This essay appeared in The Welsh Connection, ed. William Tydeman (Gomer Press 1986).
1
In "Lance-Jack", a prose piece included among the short stories of The Last Inspection, Alun Lewis, describing a conversation with chance-met
fellow-soldiers at the mess table, writes:
We are curiously impersonal, considering the imminent destruction of Fortinbras and all his braves. A soldier is always impersonal.1
The last-quoted sentence undercuts the adverb in its predecessor. Perhaps only a civilian listener ignorant of the life of soldiers could find
their impersonality curious. Lewis goes on to gloss this impersonality in two ways. First, it’s "the only way to preserve any privacy in conditions
where one is never alone". In appallingly cramped living-conditions, each soldier seeks to create an illusion of space around himself not simply
in order to secure his own privacy, but so that his comrades may secure theirs. Second, this impersonality is "non-political": it's a refusal
to think insistently of the war as a conflict between powers that define themselves in ideological terms, powers with racial and economic identities.
In his war-book Alamein to Zem-Zem, Keith Douglas elaborates a similar detachment:
We talk in the evening, after fighting, about the great and rich men who cause and conduct wars. They have so many reasons of their own that
they can afford to lend us some of them. There is nothing odd about their attitude. They are out for something they want, or their Governments
want, and they are using us to get it for them. Anyone can understand that...2
The soldiers are instruments in the hands of forces over which they can exert no influence: their destinies and lives have passed out of their
own control – and yet they don’t stop to lament this fact, for they recognise it as a donné of the game that war is. There is no resentment
in Douglas at "the great and rich men who cause and conduct wars": rather one feels in his prose a nonchalance expressive of an inner independence.
In accepting the situation without rancour he asserts the superiority of spirit to circumstance.
To Lewis's two glosses of impersonality must be added a third. This may be thought to carry more weight than the others and, though he doesn't
explicitly canvas it in "Lance-Jack", it may be felt to press forward in the words: "considering the imminent destruction of Fortinbras and
all his braves". The soldier cultivates impersonality as a means of protecting himself against feelings and emotions that threaten to undermine
his capacity to endure the predicament of war. Most necessary and most difficult is the strength to withstand the brute fact of death: the dead
body of an enemy or a comrade is the self- or mirror-image of the surviving combatant: Lewis himself is one of Fortinbras's braves. Impersonality
in this sense is a complex psychic quality, and it's easy to sell it short. To talk, for instance, of battle hardening the soldier, or of the
soldier hardening himself in order to withstand the pressures of battle, is to reduce to a single perspective a transaction between man and
circumstance that cannot be so reduced without distortion. Then, impersonality as it manifests itself in one temperament is unlikely perfectly
to agree with impersonality as it manifests itself in another. At one extreme it may be a surface matter, a veneer cultivated in an attempt
to reflect the grim images that war casts upon it, so that a soldier's sense of self remains supple and intense. At the other extreme it may
cut so deep as to constitute a state of hollowness in which an individual's powers of emotional response are depressed to a point at which it
would be true to say that he has lost his sense of himself as a person vitally alive: he has undergone, that is, psychic death.
Alun Lewis was deeply conscious of the dangers inherent in the impersonal life and attitude of the soldier. In "Lance-Jack" he set up a number
of oppositions that express those dangers. The soldier's existence is rootless, itinerant, "casual, rough, hazardous and incomplete"3.
Against this is the life of the family rooted in as particular locality: "warm and personal and loving". The soldier's existence is masculinity
untempered by the feminine, necessity unsoftened by possibility, and it's natural, as Lewis says, that women should "dislike, even hate" the
male capacity to live the separated, strange and lonely life of the soldier. Such an existence becomes "dangerous" for Lewis when the soldier
loses all sympathy with the integrated, balanced life of families:
For sometimes when he is utterly alone, utterly impersonal, on guard in the night at some outpost, somewhere, he can only envisage the human
past, the great centrifugal force of the heart which draws into its orbit and unites in love all differences of people, mother and sweetheart,
friend and pauper, employer and baby daughter, I say he can only envisage this great power of life as a swarming of bees on a bough, of flies
on a fallen damson, a noisy, slightly indecent congress. 4
At the time he wrote this, in late 1940, Lewis was undergoing advanced training at Longmoor in Hampshire and had been a soldier for less than
six months; he wasn't to leave England for India until two more years had passed. It's difficult not to believe that he's contrasting in this
remarkable passage modes of feeling he had himself experienced. He had known both that "great centrifugal force of the heart" which is the power
of love and sympathy, the desire to reconcile and to create, and its opposite: a spiritual state in which human beings, their affinities and
involvements, become insectile and repellent. Feeling "centrifugally", you are at the centre of life, at one with human beings and their emotions
and aspirations; thrown "outwards" by the centripetal action of imagination, however, you look down at the earth from a remote and cold orbit,
and human life appears a trivial and nauseous phenomenon.
Of course, it isn’t necessary to be a soldier to experience these conflicting extremes of feeling. The 'negative' pole is classically that of
the Outsider, of, say, Sartre's Roquentin. Indeed, a disposition to module between extremes of feeling and mood seems to have been established
in Lewis before he joined the army, so that the life of a soldier exacerbated a pre-existing tendency. Furthermore, Lewis was a poet before
he was a soldier, and it's at this point that we need to remind ourselves that "impersonality" is a familiar term for the state of mind of the
artist in the act of creation. Most famously (and infamously), T. S. Eliot declared in his essay of 1919, "Tradition and the Individual Talent",
that "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality", and that "Poetry is not a turning loose
of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality".5
There are great and contentious difficulties here, first in the assertion that all artists (for that is what "an artist" seems to mean) do not
express their personalities in the works of art they create, second in the doctrine that poetry shouldn't express emotion, and third in the
denigratory linking of "emotion" and "personality". Nevertheless, Eliot's formulation provides us with a handy definition of artistic impersonality:
it's "a continual self-sacrifice", a suppression of ego in order that imagination can act as a medium through which the "more valuable" promptings
of the unconstrained unconsciousness can rise up.
