Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War: The Making of Frank Prewett 9781350199729, 9781350199750, 9781350199736

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations of archives and collected works
Introduction: A poet of modern trauma
On method and approach
Summary
Chapter 1: Being Frank Prewett
An enthusiastic Canadian soldier
Choosing a fighting indigenous identity
Chapter 2: The experience of combat in the First World War
The body and the mind in war
The positives of war
Prewett’s dissociative poem ‘Card Game’
A sheer time: Being blown up, then buried alive
Chapter 3: ‘Shell-shock’
‘Shell-shock’ in interdisciplinary context
Gender and ‘shell-shock’
The debate over organic versus psychological causes
Incidence and diagnosis
Class and ‘shell-shock’
Experiencing ‘shell-shock’
Treatment options
Chapter 4: Primitivism, ‘Toronto’ Prewett and Dr William Halse Rivers Rivers (1864–1922)
Reconsidering the best-known ‘shell-shock’ doctor of the First World War
Rivers’s empathetic reciprocity in clinical context
Rivers and primitivism
Containing the primitive: The ‘shell-shock’ doctors and the 1898 expedition to the Torres Straits
‘A human experiment in nerve division’
Chapter 5: Adopting the ‘Toronto’ personality at Lennel and meeting Siegfried Sassoon
Dressing up and pretending in the early twentieth century
‘Toronto’ Prewett, Long Lance and Grey Owl
Sassoon smitten by ‘Toronto’ Prewett
Sassoon: A soldier, acting on behalf of soldiers
Chapter 6: Prewett’s friendship with Robert Graves and trauma poetry
Graves: Conjuror in myth and jests ‘too deep for laughter’
Prewett’s communion with the dead and trauma poetry
Chapter 7: An ‘Iroquois’ at Oxford and Garsington
Oxford University
The theatre of Garsington
Ottoline and Philip Morrell
Understanding Ottoline via the law of inverse proportion
Beauty, philosophy, sex and life in the ‘specious present’
‘Toronto’ Prewett’s popularity
A ‘blue and gold existence’: Ambivalence and Ottoline
Chapter 8: Repatriated to a suburbanizing Canada: November 1919–January 1921
Return amid pandemic to a consumerist Canada bereft of indigenous values
Prewett’s published and unpublished poetry on trauma, romance, sex and nature
Chapter 9: ‘Mad in the peace’: Farming and trauma poetry
Using Edward Thomas to understand Prewett’s ambivalent relationship with the natural world
Chickens and cheese
Tubney farm, marriage and a daughter
Chapter 10: Prewett responds to changes in the land
The Chazzey Tragedy
Publishing on country life, marriage and a son
Endings: Surviving but not escaping war
Conclusion: Protest memory and soft primitivism
Primitivism and intellectual change
Primitivism and The Rite of Spring
Protest memory and trauma poetry
Yeats and the exclusion of protest memory
Soft primitivism
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

ii

Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War The Making of Frank Prewett Joy Porter

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Joy Porter, 2021 Joy Porter has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image: Portrait of Frank Prewett by Dora Carrington (1893–1932), 1920. Private Collection, UK, image courtesy of Sotheby’s All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Porter, Joy, 1967- author. Title: Trauma, primitivism, and the First World War: the making of Frank Prewett / Joy Porter. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020054782 (print) | LCCN 2020054783 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350199729 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350199736 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350199743 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Prewett, Frank, 1893-1962. | Poets, Canadian–20th century–Biography. | World War, 1914-1918–Literature and the war. | Soldiers–Great Britain–Biography. | War neuroses–Patients–Great Britain–Biography. | Prewett, Frank, 1893-1962–Psychology. | Prewett, Frank, 1893-1962–Friends and associates. Classification: LCC PR9199.3.P735 Z83 2021 (print) | LCC PR9199.3.P735 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54 [B]–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054782 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054783 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9972-9 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9973-6 eBook: 978-1-3501-9974-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Charles

vi

Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Abbreviations of archives and collected works

x xi xiii

Introduction: A poet of modern trauma 1 On method and approach 4 Summary 8 1

Being Frank Prewett 13 An enthusiastic Canadian soldier 17 Choosing a fighting indigenous identity 21

2

The experience of combat in the First World War 29 The body and the mind in war 32 The positives of war 39 Prewett’s dissociative poem ‘Card Game’ 43 A sheer time: Being blown up, then buried alive 46

3 ‘Shell-shock’ 53 ‘Shell-shock’ in interdisciplinary context 53 Gender and ‘shell-shock’ 56 The debate over organic versus psychological causes 58 Incidence and diagnosis 59 Class and ‘shell-shock’ 60 Experiencing ‘shell-shock’ 62 Treatment options 64 4

Primitivism, ‘Toronto’ Prewett and Dr William Halse Rivers Rivers (1864–1922) 69 Reconsidering the best-known ‘shell-shock’ doctor of the First World War 69 Rivers’s empathetic reciprocity in clinical context 74 Rivers and primitivism 77

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Contents

Containing the primitive: The ‘shell-shock’ doctors and the 1898 expedition to the Torres Straits 80 ‘A human experiment in nerve division’ 85 5

Adopting the ‘Toronto’ personality at Lennel and meeting Siegfried Sassoon 93 ‘Shell-shocked’ at Lennel 93 Dressing up and pretending in the early twentieth century 95 ‘Toronto’ Prewett, Long Lance and Grey Owl 96 Sassoon smitten by ‘Toronto’ Prewett 101 Sassoon: A soldier, acting on behalf of soldiers 103

6

Prewett’s friendship with Robert Graves and trauma poetry 113 Graves: Conjuror in myth and jests ‘too deep for laughter’ 113 Prewett’s communion with the dead and trauma poetry 119

7

An ‘Iroquois’ at Oxford and Garsington 127 Oxford University 127 The theatre of Garsington 130 Ottoline and Philip Morrell 136 Understanding Ottoline via the law of inverse proportion 141 Beauty, philosophy, sex and life in the ‘specious present’ 142 ‘Toronto’ Prewett’s popularity 145 A ‘blue and gold existence’: Ambivalence and Ottoline 148

8

Repatriated to a suburbanizing Canada: November 1919–January 1921 153 Return amid pandemic to a consumerist Canada bereft of indigenous values 153 Prewett’s published and unpublished poetry on trauma, romance, sex and nature 157

9

‘Mad in the peace’: Farming and trauma poetry 167 Using Edward Thomas to understand Prewett’s ambivalent relationship with the natural world 168 Chickens and cheese 175 Tubney farm, marriage and a daughter 179

10 Prewett responds to changes in the land 183 The Chazzey Tragedy 186 Publishing on country life, marriage and a son 191 Endings: Surviving but not escaping war 193

Contents

ix

Conclusion: Protest memory and soft primitivism 199 Primitivism and intellectual change 199 Primitivism and The Rite of Spring 204 Protest memory and trauma poetry 206 Yeats and the exclusion of protest memory 210 Soft primitivism 214 Notes Bibliography Index

217 257 283

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Frank Prewett by Dorothy Brett, 1923 Frank James Prewett by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1919 W. H. R. Rivers by D. G. Shields Colin de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, Frank ‘Toronto’ Prewett by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1922 Siegfried Sassoon; Mark Gertler; Ottoline Morrell; Frank Prewett and Julian Vinogradoff (née Morrell) by Philip Edward Morrell, 1921 ‘Garsington’ by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1924 Lady Ottoline Morrell by Cavendish Morton, 1905 Frank James Prewett by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1921 Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington, possibly by Cecil Beaton, 1933 Frank James Prewett, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1922

12 52 68 92 112 126 126 152 166 182

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Emily Drewe, Penny Liechti and Abigail Lane of Bloomsbury Press for their good humour and support of this book. Thank you Mrs Kathyrn J. McKee, Special Collections Librarian and Malcolm Underwood, Archivist, St John’s College, Cambridge; Peter Meadows and John Wells, Under-Librarian, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, University Library, Cambridge; Anna Petre, Assistant Keeper of the Archives, Oxford University; Colin Harris, Superintendent, Special Collections Reading Rooms, Radcliffe Science Library, University of Oxford; Catherine Hobbs, Literary Archivist, Harold Averill, Loryl MacDonald and Gaya Déry at Library Archives Canada, National Library of Canada, Ottawa; Graham Bradshaw, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto; Catherine Walker, Curator of the War Poets Collection at Craiglockhart, Napier University, Edinburgh and Alison Lindsay, Head of Historical and Legal Search Rooms, National Records of Scotland. Many thanks also to Jean Rose, Library Manager of Random House Group’s Archive and Library in North Hants, UK, who facilitated my access to Prewett’s letters to publishers Chatto & Windus at the University of Reading; Ian Glen, Arts and Humanities Librarian at Swansea University and Michael Meredith, Eton College Library, Windsor. Thanks to Bruce Meyer, of Laurentian University, who has kept alive interest in Prewett and set the standard for all who consider him, Dr Andrew Coppolino for his previous work on Prewett, and his counsel and kindness supplying research materials and to Joel Baetz, Trent University, Ontario, for the work on Prewett within his book Battle Lines: Canadian Poetry in English and the First World War (2018). Thanks also to Paul Stevens, FRSC, Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto; Gursimran Thandi, Academic Department of Military Mental Health, King’s College, London; Professor Peg Jacobs, Department of History, UCLA; Roberta Estes of DNA Explain and Patrick Hagopian, Department of History, University of Lancaster. Thanks also to colleagues who gave feedback on aspects of this work at the University of York, 2013; at the Department of Native Studies, Dartmouth College, 2015; at the Department of English, University of Cambridge, 2016, to Professor Robin Dunbar, head of Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group,

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Acknowledgements

University of Oxford, and to Adam Kuper, Centennial Professor, London School of Economics. Thanks to Rebecca Louise Perry-Gamble and Kayleigh M. M. Fitzgerald; Alex Gutai, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge; Paul Jackson, Editorial Director, The Countryman magazine, Yorkshire, UK and Karl Schneider, Editorial Director, Farmers Weekly Group. Thanks to my inestimable friend and esteemed colleague, Dr Susannah Hopson. Thanks to Rosalind Ingrams and her daughter Catherine, who kindly invited me to Garsington Manor. Thanks to Candida Rafferty, whose great grandfather Captain Waring owned Lennel House, Coldstream. Thanks also to Dave McFadden, Manager of Lennel Care Home, Coldstream and to Fiona Morrison, Cemeteries and Crematoriums, Highland Government, Inverness. My deep appreciation is extended to the Prewett family, particularly to Bill Prewett, Frank Prewett’s son from his second marriage. Bill honoured me with good humour and great insight about his father at a point in a man’s life when he might be forgiven for having little time for questions about the distant past. He gave me some understanding of how suffering in war is transmitted across succeeding generations who bear the loss of what might have been had those closest to them not experienced what they did. Any faults or inaccuracies herein are entirely my own, yet this book benefitted so much from Bill Prewett’s input that the debt can never be repaid. Thanks to Frank Prewett’s grandchildren, Dave Youngs of Preston and his sister, Jennie Carr, whose mother Jane Youngs died on 31 January 2011. Jane was Frank Prewett’s only child from his first marriage to Madeline Clinkard, whom Frank Prewett divorced not long after the birth of their daughter in 1927. Keen to dispel the suggestion that Frank Prewett had indigenous ancestry, Dave has traced the Prewett line back to Somerset, England, while Bill Prewett supplied me with a DNA test to reinforce his belief that his father was not indigenous. Finally, many thanks to the people closest to me whose consistent kindness made this research possible. Thanks to my late brother John and his wife Anne Chun, to M. R. Porter – cara m’anama, to Jan Simons, Artur Porter-Simons, Sherlock Porter-Prior and, as always, to Sue and Alan Bevan of Gower. This research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Abbreviations of archives and collected works LAC

Library and Archives Canada, Frank Prewett Fonds, Ottawa.

HRHRC

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, the University of Texas at Austin.

NRS

Lennel Papers, National Records of Scotland.

UTA

University of Toronto Archives, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

RSLSC

Radcliffe Science Library Special Collections, University of Oxford.

WPC

War Poets Collection, Craiglockhart, Napier University, Edinburgh.

SPFP

Selected Poems of Frank Prewett. Bruce Meyer and Barry Callaghan, eds. 1987. Reprint, Toronto: Exile Editions, 2000.

CPFP

The Collected Poems of Frank Prewett. London: Cassell, 1920.

SIUSCRC The Robert Graves Manuscripts, Special Collections, University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale. URSCS

University of Reading Special Collections Service, Chatto & Windus Files.

xiv

Introduction A poet of modern trauma

This is an analysis of how the First World War affected one of the finest Canadian poets, Frank ‘Toronto’ Prewett. War-induced trauma or ‘shell-shock’ led him to ‘play Indian’, that is, to pretend to be an indigenous North American, while in hospital undergoing treatment for ‘shell-shock’ and afterwards when living in Oxfordshire. He was accepted as indigenous by some of the most significant literary figures of the time, notably Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden – key members of the group of First World War poets brought into critical relief in 1975 by Paul Fussell. Often thought of as quintessentially English poets, they continue to stand in symbolic guard over the cultural memory of the war.1 Prewett also ‘played Indian’ to a great effect within an exceptional literary and intellectual milieu that included Lady Ottoline Morrell, Virginia and Leonard Woolf and W. H. R. Rivers as well as a great many others. This first book-length consideration of Prewett as a poet of combat-induced trauma directly connects his adoption of an indigenous identity to both his experiences in war and the primitivist cultural currents of the time. This volume foregrounds a number of archives new to scholarship including the Lennel Papers held at the National Records of Scotland and sheds light upon an individual whose life, associations and work merit much greater exposure, but it does not attempt a conventional biography or pronounce critically upon Prewett’s poetry in total, the worth of his literary style or his status as a Canadian icon. Instead, the focus is solely upon war-induced trauma, primitivism and the brief, bright snapshot of Prewett’s life and thought around the time of the war and its aftermath as revealed by the available archives. Those seeking a detailed recovery of Prewett’s family history and experiences from birth to death or discussion of his poetry as it relates to anything other than his experience of war are asked to await further studies. Prewett was profoundly affected by combat. A Canadian promoted into the British Expeditionary Force, he experienced some of the worst fighting at Passchendaele, the Somme, the Second Battle of Ypres and Vimy, the battle often

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Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

held up as the coming-of-age conflict for Canada as a nation on the world stage. As a lieutenant in the 5B Reserve Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery, early in 1916 he was thrown from his horse at the Somme and sustained a serious spinal wound. He then spent a year in hospital in England recovering, before returning to the Front as an officer with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the regiment revered by Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves throughout their lives. Prewett was buried alive in April 1918, after a dugout collapsed on top of him during combat, but managed to claw his way out using his bare hands. Deeply traumatized and badly wounded in the spine, he was once again sent to a hospital in southern England, then to recuperate in Scotland at Craiglockhart, and following this, to Lennel House on the Scottish Borders. Here, like his close associate Siegfried Sassoon, it is thought he received care from the influential Cambridge anthropologist and psychologist, W. H. R. Rivers. At Lennel, he began to dress and behave as an ‘Iroquois Indian’. He formed attachments that led to his being introduced to the literary set that orbited around Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire, at the time a clearing house for creative talent and the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell and her husband, Philip, a pacifist Member of the British Parliament. In this way Prewett’s life interconnected with some of the early twentieth century’s most significant literary and cultural figures. One intimate circle con­ tained Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who hand-set his first book, Poems (1921), at the Hogarth Press, William Heinemann, who published his second collection, Rural Scene (1924), Siegfried Sassoon, who fell in love with Prewett and remained his friend and benefactor; Robert Graves, who consistently championed his talent, included his work in Oxford Poetry 1921 and edited his Collected Poems (1964), and the Morrells, vital benefactors and employers for Prewett during and after the war. A wider circle whom Prewett either met, corresponded or had sustained interactions with included the painters Mark Gertler and Dorothy Brett, the translator S. S. Koteliansky and the writers and poets Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Edmund Blunden, poet laureate John Masefield, T. E. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and her husband John Middleton Murray, Edward Marsh, W. B. Yeats, the Sitwells and Thomas Hardy, a particular influence. Prewett also met Harold Monro, who included his work in Georgian Poetry V. Other Garsington visitors he encountered included T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Walter de la Mare. Prewett therefore, was a remarkable intellect caught up at an extraordinary time with exceptional people. A significant number of the post-war intellectual élite were convinced Prewett would be the next big literary splash. Virginia Woolf, after his first book came out, wrote to Lytton Strachey on 29 August 1921, ‘The [Time s] Literary

Introduction

3

Supplement, by the way, says that Prewett is a poet, perhaps a great one.’ Siegfried Sassoon was convinced Prewett was special from the moment he set eyes upon him. He told fellow poet Robert Graves, ‘Toronto is a great man, and will be a great writer, greater than you or me, because of his simplicity of mind and freedom from intellectual prejudices.’ Graves would remain convinced all of his life of Prewett’s literary importance. His introduction to Prewett’s posthumous Collected Poems states, ‘dedicated poets like Frank Prewett are few in any age; and lamentably so in this’.2 Such strong personal impact was rooted in Prewett’s inherent charisma, his good looks and his self-presentation as a glamorous figure from another culture. Fresh from the war, he claimed he had Iroquois, Mohawk or Sioux ancestry. It helped that he looked and acted every inch the movie version of a ‘Native brave’. Adroit on a horse, he liked to ride shirtless, was prone to brooding silences and made a point of giving others the sense that he possessed both profound sensitivity and a kinship with nature. At five-feet nine with a dark complexion, high cheekbones, hot, deep-set hazel eyes and dark hair, he reminded many of those he met of the Italian movie star Rudolph Valentino. One of the strongest literary and emotional engagements he formed was with Lady Ottoline Morrell, the remarkable beauty and aristocratic patroness described by Lytton Strachey as the daughter of a thousand earls. Dorothy Brett and Siegfried Sassoon also became deeply emotionally engaged with Prewett, along with a number of other visitors to Garsington after the war.3 As the artist Mark Gertler remarked with some chagrin in 1921, ‘Women seem rather taken with him, goodness knows why.’ Even towards the end of his life, after Prewett had been an alcoholic for many years because of demons he linked to the psychological trauma he experienced during the war, he was still attractive. As the artist Vivienne Jenkins was forced to admit when she created Prewett’s bust late in his life, ‘There was something about him to which you could not help being drawn.’ Prewett considered himself a man apart and felt his literary voice was attuned to generations far in the future instead of to the morés of his own time. He wrote that he heard ‘a hard but true music, and do not belong to the cant of the age’. When living at Garsington he confessed to Edmund Blunden, ‘I occasionally get a moment in which I see more than this world.’ Even though he suffered acute poverty following the war, he never wavered from this profound commitment to his own sense of literary integrity. He knew that if poetry presented ‘new and halting expressions’, then the general public would not like it, something he explained to Lady Clementine Waring, the aristocrat with whom he became fast friends after he recuperated at her home Lennel House in 1918. Yet he was also

4

Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

convinced that ‘If truth and sincerity are inherent in art, sooner or later that art is recognized.’4 Graves, a dear friend and a fellow veteran, put it differently. He wrote that Prewett ‘felt it his duty to write at the orders of the daemon who rode him’.5 What made Prewett’s poetry unique was its particular approach to truth. He discussed the psychological harshness needed for survival in war and acknowledged the horror that haunted the conscious and unconscious mind following proximity to danger and death. He confronted depression and deathly thoughts but also to weighed up the possibilities for joy and love in a post-war world increasingly alienated from the rhythms of nature. He stands, therefore, as an early and significant modern poet of trauma. If, for Wilfred Owen (who was fascinated by news about Prewett in the trenches) ‘the poetry was in the pity’, for ‘Toronto’ Prewett, poetry was an imperfect means to attempt articulation of the trauma that attended the modern soul. Prewett thought of war as necessary and ageless and his literary focus was not upon how it might be prevented in future, but upon how its effects might be coped with in a world increasingly bereft of certainties, subject to large-scale change and unanchored in tradition. As a result, his war poetry often has an immediacy, directness and candour that resonates deeply with modern sensibilities in ways analogous but at the same time discreet from that of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg. After the war, Prewett did not lapse into romance for the English landscape as did Sassoon, or at least, he did not do so consistently. Rather, Prewett’s focus remained the challenge of living with the legacy of historical trauma and of finding ways to cherish and preserve human relationships to land and nature in an era of agricultural industrialization.6 Although deeply influenced by Sassoon and by Owen (whom it seems he partly replaced in Sassoon’s affections at Lennel House), Prewett’s aesthetic project was to find a way to get beyond both language and the experience of suffering. He considered words ‘not the means, but the obstacles to expression’. The literary and personal challenge of his post-war life was to recapture the emotional immediacy he lost by having been a soldier. He wrote to attempt to restore what war had taken from him – a secure internal platform from which to express emotion. ‘I cannot write’, as he put it in 1919, ‘simply because I experience no deep emotion. I stand still, and he world spins around me’.7

On method and approach Prewett’s writings and correspondence are spread within archives across either side of the Atlantic and are used in this book to provide an index to his times

Introduction

5

and an insight into the primitivist impulses within literary and social history of the beginning of the twentieth century. His life experience is explored, not to showcase or catalogue biographical detail, but to excavate deeper meaning in relation to combat-induced trauma, primitivism and the specific literary milieu of which Prewett was a part.8 While Prewett’s poetry has significant literary value, it is not discussed critically here, but is used to provide insight into his exceptional experience and to allow access to the cultures to which he was party. Poetry is not autobiography, but Prewett’s poems nonetheless provide valuable insight into how trauma led to his primitivist self-representation. This book takes a sideways approach to exploring the past and heeds the advice of Lytton Strachey, one of the most serious comics Prewett knew. Strachey’s gift to the art of historical biography was to recognize that any attempt to narrate the past in an age deluged with information is destined to fail. Instead, in 1918, he advised a subtler strategy. The historian should, Strachey suggested, attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with careful curiosity.9

Taking on board Strachey’s advice, this book is a micro-historical study of how combat-induced trauma caused someone to present himself as indigenous. It is interdisciplinary, and draws upon scholarship from war studies, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, neurology, indigenous and cultural studies, as well as varieties of critical, literary and historical research. It references both fictional and near-fictional accounts and makes use of historical ideas and data. It does so, not to imply that the fictional and the archival are of equal worth, but in an attempt to encompass the incommensurability of the First World War. Such an approach resonates with that chosen by a number of memoirists of the time, from lesser known figures such as Enid Bagnold, author of A Diary Without Dates: Thoughts and Impressions of a V.A.D. (1918), to much-discussed writers such as Robert Graves, who penned Goodbye to All That (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon, who produced the trilogy The Memoirs of George Sherston (1928–36). Each of these writers recognized that to garner what matters most about the First World War and to understand something of its wider cultural significance within the Anglophone world, it is appropriate to set aside divisions between the historical, the literary and certain other sorts of knowledge.

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Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

The significant writers who saw combat and who are conventionally discussed as the ‘war poets’ were generally not blanket pacifists. Many enlisted to fight more than once, in the First World War, or in the second.10 Their work did not try to provide exact, positivist chronicles somehow capable of realizing the past, despite Graves being related through his mother to the nineteenth-century historian associated with such ideas, Leopold von Ranke. Rather, these authors each looked to profit from the literary market, to teach the future about the First World War as they had experienced it and to achieve a measure of catharsis through the act of writing. However, the most talented and productive First World War literary writers who saw combat were like Ranke in the sense that they invoked a ‘pure love of truth’ and a desire ‘to show how it actually was’. Their truths were tempered by their experiences of war and informed by the dictates of their chosen genres of poetry and memoir.11 Their concern was with what was vivid, personal and original – with what most fully explained and made immediate war as they had known it. Lytton Strachey has also informed this project in another way. He warned that human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. More than indicators of processes at work in time, they are entities in themselves, members of families, networks and nations which have their own unique stories and responses to change. With this in mind, it is important to recognize Frank ‘Toronto’ Prewett’s primary significance to his own extended, transatlantic family. He mattered greatly to his recently deceased son, Bill Prewett, who provided the author with a DNA report on himself undertaken so as to disprove his father’s claims to indigenous heritage. Bill did so because his father has regularly been put forward as a central figure within the North American indigenous poetical canon. For example, Frank Prewett was the first name to appear in the 1988 Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth Century Native American Poetry. He was described by Norma C. Wilson in the 2005 Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature as, ‘an Iroquois – the best-known Native poet of his generation’ and the tone and style of his poetry linked with the work of the Choctaw/Welsh 2009 Oklahoma Poet Laureate Jim Barnes, the Kiowa Pulitzer prize winner N. Scott Momaday and the Crow Creek Sioux scholar and author, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Prewett was also listed as Canadian Iroquois in the 2012 Handbook to Native American Literature along with the Mohawk-English poet and performer Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake, 1861– 1913), and praised as one of the few indigenous poets published before the 1970s.12

Introduction

7

Prewett’s work is also significant to the narrative of Canada’s literary development. He has appeared regularly in anthologies as a stepping stone in the development of a distinctive modern Canadian literary voice. In these contexts, Prewett has been characterized as a typical later Georgian limited by the convoluted sentimental, romantic rhyme of that era, a poet overly influenced by Hardy, Donne and Hopkins. There is truth in this. Even someone as enamoured of Prewett’s talent as Siegfried Sassoon sometimes despaired of his periodic lapses into ‘crocus-crowded lyrics’. Yet such lapses pale when juxtaposed with the cold, glistening truths about war Prewett articulated in poems such as ‘Card Game’; the grim, spiritual horror wrought by trauma he voiced in poems such as ‘The Kelso Road’, ‘I Stared at the Dead’ and ‘Soliloquy’; the joyous, sexual pleasure in nature he rejoiced over in poems such as ‘I Shall Take You in Rough Weather’, ‘Where the Wind Lies’ and ‘Do Not Go Away So High’ or the honesty about male–female relations he articulated in poems such as ‘Seeking Perfect’ and ‘Plea for a Day and a Night’. Looked at anew today, Prewett steps into the light as a unique early twentieth-century literary voice, a figure who spoke with unadorned candour about issues of deep contemporary relevance. The soldier personae he brought to life within his war poems, as Joel Baetz has pointed out, evoked Georgian interests, ideas, feelings and attitudes, but did so in order to deny them. Prewett was anti-Georgian, individual, dissonant and often harsh, yet he wrote within the Georgian tradition.13 Until now, Prewett has been eclipsed by better known figures linked to Canada such as John McCrae and Robert Service. McCrae’s 1915 poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ helped to make the poppy an iconic First World War symbol, but Prewett’s work and life stands in stark contrast and leads down wholly separate paths. McCrae died of pneumonia in 1918, just as Prewett’s literary life was beginning. Despite the debilitating effects of multiple trauma linked to combat, Prewett served again in the Second World War.14 Although both figures foregrounded the aesthetic and social significance of land and nature, Prewett’s work voiced more of war’s complexity, examining the pleasures of combat, the thrilling terror of battle as well as the regret that taints survival. His work made every effort to displace any simple militaristic or imperialist message. Robert Service, meanwhile, produced work that spoke in a register and idiom discreet from that of Prewett. Today he is among the best known of Prewett’s Canadian poet contemporaries but his use of a then fashionable, stylized Irish/ Scots/Cockney vernacular has not aged well. Born into affluence himself, Service used it in his poetry to register both a disdain for the high diction of war propaganda and an awareness of the commonalities of war experience across

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Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

divides of class and nation. Although hailed by his publisher as ‘The Canadian Kipling’, he spent only seventeen of his eighty-four years in Canada and his work in fact laughed at moral certainties in relation to imperial victories. His objective in a literary and physical sense was to place himself close to nature and adventure so as to articulate a popular, democratic outlook grounded in experience. Prewett also had a firm sense of processes of dispossession and discrimination, but had no truck with the idea that death in war was noble. His only foray into the sustained use of dialect was in a novel he published in 1933. Other soldier poets linked to Canada from this period include Bernard Freeman Trotter, who was hailed as ‘The Canadian Rupert Brooke’, Philip Child, H. Smalley Sarson, and W. W. E. Ross. Each figure’s work deserves further analysis and exposure but is not explored here, where the focus is specifically upon trauma, primitivism and the unique literary and social context that surrounded Prewett and his writing during and after the war.

Summary Chapter 1 describes aspects of the indigenous world that surrounded Prewett growing up and as a soldier. It explores the regional context, indigenous celebrities, soldiers and poets whose example may have led a young Canadian exposed to combat in 1914 to adopt an indigenous persona. Chapter 2 examines the lived experience of the trench warfare Prewett experienced and the callous stoicism it wrought in him that was reflected in his poetry. Drawing upon a range of contemporary historical and literary sources, it examines the elation and pleasure as well as the repulsion that attended combat on a physical and psychological level, before contemplating the defining traumatic combat experience for Prewett, that of being buried alive and digging his way out to survive. The chapter concludes by positioning Prewett’s poetry within the revolutionary realism at the core of late Georgian poetics, arguing that examination of ‘shell-shock’ offers a highly generative lens for the interpretation of such work. Chapter 3 sheds new, interdisciplinary light on ‘shell-shock’ or war trauma, examining it in terms of class, gender, ethnic identity and the treatment options of the period. Chapter 4 addresses a long-standing need for interdisciplinary re-evaluation and contextualization of Dr William H. R. Rivers, the renowned Cambridge ‘shell-shock’ psychologist and anthropologist who treated Sassoon and, it is thought, Prewett. It places Rivers’s ‘shell-shock’ work within a broad

Introduction

9

trajectory of primitivism that informed both his oeuvre and intellectual milieu. It suggests that Rivers’s Freudian-inflected primitivist thinking was reflected in some of the primitivist ideas that informed the ‘shell-shocked’ indigenous persona adopted by Prewett. The chapter explores how both figures cherished and promoted abstract notions about ‘primitive’ identities that informed their behaviour and helped advance their status. Chapter 5 focuses upon Prewett’s adoption of an indigenous identity while undergoing treatment for ‘shell-shock’ at Lennel House Auxiliary Hospital near Berwick-Upon-Tweed. It contextualizes Prewett in relation to the dissimulation and pretence then prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic, exemplified in the internationally known ‘Indians by choice’ Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and Grey Owl, both also writers and veterans. It examines Prewett’s friendship with Siegfried Sassoon, considers Sassoon’s protest against the prolongation of the war, his homosexuality and Prewett’s links to the British homosexual creative world of the time. Chapter 6 considers the specific approach to truth of Robert Graves, before examining Prewett’s trauma poetry in depth and the conviction he shared with Graves that he was ‘ghost-ridden’ or dead-while-alive as a result of the war. Chapter 7 transports the reader to the early-twentieth-century literary clearing house and sex-and-intrigue-filled salon of Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell and her husband Philip. It considers the creative figures Prewett befriended while studying at Oxford University. It explores the beauty of Garsington and some of the most exceptional intellectual figures of the twentieth century through the letters and poetry of the impoverished Prewett, whose professed indigenous identity and raw good looks ensured he was a centre of attention. It considers why Prewett could not satisfy Ottoline, his sexually dynamic patroness, or his literary mentor, Sassoon. Chapter 8 describes how an ill Prewett was repatriated away from this idyllic Oxfordshire house in 1919 and to a rapidly suburbanizing, pandemic-ridden Canada. It was a homeland Prewett quickly came to despise for intellectual vapidity. The chapter examines his published and unpublished poems, his correspondence, relationships, drinking, ‘war despair’ and the solace he found in music. Chapter 9 considers the new consciousness in relation to the natural world, land and agriculture that crystallized within Prewett upon his return in 1921 to Oxford University and a job farming at his beloved Garsington. It connects Prewett’s creative approach at this time to the prose that informed the poem Rain by the Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas. It employs aspects of Theodor Adorno’s thinking on ‘living death’ to help explain Prewett and Thomas’s sense

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Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

of themselves as alive but also dead, part of a natural world they found beautiful but inherently uncaring. The chapter explores why Prewett rejected and was in turn rejected by his aristocratic friends, how he found work as an experimental farmer, married and then left his wife and child to work for an Oxford agricultural institute and broadcast for the BBC. Chapter 10 analyses Prewett’s role at Oxford advancing innovative thinking on ‘power farming’ and agricultural technique and assesses how trauma, farming and his responses to changes in rural life coalesced in his 1933 novel, The Chazzey Tragedy. It considers his success as editor of The Farmer’s Weekly, various editorial roles he took on thereafter, and his second marriage which led to the birth in 1941 of his son William. The chapter brings Prewett’s life to a close in 1962 in Scotland and examines his poetic vision of rural harmony rooted in an understanding of indigenous values and a desire to protect the British farming landscape he loved. Prewett’s life’s work, ‘to translate the man to the fields and the fields to the man’, is evaluated and the argument made that consideration of Prewett’s relationship to trauma, primitivism and modernity is more generative than a focus upon him as an intercultural imposter.15 Chapter 11 concludes this volume by linking Prewett’s experience of trauma to larger intellectual changes within the natural sciences, psychology and literature from the turn of the century to the 1930s. Viewed through this expanded lens, Prewett’s trauma poetry and adoption of an indigenous persona is brought into relief as an articulation of protest memory deployed to subvert and challenge national representations of the war. The conclusion makes the case that Prewett expressed a form of ‘soft’ primitivism, a variety of nostalgia practiced by individuals to resist a modernity that appears to lack the important values of the past.

11

Figure 1  Frank Prewett by Dorothy Brett, 1923. Image courtesy of Bonhams.

1

Being Frank Prewett

Frank James Prewett was born on 24 August 1893 on his maternal grandfather’s farm at Kenilworth, Ontario. Late in life, in the first of three BBC radio talks he delivered, he claimed that he came from eighteenth-century pioneer English stock who had gotten along well with their indigenous Iroquois neighbours. Titled ‘Farm Life in Ontario Fifty Years Ago’, it began: The community where I was born was mostly of English descent. Their forebears of the eighteenth century had been trappers who, as fur-bearing animals became scarce, began to depend upon cultivated land. They occupied this land where and as they liked, if they were on good terms with the Iroquois Indians, who were then a powerful nation.1

That Prewett understood his neighbours to have been Iroquois is not surprising since their importance within North American history is hard to overestimate. At one time, they had control of most of northeastern United States and eastern Canada, including southern Ontario and parts of southwestern Quebec. Iroquoian-related languages once spread to over 90,000 people in what is now New York, southern Ontario and adjacent parts of Pennsylvania, Quebec and Ohio. ‘Ontario’ is a Mohawk word, as is ‘Toronto’, the name Frank Prewett adopted during the war and a name linked in Mohawk to a weir at Orillia on the north end of Lake Simcoe, Tkaronto. ‘Kanata’, meanwhile, is a Saint-Lawrence Iroquoian word meaning settlement. The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee/‘people of the longhouse’ are a Confederacy originally of five and then six nations: the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Mohawk and from 1722, the Tuscarora. The Mohawk, or Kanien’kehá:ka/‘people of the flint’, with whom Prewett claimed affiliation after the war, metaphorically guard the easternmost door of the longhouse that symbolizes the league between the nations. The Mohawk homeland is in the Mohawk Valley of New York State but as allies of the British, after the American Revolution they were forced to resettle in British Upper Canada, some joining existing Mohawk settlements

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along the St Lawrence River. Self-governing Mohawk communities in southern Ontario today include the Kenhtè:ke (Tyendinaga) ‘On the bay’; Wáhta (Gibson) ‘Maple tree’ and Ohswé:ken (Six Nations of the Grand River). According to some of the oldest written records, the Toronto area had Tionontati (Petun) peoples living there, as well as related Huron-Wendats, Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe. By 1701, a branch of Anishinaabeg peoples whom the French called the Mississaugas moved into the vicinity and when settler Toronto was founded in 1793, Mississaugas signed land ‘surrenders’ to the British. Thereafter they were forced out, made to ‘confirm’ the Toronto Purchase in 1805 and sell the ‘Mississauga Tract’ for a fraction of its worth. By the time Prewett was born in 1893, many Torontonians claimed to know little of the area’s long history of colonial displacement, yet somehow Prewett learned enough about it to be impressed. While there is no direct evidence, it is possible he heard oral histories like those recited and remembered by the Mohawk traditionalist William Woodworth in 2006. Woodworth spoke of Toronto’s ‘dark energy’ as a result of past genocide and of Teiaiagon, the seventeenth-century Seneca village on the Humber River in western Ontario that was the site of a massacre by the French who destroyed it by fire and deforested the whole area around Toronto. Since oral history can be accurately transmitted across many generations, it is possible Frank Prewett heard a version of this same story from First Nations people as he grew up.2 The land around the Prewett homestead where Frank Prewett played as a child may originally have belonged to Mississauga or Saugeen Ojibway peoples. Having been swamped by migrants after the war of 1812, Saugeen representatives now contest the ‘surrender’ of their territory in this region to Canadian representatives. The Saugeen First Nation has around 1,900 registered members and a number of ongoing land claims including a heavily publicized wrangle which hinges on a treaty from 1854 over the ownership of Sauble Beach, Ontario. One way that Prewett may have come to understand that the family farm was at the heart of contested territory was via runaways. As late as 1938, there are records of runaway indigenous boys working on farms around Kenilworth who had made their escape from the prison-like Methodist Mount Elgin Industrial Institute at Muncey, Ontario, run under the auspices of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs. First Nations children were forced to work here between 1851 and 1946 in punitive and profoundly abusive conditions. The government’s stated intention was to enforce assimilation by deliberately separating indigenous children from their families and communities. This linked to a wider, multigenerational strategy within Canada to force indigenous peoples onto reserves

Being Frank Prewett

15

and to deny them access to their ancestral lands and resources.3 Overall, First Nations residential schools in Canada lasted from the mid-1880s until the 1990s and disrupted the lives of over 140,000 indigenous children. The scandal ultimately led to the setting up of a $350 million government ‘Healing Fund’ in 1998 and claims for compensation in relation to abuse claims number in the billions of dollars. Frank Prewett’s mother was Clara Hellyer, from Arthur, Ontario, the child of two emigrants, James Hellyer of Somerset, England, and Jane Ellen Langdale of Yorkshire, England. Frank’s father was Arthur Henry Prewett, a shoe-worker from Bath, England, about whom little is known other than that he was respected as a prize-winning rose-grower and prominent angler.4 Clara is thought to have come from stock that came originally from England to take up land given under Royal charter as a result of participation in the Battle of Waterloo of 1815. Reportedly, one of her ancestors died horribly in 1756 as a British prisoner thrown into what became known as the Black Hole of Calcutta (Kolkata, India) after the capture of Fort William by troops of the Nawab of Bengal. It was on his mother’s side that Prewett claimed Iroquois descent when he was in England after the war, a heritage manifest, according to Robert Graves, in Prewett’s ‘high cheek-bones, dark colouring, graceful walk and fiery heart’.5 Prewett’s parents spent time in the United States after their marriage in 1888, trying to succeed as farmers in the Midwest, but they returned to live on the Hellyer homestead early in the twentieth century. It was north-west of Guelph on Highway 6, on an ‘Indian trail’ that when Frank Prewett was a child was still ‘corduroy’, that is, made of cedar laid perpendicular to the direction of travel. Frank was born there; his siblings Albert, Olive and Gladys. The family was not without status. Prewett’s uncle Albert Hellyer was elected in 1919 to represent the United Farmers of Ontario party for what was then Wellington East, and in 1926, Gladys was to marry the well-known Canadian television broadcaster and author, Gordon Sinclair.6 Prewett’s upbringing was far from the romantic, freedom-filled frontier fantasy his British literary friends imagined after the war. To the contrary, like many pioneer settlements, the Prewett farm was firmly orientated around hard work. Approximately eighty miles from Toronto, made of cream-coloured brick arrived at after a boulevard of sugar maple trees, it was set half a mile from Owen Sound Road. The twenty-acre square fields close to the highway had all been cleared of boulders and tree stumps, but the task of clearing the remainder would take far longer than the four generations who had attempted it up until Prewett’s birth. Beyond the cultivated fields near the house and road, all the fine-

16

Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

leaved maple, oak, elm and hickory in the next eighty acres had been removed to make way for valuable sugar maple. A huge, handsome, red, cathedral-like barn stood one hundred yards from the house made entirely of wood. Its giant oak pillars had been squared by hand using adzes and it sheltered all the farm’s stock and crops during the harsh Ontario winters. Prewett thought of his own people and those he grew up with as peasants. In his thinking, this was not a pejorative term, it simply encapsulated a state of mind intimately committed to the husbandry of animals, practicality, determination and the rhythms of the seasons. ‘A peasant’, he explained, ‘is a man who is the slave of his land and loves his servitude.’ Such a cultural context by necessity placed little value upon the life of the mind. Instead, the imperative was to forge a productive way of life amid land thought of as dangerous wilderness. After all, as Prewett acknowledged with some resignation, ‘No intellectual brilliance or appreciation of the arts would have turned forest and marsh into rich farmland and a stable society.’ As an adult, Prewett’s writing about his childhood was nostalgic, but not about the lost love of his family. Instead, it was for the gentleness of farm animals and the kindness of a farm servant named Ben, an orphan the Prewett–Hellyer family had taken in from one of the children’s homes set up by the Dublin Protestant evangelical Thomas Barnardo. It is possible Ben was of First Nation descent although there is no evidence to confirm it. With Ben, the young Prewett settled the array of animals in the great barn at night and carefully secured them against grey wolves. Amid the sweet smells and warmth, the pair patted each horse in turn last thing lest there was ‘trouble with sulks in the morning’. In Spring with the onset of maple syrup season, gentle, patient Ben would tuck Prewett and his siblings in to sleep in soft buffalo robes in the sugar shack after the children had been with him as he worked. Whatever softness and laughter Prewett recalled from his childhood stemmed not from his strict, observant Baptist family, but from Ben, and to a lesser extent, from a local Catholic Irish family shunned by the local Ontario Protestants. His own family ‘smiled rarely and never laughed’, but his Catholic neighbours were ‘always jesting and laughing . . . the only people we knew who enjoyed every moment of their lives’. ‘Life to my family, and to all respectable families’, Prewett noted in contrast, ‘was a duty of serious hard work, by which came wealth and respect in this world and in the world to come’. This outlook came from Prewett’s grandfather who was profoundly religious, as were a number of settlers who lived nearby. He would gather the whole farm for prayer in the kitchen each morning to hear him intone from the Old Testament and invoke a God given to anger and threats of vengeance. As a result, Prewett

Being Frank Prewett

17

and his siblings grew up convinced of their personal doom, persuaded by their elders that their many sins meant their salvation would not be found in this world. Long term, however, Prewett did not take this message to heart. Rather than martyrdom and the dictates of a joyless God bent upon retribution, what he remembered was Ben’s gentle understanding and patient thoughtfulness to animals and children.7

An enthusiastic Canadian soldier Around 1900, Frank Prewett’s family moved to the more urban context of Parkdale, Toronto, but they continued to observe the strict Anglicanism practiced on the farmstead. Prewett attended Riverdale Collegiate, from around 1910 worked as a clerk in the Methodist Bookstore in Toronto, took music lessons and became an organist at a Baptist Church. He registered in 1912 within the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and excelled in English, Latin, Biology, German and French. He also worked for the campus newspaper, The Varsity, and in 1914 became its editor. As part of Canada’s Anglophone majority, Prewett grew up acutely aware of the country’s deep British affinities. About half of the voluntary enlistments to the war were British-born and about half of these were from Ontario, Prewett’s home province.8 The 1911 census registered 54 per cent of Canadians as originally British and the next largest ethnicity, 28.5 per cent, French. Canada then was a production-based economy orientated around forestry, grain and manufacturing with particularly close financial ties to Great Britain. In 1914, around a third of all British investment went to Canada, mostly to railroads. As a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, the country did not control its own foreign affairs, but it did have the right to control the level of its involvement in wars declared by the motherland. Prior to confederation in 1867, Canada’s key spokesmen had smoothed the Canada’s transition in status by explicitly styling the new nation as a future English ally – ‘a friendly nation – a subordinate but still a powerful people – to stand by her [England] in peace or in war’. Famously, French-Canadian prime minister Wilfred Laurier said in 1910, ‘when Britain is at war, Canada is at war: there is no distinction.’ However, as the war developed, Canada’s non-British-born constituencies would become increasingly agitated about the sending of soldiers and other support.9 When conscription was introduced in Canada in 1917 Laurier became a vociferous and articulate opponent and the issue culminated in anti-draft riots the following

18

Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

year in Quebec. Yet when the war began, not a single voice of dissent was heard querying the provision of support in parliament. It was evident from very early on that sending men would be Canada’s most appropriate focus. The country had no air force, only a fledgling navy and no standing army, but it did have many young people and the world’s highest ratio of men to women. By May 1915 the British War Office was explicit about how urgent the need was for manpower, writing to a Canadian minister: ‘It is difficult for us to place a limit upon the numbers of men that may be required in this devastating war. No numbers which the Dominion Government are willing and able to provide with arms and ammunition would be too great for His Majesty’s Government to accept with deep gratitude.’10 Aged just twenty-two, Prewett could not know that by enlisting in February 1914 he was exposing himself in broad terms to an almost 40 per cent chance of becoming a casualty and a 9.3 per cent chance of being killed. From 4 August 1914 to 11 November 1918 Canada was to lose over 60,000 with another 170,000 injured out of a total number enlisted of 619,636 including conscripts. Overall, about ten million civilians and under ten million soldiers would die in the Great War. The odds of death or casualty were much higher for those, like Prewett, who served on the Western Front.11 We know why Prewett enlisted. Whatever other personal reasons may have contributed, he joined up for Canada and its future, wishing to represent a young nation to the world as confident, dynamic and distinct. In this sense, he embodied the push to transform Canada from ‘colony to nation’.12 He was morally and culturally conscripted by the circumstances of his upbringing – in fact, given his background, it is hard to imagine how else he could have responded to the clarion call of war. Thus, on the day he received his uniform at 19 Grenadier Road, Toronto, on 11 February 1915, Prewett wrote to a University of Toronto Economics professor who had asked enlisted alumni to explain their circumstances: Chiefly it has been a feeling of injured pride that has drawn me into the force. I have felt hurt to see that those very men who are Canadians, if there can be said to be any Canadian nationality yet, men who have received all the advantages and none of the hardships of this country, are yet the men who are remaining at home and permitting those who have a less careful physical and mental development to represent their country in this great war that is changing the whole life of the world, and which in its change is going to determine to the eyes of all nations whether this Canada of ours is a colony or a great and distinct people independent and confident in thought, feeling and action.13

Being Frank Prewett

19

Prewett’s first published poem, entitled ‘To Canada’, reflected such thinking and appeared in The Varsity. It was written at Stanley Barracks, Exhibition Place, just after Prewett joined the Eaton Machine Gun Battery, a unit sponsored by the famous Toronto department store: We gladly pledge stout hands and ready hearts To thee, thou right and faithful bride At thy birth-time like men to play our parts; Hear now our faith, and if thine hour be hard It is our greater glory that we guard.14

