalloway exclaimed, 'How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!' How much? Mrs Dalloway contains the birth and the doom of the modern self. We are all Virginia Woolf's children. She wanted light and was determined that it could be found somewhere at the back of the 'dark region of psychology'. She never found it, but we have continued her search. Her 'queer individuality' is a public deity. That the unexamined life is not worth living is a truth inviolable; indeed we examine relentlessly. It is almost axiomatic that inward tunnelling breaks through to rewarding clarity. But Mrs Dalloway is a warning as much as guide. Perhaps, for once, we need not go deeper. [See also: Who's offended by Virginia Woolf?] Related
The Herald Scotland
11 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Dumbstruck in Dumfries: I discovered my Scots great gran was a hussy
This had the makings of a disaster. The BBC's long-running genealogy show had chosen as its subject one Diane Morgan. As her alter ego Philomena Cunk, Morgan has made her name lampooning the likes of WDYTYA, with its talking head experts and presenters who go on 'journeys'. Her sitcom, Mandy, once referenced a show called Who Are You, Do You Think? ('Not as good as Danny Dyer's but still all right'). I know WDYTYA has been a bit boring lately - frankly, some of the 'celebrities' have been human sleeping tablets - but come on, wasn't this a case of TV eating itself? As Morgan said: 'I never thought in a million years you'd actually ask me to be on it.' Bolton born and bred and now living in Bloomsbury (nice), Morgan had three aims: to learn more about her Aunty Ginny's fiance, Albert Dugdale, who died in the First World War; to trace her Scottish roots in Dumfries; and to find out the identity of 'German Charlie', the stuff of family legend. As she suspected, Morgan's journey was far from glam. She travelled on buses and suburban trains to small town libraries, all the while supplying her own self-deprecating commentary. 'Can I pretend to pay cos I'm with the film crew?' she asked a bus driver. There was a lot of weaving in her background. German Charlie's story was part of that history and wasn't terribly interesting unless you were into chimneys. Aunty Ginny, Morgan discovered, lived near the rest of the family in Bolton, as many of her generation did. That didn't set the heather on fire either. But Dumfries and Morgan's four times great-grandmother Isabella? Now you're talking. Isabella turned out to have had five children to four different fathers. History could relate this because she had taken all the absent fathers to court for child support. As a result, a record of her existence existed - a rarity for a woman, even more so someone who was working class. Young Diane at home in Bolton with her family (Image: PHOTOGRAPHER:Diane Morgan) Between the lines there was obvious sadness. One record said Isabella had been known to the local lads as 'an improper character'. 'I thought you were going to tell me I was related to Robert the Bruce or Robert Burns, one of the Roberts,' said Morgan. 'Instead my great, great, great grandmother was a bit of a hussy.' For fear of spoilers I'm not going to say what happened next in Dumfries, or how Morgan got on tracing Albert Dugdale's family to give them the 'death penny' that had been kept safe in her family. If you haven't seen the show you are in for a treat. Morgan's WDYTYA probably isn't destined for the hall of fame. But the very ordinariness of the people we learned about was what made them special. They weren't kings or queens or captains of industry or explorers, they did dull jobs and lived in terraced houses, but they were here once, and their lives mattered. Whoever decided Diane Morgan would be a good pick for WDYTYA should be given a pay rise. This could have been a disaster; instead it was a triumph.
South Wales Argus
4 days ago
- South Wales Argus
Ghost hunt event to take place at Llanyrafon Manor Farm
Llanyrafon Manor Farm, in Cwmbran, is hosting a 12-hour lockdown and fear ball ghost hunt. Those brave enough are invited to bring their own bedding and spend the night inside the reportedly haunted building. (Image: Supplied) The event will include a paranormal investigation with Tracey and Nigel Turner, séance technique experiments, and a free exploration of the site's three acres of grounds. Visitors will have access to most areas, including the Tudor kitchen, Great Chamber, and attic bedrooms. The history of Llanyrafon Manor Farm dates back to the mid-1500s, and it's thought that a timber-framed medieval building stood on the site as far back as the 13th century. The site was possibly a farm for the monks of Llantarnam Abbey, and some of its remains can still be seen today. The Griffiths family owned the manor for centuries, with the earliest member of the family appearing to be Walter Griffith of Llanyrafon, who practised as an attorney and left a will dated November 20, 1629. The manor once stood in a thousand acres of ground, and during the First World War, three Italian prisoners of war worked on the farm. In the Second World War, members of the Women's Land Army worked the farm, learning how to perform tasks including ploughing, milking, harvesting, and digging. Today, Llanyrafon Manor Farm stands as grand as ever, its history once again showcased for all to enjoy. A free breakfast and unlimited teas, coffees, hot chocolate, bottled waters, juice, and biscuits will be available. The event is not open to pregnant ladies or anyone intending to consume drugs or alcohol. Over in Abersychan, Garndiffaith Millennium Hall will host a murder mystery evening. (Image: Supplied) The event, which will run from 6pm to 9pm on Saturday, June 7, invites attendees to come along and solve the mystery. A ploughman's supper is included in the ticket price of £6.50. For those interested in the murder mystery evening, tickets will be available from the hall or via Eventbrite. Flash Back will travel across the border to the Olway Inn, Usk, on Saturday, June 7. (Image: Supplied) The band will perform rock and pop hits from the 60s to the 00s, promising an evening of dance and sing-along for all. Tintern Abbey will also be hosting a historical event over both days of the weekend. (Image: Supplied) Visitors will be able to discover all about monastic life in the high medieval period at one of the nation's largest monasteries of the time. The Chapter of Stronghold re-enactment group will portray the lives of monastic people, including monks, nuns, and laypeople as they write, pray, live, and eat at Tintern Abbey. There will be authentic cooking, manuscript writing, a holy reliquary, and more. Normal admission prices apply for this event.