2
In focussing in this essay on the meeting-point of these two forms of impersonality in some of the war poems of Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas,
I'm particularly interested in the mutual accommodations they establish, and in the artistic and human cost they exact. Lewis, the older of
the two by some four and a half years, was the son of a Welsh schoolmaster. A historian by training (he took his M. A. at Manchester in 1937),
he eventually found a teaching post at a secondary school in Pengam, Glamorgan. His upbringing in Cwmaman, a coal-mining village in the same
county, had left him a socialist. In an article published in the Aberdare Leader in September 1938, he asks himself whether he is by
nature a fighter or a pacifist and opts, with reservations, for the former:
But this does not get us very far. I could hit a man with my fist, but I do not think I could stick a bayonet into him. Nor could I bomb an
open town. 6
He questions whether a Government has "the right to demand the lives of its 'subjects' in order to remedy a situation which is largely of its
own making" and concludes that enlistment, if war comes, will not be justified. But within the next eighteen months his attitude changed, and
impulsively he enlisted in the Royal Engineers in May 1940, from which he transferred, by way of an officers' training course, to the South
Wales Borderers late in the following year. When eventually he was posted in the autumn of 1943, it was to India.
Keith Douglas was the son of a Captain of Royal Engineers who had seen service in Mesopotamia and earned the M. C. for his part bridging the
Diala under fire. Captain and Mrs Douglas separated when Keith was eight, after which he was brought up by his mother. In a self-portrait written
at about the age of twelve, Douglas wrote:
As a child he was a militarist, and like many of his warlike elders, built up heroic opinions upon little information – some scrappy war stories
of his father.7
At Christ's Hospital his marked rebelliousness sorted oddly with his enthusiasm for the school Crops: he would spend half a week preparing for
parade and took pleasure in drilling, yet, according to his biographer Desmond Graham, "at sixteen he remained unambiguous about the reality
of war and the evil of militarism". In October 1938 he went up to Merton College, Oxford, to read English, but in July 1940 he enlisted. Following
a period of training at an equitation school, he went to Sandhurst where he opted for mechanised training. His main battle experience was to
be in North Africa.
Both Lewis and Douglas experienced the frustrations of the 'phoney' war, and the sense of stagnation that grows in the soldier continually preparing
for a battle that seems as though it will never take place. Lewis wrote to his wife from India on New Year's Eve 1942:
I get tired so quickly of the conventional life of the Mess, the officer-mind and its artificial assumptions, the rigid distinctions of rank
which so rarely go with quality and character, and the back-biting and watching each other that is a seething obligato to our daily bread.8
The enthusiasm which Douglas had earlier felt for repetitious military activity waned at Sandhurst, where he neglected his appearance and observed
sardonically to a friend:
I can see nothing more attractive than active service and final oblivion, to which I quite look forward. I shall feel such a chap dashing about
with stuff blowing up everywhere. I am trying to get East as soon as possible: and when I get there I shall make for the nearest harem and leave
the rest to Allah. 9
In order to get into action in the desert, Douglas (who had been given the safe job of commanding a two-ton truck at HQ) took the unusual step
of deserting to his regiment at the front, the Sherwood Rangers. In the event the regiment turned out to be so in need of reinforcements that
no questions were asked about Douglas's sudden appearance, and he was immediately assigned a troop of tanks. He then fought until wounded by
a mine in the advance on Tripoli in January 1943. Lewis, however, never saw action in Burma.
3
In June 1943, Lewis wrote to his parents from Bhiwandi:
Thinking back on my own writing, it all seemed to mature of a sudden between the winter of 1939 and the following autumn. Can't make it out.
Was it Gweno and the Army? What a combination!!! Beauty and the Beast! 10
Lewis locates his achievement of maturity in his twenty-fifth year. If by poetic maturity we mean a poet's discovery of his voice, his attainment
of a unified style in which there is no strain between discordant elements, and his ability to exert complete control over his medium (rather
than his medium, at times, controlling him), then I wouldn't accept that Lewis's verse was securely mature by late 1940. Only a minority of
the poems in Raider's Dawn (1942) strikes me as fully achieved, and the weaknesses in this collection are visible still from time to
time in Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets (1945). The problem may be expressed, at the risk of oversimplification, as one arising from the conflicting
demands of a romantic temperament and a reality whose texture remains intractable and militates against the transcendence the poet wishes to
affirm. Lewis is liable to lapse into a self-dramatising rhetoric that emphasises the disabling nature of his introspection. Here, for example,
is the first section of "The Soldier":
I within me holding
Turbulence and Time
– Volcanic fires deep beneath the glacier –
Feel the dark cancer in my vitals
Of impotent impatience grope its way
Through daze and dream to throat and fingers
To find its climax of disaster.
The sunlight breaks its flashing wings
Imprisoned in the Hall of Mirrors;
Nightmare rides upon the headlines:
And summer leaves her green reflective woods
To glitter momently on peaks of madness.
But leisurely my fellow soldiers stroll among the trees.
The cheapest dance-song utters all they feel.
This is not greatly intelligent or imaginative writing. The romantic self-absorption of the poet is complete: only I am vitally aware,
fully alive. But the strident language with its vague interlacings of material and abstract – "vitals / Of impotent impatience" – fails to convey
anything beyond melodrama. What's imprisoned in the Hall of Mirrors is the narcissistic poet, unable to see beyond his own pain to the pain
of others. When he does glance outwards, it’s to register the shallowness of the sensibilities of his fellow-soldiers. Yet though the soldiers
are rebuked, the language that describes them is measured and plain. If the soldiers have nothing to offer (and it's difficult to believe that
they have nothing to offer), the language in which they demand expression certainly has. It's refreshingly clean and sane. In the second
section of "The Soldier", the poet gains some relief from his torment by looking outwards at the behaviour of some finches. After a bit of undigested
Yeats, the poem ends:
Yet still
I who am agonized by thought
And war and love
Grow calm again
With watching
The flash and play of finches
Who are as beautiful
And as indifferent to me
As England is, this Spring morning.