Prewett was neither alone nor naïve in thinking that the war offered a vital opportunity to assert Canadian autonomy on the world stage, but Canada’s role as ally of the British Empire was to be far from uncomplex. Its next prime minister would write to the British on 4 January 1916 to assert Canadian autonomy and castigate the mother country for treating Canada not as an ally that deserved consultation but as a ‘toy automata’. Elsewhere, Prime Minister Borden ominously predicted that the day would come ‘when the men of Canada, Australia, South Africa and the other dominions will have the same just voice in these questions as those who live within the British Isles. Any man who doubts that will come, doubts that the Empire will hold together.’ It hardly helped that in Borden’s view, those who fought for Britain in 1916 suffered most not from a want of guns or ammunition, but from an acute shortage of brainpower and leadership. In his opinion, what was most conspicuous about the British side was ‘procrastination, indecision, inertia, doubt, hesitation and many other undesirable qualities’. Borden and Prewett would be proved broadly correct that the war would force the British to recognize Canadian distinctiveness. A telling example of this re-orientation in outlook was a letter about ‘colonial Forces’ written by Lord Derby as secretary of state for war to chief of the General Staff Sir Douglas Haig in November 1917. In it, Derby was forced to acknowledge: ‘I am afraid, for various reasons, we must look upon them in the light in which they wish to be looked upon rather than the light in which we should wish to do so. They look upon themselves, not as part and parcel of the English Army but as allies beside us.’ Further readjustments to how the British understood Canadian status resulted from the rapprochement that conflict fostered, in particular economically, between Canada and its former enemy the United States. The war and the introduction of conscription was to prove powerfully divisive for Canada’s English and French populations, but Prewett was right to hope that

20

Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

sacrifice would speed Canada’s entry through what Prime Minister Borden later dubbed ‘the portal of full nationhood’.15 Prewett’s war enthusiasm also suggests he was entranced by the overarching power and immediacy of the moment, by war as ‘the romance of history’, as the philosopher William James put it in 1910. War offered a young man the possibility of total exertion, the chance to show his potency and reap the rewards of group belonging. Even James, who declared himself a pacifist, was so repulsed by what he saw as the pettiness and bureaucracy of the times he was moved to write: [War’s] horrors are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zoophily, of ‘consumers’ leagues’ and ‘associated charities’, of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valour anymore! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!16

Was there a girl left behind? Prewett’s earliest poems reveal an ambivalence about convention, romance and the wiles of the opposite sex, but there was someone to whom he addressed poetry and with whom he corresponded for years after his departure. Muriel Slee was four years his junior, the sister of a fellow student who had invited him to swim at their family farm at Humber Bay on Lake Ontario during the summers of 1913 and 1914. The poetry Prewett dedicated to Muriel revealed a deep-seated mistrust of females and a baleful fear of being trapped by their charms that was to re-surface in Prewett’s subsequent intimate relationships. Prewett joined the Eaton Machine Gun Brigade (4th Battery) in February 1915 and left for overseas on 3 June 1915, listed as a Second Machine Gunner and qualified signaller. However, soon after landing in England, the Eaton Gun Brigade was disassembled, Private Prewett was transferred to the Imperial Army, given a commission in the Royal Field Artillery (2nd lieutenant, 5B Reserve Brigade) and stationed temporarily at Ballincollig, around six miles from the city of Cork in Ireland. It would remain a British Army base until 1922 and the founding of the Irish State. Prewett was rapidly elevated because the British Army was haemorrhaging junior field officers, whereas the Canadian Army had more than enough. He had the right profile given he had studied for a university degree, and the chance to accept a commission and become Lieutenant Prewett on 26 November 1915 was a considerable advance. At the front, Prewett served as a battery officer, later in trench mortars and finally as a staff officer.17

Being Frank Prewett

21

Choosing a fighting indigenous identity What made Prewett adopt an indigenous identity during the war? On a superficial level, presenting himself as indigenous was a way to communicate with Europeans who had little understanding of Canada. Many French and British people encountering ‘real, live’ Canadian soldiers in this period found them powerfully exotic and expressed great surprise at their tangible existence outside of the realms of popular novels, travelling shows and cinema. One Canadian soldier after having identified himself, got the response, ‘Strike me pink, Cannydians, and you’re white!’ He confided to his diary, ‘I suppose [the British man] shared the popular idea that all Canadians were redskins.’ Another wrote to his parents that the British ‘have great ideas about Canada. They imagined we were all savages or cowboys that lived in tents, and forests were everywhere, and no farm land.’ Yet another described being perceived as a curio, and people stopping in the street to say, ‘There’s a Canadian!’ as though he were a strange animal of some kind.18 Taking on an indigenous identity made Prewett distinctive within the twothirds British-born British Expeditionary Force within which he served and it tied him to a long history of indigenous loyalism to the British Crown. The Iroquois and specifically the Mohawk ranked highly within British thinking about ‘martial races’ that had developed after the 1857 Indian Rebellion. The Mohawk were known to be central to the Crown-Iroquois alliance that was foundational to Canada’s existence and to have dominated and then encompassed other indigenous nations such as the Huron and the Mahican Confederacies. ‘Martial races’ thinking also held that an inherent lust for blood and combat inoculated such peoples from susceptibility to ‘shell-shock’. The idea was prevalent among Canadian authorities and explains some of the curiosity German soldiers displayed towards Native soldiers. For example, William Foster Lickers, a Mohawk from Six Nations, was left paralysed for life by beatings and torture inflicted by German prison guards after the Second Battle of Ypres. His captors acted as they did because they were keen to find out if ‘Indians could feel pain’.19 Another reason Prewett may have been attracted to an indigenous identity is because he knew of, or knew personally, a number of respected indigenous Canadian fighters. Around 4,000 indigenous soldiers served out of a total indigenous population in 1914 of perhaps 103,774, although this figure excludes non-status indigenous peoples, Métis and Inuit peoples. Indigenous peoples’ contribution to the war effort was also disproportionate to their numbers and

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Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

available resources. This was the case despite their enlistment being discouraged until after December 1915 and only actively encouraged in 1917, in particular after conscription was brought in from the 29 August that year.20 Since the official desire was to speed indigenous assimilation, they were not placed in segregated units. Most served as non-commissioned officers, with the reasoning being that at the time less than 37 per cent of the Native population were listed as able to speak English. The patriotism of prominent indigenous Canadian soldiers such as Cameron D. Brant of the Six Nations at Grand River became comparatively well known in Canada and Prewett would have been exposed via forces media to the efforts of a number of indigenous soldier competition runners such as Tom Longboat (Onondaga); Arthur Jamieson (Tuscarora), Joseph Keeper and Alex Decoteau (Cree), who competed superbly in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Furthermore, First Nations service in the First World War existed within a particular context of nation-to-nation intercultural alliance with the British. Lieutenant Cameron D. Brant, among the first of around 300 men who enlisted from the Six Nations Reserve, is an excellent example. An impressive fighter, Brant died leading his men in a counter-attack at Ypres that followed the deployment of poison gas in April 1915. In choosing to fight alongside Britain, Brant perpetuated a significant intergenerational, geopolitical relationship. First Nations considered the treaties they had struck primarily as agreements between themselves and the Crown, rather than with Canada, and held to them as dynamic examples of their own agency as sovereign entities. From an Iroquoian perspective, a salient point of reference was the Two Row Wampum Belt that symbolized sovereign mutual coexistence between the Iroquois and various European powers that had gained power over time (the Dutch in 1613, the British in 1664/7 and the United States in 1794). Cameron Brant was the greatgreat-grandson of the loyalist Mohawk leader of the American revolutionary era, Thayendanegea, also known as Joseph Brant. Joseph Brant remains a figure of controversy in multiple contexts to this day because he unified a number of New York tribes and lead terrifying raids against American settlers on behalf of the British. While his name can be translated as ‘he places two bets’, in truth, he bet firmly on the British, and despite the treaties he signed, his people suffered badly following their defeat by the Americans. 21 Aside from Cameron Brant, Prewett could have been personally acquainted with any number of less well-known indigenous soldiers. The military careers of Prewett and brothers Albert, Mike and Joe Mountain Horse (‘Miistatisomatai’) of the Blood Indian Reserve in Alberta, for example, directly overlap. Encouraged to join up by a local missionary, Albert Mountain Horse was gassed at Ypres and

Being Frank Prewett

23

died from tuberculosis a day after making it back to Canada. After their mother attempted to knife the missionary in November 1915, Mike and his brother Joe enlisted, seeking revenge abroad for their brother and glory for their nation. Joe travelled overseas early in 1916, was wounded at Passchendaele Ridge and again prior to Cambrai. Like Prewett, he was sent to England to recuperate. Mike did not sign up until May 1916. He fought at Vimy and was buried alive in the cellar of a collapsed bomb shelter at Cambrai for four days in November 1917, before also being sent to a hospital in England to recover from ‘shell-shock’ and a bayonet wound. He took his people’s war traditions into battle and was told he ‘stopped the war for at least a few seconds’ when he ‘released [his] pent up feelings in the rendering of [his] own particular war song’. Mike returned to his Reserve with a Distinguished Conduct Medal and achieved some celebrity within the non-indigenous world and respect within his own Kainai culture. In the 1930s, he dictated his war deeds for representation on calfskin by Ambrose Two Chiefs, and placed being buried alive and left for dead only in position five out of twelve episodes of significance in his life. Much more important was the fact that he killed a German officer and was sent ahead as a trusted scout by his commanding officer at the Battle of Amiens in 1918. He also wrote a tribal and personal history in the 1930s, but this was not published in his lifetime. Poverty and ostracism by both indigenous and non-indigenous communities, combined with alcoholism, made for a difficult life.22 When he produced his book, he tailored it to meet the expectations of a Depression-era non-First Nations audience but also wondered of his readership ‘how long it will be before your so-called civilization extinguishes my people from the face of the earth?’ He was also explicit about First Nations geopolitical thinking. ‘We are not looking forward to a time when the buffalo shall return’ he wrote, ‘Nor are we anticipating a time when the white man shall disappear from the continent. But we are scanning the horizon for further chances of advancement and further opportunities of proving ourselves true and loyal subjects of the British Empire.’23 One of Mike’s main concerns was to highlight the exceptional war effort of his and other indigenous peoples through the buying of Victory bonds and donations to patriotic funds. After all, perhaps 12,000 US American Indians had also served in the American Expeditionary Force, men such as the Oneida, Albert Kick of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Like Prewett and Mike, Albert Kick fought at Cambrai, but he never made it home.24 First World War indigenous battle prowess was fact rather than myth. Indigenous warriors drew upon their early community training and excelled as marksmen and scouts, some wearing moccasins to track the enemy. Mike

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Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War

Mountain Horse was especially proud of the Edmonton First Nations figure, Corporal Norwest, who before his death in battle was considered the greatest sniper within the British Expeditionary Force with 115 observed hits.25 The man most often discussed as the best sniper of the war in its entirety was an Ojibwa, Corporal Francis Pegahmagabow. He enlisted early and returned to his reserve one of the few Canadians to have been awarded the Military Medal three times with an unofficial tally of 378 kills and over 300 captured. Like Prewett, Pegahmagabow was invalided to England with ‘shell-shock’ and it is thought that he also survived having been buried alive because of shellfire. He was transferred repeatedly to numerous hospitals within England, but it is not known whether he ever interacted with Prewett. Pegahmagabow considered his ‘shell-shock’ a spiritual attack and was desperate to return to the fray because he believed it was easier to fight the spiritual assault of trauma while simultaneously fighting a material enemy. Although the indigenous contribution to the war effort was exceptional in North America even in the face of high unemployment and dire conditions on many reserves and reservations, this did not translate into a general acceptance of traditional ways of life, respect for treaty rights or of indigenous sovereign autonomy. Instead, indigenous valour and success overseas was seen as yet further evidence of incipient full assimilation of all such communities. American and Canadian indigenous soldiers were often contextualized within their respective national media as exotic mascots whose engagement telegraphed the moral rectitude of the Allied cause. They were a noteworthy part of what one Canadian newspaper article called the ‘human colour-box’ of nations that constituted the imperial war effort and were one section of the family of dominions and colonies depicted on British propaganda posters and adverts. Despite this, and the remarkable level of war donation made by indigenous peoples, after the war the Canadian Patriotic Fund was closed to indigenous peoples and the process of denuding their communities of land and resources continued. Furthermore, indigenous veterans were systematically discriminated against in relation to disability, pension and War Veteran Allowances.26 For both sides of the conflict, stereotyped notions and fantasies about indigenous peoples in North America were part of the mix that made up how male prowess in battle was collectively understood. For example, when Ernst Jünger crawled on his stomach towards an English trench amid dew-covered thorny grass, he thought of the bestselling novels he had read as a young boy by Dr Karl May. May’s multiply-translated, stirring tales of indigenous valour, animal-like sagacity and closeness to the land touched a deep chord in the

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German psyche. They tied an indigenous military genius named Winnetou to his ‘white brother’, ‘Old Shatterhand’, a Germanic cowboy character. In essence, the May novels were a colonial fantasy that worked to absolve the non-indigenous of guilt for appropriating indigenous resources. In this regard, they echoed a long trajectory of American stories, including James Fenimore Cooper’s midnineteenth-century Leatherstocking Tales, which have a similar intercultural partnership between a character named Chingachgook and the non-indigenous figure Natty Bumppo. That Germans shared the desire for absolution that underpins such stories should not be a surprise, since German peoples had been part of the invasion of indigenous land in the Americas from its beginning.27 As Mike Mountain Horse put it, although indigenous numbers fighting in the First World War were a minority, ‘the power of their example was strong, and they were particularly mentioned by the Germans as enemies worthy of their approbrium’.28 Of all indigenous figures, Thomas Charles (Tom) Longboat is probably the most likely to have led to Prewett adopting an indigenous Canadian identity during the war because he was the most impressive internationally famous sporting Canadian of the era. Sometimes called ‘Wildfire’, he was also the most popular Canadian at home in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Longboat was from Prewett’s area, an Onondaga Iroquois whose name, Cogwagee, translates as ‘Everything’. He was only six years older than Prewett and reached his sporting peak around 1912. Prewett told the story of how his early life connected with this hero from the Ohswé:ken community in one of his broadcasts for the BBC: Once, when there was a fair in our nearest village, seven miles away, an Indian boy was wagering himself to outrun any pony or pair in a race of two miles or upward. Now, all of the well-off farmers fancied their ponies, yet the Indian boy beat them. He was left far behind at the start but he came back to the fair well in the lead. I learned later that the boy’s name was Tom Longboat. He was tall and slim and dark. He was to become Olympic champion at long-distance running.29

Longboat had poise and a dry, laconic humour not dissimilar to that of another famous indigenous celebrity of the twenties and thirties, the Cherokee actor and humourist Will Rogers. He first used his running skills to run away from the Anglican-run Mohawk Institute Residential School within six months of being sent there aged twelve in September 1899. On his second attempt he was successfully hidden from the authorities by his uncle. He went on to win the Boston Marathon in 1907, the Olympic Marathon in 1908 and the title ‘World’s

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Professional Marathon Champion’. Tom’s brand of competitive marathon running was key to the modern Olympic movement that began in April 1896. Two-man endurance races were hugely popular at the time and set up like boxing matches with a great deal of betting on the side. Thousands lined Longboat’s running routes to cheer, with the crowd at one race said to number 100,000. He was so famous he was even plagued by at least one imposter after he signed up for war service in 1916. Longboat’s enlistment was a public event, one of a number of ways he served as a recruiting tool for the war effort. Once in Britain and France, where he served as a sapper and in the dangerous role of dispatch runner and rider, his athletic prowess was regularly shown off to the troops to boost morale. Like Prewett, he was at Vimy in April 1917, and at Passchendaele. He was also at Lens, Amiens and Canal du Nord but ended the war physically unscathed.30 Finally, there is a poet role model who may have prompted Prewett to adopt an indigenous identity. Pauline Johnson was a comparatively well-known published Canadian indigenous poet in this period who was born on the Six Nations Reserve on the Grand River near Brantford, Ontario, just sixty-eight miles away from where Prewett was born. She performed many times all over Canada including in and around Toronto throughout her life but died in Vancouver in 1913. Her complete works were published to considerable acclaim in 1912 as Flint and Feather and from 1906, she wrote for publications Prewett would have had exposure to such as Boy’s World and Mother’s Magazine. Johnson pioneered performance art in Canada, for example, appearing first in an evening gown and then changing into a racy buckskin dress that incorporated wampum belts and what looked like two scalps. Her father had been a hereditary Mohawk chief, and her mother was wealthy, English and well-connected. Most unusually for the period, Pauline’s poetry and ballads mixed talk of ‘redskins’ and Hiawatha-style ‘Indian romance’ with a desire to educate the non-indigenous world about indigenous diversity, dispossession and disadvantage. Yet more unusually, her work was powerfully sensual and played with and subverted the Indian princess stereotype. Like Prewett, Pauline Johnson is an awkward fit in relation to conventional understandings of indigenous identity which tend towards extremes of either indigenous protest or assimilation. It is possible that her poetry and performances gave Prewett a sense of how powerful eroticism can be as an intercultural tool. As Prewett neared the theatre of war, he had no framework within which to contextualize the battles of which he would be part. Prior Prussian victories in Europe and the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 provided some clues, but few in Europe (apart from the German General Staff) showed much awareness

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of the fact. Mechanized death and sieges had happened in the United States, including one that lasted four years between Washington and Richmond, but the trench warfare and combined arms tactics of the First World War would owe as much to nineteenth-century European antecedents as to those of the newly re-united American states. However, much that we now identify with twentieth-century warfare had already been introduced in the American Civil War: a new phase in the concept of total war via General Sherman, conscription, aerial reconnaissance, the submarine and, of course, significant use of trenches for prolonged attrition. There had been global conflicts before, for example, the Seven Years War (1756–63) and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), but neither had the depth of long-term impact of 1914–18. Military leaders on the German side sensed how desperate and bloody the conflict was likely to be, but were unable to anticipate how it might conclude. The Elder General Moltke, for example, said in 1890: If this war breaks out, then its duration and its end will be unforeseeable. The greatest powers of Europe, armed as never before, will be going into battle with each other; not one of them can be crushed so completely in one or two campaigns that it will admit defeat, be compelled to conclude peace under hard terms, and will not come back, even if it is a year later, to renew the struggle. Gentlemen, it may be a war of seven years’ or of thirty years’ duration – and woe to him who sets Europe alight, who first puts the fuse to the powder keg!31

The world was not ready for the shock that accompanied the 1914–18 conflict, although Europe was highly armed and the conditions had been in place globally since at least 1870 that prepared the way for a war of mechanized attrition. For over a century, there had been no extended wars involving a large proportion of civilian populations, apart from the American Civil War which had been confined to the Southern states and the Taiping conflict in southern China from the 1850 to 1864 which killed twenty to thirty million, mostly as a result of plague and famine. The century had seen a rise in prosperity and material well-being for many, and with this, great love of country and hope that positive progress might continue indefinitely. War appeared to now be largely confined to the colonies, often to asymmetrical conflicts where new technologies, tactics and weapons were tested, such as the Maxim heavy machine gun. Few could conceptualize what war might entail when the great industrial powers drew manpower and resources from those same colonies and turned high explosives and other lethal technology upon each other. Germany, intent upon fighting a

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‘war of annihilation’, would attack not just its enemy’s armies, but its cultural supports and will to persist. Trenches had been required in the South African War (1890–1902) and in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), but in 1914 the Allies thought they would be temporary and not what they became, a primary defence against almost insurmountable firepower.

2

The experience of combat in the First World War

War strips off the later deposits of civilization and allows the primitive man in us to reappear. – Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War & Death, 1918. It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. –Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg1 Prewett experienced some of the most intense fighting of the Allied war effort. Early in 1916, he was gassed and thrown from his horse while serving in the Royal Artillery, probably at Verdun. His injuries were serious and he was forced to spend most of the rest of the year in hospital. He was to suffer periodically debilitating back pain for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, Prewett returned to the front as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers early in 1917, to the same battalion as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, although it is not thought that he interacted with either while on active service. He was at the Battle of Vimy Ridge (9–12 April), one of the few successful actions in early 1917 and one that remains emblematic of Canadian national sacrifice and of the ties that bind Great Britain and Canada. He was at Passchendaele (31 July–10 November 1917), known more properly as ‘Third Ypres’, and at Cambrai (November/ December 1917), where combined tactical and technological innovations including tanks proved decisive. Few records are available of how he performed in combat, other than the customary phrases Major Charles Hewson wrote for him when he provided a personal professional reference in 1923 at Garsington. Hewson served alongside Prewett and described his ‘coolness under fire’, his ‘tactfulness in a delicate situation’. He considered him ‘a most capable leader of men, a gallant officer and a true comrade’.2

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30

The Radcliffe Science Library in Oxford has four hand-worn notebooks within which Prewett scribbled down his most personal ideas and poems while in the trenches and afterwards. The notebooks reek with an accumulation of smells, have numerous hedged-in doodles and one is adorned by Prewett’s flamboyant signature. There are a number of poetic fragments, and some poems have been so deeply revised they cannot be deciphered. One poem has been sweated over and re-written nine times. Some poems call out to God, others bemoan the loss of fallen comrades and grapple with grief, others long for home. One notebook has a small, pressed, delicate flower tangled up in another, its mirror image. Another has a pressed fern. There is a torn-out map of the front detailing Cambrai, Margicourt and St Quentin. The legend reads: ‘British troops yesterday made an advance of half a mile along a front east of Margicourt (north of St. Quentin) disarming and capturing strong points at Cologne and Malakoff farms.’ Certain things stand out from these combat notebooks: Prewett’s terror at facing conflict, his dismay at the prospect of the empire losing the war and his fear that he was doomed to be forever haunted or ‘phantom rid’ as a result of the loss of his comrades. For example, he wrote fragments such as: This is the hour of fortune perilous When panic flits white-faced and beckons flight So mighty hosts, this night we may be fled An empire fled, that gave the world its light.

and elsewhere, No friend is left to bid Me quiet lie So am I phantom rid Until I die.

Such writing suggests that the experience of battle altered the psychic location from which Prewett understood himself, that he came to feel he had incorporated the identities of those who fought alongside him but who did not survive, and that, in his mind, he continued to carry them about his person as ghostly forms not discernible to the common eye. In doing so, he adopted a framework for feeling and understanding that defied conventional social norms and that did not recognize either the pastness of the past or the finality of death. In one particular poem, the sense that Prewett perceived himself to be crowded all around by war dead is almost palpable. It epitomizes Prewett’s post-

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war idea of himself as a constant communicant with the dead, a tragic figure convinced that even his own death could offer no respite from the burden they represent. The poem is housed in a small black flip-top notebook with a beautiful purple inner leaf inscribed ‘December 30th, 1919’, its dedication suggesting a Garsington connection. The dedicator, likely Lady Ottoline Morrell, describes Prewett as a blossoming poet and writes ‘This is to Catch the Treasures of the Imagination . . . of one who is rich . . . and who . . . knows not half his riches.’ In fragments, the poem registers: The souls of the dead crowd round I dare not walk at night From home, their stealthy sound Doth my soul affright. They lift their hands to me To hear an ancient tale Of something ill-coming and wrong As though I might avail. They bend and flutter, sigh and weep We weep together, these and I Not doubting but it were the best If there were death, to die.

However, despite this ghastly psychological burden repeatedly returned to, Prewett also had positive feelings connected with the war. Several times he revisited feelings of triumph and elation linked to his own survival in battle. One untitled poem described both his mixed emotions and the intensity of feeling conjured by his having cheated death: When the earth rocked When the world’s edge was burnt with flame When phantoms flocked When the air was full of the plaint Of death, when my scalp sweat When my breath came Agasp, the taint Of frail oblivion wavered and set. When death flapped wing Of then secure I of life? My triumphing

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Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War Prevailed amid the belch of hell And I remembered boyhood days, A pocket-knife A dance, a smile And laughed in glee; War thy mysterious ways.3

To begin to comprehend such poetry, and the psychological state at which Prewett arrived post-war, we need first to pause, and explore the conditions under which he lived and fought.

The body and the mind in war Prewett’s war experiences were every bit as gruesome as some recent media has taught us to expect. However, while not shying away from the truth of the record, it is important to be alert to the fact that today’s emphasis upon the First World War trench suffering has its own history. This was perhaps better recognized in the late 1920s than within popular discussions of the war today. The French veteran of Verdun, Charles Delvert, wrote in 1929; ‘Once upon a time, they wanted a fictional war, flags flying in the breeze; today they want something no less fictional, trenches filled with hellishly grimacing corpses.’ As the conservative veteran and commentator Douglas Jerrold also pointed out around the same time, the war books and poems that appeared after the fact inevitably telescoped experiences which occurred across larger timescales. Furthermore, even the representation of true incidents, or series of incidents, may still not adequately represent the fundamental truth of the war per se.4 Delvert and Jerrold remind us that suffering can never be divorced from context and that the majority of the men who fought recovered either fully or partially from the hardships they experienced. Neither was the worst of the experience unremitting. Normally, a tour of duty in the front line lasted three or four days and nights, followed by the same in support trenches and the same again in reserve. Some who served never saw an attack and some completed the war unscathed. Even where conditions were at their worst – for example at the Somme, Verdun and Ypres, truly large-scale artillery attacks were rare. Despite the trauma Prewett experienced and its profoundly negative impact upon the rest of his life, he survived and chose to volunteer to fight again in the Second World War. While his war was not representative of all soldiers who fought, neither was it aberrant or undeserving of note. For Prewett, war was a complex

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and multiple experience that both induced psychological trauma and generated profound satisfaction. Trench conditions deserve further consideration at this juncture because of the established links between bodily experiences in war and consequent psychological trauma. Horror is always made most real to us via details, therefore it is appropriate to begin with the details of trench service – with rain, ice, sleeplessness, noise, drearily monotonous food, infestation, discomfort, stink and fear laced with profound tedium. Although it is now fashionable to ridicule such an emphasis, just such a list was produced by the painter Otto Dix, who fought at Artois, Champagne and, like Prewett, at the Battle of the Somme. His included ‘lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, gas, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel’.5 During their time in the trenches in France, some or all of the habitual corporal pleasures that punctuate daily life were regularly taken from men of all ranks, with the lower ranks suffering the most. A lot depended on the weather, particularly the dispiriting effects of rain and biting cold. During the harsh winter of 1916–17, for example, rations froze to the extent that hot tea solidified in minutes. At the Third Battle of Ypres it rained incessantly for four days and four nights. The nights were always the coldest, a time when, as Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Exposure’ described, hands shrivelled, foreheads puckered and the eyes of the living and the dead resembled ice. Wet weather made mud and fifth inescapable and aided the development and spread of infections such as trench foot, trench nephritis and trench fever. ‘The rain drives on’, war artist Paul Nash wrote, ‘the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell-holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime. It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless.’6 However, when the weather broke, often the men’s spirits lifted too. For example, even in the midst of Verdun in March 1916, the sun coming out delighted Charles Delvert. ‘Life has its charm’, he wrote blithely, ‘It’s like camping out. You wonder through the trenches; the air is fresh, the sun brilliant. Gay little clouds flit across the blue sky.’7 Sleep, a balm that soothes even the worst day, was often snatched and regularly an impossibility even in the comparative safety away from the front line. This was partly because of incessant noise, a constant stressor whose cumulative impact was difficult to express. Robert Graves observed, ‘you can’t communicate noise. Noise never stopped for one moment – ever’ and he felt he emerged from the war with ‘about four years’ loss of sleep to make up’. Sleep in these conditions became the subject of fantasy as opposed to a pleasant daily recourse. ‘Poor Sleep’s gone lame’, as Edmund Blunden put it in the war poem ‘A House in Festubert’; it had

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been poisoned by Mahu, chief of all demons and bringer of madness.8 Food was another habitual comfort often either in short supply or of poor quality. Unless better fare was sent or brought from home, it was often dully the same, lacking in vegetables and available at unpredictable times via the supply lines. The men could rely only on chlorinated tea, bully beef, biscuits jam, not enough bread and a rum ration distributed on occasion. One diversion as well as a hated chore was hunting the various creatures that enjoy feeding off or infesting humans living in close quarters. Lice were chief among the litany of creeping things including flies, fleas, nits and mosquitoes that bothered the men on an intimate level and brought on infections. Ominously large and repulsively confident rats ‘big as kittens’ were also often near the men, who were well aware they were fat because they fed on corpses.9 The ease with which rats carried out their fetid business could easily gnaw upon a man’s consciousness in the same way that they invariably gnawed upon his possessions. The most thoughtful examination of the trench rat was produced by Isaac Rosenberg in his poem ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’. Addressed directly to a rat, it ironized other famous poems such as John Donne’s ‘The Flea’, Shelley’s ‘To A Skylark’ and Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and affected a conversation with a reviled creature who is also one of the world’s most successful and prolific species. Rosenberg found the rat’s transgressive and ‘cosmopolitan’ nature amusing because rats cared nothing about which side fought or who won the war. There were obvious resonances between certain prejudices against Jews like Rosenberg himself and his description of the trench rat, but his main focus was the multiple correspondences between his spirit and that which guided the rat. Both made wry, intelligent accommodations with danger and kept up a defiant commitment to their art despite oppressive, grim circumstances. Somehow, defying poverty, discrimination and while feeling like a slave as a private because he was allowed only ten days’ respite in the twenty-two months he served prior to his death, Rosenberg produced peerlessly expressive work that exposed the realities of combat. Rosenberg’s feelings for the trench rat were complex, but he was utterly disgusted by the squalor combat produced. A war of attrition and defence fought in trenches that needed continual maintenance and development meant constant dirt and mess. Added to this, battle left its own disgusting landscape. R. H. Tawney’s description of what was left behind by an Allied barrage on 1 July 1916 provides a useful glimpse of what those in service might see: ‘the slimy grass, the dirty food cans . . . the offal, the rusty bits of metal, the stench, the rats . . . which devoured the bodies in no man’s land.’ The decencies of being able to

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wash, change one’s clothes and communicate by letter were reliably available only on reserve. Wilfred Owen, although he could also write in his poems of the beauty in the swearing that kept up morale, was among the most disgusted of all war’s commentators by the profane language and perversion of order he found around him. He wrote to his mother in January 1917: There is the universal perversion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devil ridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth.10

For some, the ugliness of the trench landscape was matched only by the tedium of the filth then on view within industrial cities. To the poet soldier David Jones, the trenches were a loveless scene spread horizontally, imaging unnamed discomfort, sordid and deprived as ill-kept hen-runs that back on sidings on wet weekdays where wasteland meets environs and punctured bins ooze canned-meats discarded, tyres to rot, derelict slow-weathered iron-ware disintegrates between factoryend and nettle-bed.11

Sassoon had the good sense to carry an antidote with him. He kept on his person a form of mobile beauty to distract himself and others from the reality of tight spots. His ‘pocket sunset’ was a piece of fire-opal on a fine gold chain, a remnant of Ottoline Morrell’s decadent glamour to ward off the gloom. Waiting for the off, he would pass it around. He recalled, ‘I . . . derived consolation from its marvellous colours during the worst episodes of my war experiences. In a small way it had done its best to mitigate much squalor and despondency. My companions in dismal dugouts had held it in their hands and admired it.’12 Finally, there was fear, which even beauty cannot dependably quell. Exposure to death, the primary business of war, and to its particular, choking smell was inescapable for those who fought. The dead, or parts thereof, kept reappearing in surreal fashion – in sandbags when trenches were dug or repaired and in the churning landscape as the line of conflict shifted. One response to such enforced intimacy with the dead was macabre humour coupled with grim stoicism, an attempt to paper over the transgression of one of mankind’s earliest and most fundamental taboos. For example, at one stage at Ypres, the men being relieved each shook hands with a disembodied arm sticking out of the side of a trench and said ‘Tata Jack’. In turn, the men who relieved them did the same, saying ‘’ello Jack’.13 Living alongside death like this had its own fascination, at least

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initially, but in time it gave way to a corrosive disgust. This trajectory of emotion was explored by A. P. Herbert in his 1929 novel The Secret Battle. His character, Harry Penrose, is at first intrigued and then tormented by the repulsive things war exposes him to. He is finally undone by the sight of a corpse-filled trench, whose unignorable horror the narrator explores fully for the reader: But there was a hideous fascination about the things, so that after a few hours a man came to know the bodies in his bay with a sickening intimacy, and could have told you many details about each of them – their regiment, and how they lay, and how they had died, and little things about their uniforms . . . All of them were alive with flies, and at noon when we took out our bread and began to eat, these flies rose in great black swarm and fell upon the food in our hands. After that no-one could eat. All day men were being sent away by the doctor, stricken with sheer nausea by the flies and the stench and the things they saw, and went retching down the trench.14

In this instance, flies, like the rats of Rosenberg’s poem, perform a communion of sorts between the living and the dead. Their effect is to make death, previously thought of as external to the self, potentially internal. In this way nature, in the form of the creeping, crawling, gnawing things of the earth, worked to remind the soldier that the gains of war are ultimately secondary to larger, more powerful forces that continually push to recycle flesh and matter. Much suggests that intimacy with the dead and in particular, tasting or inhaling putrescine smells, was a primary trigger for ‘shell-shock’. For example, W. H. R. Rivers wrote in 1918 and 1920 about an officer tormented by the recurrence of the taste and smell of the entrails of a German into whose decomposing stomach he had been flung face-forward by a bomb. He wrote, ‘Before he lost consciousness the patient had clearly realised his situation, and knew that the substance which filled his mouth and produced the most horrible sensations of taste and smell was derived from the decomposed entrails of an enemy.’15 Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother about the psychic distress of being forced to live alongside the dead: ‘But to sit with them all day, all night . . . and a week later to come back and find them still sitting there, in motionless groups, THAT is what saps the “soldierly spirit”.’ From the outset, it was the visceral, sensory, palpable way death made itself manifest in the trenches that was among the worst of war for Owen. ‘I have not seen any dead’, he told his mother just three weeks after arriving at the Front, ‘I have done worse. In the dank air, I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt.’16 For Guy Chapman, a powerful chronicler of the Third Battle of Ypres, it was the sight of bones that simply could not be borne. When his eye caught sight

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of something white and shining as he walked along a trench he bent to inspect it and found the last five joints of a spine. ‘There was nothing else, no body, no flesh’, he wrote, ‘This apparition overcame me.’ Yet Chapman also recorded that his colonel found the whole phenomenon fascinating. Chapman had to plead off when his superior ‘tried vainly to interest me in a complete jaw without skull or cervical, and with the teeth still flecked with blood’.17 For Sassoon, the opposite aspect of decomposition – the separation of flesh from the bone to which it should by rights be attached, was what haunted. He dwelt upon the horror it engendered in his quasi-fictional war memoirs: ‘Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull.’18 Edmund Blunden was among the longest-serving of the war’s poets, and afterwards had ongoing recurrent thoughts about two German corpses, ‘tallowfaced and dirty-stubbled’, who lay in a shell hole the British used as a latrine. Yet it was possible to be both repulsed by the war and proud to be part of it. One gunner, R. B. Talbot, wrote to his sister during the Battle of the Somme of ‘the awful dead in every shell hole and on every doorstep, with their smashed-in faces and their bayonet wounds; or blown to pieces by shellfire or bombed at the entrance to their dugouts’ but also asserted, ‘still I was glad I was a soldier and would not exchange my experience for anything in the world, for war is surely a terrible but wonderful thing!’ Talbot, at this point at least, considered himself deserving not of pity but of envy because of his luck at having the chance to experience what he did.19 Clearly, soldiers’ responses to being surrounded by death were multiple, and the associated psychological effects often cumulative, diverse and specific to circumstance. When they could be located, decomposing mutilated bodies could only be dealt with by dousing them with acrid chloride of lime. The literature of the war is therefore replete with stories of men’s forced interaction with bodies torn apart as well as with the horror of witnessing the last moments of others in agonizing pain or in shocked ignorance of the nearness of their own death. The front was ‘rotten with dead’, as Sassoon put it, or, in Louis Mairet’s terms, rotten with ‘the wet death, the muddy death, death dripping with blood, death by drowning, death by sucking under, death in the slaughterhouse’.20 This made the landscapes of the front a sinister inversion of the pastoral, a reeking, fetid vista or ‘slimescape’, to use the term coined by contemporary historian Santanu Das. It is difficult to under-emphasize this aspect of trench experience given its persistence across the spectrum of literary output on the war. One of the most resonant and direct descriptions came from Donegal writer Patrick McGill, who wrote of a corpse he was forced to sprawl over in the dark: ‘Worms feasted on its

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entrails, slugs trailed silverly over its face, and lean rats gnawed at its flesh. The air was full of the thing, the night stank with its decay.’21 This was a world capable of realizing man’s worse imaginings, the language it prompted as evocative as the hellscape on the right-hand panel of the 1490 Hieronymous Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Because it was potentially lethal as an obstruction and because they knew it might contain the undigested flesh of those who had fallen, soldiers hated the mud of the trenches. It was so redolent it was even capable of communicating some of the horror of the front to those back home. For example, when the writer Vera Brittain received the clothes of her dead fiancé from the Front, she was appalled at how disgusting they were, at how ‘the mud of France’ clinging to them seemed ‘saturated with dead bodies’.22 For some, the worst aspect of the fighting was none of the experiences mentioned previously, it was uncertainty about what might happen next mixed with profound boredom from tiring, dull chores and long, long stretches where nothing happened. This was the ‘Boredom and boredom and boredom’ which H. G. Wells’s fictional soldier Hugh Britling described in his letters home and the feeling of always waiting which Henri Barbusse encapsulated in his 1916 memoir Under Fire. ‘We have become waiting machines.’ Barbusse wrote, ‘For the moment it is the food we are waiting for. Then it will be the post. But each in its turn. When we have done with dinner we will think about the letters. After that, we shall set ourselves to wait for something else.’23 Since the human mind is capable of normalizing almost anything in the long term, even the possibility of death from explosion did not always mitigate the psychological attrition of boredom. Thus Ivor Gurney wrote home: ‘Guns are going in the distance, and every moment there is the chance of a strafe . . . yet the note of the whole affair is boredom.’24 Sitting around, scrounging for resources or other things to consume, doing drill, and talking about or scheming to gain access to the desired sex has always been part of military life. However, war conducted via belligerent attempts to wear down the enemy to the point of collapse brings with it a constant drip of death (from sniper fire, enemy artillery, accidents) and it removes from those involved the solace of secure rest. The First World War was further characterized by a tiring lack of resolution or transformation because territory was won, lost again and then fought for once more. This created within many of those who fought ‘extravagant joy’ followed by hopelessness – an emotional trajectory Edmund Blunden powerfully encapsulated in his poem, ‘Third Ypres’. Such conditions were a perfect cocktail for mental distress for a significant number exposed to combat conditions. Extended comparative indolence or

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routine work interspersed with prolonged periods when men’s nerves were kept on edge, as, for example, when artillery fire was exchanged, were especially psychologically difficult. Although the enemy was directly encountered infre­ quently, the danger of death or maiming if a soldier’s head was not kept below ground level was high. Added to this, the men lacked opportunities to respond to threat by venting their aggression and attaining some form of compensation for what they were living through. According to Eric Leed, there was a clear relationship between how active the war was and the level of ‘shell-shock’ or neurosis experienced, a claim supported by the fact that the incidence of ‘shellshock’ declined when conflict mobilized after German offensives in 1918.25 The majority of soldiers who collapsed from psychological trauma never killed anyone, adding further support to the idea that inability to meaningfully retaliate in the face of violence was a primary cause of emotional distress. Mechanized warfare made death random and limited the individual agency that could be offered in response. Instead, men in the trenches were forced to adopt a troglodyte existence, fearful in the way that small animals are who rush for cover in the face of unassailable power. As the contemporary psychiatrist John T. MacCurdy put it, men were forced to ‘remain for days, weeks, even months, in a narrow trench or stuffy dugout, exposed to constant danger of the most fearful kind . . . which comes from some unseen source, and against which no personal agility or wit is of any avail’.26 Most men did not come from cultural contexts that allowed such powerlessness to be easily accommodated psychologically, especially when it was extended over long periods and combined with heightened vigilance. To the contrary, in this period instant, appropriate violence in response to threat was a primary way ‘normal’ male identity was articulated and recognized. As Robert Graves expressed it in one collection, the military context many men experienced was that of ‘Goliath and David’, an overwhelmingly asymmetrical inversion of the combat narratives with which they had grown up.27

The positives of war Although it is under-discussed, war generated rewards as well as horrors for those of a literary bent. Prewett’s combat experiences severely traumatized him but the evidence shows that at the same time they also brought transcendence and communion with forces outside of the self. His poem ‘The Bombardment’ described how in the cold and dark he pressed his face to the earth, ‘the mother

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of life’, so that he ‘might hear what was said’. He felt the stars land at his feet, the earth sweetly sing upwards and recorded: So I lay down close to earth, My soul eager, trembling, and dread, When God, loving my desire, Raised the veil that clouds his head.

The most positive of all the poems he published about combat was ‘My Bride Is Battle’. Within it, Prewett admitted that he sometimes denied his own unquenchable love of war – ‘Her clamorous cosseting I in revolt deny, yet love for her I cannot satisfy.’ War took the place of romantic love and the poet deemed his own death a worthwhile sacrifice. It concluded: My bride is battle, she me comforts deep, She after tumult comforts me asleep; Her iron front feeds me with fire, I die, but battle is my all desire.

Prewett also wrote of a sexual encounter with a girl, ‘plump and busk’ near his billet, an encounter so memorable it stayed with him for over thirty years. The meeting happened at dusk, the poet stating coyly, ‘I knew her not, yet I knew her most.’ The two ‘merged their natural joy’ in a ‘surge of innocence’ before the soldier ‘took [his] fearful way’. Had there been more time, ‘each would have given what is vainly sought’, but the poet was left only with frequent memories of the event and the farewell kiss he placed upon her hands. It is one of a series of Prewett’s poems that describe the intensity of feeling between the sexes the war generated.28 A number of other poets also discussed war’s positive effects upon them. Julian Grenfell, for example, found new life through its violence. His work was popular early in the war, in particular the poem ‘Into Battle’, written on 29 April 1915 and containing the memorable line ‘who dies fighting has increase’. Grenfell thought of nature as spurring him on to warrior glory and wrote home that life at the Front ‘just suits my stolid health and stolid nerves and barbaric disposition. The fighting excitement vitalises everything – every sight and word and action. One loves one’s fellow man so much more when one is bent on killing him.’29 This was an aristocratic hunter’s viewpoint applied to killing humans as opposed to foxes or deer. It reflected both Grenfell’s dissociation from the impact of his actions, the misapplication of Homeric values to modern warfare, and Grenfell’s portentous fascination with mortal danger, a proclivity of his firmly in place long

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before the war. For Charles Carrington, who wrote up his memories in 1929 and 1965, war brought out multiple personas: one persona was aware of war’s danger, another denied it and became an efficient ‘Zombie’, while yet another possessed ‘a romantic ardour for battle that was almost joyful’. Attack, at least early in the war, for Carrington was ‘good fun like playing the soldier in the garden at home’.30 Other men, such as Private Alfred Pollard, enjoyed combat, finding it ‘jolly’ and ‘fun’. Pollard recorded that he wanted to kill, ‘because the primitive instinct was strong in me to fight’. Even Robert Graves, who wrote candidly that the First World War was ‘grossly mismanaged’ and heaped ‘grief, pain, fear and horror’ upon its infantrymen, also acknowledged, ‘it also brought new meanings of courage, patience, loyalty and greatness of spirit; incommunicable, we found, to later times’. Such transcendence perhaps was registered most fulsomely by the Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He wrote of the ‘immense freedom’ and feeling ‘memory charged with wonder’ amid the smell of death on Ypres plain in April 1915 and Souville in July 1916. The experience gave him a sense of closeness to God, a sense of ‘a tenacious, unsurpassable essence of exultation and initiation, as if . . . part of the absolute’. Another soldier who enjoyed the First World War and called it ‘the greatest time of my earthly existence’ but who succumbed to ‘hysterical blindness’ as a result of what he experienced was Adolf Hitler.31 As revisionist historians often stress, war service provided those who fought with a means to prove their individual worth and with a sense of community. Love of battalion, tenderness for comrades and a desire to see things through under orders mattered deeply to a great many.32 Repeatedly, it was taken as read in memoirs and letters that voluntary subordination of free will for the greater good of others was a national imperative. Wilfred Owen, for example, was far from unusual in finding profound solace in the admiration he felt for those he led. Words to this effect were among the last he ever committed to the page, when he wrote to his mother on 31 October 1918; ‘Of this I am certain you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.’33 However, the complex nature of such ‘group cohesion’ is less often discussed. The phenomenon may stem primarily from the desire to survive in conditions where this is more likely if a man meets the requirements of the group within which he finds himself. Of course, such an instrumental outlook, that war is hell and sticking it out collectively is the best hope for individual survival, drains war service both of its glamour and its moral virtue. A recent book has argued that war’s greatest positive is that it allows for a reassertion of the sort of collective identity more usually found within

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tribes. According to the war writer and film-maker Sebastian Junger, this is why men can keep going as soldiers in combat but then find it difficult to readjust to civilian life after the fighting ends. ‘Humans don’t mind hardship’, he argues, ‘what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.’ In contrast, he argues that the combat battalion, like the tribe, is ideally geared towards giving meaning to collaborative action. It can generate the sort of collective rather than individual sense of self that sustains personality and produces calm. This may be a romantic idealization of both tribal life and military service, but it nonetheless addresses something that deserves further analysis – that war service has the potential to liberate individuals and bring out their best selves within worthwhile joint endeavour.34 We may not agree fully with William Broyles in his remarkable 1984 essay ‘Why Men Love War’, that war heightens everything, is beautiful in its terror and brings a tarnished, utopian joy. However, Broyles, who fought in Vietnam, quoted Robert Graves in his work for a reason: both knew there can be delight in killing and ecstasy from cheating death. Evidence for this among First World War combatants was provided by Joanna Bourke in her 1999 volume An Intimate History of Killing, but such work and discussion of what might be called ‘the joy of war’, must always be balanced with other evidence of how traumatizing war can be. Furthermore, trauma and joy from inflicting death or escaping it are often intertwined experiences.35 For some whose lives before service had been marked by adversity and strain, the war brought relief of sorts. The exceptional poet and critic Edward Thomas wrote from the trenches: ‘I have suffered more from January to March in other years than in this’, while Ivor Gurney, who teetered on the edges of sanity for years after the war, found service strangely strengthening before he got to the trenches. He wrote: ‘It was a great time: full of fear of course, but not so bad as neurasthenia.’ In February, 1915, he wrote, ‘It is hard, and always I am tired, but I struggle through in a very much happier frame of mind than that I have had for some time – probably four years.’ These, of course, are the remarks of men who were never quite at ease with ‘normal’ life in the first place and who had already experienced pre-war psychological challenges that had brought them close to despair. Even so, Gurney, a poet and composer whose work is more concerned with mourning and his own struggle with mental illness than with overt protest against the war, wrote with intense fondness and detail about the domestic pleasures that sometimes were available to soldiers. These included the chance to fry bacon, smoke

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a slow Woodbine, laugh with comrades and drink grenadine, citron, wine and beer in cool, airy little French estaminets (cafés). Gurney claimed he found the mental trauma war generated less terrorizing than expected, and in one poem even suggested that it paled in comparison with the dreadful heart-tearing mundanity that was on offer post-war for most men. His poem ‘Strange Hells’ registered: There are strange Hells within the minds War made Not so often, not so humiliatingly afraid As one would have expected – the racket and fear guns made.