One might say that the psychological history of Raider's Dawn is adumbrated in these lines. The poetry runs from an egocentric declaration
of the poet's sufferings, from its claim for the primacy of the experience of the romantic first person, to the poet's recognition that the
world is indifferent to his experience. Lewis owes the poise of his last three lines to the example of Edward Thomas, and it was from Thomas
more than any other poet that he leant how the shrill ego might be stilled – how impersonality might be cultivated. In the reflective calmness
of the poem's closure, Lewis escapes the ugly tyranny of the ego and recognises that the universe doesn't exist for his benefit, exists indeed
perhaps for no purpose. Nature, though indifferent to him, (certainly the finches are not indifferent to one another), is a source of consolation.
Lurking in the phrasing of the penultimate line one may detect the germ of a very different response: to step from the world's (or the cosmos's)
indifference towards the self to the self's indifference to the world can be to travel a surprisingly short distance. Impersonality isn't of
course synonymous with indifference: but if in a person the two do become the same, they do not do so without risk.
That Keith Douglas wrote poems displaying wit, sophistication and considerable technical ability at a dauntingly early age is a critical commonplace.
"Encounter with a God", written when he was sixteen, is a poem whose impersonality appears absolute. At once, however, one is confronted by
the paradoxicality of the term, for in truth "Encounter with a God" represents an act of complete self-possession on Douglas's part; it's a
creation in which an imaginative temperament perfectly expresses itself. But I want here to cite a still earlier piece, ".303", whose theme
is more germane to my discussion:
I have looked through the pine trees
cooling their sunwarmed needles in the night
I saw the moon's face, white,
beautiful as the breeze.
Yet you have seen the trees sway'd with the night's breath
wave like dead arms, repudiating the stars
and the moon, circular and useless pass
pockmarked with death.
Through a machine-gun's sights
I saw men weep, cough, sprawl in their entrails.
You did not know The Gardener in the vales.
Only efficiency delights you.
Although it's most natural to think that Douglas is contrasting his own way of seeing with that of another person, it's possible to interpret
the contrary viewpoints as objectified aspects of his own nature: certainly, in presenting the view of a sensibility that sees nature as dead,
he has passed that view through his imagination. The poem holds its contraries in unprejudiced balance: it doesn't cleave to one, dismiss the
other. The first person states the second person's ignorance of "The Gardener in the vales" as a simple fact, not a culpable failing. And if
the word "Only", beginning the last sentence, suggests a limitation, it also suggests a singleness of being, and the existence of opposite natures
and sources of delight which up until this moment the first person – whose understanding also has been limited – hasn't appreciated.
".303" clearly expresses a sensibility very different from that at work in "The Soldier". The unquestioning primacy assumed on behalf of the
romantic self and easy dismissal of the fellow-soldiers in Lewis's poem contrast sharply with Douglas's readiness to meditate on a way of seeing
that challenges 'his own'. One might express the difference as one between self-consciousness and self-awareness: Lewis is self-conscious whereas
Douglas is self-aware: Lewis's imagination is vulnerable to the play of ego, whilst in Douglas's poem ego has vacated in favour of imagination.
As a result, Douglas's is much the better and more intelligent poem.
4
As one might expect, both Lewis and Douglas saw military life as a test. In July 1940 Lewis wrote to Andrew Davies, a fellow-teacher:
The Army is a test of endurance – long term qualities – not courage or alacrity so much as the ability to conceive and maintain one's courage
or faith until it's needed – indefinitely.11
Even at this early point in his army experience, it's less the prospect of battle, of dying that exercises Lewis's mind, than the prospect of
maintaining a long-term "faith" in – a belief in the value and purposiveness of – living. The life that must be lived now is that of
a soldier, yet one suspects that maintaining faith with life would have been the great issue for Lewis whatever his circumstances. In the event,
the place to which he was posted tested him even more than the life he was compelled to live as a soldier. In his last letter to Robert Graves,
dated 23 January 1944, he wrote:
England is 'easy' compared with India – easier to corrupt & easier to improve. There are few deterrents at home: the inclination isn't continually
opposed by the cosmic disinclination, the individual isn't so ruthlessly & permanently subject to the laisser faire of the sun and the sterility.
India! What a test of a man!12
Rationally-speaking, there is neither "inclination" nor disinclination" in the cosmos, there is only existence – energy in a multitude of material
forms going about its entropic business. The "cosmic disinclination", an expansion of his insight in "The Soldier", is Lewis's disinclination
in the face of a landscape which declares the unprogressiveness of racial experience and the futility of human aspirations. What India did was
to define and deepen a spiritual rhythm in Lewis which he himself recognised. In the same letter to Graves, he says:
I live a certain rhythm which I'm becoming able to recognise. Periods of spiritual death, periods of neutrality, periods of a sickening normality,
and insane indifference, to the real implications of the present, and then for a brief wonderful space, maybe every six months, a nervous and
powerful ability moves upwards in me. India and the army both tend to fortify and protract the negative & passive phase, and if I am suddenly
excited & moved by something I have seen or felt, the excitement merely bounces on the hard unchanging surface like a rubber ball on asphalt.13
Lewis provides here not only a penetrating description of himself but the paradigm of a modern temperament. The letter confirms the contrasting
perceptions of "Lance-Jack", and extravagance of "The Soldier" and other poems of Raider's Dawn testify to the struggles of that temperament
to understand itself and to combat its own darkest propensities by seeking out the calmative powers of nature or by affirming the transcendent
powers of love.
In an autobiographical poem, "Prelude and Fugue"14 (a revised version of a poem first drafted at Longmoor in
1940 called "Thoughts on the Eve of a Great Battle"), Lewis sees his volatile and divided temperament, together with his artistic creativity,
as his inheritance from his mother. Whilst his father possessed "the ancestral peace of mind", his mother (he says in a passage influenced by
Yeats) "had the dance in her, / The deep despair and the unbounded hope". The first of these responses, the deep despair, is then glossed in
this way:
Both she and I have had the dream of darkness –
Of darkness beating implacably into the brain
Of the preacher unheeded and pitiful on the hillside,
And the poor no different for all his anguish.
It's a dream of the futility of humanitarian, socialist and democratic ideologies. "Darkness" here is not only death but that barbarism which
exists in the grain of the wood beneath the veneer of civilisations and which civilisations, losing their way, may themselves awaken and make
use of. This is made plain in the final movement of the poem:
And now that the darkness is throbbing through all the desolate lands
Where the dead must bury the dead who still prolong
Their bitter argument; where love cries out
A country's or a woman's name in vain;
Where the armoured monsters tremble, but not with pity,
And rumble inexorably onwards, into the dream of darkness,
I inherit my father's peace, my mother's silence,
And everything is as one. The beautiful stranger
Is singing the songs in which the larks are hidden –
That music was always in us, farmer, collier, or sailor.
What seemed a long way is not far to go.
Lewis attempts to affirm the unity rather than the dividedness of his sensibility in face of the darkness that's both within him and outside
him. Despite the controlled writing of the closing lines, however, I find this ending ambiguous. The songs of the beautiful stranger ring for
me with a siren-like quality, promising a fulfilment that's also an oblivion. In the figure of the stranger Lewis appears to fuse his wife Gweno
and an alluring but treacherous Muse. (The "dream of darkness" over which she presides, then, is sexual knowledge, creative fecundity, and the
promise of annihilation.) The poem's last line may primarily mean that, in view of the poet's affirmation of self-confident wholeness, the journey
that the war has condemned him to undertake seems to him less daunting; yet at the same time it conveys the sense that the darkness of which
he has repeatedly spoken, and of which the stranger sings, isn't far distant. That in India – "What a test of a man!" – Lewis encountered that
feminine darkness is witnessed by many poems.
When Douglas expresses the idea of the test, it's in this way:
To say I thought of the battle of Alamein as an ordeal sounds pompous, but I did think of it as an important test, which I was interested in
passing. I observed these battles partly as an exhibition – that is to say that I went through them a little like a visitor from the country
going to a great show, or like a child in a factory – a child sees the brightness and efficiency of steel machines and endless belts slapping
round and round, without caring or knowing what it is all there for."15
Whereas Lewis, in speaking of the army as "a test of endurance", conceives it as stretching out "indefinitely", Douglas is writing of a single
completed campaign, and can isolate it and encompass it. Despite this circumstantial difference, however, one can still point up the objectivity
of the prose. The North African campaign was a test he "was interested in passing": the chosen mood of the verb – the passive – and the choice
of governing verb play down the degree to which he felt personally involved in these experiences whilst still allowing their importance to him.
Douglas's self-depreciating comparison of himself to a child in a factory is both honest and self-detached: he declares a certain naivety, an
unseriousness in himself which it's impossible to imagine from Lewis. Lewis's capacity for self-analysis is shown by his letters to be massive;
and the cumulative effect of the generous extracts from them that John Pikoulis gives in his biography of the poet is increasingly oppressive
– or so at least I found them. Certainly they not only convey something of what it must have been like to be Lewis – and the experience isn't
enjoyable. The letters of Keith Douglas quoted in Desmond Graham's biography reveal no such self-absorption: indeed, Douglas declares to one
correspondent, after an unusually frank and self-revealing passage, that "we should not always be so serious and introspective in our letters".
If seriousness is a somewhat suspect quantity for Douglas, it's the touchstone of authenticity for Lewis.
In Raider's Dawn, "The Soldier" is followed within a couple of pages by this poem, "The Sentry":
I have begun to die.
For now at last I know
That there is no escape
From Night. Not any dream
Nor breathless images of sleep
Touch my bat's-eyes. I hang
Leathery-arid from the hidden roof
Of Night, and sleeplessly
I watch within Sleep's province.
I have left
The lovely bodies of the boy and girl
Deep in each other's placid arms;
And I have left
The beautiful lanes of sleep
That barefoot lovers follow to this last
Cold shore of thought I guard.
I have begun to die
And the guns' implacable silence
Is my black interim, my youth and age,
In the flower of fury, the folded poppy,
Night.
Apropos of the opening paragraph, John Pikoulis comments: "The composure is intimidating",16 and it's true
that Lewis exerts a much tighter control over language and rhythm in this poem than in "The Soldier". The impersonality of "The Soldier" is
an impersonality of tone; made possible by the speaker's indifference to his own experience, it's attained both through and in spite of Lewis's
choice of the first person. The speaker rejects illusion, romantic escapism and healthful sleep in favour of that darkness which Lewis writes
of in "Prelude and Fugue": yet, in leaving behind "the lovely bodies" and "the beautiful lanes", he seems to caress covetously their outworn
epithets; and at the very end he fails to withstand the temptation to invoke that most Keatsian property, the poppy, in language which is too
charged, too dramatic for one who by his own testimony is dying. In "The Sentry", then, the rejection of romanticism is incomplete, for Night,
that darkness which Lewis has claimed as an ancestral possession, is itself ineluctably romantic. Never felt as a fearsome consummation, it's
one to which Lewis as sentry seems at best indifferent; one, at worst, that he seems even to desire.
Here, by way of contrast, is Douglas's "Egyptian Sentry, Corniche, Alexandria",17 a poem, written perhaps in
July or August of 1942:
Sweat lines the statue of a face
he has; he looks at the sea
and does not smell its animal smell
does not suspect the heaven or hell
in the mind of a passer-by:
sees the moon shining on a place
in the sea, leans on the railing, rests
a hot hand on the eared rifle-muzzle,
nodding to the monotone of his song
his tarbush with its khaki cover on.
here is no pain, no pleasure[,] life's no puzzle
but a standing, a leaning, a sleep between the coasts
of birth and dying. From mother's shoulder
to crawling in the rich gutter, millionaire of smells,
standing, leaning at last with seizing limbs
into the gutter again, while the world swims
on stinks and noises past the filthy wall
and death lifts him to the bearer's shoulder.
The moon shines on the modern flats
where sentient lovers or rich couples
lie loving or sleeping after eating.
In the town the cafés and cabarets seating
gossipers, soldiers, drunkards, supple
women of the town, shut out the moon with slats.