The poem ends with Gurney wondering morosely whether the men who fought are now on the State dole, or, perhaps, girlishly employed ‘showing shop patterns’.36 The beauty and fascination of the natural world remained an inspiration, consolation and solace for a number who fought, but this was not so for every soldier or every poet. The war drained Prewett of an unvarying relationship to nature and caused him to lose faith in it as a necessarily protective or enduring force. He became creatively attuned to one of the persistent themes of modernism: the gossamer-thinness of what appears real and substantive about life and the unknowable character of what underpins it. In contrast, for Ivor Gurney, even the most fearful conditions could not sully nature’s delights. He wrote of a June 1916 incident when a fellow soldier turned to him and said: Listen to that damned bird . . . . All through that bombardment in the pauses I could hear that infernal silly ‘Cuckoo, Cuckoo’ sounding while Owen was lying in my arms covered with blood. How shall I ever listen again . . .! He broke off, and I became aware of shame at the unholy joy that had filled my artist’s mind.37

Prewett’s dissociative poem ‘Card Game’ Each of the aspects of conflict and the responses to it discussed earlier show war to be hybrid and diversely experienced as a collective cultural expression. ‘War’, as H. G. Wells put it, ‘is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light.’38 However, only the emotionally numb or mentally ill could have avoided being affected by serving in the midst of battle. According to Ernst Jünger, standing in the field during the First World War was like watching a giant swinging a hammer and missing your head by a quarter of an inch.39 Although he did

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not serve himself, Thomas Mann powerfully described the experience in his 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg): Dusk, rain, and mud, fire reddening a murky sky . . . the damp air rent by piercing, singsong whines and raging, onrushing, hellhound howls that end their arc in a splintering, spraying, fiery crash filled with groans and screams. He [the hero, Hans] runs with feet weighed down by mud, his bayoneted rifle clutched in his hand and hanging at his side. Look, he is stepping on the hand of a fallen comrade – stepping on it with his hobnailed boots, pressing it deep into the soggy, branch-strewn earth . . . He stumbles. No, he has thrown himself on his stomach at the approach of a howling hound of hell, a large explosive shell, a hideous sugarloaf from the abyss. He lies there, face in the cool muck, legs spread, feet twisted until the heels press the earth. Laden with horror . . . [it] buries itself in the ground and explodes . . . bursts inside the earth with ghastly superstrength and casts up a house-high fountain of soil, fire, iron, lead, and dismembered humanity.40

Mann’s account was fictional, but resonates with the description of being at Vimy provided in the 1930s by Mike Mountain Horse, the Blood (Kainai) First Nations soldier from Alberta discussed in the previous chapter. ‘To realize the full horror of war’, Mountain Horse recorded: let the reader accompany me to the Vimy sector where I first underwent my baptism of fire. Lying on top of Vimy ridge one night, along with a number of other Indian boys, the scene before our eyes might best be described as that of a huge stage with lighting effects – Very (flare) lights from the Hun lines, and flames from bursting shells in the city of Lens. The red glare thrown back appeared like a great fire in the sky all the time.

As he watched ‘geysers of smoke and dirt shooting skyward like volcanoes in eruption’, houses burst suddenly into flames and he listened to a huge bomber overhead ‘droning like a huge bumble bee’. White Horse thought, ‘Where is the God that the white man taught the Indian to believe in?’ He prayed to him nonetheless.41 Chance impacts all our lives, but the trenches brought into stark relief how little control the individual in modern warfare has over their survival. Edmund Blunden’s poem ‘The Welcome’ exemplified this and described a man with jangled nerves from the horrors he has already been exposed to being welcomed back to the Front. The first thing he then witnesses is the instant evisceration of six men in a concrete doorway, leaving only ‘a black muckheap’ blocking the way. The potential for this sort of arbitrary and instant death generated extreme

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unease, superstition and fear for many. Deep, traumatic impact often was linked to what men witnessed as opposed to what happened to them directly, including the fearful, animal behaviour of others in extremis. César Méléra, describing Verdun, painted one of the most evocative descriptions of such a context of crisis for survival: Horses and mules buried. A fetid mud sometimes reaches your ankle, disgorging an awful smell and a heavy opaque air. He who has not seen the wounded emitting their death rattle on the field of battle, without cares, drinking their urine to appease their thirst . . . has seen nothing of war.42

However, even horror and the obscene can become humdrum and superficially at least, can be incorporated into the rhythms of existence. Prewett was especially sensitive to this normalization and devoted one of his most powerful poems, ‘Card Game’, to the carapace of immunity to suffering time spent in the trenches forced men to adopt. ‘Card Game’ described his group’s response to the whine and explosion of a bomb, and how upon reaching the wounded, the poet put his hand to the breast of one of the men. ‘His heart thumped, stopped, and I drew/My hand out wet.’ After dealing with the screaming and the pouring blood, Prewett concluded his poem: We bandaged the rest And went in, And started again at our cards Where we had been.

The precision with which Prewett and his uninjured group resumed playing their card game powerfully evoked their desperation to dissociate and re-enter a mental world preoccupied with something other than death and suffering. It also testified to how even the most terrifying violence can eventually come to seem acceptable, even banal. Such apparent emotional iciness was echoed in Jünger’s 1920 book, The Storm of Steel. Its hero-narrator made no overt comment on the horrors he described and instead consistently confined his field of vision to what was before him, responding as if in a dream despite being surrounded by sudden reports, terror and death. Thus, when describing the loss of a fellow fighter, Jünger’s writing concerned itself not with feelings, but with measurements – of quantities of blood, intervals between death-rattles, bullets fired: ‘His blood poured on to the ground as though poured out of a bucket. The snorting death-rattles sounded at longer intervals and at last ceased. I seized his rifle and went on firing.’ Similar emotional distancing also characterized the

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poem ‘Breakfast’ by Wilfrid Gibson, published in The Nation on 17 October 1914. Here, a soldier described the death of his comrade after he raised his head in response to the offer of a bet on a football result. The reader never learns how the author reacted to the circumstance, only that the war continued as before. Gibson did not see active service, but very early in the war he was able to bring a new honesty to descriptions of the front in verse. As a result, he was admired by poets like Sassoon, Gurney, Rosenberg and, it is likely, Prewett.43

A sheer time: Being blown up, then buried alive Having arrived at the front early in 1916 and having been gassed, thrown from a horse and permanently damaging his spine; then having returned to the front a year later and having survived repeated battles over the ensuing two years, the worst for Prewett came in April 1918 when he was blown up and buried alive in a collapsed artillery dugout. It probably happened at the Battle of Béthune. The overwhelming panicked horror of being hurled through the air by the explosion followed by the sensation of being completely interred, trapped head to foot in soil, was Prewett’s ‘sheer time’, a phrase used by Wilfred Owen in his last letter to Siegfried Sassoon.44 It alluded to the charring of the senses Owen experienced after a young man bled out for half an hour on his shoulder having been shot through the head. Prewett was to partially replace Owen in Sassoon’s affections after the pair met in hospital in August 1918. Less than a month before dying in combat, Owen had been thrilled to hear about Sassoon’s new poet friend ‘Toronto’ and wrote to tell Sassoon he was ‘so interested about Prewett’.45 Had the three met, it seems likely they would have had a great deal to share about ‘sheer times’ in war. Owen had also been trapped for over a day in March 1917 after falling down a fifteen-foot hole in a cellar and hitting his head. The experience fundamentally contributed to his ultimately being hospitalized for psychological trauma. According to his biographer, the event marked ‘the end of his “exuberance” at being an officer who had done his honourable bit and survived’. However, the real trigger experience that led to ‘shell-shock’ for Owen came the following month when he was trapped for twelve days in another hole too small for his body alongside a dead friend who was ‘in various places around and about’.46 Predictably, he returned to the underground as a setting in a number of his poems. It took a long time before Prewett was able to even refer to his own near-death experience of being buried alive or for the psychological suffering it caused not

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to be obvious socially. He did, however, refer to being triggered into instant regression in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell on 15 July 1920, but even then, well over two years after the event, he could do so only in wild and bizarrely arched handwriting. He wrote, ‘Just a moment ago there was a crash somewhere in the distance and instantaneously I was in a dug-out and the roof had been blown in. It is dreadful how these war experiences cling to one.’ His published poems ‘Epigram’ and ‘Out of the Nothingness of Earth’ refer to the horror of the experience, but do so obliquely, as does the unpublished poem fragment, ‘A Homecoming to Earth’. Collectively, his poems suggest Prewett dug himself out of the hole he was in with his bare hands despite his existing spinal injury. They describe the earth fatalistically as both the poet’s beginning and his eventual end, but also as a place from which he makes a ‘presumptuous leap’ into hope. ‘Epigram’ suggests that being buried alive gave Prewett a positive sense of wider, cosmic reincarnation. Meanwhile, ‘Out of the Nothingness of Earth’ suggests that the experience caused him see to himself as an insignificant, ignorant animal, born to live and die as do the stars and planets. An archive note in Prewett’s handwriting suggests that the latter poem was written at his friend Lady Clementine Waring’s home The Moult, Salcombe, in 1919, a time when Prewett’s poems took comfort of sorts in the constancy of nature but remained resigned to how tiny man’s place was in the great cosmic scheme. The poem reads: Out of the earth I sprang Bewildered sore, Gazed all around, and knew I lived before. Into the earth I spring Bewildered sore; So shall I rise and fall Forevermore.47

Meanwhile, ‘A Homecoming to Earth’, which was sent to Lady Clementine, describes some social uses of earth, but its author concludes, ‘Would that I had never tried to live’.48 References to the experience of surviving being buried alive pepper the records, literature and histories of this period, but precisely how often it contributed to the onset of ‘shell-shock’ is difficult to know. What is clear is that being buried alive was among the worst fears of many in service. One example was Private P. H. Jones who fought with the Queen’s Westminsters. He wrote in

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December 1914, ‘Nightmares are very common and it is curious to note that everyone has the same dream of the dugout falling in and being buried alive. At times this dream is so vivid that a man wakes up yelling in a positive fear of anguish.’49 Fear of live burial was not a dread unique to war. In fact, terror of live burial was so prevalent as a psychiatric issue in the nineteenth century that the diagnostic term taphephobia was invented for it in 1891. The phenomenon has always been a mainstay of Gothic horror and its master storyteller Edgar Allan Poe was creepily fascinated by it. His 1844 short story ‘The Premature Burial’ claimed ‘no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and mental distress, as is burial before death’. In florid but moving style, it described what the experience felt like: The unendurable oppression of the lungs – the stifling fumes of the damp earth . . . the blackness of the absolute Night – the silence like a sea that overwhelms – the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm – these things . . . carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. We know nothing so agonizing upon Earth – we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.

One key reason being buried alive was held to be capable of generating more terror than almost any other form of potential death was because it was thought to offer an unwelcome glimpse between worlds. As Poe explained: To be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of . . . extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who can say where the one ends, and where the other begins?50

Mike ‘Miistatisomatai’ Mountain Horse from Alberta was buried alive for four days at Cambrai in October 1917 and it led to his being hospitalized for trauma, although he returned to achieve the rank of Sergeant and was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal (DMC). The Bloomsbury figure Ralph Partridge also suffered profoundly from being buried alive by an exploding shell. Partridge and Prewett moved in interlinking circles, Partridge being the long-term love interest of Ottoline Morrell’s close friend, Lytton Strachey. Being buried under rubble and mud at the Somme, Partridge said, was ‘what it feels like to die’. Despite being under fire, his batman scraped and scooped away the earth until he uncovered Partridge’s head, but by then Partridge was unconscious and his

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tongue black and sticking out from lack of oxygen. Brandy was administered, but Partridge’s lungs filled up with earth every time he tried to breathe. He survived nonetheless and was awarded the MC and Croix de Guerre; his batman, the DCM. The effects of being buried stayed with Partridge an extremely long time. After the cataclysm of Lytton Strachey’s death in 1932 and the subsequent suicide of Partridge’s wife Dora Carrington, Partridge re-married and took his bride back to where it had happened, a therapeutic experience that helped them live together more or less happily for the following thirty years. Partridge became a conscious objector during the Second World War. The effect of being buried alive upon Walter Gropius, meanwhile, is more difficult to discern. After the war he became the charismatic head in Weimar Germany of Bauhaus, the most influential and creatively dissonant design school of the twentieth century. His horror-filled war included spending two days and two nights buried alive with corpses after a shell blast in June 1918 at Soissons-Rheims. What made the experience yet more gruesome was that Gropius was the only one of his group to survive because a chimney allowed him air. His ever-lessening cries for help were eventually heard by a rescue party.51 Escapologists who have been buried alive describe having to use every muscle in the body to punch up through the soil, which finds its way into the eyes, nose and mouth. They describe the pitch black and dampness as overwhelming and the feeling of having life squeezed out by the weight of the soil as similar to being held bodily in a vice. Often, the ribs and head are crushed, blood vessels burst and bones break. Perhaps because of its gruesomeness, being buried alive has a long history as a cruel punishment for murder. Dante’s Inferno referred to murderers who refused to repent being buried alive, while in the seventeenth century the fate was reserved for Russian wives who murdered their husbands. Yet being buried alive has also long been held to be spiritually powerful as a way to die. It was used, for example, as a propitiatory ritual in the Christian tradition at Iona where Saint Odhran’s live burial was said to have expelled the Devil.52 Although being buried alive generated unsurpassed horror for short story writers such as Poe and Émile Zola (author of ‘La mort d’Olivier Bécaille’ in 1884), it also reportedly brought compensation to the victim in the form of unique psychological gifts. Both Poe and Zola’s protagonists graduated from the experience having lost their fear of death and continued their lives healthier and saner. For Prewett, however, little seemed to be positive about the experience. It fostered the idea in him that he might in fact be dead or have become overly accessible to the dead. Being buried alive shattered the thin veil between the

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living and the deceased and led to a mental disequilibrium from which Prewett struggled to escape for the rest of his life.53 In Freudian terms, the experience replicates materially the processes whereby emotions are repressed over time thereby causing fundamental emotional disruption. In his famous 1919 essay, Freud characterized being buried alive as supremely uncanny and held that what so terrified people about it was that it promised the ultimate combination of the familiar, homey and mothering with its very opposite. It represented nothing less than the return of something that is usually deeply psychologically repressed – the desire to re-enter the mother’s body. He wrote: To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness – the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.

For Freud, being buried alive is a physical manifestation of the repression concept which relies upon an archaeology within the psyche where emotions may be hidden or buried, usually unconsciously. Being buried alive is the ultimate physical, material corollary of the subversion of psychological repression.54 Overall, Prewett’s war experiences did not cause him to make a simple transition from pre-war high diction and embroidered discussion of idealized nature to realist truth-telling.55 Instead, war prompted him to articulate the revolutionary realism at the core of the Georgian poetic. A commitment to social justice, to the articulation of the voices, interests and perspectives of the poor and uneducated, and accurate description of the physical and sexual alongside a strain of anti-religiosity, had all been vital aspects of the Georgian poetic impulse prior to the beginning of the conflict. Prewett’s work owed as much to these existing traditions as it did to any starkly new poetic consciousness. His poem, ‘The Somme Valley, June 1917’ is a useful example. Deeply Georgian in its realism and desire to ask moral questions on behalf of those without a voice, it had a cold, descriptive quality and a tone seemingly at ease with death and morally equivalent about war itself. Its repeated question was a counterblast to the famous poem ‘In Flander’s Fields’ by John McCrae, the Ontario doctor who served with the Canadian Field Artillery at the Second Battle of Ypres and probably, it was intended as such. Prewett’s poem demands reflection from the reader and asks about the place of sorrow in circumstances where loss is inevitable. As in McCrae’s poem, the conventional poetic compensation of larks

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singing is invoked, but Prewett’s work made clear that such singing in fact holds no consolation at all: Comrade, why do you weep? Is it sorrow for a friend Who fell, rifle in hand, Whose long fight is at end? The harsh thunder-lipped guns Roll his dirge deep and slow, Where safe at last he sleeps, Head to toe with foe. The sweet lark beats on high, For the joy of those who sleep In the soft arms of earth: Comrade, why do you weep?56

Prewett’s work straddled a shift in poetic style, but alongside contextualizing it in these terms, it is fruitful to link the harsh candour within his poetry to the experience of ‘shell-shock’ or combat trauma, however defined. In the chapter that follows, an interdisciplinary lens is applied to ‘shell-shock’ and its treatment so as to shed fresh light on the topic and on how and why Prewett suffered. For Prewett, ‘shell-shock’ was a psychological rupture with primitivism at its core.

Figure 2  Frank James Prewett by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1919. © National Portrait Gallery, London

3

‘Shell-shock’

Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. Psalms 55.5 – King James Bible ‘Authorized Version’, Cambridge Edition Diagnosed as ‘neurasthenic’ or ‘shell-shocked’, Frank Prewett was admitted to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh in Scotland on 31 July 1918. He had been in the field one year and eight months and was known by his soldier’s nickname, ‘Toronto’. In what follows, the psychological trauma or ‘shell-shock’ Prewett experienced is examined in relation to developments within history, psychiatry, psychology, medical biology and through lenses of gender, class and culture. The aim is to provide the reader with an up-to-date, interdisciplinary understanding of this complex phenomenon and to contextualize both Prewett’s combat-induced trauma and his comparative good fortune in terms of the treatment he received.

‘Shell-shock’ in interdisciplinary context This chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach in attempting to understand the ‘shell-shock’ or combat-related psychological trauma experienced by Prewett and a number of his literary peers. This facilitates dynamic understanding of transnational debates across disciplinary boundaries and avoids over-reliance upon a limited set of sources. In literary and historical analyses, this is usually the work of Cathy Caruth and Elaine Showalter.1 An interdisciplinary approach is also appropriate because ‘shell-shock’ long ago transcended its original position as a purely medical diagnosis. Instead, as pointed out by the American historian Jay Winter, it has become a metaphor for the war itself, perhaps most pointedly in the literary works of British writers such as Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks.2

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An interdisciplinary lens helps us to locate the politics that inheres within both metaphors and psychological medical diagnoses. It also prompts recognition that the British relationship to ‘shell-shock’, rooted as it is within Western ideas about class and gender, is part of an ongoing, wider transnational and transtemporal evaluation of psychological trauma and its relationship to modern warfare.3 The fact that we stumble almost immediately over the appropriate term for the combat-related mental suffering Prewett experienced is revealing, a symptom of the challenge of attempting to apply scientific exactitude to the study of the mind. Few things say more about a society than what it deems unhealthily abnormal yet capable of being cured. As Michel Foucault’s work from the 1960s has shown, disease per se is historically contingent and cannot reasonably be disconnected from the multiple discourses that help create social reality.4 Therefore, it not surprising that over time and across national boundaries, a host of designations and ideas have been applied to the types of mental and physical injury designated as ‘shell-shock’. The first article using the term was written for The Lancet in 1915 by Dr Charles S. Myers, the doctor in charge of such arrangements at Passchendaele and Cambrai. However, Myers recognized that the term had a plastic, suggestive cultural valency all of its own and so as early as 1917 he demanded that its use be restricted. Afterwards, British Army doctors more often labelled men NYDN – Not Yet Diagnosed (Nervous).5 For the same reasons that prompted Myers to reject it, this book retains ‘shell-shock’, the term of the period that proved most popular in Anglophone countries. Psychological or combat trauma is also used because it usefully suggests the important element of a wound having been sustained by the psyche. However, it is important to keep in mind that the adoption of any specific term for this phenomenon will always be fraught, since it has been perceived differently over time within different countries and registers. Yet at the root of ‘shell-shock’ or psychological war trauma, however defined, is the individual’s own experience and memory of suffering linked to conflict. Therefore, in ways different to that of certain other diseases, it is firmly imbricated within historical context.6 Military and clinical responses tell us a great deal about the disorder, but its exact nature, causes and cures have always been contested.7 Because so much information in this period comes from clinical records as opposed to patient testimony, it requires careful evaluation. Additionally, it is problematic that key figures within the study of ‘hysteria’, including the ‘father’ of neurology JeanMartin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, linked it in the 1880s to innate degeneracy. Charcot innovated by broadening the study of hysteria beyond middle and upper-class females to include the working-class and males,

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but the idea that ‘shell-shock’ symptoms were a marker of inherited atrophy and baseness retained great persuasive power within psychiatry as it developed both in Germany and Britain. Further complexity is rooted in the fact that ‘shell-shock’ has always been intimately bound up with issues of fault and reparation. If the disease was deemed to be caused by war, then the state that waged it was responsible for the care of those affected and it was morally appropriate that it make recompense through veteran’s pensions or other means. Debate on this issue was significant from the earliest diagnoses. Indeed, when Charcot introduced the idea that hysteria could result from the trauma linked to railroad crashes, it was resisted by the medical profession and a rival psychologist promoted the pejorative term ‘railroad neurosis’. Predictably, it was he rather than Charcot who was regularly called thereafter to testify in compensation cases. ‘Shell-shock’ has also played a central role within wider questioning of the moral status of modern war given that the incidence of psychological trauma has grown in scale in the wake of industrialized conflict. Although modern trauma theory did not emerge exclusively from industrialized or technologized circumstances, there is overlap between warfare’s industrialization and the appearance of varieties of combat-related psychological trauma as distinct psychiatric categories in the last third of the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America. Increased incidence over time has been used to support arguments that mechanized modern war is inhumane in ways that cannot be reconciled with other Western values. This may partly explain the continued popularity and persistence of ‘shellshock’ as a term in British and Anglophone contexts despite its early rejection by the medical community. After all, the phrase does important work. It links psychological trauma to a man-made device and evokes how in this period the individual lost control over the pace and emotional context of the combat experience. Mass mobilization meant unprecedented numbers were exposed to combat conditions and the 1914–18 war of attrition made combat abstract in new ways. It created casualties primarily from shelling and sniper fire and only sporadically did it allow soldiers the chance to respond to attack as humans habitually do, using hand-to-hand combat. Acute psychological distress may always have accompanied war, but the phenomenon became more evident in the nineteenth century. During the American Civil War (1861–5) the federal army alone reported over 5,213 cases of nostalgia or ‘soldier’s heart’ resulting in fifty-eight deaths among whites from May 1861 to June 1866. However, these figures are considered deep

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underestimates. After the war, the issue started to generate its own medical literature.8 Comparable psychological symptoms during the Second World War were discussed as ‘combat fatigue’. Since 1980, media attention has revolved around the clinically legitimized syndrome known as post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. While it is reasonable to think of ‘shell-shock’ and combatrelated PTSD as synonymous, a sizeable number of patients treated for ‘shellshock’ during the First World War would not meet today’s clinical criteria for chronic PTSD since it is defined as a psychiatric rather than neurological phenomenon with a minimum duration of two years. Furthermore, the definition of PTSD provided by the American Psychiatric Association is too subjective and porous to directly map onto the basket of symptoms known as the First World War ‘shell-shock’. The APA described PTSD as falling under the general bracket of ‘Anxiety Disorders’ and as being precipitated by an event that would cause great distress to almost anyone. It added later that the event must lie, as admittedly war tends to for most people, ‘outside the range of usual human experience.’ In sum, ‘shell-shock’ is more varied than the current definition of PTSD, a diagnosis that in any case is likely to ultimately prove inadequate for understanding the full gamut of human responses to terror or prolonged stress, whether linked to war, combat or other phenomena. Overall, there are only a limited number of things we can be comparatively sure about in relation to psychological trauma in war: culture influences diagnoses; the pathology of syndromes linked to war changes over time; and human psychological resilience is often greater when the reasons for accepting risk and fear are clear. Additionally, it is important to bear in mind that while the civilian world has undergone a shift since the 1960s away from group values towards an emphasis upon individual rights, as well as what has been described as a ‘trauma revolution’, it cannot be assumed that these shifts have transferred to contemporary military experience.9 It is the case, however, that formal recognition of PTSD in 1980 marked an important shift. From this point, the individual soldier was no longer necessarily responsible for their psychological symptoms; instead they could be considered a direct result of trauma related to combat.

Gender and ‘shell-shock’ Although much ink has been spilt discussing this issue in the context of male military service, psychological war trauma has always also been experienced by

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women, children and other non-combatants. Experiences known to contribute to the onset of ‘shell-shock’ symptoms, including feelings of powerlessness in relation to negative overwhelming force that cannot be escaped, are not exclusive to male soldiers. Arguably, they are in fact most acutely felt by the most vulnerable. This was recognized to an extent during the First World War and women’s experience of war trauma appeared in Anglophone literature of the period, for example, in Rose Macauley’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916), Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934) and John Buchan’s The Three Hostages (1924). The poet HD attributed her stillbirth in 1915 to the war and the idea recurs throughout her war writing that those who did not directly experience combat could nonetheless suffer psychological trauma. The memoirist Vera Brittain had wartime experiences not dissimilar to that of a combat soldier and suffered terribly when she returned to Oxford in 1919 after being bombed at the front during the Ludendorff offensive. Among much else, repeated bereavement caused Brittain to become convinced that her face was changing into something terrifying. She recorded an ‘exhausting battle against nervous breakdown’ over eighteen months.10 The sense that violence and the actual or potential loss of close relatives causes pathological psychological trauma also recurs in the life and work of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Rudyard Kipling. In his 1915 story ‘Mary Postgate’, Kipling generated considerable shock by showing that profound trauma during the First World War could be experienced by an outwardly deeply respectable, middle-aged woman. His character, Miss Postgate, behaves in a dissociated manner, and exhibits seemingly perverse, pitiless violence that the story directly links to the violence and loss she has experienced in part as a result of the war. Miss Postgate takes delight in a German’s suffering, a response presented as rooted in her prior experience of the death of a nine-year-old British child.11 It is curious that analysis of warrelated psychological trauma has to date remained so emphatically focussed upon males since, prior to Charcot’s work from around 1885, the psychological malady known as ‘hysteria’ was associated almost exclusively with young or mature women. However, recent work by Susan R. Grayzel has gone some way towards redressing this imbalance, bringing greater awareness of cases such as that of Elizabeth Huntley, a British woman whose ‘air raid shock’ was held to have contributed to her decapitating her daughter in 1917. Further work by Tracy Loughran, Santanu Das and the nursing historian Christine Hallett has also problematized and historicized the peculiarity of ‘shell-shock’ having been reserved for males as a diagnosis.12

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To date, comparatively few studies have transcended a pervasive analytical emphasis on ‘shell-shock’ as something experienced primarily by officer-class, white males. However, one study that has done so is Shell Shock, Memory and the Modern Novel in the Wake of World War One by Trevor Dodman. It extends analysis of ‘shell-shock’ beyond poetry to include post-war novels by writers such as George Washington Lee and Mulk Raj Anand who gave voice to the traumatic experiences of African American doughboys and Indian sepoys.13

The debate over organic versus psychological causes When not dismissed as malingering, the primary divide in terms of approach over time to ‘shell-shock’ has been between those who see its cause as rooted in organic disturbance, a form of what in the sixteenth century was known as commotio cerebri, and those who view the phenomenon as essentially psychological. The former approach links ‘shell-shock’ to the high levels of explosion that occurred around frontline soldiers, from mortar attacks, artillery barrage and mines, each of which led to concussion. In the last decade advances in research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy have re-ignited this division and attention has returned to the physical as the source of the cluster of symptoms associated with ‘shell-shock’. A research team that includes neuropathologist Daniel Perl has argued that blast force from explosions could account for ‘shell-shock’ symptoms previously thought of as psychological. It is possible that the blasts created by the trinitrotoluene (TNT) first used by the Germans in 1902 could have caused damage to vessels and junctions between grey and white matter within soldiers’ brains. Such damage would have been cumulative, would have built up as a result of repeated exposure to blast waves of different sizes and would have been magnified by the fact that soldiers were often in confined spaces. Perl’s team found scarring in the brains of contemporary blast-injured veterans diagnosed with PTSD, specifically in areas linked to sleep and cognition. Should these results prove generalizable, it would explain the repeated references made during the First World War to soldiers dying as a result of explosions despite their having no visible injury. It would also help explain how the onset of ‘shell-shock’ symptoms often began long after exposure to what were recognized as traumatic events. Such research sees a medical debate coming full-circle, since the relative significance of organic versus psychological processes was a matter of contention well into the 1920s. Consultant physicians to the British Expeditionary Force including T. R. Elliott early in December 1914, linked ‘shell-shock’ to patients

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having been close to explosions, echoing thinking since 1860 about ‘railway spine’. Psychological trauma symptoms associated with railway accidents were thought to be caused by concussion of the spinal cord or traumatic meningomyelitis, and to have antecedents at least as far back as the ‘wind contusions’ reported after the Napoleonic Wars. The chief proponents of an organic role in ‘shell-shock’ were Sir Benjamin Brodie in Great Britain, Charcot in France and Hermann Oppenheim in Germany, but Oppenheim argued that the main cause of what he dubbed ‘traumatic neurosis’ was psychic rather than secondary molecular changes because of minute lesions in the brain or central nervous system. He retreated from neurology after 1916 partly because of antiJewish prejudice and because of a conflict of conscience because his work was incompatible with the dictates of a German military treasury intent upon not paying out war pensions. If Perl’s team’s contemporary research proves to be correct, the most prescient First World War figure on ‘shell-shock’ was British physician Frederick Mott. Mott wanted to examine soldiers’ brains, talked about blast compression waves, and in The Lancet in February 1916, hypothesized that ‘shell-shock’ was linked to a ‘physical or chemical change and a break in the links of the chain of neurons which subserve a particular function’.14

Incidence and diagnosis While it is not surprising that Prewett became ‘shell-shocked’, it is remarkable that the available records suggest so many of those who also fought and experienced large-calibre artillery warfare and explosions did not. The Army Report of the War Office Enquiry into ‘Shell Shock’ discussed 28,533 cases from 1914 to 1917 within the British armed forces; however, other estimates suggest that a figure closer to 80,000 is a more accurate number just for British soldiers alone.15 Given the likelihood of delayed onset for symptoms, the culture of shame surrounding diagnosis and its implications in relation to national morale and pension costs, all such figures remain estimates at best. A more indicative figure is perhaps the fact that 36 per cent of the British veterans receiving pensions in 1932 were recorded as suffering from psychological symptoms.16 Psychological casualty, associated with low return-to-duty rates and long periods of convalescence, was certainly militarily significant in a conflict that was prolonged and where at least 1.2 million British soldiers were admitted to hospital. ‘Shell-shock’ took many forms but the main diagnostic demarcation was between forms linked either to hysteria or anxiety. The tipping point into

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obvious symptoms and a consequent military response was often either linked to a single, traumatic event or was reached through an accretion of stress over time. A delayed reaction was far from uncommon, suggesting that the body and mind may react to profound stress only when it is deemed by the subconscious to be ‘safe’ to do so. Certainly, the graph describing post-war psychological trauma in multiple forms has a long tail. By 1922, over 65,000 British veterans were in receipt of war disability pensions or were hospitalized because of such symptoms. Additionally, the incidence of war veteran psychoses, including schizophrenia, increased steeply throughout the 1920s.17 The link between what the mind experiences and how the body reacts was most evident in what medics of the time dubbed ‘conversion-hysteria’.18 Here, there was an obvious link between the specific type of trauma the soldier had experienced and the external debilitation he exhibited. For example, those who had seen horrors developed blindness, those who had bayoneted someone in the face developed a corresponding facial tic, while others developed problems with gait, posture, hearing or speech that directly connected to what they had seen or felt. Profound anxiety or anxiety-hysteria often accompanied the physical debilitation or was itself the primary debilitating symptom. Perhaps predictably, all of this generated intense exhaustion (or psychasthenia, as it was called by psychologists Pierre Janet and Monague David Eder), which itself could be diagnosed as the only or primary form of the ‘shell-shock’ experienced.

Class and ‘shell-shock’ Recent research looking closely at case records has unsettled the hitherto pervasive belief that ‘shell-shock’ treatment methods were linked to the patient’s social class. It has become clear that internationally, treatment methods were varied, complex, and not limited simply to an emphasis upon either disciplining the soldier in some way or upon implementing forms of Freudian analysis. Diagnosis, however, is thought to have been affected by class, with hysterical types of ‘shell-shock’ associated with non-élites. This is unsurprising, given that nervous disorders had been the preserve of the rich and educated for centuries, based on the premise that the poor and the ‘primitive’ were insufficiently emotionally developed to be affected in this way. Thus, the upper-class Cambridge intellectual Rivers, who treated Sassoon and was in Prewett’s orbit when his ‘shell-shock’ was at its most visible, was able to confidently assert: ‘It is a striking fact that officers are especially prone to the occurrence of anxiety

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states, while privates are the chief victims of hysterical manifestations.’19 Rivers’s contemporaries, such as John T. MacCurdy, linked officer proneness to anxiety to their need to repress their fear in front of the men they led and fellow officers.20 Overall, while guilt over abandoning their charges and abdicating duty was a common theme expressed by ‘shell-shocked’ officers who left records, in fact, direct comparison is extremely difficult because of the paucity of writing on the topic by the other ranks. The psychological discourse of the time connected officers’ tendency towards anxiety to their supposed superior intelligence, but it is equally possible that for non-élites, only certain forms of mental illness were culturally constructed as plausible. Mutism, perhaps the most common ‘shell-shock’ symptom, deserves particular consideration in this regard. It was expedient in terms of helping the sufferer to escape potential death whether the patient consciously acted to generate this expediency or not. It made for a ‘Blighty wound’ since the soldier could no longer serve in action and might be sent home and it removed the possibility that he might verbalize anger towards his superiors. Those so diagnosed tended not to recover enough, or speedily enough, to return to action. Since privates were expected to follow orders rather than give them, mutism fitted their culturally sanctioned role. An analysis by Peter Barham of the experience of ‘shell-shock’ victims at Napsbury War Mental Hospital, St Albans, UK, where a more inclusive and egalitarian mental health culture operated and patients had opportunities to negotiate their own treatment, shows that Rivers’s application of psychological hierarchies was flawed. At Napsbury, ordinary soldiers were highly loquacious and showed the full range of ‘shellshock’ responses, including feelings of failure and self-hatred. It is not known how many combatants who were shot for cowardice or court martialled for absence were in fact suffering from ‘shell-shock’ symptoms since the condition was not universally recognized as valid by doctors, commanders and military courts even after the jump in incidence after the Somme. While it is known that the British Army executed 306 men for desertion, cowardice and other offences, we cannot know how many of these were actually suffering from varieties of psychological trauma. Dr Charles Myers, to his great credit, was convinced this was happening and worked to stop soldiers being executed because he felt they were suffering from ‘shell-shock’ rather than insubordination, desertion or malingering. Overall, it is probably not the case, as Jay Winter has suggested after having been heartened by a depiction of the condition in a working-class figure in Pat Barker’s novels, that ‘Trauma is democratic.’ Rather, the diagnosis of psychological trauma may more often be a cultural privilege bestowed upon those

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with the social capital to escape punitive sanction for behaviours not tolerated in others. Records suggest that significantly more traumatized British patients were officers – one in six, when there was one officer to every thirty men at the front – because wounds to the mind were a prerogative disproportionately reserved for men of that class within British culture at the time.21

Experiencing ‘shell-shock’ ‘Toronto’ Prewett was a typical ‘shell-shock’ victim in the sense that they were often agitated, hyper-vigilant, irritable and, as a result, extremely tired. Sleep, when it did come, did not always bring restoration, but often its opposite, and like other victims, ‘Toronto’ was plagued by nightmares that pitched him back into precisely the war horrors most dreaded by his waking self. Arguably, this is the mind’s way of reintegrating a horrific experience through forcing the sufferer to recall it partially or in a different form while asleep. In other words, what cannot be fully assimilated while conscious, is introduced into consciousness in segmented form via the remembered dreamt self. Since restorative sleep is essential to health, if this process took too long patients could then develop ingrained psychosis. Current thinking suggests that a crucial factor in such decline is the disruption of rapid eye movement sleep (REM), the sleep that comes after slow-wave sleep. REM sleep remains mysterious, despite doctors pondering the connection between sleep and memories of psychological trauma since 1921. In 1983, molecular biologists Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison proposed that REM sleep facilitates ‘unlearning’ and ‘remove(s) certain undesirable modes of interaction in networks of cells in the cerebral cortex’. The victim’s nightmares could, in this view, be a means of removing ‘parasitic’ or obsessive thoughts and of altering the strength of memories so that horror does not dominate perception long term.22 The repeated instances of the First World War trauma victims, including Prewett, describing doubles, ghosts or second, parasitic selves both during waking hours and while asleep, suggests that aspects of the approach of Crick and Mitchison may prove of lasting value, despite Crick having drastically refined his theory since. Multiple records of the psychological trauma men suffered in this period discuss the wall breaking down that separates the dreamt self from the waking self. This generally unbidden invasion often caused psychological distress discrete from or in addition to the traumatic memory itself. An individual unable, even temporarily, to control when and how he remembered traumatic or horrific incidents, or to

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anticipate or control dreaming, not infrequently began to record feeling unsure of the wider basis to reality as he experienced it. As one young officer put it: The chief trouble now is dreams – not exactly dreams, either, but right in the middle of an ordinary conversation the face of a Boche that I have bayoneted comes sharply into view, or I see the man whose head one of our boys took off by a blow on the back of his neck with a bolo knife, and the blood spurted high in the air before the body fell. And the horrible smells! You know I can hardly see meat come on the table.23

Prewett described just such an unbidden moment of intense recall in a letter to Ottoline Morrell. It happened while he was staying with Sassoon at the notorious homosexual salon of Robbie Ross at 40 Half Moon Street in London.24 Prewett wrote: The moment I stepped into London yesterday I saw a man named Murray. He was with me during the worst despair and madness at the front. I can hardly describe the effect of seeing him. It was as though something had suddenly fallen before me from another planet.

Despite consciously longing to speak to Murray, Prewett found himself unable to make contact and could only hover around, passing the man three times before feeling able to compel himself to go away. He told Ottoline; ‘It would not have meant any sort of outburst, but I felt it was something beyond recall, and which would lose its present comfortable oblivion and become an ugly and distorted reality if rediscovered. It was a most peculiar thing.’25 Prewett’s fear of triggering an overwhelming recall of the ‘madness of the front’ prevented him from speaking to an old comrade even in the safety of a London street. Such a blurring of the subject’s reason so that they cannot differentiate safety from danger is thought today to be characteristic of complex post-traumatic stress, a condition brought on by repeated, unpredictable exposure to trauma experienced over an extended period that was difficult or impossible to escape from. A similar cumulative effect was described in Edmund Blunden’s poem ‘Pillbox’. Blunden personified war as a giant who brings his fist down upon the battlefield soil, but in the poem, the giant misses two men, Serjeant Hoad and Worsley.26 Hoad, as his commanding officer put it, had been ‘a good man, for weeks’, but the closeness of this shave with death proved one horror too many. Convinced his superficial bleeding was lethal, Hoad yielded to death and Worsley, despite shouts and the proffer of rum, could do nothing. Blunden’s poem spoke to the limits of the repression of fear – Hoad is killed, not by war directly, but by the bursting out of ‘terrors that he’d striven

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to tame’. His death is presented as an articulation of the cumulative power of trauma and of its ability to be ‘stored’ internally. The poem expressed what Freud called the ‘afterwardsness’, or nachträglich, of trauma. It is dangerous because the realization or acknowledgement of the actuality of the traumatic event is what has the potential to psychically overwhelm, rather than the event itself, which the victim survived.27 The poem explains how such an accumulation can be lethal if triggered or if the repressed fear goes beyond containment. Some men in combat in the trenches fought against this process by deliberately courting death. Paradoxically, they found that exercising choice in relation to the timing of their exposure to danger assuaged the constant drip of fear they felt. Sassoon is a good example. His ‘shell-shock’ symptoms only became manifest after just such a period of reckless fearlessness during which he consistently sought out danger. Although it may seem counterintuitive, such self-treatment makes sense when related to aspects of today’s neuroscience, in particular the now dominant concept of neuronal plasticity. It holds that the brain is able to reorganize or adapt itself as a result of activity passing through its connections. Neural plasticity has roots in the 1930s and the work of behavioural scientist Donald Hebb, who believed that sensory stimulation could initiate patterns of neural activity that then perpetuated in synaptic feedback loops. A synaptic feedback loop that reinforced the idea that the individual had control over his exposure to danger, even if such control was self-generated, could therefore be extremely valuable to a soldier forced to persist within conditions of prolonged, unpredictable and extreme stress.28 It was a means whereby the individual could attempt to salve the psychologically ‘open wound’ of combat-induced trauma, to use the description of ‘shell-shock’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Dr Dick Diver in his 1934 novel, Tender is the Night.29

Treatment options Despite each of the treatment therapies for ‘shell-shock’ being primarily concerned with the prompt return of the traumatized soldier to active service, rates of return were low. Behind the lines in hospitals, the main treatment options spanned a spectrum that reflected how far the physicians had travelled from classical psychiatry which was characterized by notions of clinical omnipotence and the idea that substantial cruelty could be curative for the patient. Treatment therefore varied, but might include drugs with a diet regimen, hydrotherapy; a method of ‘rational persuasion’ or cognitive therapy

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towards virile self-discipline developed by the Swiss neuropathologist PaulCharles DuBois; or, psychoanalysis coupled with rest and gentle therapeutic work. Towards the more intrusive end of the spectrum, treatment options included deprivation and isolation, startling and shock and suggestion and hypnosis. The latter might progress to include, or begin from the outset, with Faradism – the painful application of electricity to enhance suggestion. Faradism was associated with the Austrian neurologist Fritz Kaufmann and the French neurologist Clovis Vincent. In evaluating treatments, it is important not to retrospectively apply today’s ideas about patient agency and suffering to the past or assume that intrusive or painful treatment options were necessarily ‘bad’ or morally reprehensible. While taking historical and clinical context into account, Prewett was nonetheless lucky to escape the brutal therapeutic strategies associated in Austria with Dr Julius Wagner-Jauregg and in Great Britain with a fellow Canadian, Dr Lewis Yealland, who in this period was Resident Medical Officer at the National Hospital, London. Each used Faradism, in Wagner-Jauregg’s case to extremes that were said to have generated deaths and suicides among those at his clinic in Germany. His fellow Austrian, Sigmund Freud, agreed to testify in 1920 when Wagner-Jauregg’s psychiatric work was investigated with a view to judicial proceedings. Records from the hearing paint neither doctor in a flattering light. Wagner-Jauregg was deeply suspicious of his mostly non-German-speaking patients, found them ‘whining’ and was convinced ‘shell-shock’ symptoms were a wartime ‘infectious disease’ rare among German-speaking soldiers. He claimed his results were ‘absolutely brilliant’, admitted that electrical currents had been applied to peripheral parts of the body including the genitals and that he had administered vomit-inducing drugs that were ineffective and medically anachronistic. At least one child was treated in this way. Freud had also practiced electrotherapy in the past, unsuccessfully, and he and the defendant were largely in agreement about war neuroses. Freud however, felt his colleague ‘drew the boundaries of simulation a little too broad’. Freud made a wry joke on record about the fact that patients had been kept in solitary confinement for seventy-seven-day stretches and dismissed electrical treatment for war neurosis as a ‘laborious and tedious’ technique. In Wagner-Jauregg’s defence, at the time he had been working without pay, in poor conditions, in an auxiliary medical clinic with patients whose language he did not understand. In the end, he suffered little as a result of the investigation and went on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927 for development of malaria therapy for the treatment of neurosyphilis, an early triumph for biological psychiatry over psychoanalysis. His prejudice against foreigners was by no means unique to

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Austro-Hungarian treatment of war neuroses: the British also claimed that the southern Irish were prone to mental weakness, German authorities made similar claims about Jews, as did the French about soldiers from Senegal.30 Yealland, meanwhile, has been unfairly demonized by recent humanities scholarship.31 He used Faradism more than his colleagues, but the technique was practiced internationally long before he adopted it and his treatment outcomes were comparable to those of his peers. He did not claim a 100 per cent success rate, and only resorted to painful electric currents when weaker ones failed. His main objective was to suggest a cure to the patient rather than punishment. Suggestion, as well as demonstration of functionality to the patient using electrotherapy, remains in use in paralysis treatment today. Perhaps Yealland has prompted particular opprobrium from literary critics because, as well as being prepared to apply progressively more intense shocks to the part of the body suffering from ‘shell-shock’ symptoms, he also felt it therapeutic to remove the psychological shield of poetry from sufferers along with any means they might have used to express their emotions. As he told one patient whom he claimed successfully lost his ‘shell-shock’ gait abnormality soon after: Your reason for coming here was to be cured and not to quote poetry . . . . Emotional demonstrations are entirely out of order in cases such as yours, and I do not appreciate them, and neither will you when you consider that the result obtained is what should be expected.32

Yealland’s objective was to shift the sufferer’s locus of repression by making his fear of being electrocuted greater than his unconscious fear of returning to the theatre of war. Yealland thought he was directly affecting the dynamic of the individual’s unconscious, but in truth it was his own unconscious desire to reinforce his world view within which duty always prevailed that dominated. There is little evidence that his punitive treatments produced lasting cures. Prewett primarily experienced gentle therapeutic activities and psychotherapy. These methods had a number of pluses: they were non-invasive, lightly supervised, diverted the mind and gave the patient back a degree of ownership over his own time and choices. Eventually Prewett was allowed to go for long walks and explore his interests in farming and the land. He was permitted a great deal of rest and free time to pursue light leisure activities including ‘poetry therapy’ under Sassoon’s direction. When Sassoon recalled Prewett at this time in his memoirs, he wrote: ‘He was quite young, and the verses he was writing were blurred and embryonic, but there was a quality in them that interested me and raised expectation.’33

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Prewett’s treatment hospitals: Aubrey House, Craiglockhart and Lennel House Prewett was first treated for his spinal injury and neurasthenia in 1916 at Aubrey House Hospital for Officers, Holland Park, London, for seventy-six days. Then, on 31 July 1918, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, near Edinburgh, one of the larger, better-resourced British treatment centres for ‘shell-shocked’ officers. A former country house, it had been a fashionable hydrotherapy centre before the war. Putting ‘shell-shocked’ men in country retreats, away from noise and urbanization, was government strategy both in America and Britain, to facilitate what was known as the ‘rest cure’. Craiglockhart and the next hospital Prewett was sent to, Lennel House near Coldstream on the Scottish Borders, were two of nineteen such hospitals in Great Britain set up to cope with the overflow of war neurosis from the Front. Prewett was twenty-four when he arrived at Craiglockhart and had spent a total of three years and ten months in service, one year and eight months of which had been in the field. He was transferred to Lennel House, on 6 August 1918. Prewett would be recorded as discharged from Lennel on 23 August 1918, prior to final discharge to duty on 15 October 1918, around the same time as Sassoon.34 Those who have written about Prewett record that he was treated by Rivers, the deeply respected and for his time, progressive psychologist and anthropologist from Cambridge University. Robert Graves wrote to Edward Marsh that Sassoon, Owen and Frank Prewett all received treatment from him. In fact, Owen was a patient of Dr Arthur Brock and if Prewett was treated by Rivers it was probably not formally, as Rivers was at Craiglockhart from October 1916 until he returned to London at the end of 1917 to take up a position as a consulting psychologist to the Royal Flying Corps. Yet it is very likely that Prewett and Rivers met more than once, since Rivers and Sassoon had an extremely close ongoing doctor–patient relationship and it is known that they met regularly after Sassoon’s final tour of combat. Sassoon and Rivers dined together, for example, the day after Armistice and it is thought that Sassoon introduced Rivers to Ottoline Morrell.35 Graves stayed at Craiglockhart for only a few days, and although he was never formally Rivers’s patient, saw him in London in 1918 and at various times afterwards up until Rivers’s death. Rivers probably knew Prewett on a similar level and it is highly probable that he treated him informally, in the same way that it is known he treated other veterans on an ad hoc basis after the war. Just what it meant for such a figure to interact with and treat a ‘shell-shocked’ officer who was convinced he was indigenous, is the question to which we now turn.