Everywhere is a real or artificial race
of life, a struggle of everyone to be
master or mistress of some hour.
But of this no scent or sound reaches him there.
He leans and looks at the sea:
sweat lines the statue of a face.
Whereas Lewis imagines himself the sentry, Douglas is an observer, interpreting his sentry from a position of detachment. What he sees is the
withdrawnness of the soldier from the ongoing struggle that constitutes the life of the city, his isolation in a man-made limbo in which nothing
happens, nothing can happen. Lewis's sentry is in limbo also, but both his present condition and his past life were simplified and romanticised:
on the one hand Night, on the other "lovely bodies" and "beautiful cities". Douglas refuses to simplify: his sentry undergoes a forced deprivation
of living in all its richness: its pains, its pleasures, its puzzles. Like Lewis's bat-eyed soldier he exists in a state of suspension,
but he is insulated from unpleasant as well as pleasant experience. Douglas sees life not as a decline from the beautiful to the wasteful, but
as a cycle – one emphasised by the long sentence in stanza three which takes his sentry on a circular journey from one shoulder to another,
beginning and ending in a curiously similar relationship to the bodies of the living. Instead of Lewis's "beautiful lanes" we have in Douglas's
poem "the rich gutter" and "the filthy walls"; instead of Lewis's hieratic "barefoot lovers" we have "Douglas's "sentient lovers and rich couples"
(the unexpected "sentient" literally saying no more than is obvious, yet contriving to suggest that condition of intense physical sensitivity
which lovers create in one another), and the detail which tells us that some of them lie "sleeping after eating", locates them in a real
and not a dream world. Douglas's imagination renders the life of a place in all its concreteness and variety – the sea, the flats, the cafés
and cabarets with their mixed clientèles: Lewis's imagination in comparison is abstracted and inturned – it gestures towards the real world
only. If Douglas's poem has a weakness, it's that he too easily reduces his sentry to an unfeeling, unthinking tabula rasa: how does
he know that the sentry "does not suspect the heaven or hell / in the mind of a passer-by"? Douglas seems to dictate this lack of interest
to his subject. Clearly, despite the comparable mental states of the two sentries, these poems are very different in conception and style, so
that it would be absurd to criticise either poet for not doing what the other's doing. It does seem to me, however, that whilst Douglas's poem
makes a statement about the effect of the soldier's life on a man, Lewis's poem, though it may appear to do the same thing, is essentially an
exploration of his own poetic sensibility. Military experience is peripheral to "The Sentry": for would we, unless given the poem's title and
the late reference to "the guns' implacable silence", guess (or need to know) that the speaker of the poem is a soldier?
5
"The Soldier" and "The Sentry" may be regarded as stages in Lewis's progress towards a maturer artistic impersonality. One of the natural resources
of that impersonalising sensibility which seeks to protect itself against self-indulgence, is irony. Irony is dangerous, for used excessively
it may suggest a sensibility afraid of or incapable of feeling. The subject of military glory has seemed to many writers since the first World
War inevitably to call for ironic treatment: to dismiss the possibility of individual heroism along with it, however, is to abandon the field
of battle to cynicism: Lewis and Douglas are among those writers who want both to affirm the positive of self-sacrificing gallantry and to expose
the absurd and pretentious. Douglas expressed a hope to J. C. Hall in August of 1943 that "perhaps one day cynic and lyric will meet and make
me a balanced style"18 – though perhaps he was being modest, and might have believed that he'd already brought
off the necessary fusion.
Lewis's "Finale" at once demonstrates his debt to Wilfred Owen and shows him at his closest point of approach to Douglas:
He who continually struck poses
By the palm-tree in the foyer,
At the saloon bar and the banker's counter,
Crossing the dance floor after the rumba;
Who saw himself glorified in the minds of others,
Was fascinating to the young ladies,
Male, seductive, sardonic for the occasion;
Whose sloping shoulders were blazoned for duration
With the flashy epaulettes of tradition,
And yet was ever restless in ambition,
Locked in uneasy conflict with the unwinking
Inscrutable demon of self-knowledge;
Today he struck a final gesture,
Arms akimbo against the sky,
Crucified on a cross of fire
With all the heroic age magnificent in him.
And now he lies in a pose more rigid
Than any that Life with its gambler's chance
Flung on him at a venture.
He had no choice in this, yet seems content
That Life's confused dishonesty
Should find this last simplicity.
This poem was excluded from both Ian Hamilton's Alun Lewis: Selected Poetry and Prose (1966) and Jeremy Hooker's and Gweno Lewis's Selected
Poems of Alun Lewis (1981); even so it strikes me as one of the most secure pieces in Raiders' Dawn. In the opening paragraph
the young officer is presented as a self-divided being: an inveterate poseur who loves to bask in the falsity of his behaviour. Lines 13-16
make use of Owen's characteristic identification of the dead soldier with the crucified Christ. Kathleen Devine comments:
So strongly does Lewis identify the soldier with Christ that even the death of the flashy officer in "Finale" is ennobled by becoming a symbol
of the idealist's cross.19
To say this is to miss the irony of this momentary burst of rhetoric, calculatedly surrounded as it is by more probing, cooler and plainer writing.
The officer's dying "gesture" was in keeping with the heroic posing: it is spurious, for we are surely meant to see that this is far from being
a "heroic age". The final "pose" of the corpse, lying ready for the grave perhaps, is the truthful one, for this pose is in keeping with the
knowledge that his "demon" gave him in life. His unassuming rigidity seems to the speaker to "content" him because death, in purging him, has
restored him to his authentic self, has given him back his self-respect. "Finale" is Lewis at his impersonal best: clear-eyed, untouched by
useless pity, yet gravely winning for the soldier from his inauthentic life a purged dignity of a kind.
Against "Finale" may be set Douglas's "Sportsmen":
The noble horse with courage in his eye,
clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst:
away fly the images of the shires
but he puts the pipe back in his mouth.
Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88;
it took his leg off; he died in the ambulance.
When I saw him crawling, he said:
It's most unfair, they’ve shot my foot off.