Figure 3  W. H. R. Rivers by D. G. Shields. By Permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

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Primitivism, ‘Toronto’ Prewett and Dr William Halse Rivers Rivers (1864–1922)

Such meetings – between a traumatized but articulate and intellectual soldier convinced he was ‘primitive’ and one of the foremost British disseminators of primitivist ideas across disciplines – embody a remarkable interpersonal and conceptual clash. Since no patient records exist, we can only imagine the interactions between Rivers and the ‘shell-shocked’ poet. However, were Rivers to have accepted Prewett’s indigenous identity, almost everything about his patient would have contradicted his published ideas. The circumstance prompts the following recontextualization of Rivers and his ongoing role within understandings of the First World War ‘shell-shock’ treatment. This chapter unpacks Rivers’s primitivist thinking across his career, working backwards from his wartime psychiatry to his earlier anthropological work in Melanesia and remarkable experiments on penile sensation while at Cambridge. It is suggested that the primitivist thinking that led Prewett to adopt an indigenous identity was reflected in aspects of the primitivist thinking cherished by the highestprofile British psychiatrist of the era. Both figures cherished abstract notions about ‘primitive’ identities that informed their behaviour and advanced their status. Recognizing the seam of primitivism that underpins Rivers’s status alters how he is understood across registers.

Reconsidering the best-known ‘shellshock’ doctor of the First World War Fresh interdisciplinary evaluation of Rivers is long overdue.1 He presides over understanding of trauma and its treatment in the British First World War context because of his foundational impact in Britain within physiology, psychiatry and psychology, because he greatly influenced anthropology globally from 1906 until

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around 1930 and because he has featured prominently in unfictionalized form within imaginative literature, particularly Pat Barker’s million-selling trilogy, Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995). Part of the trilogy won the UK’s premier award, the Booker Prize for Fiction, while another was made into a major film (Regeneration, 1997). Barker’s texts presented a clear view of the value of Rivers’s anthropological projects and an unequivocal message in answer to the question of whether the carnage caused by the First World War was justified. ‘We weren’t the measure of all things’, Barker has Rivers say of his anthropological investigations. Meanwhile, a central ‘shell-shocked’ character named Hallet, a name similar to Hamlet, concludes, ‘Shotvarfet’ (it’s not worth it).2 As has been the case within a number of popular literary representations, this version of Rivers and his patients suited thinking prevalent at the time, but it was not an accurate characterization of circumstances in the past. Rivers was both more and less than Pat Barker’s benign characterization of him as a thoughtful, progressive and kind representative of the establishment left in this era. His work as a psychiatrist during the war cannot be fully understood without nuanced consideration of his other, earlier work as an anthropologist and the primitivist thinking with which it was imbued. Rivers was fifty when the war broke out and treated ‘shell-shocked’ officers with a mixture of caring, intellectual curiosity and subtle, Freudian-inflected discursive probing designed to encourage them to focus on the positive aspects of being at the front with a view to persuading them to return. Such efforts by doctors were ‘part of a military compliance system’, as recent work by Fiona Reid has made clear.3 With Sassoon, whom he first treated at Craiglockhart and who quickly came to venerate him, his strategy was to emphasize Sassoon’s love of his men and his sense of himself as a strong leader. Sassoon had been sent to Craiglockhart following his public protest against the promulgation of the war – a ‘Soldier’s Declaration’, read out by the war veteran and Liberal MP Hastings Lees-Smith in the British Parliament on 30 July 1917. Sassoon would not meet Prewett until the following August at Lennel Hospital, after Sassoon had been persuaded back to service by Rivers while still in considerable mental distress. A sentry on his own side then shot Sassoon in the head in what may have been an intentional act of pragmatic kindness for all concerned. When Sassoon encountered Prewett he was vulnerable and alone, Rivers having moved on and their sessions together having become less frequent. Sassoon’s protégé, Wilfred Owen, had also returned to the front, and worst of all, Sassoon was in hospital, surrounded by men in various states of mental distress considerably more debilitating than his own.

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The frisson surrounding homosexual attraction and repulsion in light of the conventions of the day cannot reasonably be disaggregated from any of the meetings and interactions between Rivers, Sassoon, Prewett, Graves, Owen and others in their orbit at this time. Rivers first developed an interest in treating ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers following his experiences with a young student named John Layard who had accompanied him on an expedition to Melanesia just before the war and fallen in love with him. At their request, the two had been placed via the Resident Commissioner’s yacht, on Atchin Island, part of the South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu in September 1914. Not surprisingly, they found conducting research on this small island difficult. They were the only two non-indigenous people on the island, were far from welcome because of the islanders’ prior violent experiences with an Irish trader and the British navy, and they were forced to live in a deserted mission building. Rivers had himself picked up by missionaries within a week, leaving Layard to remain there for a year. He had little option but to learn what he could of the local language, but overall was happy and sometimes joined the people of Atchin for dances dressed only in a penis wrapper. After Layard returned to fight in 1915, he suffered a psychological breakdown and was treated by Rivers but this ended with a profound falling out in a bed and breakfast near Craiglockhart. Layard said of the encounter, ‘Rivers had obviously not recognized the whole homosexual context of our relationship, probably on both sides.’ Although Layard far surpassed Rivers in terms of developing participatory observation as a social anthropological technique, Rivers is now the figure more usually credited with taking anthropology as a discipline beyond its nineteenth-century ‘armchair’ origins.4 Rivers’ own homosexuality may explain his later distaste for the sexual elements of Freud’s theories and for other thinking such as that of Karl Abraham, who held that latent homosexuality and an inability to fully engage with the opposite sex or be aggressive, lay at the heart of ‘shell-shock’.5 Before coming to Craiglockhart in July 1915, with its marble steps and heavy wooden balustrades, Rivers had been at another important treatment centre for ‘shell-shock’ – the slightly squalid, under staffed but well-run Military Hospital for other ranks at Maghull, near Liverpool. He had liked it because he was able to fully explore his interest in dreams and psychology under Dr R. G. Rows, but he found the simple nature of the rank and file patients he encountered there frustrating. Rivers felt, ‘The dreams of uneducated persons are exceedingly simple and their meaning is often transparent.’ He yearned instead for the sort of intellectual challenge that would rival his prior experience as an ethnographer. Overall, Rivers approached his psychological efforts with ‘shell-shocked’ men

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with the same penetrating curiosity bounded by pre-conceived intellectual limits that previously he had applied to his ethnographic subjects in the South Seas. As his ally and friend Grafton Elliot Smith said of Rivers, ‘the measures taken to discover the causes of the soldiers’ mental disabilities were so similar to those he had been using in Melanesia into the social and magico-religious problems of lowly culture.’6 At Craiglockhart, Rivers was able to explore the dreams of officer patients and to consider in depth how they related to the functioning of their minds. Its traumatized officers seemed to offer him a royal road to the unconscious, with the additional bonus that some, such as Sassoon, were already familiar with psychoanalytic ideas. Rivers quickly dominated among the staff and ensured he had his pick of the patients as they arrived. Just then Craiglockhart was unusually lax in terms of military discipline following something of a scandal previously. It was run like an exclusive rest retreat with an emphasis, in keeping with the theories of Wilfred Owen’s Craiglockhart doctor, A. J. Brock, on activity as a means of generating ‘moral energy’ in patients. Therefore, Owen was encouraged to edit the hospital journal, The Hydra, and to develop his poetry, while Sassoon wrote, played as much golf as he could and, since he met with Rivers only three times a week, enjoyed long stretches when his time was his own. The bedrooms were small and most men had to share with one or two others, so getting out and about was smiled upon. However, Sassoon’s dreams in this period were hideously ghoulish. He was at Craiglockhart for four months, from July to late November 1917 and was intensely productive as a poet, as was Owen whom he mentored, but the nights were the worst aspect of what Sassoon called Craiglockhart’s ‘underworld of dreams’. He thought of his fellow inmates as having been ‘martyred’ for civilization, and was acutely aware that when the dark came they came alive to the terrors that had traumatized them.7 Rivers learnt a great deal from Sassoon and from other men he took under his wing. Sassoon had composed the poem ‘Repression of War Experience’ before meeting Rivers, who was inspired to publish an essay of his own with the same title in 1920. It took onboard the message of Sassoon’s poem and argued that to tell traumatized men to ‘forget’ the horrors they experienced in war was precisely the wrong advice. Sassoon’s poem had compared damaged soldiers to helpless moths drawn to scorch themselves in a candle flame. In free verse, it registered the redundancy of the platitudes and reassurances of normalcy so often offered up to those who had experienced the overwhelming immediacy of utter horror. The ‘ugly thoughts’ it continued to generate could easily send soldiers mad, the

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poem explained, and ‘drive them out to jabber among the trees’. Rivers therefore advised that ‘shell-shocked’ patients be encouraged to talk about the pain of war until they could find its good or noble side and bring the traumatizing experience into the intellectual realm. ‘The relief ’, Rivers explained, ‘afforded to the patient by the process of talking over his painful experience, and by discussing how he can readjust his life to the new conditions, usually [] may be followed by a great improvement.’8 Rivers’s overall strategy with Sassoon at Craiglockhart was effective from a military stance because it gave Sassoon nothing to fight against and it played to his sense of himself as special and ready to sacrifice nobly for his comrades. This counter-balanced the social stigma of being treated for ‘shell-shock’, even if it was as the result of a military directive. Sassoon later noted that such stigma was something Craiglockhart’s inmates fully internalized. ‘Sometimes I had the uncomfortable notion that none of us respected one another’, he wrote, ‘it was as if there was a tacit understanding that we were all failures, and this made me want to reassure myself that I wasn’t like all the others.’9 Ultimately, Rivers’s treatment allowed the young poet to not lose face with his literary and pacifist friends when he chose to escape the unglamorous suffering all around him at ‘Dottyville’, his name for Craiglockhart. He demanded return on his own terms – that is, back to France and the heart of the fray – and was recommended for general service on 26 November 1917. He explained to Ottoline Morrell: I have told Rivers that I will not withdraw anything that I have said or written, and that my views are the same, but that I will go back to France if the War Office will give me a guarantee that they really will send me there . . . . After all, I made my protest on behalf of my fellow-fighters, and (if it is a question of being treated as an imbecile for the rest of the war) the fitting thing for me to do is go back and share their ills.10

Sassoon played it down in his letters to Ottoline, but Rivers had become his mental anchor. He confided to his diary that Rivers was the only one who could save him if he broke down and the only thing keeping him going. Furthermore, Sassoon knew exactly what lay before him in France: ‘a big chance of being killed outright – ditto of being intolerably injured – a certainty of mental agony and physical discomfort – prolonged and exasperating – a possibility of going mad or breaking down badly.’11 That Rivers could guide Sassoon towards perceiving these odds as his best option is testimony to his skill, personal authority and ability to kindle a sense of integrity in others. He was capable of transforming

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men from being psychologically ill to being what Craiglockhart’s patient journal The Hydra called ‘dangerously well’.12

Rivers’s empathetic reciprocity in clinical context How did Rivers do it? One answer lies in his considerable personal power and his politician’s ability to make others feel important and appropriate recipients of individual, exclusive and penetrating attention. Supporting evidence for this comes from his students who would throng to his rooms in Cambridge and relish how he dispensed with customary hierarchies when conversing with younger men. His protégé Frederic Bartlett recalled how he was thrilled at being treated ‘not as an undergraduate, but as an equal’ and reflected – ‘that was Rivers’ way, then and later. It was a great part of his power over men, especially younger men.’ Other students, such as John Layard, idolized him until the pair reached a sexual tipping point. He recalled, ‘Rivers had immense quantities of clever young men around him. He told me once that it was the only thing that kept him alive.’ During and after the war, Rivers found establishing intellectual and emotional reciprocity with individual younger officers and students professionally and personally enervating. ‘Many of them’, one said at his death, ‘simply worshipped him. He also became attached to them, would spend holidays with them or invite them to stay with him in his College rooms, and thus got to know them through and through.’ Late in the war, Rivers took the task of understanding the airmen he was treating so seriously that he went on a number of ‘loop the loop’ flights so that he could experience the fear they felt. Such a deep-seated desire to empathize led him to attempt to enter the very psychological plane where an officer’s trauma operated in order to assuage it. Sassoon experienced this and wrote of ‘fires in the dark’ built by Rivers, ‘in the huge midnight forest of the unknown’. Others spoke of Rivers somehow melding his personality to that of the men he treated and of having ‘a sort of power of getting into another man’s life and treating it as if it were his own’. Sassoon’s poem, ‘Revisitation’, acknowledged this interpenetration of concern in the phrase about Rivers, ‘his life’s work, in me and many, unfinished’. 13 The persona Rivers cultivated had a theatrical, ineffable and all-powerful dimension that was in keeping with aspects of clinical thinking of the time in relation to persuasion as a therapeutic approach. Other doctors took it much further. The French neurologist Joseph Babinski, for example, stressed the importance for the doctor treating hysterical patients of keeping up an image

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of infallibility and uncontested authority. Babinski went so far as to use magical effects, intimidation and to require (as did Charcot and a number of other French neurologists) that his patients received treatment naked. ‘The neurologist’, he advised: Must forge in his milieu, for the benefit of his patients, the reputation of an infallible healer. His psychotherapeutic power becomes very great from the moment when there is no longer any doubt as to the accuracy of his diagnosis, or the precision of his prognosis and all of his affirmations.14

The renowned Hamburg neurologist Max Nonne also required his patients be naked while he practiced hypnotic suggestion upon them. As a surviving film of his treatment techniques shows, he also stroked and tapped their affected limbs. ‘I have always made the patients strip naked’, he stated, ‘because I find that the feeling of dependence or of helplessness is heightened in that way.’15 Such a wider clinical context puts the awe and respect Rivers generated in the emotionally vulnerable men he treated in a new light, as something at least in part linked to the persuasive techniques he was applying. Profound emotional intimacy with traumatized men helped Rivers flourish on a personal level, particularly from around 1916. Almost every aspect of him loosened up after intimate exposure to Sassoon, Graves and other men suffering psychologically as a result of the war. Some, like Rivers, were homosexual. Rivers gradually lost his reticence, gained conviction and began to focus outwards. As Praelector of Natural Science from 1919 at St John’s College he threw himself enthusiastically into University committees and every possible means to help students. He formed ‘The Socratics’, a discussion group, in new, larger rooms which attracted Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and Sassoon. He spoke out against imperialism, planned worker’s education courses and ran in 1922 as Labour Party candidate for the University of London seat in parliament. Myers, his close friend and former student, despite being appalled at aspects of the socialist agenda Rivers espoused, noted ‘he became another and far happier man – diffidence gave place to confidence, reticence to outspokenness, a somewhat laboured literary style to one remarkable for ease and charm’.16 A previously shy, introverted and deeply conservative intellectual transformed into a force determined to change the world. As someone close to him said, he embarked after the war upon ‘obvious conflict . . . with the Establishment (both army, medical and otherwise)’.17 Although some form of treatment linked to suggestion was likely for any British officer being treated for ‘shell-shock’, the version of psychoanalysis

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along Freudian lines adopted by Rivers was by no means the national norm as a technique. Mostly, the medical emphasis was upon treating symptoms rather than causes. After all, psychoanalysis was a German idea, and Freud’s thinking would not gain intellectual traction in Britain until well after the war. During the conflict, doctors including British psychoanalyst David Eder doubted whether psychoanalysis was necessary for ‘shell-shock’ victims. Others such as Myers, nursed a crudely didactic understanding of ‘talk therapy’. Myers acknowledged that traumatized men needed to be talked back into regaining self-control, but recommended ‘a judicious admixture of explanation, persuasion, and sometimes scolding, as in the education of children’ rather than psychoanalysis.18 Rivers meanwhile, concurred with Freud only in part, taking umbrage at the importance of sex to Freud’s analyses. Instead, Rivers held that as far as the unconscious was concerned recent experiences could be as salient as childhood ones. Missing the nuance in Freud’s thinking at the time, he also questioned the idea that dreams were a form of wish-fulfilment. In fact, Freud exempted traumatic neuroses from what he called the pleasure principle – the idea that humans have an innate desire to seek enjoyable, positive feelings. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he explained, ‘it is impossible to classify as wish-fulfilments the dreams we have been discussing which occur in traumatic neuroses . . . . They arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion to repeat.’ Freud argued that repetition, as when a child throws its toy repeatedly from its crib, provides a way of mastering sensations such as loss. In this schema, ‘shell-shock’ nightmares are instinctive, a means of mimicking the earlier stress but also through repetition, of leaving open the possibility of altering memory. In a 1914 article, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, Freud suggested that transference or behaviour acted out with the therapist could benefit the patient by allowing them to remember via means other than conscious recall.19 It is possible that Rivers was revered by Sassoon and so many others because of Rivers’s preparedness, as a kindly, unshockable authority figure, to allow his traumatized patients to do just this – act out their fear and suffering in sessions with him and thus find a degree of relief. Sagely, he understood that some memories were impossible to banish, but also held that it was possible to make them ‘tolerable, if not even pleasant, companions instead of evil influences’.20 A key reason Rivers’s version of psychoanalysis has taken on significance is because the approach overall has continued to enjoy a positive profile within literature, anthropology and philosophy – disciplines that have continued to award Freud and psychoanalysis a centrality neither have enjoyed since the 1950s

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within academic psychology itself. Rivers’s approach also resonates well with aspects of newer sorts of ‘talking cure’ such as cognitive-behavioural therapy which have gained prominence since the 1970s within the heavily feminized professions of social work and clinical psychology.21 Rivers’s therapeutic approach has also been attractive within literary circles because it was pro-poetry and pro-creativity as a means of bringing restoration to those traumatized by war. Rivers appears to have thought in a relatively simplistic way that poems, like paintings or dreams, were a reflection of the unconscious. Their great value was that they had the curative potential to allow the sufferer to re-contextualize his relationship to his own past, something Rivers was explicit about after the war. His posthumously published volume Conflict and Dream (1923) states: It is possible to take the images of the manifest content of a poem and discover more or less exactly how each has been suggested by the experience, new or old, of the poet. It is also possible, at any rate in many cases, to show how these images are symbolic expressions of some conflict which is raging in the mind of the poet, and that the real underlying meaning or latent content of the poem is very different from that which the outward imagery would suggest. Moreover, it is possible to show the occurrence of a process of condensation by means of which many different experiences are expressed by means of a simple image.22

Rivers and primitivism Prewett’s link to Rivers prompts examination of Rivers’s ‘shell-shock’ work in relation to the broader context of the primitivist thinking foundational to Rivers’s achievements. A genealogy of Rivers’s ideas allows us to go beyond the picture of him that has become entrenched across fields of intellectual enquiry largely because of Rivers’s literary persona and an influential, laudatory biography produced by fellow socialist anthropologist Richard Slobodin in the late 1970s. Despite being in the vanguard in practicing field, rather than armchair anthropology, displaying a rare level of self-reflexivity and numbering among the most high-profile academic anthropologists of the era, the statements of Rivers’s admirers about the strength of his achievements across multiple areas of intellectual enquiry are difficult to substantiate. Almost none of what Rivers claimed to have demonstrated as a scientist is agreed to pertain today and much of it remains steeped in the ethnocentrism and racist thinking prevalent in his time. However, he was among the first to use double blind procedures in psychology (as in his 1908 monograph The Influence of Alcohol and other Drugs on Fatigue),

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he brought a workmanlike precision to fieldwork and was fundamental in the setting up of England’s first school of experimental psychology at Cambridge University. Overall, Rivers’s primary achievements and that of a number of the other anthropologists and intellectuals of his era lay, not in arriving at robust scientific truths per se, but in helping to generate the tools of modern analysis. Much of Rivers’s thinking within neurology, psychiatry and anthropology up until his sudden death in 1922 was rooted in the evolutionary ideas of his mentor, the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, a figure who also had an avowed influence upon Freud. Jackson in turn had adapted ideas about an evolutionary hierarchy within the human nervous system from the biologist Herbert Spencer. Jackson held that there was an evolutionary hierarchy in human nervous centres and that ‘dissolution’ occurred when the higher centres lost control or when the lowers centres became hyperactive. As Jonathan Miller pointed out in his incisive critique of Rivers in 1972, such thinking was flawed to the core. It said more about the then-current concerns of empire as it struggled to rein in and control subordinate populations at various removes from the metropole than it did about the human body.23 Rivers was also a strong defender of aspects of the work of the American social evolutionary anthropologist who had learnt much from indigenous Iroquois informants, Lewis Henry Morgan. Via friendship with the Seneca engineer and politician Ely S. Parker, Morgan had learnt of the abiding significance to indigenous life of kinship relationships. Morgan’s primary impact however, was as an advocate of the idea of human social evolution. He held that Aryan ‘races’ were the epitome of progress on earth and wrote in his volume Ancient Society in 1877, ‘savagery preceded barbarism in all the tribes of mankind as barbarism is known to have preceded civilization. The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, and in progress.’ ‘Primitive’ groups, therefore, despite being coeval with their betters, were considered living examples of a stage already passed through by the ‘civilized’.24 Although it is thought he got the idea of looking at family histories from Francis Galton, Rivers transposed key elements of Morgan’s research on consanguinity onto his own findings on the Todas of Melanesia and disseminated within Britain Morgan’s realization that ‘primitive’ kinship networks were social rather than biological. Morgan’s work on classificatory kinship systems (where relationships such as ‘father’ and ‘mother’ are extended beyond lineal relatives) caused Rivers to become profoundly confused and to imagine that indigenous peoples practised or once practised widespread promiscuity. Rivers also adopted Morgan’s practice of using indigenous assistants. However, unlike Morgan who dedicated a book to

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Parker, Rivers and his fellow investigators made limited reference to informants’ roles operating fieldwork equipment and explaining how their cultures worked.25 Social evolutionary ideas and the primitivism upon which they rest underpinned Rivers’s work. St John’s College, Cambridge, allowed him a comfortable sinecure from 1893 and placed no restraints upon his jumping from discipline to discipline across his career. However, what remained constant in his thinking was a set of oppositions deeply embedded in Western religious and intellectual traditions: ideas about outward appearances masking inner conflicts, wolves lurking in sheep’s clothing and primitive, pagan impulses fighting within the self against more recent and evolved imperatives linked to superior Christian virtues. This set of tropes was highly active culturally when Rivers qualified as a young doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in 1886, the year Robert Louis Stevenson published his masterpiece Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson presented the public with an outrageous figure representative of the fractured self said to inure in us all and claimed the idea for his novel came to him in a dream. In the novel, Dr Jekyll learns ‘that man is not truly one, but truly two’, adding, ‘I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man’. Stevenson’s story both developed and contradicted aspects of thought within early psychology, notably the Italian thinker Cesare Lombroso’s ideas about criminals being evolutionary throwbacks driven to behave like savages or apes, and Frederick W. H. Myer’s theory of the multiplex personality, which held that the left brain was sinister and the right brain the centre of higher qualities. Eleven years later, Bram Stoker published Dracula, his exceptional novel rooted in early European folklore that presented the reading public with one of the most accomplished and terrifying dual personalities ever imagined.26 It was a vibrant expression of several currents of thought that explored the idea of inherent plurality and inner primitivism within man. After all, dissociation, the notion of dual states within the self, was central around this time to a host of studies that drew upon the work of Charcot. These included the French psychologist Pierre Janet’s L’automatisme psychologique (1889), Josef Breuer & Sigmund Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (1895), Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality (1905) and Janet’s further volume, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (1907). Rivers was steeped in the racial determinist thinking of his early years, but he was also someone who contributed to its gradual displacement and to the rise of the cultural relativism associated with anthropologist Franz Boas, particularly following Boas’ move to Columbia University, New York in 1896. However, it is important to recognize that Rivers’s thinking throughout his life consistently owed more to the legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan, Herbert Spencer and John

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Hughlings Jackson than to any post-Boasian commitment to racial equality, even if to assume the latter is more palatable today. Rivers was as limited by the prevailing climate of élite intellectual opinion on ‘primitive peoples’ and by assumptions rooted in seventeenth-century science as were most of his peers at this time across disciplines.27 Rivers operated close to the apex of a transnational intellectual scientific community that articulated ideas about innate racial hierarchy in the interests of empire. At no point was he minded to embrace relativism and incur the displeasure of famous, eminent social evolutionary thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Edward Tylor. The Cambridge friends and colleagues with whom he undertook field research, with limited exceptions, were not in stable enough institutional positions to enable them to do so either, should they have wished to. Herbert Spencer’s imprint upon Rivers ran deep, notably his belief that all societies had a shared origin and the notion that society progressed from lower to higher forms over time while in some way incorporating past institutions into the present. It was a version of social Lamarckism that helped make primitivist thinking appear sensible. The modern world of empires was surely progress, so what was considered its opposite – the ‘primitive’ world, was deemed a version of the modern world in an earlier form. This made what was primitive worthy of salvage and study because it offered a tantalizing glimpse into how the modern world came to be, much as fossils do. As some of our best minds have pointed out, one of the most interesting things about this misguided, ethnocentric idea which cannot reasonably be linked to Darwin, is its persistence, both in popular discourse and elsewhere.28

Containing the primitive: The ‘shell-shock’ doctors and the 1898 expedition to the Torres Straits Rivers’s experiences after he joined Cambridge colleague Alfred Cort Haddon on a trip to the Torres Straits between Australia and Papua New Guinea in 1898 expose the inevitable difficulties primitivist and racialized thinking encounters when transferred into any practical, real-life context. Although the expedition is still routinely presented as an uncomplex example of disciplinary pioneering in line with the Slobodin Rivers biography, the wider asymmetrical power relations and racism surrounding this and other such anthropological efforts inhere. This remains the case despite recent work at pains to highlight instances where the data gathered by such anthropologists pointed towards conclusions in conflict with

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prevailing imperial hierarchies and despite the totemic significance the expedition has taken on within conventional narratives describing the ascent of British social anthropology. In fact, it was inevitable that the exposure of Rivers and his friends to Torres people would test ideas about ‘the native mind’ upon which imperial power rested, since those ideas were ludicrous. They included the notion that there was a single native mind, the belief that all native peoples had a childlike simplicity, that they slavishly adhered to tribal morés and that they had no concept of individuality. Even when one Torres investigator, the previously discussed Dr Charles Myers, declared very publicly in 1911 that ‘the savage can reason as we do. He will not, where the force of tradition is so strong’, he qualified this recognition of primitive capability by stating that any potential change towards non-primitive standards would likely take ‘many hundreds of thousands of years’.29 The Torres trip reveals intimate links between the study of ‘primitive’ psychology and later attempts to control the supposed ‘primitive’ emotions said to erupt in men traumatized by combat. Rivers and Haddon were accompanied on their voyage by Charles Seligman, a self-financing pathologist friend of Myers; photographer-undergraduate Anthony Wilkins (whose family supported the trip financially but who died from dysentery in 1901), linguist Sidney Herbert Ray and two of Rivers’s former pupils, Myers and the brilliant William McDougall, scion of the wealthy Manchester flour business family. Drs Rivers, Myers, Seligman and McDougall would all work with ‘shell-shock’ victims during the war to come, and, as mentioned previously, Myers would be the first to discuss the term in print. Within Torres, Rivers set himself the task of investigating why indigenous peoples were mentally deficient. He did so among a dark-skinned population the British had long considered low on the evolutionary scale. Although Rivers’s intellectual milieu thought of ‘primitive’ peoples overall as psychologically uniform, it was still thought possible that specific ethnic characteristics could be examined. Rivers’s intention was to work in the field so as to extend prior, bestselling work by Herbert Spencer arrived at primarily in the library. Spencer held that the less advanced races had keener senses because they did not expend energy on higher mental functions. Eventually, Rivers found what he went looking for, as salvage ethnographers in this era tended to do. He concluded that ‘those who live in a state of nature’ had to be especially observant to survive and this inhibited ‘higher mental development . . . . If too much energy is expended on the sensory foundation, it is natural that the intellectual superstructure should suffer.’30 Fieldwork, in this instance, reinforced library-generated ideas already established by a figure held in great esteem.

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Despite the air of japery and innocent curiosity that originally surrounded the trip, it was intimately connected with imperial efforts to extract wealth and resources along an important shipping route to Queensland and New South Wales. By the time the Cambridge anthropologists arrived in the Torres Straits, the region had been the playground of European powers for generations. Its indigenous populations had been swamped by violent non-indigenous peoples seeking to make fortunes from pearls and sea cucumbers and it had suffered greatly as a result of the cultural and spiritual activities of Protestant missionaries. Haddon felt it the ‘bounden duty’ of his group to record the characteristics and psychology of island peoples given that ‘In many islands the natives are fast dying out, and in more they have become so modified by contact.’31 As a result, as was the case for a number of later salvage ethnographers, Haddon was forced to partially re-invent the ‘primitive’ Torres cultures the expedition set out to find. He had to create a market for masks, skulls and other artefacts and to persuade Torres women to take off the calicos given to them by missionaries and replace them with ‘a scanty but sufficient grass petticoat’. Haddon paid the men of what had come to be known as Prince of Wales Island (Muralag), at the time working in industrialized fishing, to restage traditional dances so he could glimpse what he imagined the early stages of all mankind were like. He confided to his journal: Altogether it was a vivid glimpse into savagery, all the more remarkable for the fact that half an hour’s sail across the channel lands you into nineteenthcentury civilisation! Hardly anywhere else in the world can the transition be affected so rapidly between the conventional manners of English society and the barbaric customs of the uncivilised savage. Years ago these islanders had a most unenviable reputation for ferocity, exhibiting a fierce determination to slay the encroaching white man – now they walk thirteen miles and dance the same day for the delectation of an Englishman they have never seen.

Haddon also put significant effort into getting the men of Murray Island (Mer) to recreate Malu, a secret manhood initiation ceremony. Once enough pressure had been applied and the islanders persuaded to defy both their Christian beliefs and their Samoan preacher and perform Malu, the anthropologists retreated to a spot that had previously been cleared of bamboo to watch. The ceremony, along with several others, had been violently suppressed some generations previously, but Myers still convinced himself when he described it that ‘Today the ceremony is performed which no white man ever witnessed before.’32 In sum, in 1898 the Cambridge Torres Strait anthropologists were intent upon finding indigenous communities that corresponded to their fantasies. In this

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regard, they perpetuated a tradition that can be dated back to Columbus and his encounter with Arawak peoples in the West Indies in 1492. Such efforts to re-construct an imagined primitivist past echoed aspects of the work of earlier theorists including Lewis Henry Morgan. His anthropology had its roots in a fanciful Indian re-enactment group, the Grand Order of the Iroquois, and his access to ‘primitive’ Iroquois ritual and information had been carefully managed by the highly assimilated Seneca Iroquois, Ely S. Parker.33 Overall, as with a number of early anthropological efforts, the Torres expedition was characterized by staged re-enactments, posed photographs and by repeated efforts by indigenous populations to subvert or deny access to their cultural knowledge. It is nonetheless to Rivers’s credit that he had the honesty to record that Torres peoples found him and the practices of his culture ridiculous. Once, upon finding out that Rivers would not normally share good fortune with his brothers and sisters, he recorded, ‘they [inhabitants of Niue, also known as Savage Island] found my reply so amusing that it was long before they left off laughing.’34 Such candour is beguiling given that Rivers was part of an intellectual culture and family heritage with strong beliefs in racial hierarchy. His uncle James Hunt considered ‘the negro’ a wholly discreet species from Europeans. Rivers’s colleague Haddon, much influenced by the measuring of intelligence conducted by Francis Galton, would go on to measure the skulls and physical anthropology of other groups deemed ‘primitive’, including the peasant villagers of Barrington, near Cambridge and the ‘Irish race’. The jovial, good-natured expedition photographer Anthony Wilkin, meanwhile, had brought to Torres some photographs of England ‘so as to give the “n-----s” an idea of what things look like over here’.35 Rivers’s health was always fragile and part of what had prompted him to travel to Torres had been the desire for a holiday after the death of his mother. A neurasthenic collapse of his own in 1892 had been what had first prompted his research interest in the mind and mental illness. He found he enjoyed ethnographic fieldwork because it allowed him to set aside the more severe and inhibited aspects of his personality. The islanders were friendly and wore little clothing, the pace was relaxed, he could rest frequently and his stammer mattered less because islander cross-cultural communication was in pidgin English. He found it restful to spend time playing games with string with indigenous peoples (‘cat’s cradle’), in the hope of establishing how advanced their pictorial imagination was in compensation for their supposed inferiority as abstract thinkers. Each of the conclusions Rivers arrived at, for example, about superior ‘savage’ vision or limited linguistic ability to name colour, reinforced his

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pre-existing ideas about ‘primitive confusion’ or indigenous peoples’ cognitive incapacity. The costs of the expedition were partly met by ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, the self-taught, intellectual rebel, T. H. Huxley. His formative experiences with indigenous people, whom he referred to as ‘remarkable fuzzy heads’, began as a young surgeon’s mate on board the twenty-eight-gun frigate, HMS Rattlesnake. In 1849, his ship had found Barbara Thompson, a near-naked young Scottish woman who had been adopted five years previously by the Kaurareg ‘headhunters’ of Prince of Wales Island (Muralag) after they had found her shipwrecked. Thompson’s stories fascinated Huxley and many others because they seemed to offer tantalizing insights into a soon-to-disappear, primitive culture untainted by European contact. Such a culture, it was thought, could provide an invaluable index to all mankind’s evolutionary past. Kaurareg peoples’ fight to unseat such thinking and its repercussions continues today, but gained a particular victory in 1996 when Kaurareg rights to possess and occupy five island regions were recognized by the Federal Court of Australia. The Kaurareg declared independence from Australia in 2002 and now refer to their lands as the United Isles of Kaiwalagal.36 Rivers carried out further expeditions as the twentieth century advanced, for example, among the Todas peoples of South India, always in the belief that somehow the ‘primitives’ he encountered were fossils of an imagined universal past, keys to an evolutionary journey within which Germanic and Anglophone cultures had far outpaced the rest. ‘I had reached the belief,’ as he put it in 1914, ‘that in systems of relationship we have, like fossils, the hidden indications of ancient social institutions and that their study is essential for advance in our knowledge of prehistoric sociology’. The Toda fascinated Rivers and would interest the wider Western ethnographic community for some time to come. They numbered only in the mid-hundreds, were attractive to study, lived in a beautiful, temperate region, were light-skinned and Toda males were often athletic and tall. Rivers’s intimate book about Toda social organization, within which individual indigenous people were named and much attention paid to promiscuity and formal marriage regulation, become a classic. Studying such genealogies was of great value, Rivers felt, ‘because it enables one to study abstract problems, on which the savage’s ideas are vague, by means of concrete facts, of which he is a master’.37 Although Rivers never learnt an indigenous language, his attentive recording of detail gave ethnographic work some of the attributes of a science and set a precedent that led in time to the adoption of participatory observation as an

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anthropological method. His obsession remained to use indigenous peoples as a means of isolating the processes whereby the wider narrative of human social evolution took place. In a career regularly marked by inconsistency, this remained constant. However, by attempting to generalize about the nature of social organization through examining, as he put it, ‘rude savage tribes’ and ‘a great empire like our own’, and through comparing the relationships of indigenous families with that of ‘great English political families, such as the Cecils or the Cavendishes’, Rivers did go some way towards unsettling established hierarchies, albeit from a position of presupposed innate intellectual superiority.38

‘A human experiment in nerve division’ A further insight into the bundle of primitivist and sexually repressed thinking that characterized Rivers comes from the experiment he conducted from 1903 to 1907 with Cambridge alumnus, Henry Head. Rivers had met Head and Hughlings Jackson when they both worked at the same London hospital. Each had spent time in Germany, and would share many of the same friends including Bertrand Russell, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, the Woolfs, Robert Nichols and Alfred North Whitehead. Head was to be one of a number of doctors to treat Virginia Woolf to little beneficial affect during her period of acute psychological distress from 1913 to 1915. He was a staunch imperialist and although of Quaker stock, was strongly pro-war but did not see combat himself. Overall, his neurological work unsettled previous notions about how human beings experienced the world. While a vocal proponent of the primitivist and sexist thinking of his time, he was also a cognitive and aesthetic modernist with avant-garde tastes. He loved poetry and even published his own. Loud, rotund, opinionated with a high-pitched voice, jovial but also somewhat alienated from urban life, Head was an obsessive researcher into the neurology of sensation. A series of investigations into pain carried out without informing his patients in various hospitals secured his election to the Royal Society aged only thirty-eight. His decision to embark upon self-experimentation with Rivers was equally cavalier, but in this instance in relation to his own health, since neither antibiotics nor blood transfusions were available to counteract possible complications. Convinced his working-class and Jewish patients were ‘too stupid’ to accurately report on their sensations, Head persuaded a surgeon colleague to sever the superficial ramus of his radial nerve so that he and Rivers could carry

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out prolonged investigations into the recovery process mostly over weekends in Rivers’s rooms in St John’s College. The publication they later published about this in Brain brought both figures wide acclaim.39 Following Hughlings Jackson and two other Cambridge figures, Michael Foster and Walter Gaskell, Rivers and Head supposed that the human nervous system replicated aspects of human social evolution as they understood it. They held that human sensation could be divided into ‘protopathic’ impulses, which were strong but crude, basic, animalistic and established earlier in the evolutionary process, and higher, ‘epicritic’ impulses that had developed later to supress or govern the first set. Only disease could disrupt the dominance of the evolutionarily superior ‘epicritic’ system. It could discriminate between simultaneous contacts, discern light touch, temperatures close to that of the skin, as well as localized stimulus. The idea linked closely to Rivers’s thinking about the primitive mind. Rivers believed that ‘protopathic’ thinking in humans was visual, concrete and characteristic of ‘savage’ peoples, while ‘epicritic’ thinking was verbal, abstract and characteristic of ‘civilized’ peoples. As the two intellectuals explained in print, ‘The gradual triumph of the epicritic over the protopathic in human evolution could be seen as a metaphor for the triumph of civilisation over savagery in human history.’40 Rivers’s experiment with Head and the general idea that underpinned it defined his career, according to his pupil Frederic Bartlett. Rivers was much taken with the notion that older primitive elements could resurface despite it appearing that newer elements had fully integrated and subsumed them. Describing what amounts to a precise inversion of what is now considered appropriate scientific method, Bartlett held that in practically everything Rivers wrote: ‘He liked to adopt, or find for himself, some general principle, then to search untiringly; but with complete fairness, for illustrative material and finally, in the light of this material to regard the basic principle as established.’41 Although Rivers and Head’s work can now be seen as more reflective of the thinking of the time than of repeatable science, Head is still deservedly respected within the history of British neuroscience since aspects of his voluminous corpus were deeply prescient. His was a holistic perspective with a sophisticated awareness of the importance of how the subjective self experiences disease. That said, there is little within today’s science to support the idea of ‘epicritic’ and ‘protopathic’ levels to the nervous system. The pair’s experimental observations were misguided, but nonetheless had scientific value. Their work extended ‘over five happy years’, as Head recorded, and had undeniable homosexual overtones. Attempts to find a control region

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of the body that could sense pressure and pain but not soft touch led to a focus upon Dr Head’s penis. The two doctors noted; ‘We discovered that the glans penis responded to cutaneous stimuli in that peculiar manner with which we were already familiar from our study of the first stage of recovery after nerve division.’ The men spent time exploring the sensitivity of Head’s penis after the foreskin had been drawn back and the penis allowed to hang downwards. With Head’s eyes closed, Rivers approached it variously, with cotton wool, fine hairs, needles and glasses of water at differing temperatures. Sometimes, Head reported not being aware that he had been stimulated. They concluded: In the case of [Head], the tip happens to be devoid of heat-spots but is sensitive to cold and to pain. When . . . it was dipped into water at 40˚C, no sensation of heat was produced, but [Head] experienced an unusually disagreeable sensation of pain . . . . But as soon as the water covered the corona without reaching the foreskin, both cold and pain disappeared, giving place to an exquisitely pleasant sensation of heat.42

The glans of the penis, it seemed, lacked ‘epicritic’ sensations and could respond only to coarse stimulation, yet when it did so, it was with sensations of great ‘affective tone’, Head noted. Rivers also carried out control experiments of the same nature upon someone else who was circumcised, but it is not known with whom. It remains unclear why both sets of observations needed to be carried out upon two separate parts of the body, or, for that matter, why Head and Rivers did not search for anatomical structures within the skin that might reflect their hypothesis at work. With Rivers as experimenter Head appears to have felt more at the tip of his penis than he recorded he felt at other times. In his Studies in Neurology (1920) he asserted that the penis tip was about as sensitive as the heel of the foot. This is still held to be scientifically true and Head’s conclusions remain a building block within the history of research on touch. In primates the prepuce covering the glans penis is recognized as being the erogenous tissue that contains a high concentration of touch receptors in the ridged band. This goes some way towards explaining why the penis was the focus of Head and Rivers’s experiment. It remains curious, however, that the pair ignored the phenomenon that most obviously affects sensation in the penis – the extent to which it is engorged or erect. Of course, had Head and Rivers taken this into account, the experiment would have taken on new character.43 That said, they did hit upon another part of the body especially responsive to protopathic stimuli and uninhibited by the epicritic system, the lower alimentary canal.

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Rivers connected things ‘protopathic’ with emotions, with the visual and the subjective – each of which fascinated him. It was a delight to find that aesthetic pleasure, particularly poetry, could generate strong protopathic responses such as the pilomotor reflex that causes hairs to rise on the skin. When Head placed himself in a warm room and exposed his arms to the shoulder, he found he could make his arm hairs erect just by reciting a favourite poem. The pleasure thrill ‘started in the region of the neck and spread rapidly down the arms, over the trunk, the thighs and the outer aspect of the legs’.44 Poetry was thus profoundly connected in Rivers’s and Head’s minds with the ‘protopathic’, with sensation, emotion and with the absence of ‘epicritic’ inhibition. Head was an especially valuable research partner in this sense because he was a strong visual thinker whereas Rivers claimed he lacked the capacity to generate visual imagery except when he was dreaming or had a fever.45 The detailed, scientific recording of protopathic behaviours and sensations was, of course, itself deeply epicritic because it involved the sort of abstract conceptual thought characteristic of advanced civilizations. Such thinking eventually led Rivers to make a number of preposterous claims about the capabilities of ‘advanced’ societies. In 1914, in his History of Melanesian Society, for example, he went so far as to hope that someday all description of indigenous social systems could be reduced to symbols and equations.46 From 1911, Rivers was heavily influenced by the forceful personality of Grafton Elliot Smith. That year, in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science Rivers eschewed the idea of global evolutionary stages and instead lent towards German thinking that culture changed as a result of populations mixing. Smith and Rivers worked closely together in 1915 at Maghull Hospital and extended their joint fascination with dreams and their interpretation. Eventually, Smith’s influence led Rivers to adopt extreme diffusionism, the idea that early cultures had not developed independently, but spread by conquest and migration. By August 1918, Rivers was so enamoured of this idea that he gave up his hospital work and took a week’s break in the Lake District with Smith to mull over evidence.47 Smith then went on to put much energy into popularizing the fanciful idea that the first human civilization was a European Mediterranean race occupying the British Isles, the Levant and Egypt, rather than peoples from Asia or Africa. His reputation suffered severely because of his promotion of this variety of pseudo-history and because he fell for the 1912 Piltdown Man hoax. This fraud purported to have found the earliest Englishman, who happened to have a large, dome-shaped brain and a cricketbat shaped implement. However, Smith’s achievements in anatomical teaching

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and research remain transformative and to his credit, he began to resist racial thinking in the 1930s.48 The alliance forged between Smith and Rivers is yet another example of Rivers’s readiness to look to the past for evidence of the same cultural hierarchies that surrounded and benefitted him personally in the present. Although diffusion is a recognized part of Melanesian and many other deep territorial histories, Rivers was wrong to succumb to the diffusionist idea that innovation had always spread from ‘higher’ to ‘lower’ cultures despite its attraction as a ready justification for Great Britain’s dominion at the time over a quarter of the world’s land surface. When it came to treating ‘shell-shocked’ patients, Rivers directly transposed the primitivist, hierarchical thinking he had developed as both a salvage ethnographer and a student of physiology. Neuroses, he concluded in his influential Instinct and the Unconscious, were the result of primitive instincts such as sex and the desire to avoid death reasserting themselves over newer ‘forces’ such as duty, religion and intelligence. Most of his officer patients, he found, suffered from ‘anxiety neuroses’ which caused them to regress to their childhood selves and experience the same inability to differentiate between imagination and reality as had characterized their earliest years. Henry Head neatly summed up the way in which his colleague’s career conflated three primary applications of the same theme: the idea that indigenous peoples were troublesome, often difficult to control representatives of the ‘childhood of mankind’; the notion that the same struggle operated within the body’s physiology; and the idea that ‘earlier’ instincts broke free of their appropriate repression under conditions of war and caused psychological neuroses. ‘He attempted’, Head said: to bring the abnormal phenomena of mental life into harmony with processes familiar on the physiological level. He conceived of instincts as suppressed forms of primitive behaviour, which may be used in part during normal acts of consciousness or held back completely. This he thought was analogous to the control exercised by ‘epicritic’ impulses over more primitive ‘protopathic’ reactions. Experience of the War neuroses led him to believe that, when a man regressed to a more instinctive form of conduct under the influence of mental states, his actions assumed an infantile character; this was evident in the content and structure of dreams.49

Rivers’s conflation of the geopolitical, the physiological and the psychological under the umbrella of one governing idea was reassuring to those within his intellectual context. Although Britain ruled over an empire more extensive than

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any other in world history at the time of the Torres Expedition and dominated world investment, trade and banking, this began to crumble over the next six decades as Britain fought off its imperial rivals and gave way to demands for decolonization. Prior to the immense upset of the First World War, there had been notable incidences of trouble at home (riots in Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square and Belfast in 1886) and abroad (resistance from the Zulu Kingdom in 1879, ongoing wars with the Ashanti from 1824, and the Yihetuan Movement or Boxer Rebellion in China at the turn of the twentieth century). In contrast, Rivers’s work suggested that dominance by existing élites who were socially superior and who had evolved to rule was natural and inevitable, a hierarchy that could only be disrupted temporarily and that was reflected even in the innate processes at work in every body and mind. Post-war, influenced by Sassoon, as well as by Bertrand Russell and other members of the Fabian Society, Rivers set out to put his scientific understanding of human behaviour to use as a Labour MP. His intention was to help lead the British ‘back to health and sanity’. The ‘social mind’, Rivers held, should be comprehended and treated just like the individual mind and he detected pathological suppression and repression within it that if left unchecked would lead to further conflict. The socialist platform Rivers promoted was proanticolonial movements in Ireland, Indian and Egypt, wanted a League of Nations to hold back imperialism, a progressive tax on vested capital and the nationalization of mines and railways. Rivers had seen first hand how negative the impacts of imperial exploitation were on indigenous peoples and how the destruction of cultures had led to chronic depopulation in the Pacific. To Rivers’s great credit, he called for recognition that British supplanting and repression of indigenous lifeways in places like Melanesia had removed its peoples’ ‘interest in life’ and damaged the cultural matrix that sustained meaning within those societies. He was equally appalled that the communitarianism the British had destroyed abroad had also been fundamentally eroded at home. He spoke out against the way the rich repressed knowledge of how their actions further impoverished the poor. Rivers feared that injustice overseas and the use by plutocrats of the yellow press to manipulate the ‘herd instinct’ would foster yet further injustice at home.50 H. G. Wells took Rivers’s place at the hustings after Rivers’s sudden death in 1922, but came in third to an establishment administrator who was a Unionist doctor and vice-chancellor of London University. Ironically, this newly elected MP-medic would compare the Houses of Parliament to a mental asylum, echoing aspects of Rivers’s own diagnosis of the country’s primary chamber of power.51

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Having explored Rivers’s primitivism and worked to place it in wider interdisciplinary context, the two chapters that follow examine the primitivist impulses that led Frank Prewett to adopt a post-war indigenous identity and the name ‘Toronto’. They explore the development of his close friendships with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves and the profound dissociation or sense of being ‘ghost-ridden’ he recorded in his poetry.