How then can I live among this gentle
obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?
Unicorns, almost. For they are fading into two legends
in which their stupidity and chivalry are celebrated;
the fool and the hero will be immortals.
These plains were a cricket pitch
and in the hills the tremendous drop fences
brought down some of the runners, who
under these stones and earth lounge still
in famous attitudes of unconcern. Listen
against the bullet cries the simple horn.
The regiment of the Sherwood Rangers that Douglas joined had originally been officered, and was still partly officered, by just such upper-class
sportsmen (an earlier version of the poem is in fact entitled "Aristocrats"). A cavalry regiment, it had undergone mechanisation subsequent
to its arrival in Palestine in 1940. As Douglas explains in Alamein to Zem Zem, information passed over the radio from tank to tank was
often 'disguised' by being expressed in equestrian or cricketing terminology. Like Lewis, Douglas's attitude to his officers is divided. As
Desmond Graham points out, these are not the heroes Owen had in mind, "the tortured victims of war", but "the traditional heroes of the English
schoolboy of the period, diffident and pacific and also stupid". Peter's stupidity is shown by his speaking of his injury in the language of
a schoolboy appealing to the unsportsmanlike nature of the opposing side's behaviour. He deprecates somewhat, calling his leg his foot; in an
earlier draught Douglas had Peter omitting to apply a tourniquet to his stump in order to prevent himself from bleeding to death. Douglas recognises
his sportsmen as anachronisms of an almost mythical order, yet, fatuous, as their behaviour may be, they still compel his admiration. His "weeping",
I suggest, expresses the complex of emotions they prompt: simple pity mixed with exasperation at their absurdity. Whereas Lewis in "Finale"
sees his flashy officer reduced in death to an unassuming posture, Douglas imagines his heroes maintaining in their graves their "famous attitudes
of unconcern", where "famous" may carry, as well as its ordinary meaning of "celebrated", its schoolboy meaning of "splendid". Of the two, Lewis's
is certainly the more astringent poem, while Douglas's is wry, even indulgent. It’s worth noting finally a curious consonance in the final line
of each:
...should find that last simplicity.
...against the bullet cries the simple horn.
Douglas's hunting horn may be out of place on a desert battlefield, but "simple" here is a positive epithet, carry the sense of an uncomplicated
purity. Death simplifies for both poets, it's the ultimate unmasker of pretence and pretension. It was in full knowledge of this that Douglas,
before he left England for North Africa, wrote one of his most remarkable poems, "Simplify me when I'm dead" – a poem whose self-detachment
is unnerving.
The brutal finality of death in battle, its sudden severing of earthly ties, its abrupt reduction of a complex existence to uninhabited flesh,
taunted the imaginations of both Lewis and Douglas. Douglas saw more dead soldiers than Lewis; but that Lewis had looked closely at one or more
corpses is shown by his poem "The Unknown Soldier" in Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets. Commenting that "Velasquez might have made this flaccid
mask", he dwells on
The silence round the languid mouth,
The weak and glassy eyes, the crumpled brow.
and asks
What is the soul to him?
He has outlasted everything.
– where the last line turns on the idea that the world dies with each and every person's death. These extracts are quiet and meditative; elsewhere
the control slips and gives way to rhetoric – "All days are heaped in wrath upon today" – that recalls the biblical influence frequently to
be found in Raiders' Dawn. "The Unknown Soldier" provides an instructive contrast to "The Sentry". In the earlier poem, romantic love,
though opposed by "Night", was still a positive. In the later poem, however:
Joy's deceitful liturgy has ceased.
Tomorrow and tomorrow have no place
Among the seas of rain, the seas of peace
That are the elements of this poor face.
The mean humiliating self no more
Has access to him, nor the friends
Whose sensual persuasions first began
The brittle scattering that this day ends.
This is bleak poetry: it's as if Lewis has read and approved the Duke's speech to Claudio in Measure for Measure. Death doesn't only
end life but reveals as illusory all life's pleasures, negating them retrospectively; death is a desirable release from egotism. In the light
– it's a dark light – cast by these lines, the romantic phrases of "The Sentry" are shown up for the flimsy things they are. Lewis has travelled
so far from "the lovely bodies of... boy and girl" and "the beautiful lanes of sleep" that even their unelaborated form, unromanticised love
and indifferent nature, are not perceived, when the crunch comes, to embody values that call for affirmation. "The Unknown Soldier" exemplifies
the pessimistic face of Lewis's temperament: its impersonality is biased by the heavy presence of death.
Alamein to Zem Zem contains a number of descriptions of dead soldiers, some of which provided material for poems. Here is the most detailed
of them:
I looked down into the face of a man lying hunched up in a pit. His expression of agony seemed so acute and urgent, his stare so wild and despairing,
that for a moment I thought him alive. He was like a cleverly posed waxwork, for his position suggested a paroxysm, an orgasm of pain. He seemed
to move and writhe. But he was still. The dust which powdered his face like an actor's lay on his wide open eyes, whose stare held my gaze like
the Ancient Mariner's. He had tried to cover his wounds with towels against the flies. His haversack lay open, from which he has taken the cork
out. Towels and haversack were dark with dried blood, darker still with a great concourse of flies. This picture, as they say, told a story.
It filled me with useless pity.20
Douglas isn’t the first war poet to feel that death counterfeits life. Sassoon's dead men in "Counter-Attack" sprawl, grovel and wallow in the
slime of the trenches in a grotesque parody of activity. Douglas says at the beginning of Alamein that he continually "looked for more
significant things than appearances... for something decorative, poetic or dramatic",21 and the imagination
at work in the passage quoted is inescapably a poet's. The depiction of the dead man combines elements of a grim and thrusting immediacy ("his
expression of agony... his stare so wild and despairing... an orgasm of pain") with language that suggests the ersatz, the theatrical ("a cleverly
posed waxwork... dust which powdered his face an actor's"), and the reference to the Ancient Mariner's hypnotic gaze emphasises by literary
means the theme of life-in-death. (Lewis too had found his dead officer posed in "Finale", whose title implies the last turn in a vaudeville.)
Douglas says that the dead man moved him to pity, but the description itself is informed by no such feeling. There is pathos in the details
of towels, haversack and water-bottle, but it is a pathos of situation. Douglas's pity as a fellow-soldier is, as he says, "useless", so that
to represent it in the writing would be insincere, an imposture against both life and art. For Wilfred Owen the poetry was in the pity, but
Owen's war seems, as far as a poet like Douglas is concerned, to have exhausted the poetry of pity just as it exhausted the poetry of heroic
idealism. What's left is a poetry of lucid, unrhetorical and unevasive objectivity, the poetry of a man without illusions.
Douglas's poem "Dead Men" represents a response to the fact of death diametrically opposite to that of Lewis in "The Unknown Soldier". Moving
between the desert with its buried corpses and the city with its moonlit lovers, and aware of the fortuitousness of the historical circumstances
which decree that a man shall be one or the other, Douglas debates the attitude appropriate to one in his position. A dead body is matter for
the wind to reduce to powder, or meat for a wild dog, but to brood on such consequences is to risk falling into a debilitating cynicism. Douglas
resolves to
leave the dead in the earth, an organism
not capable of resurrection, like mines,
less durable than the metal of a gun,
a casual meal for a dog,
and concludes:
And the wise man is the lover
who in his planetary love revolves
without the traction of reason or time's control
and the wild dog finding meat in a hole
is a philosopher. The prudent mind resolves
on the lover's or the dog's attitude for ever.
Wisdom consists in living in the present, in contenting oneself with whatever satisfactions come one's way. But although Douglas is strongly
attracted by the prudent man's determination to live without expectations and anticipations, he doesn't finally identify himself with that stance.
Despite his ingrained scepticism towards ideals and ideologies, he seems at the end here to reserve the right – marginal as it may be – to choose
to behave unwisely should he so desire. The moon that presides ambiguously over desert and city is the same luminary which presided over the
thoughtscape of ".303". It's worth noting that Douglas doesn't in "Dead Men" deny the validity of sensual pleasure, of what lovers do, as Lewis
denies it in "The Unknown Soldier". The difference between the two poets lies in the difference between a sensibility for which experience confirms
a resilience, and one for which experience confirms a vulnerability.
6
Sometime in the early months of 1944, in England, Keith Douglas made several attempts at a poem to be entitled "Bête Noire". Failing to develop
a satisfactory line of attack on his theme, he wrote a prose note that includes the following passages:
The beast... is indefinable: sitting down to try and describe it, I have sensations of physical combat... My failure is that I know so little
about him, beyond his existence and the infinite patience and extent of his malignity... he is so amorphous and powerful that he could be a
deity. Only he is implacable; no use sacrificing to him, he takes what he wants.22
The fragments Douglas produced try out a variety of tones – the wryly grim, the factually prosaic, the metaphysically grave. The latest of the
series is this:
If at times my eyes are lenses
through which the brain explores
constellations of feeling
my ears yielding like swinging doors
admit princes to the corridors
into the mind, do not envy me.
I have a beast on my back.
These lines seem to be about poetic imagination: don’t envy me because I have the kind of mind I have, Douglas is saying, a price has to be
paid for it. The beast interferes in the poetic process, directing his pen and causing him to write what it wants, and not what he
wants. The metaphor of "the beast on my back" externalises a presence that's actually internal. Desmond Graham suggests that the beast, which
Douglas felt had left its tracks in several of his poems, "had ridiculed his early lyricism, introduced Time and Death and the skull of 'The
Prisoner', and driven poem after poem towards an awareness of loss".The beast (demon, devil) is an inner creative compulsion that the poet cannot
resist – or could only resist at the cost of screening out the dark and inhospitable areas of the mind which constitute its habitat. It's not
surprising that Douglas failed to write a poem about his beast, for the undertaking was tautological: he was trying to write about that quality
which makes for a ruthless creative objectivity – impersonality itself. The beast "is so amorphous and powerful that he could be a deity" –
precisely: it's by sacrificing ego-awareness that one gives oneself into the intangible hands of this deity and brings back from his domain,
the unconscious, discoveries that it's beyond the ability of diurnal rationality to make.
Arguably the most remarkable poem of Douglas's to have been written under the sway of the beast is "How to Kill":
Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the waves of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.
In "How to Kill" Douglas has made the point-of-view of the second person in ".303" entirely his own. If the early poem testifies to one of the
beast's earliest visitations, dramatising the clash between the humane and the lyric and the cold and demonic aspects of his imagination – 'daytime'
and 'night-time' knowledge – the later poem demonstrates the complete domination of the beast, a complete submergence in the unconscious. For
Douglas doesn't impersonate a killer in "How to Kill", he is totally and convincingly the killer. The matter-of-fact casualness of lines 7-8,
the Iago-like smile that seems to animate the third stanza, the calm, mildly wondering satisfaction of "How easy it is to make a ghost", all
contribute to show that Douglas isn't playing a literary game, that his sense of damnation is for real. It's clinched by his insistence, in
the second and third stanzas, that the soldier he's killing exists as a focus of love, is a centre of human goodness. If Iago is the presiding
Shakespearean presence in stanza three, Hamlet takes over in stanza four. Behind the phrasing of "with how like, how infinite / a lightness"
is surely Hamlet's great speech "What a piece of work is a man..." Douglas marvels at the fineness of the relationship between life and death
with something of Hamlet's marvelling at man; yet for both the marvelling passes into the flatter language of a darker apprehension:
Man delights not me...
A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.
Surely at the end here, submerged under the generality of the reflection, one may detect Douglas's own sense of fatedness. The beast's demands
in the body of the poem leave no room for self-pity: death 'by the sword' is no more than justice for one who had lived by the sword. Douglas's
demon enjoins upon him an impersonality which, despite the dreadfulness of its disclosures, remains strangely pure.