Figure 4  Colin de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, Frank ‘Toronto’ Prewett by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1922 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Adopting the ‘Toronto’ personality at Lennel and meeting Siegfried Sassoon

‘Shell-shocked’ at Lennel Frank Prewett, whom everyone called ‘Toronto’, was transferred from Craiglockhart in Edinburgh to Lennel House, Private Convalescent Home for Officers, near the birthplace of the Coldstream Guards, Berwick-Upon-Tweed on the border of Scotland and England. He had been there two weeks when Siegfried Sassoon arrived on 20 August 1918, and the pair would ultimately be discharged to duty at roughly the same time in mid-October the same year.1 This chapter explores some of Prewett’s key experiences while convalescing at Lennel and the circumstances and friendships that surrounded his adoption of an indigenous identity. It contextualizes Prewett as a precursor to other early-twentieth-century transculturative figures who also adopted indigenous identities, including the media personalities Long Lance in the United States and Grey Owl in Canada. The chapter concludes with discussion of the homosexual world around whose edges Prewett now began to circle. Lennel (pronounced Lee-nal) Auxiliary Hospital was a large, private Georgian home owned by Lady Clementine and Major Walter Waring. A house of pink stone, with ornate, high ceilings and many windows, it was approached along a large drive with stone lions, leading to large steps and composite columns. When it was commandeered, Lady Clementine carefully converted it to accommodate around forty officers above the rank of Major. She even permitted her husband’s private study to serve as an officer’s mess, which on one level hardly mattered, since he spent much of the war away, fighting in France and Morocco. Wealthy and personable, Clemmie was respected for the hard work she put into making the officers comfortable. Despite some rooms being small and awkwardly partitioned, she ensured the atmosphere at the house stayed positive and she genuinely cared about the men’s welfare. Rest, quiet and therapeutic caring,

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rather than the clinical treatments carried out at Craiglockhart, were the order of the day. Prewett appears to have settled in quickly, and he and ‘Clemmie’ Waring began to enjoy what became an abiding friendship. His letters to her would reveal an intimacy and candour he did not share with anyone else. Clemmie was attracted to Prewett and soon wanted to take things further, but he related to her primarily as a confidante, therapist and source of support. He summed up their relationship in a long heartfelt letter the following year after one of his regular visits to her summer residence in Salcombe, Devon, confessing, ‘I do not think I ever depended upon anyone until you were rash enough to be kind, since when all the accumulated instinct in my life for support has been attached to you.’ After Prewett left Lennel, Clemmie would help him financially while he was a student at Oxford and remained emotionally at his service for years. He was part of a small circle of creatively minded officers she cultivated, an oasis of shared sympathies the pair jokingly referred to as Lady Clemmie’s ‘mutual admiration society’.2 The countryside surrounding Lennel House is beautiful and it had a profound impact upon Prewett, prompting him to write some of his strongest poetry. The area teamed with wildlife. In fact, Lennel was where Beatrix Potter stayed for a summer in 1894 with her collie dog, the year after she first drew the four little rabbits in her bestselling The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Although it can be dreary when cut off by snow in winter, Prewett had good weather for his frequent walks along the meanders of the river Tweed, surrounded by soft undulating hills and grazing sheep. The gentleness of the landscape could have been conducive to his regaining his spiritual and psychological equilibrium, but Prewett soon came to both love and fear it. Lennel House’s long-standing reputation for being haunted may not have helped. Even today, large bats like to come inside, particularly in the summer, and there are stories that descendants of zoo animals such as panthers remain at large in the environs, their ancestors released before 1820 by impoverished gentry.3 Prewett enjoyed the chance Lennel gave him to mix with the upper classes and a cosmopolitan set of other men (there were Belgians, Yugoslavians and at least one ‘coloured’ officer). Clemmie believed her guests should be kept occupied and encouraged patients to reproduce their coats of arms as therapy. Those from families without emblems of heraldic achievement were told to make them up. Clemmie also staged as much pageantry and created as many occasions for dressing up as she possibly could. This was an extension of the country house amusements she had been used to before the war, but now it was considered a useful way to prompt ‘shell-shocked’ men to forget themselves, to

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set aside the etiquette of the class system and to relax. Dressing up was thought to offer a way out for those whose experiences had been so grim that their fear had hardened like stone, a phenomenon the neurologist William Brown called ‘the petrification of terror’. The reasoning went that ‘shell-shock’ victims could only find rest once they had ‘worked off ’ the excess emotion caused by trauma. Temporarily becoming someone else was a way to vent what otherwise was toxic.4 Prewett had already been encouraged to dress up for therapeutic reasons at Craiglockhart, and at Lennel, he seized the chance to fully articulate another self. He adopted an indigenous Iroquois identity.

Dressing up and pretending in the early twentieth century Prewett’s decision to fabricate an indigenous heritage was extreme, but also an extension of activity deeply fashionable at the time. Playing with identity was beloved by élites and those who aspired to be so. Passing as someone else, impersonation, pantomime and costume had a particular valency tied up with new knowledge filtering back from the empire at its peak and with pent-up desire for the transcendence of boundaries linked to class, gender and tradition. Exoticism was particularly popular in society circles and the hallmark of Paul Poiret, the most influential clothes designer of the era who reached the height of his influence around 1910. He used Japanese and Chinese silks and Middle Eastern embroideries, dispensed with petticoats and the boned corset and encouraged individuality rather than slavish reverence for fashion. Even the less adventurous who did not wear Poiret’s designs found themselves aping aspects of his intent and wearing clothes with ethnic or artisan textile elements, Arts and Crafts embroideries, hanging sleeves, flowing draping or smocking. The power of fancy dress in this period was exemplified in the lavish fancydress garden party thrown by Poiret in June 1911, entitled ‘The 1002nd Night’ and inspired by the ancient Arabic tales A Thousand and One Nights. Dressed as a Persian sultan, carrying a whip and surrounded by a bevy of models, Poiret made harem pants, fabulous turbans, colourful wired tunics and the most outlandish designs a requirement for the over 300 guests he invited. Fancy dress had been transgressive from its seventeenth century roots in the Venetian carnival, but Poiret’s version was multiply so and a roaring success. Overall, the event was a powerful marketing occasion for Poiret that dared to replicate for the buying public the great exclusive fancy-dress balls of the previous century, such as the one given by the Duchess of Devonshire to mark Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond

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Jubilee and the one given in Toronto for the same reason by the Lord Aberdeen, Governor of Canada.5 Poiret’s success was symptomatic of how adopting an exotic other self was bound up in this period with a loosening of strictures of various sorts, with an expanding understanding of the world’s cultural diversity and with the aspirant impulses to which consumerism appealed. A willingness to pretend oneself and to encounter pretence in others accompanied the rise of mass culture. From the delight caused by showmen such as P. T. Barnum to the thrill of witnessing Robert-Houdin’s conjuring and escapes, the world as it modernized was increasingly willing to suspend disbelief. As the twentieth century began, imposters as protagonists and deceit as a theme within literature reached a peak, building upon an appetite whetted by Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857) and by the character Madame Merle in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). This has been linked to the growth of capitalist market economies and to a wider contestation of the status of truth, but it may also be that with modernity comes an increased desire for self-enchantment. After all, reason and irony are not necessarily incompatible with a willingness to permit the imagination to take flight in relation to the self. As Mark A. Schneider has explained, ‘Enchantment. . . is part of or normal condition, and far from having fled with the rise of science, it continues to exist (though often unrecognized) wherever our capacity to explain the world’s behaviour is slim, that is, where neither science nor practical knowledge seem of much utility.’ Arguably, we most desire to be fooled, or to fool ourselves, at those points when human capability is seen to be expanding but the limits of those capabilities are also evident. Furthermore, deceit is, at least superficially, more complex than candour, and this has its own inherent attraction. Exposing oneself to deceit or deceiving one’s self can be a creative, potentially educational choice. It is worth recognizing in this regard that figures such as Robert-Houdin and P. T. Barnum were debunkers at heart. The former was paid by the French government, for example, to expose the conjuring feats of traditional spiritual figures such as the Dervishes (Mevlevi sect) in Algeria, while the latter went to great pains to expose spiritualists who defrauded the bereaved.6

‘Toronto’ Prewett, Long Lance and Grey Owl The non-indigenous desire to adopt an indigenous identity is, however, in a category of its own. As well as its appropriative dimensions, it has a long history as a means whereby the non-indigenous resisted culturally dominant norms.

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‘Playing Indian’, to use a phrase first coined by the early-twentieth-century Seneca Iroquois anthropologist Arthur Parker, has been an American past-time at least as far back as the Boston Tea Party, when Americans in revolt dressed up a Mohawks to hoist tea into Boston harbour.7 Examination of two other globally known ‘Indians-by-choice’ – Long Lance and Grey Owl – helps place Prewett’s ‘playing Indian’ in context. They achieved fame some years after Prewett represented himself as indigenous, but had much in common with him. All three had a strong desire to escape stifling backgrounds, served militarily, were injured overseas and had lifelong weaknesses for alcohol which ultimately contributed to their deaths. Each was a complex, handsome, socially adept figure of a literary bent who adopted another ethnicity in order to transcend a context they disliked, gain profile for their creative work and mix socially for a time at the highest levels. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance (aka Sylvester Clark Long) achieved prominence and some celebrity in New York and Hollywood in the 1920s. He served for four months in France in 1917, and like Prewett, was at Vimy. He was wounded twice and hospitalized in England before returning, as Prewett did, to Canada in 1919.8 Following his suicide in 1932, key aspects of his role as an indigenous media figure were taken over yet more successfully by Grey Owl (aka Archie Belaney). Both men spent time in Canada, but it was Grey Owl who became probably the best-known Canadian in the world in the 1930s through his books, lectures and films for a mass audience.9 Long Lance ‘chose Indian’ to escape the social limitations of being born the ‘coloured’ son of parents born slaves in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.10 Both his parents claimed indigenous and European descent, his mother Sallie identifying as Croatan-Lumbee. In 1909, Long Lance got himself accepted as a Cherokee at Carlisle Indian School. Later in 1922, the Mountain Horse family of the southern Alberta Blood Indians agreed to make him an honorary chief. Subsequently, his flair as a writer allowed him to parlay his knowledge of indigenous peoples in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia into articles for major newspapers and magazines. These found a receptive audience partly because they tended to acknowledge the superiority of the dominant culture and the supposed inevitability that the indigenous world would vanish. Long Lance produced a bestselling, critically acclaimed biography in 1928 which inaccurately stated that he had attended West Point but also described his valiant fighting in France and Italy and close friendship with American Indian Olympic Gold Medallist Jim Thorpe. Long Lance went on to endorse footwear and star in one of the earliest films to use indigenous actors, The Silent Enemy (1930), about

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hunger among the Ojibwa in northern central Canada prior to non-indigenous settlement. However, while working for an heiress in Los Angeles, depression, alcoholism and the gathering certainty that he would be unmasked as a fraud led to his suicide by firearm in 1932. Grey Owl, meanwhile, considered himself a modern Hiawatha. He was a conservationist, superb storyteller, talented popular author and movie star who, although thought of as indigenous, actually hailed from Hastings, England. His alcoholic father had disappeared to the United States when he was very young, leaving him to be brought up by a set of strict female relatives. Although his given name was Archie Belaney, he adopted a version of Ojibwe identity after spending time in northern Ontario around 1907–11, deciding to present himself as Grey Owl, or as he put it, ‘the Indian as they expect me to be’.11 At Lake Temagami, Ontario, he married a much younger Ojibwe woman named Angele Egwuna who along with her extended family, changed Archie’s whole perspective on life. Even so, he abandoned this indigenous family, and another one, before joining the Canadian Army when war broke out. He returned to Canada in 1917 wounded in the foot to a life of drink, bigamy and masquerade as a First Nations Native. Initially, he did not advance a conservationist agenda but in time he gained great fame as a sort of living environmentalist-noblesavage and even met George VI for three hours in that role. Grey Owl was never debunked by indigenous communities because his proCanadian First Nations and environmentalist message gelled with their own and he had the respect of a number of important government officials. He was also an exceptional communicator promoting an environmentalist and social justice message that was extremely well received and achieved worldwide impact for over a decade. Even Anahareo (Gertrude Bernard), Grey Owl’s Mohawk fourth wife with whom he had a daughter, did not suspect he was non-indigenous until she met his biological family, whereupon she realized she ‘had been married to a ghost’. Ironically, meeting Grey Owl had allowed her to transcend her own urban, formal education and reconnect with aspects of her indigenous heritage. Grey Owl died finally from a combination of overwork and alcoholism in 1938. Overall, his is a story as much about the inclusivity and emotional generosity of the series of indigenous women and families he met as it is about the racial boundaries he chose to transgress, although the former gets much less attention than the latter.12 The choices made by such transcultural figures can be viewed negatively, as appropriative, or positively, as the adoption and promotion of indigenous lifeways and values that in fact are superior. Although many non-indigenous

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commentators have chosen to dismiss Grey Owl as an ethnic fraud, alternatively, he is simply a transcultural figure who chose a better set of moral and community values than those into which he was born. It is also important to recognize that his achievements outside of the adoption of Indian identity are far from trivial. He was one of the first twentieth-century figures to put environmental concerns onto the global agenda. He publicized indigenous ideas about environmental balance and kinship between the human and non-human world that remain of vital importance today and he was one of the first world figures to foster an awareness of animal suffering. Although he can be understood in terms of the primitivist impulses of the time and as answering a deep-seated Canadian collective desire for reassurance about their relationship as settlers to the land, Grey Owl was a Deep Ecologist long before that movement coalesced in the 1970s.13 For all three figures, adopting an indigenous identity was a way of gaining access to élite social contexts through behaving in the same ways they did. After all, adoption at will of the identities of others was then a mark of class privilege and a capacity prized by the British upper classes who ruled an empire of enormous diversity and size. Dressing up was part of the ornamentalism that oiled the cogs of empire and a sliver of carnival that could release the tensions that arose from restrictive social hierarchies.14 The notorious occasion in 1910 when Virginia Woolf dressed up as an Eastern princess to take part in the Dreadnought hoax brings together a number of these threads. The stunt made the national newspapers and even prompted questions in parliament, but at heart, it was simply an extension of ongoing officer-level pranking between the HMS Dreadnought and another Royal Navy ship, the Hawke. Virginia, her brother Adrian, the painter Duncan Grant and three others contrived to get themselves invited to inspect the flagship Dreadnought while it was at anchor in Weymouth. Got up in full make-up, beards and exotic costumes with one of their number in plain clothes, they masqueraded as ‘His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Abyssinia’, his cohort, and a Foreign Office official. To their delight, they received every naval courtesy, full pomp and ceremony. Speaking a garbled mixture of Latin, Greek and Swahili, they exclaimed ‘Bunga! Bunga!’ when presented with the ship’s guns. The instigator, Horace De Vere Cole, was helping his Navy officer pals continue a humorous feud and the stunt was an establishment game among élites, yet in taking dressing up into the realm of formal impersonation, the Dreadnought hoaxers also ridiculed the whole imperial political project. Cole described his dressed-up friends as ‘jolly savages’, wrote of how wonderfully they had been ‘talking gibberish fluently’ and found the whole escapade an utter delight. As he put it, it was ‘a day worth living’.

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Although it has been suggested that Woolf was deliberately showing solidarity with Abyssinians who had suffered as a result of Britain’s 1868 campaign, the hoax laughed both at the idea of empire and with its servants in the navy. In contrast, the routine dressing up of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Woolf ’s fellow pacifist, sometime confidante and friend, spoke directly to Ottoline’s desire for cultural change. She dressed so colourfully and outlandishly that many thought her permanently ‘dressed up’ as if about to act upon the stage. She wrote and spoke of her salons as ‘theatres’ and her intent for most of her life was to foster a better world through performance and creative behaviour. A further example of surreal dressing up, in this case to save rural England and its ancient monuments from the blight of thoughtless building development and destruction, was Ferguson’s Gang, formed in 1927. They were a group of educated, upper- and middle-class women who raised and donated funds to the National Trust in crazy ways using pseudonyms and adopted identities. It was superb promotion of their cause and again, a means of fostering personal and cultural change.15 Dressing up was also filtering downwards during this ‘age of disguise’, to use a phrase from the biographer of Netley Lucas, another post-war impersonator and one of the world’s greatest con artists. Social signifiers were in flux and advertising beginning to expose everyday people to unimagined identities. This created opportunities for the confident but impecunious to monetize genteel manners and an attractive appearance. From 1917 to 1924, for example, orphaned confidence trickster Netley Lucas hustled until he had money, a chauffeur-driven Daimler and duchesses and chorus girls on his arm. He managed this with only a heroic story, a uniform bought from a shop and the sort of accent and languidly spoilt mannerisms that convinced people he must be an aristocrat.16 Prewett was far from being a confidence trickster like Netley, who served time for his crimes, but both played with their image and were writers committed to literature in specific ways. Like Long Lance and Grey Owl, they also both drank themselves into early graves. At heart, in adopting an indigenous identity Prewett was attempting to be true to himself, to be sincere in the way the term was once used by Lionel Trilling. Trilling’s model for sincerity referenced Polonius from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who urged his friend Laertes ‘to thine own self be true’ so that he might avoid being false to anyone else.17 In refashioning himself as indigenous and performing a subaltern identity he considered more authentic, noble and unironic than any aspect of his recent experience, Prewett chose to perform on the outside what he felt on the inside. The choice reflected the extent to which these two aspects of his identity were no longer in seamless relationship.

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Sassoon smitten by ‘Toronto’ Prewett While Prewett was re-inventing aspects of himself at Lennel, Sassoon, in comparison, was profoundly bored as soon as he arrived. He was delighted to be distracted by a glamorous Canadian fellow poet. His diary records how he was trimming the pages of a Thomas Hardy edition one rainy day when Prewett walked in. At once he was struck by Prewett’s energizing, but, he soon found out, intriguingly changeable nature. Sassoon wrote: the greatest luck I had was in finding among my fellow convalescents one who wrote poetry. His name was Frank Prewett. Everyone called him ‘Toronto’, that being his home town. He was a remarkable character, delightful when in a cheerful frame of mind, though liable to be moody and aloof.18

‘Toronto’ Prewett was charming and cheerfully good natured, but prone to silence and brooding sulkiness. He had what Sassoon thought of as a sort of otherworldly liveliness, a condition Sassoon attributed to his indigenous ancestry. Although he admitted Prewett alternated between ‘spiritual animation and dark depression’, Sassoon quickly became enamoured with him as the epitome of primitive vigour and backwoods virility. Prewett’s changeable nature seemed to Sassoon to suggest ‘a streak of genius’ and his moodiness and aloofness were explained ‘by his having served in the Ypres Salient, from the horrors of which he had been delivered by a huge shell bursting near him’. Sassoon even wrote to tell an initially sceptical Robert Graves that Prewett’s indigenous simplicity meant he would ultimately surpass anything they might achieve. ‘Toronto is a great man’, he gushed, ‘and will be a great writer – greater than you or me, because of his simplicity of mind and freedom from intellectual prejudices.’19 Sassoon’s ‘Toronto’ was an attractive embodiment of the nostalgic rejection of the present that was to characterize Sassoon’s work for decades to come. Prewett took wry pleasure in the poetry and passion he engendered. ‘I saw Sassoon’s bundle of manuscript poems’, he later confided to Clemmie from Oxford University, They are full of ‘Lines to a Young Canadian, and the soul of the woods, back of beyond, Indians, etc . . .’ As it happens, one of these curious things, written on the occasion of the fancy-dress evening is good. I knew there was something wrong with the man in those days, but he has made an excellent recovery.20

The poem by Sassoon that Prewett considered ‘good’ was occasioned by Sassoon seeing him in full ‘Indian’ regalia at one of Lennel’s therapeutic fancy-dress

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parties. Sassoon published his love-struck paean to the inner primitive he perceived in ‘Toronto’ in 1919 with the title ‘Fancy Dress’ in his privately printed volume, Picture Show. It read: Some Brave, awake in you tonight, Knocked at your heart; an eagle’s flight Stirred in the feather in your head. Your wide-set Indian eyes, alright Above high cheek-bones smeared with red. Inveiled cragg’d centuries, and led You, the snared wraith of bygone thingsWild ancestries of trackless KingsOut of the past . . . So men have felt Strange anger move them as they knelt Praying to gods serenely starred In heavens where tomahawks are barred.21

The composition was at once testimony to Sassoon’s attraction for Prewett and to his desire for peace. He described his new beau to Edward Marsh as a ‘CanadianFrench-Red-Indian’, and in his diaries admitted that his ‘intimacy with Toronto Prewett began with a strong sexual attraction’ but this ‘horrified’ Prewett when he recognized it. It has been suggested that meeting ‘Toronto’ at this time helped Sassoon accept the homosexual feelings that had caused him so much angst in previous years, but there is much to suggest that at this juncture Prewett was too traumatized to reciprocate physical intimacy from either sex. However, he remained in thrall to Sassoon on multiple levels, admitting in 1919, ‘I shall always feel with a conviction beyond argument that he is one of the best men on earth.’22 Sassoon was good-looking and fit. Indeed, Wilfred Owen claimed he looked five years younger than his age and soon after meeting him wrote, ‘He himself is 30! Looks under 25!’ Prewett really was just turning twenty-five, and looked like Rudolph Valentino, the Italian-American silent movie star and heart-throb of the age.23 ‘Toronto’ also had Valentino’s bisexual appeal; he was smolderingly attractive to women but with a dandyish or effeminate side. The trouble, as Sassoon admitted to his diary, was that despite ‘Toronto’s’ attractiveness, his indigenous friend’s recurrent depression and tendency towards resentment always erected a barrier. However, Sassoon claimed that the two were eventually able to set aside the issue of sexual attraction and stay close. As Sassoon put in his diary: we established a very solid and sympathetic understanding which ranks very high among the amicabilities of my existence. But Toronto’s character lacks that

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. . . sweetness which makes little B [Edmund Blunden] so delightful. Toronto is always rather enigmatic. He is inclined to sulk and grumble and retire into resentfulness. One does not always feel that he trusts one. He does not give himself wholeheartedly to his friends.24

What complicated matters was that the attraction between Sassoon and Prewett was always awkwardly mixed up with other things, including Sassoon’s respect for and desire to nurture Prewett’s poetic ability, problems surrounding ‘Toronto’s’ see-saw moods and drinking, Prewett’s poverty and Sassoon’s quite exceptional wealth. Of course, this did not stop them having a great deal of fun. They walked together across the Cheviots and had wonderful days out, for example, biking in September 1918, to the Arts and Crafts gem Lindisfarne Castle, owned by Edward Hudson, owner of Country Life magazine. There, they listened as the renowned Portuguese cellist Madame Guilhermina Suggia played Bach before cycling back. At the beginning of their friendship, Sassoon appeared to Prewett to possess gargantuan powers. He wrote breathlessly from Lennel to Clemmie Waring that Sassoon was ‘writing an epoch-making poem . . . to bring about Haig’s retirement, the democratising of staff officers and the abolition of the House of Lords’. However, in time, Prewett started to feel he was following almost helplessly in the wake of a much grander personality. As he later told Ottoline from Christ Church, Oxford, ‘The indomitable Siegfried has dragged me after him, like the tail of a comet, in his triumphant career.’ Prewett had few mental reserves, even had he wished to resist. His mental health remained very fragile for many years after Lennel. When he arrived at Oxford University, helped by financially by Sassoon, there was much discussion as to whether it would in fact be better to return him again to another convalescent home. At points when his psychological ill-health became unignorable, all Prewett could do was confess to Ottoline, ‘The doctors are very kind. They gave me a long lecture upon worry, and told me I would be quite well as soon as I became satisfied with myself.’ Several times, he wrote with euphemistic blitheness to Clemmie that he had had ‘rather a severe bout with the round-and-roundness in my head’.25

Sassoon: A soldier, acting on behalf of soldiers Of all those conventionally thought of as ‘trench poets’, Sassoon is the poet who most effectively hammered his words into political action, however limited its impact at the time. Rather than solely fight or plead in print, he ensured that his

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voice was heard outside of literary space and at the heart of British politics. Despite the current propensity to see him as a fractured personality or as the multiple set of selves reflected in his trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (1928, 1920, 1936), it is important to recognize that this political dimension was primary during this crucial period in his life. He remains emblematic of all those combatants who during and after the war broke General Sir John French’s edict delivered after the Armistice that ‘soldiers should have no politics’.26 His protests, against his upbringing, against the limitations placed upon his expression of self and against the war, took multiple forms, but the best known is the proclamation that was read out in Parliament on 30 July 1917 and appeared the next day in The Times and The Daily Mail newspapers. Sassoon’s ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ read: I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

His alter ego, Sherston, issued the same ‘wilful defiance of military authority’ at the close of Sassoon’s factional Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, stating that the war became one of ‘aggression and conquest’ that was ‘deliberately prolonged’ for ‘evil and unjust ends’.27 Sherston puts Sassoon’s parliamentary protest into broader context and helps us to see it as part of a trajectory of resistance he undertook in relation to various roles that included those of dutiful schoolboy, rural sportsman and heroic, gentleman infantry officer. After 1917, Sassoon experienced a flowering both of his literary and political sensibilities. He began, he wrote, ‘to learn that life, for the majority of the

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population, is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds, culminating in a cheap funeral’. Like his hero Rivers, after the war he leant towards socialism, becoming literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald and making efforts to change his relationship to the morés of the family and class into which he was born. Ultimately, his new-found socialist politics did not stick, but it was followed by a remarkable personal-sexual liberation which reached a peak of sorts in his relationship during the 1920s with the flamboyantly homosexual figure, the Honourable Stephen Tennant. Tennant was perhaps the great love of his life, a person of exceptional wealth, glamour and sophistication who also suffered from what has been described as a dual personality.28 On one level, it is surprising that Sassoon’s ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ gesture has achieved such high profile within descriptions of this period, since it had limited public impact at the time and Sassoon was before a medical board and determined to return to the front only four months afterwards. He knew he had a ‘multiple personality’, that his protest was unlikely to work, but made it nonetheless. He later compared the whole thing to a man shouting from the shore at a boat on the horizon.29 How much of Sassoon’s protest was a result of mental anguish reflective of the conditions he had recently experienced is impossible to estimate. The politics surrounding Sassoon’s diagnosis and admission to Craiglockhart and Lennel hospitals make it difficult to record with certainty that he was in fact suffering from ‘shell-shock’ or combat-induced trauma. Sassoon’s close friend Robert Graves claimed Sassoon was very ill mentally indeed and testified before his medical board that at the time he was seeing things, including corpses in Piccadilly, and having fiendishly hideous dreams. However, Graves was traumatized himself and had an instrumental and flexible approach to the truth.30 Yet Graves also thought the war was mad and that Sassoon had spoken the truth, albeit ill-advisedly. Five months beforehand, Sassoon had confided to his diary that all a ‘brave and thoughtful creature’ like himself might hope for by that stage in the war was to ‘become of a sort of ignoble Hamlet’.31 Indeed, it seems his statement read out in parliament was an attempt to rail against the rottenness at the heart of the body politic, much as in the way Bertolt Brecht later used Hamlet. Hamlet, after all, was pushed towards madness by conflicts over ‘a little patch of ground’, ‘that hath no profit in it but the name’. Like Sassoon at this time, Hamlet fretted over men who ‘Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot/Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent/To hide the slain.’ The powers that be under-reacted to Sassoon’s protest – an appropriate strategy from their point of view. Under Secretary for War, Sir James McPherson, deftly

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responded to the reading out of Sassoon’s statement by pleading solicitously with his fellow MPs not to exploit ‘an extremely gallant young officer’ suffering from ‘nervous shock’. This served to neutralize the impact of Sassoon’s comments and implied he was a noble innocent being manipulated by larger, anti-war political forces. This was not true, although Sassoon’s pacifist friends were delighted with his action, partly because like him, they anticipated a more socially reverberative and punitive response than actually materialized. Ottoline Morrell gushed to Sassoon in a letter soon after the statement was published, ‘It is tremendously fine of you doing it. You will have a hard time of it, and people are sure to say all sorts of foolish things. They always do – but nothing of that sort can really tarnish or dim the value of such a True Act.’ Ironically, Sassoon’s having been decorated for bravery made his dissent over the conduct of the war less powerful rather than more so. Dissent from the patently hitherto brave and committed could easily be dismissed as a temporary loss of control, or, as with the 1916 satirical officers’ newspaper, The Wipers Times, as a harmless example of pressure release. Sassoon’s was a gilded life and his protest possible only because of the elevated circles within which he moved. For example, in the six months before he met Prewett, he had had meetings with the prime minister, with Winston Churchill, with the celebrity figure T. E. Lawrence and with Poet Laureate Robert Bridges. He had also begun deep friendships with his literary hero Thomas Hardy and with Edith Sitwell. When recovering in hospital in London from his head wound, he even received visits from royalty. Sassoon’s experience at the Somme in 1916 made him not anti-war, but against the prolongation and perpetuation of the First World War at that time. During battle at the Somme, Sassoon had seen things he could not dismiss or categorize that turned him against those he understood to be war’s chief instigators and perpetuators. To give one example, he saw in a trench three very mangled corpses lying: a man, short, plump, with turned up moustache, lying face downward and half sideways with one arm flung up as if defending his head, and a bullet through his forehead. A doll-like figure. Another hunched and mangled, twisted and scorched with many days’ dark growth on his face, teeth clenched and grinning lips.

After the battle, he wrote, quoting H. G. Wells’s central character in his 1916 novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through: It is a war now like any other of the mobbing, many-aimed cataclysms that have shattered empires and devastated the world; it is a war without point, a war that has lost its soul; it has become mere incoherent fighting and destruction,

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a demonstration in vast and tragic forms of the stupidity and ineffectiveness of our species.32

Sassoon’s protest has been viewed as primarily a symptom of a self-absorbed and narcissistic nature, in, for example, John Stuart Roberts’s 1999 biography. Roberts echoed a description of Sassoon penned by J. R. Ackerley after meeting him late in life in 1949 and 1950. However, this view is difficult to sustain, since Sassoon avoided taking the easy way out and risked so much, in his mind at least, on behalf of others whose voices were less likely to be heard. Furthermore, an awareness of religious sacrifice pervaded his work. From early in life he retained a sense of himself as a prophet, and as an older man he turned fully to God, converting to Catholicism in 1957. It brought him, he claimed, ‘peace beyond anything I could have hoped for – not through my formal submission to R. C. dogma, but through the grace of faith which came to me after prolonged perseverance in prayer’. His faith gave him a superb death, one that communicated to those present at his passing a sense of enlargement rather than loss.33 It is important that this transcendent, spiritually sensitive dimension to Sassoon and his work is not underestimated. He saw himself as a prophet ruminator and an historian of sorts, one committed to the revelation of universal truths rather than the regurgitation of facts. A number of things about Sassoon constrained the literary reminiscences he published but, as he had his literary alter ego Sherston point out, ‘inconsistencies are often what make us most interesting’.34 These things made Sassoon an outsider, but also gave him unique insight and propelled him towards being exceptional. He once said that ‘the daemon in me is Jewish’, invoking the Sephardic side of his family tree that had established the Sassoon name in English society. The Sassoon business empire was originally based in Bombay, Shanghai and Hong Kong and its extension to England in 1858 allowed Sassoon’s by then fabulously rich greatuncles to get close to the British royal family.35 However his handsome, muchindulged father broke with tradition by marrying a gentile whereupon Siegfried’s grandmother promptly declared his father dead, sat Shiva for him, cursed his future progeny and cut him out of her will. This left him only the allowance due from his father’s will. Yet even this money on its own was enough for Siegfried to remain comfortably off for most of his life, under no obligation to work. Sassoon was also homosexual, or perhaps bisexual, in light of his marriage and parenthood late in life. One of his most generous gifts to Wilfred Owen when Owen departed from Craiglockhart in 1918 prior to his going back to the front, was the chance to meet up with an unashamedly homosexual literary London social scene. Sassoon gave Owen a letter of introduction to Robbie

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Ross, the devoted Scots-Canadian friend and first lover of the deceased Oscar Wilde. Sassoon had been intimate with Ross and along with Robert Graves, had found a haven at 40 Half Moon Street, Piccadilly, and benefitted from the kindly solicitations of its inimitable landlady, ‘Dame Nelly’ (Nellie Burton). Near St James’s Park and Piccadilly’s pick-up sites, Ross’ first-floor flat decorated in dull gold was a microcosm in open defiance of convention and wartime stricture. Ross was a pacifist, kind, witty and a creative catalyst. He introduced Owen to Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells and Sassoon to Ottoline Morrell and the Garsington set. In linking Owen to Ross, Sassoon gave Owen access to a demiworld of homosexual and intellectual opportunity at a juncture in Owen’s life when it might be his last chance to fully experience sexual freedom or luxury of any sort. When on leave again in mid-May 1918, Owen rented a flat above Robbie Ross’s on Half Moon Street. This time he met Osbert Sitwell and had, he said, ‘more invitations to lunch and dinner than I could manage!’36 Ross was the grandson of the reforming Canadian Governor General Robert Baldwin, and like Sassoon, was independently wealthy and very open to being a friend and mentor to literary young men. He remained a crucial figure within the artistic and literary world from the mid-1910s until his premature death aged forty-nine in 1918. This came not long after a right-wing MP caused a scandal by implicating Ross’s circle in a ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ – a group of 47,000 establishment figures it was claimed the German Secret Service intended to blackmail. The resulting libel trial was actioned by another Canadian, the dancer Maud Allan, and it led to Ross’s name being sullied irrevocably. Hounded by Wilde’s lover Alfred Lord Douglas, and despite political and society support at the highest levels, Ross died as his great friend Oscar did, beset all around because he was indiscrete about his sexual practices. Prewett also spent time at Half Moon Street, as revealed in his letters to Ottoline Morrell. He would, for example, accompany Sassoon to the theatre from there. On one occasion after seeing a disturbing play called ‘Bat’, the pair sat at Half Moon Street drinking whiskey and cherry brandy until two in the morning with the Treasury civil servant Roderick Meiklejohn.37 Prewett maintained a studied ignorance within his correspondence to Clemmie Waring about the homosexual circles within which he was mixing. In one 1918 letter, for example, he described a trip to the home of the ‘notorious pacifist’ Lady Ottoline Morrell, where he admitted that Sassoon ‘vaunted himself in a manner that surprised me’. Even so, Prewett assured his benefactor, ‘I am glad to say that I think I was unjust in my suspicion of undesirableness in Siegfried’s attitude.’ Prewett was less sure about Edward Marsh, the well-connected editor and patron of the arts who

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would serve as personal secretary to Winston Churchill for twenty-three years. Marsh introduced Churchill to the work of Sassoon, Owen and Blunden, was attracted to male beauty and according to his long-term partner and biographer Christopher Hassall, showed a tender devotion to certain protégés and male friends.38 Prewett probably knew that Mark Gertler, a talented but impecunious artist, had moved in with Marsh for a time in 1914 and that Marsh held great sway as a powerful judge of taste. Yet Prewett reassured Clemmie, ‘I completely accept your advice concerning Marsh and the effete. I do not care if I never see the man again, even if he should become arbiter of English verse.’ Whatever Prewett’s relationship with Marsh, it did not preclude Marsh including him in the fifth anthology of Georgian Poetry he edited in 1922.39 It is impossible to know whether or how much of Prewett’s private life at this time was homosexual, but one poem of his, published in The London Mercury in 1922 can easily be read as expressing a sort of love he could not fully articulate. ‘Lark Song’ describes the intimate meeting of the poet with a man under a dappled autumn sky when the air is soft and larks are singing. It concludes: I love you John, I tried to say, He with his jolly eyes Regarded me and went his way, Listening the shrill lark cries. I feel I never shall express This love, this love of mine, Only the birds this dear excess Can free-heart round make shine.40

Sassoon’s thinking was more advanced. He had read Edward Carpenter’s 1906 book The Intermediate Sex in 1910 and had thrilled at its suggestion that homosexual love was unique, superior to the more functional heterosexuality, and linked to an artistic or philosophical nature. As Carpenter explained, inverting the message of the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895, society needed homosexuality so as to create ‘those children of the mind, the philosophical conceptions and ideas which transform our lives’. Reading Carpenter opened up a new life for Sassoon, as a letter between the two explained, and allowed him bring into full consciousness a hitherto subconscious intense attraction for his own sex.41 Carpenter further developed the idea that homosexuality was socially beneficial in a 1914 work, Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk, and argued that ‘intermediates’ had in fact been responsible for human evolution and were essential to political and martial advance across time and to democracy

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itself. Sassoon went so far as to visit Carpenter at his farm in the Peak District named Millthorpe, where Carpenter sought to realize the socialist ideals of his literary heroes Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Sassoon’s socialism never matched Carpenter’s but he was also profoundly influenced by Whitman, especially his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass. Sassoon made a point of sending a delighted Carpenter a copy of his 1917 ‘Statement Against the War’. Carpenter was part of what prompted Sassoon and Graves to think of themselves as representative of poets and of poetry in war.42 This may have been why Sassoon deliberately sought out sensation and exhibited a careless fatalism that even service with the famously pugnacious Royal Welch Fusiliers First and Second Battalions could not sate. His 1916 diary spoke of his need ‘to get as many sensations as possible’ and end up with ‘a good name in the Battalion, for the sake of poetry and poets, whom I represent’. However, such daring on Sassoon’s part was also a response to trauma, the result of his having drunk the elixir of extreme experience and having developed a revenge-filled bloodlust after the loss of a series of men he loved. These included his brother Hamo who died at Gallipoli in November, 1915; a Private under his command named O’Brien; Lieutenant Bobbie Hanmer, and in March, 1916 ‘Tommy’ – Lieutenant David Thomas. Tommy’s loss in particular cut him to the quick, since he had previously lived an idyllic four weeks with him in rooms at Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge. Sassoon used the most loving language about Tommy, describing in his diaries how ‘I lay under the smooth bole of a beechtree, wondering, and longing for the bodily presence that was so fair . . . . So I wrote his name in chalk on the beech-tree stem, and left a rough garland of ivy there, and a yellow primrose for his yellow hair and kind grey eyes, my dear, dear’. For Sassoon in this period, all of this had the effect of making what beauty and grace he could access all the more precious and intense. It made his own death appear relative as a potential experience, better, possibly, than the pettiness that surrounded the everyday humdrum quest for happiness. He wrote from the front with jittering calm: ‘I am bound to get it in the neck sometime, so why not make a creditable show [] And death is the best adventure of all – better than living idleness and sinking into the groove again and trying to be happy. Life is precious to us all now; too precious to keep long.’ As a second lieutenant, Sassoon had come to know and love his men, not least through laboriously trawling through their innermost thoughts in letters home in his role as censor. His empathy for those who suffered and died alongside him fostered a Christ-like impulse to serve them and a bitterness about his own role in their distress. Sassoon’s April 1917 poem, ‘Foot Inspection’, articulated the inner thoughts of an officer before

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one of his men. It read, ‘How glad I’d be to die, if dying could set him free / From battles.’ This was the voice of a great and feeling spirit desperate to make amends for his own part in a cacophony of death. Such feelings persisted in Sassoon throughout his life, their calling card his repeated references to ghosts in his writing and his membership in psychic research groups such as The Ghost Club. As he put it in the December 1916 poem, ‘The Poet as Hero’, ‘my killed friends are with me where I go’. As late as 1950, he would compose unpublished work such as the poem ‘An Incident in Literary History’ that described himself in the third person as a ghost. It argued, in relation to his poetic persona, ‘He should have kept/ Silence, and out in France forever slept.’43 It was this fragile, exhausted and dissociated side to Sassoon that guided Robert Graves’s actions in relation to Sassoon’s ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ and which led to a fundamental personal and creative divide between the two. Graves knew how much Sassoon had seen in combat and he had no interest in his suffering further as a political martyr for the pacifist agenda. Graves acknowledged that the war was being bungled strategically by the politically inept, but he knew his friend’s actions were misguided and would have no impact on the war’s outcome. Therefore, he made Herculean efforts to ensure Sassoon escaped what he swore on oath to Sassoon would happen – Sassoon being confined to a padded cell. Sassoon hoped for maximum publicity as a result of his Declaration via a court martial and imprisonment, but when Graves said he had been told unofficially that this would not happen, it went a long way towards deflecting Sassoon from his original intent. Despite being in a poor state himself at a military hospital on the Isle of Wight at the time, Graves did everything he could to prevent Sassoon from sacrificing his reputation. First, he used his influence to muffle the impact after Sassoon’s protest was discussed in the House of Commons. Then, he got Sassoon a medical board evaluation at which he testified to Sassoon being mentally exhausted and broke down in tears himself three times. Sassoon, as we know, was then sent to Craiglockhart and placed under W. H. H. Rivers’s care. However, Sassoon always suspected Graves had lied to him about the likelihood of a court martial, and from this their relationship never fully recovered. The situation truly worsened in 1929 when Graves published his bestseller Goodbye to All That. To Sassoon’s thinking, the book exposed an inherent callous egotism and neuroticism on Graves’s part that was unforgiveable. Sassoon was much richer than Graves and able to do more for Prewett socially and materially, but it would be Graves’s friendship that would endure in the long term and help to secure Prewett’s literary legacy. Graves always related to Prewett as an indigenous poet and dear friend for whom he had an ineffable respect. It is to this relationship we turn next.