We recall that Alun Lewis, writing to his parents in June 1943, tentatively ascribed his maturity as a writer to "Gweno and the Army... Beauty
and the Beast!" The metaphor is jokingly thrown off, but this is by no means the only occasion on which Lewis uses the word to express the dark
side of his experience of India. In "Observation Post: Forward Area" he writes, apropos of the drought-ridden landscape:
Some evil presence quenches
The vagrant drunken theme
Of the swart and skinny goatherd
And the black goats of his dream.
A darker beast than poverty
Transfixed the crouching peasants there,
And tore the votive tablets down
And filled the children with such fear.
This is inferior writing admittedly: the rhythm either lollops along or falls slackly off, devoid of necessary tension; yet here is the beast,
in this context modified by Lewis's favourite epithet. It's not simply the promise of death; rather it's a presiding demon of hopelessness,
baleful and implacable. In two love-poems, one to his wife, the other to his mistress, the beast carries other meanings. In the final stanza
of "Midnight in India" he writes:
Mysterious tremors still the beast,
In unknown worlds he dies;
I lie within your hands, within your peace,
And watch this last effulgent world arise.
The "beast" here isn’t obviously placed by anything else in the poem: it seems to stand for something within Lewis himself – restless sexual
desire, perhaps – as well as something outside him – a force coming into, and passing out of, being. Gweno and the moon fuse in the figure of
"this effulgent world", placid and annealing; a composite presence possessed of the power to counteract, even neutralise the menace of the beast.
Yet the implication that the beast is inward as well as outward has been made. More clearly, in "A Fragment", Lewis declares:
The wild beast in the cave
Is all our pride; and will not be
Again until the world's blind travail
Breaks in crimson flower from the tree...
"A Fragment" is extravagant, a late upsurge in Lewis of overheated romanticism, but commands interest for its assertion that the beast is of
sublime value: passion may be destructive, but is life without it? The risk it represents is necessary.
Lewis's struggle in his later poems is a struggle to prevent the beast in its identification as death and the wish for death from winning the
poet away from caring for "the warm ones about us" – lovers, family, comrades, community. The severely wounded soldier who is the subject of
"Burma Casualty" gives Lewis's imagination an opportunity to express the case for the beast:
Lying in hospital he often thought
Of that darkness, whence it came
And how it played the enchantress in a grain
Of morphia or a nodding of the head
Late in the night and offered to release
The Beast that breathed with pain and ran with pus
Among the jumping fibres of the flesh.
The beast is feminine here: like the Muse, it's an enchantress, a dark siren that promises a kind of sensuous extinction. Although the soldier
has fought to live, and has survived, he cannot feel that he has held on to something superior to what his comrades have succumbed to. In closing
the poem with the lines –
The dark is a beautiful singing sexless angel
Her hands so soft you scarcely feel her touch
Gentle, eternally gentle, round your heart.
She flatters and unsexes every man.
And Life is only a crude, pigheaded churl
Frowsy and starving, daring to suffer alone.
– Lewis, it seems to me, is not only giving us the reaction of the soldier to the beast, but his own response within the terms the poem explores:
his imagination, having lived through the soldier's pain, cannot come to any other conclusion about life. "Burma Casualty" is one of Lewis's
finest poems: it's immediate and clear, and avoids factitious rhetoric. Nevertheless, I feel that its impersonality, like that of "An Unknown
Soldier", is partisan. The dialectic, the balance between eros and thanatos, in this poem and elsewhere in Lewis, is compromised because thanatos
– that "beautiful singing sexless angel" – has been allowed to absorb too much of eros. "Life", seen as the life of the Indian peasant, is pointless
and intransigent suffering, while Death is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Both Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis looked through the eyes of the beast in their poetry: yet whilst Douglas remained sceptical of his demon,
and capable of regarding it with wry humorousness, Lewis couldn't prevent his from entering at every pore and invading every cell. Both poets
brought back fine poetry from their descents into the dark realm, but whilst Douglas wrestled with the beast, Lewis towards the end conspired
with it, more than half in love with it. Even the poem that many readers think his finest, "The Jungle", seems to me unable to hold its contraries
– dark and light, east and west, the jungle and the industrial community – in equilibrium: the poet is critical of the world he has left behind,
but not of the world he has newly discovered. Keith Douglas died in Normandy four days after D-Day. He had contemplated his own death with the
same lucid detachment that he'd brought to his descriptions of the corpses of German and Italian soldiers in the desert of Libya. Reading John
Pikoulis's account of the circumstance of Alun Lewis's death, it's difficult to find any verdict other than that of suicide to make sense of
them. "India broke him", writes Dr Pikoulis, and he's surely right. India, that exemplar of cosmic disinclination, had lain waiting inside Lewis
for years, waiting till he was ripe for reading the words etched there upon his spirit.
Notes
1 George Allen & Unwin (1947) p. 75.
2 Oxford (1979) p. 15.
3 Op. cit. p. 78.
4 Ibid. p. 72.
5 Selected Essays, third edition (Faber 1972) pp. 17 and 21.
6 "If War Comes, Will I Fight?" Reprinted in Alun Lewis, A Miscellany of his Writings, ed. John Pikoulis
(Poetry Wales Press 1982) pp. 81-85.
7 Desmond Graham, Keith Douglas 1920-1945 (London 1974) p. 1.
8 In the Green Tree (George Allen & Unwin 1948) p. 31.
9 Keith Douglas 1920-1945 p. 109.
10 In the Green Tree p. 43.
11 Quoted in John Pikoulis, Alun Lewis – A Life (Poetry Wales Press 1984) p. 106.
12 Alun Lewis, A Miscellany p. 149.
13 Ibid. p. 148.
14 This poem is included in Alun Lewis, A Miscellany.
15 Alamein to Zem Zem p. 15.
16 Alun Lewis – A Life p. 110.
17 Complete Poems, ed. Desmond Graham (Oxford 1979) p. 86.
18 Ibid. p. 124.
19 Kathleen Devine: "Alun Lewis – a debt to Wilfred Owen" in Poetry Wales Vol. 10 No. 3 (February 1975)
pp. 84-98.
20 Pp. 51-52.
21 Op. cit. p. 15.
22 Complete Poems p. 120. For the fragments, see ibid. pp. 118-119.
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