Figure 5  Lady Ottoline Morrell with Friends: Siegfried Sassoon; Mark Gertler; Ottoline Morrell; Frank Prewett and Julian Vinogradoff (née Morrell) by Philip Edward Morrell, 1921. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Prewett’s friendship with Robert Graves and trauma poetry

Graves: Conjuror in myth and jests ‘too deep for laughter’ Graves stands out amid a number of Prewett’s creatively minded First World War associates who each had a specific relationship to verisimilitude and the importance or otherwise of facts. From the outset, Graves found aspects of his experiences in the trenches surreal, more like being instantly thrust into a movie than real life. He told Edward Marsh, ‘I feel here more like a man who has watched the “movies” for a long evening and then suddenly finds himself thrown on the screen in the middle of scalp-hunting Sioux and runaway motor cars.’1 Post-war, his writings are those of someone at ease with a certain sort of humour and with truths not conventionally recognized or talked about. His profound cynicism about hierarchies, social systems and the shibboleths of the previous generation, mixed with his facility for generating and perpetuating myths, easily lent itself to exquisite parody and bitingly funny ‘truth-telling’. He established a complex bond with his readership that spoke to a deeper, quintessentially modern set of verities that a simpler form of reporting could never have encompassed. The remark was characteristically catty, but Philip Larkin isolated something important about Graves in a review of his work in 1958. He wrote, ‘His advantage as a scatterer of other people’s nonsense resides chiefly in the intimidating quality of his own.’2 Ironically, a commitment to deeper truths and to authenticity helped cement ‘Toronto’ Prewett and Graves together both as poets and as people. ‘The poet’, Graves held, ‘is concerned with truth which is not a historical product but which is always there of itself because it is reality: he is concerned with final truth only.’ ‘Poems’, he wrote elsewhere, ‘are like people. There are not many authentic ones around.’3 Prewett, in contrast, always appeared to Graves to be wholly authentic, someone grounded in pre-Christian oral storytelling traditions that perpetuated moral truths as opposed to prosaic facts. This meant the pair shared a link to the

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pre-colonial past, connecting Graves to his Irish cultural roots and the great lake of knowledge he had benefitted from via his father, Alfred P. Graves, a significant writer on Celtic folklore and the ancient Irish past. ‘Toronto’ Prewett was a figure who amplified Graves’s determination that the historical past was there to be quarried, played with and added to, so as to bring it alive and present it afresh to culture. Graves held that careful attention to specific facts was to be reserved for campaign or regimental histories. Instead, his objective was to exorcise the ‘godawful’ past by describing and laughing at its essential characteristics. He knew no war memoir could ever present the definitive truth and argued that, in fact, ‘the memoirs of a man who went through some of the worst experiences of trench warfare are not truthful if they do not contain a high proportion of falsities’. ‘High explosive barrages’, he maintained, ‘will make a temporary liar or visionary of anyone.’ What mattered were the deeper human truths of war. These, Graves knew, lay with affinity to one’s regiment and in articulation of ‘the really shameful things that happened’. War memoirs that were not inaccurate about details were unlikely to be true. As was later said by others about the decade of the 1960s, for Graves, if a person thought they could accurately remember trench warfare, they probably were never really there. After all, keeping diaries or sending letters filled with specific information was forbidden during the conflict and the better the soldier, the less time he was likely to have for writing things down. In adopting such a stance, Graves toyed with the sensibilities of those who clung to pre-war standards of verity, order and hierarchy but he also made a serious point – to require dissenting voices to display consistency and accuracy with reference to combat experience is unreasonable. Furthermore, such stringent standards were much less often applied to testimony held to be in keeping with conventional wisdom about war and its conduct.4 The sort of humour in Graves’s post-war autobiography-of-sorts, Goodbye to All That, was ‘too deep for laughter’, to use the phrase of arch anti-sentimentalist, painter and writer Wyndham Lewis. Lewis rather liked it for this reason, seeing in it exquisite satire and the ‘masterly winding up of a bankrupt concern’.5 Graves himself remained ambivalent about his own book. He described it as a catharsis, an expulsion of memories that could not be psychologically assimilated, and a means of making money at a time of great personal need. In 1957, when he explained how he had come to write the book in 1929 just as he reached thirtyfour, he played down the emotional lunacy and unhappiness of this time in his life. However, it was a period when both he and his great love, the American poet-muse Laura Riding, found it necessary to deliberately throw themselves out

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of high windows, a form of playing with death, ‘re-birth’ and ‘Time’ with obvious echoes in Graves’s experiences of death and survival in war. He wrote: I partly wrote, partly dictated, this book twenty-eight years ago during a complicated domestic crisis, and with very little time for revision. It was my bitter leave-taking of England where I had recently broken a good many conventions; quarrelled with, or been disowned, by most of my friends; been grilled by the police on a suspicion of attempted murder; and ceased to care what anyone thought of me.6

In saying Goodbye to All That, Graves, was heeding, consciously or unconsciously, the advice of Friedrich Nietzsche about the personal value of deliberately forgetting the past. Nietzsche recommended in a 1874 essay that the modern individual should ‘forget and enclose oneself in a limited horizon . . . and guide the eye away from becoming and toward that which gives existence an eternal and stable character, toward art and religion’.7 Graves rephrased associated ideas in the first edition of his bestselling book, stating that Goodbye to All That was ‘an opportunity for a formal good-bye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that; forgetfulness, because once all this has been settled in my mind and written down and published it need never be thought about again; money’. He was on an emotional/spiritual journey with his new partner Laura Riding, whose jump from a fourth-floor flat meant, they thought, that she could live thereafter, ‘invisibly, against kind, as dead, beyond event’.8 As Graves’s comments at this time show, despite coming from a comfortable family background, he had to be serious about using his exceptional skills as a writer for profit. He had few qualms about bending the truth in order to make a good story and deliberately included within Goodbye to All That elements from other popular books that he knew would sell. In particular, he recounted incidences that may or may not have happened but that corresponded overall with his feelings about the war. He gave stories of horror and gore greater impact by relating them with deadpan nonchalance, presented a series of resonant uncanny or ghostly coincidences, made a point of referencing T. E. Lawrence (with whom the public were fascinated), and mercilessly ridiculed ‘all the terrible people’ whose stupidity so often is allowed free play in times of crisis. Graves’s strategy worked. The book sold 30,000 within just one month, far more than others such as Sassoon’s Fox-Hunting Man which attracted literary awards. Graves’s popular success may also have been rooted in his particular combination of irreverence and duty. He cared little for strict factual accuracy but throughout the book his loyalty and profound respect for his regiment was

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beyond question. Although he ranted against what he knew was the waste of young lives in strategically poorly planned attacks, his work never questioned the appropriateness of soldierly professional conduct or the soldier’s primary requirement to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who fought at his side. Sassoon and Blunden took deep umbrage at Graves’s lack of concern for strict factual accuracy in Goodbye to All That. Graves was rejecting a present he considered venal, while they at that time were exercised in print at the fact that the halcyon traditions they valued were no longer recoverable. The lasting split that developed between Sassoon and Graves was not helped by the book’s publication coming just a few years after the beginning in 1926 of Graves’s passionate relationship with Laura Riding. Both Sassoon and Blunden made furious, petty-minded annotations to the review copies sent to them by Graves’s publisher who had hoped the pair would help generate positive advance publicity. The comments reveal petulant anger at Graves, whom Sassoon and Blunden lampoon as a tactless fantasist talking nonsense, unfortunately besotted by a dislikeable, ill-bred female.9 Goodbye to All That can be seen as part of a trajectory of writing over time where the experience of war generated sorts of candour, humour and playfulness linked to new understandings of how truth circulates and can be undermined or warped. As the 1920s progressed, the word propaganda took on fresh, darker connotations in the wake of the war’s highly successful manipulation of information, both officially and semi-officially. The stakes were raised in 1928 when all women and men over twenty-one in Great Britain began to have the right to vote. If the state could powerfully manipulate the truth, as it had during war, this extension of rights had new dimension.10 Alongside Graves, Ford Madox Ford, who had been a government propagandist early in the war, was the post-war writer who perhaps had the most to say about truth. The four novels he published from 1924 to 1928 which finally appeared in 1950 as Parade’s End, had a land-owning central character named Christopher Tietjens who suffered repeatedly and caused suffering because of lies, malicious rumour and deceit. Importantly, one of his main problems was an inability to lie appropriately or in the expected manner. In one instance, this caused a General to despair of him and exclaim, ‘Damn it all, it’s the first duty of a soldier – it’s the first duty of all Englishmen – to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge. But a lie like that.’11 The aftermath of the Second World War would in turn accelerate further profound change in terms of how truth was related to and conceptualized within Anglophone culture. Catch 22, published in 1961 by the American writer and

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veteran Joseph Heller, is usually discussed in this regard, but the innovative, surreal comic genius of The Goons, the British comedy group who influenced both the Beatles and Monty Python, is also significant. Led by Spike Milligan, a psychiatric casualty of the intense fighting at Monte Cassino, the Goons each began performing while serving in the Allied Forces. After the war they dropped their own cultural bomb of sorts, aided by writers such as Eric Sykes and Kenneth Williams. The Goon Show often blew people up but displayed the same detached attitude towards death that had characterized the behaviour of a number of traumatized soldiers in the First World War. ‘Is it dangerous?’, the Goon Show character Seagoon would ask another, Major Bloodnok, about a bomb. ‘Only when it blows up’, Bloodnok would reply, with the same disconcerting nonchalance in connection to acute danger employed by Graves in Goodbye to All That. Both Graves and the Goons spoke to their audience about what war had taught them – that survival is often arbitrary and the discrepancy between rhetoric and reality can be vast. Spike Milligan was hospitalized several times in his life because of psychological distress, a distress Graves and Prewett would very probably have recognized as a legacy of ‘shell-shock’. One of the ways Graves ultimately dealt with his memories of the First World War was to contextualize them within a complex mythological belief system which he outlined in a 1948 publication, The White Goddess. In it, he articulated a basic value stressed by pre-Christian faiths and within a number of North American indigenous traditions – that life should be lived in spiritual, environmental and social balance. In the book’s introduction, he described poetry as ‘once a warning to man that he must keep harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born . . . [but] is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warnings, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin upon himself and his family’. The White Goddess was a whimsical riddle, a means of justifying Graves’s personal and creative inconsistencies, but also a serious incantation instructing the reader about the unresolvable limitations of language, the inevitable cycle of life and death and the vital importance of balance and right relationship between humans and non-humans. The issues Graves considered in depth within The White Goddess concerning the spiritual underpinnings of the world were also a topic of discussion within Graves and Prewett’s correspondence from at least 1925, when the pair were attempting to make a success of rural life in Oxfordshire. Prewett, for example, described to Graves his progress in ‘the appreciation of the Oneness and Love, the universal’, and wrote of how ‘the former makes the universe workable, the

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latter makes it work’.12 Prewett’s war notebooks show that he had been thinking about such big issues, about conflict as a human constant and man’s place within deep time, since the war. His experience of battle had caused him to disassociate periodically from the present, and had convinced him that the dead remained with him on some level. This, in turn, he linked to both the indigenous peoples he had known about in his youth and Britain’s rural agricultural poor, groups he wrote about as somehow existing outside of time. For Prewett, both groups had a pre-modern connection to the land that deserved recognition and respect. Thus, one of his poems examined a ‘native’ figure, recalling perhaps, someone Prewett used to see as he grew up in Ontario. It did not identify whether the person was indigenous or settler, what mattered was the man’s abiding attachment to the land and animals of his birth. It is entitled, ‘The Farm Labourer’: He plods his native road Ground-grazing, stooped and lame The ways his people strode Ages ago the same. From fields so old, his mind From stock so old, his love He carries on his kind And has no life his own. He plods his native roads A thousand years the same No matter what forebodes A nation’s place and fame. Until the hills lose form And blood the kin it wields So, through the sun and storm Shall plod his native fields.13

The idea that those intimately linked to the land are a timeless constant is a comforting trope that persists today, but it is curious that Prewett perpetuated it. He would later write at length professionally and creatively on the impact of changing agricultural practices on land and he had grown up alongside indigenous peoples whom he knew were as subject to history as he. Life on the Prewett farm, after all, had been devoted across generations to permanently altering a landscape that once belonged exclusively to First Nations peoples, likely Saugeen Ojibway.

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Of course, such cognitive dissonance, the ability to perpetuate myth while at the same time remaining aware via practical experience that it was untrue, was by no means unique to Prewett. A stark example at this time was another Canadian poet, Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932. Scott was garlanded with honours in Canada for poetry that included a number of well-known, romantic ‘Indian poems’ praising First Nations peoples as free and noble savages. At the same time however, Scott advanced a series of draconian measures to eradicate aspects of indigenous culture and dispossess First Nations peoples of the means to survive or prosper. These included the forced removal of around 150,000 indigenous children from their communities so that they might attend often poorly maintained and administered residential schools. A significant number died and others suffered physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Scott may have expressed sadness at the encroachment of European culture upon indigenous ways of life, but he also found it appropriate to administrate policies that made that encroachment all the more brutal. It seems that in this sense poetry, for both Scott and Prewett, was a discursive space that existed outside of the realm of the real, responsive to dictates that transcended any integrated set of values or knowledge on the part of the poet.

Prewett’s communion with the dead and trauma poetry Graves and Prewett shared an understanding of how depressing it felt to be ‘ghost-ridden’, or surrounded by the dead-while-alive, and to feel alive but also be convinced that one was in fact, dead. Between jokes about Prewett’s ‘barbarous origins’ and the ‘primitive deficiencies’ of his work, their post-war correspondence returned repeatedly to how such feelings led to periodic bouts of mental bad weather for Prewett.14 Graves understood Prewett’s sense of being ‘ghost-ridden’ better than most. After the war Graves described himself as ‘dead but alive’ partly because he had been left for dead on the battlefield and then publicly declared deceased on his twenty-first birthday. This was because he had not been expected to survive a severe wound sustained at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. His friends, including Sassoon, and his family, all were led to think he was gone forever. Graves wrote a poem in 1924 suggesting that he and Sassoon had died at the Somme, or might as well have, and were simply not aware of it. Using other names, it described how the pair had holidayed on leave in Wales in August 1916, but had

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deluded themselves, because they were actually ghosts and foolishly oblivious of the fact. Of the Graves figure, the poem said, ‘died, poor fellow, the day he came of age’. It explained to another character who stood for Sassoon: ‘I don’t know for sure, but I suspect/ That you were dead too.’ The poem continued in a vein of profound existential confusion, both over what identity is, what Graves and Sassoon’s identity might have been or what it became, the nature of past selves and the surety of language as a means of gainsaying meaning. The poem suggested that Sassoon died when ‘something snapped’ and he went ‘berserk’ and took over a German trench on his own, an event that did in fact happen: No doubt, they killed you: it was your substitute Strolled back and laid down and woke as you . . . So these two substitutes, yours and my owns (Though that’s an Irish way of putting it For the I now talking is an honest I Independent of the Is now lost, And a live dog’s as good as a dead lion).15

The humour invoked, along with an Irish ease with dissonance and multiple meanings, suggests Graves glimpsed a way out of his conundrum. After all, as the concluding lines attest, it is better to be alive in whatever state. Perhaps it was the need to periodically remind each other of this truth that in part bound Graves and Prewett together in friendship. Prewett felt most exposed to the dead and most dead himself when darkness fell at Lennel. Then it seemed that the furious, pale grey ghosts of fellow soldiers crept back to haunt their living, damaged, comrades. One of Prewett’s most powerful poems is ‘The Kelso Road’, an articulation of the unconscionable dread of nightfall for the traumatized. It described a horrific walk the poet took around Lennel in 1918 along a Tweed River heavy with flood water. It opened with an acknowledgement of the psychological dangers of the night and went on to describe the horror of one who has foolishly chosen to walk the treeline just as darkness falls. He comes upon graves being dug by elves and is then himself hagridden by the dead. It begins: Morning and evening are mine, And the bright noon-day, But night to no man doth belong When the sad ghosts play.

As he walks, the poet comes upon a macabre grave-side scene, made more so by the careful attention paid to place-names. This echoes the way in which place-

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names throughout the war (the Somme, Thievpal, etc.) were re-inscribed as battle sites and from then on associated with death and loss. As the poet walks he finds Twelve surly elves were digging graves Beside black Eden brook; Twelve dug and stared at me, But one read in a book.

Continuing on, the poet’s persona becomes a vehicle for the dead, one of which alights upon him and clings In Birgham trees and hedges rocked The moon was drowned in black; At Hirsel woods I shrieked to find A fiend astride my back.

Only the lights of the hospital bring release: His legs closed about my breast, His hands upon my head, Till Coldstream lights beamed in trees And he wailed and fled.16

Prewett was by no means alone among ‘shell-shock’ victims in seeing the dead and in feeling forced to interact with them. For example, Rivers’s colleague William McDougall recorded his failure with a patient who, while undergoing treatment, claimed he spent each night beside the body of a comrade he had witnessed lose his head and spurt blood from the neck. Another of McDougall’s patients was terrified by a German soldier he had shot on the battlefield who returned to his bedside each night to fire his rifle into him in revenge before disappearing.17 In other poems, Prewett spoke for the dead. For example, in ‘The Soldier’, he adopted the voice of a twenty-one-year-old farmer who is shot in battle and finds himself asleep forever in just the sort of furrow he used to plough. The soldier mourns the children he can never have and the grey hairs he will never sport because ‘My ghost is tethered in the sand, Afar from my degree.’ One of Prewett’s poems is addressed explicitly ‘To Death’. It asked of Death only that it made itself more attractive, so that the poet can begin ‘to love as a bed/The wet consuming dark and chilly earth’.18 It was part of seam of poetry by Prewett that contemplated suicide. One of his most evocative poems in this regard is entitled ‘If I Unfold My Fist’, a single stanza simple

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contemplation of how light and effortless it might be to let go and cease to exist. It reads: If I unfold my fist My flyaway life will escape I have clenched my life for so long To hold this wisp of life Which I prized without cause Perhaps now I might unfold my hand.

Prewett’s poems and letters reveal that he came eventually to a psychological impasse. He so wished to escape the terrifying reality he encountered while asleep he contemplated suicide, yet he hesitated, because he could not be certain of death’s finality or that the death of his body would also mean the end of cognizance. He was utterly horrified by the idea that he might kill himself and endure his flesh wasting away but somehow still remain aware of the sort of horrors conjured nightly by his mind. Such thinking, where life and death are construed as porous states detached from other sorts of awareness, are set forth in Prewett’s disturbingly powerful poem ‘Soliloquy’. Here, the poet fantasized about the bliss death might bring through stopping his traumatized hands from fluttering and his mind from feeling pervading dread. He might feel ‘No thirst, no hungry need’, it surmises, if he were to die peacefully at the side of the road. He assured the reader he would end his life, ‘Were I but sure the mind/Escapes the flesh abode.’ Great fear that internal peace might not come even after death and that he might remain haunted by the dead was a prospect so terrible it could not be confronted: But the guts rot, the skin breaks, The jaws grin, the eyes sink: Not that, oh not that! I faint With loathing if I think.19

As well as perceiving the dead all around him, interacting with him and touching him, Prewett experienced himself as being dead. This phenomenon is known clinically as ‘depersonalization’ and is discussed within popular media as an ‘out-of-body’ experience. Pierre Janet carried out some of the most significant investigations into its role in post-traumatic hysteria in the late nineteenth century. These are only now regaining traction, having been displaced by Freud and Breuer’s introduction of the concept of the unconscious soon after they appeared. Janet’s work argued for multiple sites for consciousness (an idea

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Freud rejected) and suggested, plausibly, that depersonalization was a means of psychological defence against overwhelming trauma. The poem of Prewett’s that dealt with ‘depersonalization’ most fully is ‘I Stared at the Dead’. It described how the author awoke, perceived himself lying in bed deceased and therefore hoped to understand the afterlife. However, before too long the poet found himself forced back into his body. He wrote: I stood and stared at me dead: Well folded my hands on my breast, My stretch easy as in my bed, And I grew troubled at my quest. This is death before death, desire Is now, I may know how to die Before dying and at last acquire News for all doomed ignorantly.

Although Prewett wanted, through his experience, to gain a ‘glimpse . . . of my soul when I had been dead’, the bulk of opinion today is that such experiences are primarily biological. They may be linked to head trauma, which Prewett had experienced, and/ or to failures in the mediation processes normally carried out by a part of the brain known as the posterior cingulate cortex.20 Problems appropriately comprehending oneself within time, as well as forms of disassociation, are known to be common among those who have survived the sort of profound trauma that Prewett suffered in war. Time, in this sense, is a casualty of war. Symptoms can include a sense of the past seeming to disappear and of the future foreshortening. Such telescoping, according to Jonathan Shay in his study of Vietnam War combat trauma survivors, is a way the veteran protects his or her self psychologically. ‘The destruction of time’, Shay explains, ‘is an inner survival skill.’ The same theme is evident in Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Its hero, Paul Bäumer, loses the vital link between present consciousness and his memories. The book’s most beautiful language is reserved for what Bäumer remembers from his past, be it cloistered courtyards, warm sun, cool silence or the carefree transportation that can occur when reading a treasured book, but Bäumer is no longer able to access these memories. War and trauma irrevocably sever his consciousness from his past.21 Perhaps most often, war-traumatized individuals report, as Prewett did, a sense of the past invading or dominating the present as they experience it. Thus, Edmund Blunden wrote in 1973, ‘My experiences in the First World War have

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haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.’22 Sassoon also had what might be called an inverted relationship to the present after the war, such that instead of the past providing memories for the present, he quarried the present for memories. He wrote in 1935: It is significant that I have always – an increasingly – seen and felt the present as material for memories – I am as it were living in the past already, and the mechanism of my mind frames and diminishes experience into a delicate, narrated reminiscence, nicely illustrated with visualizations. This is my ‘attitude to life’ – the ruminant onlooker – forced to play a speaking part.23

Such a telescoping of the emotional range of expression available to a trauma survivor such that he or she becomes emotionally numb was also articulated by Primo Levi, the chemist and Second World War Auschwitz camp survivor. When Levi heard that he would finally be evacuated the next day, he felt only metaemotion. He wrote: ‘if I still had my former sensitivity, I thought, this would be an extremely moving moment.’24 It is possible that Sassoon wrote so much autobiographical material after the war in an attempt, in keeping with Rivers’s advice, to re-animate his own spectrum of emotional responses which had been foreshortened by war, or at least, in order to keep what emotional range he had left alive and functioning. Despite his dire inner state, Sassoon took Prewett to Garsington, the glamorous home of Lady Ottoline Morrell and her husband Philip, on 9 November 1918. It was the day Germany surrendered and it was announced that Kaiser Wilhelm had abdicated. It was also five days after Wilfred Owen had been killed in action, although no-one knew this news at the time. Sassoon had first been brought to Garsington by Robbie Ross after having been invalided from the front in August 1916, but it is worth recognizing that he is unlikely to have been able to pique Ottoline’s interest had it not been for Graves’s creative influence. Graves and Sassoon had shared poetry behind the lines as early as 2 December 1915. Graves was nine years younger than Sassoon, but the more seasoned warrior, having reached the trenches in May of the same year. Initially, Sassoon had found the realism in some of Graves’s poems ‘very bad, violent and repulsive’, but Graves knew that combat experience would make him change his style. Soon, Sassoon was writing poems such as ‘To Victory’ which spoke of ‘the woeful crimson of men slain’. Dedicated to Edmund Gosse, then published anonymously by Gosse in The Times on 15 January 1916, the poem touched upon enough of what was usually left unsaid about combat to

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fascinate Ottoline. It also spoke with exceptional eloquence of a desire Ottoline shared precisely – to ‘have hours that move like the glitter of dancers’. Intrigued, she began a correspondence with Sassoon that started their friendship.25 Sassoon, for his part, had been determined that ‘Toronto’ Prewett simply must meet Ottoline from a month after first setting eyes upon him. He wrote to her: The nicest creature here is a young Canadian poet from Toronto who was in France a long time and only just escaped insanity owing to having a very sensitive and active brain, which rebelled against the horror and monotony. He is now quite well and being discharged as unfit. He has a strong strain of red Indian which adds piquancy to his character as he is very proud of his Iroquois ancestry. I think he could write well as he has a keen educated insight into human things and a strong sense of humour.26

It was an attractive and excitingly exotic recommendation for Ottoline to receive at an opportune time and it would lead to the opening of a series of doors that transformed Prewett’s life.

Figure 6  ‘Garsington’ by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1924 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Figure 7 Lady Ottoline Morrell by Cavendish Morton, 1905 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Hindsight can smooth over memories of confusion and social vertigo that follow the final stages of war, but such feelings were felt widely across the social spectrum following Armistice on 11 November 1918. Those in charge registered it explicitly. The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, told Parliament, ‘At this moment the air of Europe is quivering with revolution. Two-thirds of Europe has been swept by its devastating deluge . . . . The Institutions, even of this country, may follow those of many in the rest of Europe.’ Canada’s prime minister confided much the same to his diary: ‘Revolt has spread over all Germany. The question is whether it will stop there. The world has drifted far from its old anchorage and no man can with certainty prophesy what the outcome will be.’ With the dissolution of the Hohenzollern, Ottoman, Habsburg and Romanov empires, violence and political chaos would ripple through the Baltic states, central Europe and the Balkans until 1923. In turn, this established the conditions for further cycles of violence in the decades that followed.1

Oxford University Prewett began study at Christ Church College, Oxford, in October 1918, helped financially by Sassoon. The college proved a sanctuary and a vital context from which to write. It also provided Prewett with much needed funds at points of crisis, such as when he received his final formal discharge from army service in January the following year. Despite considerable mental anguish, he worked hard and received his BA ‘with distinction’ in English Literature in 1922. At graduation, his tutor described him as ‘a fine and delicate critic with a true appreciation of good literature’, adding, ‘I think highly of his powers’.2 When he came first to Christ Church, Prewett was appalled by the cold, damp and lack of coal. He told Clemmie Waring that water ran incessantly down the

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inside walls of the Peckwater Quad and that his remedy was to imagine himself three miles in front of Ypres, wrap himself in his great-coat and then sleep, happily. While at Christ Church, money worries were never far from his mind, alongside concern over his own mental health and that of close friends such as fellow Canadian veteran Charles Hewson. Prewett found it hard to sleep and his mind often struggled to grasp what it read or heard. He had frequent ‘turns’ where he was forced to sit down and work to recover himself. He explained what this felt like to Clemmie in May 1919 as the crisis over his lack of money reached a peak: ‘I have not been very well lately. Something periodically seems to go wrong in my inside, so that I am nervous and ill, and I feel my heart beating from head to foot.’ Yet there were also happy times at Christ Church. Prewett fell in love with a nurse from Aubrey House whom he met first when he was sent there in 1916. When he was in funds, through a mixture of receiving his gratuity and support from Eddie Marsh and Clemmie, his spirits soared. It was a delight, for example, to see the Russian ballet during Eights Week in 1919 and he remained very close to Sassoon. The pair were dear friends, although Prewett was perplexed by the fawning entourage who surrounded him. Sassoon, he regretted, was ‘a man among mimics’.3 So much about Oxford at that time was conducive to creativity. In 1919, Lytton Strachey reviewed Prewett’s typed-up work, urged him to remain resolute in his efforts and assured him what he was producing was indeed poetry. On other occasions, the list of literary expertise Prewett was able to draw upon was unparalleled. He told Clemmie, ‘There is a whirl of pale and refined intellect in Oxford, the Sitwells, Pinto, Earp, Lady Ottoline, Dinkinson, Sassoon, musicians, artists and so on and so on. I am favourably disposed toward Osbert Sitwell.’ Such good fortune culminated in Prewett’s work featuring in the Georgian Poetry 1920–22 anthology, and publication of his second collection, The Rural Scene in 1924. In Georgian Poetry, his work appeared alongside that of Edmund Blunden, Richard Hughes, Vita Sackville-West, Peter Quennell, William Kerr and Martin Armstrong. The volume sold only 8,000 copies, but Prewett’s inclusion registered his significance to English poetry and his relevance to his literary generation. In around August 1921, Sassoon paid for Prewett to stay on for another year at Oxford, a place ‘Toronto’ described as ‘the delectable pastures of learning-made-comfortable’. The gift represented what he called ‘a year’s armistice with necessity’ and he was profoundly grateful.4 Socially, life was thrilling. Early in 1919, Prewett befriended the composer William Walton, a fellow two-year exhibitioner at Christ Church then only sixteen years old and fresh from Lancashire. Walton was a wunderkind,

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innately talented, tall, bird-like, seemingly shy but also inordinately charming and impressively determined to live for his art. The pair were fellow rowers. Prewett introduced him to the Sitwells who at the time were waging a war on dullness. Sacheverell Sitwell was instantly delighted by Walton. Eventually, the Sitwells wrote librettos for his work and became central to his exceptional career, arranging for him to have lessons, for example, from Ernest Ansemet, principal conductor of Diaghilev’s Les Ballet Russes. The Sitwells gave Walton a means of escaping academia and of focussing exclusively on his own art. He lived with them throughout the 1920s as an adopted brother, accompanied them throughout Europe and gained exposure to the greatest works of the age such as the music of Stravinsky. Prewett also introduced Walton to the successful poet and writer, John Masefield, and to Sassoon, who fell in love with him despite being fifteen years his senior. As the 1920s progressed, Sassoon also would lend generous support to Walton’s career, paying for example, for him to accompany Sassoon’s lover, Stephen Tennant, on holiday to the Bavarian alps as a cure for the latter’s tuberculosis. Exhilarated after meeting Prewett and his circle, Walton wrote home to his mother, ‘They are great men’. Soon, Walton was also visiting Ottoline Morrell on a Sunday at nearby Garsington and finding it all ‘very entertaining’.5 Walton later confessed that he deliberately scrounged and lived off friends in these early days for the sake of his art. He was much better at this than Prewett. Of course, giving support directly to impecunious artists was then considered a decent and honourable thing to do if one was well off like Sassoon, who gave Walton money directly and acted as his guarantor. Eventually, Walton’s ability to play the game of patronage meant he was able to benefit other younger composers at the beginning of their careers. Considered at first a controversial experimentalist but ultimately as somewhat conservative and institutional, he ended his career the beneficiary of considerable donations and financial largess, knighted, with his music played at the coronation of King George VI. Unlike Prewett, he never did pass his Oxford exams.6 Prewett also inspired the composer Henry Balfour Gardiner at this time. Gardiner used verses of Prewett’s for his tranquil, introspective and last song composition, ‘The Quiet Garden’. Although reminiscent of Yeats’ 1890 poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, Prewett’s lines had a discreet, gentle, time-stopping beauty of their own: If I might have two rows of trees And a quiet space between

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Where stirred none, or the faintest, breeze And the grass stood thick and green. Then I would take my day’s ease And watch the butterflies Pensive between the rows of trees Parade their newest dyes.7

The theatre of Garsington Oxford was one thing, but Garsington was something quite different. Frank Prewett was happier at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire than he had been anywhere else in his life and he stayed there for considerable periods over the next several years.8 It generated a libertine, anti-war and intellectually fervid atmosphere that simultaneously made him feel particularly ‘indigenous’ and very much at home. Perhaps the best way to understand ‘Toronto’ Prewett’s time there is to think of it as prefiguring aspects of the experience of the fictional narrator in Evelyn Waugh’s interwar novel Brideshead Revisited. Prewett and Waugh’s character, Charles Ryder, had analogous experiences, although Garsington, a twelve-bedroom, high-gabled Oxfordshire house, does not rival the gilded splendour of the exceptional home with which Waugh’s hero falls in love.9 Yet there are important correspondences. In each case chance transported a clever and impressionable young man out of a lower social stratum to be bewitched by upper-class style. Both young men came to feel that properly, the lifestyle they encountered should really be their own. Both had romantic, transgressive encounters with the people associated with these places, but it was the places themselves that retained a symbolic primacy for them that could not be supplanted. An essential part of the attraction of both homes was that they were conducive to work, with attractive, talented people in residence who understood the creative process. ‘I love working all day here’, the painter Mark Gertler said of Garsington, ‘and then the pleasant meal in the evening, with either the pianola or reading afterwards, and if one’s work goes wrong one can seize upon someone to walk with at any moment’. There were regular, interesting visitors who sometimes left books that could be borrowed. Oxford and the cinema were nearby, and often fancy dress or a performance happened in the evening, or readings aloud of anything from Shakespeare, to Henry James or the Old Testament. A not atypical night might end with group study of paintings by

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a contemporary of André Gide and Matisse, followed by a music-filled walk amid the peacocks around the pond by moonlight reciting Verlaine. Overall, Garsington was the perfect second home, a place where the talented could be themselves amid gracious good company. An added bonus was that it frequently had the sort of visitors who could offer an impoverished artist work, people such as Lady Cunard, heiress to the Cunard shipping line and her lover Sir Thomas Beecham. There were even visits from the family of Prime Minister Asquith, a figure with whom it was known that the mistress of Garsington was intimate.10 Prewett’s infatuation with Garsington as a property, concept and rural setting bears comparison with the response to it of another colonial poet and contemporary, W. B. Yeats. Garsington was one of a series of special places where Yeats was a fixture, along with Penns in the Rocks (Lady Dorothy Wellesley’s home in Sussex), and the less grand, Coole Park (home of Lady Gregory in Galway). For Prewett and Yeats, Garsington had psychic, cultural and aesthetic significance. It inspired Yeats’ 1923 poem ‘Ancestral Houses’ which pondered the relationship between romantically beautiful residences and the bitter, grasping violence that so often made their existence possible.11 Such houses, Yeats explained, are built by ‘Some violent bitter man, some powerful man’ who ‘Called architect and artist in, that they, /Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone./The sweetness that all longed for night and day,/The gentleness none there had ever known.’ This remains an awkward truth anyone encountering homes of conspicuous splendour as a guest or tourist is usually encouraged not to contemplate. Yeats’ poem captured perfectly the sense of plenitude and luxurious lack of struggle such homes engender and connected them with rich men, despite it invariably being women who allowed him access to them. He wrote: Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains, As though to choose whatever shape it will, And never stoop to a mechanical. Or servile shape, at other’s beck and call.12

Both Yeats in his poetry and Prewett in his paid and unpaid relationships with Garsington’s owners wrestled with the same theme – whether the artist can reconcile the delight and leisure of a great house with the less lovely realities

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that underpinned its creation and continued upkeep. Each responded to this complexity in his own way. Yeats, among other things, channelled his concerns into a poem, while Prewett kicked against his subaltern status at Garsington by denying Lady Ottoline Morrell her wish to have a sexual affair and finally, by stealing from her husband when he became his trusted employee. Prewett’s poetry about Garsington, however, spoke only to its role in his life as a superbly pleasant, rural, cosmopolitan sanctuary. Sections from his simple poem ‘Garsington’ read: Garsington is all of roads Sloped hill and fresh breezy air And folk of Garsington are kind To strangers resting there. And I, who love each face And see dislike in more Homeless ‘til now, shall find A home in Garsington.13

For Prewett, Ottoline and Philip’s home epitomized the best of England, an England capable of healing all who washed up upon her shores. As one of his unpublished poems put it, England welcomed those ‘from every port and land’: England, gentle England Thou art all that and more, To me, which, to the sick, Is the fresh green shore.14

It is little wonder Garsington became so important to Prewett. Aside from its tranquillity and beauty after his experiences of strife and terror, he was a supreme social success there. It is thought he met: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Edmund Blunden, Bertrand Russell, the Woolfs, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Evan Morgan/Viscount Tredegar, the Ranee of Sarawak (Lady Brooke, Sylvia Leonora), E. M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, T. E. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Aldous Huxley. The Garsington consensus was that Prewett was set to have a glittering career. The general feeling was that he was a flower about to blossom, someone only half aware of the immensity of his talent. Thomas Hardy spent a complete lunch discussing his work with Siegfried Sassoon. ‘Toronto’ was given beautiful inlaid notebooks with inscriptions that read, ‘This is to Catch the Treasures of the imagination . . . of one who is rich and who knows not half his riches.’ He was beloved most of all by the lady of the house. Even

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before Garsington had gotten established she gushed to Robert Graves that she was arranging ‘a debating society and dining club with Frank Prewett, [John] Masefield, [Edward] Marsh, Lytton Strachey, [Karl] Liebknecht and Trotsky as honorary members’.15 For just over four golden years Garsington was Prewett’s centre of gravity and delight, despite his being forced away for over a year as a result of repatriation to Canada in October 1919. He was far from alone in feeling about it as he did. D. H. Lawrence, for example, fell madly in love with the place. ‘My God it breaks my soul’, he told Cynthia Asquith in a letter composed there one November day, ‘this England, these shafted windows, the elm trees, the blue distance’. Sassoon had even once hinted that the loveliness of the house might cause him to desert. ‘Here I sat’, he wrote while invalided from the front in August 1916, ‘in this perfect bedroom with its old mullioned windows looking across the green forecourt. Garsington was just about the pleasantest house I had ever stayed in – so pleasant that it wouldn’t be safe to think about it when I was back at the front.’ Even those who criticized Garsington could not stay away. Although its inhabitants were harshly jeered at in novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow (1921) and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1916), the authors always remained enamoured of the manor itself and its surrounds. Both Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf were simultaneously appalled by Garsington and overwhelmed with attraction. Strachey had his own first-floor bedroom, stayed very regularly and had a profound regard for Ottoline but also sometimes maligned his hosts for being painfully stupid. He maintained the food was retchinducing and often abhorred the other guests. Woolf was pursued romantically variously by both Philip and Ottoline Morrell, but found the house as transfixing as a car crash. ‘Garsington presents a scene of unparalleled horror’, she wrote ‘I’m going to stay.’16 Lady Ottoline and Philip Morrell’s home from 1915 to 1928 remains of abiding significance to Anglophone writing. Around the 1602s, it was built on land owned by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s son, possibly by the same masons who worked on St John’s or Wadham College, University of Oxford.17 It is at a remove from the road with a courtyard of exceptionally tall yew hedges at the south end of Garsington village, about five miles from Oxford, and looks southwest across the Thame valley to the Chilterns. Its aspect, the cows, wildflowers, the village and the church, are reminiscent of romantic paintings and conjure that sense of the beauty of the well-used and everyday within a vista that is also found in works by Claude Lorrain, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable. The house then had solid, aged, bright stone, an oak door, symmetrical arch-light

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mullioned windows, a large hall, red drawing room, green library, seventeenth and eighteenth-century panelling and chimney pieces at either end. Deeply alert to fashion, both in clothes and architecture, Ottoline ensured the rooms smelt delightfully and were exceptionally colourful. A gorgeous thread box used by Ottoline for embroidery and by her faithful seamstress to create Ottoline’s signature brightly coloured outfits remained in the red room into the late twentieth century. Ottoline dressed as an original on stage and the house as an English idyll was her backdrop. When ‘Toronto’ Prewett arrived, Garsington was the height of fashion. In carefully securing a dilapidated Jacobean manor with Tudor-style fenestration and then reviving and redeveloping it, Ottoline and Philip had tapped into a cultural need among the educated classes for things safe, beautiful and reassuringly old. Sympathetic regeneration of Tudor manor houses had become a cult among élites across the political spectrum. William Morris, for example, had rented Kelmscott Manor, also in Oxfordshire, in 1871; Great Tangley Manor had been delicately put back together for Wickham Flower in the 1880s, and the 1920s saw further renovations of the small medieval manors Cold Ashton in Gloucestershire and Cothay, Somerset. In an era beset by rapid technological change, houses which appeared to exist in appropriate, organic relationship with their settings conjured up a comforting sense of a more ordered, gentler world. For Geoffrey Scott writing in 1908, for example, the Tudor house with its quadrangle was successor to the fortified Saxon keep. As such it evoked ‘the most English product of our architecture . . . a focus of old history, territorial loyalties and a gentler feudalism: made from the quarries of its own hills and merging itself into the lines of them, quiet with the repose that comes of a deliberate and fitting growth’. Scott had been influenced by notions of connoisseurship fostered by the art critic and collector Bernard Berenson and like Ottoline, by exposure to the beauties of Italy, but he articulated a nostalgia shared in this period by a great swathe of the English intelligentsia.18 Alongside a quintessential Englishness epitomized by oak panelling, its pastoral setting and subdivided windows, Garsington’s water, statuary, ilex tree and bird-filled landscaped gardens echoed the glamour and ease of places such as Capri, where Ottoline had holidayed. As she put it, as a young woman she had ‘drank of the elixir of Italy – so deeply it has never left me’. Garsington was Ottoline’s attempt to replicate the sensual and aesthetically charming sunlit atmosphere of exceptional holidays. It is thought that she had the gardens modelled on those at Villa Capponi, near Florence. As a result, the play of amber light both internally and externally at Garsington, dappled through swaying

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branches, is a delight for artists of every hue. The house is more beautiful and its context even more inviting in moonlight.19 As has also sometimes been the case with Oxford colleges, the gardens and landscaped setting of Garsington have until recently received better and more consistent care than the interior.20 To the Morrells, the external space was of primary importance. The slope was terraced and a parterre formed with twentyfour square beds full of the brightest flowers set off with tall Irish yews, four to each bed. A large ornamental pool was created dotted with statues, a setting for the skinny-dipping and sexual intrigue for which Garsington became notorious. A rowing boat gave access to a planted middle island. In around five acres of garden, there were, and still are, many sweet-smelling roses, verbena, phlox and vibrant red poppies in season. The avenues of lime and holme oak that the Morrells planted are now mature. Overall, the grounds, surrounded by 360 acres with a dovecote and other smaller buildings, have an ineffably charming, idealized air. Ottoline created a ‘theatre porch’ to encourage performance, an architectural symbol of the creative impulses that underpinned everything Garsington entailed. Ottoline and Philip’s home was to be a place outside of time. Its concern was not the conventions of the day, but the challenge of generating the art, thought and experience of the future. The porch was emblematic of Ottoline’s vision as a whole. As she explained in her memoirs, Garsington was intended as ‘a theatre, where week after week a travelling company would arrive and play their parts . . . how much they felt and saw of the beauty of the setting I never knew’. The urge to theatricalize experience and exaggerate it became a leitmotif of the Garsington set over time. It was one way the group waged cultural attack upon the social dictates they felt had led to and perpetuated the war. Lytton Strachey’s 1918 bestseller Eminent Victorians, a book he worked on during his many visits to Garsington, was an incarnation in prose of the same subversive theatricality. The book was many things, simultaneously camp and bourgeois, wry but also laudatory, indiscreet but at the same time élite in tone. For Susan Sontag, such theatricalization is a central aspect of homosexual sensibility and indeed, a number who came to Garsington, such as Strachey and Sassoon, were homosexual.21 However, while being theatrical may have been convivial to homosexuals at this time, performing was a pervasive cultural impulse that served a number of purposes for a great many people. It liberated the self from polite society and tied it to sets of experiences that transcended a person’s immediate social context. Imagining the self differently in theatrical or quasitheatrical contexts was also a means for the Garsington set to resist the reality

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of war and its causes. However, for more than one regular, the sense of selfconscious striving was a strain that made them long to escape the feeling of being part of an ongoing melodrama. D. H. Lawrence went as far as to describe a number of the individuals associated with the place as ‘little swarming selves’ he could well imagine crushing.22 Despite its beauty, benevolence and comfort, it was difficult to stay at Garsington long without becoming exhausted from the sense that one was permanently on stage.

Ottoline and Philip Morrell If Garsington was special at this time, it was a reflection of the taste and exceptional character of its owners. The pair have too often been defined by their sexual libertinism, but their crimes against sexual convention pale in comparison with other contemporary transatlantic figures such as the truly outrageous and considerably richer Aimée Crocker. Crocker was heiress to an American railroad, gold and slave labour fortune and could afford to be truly wild right across the globe.23 Admittedly, Philip had many relationships with women and fathered more than one illegitimate child, while Ottoline had a string of affairs with both sexes. Her wealth and support for modern art and literature put a great many talented, attractive and transgressive people her way. She is known, for example, to have had close associations with the painter Augustus John, with Duncan Grant, Jacob Epstein, Maria Nijs – wife of the author Aldous Huxley, with the artists Dora Carrington and Henry Lamb as well as, briefly, with her gardener Lionel Gomme. Roger Fry, to whom she gave a large amount of money so as to help with the care of his mentally ill wife, also fell in love with her. At that time, however, she was too busy responding to the attentions of one of the great loves of her life, the philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell. Prewett was exactly Ottoline’s type. Her life had been characterized by a series of intense relationships with classically attractive figures who, like ‘Toronto’, were wracked by periodic episodes of depression or ennui. The British painter Henry Lamb is a good example in this regard. Slim with blond curls when they had their affair, he was fond of wearing silk and velvet, was an utter delight when in a good mood, but extremely trying for Ottoline when not. Ottoline was stunning when she met ‘Toronto’, but also in her mid-forties and at the beginning of what was to be a long, slow descent into seclusion and ill-health. Even so, Virginia Woolf told Vanessa Bell after visiting her in 1917 that she has been ‘so much overcome by her beauty that I really felt as if I’d suddenly got into the sea, and

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heard the mermaids fluting on their rocks’. Over six feet tall, slim, pale, with long legs, she had masses of lustrous, deep red hair, sparkling turquoise-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a large, noble, arched nose. Ottoline enunciated wonderfully with an Elizabethan cadence, a symptom of an upbringing where for generations there had been little need to blend in. She emphasized syllables so that her speech sang out, wore amazing scent and was often accompanied by her string of Pekinese dogs on ribbon leads. Even her handwriting was extravagant and remarkable. She was generous, flamboyant and had a regal disregard for convention. Since she was so exceptional, kind and unafraid to express herself, Ottoline fitted no readily available social category. Those she met who were insecure or ungenerous were therefore prone to both deride and marvel at her. This was particularly true of those like Lytton Strachey and ‘Toronto’ Prewett, who were convinced that their literary abilities far exceeded hers, but nonetheless found themselves dependent upon her hospitality for weeks on end. Virginia Woolf was right to identify in Ottoline ‘an element of the superb’.24 Rather than dwell on Ottoline and Philip’s sexual adventurousness, it is more enabling to think of them as having the background and money to do more or less as they pleased at a time of momentous social change. Philip Morrell was from a wealthy, aristocratic family, was educated at Eton, then Balliol, Oxford, before becoming a respected solicitor like his father. Eventually, with Ottoline’s support, he became a Member of Parliament in 1906. He did so as a Liberal despite coming from an old, Conservative family, however, his political career effectively ended when he protested against the war in the House of Commons on 3 August 1914. He went on to use his legal skills to successfully represent a number of creative friends at their tribunals in the wake of the 16 January 1916 Military Service Act that required all males between nineteen and forty-one to join up. Philip helped Lytton Strachey, David Garett and Duncan Grant in this way and, since it was a working farm, used Garsington to provide the shelter of ‘nationally significant’ employment to enable a number of conscientious objectors to avoid combat. Tall, handsome with blue eyes and brown curls, Philip had an unhappily complex and unstable nature which brought out Ottoline’s protective and nurturing side. Although he wooed her for two years beforehand, after their marriage in 1902 when she was approaching thirty, Ottoline’s fears about their sexual compatibility proved well founded. Immediately after their honeymoon, Philip confessed that he no longer found her attractive and the couple decided to base their marriage upon trust and affection rather than passion. Following the birth of Philip’s first illegitimate child in 1904, the couple decided upon open

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marriage. Ottoline had her only child, Julian, in 1906, a twin whose brother died soon after their birth. The hysterectomy and/or other complications that ensued made further child-bearing impossible. Ottoline Violet Ann Cavendish-Bentinck was remarkably privileged, the flowering, as she put it, ‘of a long line of men and women who have enjoyed inherited wealth and so have been free to move about in the world – and who have sunned themselves in the sunshine of art and culture and who, too, have taken part in weaving the tangle of history’. Her mother was Anglo-Irish and the daughter of the Dean of Lismore. Ottoline was proud of this Irish lineage, had Irish poets and musicians to her homes and linked her heritage to her romantic desire to live life at the same pitch as a great poem or meaningful song. Her father was heir to the great wealth of the Duchy of Portland and colonel of the Seventh Dragoon Guards. Ottoline grew up surrounded by an historical treasure trove in one of the country’s great houses, the seat of the Duchy of Portland at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. She stored her first letters in a casket given by King William the Third and play-acted as a child using King Henry VIII’s ruby-studded dagger and a pearl drop from King Charles’s ear. However, when she was six in 1879, her father died unexpectedly from a heart attack and it was her half-brother who inherited. When Ottoline eventually did receive her inheritance, it was not as expected because of action taken by her mother, Lady Bolsover. As a result, although it was not generally known, from 1912 the Morrells struggled to maintain their lifestyle. Ottoline was exceptional, but also deeply of her time in that she embodied a fundamental twentieth-century cultural obsession – the desire to find and commune with the authentic. Garsington was her theatre at a remove from the pettiness of London and designed for just such communion. It was a place where what was sincere and genuine might grow, particularly ‘real friendship’. Her aim was ‘to gather people together who have something ‘real’ in them’ and to create ‘a centre where the contact is sincere’.25 Ottoline had been heavily influenced at a young age by ideas of spiritual gain through sacrifice and good works she found in Thomas à Kempis’s Catholic Pre-Reformation devotional text, The Imitation of Christ. It advocated self-denial as a path to spiritual progress, patience with the faults of others and ceaseless striving towards sinless self-perfection – in many ways, a perfect spiritual and intellectual grounding for a bountiful patroness. Such thinking was tempered and honed by another primary figure in Ottoline’s life, Mother Julian, a dear, book-loving friend and nun after whom she named her daughter. This central spiritual dimension within Ottoline is too often obscured by the sexual license and unconventionality she displayed, but it is telling that she admitted that her first amour, Dr Alex Munthe of Capri, broke

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things off because he considered her a religious maniac. Ottoline maintained that being alone in beauty enabled her to sense ‘a separate self in me’ and that she was happiest when she could ‘think and commune with the unseen’.26 In sum, Ottoline shared with Prewett a childhood steeped in strict Christianity and a concomitant desire to find or adopt what was ineffably true and spiritually unalloyed. Both were fascinated by the intangible, by what Ottoline described as ‘the complex, spiritual tangle that is hidden to most of us’. To her abiding credit, despite it attracting great criticism from her family, this meant Ottoline sought out worth wherever she found it. Most often this was among artists and writers who, as she put it charmingly, ‘generally had not yet arrived’.27 As a result, her experiences were broadened by access to the very best minds of her generation. ‘My desire’, she admitted, ‘for other people to know each other and be friends is an instinctive, unreasoning passion.’ However, this was a quest that also fostered a sense of inner inadequacy. Throughout her life, Ottoline suffered from crippling headaches and was forced to consult neurologists and go for regular residential rest cures. Naturally, such stays were undertaken in stunningly beautiful locations such as La Bourboule or Lausanne, but her distress was so severe that on more than one occasion she was prepared to undergo draconian treatment regimes. Her diary entry for 21 April 1909 described one psychological episode with candour: I have been so tired the last few days that everything has seemed very dead within me. Nothing but an aching pain in every nerve in my head. It is horrid to know anything is happy and lovely around, and yet to feel utterly wretched oneself, and always haunted by the thought of the uselessness of my life. It is like an angry fury, driving and lashing me, and yet I feel too utterly tired to do any practical good to anyone.

Among the more valuable of Ottoline’s visits to neurasthenia doctors was to the kindly, fatherly Swiss specialist Dr Roger Vittoz at Lausanne in 1913. He would also treat William James, T. S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad and was renowned for his ‘system of mental control’, a form of cognitive therapy that involved him ‘feeling’ changes in thought processes within his patient’s brains and encouraging them to do exercises such as eliminating letters from words they found worrying. Vittoz’s thinking shared a lot with aspects of Buddhism and was a means of slowing down thought processes so as to allow negative thoughts to be replaced with positive ones. However, neither Vittoz nor any other doctor was ever able to fully dislodge in Ottoline a sense of her own ghostliness or detachment from satisfying reciprocated emotion from others.

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The war exacerbated Ottoline’s neurasthenia and friends became increasingly worried about her mental well-being as it progressed. Lytton Strachey, for example, wrote to Dora Carrington on 28 May 1917: Her ladyship is more fevered, jumpy and neurasthenic than ever, though as usual there have been moments (especially at first) when my heart melted towards her. She seems to me to be steadily progressing down to the depths of ruin.28

Neurasthenia, therefore, was something Ottoline and Prewett shared, in the sense that the broad spectrum of symptoms covered by the diagnosis afflicted them both. The term can be traced back to George Beard in 1869 and it included everything from fidgeting to headaches, tinnitus, insomnia, phobias, dilated pupils, anxiety, bad dreams, impotence, flushing and feelings of hopelessness. The diagnosis had roots in late eighteenth-century Scottish medical theories that held that all disease fell into two categories – sthenia, an excess of stimulation and athenia, an inability to react to stimulation. The condition was perceived as primarily a functional disorder and although it had social caché as a disease of what might be called the ‘cultured classes’, it was more than an ailment of the pampered rich and females. Neurasthenia disappeared after 1932, in part because medical nosology changed and the same symptoms were reclassified as psychological. It is possible, however, that the disease was related to post-viral fatigue following influenza epidemics and that it lessened as these epidemics subsided. Aside from her physical symptoms, Ottoline’s main problem was a sense of what might be called ‘soul loneliness’ that meant no matter whom she met or interacted with she still felt profoundly isolated. ‘I seem to have tried everyone and found them wanting’ she wrote, ‘and yet I know the fault is my own. It is as if I were condemned to walk through life quite detached; quite apart from others, and not to enter into their lives, never to arouse in others feelings of sympathy or affection, or a desire to give to me.’29 The idea that her life might be useless never left her, despite the ample evidence of her spiritual as well as tangible generosity and her unique talent for cultivating creative ability in others. This was why Ottoline was so deeply hurt by D. H. Lawrence’s caricature of her in his 1920 novel Women in Love. Lawrence repaid Ottoline’s hospitality at Garsington by creating his obscene, bullying, unquenchable character named Hermione Roddice, a figure easily recognizable as his one-time patron. A ravening beauty, the character was ‘nerve-worn with consciousness’, but her extreme desire made her incapable of its consummation. ‘Her desire was’, Lawrence wrote in unremittingly repetitive style, ‘all spiritual, all in the consciousness . . . never through the senses’. Worst of all, Hermione had ‘a lack of robust self, she had no

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natural sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her. And she wanted someone to close up this deficiency. To close it up forever.’30

Understanding Ottoline via the law of inverse proportion When juxtaposed with the suffering in the trenches, the way Ottoline lived during the war years appears distasteful and ridiculous. Despite the work she and Philip did, first to try to prevent war and then to alleviate the suffering it brought about, particularly for conscientious objectors, she nevertheless danced and flirted at house parties and in London restaurants while men floundered in the mud. Sometimes this was with Herbert Asquith, the man who had led the country into conflict. When living at Bedford Square in London, Ottoline considered her wild weekly house parties a pressure release from what she imagined war might be like, a chance to dress up, forget and dance with anyone but the fashionable, that is, with folk such as Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Dorothy Brett, Walter Sickert, Vernon Lee, Mark Gertler, Lytton Strachey, Augustus John, Bertrand Russell and Arnold Bennett. She had a store of ‘gay Persian, Turkish and other Oriental clothes’ for people to wear, while Philip played tunes like ‘Dixie’ or Brahms’ Hungarian Dances on his new toy, a pianola. They all would ‘dance gaily, wildly and often very beautifully’ bounding about like Russian ballet dancers wearing bright oranges and reds.31 To begin to understand Ottoline in this regard, it is worth turning to her favourite writer, Marcel Proust. It is little wonder Ottoline appreciated Proust, for he better than any other sensed the complexity of how war is lived, a complexity he described as, ‘like a love or a hatred’. He understood war to be myriad, ‘a millionwaved ocean’, resonant within every aspect of a person’s being and as subjective and existential as any other deeply felt emotional issue. At a fundamental level, because it delayed publication of Proust’s great work In Search of Lost Time, the war made Ottoline’s favourite novel what it eventually became, a great sevenvolume expansion upon beauty, art and truth published in France between 1913 and 1927. In it, Proust captured the incongruities that inevitably accompany even the most heartfelt empathy and compassion about war because of what he called ‘the law of inverse proportion’. As the narrator of Time Regained explains, with reference to another self-regarding socialite character named Mme Verdurin: There is a law of inverse proportion [], which multiplies anything that concerns our own welfare and divides anything that doesn’t concern it. The death of

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unknown millions is felt as the most insignificant of sensations, hardly even as disagreeable as a draught. Mme Verdurin’s croissants arrived on the morning on which the newspapers reported the sinking of the Lusitania. ‘How horrible!’ she said. ‘This is something more horrible than the most terrible stage tragedy.’ But the death of all these drowned people must have been reduced a thousand million times before it impinged upon her, for even as she made these observations, the expression on her face, brought there by the croissant, was in fact one of satisfaction and pleasure.

For Mme Verdurin and Lady Morrell, the tyranny of the immediate and the everyday trumped most abstract or political concerns most of the time. Thus, Mme Verdurin scheduled discussion of the war in a way that was almost indistinguishable from how in peacetime she scheduled discussion of any other social topic. In wartime: Those who now frequented Mme Verdurin’s house came for a social pleasure so compounded that their enjoyment of it both assuaged their political curiosities and satisfied their need to discuss incidents in the newspapers. Mme Verdurin now said: ‘Come at 5 o’clock to talk about the war’ as she’d have said in the past: ‘Come to hear the new violinist.’

Like Mme Verdurin, Ottoline enjoyed great privilege far from the theatre of conflict and distance of all sorts dictated her reasoning and impulses. Another version of Ottoline in this sense is Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, a woman who ‘could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? But she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?) – the only flowers she could bear to see cut.’32 Mrs Dalloway’s husband, like Ottoline’s, was also an MP and she found it hard to engage intellectually with the suffering of the Armenians displaced and killed in 1895–7, 1909 and massacred in 1915. Ottoline felt deeply for those who suffered in war, and such empathy no doubt worsened the neurasthenia that plagued her throughout her life, but she also shared a great deal with fictional characters such as Mrs Verdurin and Mrs Dalloway whose primary concerns were their own interests and pleasures.

Beauty, philosophy, sex and life in the ‘specious present’ Part of what made Prewett such a pleasing addition at Garsington was his personal attractiveness and the heritage he claimed. A desire for and emphasis upon things beautiful and intrinsically good was a sensibility shared by Ottoline,

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Virginia and Leonard Woolf and others associated with Bloomsbury, especially those influenced by the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore and his 1903 book Principia Ethica. Moore had a particular impact upon the social circles that surrounded Garsington, notably upon the novelist E. M. Forster, critics Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Desmond MacCarthy and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Moore also had a significant, non-sexual relationship with Lytton Strachey and of course, influenced his Cambridge colleagues, Bertrand Russell and Russell’s protégé, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Moore’s work was well received not exclusively because of his intricate ideas about philosophical analysis and his rejection of idealism, but because he refuted the centrality of duty and raised individually defined notions of goodness above notions of morality as conventionally understood. Specifically, in the last chapter of Principia Ethica, the things Moore deemed intrinsically good were friendship and the appreciation of beauty. In essence, he articulated a kind of secular religion perfectly suited to a group of privileged, talented individuals who were deeply invested in personal freedom. As was the case with Dr Rivers, part of Moore’s impact stemmed from his powerful personality. Comfortably brought up, he inherited a sizeable amount of money young, and having initially studied at the University of Cambridge, then spent twenty-eight years there as faculty from 1911. His Cambridge post allowed him to largely remain detached from the war, although eventually he admitted to being against it. According to Bertrand Russell, as a young man he was slim and beautiful, and his passion for ideas was doubly impressive because he had ‘a kind of exquisite purity’.33 It is possible that Moore’s saintly demeanour made the interpretation of his ideas in a highly individualized and pleasure-orientated fashion all the more palatable. Moore wrote in Principia Ethica: By far the most valuable things which we can know or can imagine are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse, and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these two heads.34

This was just the sort of rational-seeming, scientific-sounding justification of unworldly behaviour and emphasis upon the self and abstract intangibles that a number of creative figures most wanted to hear. Virginia Woolf was so overawed when she read Moore’s book, she wrote, ‘the more I understand, the more

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I admire’.35 In the sense that it made central the betterment of the individual soul or consciousness it was an extension of the English Puritan tradition, but at heart it was an intellectual gloss that rationalized the pursuit of narcissistic pleasure. This may have been what prompted Ludwig Wittgenstein to remark to F. R. Leavis that Moore ‘shows how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever’.36 In his 1949 memoir, John Maynard Keynes wrote an influential summary of how Moore’s thinking was distilled by Bloomsbury intellectuals and satellite figures at the time. It remains valuable, despite Leonard Woolf later querying both Keynes’s chronology and his interpretation of Moore’s impact particularly on the group known as the Bloomsbury Apostles. Keynes wrote: Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to ‘before’ and ‘after.’ Their value depended, in accordance with the principle of organic unity, on the state of affairs as a whole which could not be usefully analysed into parts. [] The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came the way first. But in the early days under Moore’s influence the public treatment of this and its associated acts was, on the whole, austere and platonic.37

In retrospect, Keynes found the myopic and overtly transgressive nature of the thinking of the time funny. Ruefully, he described in himself and in his contemporaries a variety of thoughtless, present-obsessed righteousness reminiscent of qualities shared by characters in novels of the 1920s such as Evelyn Waugh’s Captain Grimes, who is ‘careless of consequences’, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan, whose dangerous driving is a metaphor for the thoughtlessness of her class.38 Keynes wrote: We were living in the specious present, nor had begun to play the game of consequences. We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists . . . . In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of

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original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved.39

‘Toronto’ Prewett’s popularity ‘Toronto’ Prewett was extremely popular at Garsington, with Ottoline delighting in taking him to London parties in full ‘Indian’ regalia. It helped that he was new and exotic within a set that had endured profound arguments, intrigues and rows for several years. Even better, he was a friend of Sassoon, who was an utter favourite and an aristocrat. Prewett also had all the glamour associated in books, comics and movies with the Wild West. A tried and tested Allied warrior, he exhibited a deep, impenetrable ‘primitive’ side and wrote exciting poetry. Best of all, he was exceptionally handsome with hot hazel eyes, dark brown hair, high cheekbones and dark, swarthy skin. It was as if he were the natural world personified. An additional delight was that he liked to ride horses, sometimes topless.40 The artist Dora Carrington was smitten, along with Ottoline, her daughter Julian and her friends. Carrington wrote to Lytton Strachey that she saw Prewett just before he cantered off with her brother Noel. ‘There they were’ she wrote, ‘– all the troupe with the Queen in their midst. Toronto . . . looking lovely on a great sienna horse, he and Noel went off riding together before lunch.’41 People remarked that ‘Toronto’ had the ‘gait’ of an Indian, a reference to the idea popular at the turn of the century that there was a unique indigenous loping long-distance running style. It was said to explain the success of the famous Iroquois marathon runner, Tom Longboat, who advertised his own running shoe to help people run ‘Indian’ style. All of this points to the way things indigenous were connected at this time with speed and with a desire to have unimpeded freedom to commune with natural forces. A strong example of how widespread this phenomenon was in Europe is the piece by Franz Kafka published in 1912 entitled ‘The Wish to Be A Red Indian’: If only one were a Red Indian, always ready, and on the racing horse, slantwise in the air, briefly trembling again and again above the trembling ground, until one abandoned one’s spurs, for there were no spurs, until one threw away the reins, for there were no reins, and scarcely saw the country ahead of one as smoothly mown heath, already without a horse’s neck and a horse’s head.42

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As Kafka’s sentence-long allegory suggests, ‘Red Indians’ were useful creatively because of the projected fantasies they could embody, but not necessarily valued as individuals or as communities in themselves. Prewett was accepted as indigenous because having someone like that at Garsington felt appropriate. Whether indigenous or not, he stirred a pool of desire for the ‘real’ and the beautiful that was always what made Garsington thrum. Even those only half-convinced of by Toronto’s claims about his ethnicity, such as the painter Mark Gertler, were unequivocal about his conviviality and sexual charm. ‘Toronto is quite a nice young fellow’, Gertler wrote to S. S. Koteliansky just after Prewett returned to Garsington from Canada in late January, 1921: I could never quite make up my mind whether he is a fraud or genuine, but even if he is a fraud, he’s a nice homely one . . . . Women seem rather taken with him, goodness knows why . . . . I used to like going into Oxford with him and having a fling – that is to say a drinking bout, on which occasion he made an amusing companion. He could drink ever so much without getting drunk.

From the outset, Prewett did everything he could to keep himself at the centre of sexual intrigue at Garsington. He made overtures to Julian, Ottoline’s daughter, and to the painter Dorothy Brett, another semi-permanent guest at this time. Brett drew Prewett and he was also painted by Dora Carrington. His behaviour made male rivals furious. Gertler described him as someone ‘who mooches about like a faded Hamlet’, who ‘doesn’t know what he wants and is always trying to gain the ladies’ sympathy by his grumblings – even to Julian he grumbles and whines, and looks at her with glossy eyes. Ugh! Every view he expresses is romantic, unreal and sickly. In fact, he has a sickly soul.’43 Gertler, whose painting of unheroic soldiers entitled ‘The Merry-Go-Round’ caused a stir in the autumn of 1916, was also prone to depression. Having grown up in a slum, he was welcomed at Garsington because of his significant talent and because he loved to laugh and be at the heart of the gaiety surrounding Ottoline. Yet like Prewett, he disliked having to depend on rich patrons. Eventually, tuberculosis led to his coughing up blood while at dinner with the Morrells, an event that marked the beginning of a tragic decline that culminated in his suicide.44 Sassoon understood ‘Toronto’ to be Iroquois, but ‘Toronto’ told Ottoline he was Sioux when they were first introduced and he told Graves much later that he was Mohawk. Although there is repeated evidence that all three believed Prewett to be of Iroquois extraction, Prewett’s new friends did not necessarily have simplistic notions about indigenous character or think indigenous peoples were somehow ‘timeless’. Indeed, in written exchanges between ‘Toronto’ and

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Ottoline, evidence of things indigenous within modernity was what fascinated them. Although indigeneity and poetic authenticity were linked in Ottoline and Prewett’s minds, indigenous peoples were an active part of their world and not consistently confined to an imagined past. For example, Prewett sent Ottoline a present from Canada, about which he said: I hope you will receive it safely. It is the collected verse of the Indian girl who we used sometimes to discuss. She was a true poet, and, like the rest of her clan, she cried in the wilderness, – and died ultimately in the pauper’s ward of a public hospital.

On another occasion, Prewett wrote to Ottoline from Canada: You would have fallen in love with a certain huge Indian whom I saw the other day. He was standing unromantically upon the back end of a train. He towered over the rest of us, and looked beyond us, not in a stagey manner, but in utter obliviousness of us, the train, the noise, and the city itself. One would have said, what a noble creature, what composure, what dignity, yet very possibly he was a clerk in a bank.45

It saddened Prewett that despite his best efforts he could not get Ottoline’s daughter Julian an ‘authentic’ indigenous costume, but both Prewett and Ottoline recognized that modern indigenous peoples could be clerks, soldiers and poets. Prewett’s poetry, meanwhile, connected indigenous peoples (usually males) to the natural world and to peasants and pre-industrial farmers in Britain and Canada. Ottoline encouraged him to write ‘The Red Man’, a poem that acknowledged the author’s distance from indigenous culture but also his affinity with what he felt it represented – anti-materialism and resistance to an industrializing world. The poem described people staring at an indigenous figure who breaks from the wilderness as might a deer from a thicket. The watching townsfolk feel shame at their own distance from the natural world epitomized by the indigenous figure they see: He scorns to see the things we own, And steadfast stares beyond, Alone, impassive, cold, unknown; With us he feels no bond. The townsfolk nudging line the street To see a red man pass; They feel ashamed of toil and heat, And dream of springs and grass.

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Despite Prewett’s claims to indigenous heritage, his knowledge of indigenous people such as Tom Longboat as a younger man and the recognition he registered in letters of what is now termed Indian survivance within modern life, the poem ends in mystery. It concludes by invoking an unbridgeable gap between the indigenous and non-indigenous worlds: And whence he came, and whither fled, And why, is all unknown; His ways are strange, his skin is red, Our ways and skins our own.46

Prewett represented indigenous peoples as timeless, emblematic symbols of a pre-modern idyll and this was also how he portrayed farm workers in his poem ‘The Farm Labourer’. It was a comforting, nostalgic illusion at a time when largescale industrial farming was gaining sway, small-scale farmers being forced into cities in order to survive and indigenous peoples across North America facing acute pressure to assimilate and urbanize. Prewett’s farming and indigenous mythologizing made sense only to those attracted to an ahistorical mirage that excepted indigenous peoples and the rural poor from larger processes whereby twentieth-century capital made use of resources and forced migration. That Prewett perpetuated such mythologizing when there is much evidence that he knew better, is perhaps testimony to his desire to please his rich patron and suitor as well and the literary market of the time. We can compare it to the fantasies about becoming gypsies together that Prewett conjured up in other letters to Ottoline. In each case, it was the idea of bohemianism the pair were embracing and ridiculing, at the same time.47

A ‘blue and gold existence’: Ambivalence and Ottoline ‘Toronto’ Prewett did much to encourage Ottoline’s affections. For example, he took languorous walks with her in the fields and sent her his ‘Snowbirds’ poetry at the end of November 1918, as well as the more explicitly seductive poem ‘Clad all in white she ran’. This latter poem was embarrassingly frank about desire, its author wishing: That I am the shower At hot noon-day, And you the thirsting flower On which I play;

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Or that I am the father, you the child, Or subject, glad, if you, his queen, have smiled.48

Ottoline had a healthy sexual appetite, but increasingly found Prewett unable to satisfy either her emotional or physical needs.49 He was a man, as one of his poems put it, ‘who never could love easily’ and who sometimes felt a queasiness or unease about sex as something somehow sordid or bestial.50 Gradually, Prewett’s unresponsiveness grated and generated what he termed ‘a flame of irritation’ in Ottoline. In response to these eruptions, Prewett would write to massage matters through invoking his ‘barbarous origins’, and pleading, ‘I know that I seem clumsy and unresponsive to you, but God knows I feel otherwise, and have tried to overcome the appearance.’ The pattern of upset and apology continued and each time Prewett blamed his inability to express his true feelings. He wrote on one occasion, ‘I hope I am not an insufferable prig when I say that, towards most people, I put out rays of affection, even while I most loudly proclaim my indifference to them.’ It probably did not help that he wrote frequently to Ottoline from The Moult at Salcombe, the delightful summer residence of his other aristocratic benefactress, Clemmie Waring. As he would explain teasingly on such occasions, Devonshire was simply ‘too luxurious and pretty for work’ and really, frequently he was so exhausted all he could think about was food and sleep.51 At the peak of summer in 1919, ‘Toronto’ Prewett was fought over by various women who orbited Garsington, but his depression had reached heights that even Garsington’s charm could not assuage. In September he wrote to Ottoline: Garsington is at its loveliest today, everything shining mistily, the distances elusive and pale blue. A flock of migrating swallows has settled in the farm buildings, where they chirp in a plaintive and mystified way. I know what they feel, little wretches, all nicely coloured, full of food, and yet lacking selfdetermination.52

Garsington was a bubble whose protection Prewett felt might dissolve if he stepped outside its reach. He said as much in a letter to Ottoline and thanked her for her faith in him: When I left Garsington this morning I felt that the impossible had occurred. I had permitted the atmosphere of the place to possess me as few other places have ever possessed me. I was happy there, and it is hard to go out of assured happiness into the certainty of less happiness or even complete uncongeniality. [] I wish you the power to go on seeing the greatness beyond the sordidness, for it is your richest possession. You believe in me, and, having so great faith in your faith, almost believe in myself.53

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Soon, however, Ottoline lost patience. She said she wished to cease to know Prewett because of his ‘physical incapability’ and her disillusionment at his ‘deficiency of normal manly instincts’. This circumstance may have been connected to Prewett’s war trauma since a number of prominent contemporary doctors discussed impotence, along with depression, irritability, reservedness and palpitations as common ‘shell-shock’ symptoms. More recent discussions of ‘shell-shock’, particularly that of Eric Leed whose work in turn influenced Elaine Showalter, have also suggested that impotence was ‘widespread’ postwar, but this remains unproven in the British context.54 Responding to Ottoline’s irritation with him, Prewett blamed war neurasthenia which, he said, had robbed him of any confidence that life was worth living. ‘I have no passionate feeling’, he reflected: One time, perhaps, I might have been passionate, but the war made me old, body and mind, and, unfortunately, while my mind has had sufficient elasticity to recover its youth, my body has not. When you condemn me, do not forget this thing. I move about the world in a maze, an uncomprehended vagueness. I see the eagerness of life, but I feel none of it. It is so hazardous, so short, so mysterious, so ironic, this life of humanity, that I cannot bring myself to plunge seriously and enthusiastically into it. The blue-and-gold existence knows neither event nor change.55

Prewett’s was a ‘blue and gold existence’ because he was unable to place what he had experienced in war in usable context or give it meaning. Despite being exceptionally attractive and recognized as a talented poet, he was unable to satisfy Ottoline because he could not feel. He explained: I suffer from moments of panic which no-one suspects. I hope, and it is the dread which, in some measure, gives an admiration for all that is most English. Virtue is gone out of me. I cannot write, – because I experience no deep emotion. I am still and the world spins around me.

All this was extremely awkward because Prewett was conspicuously poor and alongside so much else, the Morrells provided free food and accommodation. The food may not always have been plentiful, but it was given freely. At the beginning of Prewett’s relationship with Garsington habitués, his poverty had made him something of a cause – it was felt collectively that his literary merit meant special measures should be taken to ensure his talent found expression. A subscription was even gotten together to guarantee him a permanent income in July 1919 when he threatened to take up a permanent paid post in Morocco.

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Clearly, he was not fit mentally for such an adventure. Prewett refused the subscription and then Sassoon, who supported him financially in various ways for around five years from the time of the pair’s first meeting at Lennel, gave him 1,000 pounds. When Prewett again refused the offer of funds, Sassoon converted the sum to an investment in the Morrell’s farm. Generosity like this stirred up deep conflict in Prewett. His letters reveal that he felt simultaneously pressured by the Garsington set not to ‘betray his art’ but at the same time was piqued that they did not take prompt steps to ensure he avoided poverty and the necessity of having to contemplate extreme solutions such as exile abroad. Pride, independence and confusion were mixed together with a desire to be looked after and appear grateful. He wrote to Clemmie Waring from Garsington in July 1919 that he felt ‘beaten from all sides with violent accusations’. Ever a stalwart ally, Clemmie offered a visit to her at Salcombe. ‘I shall be glad to get out of this neighbourhood of art and responsibility for art where I now live and, owing to Morocco, suffer’, Prewett replied, ‘They are like children. They have their toys, and cannot believe that other children have no toys.’ He ended his letter with a baleful poem about how, despite being derided, he ‘wrote from love and grief/To tired men and slow’ and included the snippet: ‘To sleep, to die and sleep – But the guts, the skin breaks.’ His letter acknowledged this last was ‘written at a bad moment’. He confided to Clemmie: I have not been very well lately. Something periodically seems to go wrong in my inside, so that I am nervous and ill and feel my heart beating from head to foot. This is what makes me feel uneasy about my undertaking hard and responsible work in a distant place where one cannot conscientiously sit down and wait for one’s inside to recover itself.56

Prewett was obviously in no state to undertake a journey of any sort, but now circumstances forced him to leave Garsington and go ‘home’. In repatriating, he became part of what was the largest movement of Canadian people in history up until that time.

Figure 8  Frank James Prewett by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1921 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

8

Repatriated to a suburbanizing Canada November 1919–January 1921

Return amid pandemic to a consumerist Canada bereft of indigenous values Prewett was repatriated to his family’s twenty-acre farm at Humber Bay, Ontario, in November 1919 when he came down with a suspected case of tuberculosis, the chronic infectious disease that kills slowly and for which no effective treatment was found until the 1950s. In fact, Prewett had a bad case of influenza and had fallen victim to the third wave of a pandemic that was to infect a third of the world’s population and kill upwards of fifty million people. Worse still, deaths in the 1918–20 pandemic were concentrated in younger age groups, including young adults like Prewett. Canada was to be hit hard during what still stands as the world’s worst modern pandemic, with over 55,000 deaths. Prewett’s mother almost died from the pneumonia she contracted as a result of nursing him to recovery. His nerves were already in a desperate state and watching her suffer and having to confront the very real possibility she might die rattled them yet further. When the crisis receded, his greatest fear then became that he might expire spiritually and intellectually through being forced to assimilate to the values and social context he had left behind pre-war. He dreaded he might become a ‘veneered barbarian’, a ‘fat and nasal American’ or a ‘bank clerk with slicked hair’. He hated being back in his family home and found his country soulless, disheartening and blighted by galloping materialism.1 Prewett’s experience stands in stark contrast to the myth of Canadian involvement in the Great War. This has Canadian soldiers first travelling abroad as innocent farmers and then returning with a new consciousness of themselves as part of a vibrant nation forged in battle. Thus, for example, Canadian author Jonathan Vance in his 1997 volume Death So Noble wrote of the war as a solvent

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of sorts, capable of washing away complexities such as the persistence of First Nation or French-Canadian identities. ‘English Canadians expected’, he wrote, that ‘the war’s legacy would provide the impetus for both groups to become not Native Canadians or French-Canadians, but Canadians pure and simple’.2 However, for Prewett, the sense of Canadian identity that solidified after the war was of a region increasingly bereft of what he cherished most – indigenous values of community and a moral connection to the land. After the long sea journey back, immediately his thoughts turned to memories of Garsington. He quickly began to wallow in maudlin nostalgia. He wrote asking to be remembered to the ilex tree under which scintillating conversations had been enjoyed and even begged remembrance from Ottoline’s Pug dogs. It was not just the environs of Garsington for which he ached, but also for its pace of life and commitment to the development of the mind and spirit. In contrast, in Canada: Everyone is building houses, making roads, cutting down trees; in other words, progressing. [] My thoughts are continually with that other existence where ideas and truth were investigated without relation to their purchasing power, where there was tranquility, and where the contaminating hand of change was scarcely discerned to move. . . . I am more alone than you think, and my chief dread is an abandonment to Americanism.3

He constantly referred to England as ‘home’ and sought out any connection that might result in his finding work there. Canada, he felt, was ‘a pernicious place’ that would gradually erode any poet’s grip upon ‘the higher things of life’.4 The country made him feel ‘continually strange’, whereas in England ‘people are more satisfactory’. ‘I long’, he told Ottoline, ‘to get out of this monotonous country. It is like a mattress, so very large and indistinguishable from end to end, so that one despairs of getting out of it; one is choked and suffocated; there is no distinctive feature of which one can lay hold.’ It was the calculating commodification of feeling he observed in North Americans that bothered him most. Admitting that it was impossible to convey the phenomenon to anyone English, he warned Ottoline, who soon was planning a visit, about the shock of comprehending the true nature of the continent’s inhabitants, particularly the fact that ‘sincerity and benevolence are developed in this country just as one would learn to add up accounts, – because it is profitable’.5 The trope of Canadian blandness and absence is still prevalent within popular media globally, even within media produced by Canadians themselves. It is rooted in the fact for generations the country could not offer its exceptional

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and artistically talented the same opportunities as elsewhere. Carrie Derick, the first female university professor in Canada put the issue succinctly in 1900, ‘the country is too young and too thinly populated to afford an adequate field for exercise of unusual gifts. In consequence, Canada’s most celebrated singer is seldom heard at home: the best Canadian pictures are hung in foreign salons; the best books are published first in London and New York.’6 Prewett felt and expressed the same sentiment. After all, when he left in 1914, Canadian population density outside of the habitable land areas was just 7.8 million. The Canada Prewett returned to did not feel to him like a newly forged, thrusting global power but instead, a disconnected country losing direction because of its blind attachment to capitalism. Prewett told Graves, who by this time was an exhibitioner at the University of Oxford, that he hated the ‘clinking profit and loss’. He told Ottoline he found around him ‘nothing but business, selling motor cars, land, stock, anything’. The problem with Canada, he explained, was that ‘Man cannot live by bread alone, and Canada offers only the bread’. Were he to stay long term, Prewett was convinced loneliness and family pressure would inure him to a Babbitt-like marriage and then what was left of his soul would simply trickle away. ‘Life is so isolated here’, he explained to Ottoline in a witty inversion of cliché, ‘that people must marry, and marriage is a very bad thing for very young and ambitious men’. In any case, all the matrimonial prospects he had had when he was popular at Garsington had married elsewhere and depressingly, had then written to inform him how rapturously happy they were. He asked Ottoline to find him a wife, but the peaks and troughs of his moods made match-making on his behalf perilous to say the least. For example, in September 1920 he wrote, pondering ‘why we are born, or why, being lived to twenty years, we do not take our own lives?’ ‘I wish,’ he told Ottoline, with a depth of self-loathing that might have been comic were it not so deeply felt, ‘not that I were dead, for then there is the question of the spirit, but that I had never become differentiated from the general life-substance into an individual’. A few months later, thoughts such as these had abated, but Prewett was still asking the woman he so admired but was incapable of loving: What is the reason of life? Why, since life is so short, do we permit it to be so dull, and why, since it is so dull, do we cling to it? I feel that somewhere in these rather sordid speculations lies a valuable truth, but I cannot hit upon it.7

Regularly overtaken by what he called his ‘obsession of war despair’ and a heavy sense of ‘the sharpness of the injustice of war, the greed and incredible callousness of it’, he was far from being in an appropriate psychological state for marriage.8

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Canada at this time was strongly impacted by internal and external migration, decentralization of employment and by new-fangled additions like the streetcar and the automobile. The spreading suburbs offered social advancement and a chance for many to own their own homes, but Prewett saw them as a creeping canker inching the country ever further from its true promise. The year 1900 had seen the beginning of a suburban boom and an orgy of speculative housing development that meant tens of thousands of building lots were cut into the Canadian bush. It was the first national wave of auto-orientated sprawl and with it came the steady march towards consumer lifestyles and what one writer has dubbed, ‘creeping conformity’. By the end of the 1920s, new Canadian houses would even be designed without front porches, the traditional sites for socialization in working-class neighbourhoods.9 The Canada Prewett had signed up to fight for, support and develop, home not to a colony but to ‘a great and distinct people independent and confident in thought, feeling and action’, seemed to be slipping away.10 A number of Prewett’s poems from this period registered how jarring it was for him to be increasingly exposed to an urban and suburban world. It was irksome to lose a sense of the prevailing wind in large towns as well as any awareness of why he was feeling hot or cold outdoors. He wrote: When I am in the country it means so much Where the wind lies, what its tone: Whether hot or cold to the touch It is natural to my bone.11

It also bothered Prewett that no-one in Canada seemed to care about, or even remember, the war. ‘The men who did not enlist’, he explained in a letter to Clemmie Waring, ‘hold the desirable jobs, and the soldiers begin to feel a sting of shame if they must admit they served in the affray’. Sometimes his letters lapsed into the sort of casual anti-Semitism and class resentment that was then common on both sides of the Atlantic. The war had made everything worse as far as Prewett was concerned, ‘Prosperity seems to swell the profiteer and the Anglicized Jew, while the little man in the street still struggles along, nailing the door against the wolves.’ This was an extension of aspects of his thinking that had simmered since his first periods of respite with Clemmie Waring in Devon in 1919. There, he had written a poem that began as follows: After our millions dead, what is there left, After our high endeavours, grand resolves?The little children weep, of food bereft,

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The hairy profiteer slowly revolves Complacent in his chair.12

Overall, Prewett considered the American continent to be teenage in outlook, plagued by a climate of ‘national lassitude’ and obsessed with the venal pleasures of beer and amusement. He told Clemmie’s husband that he was scared Bolshevism might take Canada over ‘bearing in mind the lack of tradition and the viciousness of the rich’. His Canadian doctors were deeply concerned about him but had no remedy for his mental anguish other than the cheerily inappropriate advice that he should mix as much as possible with others. Prewett, meanwhile, considered himself utterly adrift in an alien world. He felt ignored by his father, but liked his brother. However, he told confidantés that his brother’s wife and children were ‘a vexation to my spirit’ and that he was sure his sisters looked upon him ‘as someone not quite credit-able’. Overall, Canada felt to him like ‘a large sort of box with hard square angles’.13 When he had first arrived, the culture shock had seemed amusing. In letters to Clemmie, Prewett had joked about starting to chant his speech in rag-time as he crossed on the White Star line and suggested that he might need to be rescued from smoking long black cigars and a ‘raving desire to use a spittoon’. Quite soon, however, Canada began to seem truly oppressive and the gambling, drinking, money-making and ecstatic dancing of its self-assured populace overwhelming. ‘Now I see the triumph of the money-begetter’, Prewett told Clemmie, ‘while the man with a book in his pocket slinks shame-faced and solitary into corners where he may indulge his, to Americans’ taste, immoral practices’. The overarching problem of course, was that Prewett was still suffering from depression rooted in his experiences in war. He simply could not be part of what he called ‘the full-hearted acceptance of the appearances of things’. ‘I always feel’, he wrote echoing Hamlet, ‘that a delirious dance through life is the hanging of ribbons upon a skull, and so, in the midst of this unrestrained merriment of Canadian life, seeing the skull, I suffer sudden pangs of unpleasantness’.

Prewett’s published and unpublished poetry on trauma, romance, sex and nature It made matters worse that at the end of Spring 1919 Clemmie sent some of his poems to Eddie Marsh, the influential sponsor and patron of Georgian poetry. Marsh liked only the poems about the Somme and the Redman but found the

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rest lacked technique. Prewett’s work did lack technique and the subject matter and style of what he was writing was harsh and frequently horror-filled. One poem spoke of once merry, rejoicing birds now found ‘In the snow dead with upthrust claws’ while another, ‘The Strange Ballad of Tom Beuly’ described one brother’s cheerful desire to see another at midnight at Boesinghe, north of Ypres, despite his brother’s body being in a state of considerable decomposition. Boesinghe is an often-overlooked site of war in Flanders, but both Edmund Blunden and Raymond Asquith, son of H. H. Asquith, Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916, served there. In Prewett’s poem, the character ‘Mad Tom Beuly’ spits, looks around and ‘fondly’ reminisces: Say boys, I saw my brother, Which one ought to do, you see In a proud and well-connected and loving family. The rats had chewed his flesh for food, He shows a bony knee, But the smile upon his visage Is a cheering sight to see.

Another poem, ‘Pride of Women’, revelled in the grief and anguish of a mother who had once been proud of her son. The poet urges her to look closely at ‘In pallid, stinking mud, his faded eyes/Staring from swollen visage at the skies.’14 Meanwhile, Prewett found the poetry then being produced in Canada repulsive because it contained so little that rang true. It was, he told Ottoline, a purely Canadian brand which you would not care to read. It is full of the word divine, and much given to reposing ultimate confidence in God and his mercy; also it expatiates upon mother’s love, the wayward boy and shrieking shells.15

Prewett decided to turn his attention to writing a long, bizarre play, ‘The Tragedy of Michael Farraday’ about a crazed early-nineteenth-century religious blacksmith who marks his fellow rural parishioners out for death. It is interesting because of what it reveals about Prewett’s thinking at this time. In it, he pondered the circumstances surrounding his Canadian upbringing and gave voice to the staunchly religious farming generations who influenced his parents, depicting them as a people ‘hemmed in by their own creed’. Farraday, the central character, is vengeful and patriarchal, while another respectable but ultimately scorned farmer shares Prewett’s mother’s maiden name, Hellyer. Overall, it was a tale articulated in their own dialect about ordinary farming folk who are wholesome and simple but plagued by debt, starvation and forces they cannot comprehend.

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One character named Jonas Parkes appears to speak for Prewett when he rails against debt systems and the élites who benefit from them, while at the same time wishing he were dead. Parkes remarks: ‘If I didn’t owe my farm an’ hosses an’ implements an’ children to ole Longdale, I’d be diff ’rent, if not queer.’ Other typical Prewett themes recurred; the desire to escape social restriction through art, the rejection of romantic love in favour of enjoining with nature because love ‘lays harsh demands’, fairies and the power of the unseen, the idea that ‘the memory of fear’ was the most terrifying of all experiences, the desire for death but also for a life of sexual freedom, and, as in so many American tales, the phenomenon of strange things happening at the old Indian burial ground.16 Soon music and alcohol became Prewett’s primary psychic sanctuaries. Since he could only watch the work being done on the busy farm and hated its noise and lack of privacy, he gave over whole days to music. He embarked on organ lessons with Dr Healey Willan, the Anglo-Canadian organist and composer at the Toronto Conservatory of Music. This met with medical approval because it was thought Prewett needed to be kept under supervision and only lightly occupied. It was a privilege to have the opportunity to learn from someone so distinguished and ultimately influential in relation to liturgical music. Willan had come to Canada aged thirty in 1913 and the two bonded as fellow Anglophiles. Now often called the ‘Dean of Canadian Composition’, Willan is likely to have worked to instil in Prewett the rules of harmony and counterpoint he venerated in the great European masters. He was a Romantic and mystic who ‘loved a tune’ and like the Garsington set, he was devoted to beauty and order. Around the time he was teaching Prewett was also when he was producing his most imaginative compositions, mostly for choir and organ, and extending musical ideas he had taken from Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Wagner, Strauss and Elgar. Additionally, although musically conservative, he shared Prewett’s love of whisky. It was said of Willan that he was ‘English by birth; Canadian by adoption; Irish by extraction; Scotch by absorption’.17 Prewett found in organ music a way to switch off his internal dialogue and rest from thoughts and memories he could not reconcile. ‘I was rapidly going mad’, he explained to Clemmie in January 1920, ‘seeing the hopelessness of the sacrifice that had been made, when I discovered that by directing one’s whole time and thought to some dissociated subject, I could appear to forget these other horrible and sordid things.’ A month later, his letters returned to the same theme and he was deeply thankful because music had made it possible, as he put it, ‘to keep my mind away from the disastrous winding-up of war, the futility and

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duplicity of every nation, and the baseless lack of appreciation of the changes which have come upon us. Music leaves no time for these ideas.’ It was not enough, however, and Prewett took to epic drinking sprees using the services of bootleggers and speakeasies in prohibition Toronto. He couched his behaviour as a rebuke against the righteous smugness he perceived in his parents and Canadians generally, and painted his drinking exploits as daring in letters to Ottoline, but really, he was sinking into an addiction that in the decades to come would lead to increasing isolation and personal distress. In his letters to Clemmie, however, he portrayed himself as taking a valiant stand against the crushingly mundane. ‘I would welcome a mild revolution’, he wrote, to clear out of authority this present mania for puritan religiosity and hygiene. I assure you, one might as well live in an eternal hard training for Olympic sports. In a few years all Americans will be 7 ft tall, 20 stone in weight and, intellectually, dead as beef. One almost weeps, having in view the shortness of life, to be subjected to this limitation of one’s innocent attempts to make that short span happy.18

Even the excitement of a visit from Sassoon in March, 1920, brought only brief relief. Prewett made it clear that the ‘smallpox epidemic’ in Ontario meant meeting up in New York was impossible, but luckily Sassoon was invited to lecture by a University of Toronto professor named Pelham Edgar. Sassoon was delighted when his old friend arrived and helped him rise to the occasion. The time the pair spent together deepened their friendship further although later Prewett told Clemmie jadedly; ‘Sassoon spent two days here, and has just returned to Chicago. I spent a great deal of time with him. He was full of health and happiness. Obviously he enjoys his adventure.’ Sassoon’s blithe lack of awareness of the ways of the world was a theme between Clemmie and Prewett, who remarked in one letter, ‘When will that man cease to be a boy, and discard illusions!’19 A few months later, Prewett wrote to tell Clemmie that he had been ordered into hospital. ‘I feel quite well’, he reassured her, ‘but that does not convince the doctors. Worst of all, it makes one feel that one really is ill, and not up to the ordinary man standard.’20 Borne back by necessity to a country that seemed to him deeply reactionary and racked with smallpox and a dangerous flu pandemic, Prewett retreated, as did Candide finally, to his garden. ‘We must cultivate each one, his garden’, he told Clemmie, ‘and sigh that we did not live in the Victorian age, when established things were believed and man was not an animal’. Although he wrote letters bemoaning feeling ‘woman-loneliness’, he confessed to Ottoline that he

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abhorred the ‘animalness’ inherent in the sexual act. He wrote, concerning a relationship with another woman in February, 1920: We have never committed the sexual act, not because she would have refused, but simply because I am, in my heart, happier without it, and she, no less happy. I dread animal-ness. I hate to know that the organs of my body are those also of the pig. You perhaps know this.21

Prewett may have been referring to the on–off romance he had since before the war with Muriel Slee, a young girl four years his junior who was also from Humber Bay. Muriel’s personal papers have recently come to light and suggest that Prewett’s ambivalence about heterosexual relationships, his loathing of marriage and his equation of it with wage-slavery and materialistic ambition long preceded his war service. A month before he first sailed to Europe, Prewett wrote for Muriel the poem a ‘A Song of Hope’. A malevolent message of sorts, it described how she would soon use her sexual charms manipulatively and make the poet suffer. Two middle stanzas read: She’s young and lavish of her charms, She loves to count the hearts she harms, And fills my own with sad alarms Does Muriel. But soon she’ll older grow and wiser, She’ll wear her boots to fit and size her, And then for me her charms she’ll miser, Young Muriel.22

Prewett also sent Ottoline a long, mostly tender prose poem as their romantic affiliation ended that he had written originally for Muriel Slee. It warned the recipient to take more care in terms of who and how often she gave herself over to others. Prewett wrote, ‘hesitate/What hands on fabric delicate, /And how, are laid. One touch will blast/Love that might else a life-time last.’ Without Ottoline’s love, Prewett wrote, he dreaded that his future would hold only ‘fearinsistent solitude’. His fear and his inability to articulate it, had led finally to their alienation from each other. He wrote: For once you have been loved, but my strange And timid indecision bore you, dear, And the half-wit entreaty of my gaze, That is compassion for your fortunes here, And I dare not explain, lest worse be said, It is my love for you, keen unto fear.

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He found it impossible to share carefree abandon with her. In sending his poem, instead he urged only that those who could, should ‘dance while you dancing crave, /Drain out oblivion from each mad day’.23 This harsh, fatalistic pessimism in relation to desire and the possibilities for romantic love was to persist. Some of Prewett’s later poems, such as ‘Seeing My Love But Lately Come’ suggest that his sensitivity following trauma created a profound barrier between him and any other with whom he might form an attachment. As one stanza explains: Oh, she does not know what possess, What despairs ride me every day; For her vexed, or in slight distress I am mad, I must fly away, Or the whole world crack with my rage And scatter it out of her way, But she cannot know, or assuage.

Similarly, in the poem ‘I Went a Mile’, Prewett used a description of a spring walk with a lurcher dog to articulate his own, unmeltable, inner chill. He wrote: The May month as fair is an unkind; I am cold, too cold to love your good, The dog is hot with smells he cannot find Though I prod him into the deeps of the wood And I to your beauty am perversely blind.

Other poems detached Prewett’s pessimism about romantic love from the effects of the aftermath of war and suggested that he simply had no faith that love between the sexes could exist, or at least, do so for long. Prewett’s poem ‘In Deep Night’, compared love to a weeping woman at the shore’s edge; ‘Plea for a Day and a Night’ suggested that romantic communion can last only a day and a night because with ‘communion comes no satiety’, while ‘The Captive Bird’ compared love to a caged bird that once imprisoned, immediately loses its sheen. The poem ends ruefully: Marriage of kindred sense and thought In man and woman none may find: In the first rapture to be caught They are estranged who closest bind.24

One of Prewett’s bleakest poems, ‘The Void Between’, spoke to the forlorn, irrepressible desire of the young to find salvation in romantic love. It described such hope as utterly misplaced and concluded:

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The damned chiefly desire to be saved. Man in woman seeks lost innocence; Woman in man her lost child. Though we cling together we are isolate And reach vainly to close the void between.25

Yet another poem, ‘Seeking Perfect’, reaffirmed his argument that the search for blissful union is greatly preferable to its realization. Even when a man finds that the perfect woman ‘soothes his rage’, Prewett advised: ‘Better in happy hunger dwell, / In his fret, so he be seeker still.’26 Poignantly, one of Prewett’s most beautiful and conventionally ardour-filled ‘love’ poems is entitled ‘My Love’, but by its close the reader finds that it is addressed, not to any living person, but to a statue of white stone.27 A further series of poems suggest that Prewett felt his psychological suffering justified his treatment of the objects of his desire with cold sexual aggression. One, entitled ‘Come Girl, and Embrace’, cruelly dismissed a girl’s desire for marriage, accused her of cunningly ‘marketing [her] charms’ and asked that she respond forthwith to the author’s burning ‘envious greed’ because, after all, life is pitiful and short: I tell you, girl, come embrace; What reck we of churchling and priest With hands on paunch, and chubby face; Behold, we are life’s pitiful least, And we perish at the first smell Of death, whither heaves earth To spurn us cringing into hell.

However, it is important to recognize that Prewett did not always feel this way. Some of his best poems are descriptions of joyful, transcendent sexual communion. He may have been adopting a literary persona or attempting catharsis by expressing baleful thoughts, since elsewhere he registered only delight and happiness in physical union with the opposite sex. For example, the poem ‘I Shall Take You in Rough Weather’ is difficult to interpret as anything other than a well-formed record of exuberant sexual fun. It links roiling wind with the tempestuous coupling of two lovers and ends with an image of them warming each other in the lee of trees. It begins as follows: I shall take you in good weather Where veering wind knows not to cease or settle,

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Where December pine on blue and white tosses his feather. Once you are out of doors the tang is good mettle.28

Another poem that revels in love outdoors is ‘Simplicity’. Here, all is sunshine in an orchard glade whose apples, ‘like green breasts of maids, /Bulge out amidst the leaves’. Under a verdant canopy, two lovers come together with no suggestion of cloud either in the metaphysical or actual sky: The slumbry elms together stoop And mingle in the sky; No wonder you and I should droop And down together lie.

Again, ‘Do Not Go Away So High’, is another poem of Prewett’s that makes delicate use of the natural world to convey the deepest positive emotions and register the author’s acute need for another to reciprocate his love. It begins: You are the sun and the pencilled shade, You are the glow on the hedgebank elm in May: The First human heart was made That we might join together this day.

Meanwhile, ‘The Pack’, refers to the pack a soldier carries but refigures what he transports as the treasures of love rather than the tools of combat. Though they are small, the poet asks for approval of his pack’s preciousness which he spreads at the feet of his love because ‘It is all of all love that lies there.’29 One of Prewett’s most loving poems remains unpublished, likely because it is doubly transgressive. It not only explicitly describes sex but also delights in the idea of repeated guilt-free union between man and woman. It begins as follows: I hastened to find my girl Through the evening settling grey, And I found her seated by the fire, Hands folded in a thoughtful way.

After the poet is comforted and his head is buried in his lover’s lap, they kiss deeply and fall silent. Then the poet reveals: I placed my hand beneath my girl’s breast, Slowly disclosed her bosom fragrant and fair; Then turned we to our known love-place And wept for joy greater than we might bear.

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The poem goes on to describe an epiphanal experience for both – ‘as when a spirit moves in a secret grove’, that is child like in its innocent happiness. The pair feel truly alive: ‘Sweet odours each on each flower-like we exhale, She is all conquest, I all ardours try, The world fades back, impotent and pale.’ The poem is Lawrencian in the way it links the natural world and human sexual desire and in its description of sexual union as means towards ultimate spiritual transcendence.30 Overall, in terms of Prewett’s trajectory as a poet, it is part of a body of work that suggests he glimpsed a pathway beyond the cul-de-sac of depression linked to war. When Prewett finally returned to England on 9 January 1921, it was to begin the Hilary term at Oxford University, funded by Sassoon and Ottoline following their visits to him in Canada. It felt as if he had ‘awaked from a very long and flat dream’. He complained to Clemmie that ‘the old-time acquaintances have dropped me’, but also claimed this hardly mattered, since he now much preferred ‘study and solitude’.31 Prewett maintained that what he wanted most was time to think and develop spiritually. He told Ottoline he thirsted for ‘the leisure to think, think, think, not with the outside mind, but the inner’.32 However, coming back to Britain in 1921 presented no easy solutions. Although the average standard of living for people who had jobs rose at this time, unemployment hovered at a crippling 10 per cent and would reach 20 per cent by the early 1930s. Life was so challenging and the dividend of peace so limited, that recent commentators argue this was why so many war books appeared from 1928 until the late 1930s – they were less about the war than about disillusionment with the post-war present.33 For traumatized men such as Prewett the war did not end with the Armistice. Instead, it continued within a psychological realm that was difficult to influence directly. For such men, the internal conflicts generated by combat set in process a chain of impacts with their own momentum and direction. Edmund Blunden expressed this issue with some pathos in his poem ‘Third Ypres’. It asked: ‘who with what command can now relieve, The dead men from that chaos, or my soul?’

Figure 9  Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington, possibly by Cecil Beaton, 1933 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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‘Mad in the peace’1 Farming and trauma poetry

the essential business of poetry . . . is to harmonize the sadness of the universe. –A.E. Houseman, Letters, p.140–1. Now we must go again back to the world Full of grey ghosts and voices of men dying, And in the rain the sounding of Last Posts, And Lovers’ cryingBack to the old, back to the empty world. –May Cannan, ‘Women Demobilized’.2 Agriculture and links to land and the countryside now dominated Prewett’s life up until the advent of the next world war. He worked for the Morrells at Garsington Farm from the summer of 1921 until the spring of 1922. Then he ran an experimental farm at Tubney near Oxford from around 1924 to 1927 and when this failed, took up a salaried role at the Agricultural Economics Research Institute at Oxford University until 1933. Thereafter, he worked successfully for years for magazines concerned with farming and life in the country. It is therefore a surprise to learn that rather than a spiritual connection or sense of unbounded kinship with the natural world, the bulk of Prewett’s poetry and correspondence at this time revealed alienation from it and a sense of nature as implacable, impassive and uncaring. Nature’s beauty remained for Prewett, but no consistent sense that it offered comfort or balm. This contrasts with the view that the English countryside served as a relatively uncomplex psychic sanctuary for soldiers and soldier poets, an extension of a pervasive, longerterm British idealization of the countryside identified by Raymond Williams. Williams argued that from the 1880s such idealization had been a means of

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assuaging anxiety that stemmed from British sojourns as empire-builders abroad.3 However, for Prewett post-war, William Wordsworth’s vision of nature as a majesty that existed in pantheistic support of man was moot. It is just one of the ways his story adds dimension to narratives about how ‘shell-shocked’ veterans survived post-war, and contrasts with analyses such as Fiona Reid’s 2010 volume Broken Men, told primarily from the perspective of care-givers.4

Using Edward Thomas to understand Prewett’s ambivalent relationship with the natural world The best way to contextualize Prewett’s post-war relationship to nature is to think of it in relation to another of his Anglophone contemporaries, the Anglo-Welsh poet Philip Edward Thomas. Thomas joined the Artists’ Rifles as a volunteer aged thirty-seven in 1915, partly as a result of misreading the intent behind his close friend Robert Frost sending him his poem ‘The Road Not Taken’. Thomas died after only three months at the front, at the Battle of Arras in 1917. His sensitivity was such that it appears he was traumatized by the First World War long before he actually experienced it in the trenches. Indeed, all his poems, apart from one found in his diary when he died, were written in England before he saw combat. It was for love of England at its most fundamental, for English earth, that he fought. When a friend asked him what he would be fighting for, he bent down, crumbled some soil between his fingers, and said: ‘Literally, for this.’ For Thomas, the First World War constituted a disruption of such unprecedented magnitude that it altered the very fabric of reality. It made nature alien and destroyed many of the certainties by which life had previously been lived. As Jon Stallworthy put it, ‘His “war poems” are those of a countryman perceiving the violence done by a distant conflict to the natural order of things.’5 Among the most revealing examples of this new consciousness was the attitude to the world’s primary elemental force encapsulated in the prose that Thomas quarried to produce his poem, Rain (dated 7 January 1916). Although the poem is often discussed as primary in terms of communicative power and existential import, the prose written by Thomas from which it was gleaned far surpasses it. This spanned four pages written in 1911 as preparation for Thomas’s book The Icknield Way (1913). The prose is haunting and sensuously heavy with meaning in a way that corresponds directly with Prewett’s profound alienation following his own traumatic experiences in war. It contains elements of a new, macabre relationship to both the self and to earth’s main element,

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water. There is a negative ghostly doppelgänger, a sense of timelessness, and lonely acknowledgement of man’s individual inconsequentiality and the awful inevitability of his cosmic transience and eventual death. As with the poem into which it would develop, this almost comically depressing piece of writing is also brilliantly, unnervingly resonant. Laying half asleep at an inn, Thomas’s ‘Rain’ prose begins by recording his transition away from thinking of falling water as something comforting. His understanding of rain changes completely as he resigns himself gradually, silently and listlessly to a wider cosmic reality that he knows will rate his eventual death as puny, if indeed, it has any measurable impact at all. Following this realization, all that is left for Thomas is a spiritual proverb, a platitude that invokes a certainty that its subject – death – seems to belie. Thomas wrote: I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgement. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: the all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more. I have been glad of the sound of rain, and wildly sad of it in the past; but that is all over as it had never been; my eye is dull and my heart beating evenly and quietly; I stir neither foot nor hand; I shall not be quieter when I lie under the wet grass and the rain falls, and I of less account than the grass [. . .] Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.’

Thomas grieves for himself, a compassion he will extend to the wounded when he later converts this piece of prose into poetry. He had become fundamentally estranged from even the most basic life-affirming force – water – and faced the profound loneliness that accompanies the realization of absolute disappointment. There is nothing thereafter he can orientate towards except death, which, because of its mystery, is incapable of being inadequate. Thus, when his prose becomes

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the poem Rain, polished into a new form as Thomas serves as a Lance-Corporal, he compares himself to still, stiff reeds in cold, dead water. They are, he writes: Like me who have no love which this wild rain Has not dissolved except the love of death, If love it be for what is perfect and Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Even in 1911, when Thomas wrote his pre-Rain prose meditation, he was in one sense already ‘dead’. His prose described him listening to the dark mutterings of his own ghost telling him to recognize once and for all the inevitability of his own demise and his irrelevance in relation to the towering forces represented in the pounding rain. A liminal and truly wild figure that somehow combines life with death, his ghost dominates Rain in both forms. The ghost of Thomas’s old self teaches him the most absolute of lessons, and makes him nostalgic for a time when he naively believed that nature was sustaining and pleasant rather than a giant, cataclysmic, churning force of rhythmic creation and inevitable annihilation. Perhaps ironically, the concluding phrase, ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on’ is an old Puritan proverb, part of a list of counter-intuitive sayings that persist across cultures and work to transform what might easily be perceived as negative, such as death, into signs of good fortune. Other examples of such ‘good luck’ include bird droppings landing on someone’s clothes and rain falling on a bride’s wedding day. The broader purpose of such phrases is to dispel bad feelings by taking the focus away from the self (with which both Thomas and Prewett were obsessed) and towards other, positive potentialities and opportunities associated with the future. Thomas’s prose may well remind readers of another famous instance of symbolic precipitation written in 1907 – the poignant moment at the close of James Joyce’s short story The Dead. In both instances, the falling rain/snow speaks to the difficulty for the living of continuing once they have become fully cognizant both of their own inevitable death and of the continuing influence upon their lives of those already dead. The Edward Thomas who wrote ‘Rain’ corresponds in this sense with Joyce’s fictional character Gabriel Conroy in The Dead, a figure whose ‘soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead’. Both the poet Thomas and the Dubliner Conroy find not consolation but epiphany in the cosmopolitan blanket of precipitation that falls around them without distinction, upon both the quick and those asleep in their graves. They experience nature afresh.

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Prewett’s relationship to nature was also changed fundamentally by his experience of life in the trenches and particularly, by being blown up and buried alive. Emerging from the earth reprieved, he gained a new, enduring sense of himself as a cosmic speck, an insignificant and easily destroyed living morsel in an inherently entropic world. His poem ‘Out of the Nothingness of Earth’ described his self as nothing, peeping out of the earth, which is made of nothing, and eyeing the stars which themselves are dying. His ‘presumptuous leap’ back into life reinserted him with fresh understanding into the cosmic cycle. The poem ends: The million million suns go on, Spinning their little turn, Even as I, till death shall come And other stars shall burn.6

Perhaps inevitably, such acute awareness of life’s inherent transitoriness and of his own inevitable death as an insignificant entity born to grow, reproduce and die, worked to drain romantic love of pleasure for Prewett. For example, one of his ‘love’ poems, ‘All Earth Rejoiced’, began with a man’s delight at the ending of days of rain but then quickly introduced a cold wind of realization that all things wither and pass: All earth rejoiced at the sun After many days of rain; What a sky when the storm is done, What lifting of heart again. But a breeze embracing us foretold Our transitory day, A youth in lust, an age in cold, From golden sky to grey.

The poem ends with the man’s female lover rebelling in tears at the inevitability of what has always been, crying out ‘The bud, the fading bloom, the seed,/My heart cannot accept.’7 Prewett’s sense of life’s ephemeral nature was so intense he felt hunted by the cosmos and imagined it was hungry to devour the tiny spark of life he possessed. He felt, as he put it in one poem, ‘Hated By the Stars’ and in need of protective bars to shield him from their cold envy of his small portion of life force below. ‘Sky stars are bold’, he wrote, ‘And they hate me for heat that is mine.’ Another poem, ‘I Went Out Into the Fields’, described how he journeyed out in ‘anguish

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of mind’ and sought comfort of the trees. The trees ‘speak’ to him, but only to describe their own lack of peace, to state that they are prone to the weather and that they have no agency. The poem ends with a message from the trees and birds to the troubled poet, advising him to not to judge: Trees reached their hands to stay, Whistled birds to me, ‘Spurn one, thou spurnest all, Brother, let things be.8

Despite expressing such profound sensitivity to man’s cosmic irrelevance, Prewett’s poetry also registered a deep kinship with animals and the nonhuman world. One of his loveliest poems on this theme was ‘You Use Me With Dread’. Here the poet bemoaned the fearful way in which animals and birds, such hares, moles and moorhens, related to humans. His descriptions showed he had the keenest of eyes, creating, for example, a perfect picture on the page of a responsive, ‘lip-lopping’ hare: The bunching hare lazily raises her ears Lip-lops a pace, nibbles her breast, Plucks at the clover: then she hears And knows and leaps in tussock pressed.

It concerned Prewett that he was unable to move among the non-human world without animals and birds becoming fearful, a concern that betrayed a lack of patience and effort on his part as well as idealized notions about the potential for easy interaction between predator and prey. The poem ends with a naïve complaint to the animal world: May I not walk this bank where I was bred, Have I no right of life which you bear: I harm not, yet you use me with dread Who ask of you no other than to share.9

Elsewhere, in poems such as ‘Rain Descends’, Prewett demonstrated deep understanding of the ways of cattle, of the effect of drought and the relief brought by rain to herds, pastures and trees. ‘Rain Descends’ asked the reader to note how birds fall silent and cattle hang their heads and cluster under a hedge during the oppressive heat just before longed-for rain. When rain does come, corn glistens and ‘the cattle feeding move from the hedge as one’. Perhaps only a poet who remained a farmer could have written with such accuracy and nuance about

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the behaviour of animals and what Prewett called in another poem, creation’s ‘indestructible fruiting’.10 Having suffered as he did in war, Prewett looked in vain at the natural world to somehow regain what he found within it but had lost in himself – the ability to live in the moment. The poem, ‘If Life Be Happiness’, conveyed his regret at losing this capability and at having gained in its stead only a pervasive awareness of the potential for peril. Rather than any lighter sense of time passing, the poem expressed a deep, prolonged sense of the present, a consciousness thought to be felt involuntarily by the traumatized as a legacy of profound stress. The poet ended his poem by pleading: Let me no more have consciousness But join my momentary kind, Who blindly live and have no thought If life be happiness or not.11

Another poem, ‘Earth Song’, asked the ‘patient earth’ to protect the poet, who hides and clings to it like a hurt bird.12 How, then, can Prewett and Thomas’s despair, the persistence of ghosts in their consciousness, their sense of themselves as alive but also dead, and their deep appreciation of and alienation from nature and the non-human world, be understood? One useful point of departure in addressing this issue lies in work that achieved prominence after the Second World War by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Adorno connected the phenomenon of ‘living death’ to the mind’s need for atonement after witnessing death on a colossal scale and is known for advancing the argument that following Auschwitz, the writing of poetry is barbaric, since its production is an inevitable re-inscription of the culture which itself produced torture and Holocaust. Less well known is that he later extended his thinking and argued that whether poetry is written after Auschwitz or not, the larger question is whether we all, as survivors, have the right to go on living. He wrote: Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living – especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of

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him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.13

Adorno’s remarks foreground a double bind for the creative literary voice who has no faith in an omniscient power or destiny and who has survived trauma in war. Persisting with life as before appears to risk the return of the evil already experienced, making the only psychic atonement available the denial of life itself. As Adorno suggested, this can lead to ‘dreams such as he is no longer living at all’. Prewett had no recourse to faith, having sloughed off the hellfire and damnation Protestantism of his childhood. His exposure to death in war and being buried alive had fundamentally severed any sense that nature was a consistently comforting or redemptive force. The prior creative sensibility exemplified in the poetry of William Wordsworth, of nature and man bound together in rebirth or in pantheistic or sublime interrelationship, was therefore not meaningful for him. Adorno’s insight suggests that Prewett may have denied his own survival and imagined himself a ghost surrounded by other ghosts as a means of psychic atonement. Yet ironically, to seek atonement in whatever form – searching to again be ‘at-One’, is action fundamental to Christian practice. As a concept and psychological practice, it operates within an imagined reciprocal economy of penitence and forgiveness. Both Prewett and Thomas shared a sense that changes impacting upon land and nature were greatly accelerated by war and technology. Prewett recognized that the land he had fought for would now be profoundly altered as food production industrialized. Indeed, an important part of what had led to war in 1914 was reliance by British and German peoples on imported food.14 Just as the killing of men and women in warfare had been dominated by technology, so too now, would man’s relationship to the earth and the animals upon which he relied. Thomas, in poems such as ‘As the Team’s HeadBrass’ mourned the loss of old ways and linked the mortal peril he would face in war with the peril that confronted familiar lifeways within landscapes. Just as his body was to be endangered, so too would the soil for which he fought. He wrote, encapsulating an everyday moment of man and animal in toil that he knew would soon fade: The horses started and for the last time I watched the clods crumble and topple over After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.15

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Because profound crisis makes the familiar seem surreal, it was inevitable that the war would re-inscribe how landscape and land itself was conceived of within British poetry. War poets such as Wilfred Owen, for example, repeatedly juxtaposed the supposed innocence of the natural world with the bloody horrors of combat. Doing so in poems such as ‘Spring Offensive’ brought both the ‘naturalness’ of human conflict and the traditionally benevolent and maternal character of the natural world into question. He wrote: Hour after hour they ponder the warm field And the far valley behind, where buttercups Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up.16

In Owen’s poem, the buttercups many of us remember from childhood served not to reassure, but to remind us that man’s suffering is in fact of no moment in relation to the wider processes and cycles of the universe. Given this reconceptualization of how man related to the flora, fauna and soils around him, it is remarkable that the poetry of Thomas and Prewett still continued to find solace of any sort in nature. For the contemporary poet Michael Longley, this accounts for both success and failure within Thomas’s poetry. Longley described Thomas, whom he nonetheless took as a lodestar, as: ‘The nature poet turned into a war poet as if/ He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf.’17 As is well known, the dock leaf cure for the pain of a nettle sting provides only partial relief, just as the repetition of counter-intuitive proverbs only partially relieves pain at the loss of loved ones, inconvenience from bird spatter on clothes or regret that rain will mingle with falling confetti.18 In a similar way, nature in the wake of the First World War could no longer provide unalloyed imaginative recompense for loss and pain, nor could it be relied upon to reassert balance and equilibrium. Nature, in a world after death on such a scale worldwide, had to be recontextualized and reconceived.

Chickens and cheese From the summer of 1921, Prewett embarked upon a less abstract and more immediate relationship to land and farming. Desperation for money led him to take on milk collecting, cheese-making and chicken husbandry on the Garsington estate. When Prewett had originally contemplated the arrangement years before, he had felt the great virtue of such a set up would be that he would ‘be in actual touch with people whose ideas go beyond motor-cars and clothes,

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which is the one essential in life’. As it turned out, the work offered few such compensations and proved exceptionally challenging. Prewett had been helping Philip Morrell sporadically with aspects of farming for years and had always had his eye on Garsington’s potential as a moneyspinner. Philip had approached him about working for him properly as early as 1918 and Prewett was attracted, confiding to Clemmie Waring, ‘His place pays well in spite of bad management, and is one of the best I have ever seen.’19 From Canada in December 1919, Prewett wrote to Ottoline that if Siegfried was still prepared to put in the promised 1,000 pounds, he would run Philip’s farm for him. This no doubt pleased the Morrells because just the year before Ottoline had been forced to sell her pearls to save the farm from going bankrupt. However, as Prewett acknowledged privately to Clemmie, the situation was fraught with difficulty even at the planning stage. As early as April 1920, he expressed reticence, convinced that an ‘inevitable feeling of distrust overruled the attractiveness of opportunity’. Often, he felt so alienated from the Garsington set he preferred isolation and solitary study. He told Clemmie, ‘I never really was one with them; I felt in their presence the greatest falsity and awkwardness. If I return with Zeigfried I shall certainly be precipitated into the so-called artistic circle. Therefore, this Winter, all being well, I shall return alone and go my own way.’20 However, Prewett’s lack of money and options pushed him towards farming for the Morrells. He would resent almost every aspect of it, and in time would betray the trust of the people who had once meant so much to him. Carrying out repetitive, physical labour at a place where he had previously been an esteemed guest quickly became intolerable. Soon, Prewett’s feelings of alienation, utter boredom and envy made him reckless. As he told Clemmie: Cheese-making goes on, round and round. I survey my efforts with complacent professional boredom. Yesterday I carelessly left my finger in the press while I screwed down 1500 pounds weight. Otherwise nothing has taken place; unless that Ottoline this morning resembles a different kind of butterfly than on the day you saw her.21

In another letter, he admitted that sometimes the set up made him furious, particularly the fact that he could not get permission to take holidays. ‘One gets frantically angry sometimes’, he told his highly advantaged friend Clemmie, ‘that all the advantages are given to the advantaged’.22 Anger and resentment eventually led to action. Sassoon’s diary in 1921 recounted an awkward encounter after he had returned to Garsington to retrieve a forgotten pair of grey flannel trousers. In the interim, Prewett,

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since he had no money and was profoundly bored, purloined them. Sassoon wrote, ‘Prewett’s wardrobe is scanty, like his income, so I hesitated before the operation of recovering my grey flannel trousers. At dinner time [Prewett] appeared wearing the actual garments.’ The situation prompted a ‘distinct feeling of annoyance’ in Sassoon, aggravated by the fact when he finally did get the trousers back they had a sizeable hole in the seat. They had, he opined, ‘come unstitched’ (as if by the agency of some mischievous imp) . . . ‘My week-end seemed increasingly trouserish.’23 Prewett may have stolen and damaged the trousers as a deliberate joke, but the act was a precursor to the subsequent more substantial theft that eventually would see him removed from Garsington and Philip Morrell’s employ. By September 1921, Prewett was so angry at not being able to take a holiday and so exhausted by the autumn ploughing marathon he wrote that he wanted to ‘waft them all to hell’. Sassoon applied a bandage to the situation by taking Prewett on holiday to Rome in October. He delighted in Prewett’s exuberance at the wonder of it all, and wrote of ‘attractive faces in the streets . . . [and the] bracing influence of Toronto and pleasure at seeing his enjoyment of everything’. Prewett, however, suffered severe stomach pains during the trip, vomited blood, fainted and had to spend time in Rome’s Anglo-American Nursing Home. This may have been connected to his war trauma, since recent studies have demonstrated a link between combat trauma and such symptoms, or it may simply have been the result of exhaustion from manual labour. Prewett was delighted by Sassoon’s kindness to him during this episode, writing to Ottoline, ‘Siegfried has been simply angelic; he seemed suddenly to develop feminine tenderness and solicitude, just the qualities one supposed he lacked.’ Prewett was ashamed to be treated with such ‘undreamed-of depths of feminine tenderness’ and wrote with some chagrin to Clemmie ‘I do feel an ass to be lying here in the midst of the scenes I have dreamed about, and which I see no prospect of revisiting.’24 However, one plus about getting ill was that it took away some of the pressure of Sassoon’s intense attention. Sassoon found proximity to ‘Toronto’ and what he called ‘the physical aspect of Italy’ highly stimulating and he spent the whole holiday coping with what he called his ‘cursed obsession of sex-cravings’.25 Back in Britain after the holiday, by January 1922 Prewett was once again in an abject state. All his mental energy had been drained away by the farm. He told Clemmie, ‘I live and dream chickens.’26 It was a short step from feeling hard done by to rationalizing wrong doing. Prewett took to siphoning off the profits from the farm for himself. Perhaps he convinced himself that everyone was doing it, given that ‘borrowing’ from rich acquaintances with no intention

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of paying the funds back was fairly usual among impecunious artists within the Garsington orbit. For example, when his friend Graves had his shop at nearby Boars Hill for six months in 1921, he cheerfully overcharged any rich patrons who used his services and claimed he found deceiving them ‘as easy as shelling peas’. However, Graves maintained he was playing Robin Hood so as to make up for his systematic undercharging of the village poor. Stealing anything ‘of uncertain ownership’ was also something done in the trenches, just to survive. Prewett’s mistake was to boast about his deceit to Sassoon, foolishly acknowledging on a postcard in April 1923, ‘I have swindled Philip beyond the dreams of avarice.’27 His post-war dalliance with socialism notwithstanding, Sassoon was singularly unimpressed and promptly forwarded the card to Garsington. Prewett’s betrayal was made yet more glaring because, along with Sassoon and Gertler, he had spent Christmas with the Morrells. Prewett was dismissed forthwith and his connections with Garsington severed for good. He may have known something of the sort would happen and wanted an excuse to force a fundamental change in his circumstances. ‘Shell-shocked’ veterans getting into trouble over petty larceny or other crimes was commonly reported in the newspapers at the time and Sassoon, despite precipitating the situation, was understanding. He wrote letters of reference for Prewett soon after. Rather than trustworthiness, he emphasized to prospective employers that Prewett would be a suitable teacher of English literature or secretary, not least because he was ‘an extremely pleasant companion’.28 From this point onwards, among the Garsington set it was primarily Dorothy Brett and Graves who maintained friendships with Prewett. This, despite Graves and Prewett’s relationship suffering somewhat after publication in 1924 of Prewett’s poetry volume The Rural Scene, which Graves found disappointing. Both Graves and Brett would relocate abroad prior to 1930. In their respective ways they kept alive their own versions of a primitivist ideal, Graves most notably through his White Goddess obsession and Brett through joining D. H. Lawrence in 1924 in his attempt to create a utopian society named ‘Rananim’ on land north-west of Taos, New Mexico, owned by the New York banking heiress Mabel Dodge Luhan. Using Puebloan construction methods, Luhan and her indigenous husband Tony Lujan, had created an exceptional arts colony. After Lawrence left in 1925, Brett stayed in the region, apparently happy to live more or less in poverty despite her aristocratic origins. She found exceptional freedom at Taos, later in life becoming close friends with the Navajo artist R. C. Gorman.29

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Tubney farm, marriage and a daughter Prewett’s relationships with the Garsington set having eroded, from 1923 to 1927 he put all his efforts into an experimental farm at Tubney, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire. It was a collaboration with the economist A. M. Carr-Saunders and the man often thought of as the father of animal ecology, Charles Elton. H. W. Freeman, the novelist and fellow Christ Church man, was also involved, as well as Charles Hewson, the Canadian veteran Prewett had helped cope with ‘shellshock’ at Christ Church as an undergraduate. It is likely that once again Sassoon provided financial support. The idea was to develop and sell a new strain of millet to poor countries with Prewett in charge of making sure the practical work was completed and that the farm and its livestock turned a profit. A. M. Carr-Saunders was also a veteran, an Eton-educated academic with a private income who was fascinated by the soil and its links to over-population. He had lived for a time at the settlement house Toynbee Hall and become secretary of the Eugenics Education Society before making a critical splash in 1922 with publication of The Population Problem. Eventually knighted, he would be director of the London School of Economics from 1937 to 1956. Carr-Saunders saw ‘primitive peoples’ as responsible for the global population problem as he understood it, but perceived no intellectual differences between ‘negroes’ and modern Europeans. To his great credit, with Julian S. Huxley and A. C. Haddon, he would be one of the earliest voices to attack scientific racism in print, in We Europeans (1935). The group made a plea, still not sufficiently adopted, that the term ‘race’ be replaced by ‘ethnic group’ given that race as an idea has no scientific legitimacy.30 Carr-Saunders and Charles Elton had both been part of the 1921 Oxford University Expedition to Spitsbergen (now Svalbard) which had made important ornithological observations. Elton, meanwhile, had worked as a consultant for the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1925 plotting fur-bearing animal population shifts. He mapped a number of Carr-Saunders’s sociological ideas onto animals in his 1927 book, Animal Ecology, which argued that nature operated in ways analogous to human economics.31 Prewett shared Tubney with his beautiful first wife, Madeline Clinkard, whom he married when she was only twenty-three at Headington, Oxon. on 19 February 1925. Madeline was a friend of Ottoline’s daughter Julian and met Prewett at Garsington soon after Ottoline and he had had a deep spat. Perhaps predictably, it appears Prewett’s relationship with Madeline was rather onesided. Madeline, he told Graves, was ‘a most natural and loyal person, a lover of pictures, of poetry, but cut off from the world in increasing deafness’. It made

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matters worse that Prewett saw nothing of what he called the ‘beau monde’ at Tubney and languished without intellectual stimulus. In another letter, he complained to Graves that he suffered from ‘frightful mental congestion’, but found that Madeline at least, was ‘a jewel in the world, the sort of person one takes for granted will always be here to keep things civilised, quiet and steady, without, perhaps, acknowledging one’s obligation of that influence’. Prewett loved the farm’s quiet simplicity. He told Edmund Blunden, it was ‘in the bosom of the Vale of White Horse, one of the most secluded, contented and adventurous places in England’, free from roundabouts with nothing but green fields and copses. He invited Blunden and his wife there to holiday in the autumn of 1923, even though, as Prewett explained, he possessed ‘no furniture and practically no food’. He struggled as he put it, to ‘resist the bailiffs and the wolves’ and lurched from crisis to crisis. The financial pressure and the effort of bringing in the harvest and the hay soon seemed exhausting and never-ending. Prewett was at least able to solidify his friendship with Graves in this period. After the Boars Hill grocery shop failed to prosper, Graves and his wife had moved to Islip in the summer of 1921. Graves was struggling at the time to complete his Oxford degree and, on paper at least, the Graves were almost as poor as the Prewetts. Graves’s reputation as a poet and writer may have been more secure, but his neurasthenic symptoms, including hesitation and loss of focus in speech and sensitivity to sound, were debilitating. Although Graves saw Dr Rivers regularly in Rivers’s rooms in Cambridge in the summer of 1921 and Rivers encouraged him to exorcise his ‘ghost self ’ within his poetry, Graves never regained or perhaps achieved full faith in quotidian reality. He would search for mythical or hidden all-encompassing truths for the rest of his life. Graves, his family and other friends camped at Tubney in Army tents in the summer for fun, but as Prewett told his friend, overall, life at Tubney was ‘a small and hard-wrung existence.’ One of the Graves’s visits was a disastrous washout, prompting Prewett to explain in mitigation ‘everything is being squeezed out of my life, save the art of buying and selling agricultural produce, and exacting as much labour as possible for the wages we pay’.32 The two poets invariably discussed poetry, but Prewett was not always ready to take Graves’s advice. For example, Prewett was happy for Graves to make changes to his poem, ‘Comrade’, but insisted on another poem in draft being ‘left with all its primitive deficiencies’. After Graves’s dramatic decampment to live with the American critic and poet Laura Riding at Deià, Majorca in 1929, Prewett and Graves would keep in touch but Prewett felt Graves’s absence deeply. One cherished postcard between the two after the move ended with Graves musing, ‘I was thinking today is there

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any poet in England at the moment for whom I have any respect left?’ ‘If so,’ I said, ‘I’ll send him or her this postcard.’ ‘Yours ever, Robert Graves.’ Prewett considered Graves the premier poet of his generation and felt honoured that, as he put it, Graves was ‘inclined to be indulgent towards me’.33 By late 1925, Prewett had given up the attempt to make Tubney a success. Writing from Home Close, Garsington, he confided to Edmund Blunden he was ‘in a terrible fix for a livelihood, and spend most of my time looking for a farm tenancy or a job, even a bad one’. Yet he urged Blunden to fulfil his own duty to exercise his literary capabilities and to keep the faith despite adversity. As Prewett explained, writing as much about his own as his friend’s circumstances, ‘It is a terrible loneliness and battle in the night to cultivate a true mind upon an empty pocket, but somehow, though late, provision is made.’34 Salvation of a sort did indeed come when the Institute for Research in Agricultural Economics of the University of Oxford offered Prewett work from 1925 to 1934. It was a chance to combine his capabilities as a researcher and writer with his interest in all things rural and agricultural. He was given three smallholdings to experiment in dairy farming on and encouraged to publish detailed yearly reports on technical and efficiency-orientated farming issues with Clarendon Press. As the preface to one of these volumes explained, his focus was ‘the improvement of time-honoured practice’. Then, around March 1929, Prewett severed one of his last ties to Garsington. He abandoned his wife Madeline Clinkard and the couple’s young daughter, Jane, born on 20 September 1927.35 His friend Robert Graves had detached from his wife and children just as abruptly three years previously. It has been suggested that Madeline’s increasing deafness drove the Prewetts apart because, like many who have experienced psychological trauma, Prewett was hypersensitive to noise. As early as 1924, Prewett had complained to Graves, who had the same problem, that Madeline was ‘really rather a noisy person’. Of course, the real divisive force within the Prewett marriage was Prewett’s war-induced depression and morose feelings. Just three days after the marriage itself, for example, he had written to Graves in abject glumness; ‘I feel, if one survives February, one is safe for another year. It is the month nature is most like to death.’ Again, after a visit between the two in November 1925, he confessed he had been depressed for over a year.36 Madeline, it seems, stayed devoted to Prewett after he left her. She returned to Exeter College Farm, her parent’s homestead near Garsington. In 1941, she contracted polio. She died disabled and in comparative poverty having brought up the couple’s daughter without, it is thought, consistent support from Prewett.37 Prewett’s fortunes after leaving Madeline and Jane, however, now took a new and positive turn.

Figure 10 Frank James Prewett, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1922 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Prewett responds to changes in the land

Prewett received a grant from the Horace Plunkett Foundation that allowed him to spend two months in 1930 in Canada and the United States studying advances in agricultural co-operation. This was a wonderful opportunity to visit North America from a position of relative prestige and to bring knowledge back from across the Atlantic. It hardly mattered that Prewett’s employer, the Institute for Research in Agricultural Economics, was looked upon askance at Oxford by those who perceived limited value in vocational education or in studying land. Founded in 1912, the institute was one of three manifestations of agricultural research funded at the University by the government’s Ministry of Agriculture in an attempt to find solutions to British land-based economic problems. It published lengthy analyses of costs and prices and produced experts on agricultural issues for Britain and its colonies. Thus, for example, January 1930 saw completion of Prewett’s year-long study of milk production and distribution in Cheshire while at the time, he was progressing a further new study, The Distribution of Agricultural Produce.1 A sister institute dedicated solely to investigating agricultural machinery had been founded in 1924. It had started impressively by introducing the combine harvester to Britain; however, the government was forced to tightly curtail its remit after its director was jailed for forgery and fraud in 1931.2 Prewett was aware he was witness to time of rapid readjustment of man’s relationship to the land and what was required for it to generate food. He was fascinated by how innovation in plant breeding, chemistry and ongoing mechanization was having an unprecedented and potentially irreversible impact on the world and its peoples. For example, the combine harvesters introduced to Britain by Prewett’s colleague, M. Messer, were now able to combine three of mankind’s oldest operations at harvest – reaping, threshing and winnowing. Harvesters generated enormous cultural and material change and they remain among the most labour-saving of all devices on earth. Their introduction and

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ongoing refinement made food significantly cheaper but also made obsolete a great many rural jobs. The first self-propelled version in 1937 was introduced by Massey-Harris in Canada, and by 1952 the CLAAS ‘Herkules’ that was on sale in Europe could harvest up to five tonnes of wheat a day. Meanwhile, the Italian plant breeder Nazareno Strampelli had been hybridizing wheat since 1900, shortening its growing season and making it more tolerant of disease. This provided the platform that eventually led to the Green Revolution of the late 1960s where massive increases in global agricultural food production allowed exceptional growth in human population numbers. The 1960s also saw the final stages of the shift to input-based farming that made it almost impossible for small-scale farmers to compete in an agricultural context geared towards high credit and the extensive use of pesticides, fertilizers, engineered seeds and mechanization. While Strampelli had been working on developing wheat in Italy, in Germany the Jewish chemist Fritz Haber had been striving to find a way of fixing nitrogen from air. When he succeeded in synthesizing ammonia in 1909, he took away man’s exclusive reliance upon birds and animals to fertilize the soil and at the same time, freed the production of explosives from natural constraints. Using the Haber-Bosch process, the first ammonia plant was built in 1911. Thereafter, the world was set upon a path that permitted the production of both fertilizer and munitions in industrial quantities. When Strampelli and Haber began their respective projects in 1900, there were 1.6 billion people on earth; in 2053 there are predicted to be over 10 billion. This exceptional world historical shift can only be understood when traced back to generally unsung figures such as Haber, Strampelli and the Australian Hugh Victor McKay, producer of the first commercially successful combine. In 1932, Prewett’s institute was just beginning to study the efficiency gains of combine use and the implications of what his institute called ‘the substitution of mechanical power for horse labour’. Prewett’s poetry, novel and professional outputs in this period recognized these interconnections and dynamics, but tailored discussion of them to context.3 Prewett understood the trajectory of change and his professional publications were geared towards ameliorating the repercussions for communities of industrialized farming. His publications placed greater emphasis upon improvements to land as opposed to the more obvious means to achieve greater profit such as mechanization, or ‘power farming’, as the institute described it in the Oxford University Gazette.4 Prewett’s work on milk production and distribution, conducted in the years just prior to seismic change in this area in Britain in 1933, did not use the term,

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but nonetheless revealed a firm grasp of how liquid capital was then impacting upon farmers. His analyses would remain relevant to English agricultural policy for at least the next fifty years. He published multiple studies that explored how thousands of farms sold their milk and gave evidence before bodies such as the Milk Reorganization Commission and the Reorganization Commission for Fat Stock. Life was grim at this time for British farmers, prices having slumped postwar and lessened further after the 1929 global depression. As Prewett wrote in The Countryman in 1929: ‘On his own account the English farmer can do little for himself since his market is largely supplied and ruled from abroad . . . the system of land tenure is worn out and prevents capital going into the land. The only remedy is State control.’5 Prewett argued that farmers desperately needed a means whereby they could be guaranteed a minimum price for what they produced. The government responded, and in 1933 created by statute the collective British farming enterprise known as the Milk Marketing Board. Although the institute argued that this made the need for further milk research even more pressing, thereafter Ministry grants decreased and it became harder for the institute to keep its staff employed. The Milk Marketing Board which Prewett worked so hard to see develop was eventually dismantled in 1993, and since then British farmers have made ever louder protests against what is perceived as the stranglehold of large supermarkets able to dictate what farmers get paid. In an increasingly globalized diary market dominated by Chinese needs, British farming and the way of life it has embodied continues to suffer. Large-scale industrial farming continues to advance rapidly. Chinese and Russian investors have now built a ‘unit’ designed for 100,000 year-round housed cows at Mudanjiang City, north-east China. Production capacity on such a scale is likely to make EU dairy farmers irrelevant to their formerly significant Russian market. The ongoing negative impacts of industrial farming upon cows and their welfare, rural communities and the environment is a direct extension of the processes of change Prewett identified and responded to in print in the decades after the First World War.6 As the 1930s progressed, Prewett broadened his involvement and thinking about the British countryside but remained employed at the institute. During the first six months of 1931, he broadcast a series of ‘Country Topic ’ talks for the BBC.7 They were well received and re-broadcast in 1933, a precursor to his 1954 BBC radio talks ‘Farm Life in Ontario Fifty Years Ago’ that were subsequently published. Prewett began to work part-time as a pub landlord at The Two Brewers, near Henley Bridge. He had been approached by a publisher looking for a book on ‘Country Life’ and he hoped the conversations overheard

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in the pub would help him generate something ‘on the beginnings of modern farming’. However, the challenge of combining writing about ‘the listening proletariat’ while simultaneously producing ‘civil-service English’ at an Oxford Institute, proved a strain.

The Chazzey Tragedy Despite these challenges, in 1933 Prewett published his novel articulating his concerns about alterations to land use over time. The Chazzey Tragedy voiced the sufferings of the rural poor subject to overwhelming change wrought by mechanization about a century earlier, but resonances with the time of publication in terms of how mechanization was causing rural displacement and irreversible loss of culture and community were obvious. Overall, the novel was an attempt to emulate the success of Prewett’s friend H. W. Freeman whose bestselling 1928 book about Suffolk farming culture, Joseph and His Brethren, had made American Book of the Month.8 Both Prewett and Freeman’s books shared an intense love of the land and a nuanced understanding of how backbreaking living off it was for both genders. Around this time, farmer novelists such as Freeman, A. G. Street and Adrian Bell were in vogue. Prewett had most in common with the most talented and original of the group – T. F. Powys. Like Prewett, Powys produced work that paid little heed to fashion. It used dialect and humour, was often profoundly gloomy but at the same time registered a deep spiritual awareness of the interrelatedness of all living things. Prewett’s novel was also imbued with this idea, as was his poem ‘I Went Out Into the Fields’ with its lines ‘And all things grieve, for we/One fabric are made.’ Unfortunately for Prewett, Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons’s townsperson’s critique of the rural novel genre, appeared just a year before The Chazzey Tragedy. Its biting, light-hearted satire of the raft of formulaic, gloom and dialectladen fiction spawned in the aftermath of Emily Bronte’s 1847 publication of Wuthering Heights, dealt rural literary writing a devastating blow in critical and popular circles. Arguably, only in recent decades has literary discussion of issues surrounding land, farming and the natural environment re-established itself, with the success of the ‘New Nature’ genre and the work of Cambridge University Fellow, Robert McFarlane.9 Prewett was attracted to the rural novel because it allowed for meaningful discussion of work, gender, disadvantage and class. The form also accommodated the fatalism which had characterized much of his previous work. The Chazzey

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Tragedy vacillated between a focus upon a community collectively oppressed by the clergy, the aristocracy and moneyed farmers, and a personal, psychological emphasis also found other fiction of the time. Fundamentally, Prewett’s novel was nostalgic. It was a paean to a lost peasant class and bemoaned the absence of a landed gentry that understood the importance of noblesse oblige. As Prewett explained in his introduction, ‘The problems of the village have come round again . . . we have exchanged a government of the aristocrat for a government of the demagogue.’ He traced the roots of this decline to the 1830s – ‘when the aristocracy first grew doubtful of its natural right to authority, when the Church successfully maintained its privileges, when the moneyed farmer supplanted the freeholder, and when the freeholder became a wage-labourer’. The problems of the present, the building boom upon green spaces, the increase in motor car use, the spread of industrialized farming, the loss of indigenous culture linked to the land, the spreading ugliness criticized in books, such as Clough Williams Ellis’s England and the Octopus (1928) and C. E. M. Joad’s The Horrors of the Countryside (1931), could all be traced back to mistakes made in this period.10 The Chazzey Tragedy was therefore both a history lesson and a call to consciousness. It was set in the days of ‘Captain Swing’, a symbolic figure whose name was ‘signed’ when threatening letters were sent to magistrates, farmers, parsons and others who supported the introduction of horse-drawn threshing machines, the collection of tithes from the rural poor and the enforcement of new, harsh agricultural work regimes. Arson was committed in Swing’s name. Farm workers from Sussex to Kent demanded better wages, food and general poor relief and an end to short-term contracts. As in Prewett’s generation, in the days of ‘Captain Swing’ the rural poor suffered because of post-war recession and competition for jobs from demobilized servicemen. Although more land was in fact enclosed in the English Midlands, uproar in the ‘Swing’ counties was linked to a wider process of parliamentary land enclosure which accelerated between 1770 and 1830. Overall, around six million acres of what had been common land used by the poor was transferred into the hands of large local landowners. As a result, rural folk became dependent upon this élite for wages and subsistence. In the same way that mechanization and new relationships to land were justified in Prewett’s day, these changes were carried out under slogans that claimed the coming of the new regime was inevitable and that it would bring improved productivity and better lives for all.11 Prewett’s novel was set near where he was living in a Chiltern village near Abingdon, then in Berkshire, and it made full use of local dialect. This was a choice the reviewer in The Sydney Morning Herald claimed created ‘a severe obstacle

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to understanding’, but in fact, the dialect used was far from impenetrable and impressively, the novel did not link depth of rural dialect to lack of intelligence, awareness or capability.12 Even the Herald was forced to admire Prewett’s two leading protagonists, the idealistic, legal-minded, ‘eedicated’ and peaceful Carter Costar on the side of the starving peasants, and his evil opposite number, Bob Lonsley. Lonsley aligned himself with the local squire rather than the peasants, and incited them to rick burning which led to their eventual brutal suppression. Although the Herald reviewer found the story an unrelentingly grim tale of insistent greyness, extreme starvation, savage assaults and frequent executions, this was an overreaction. There was, for example, only one execution, that of the flawed hero Costar who dies as a result of Lonsley’s machinations. An intrigue and power-obsessed social climber, Lonsley was not unlike another, later fictional character, Kenneth Widmerpool, the repulsive epitome of bureaucratic striving within Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time.13 Much in Prewett’s story echoed D. H. Lawrence, in particular Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover which was first published in Italy five years prior to The Chazzey Tragedy but not widely available in Great Britain until after the associated obscenity trial of 1960. In Prewett’s novel, Costar, the land-loving lead character, falls in love with Emily, a pretty, aristocratic squire’s daughter when they gently bind a colt’s injured foot. Like Lady Chatterley, young Emily finds such tenderness rooted in the natural world profoundly stimulating both politically and sexually. She tells her father that she grew up suddenly while learning about ‘life in the fields . . . while a man was taking a flint out of a colt’s foot’.14 As was the case for Constance Chatterley, the experience distanced Emily irrevocably from her family, particularly her father, who resembles Sir Clifford Chatterley in outlook. He has a dependent relationship with the governess he employs, much as Sir Clifford did with his housekeeper, Mrs Bolton. In Prewett’s novel, Emily’s father and her governess spend an inordinate amount of time alone together ‘translating Horace’, presumably a euphemism. Lawrence is said to have gotten the idea for the Chatterley cross-class love affair from witnessing Ottoline Morrell’s passion for a young stonemason who carved her garden statues at Garsington. Prewett may have gotten the same idea from the same source or from Lawrence himself. Certainly, The Chazzey Tragedy registers Lawrencian resentment at the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class and suggests that disconnection from the land and from meaningful work is detrimental to the lives of the privileged. Unlike in Lawrence’s

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novel however, in Prewett’s, cross-class love blossoming through awareness of nature is quickly squashed. Costar is unable to resist a local serving girl whom he gets pregnant and as a result Emily reverts to type, heartlessly letting her former lover be beaten in front of her. Costar eventually is hung on the scaffold, one of his supporters transported to the colonies, and the rest of those he led bought at a hiring fair and sold with the same inhumane casualness as were slaves at that time in the American South. Thomas Hardy’s anti-romantic influence was also evident in Prewett’s novel, particularly as exemplified in his 1895 novel Jude the Obscure. The Chazzey Tragedy shared the disdain evident in Jude for the hypocrisy and élitism of Oxford University, described by Hardy as a ‘castle, manned by scholarship and religion’. Prewett made his views about such advantage explicit by having a crew of Oxford ‘young gentlemen’ brought in by the Chazzey Squire beat up the starving local peasantry at the crucial juncture in their protest. One of the Oxford students remarks how much he abhors books and how thankful he is to be able to hand over the wretched things to a ‘sweat’, a man tasked with the tiresome work of reading and then producing essays on behalf of Oxford students. The squire, who is afflicted with intellectual aspirations, is shocked, but the parson explains with an easy smile that the practice is acceptable because ‘the University is concerned not only with scholarship, but with cultivating those other qualities which characterize our landed gentry, our statesmen and our administrators abroad’. Exhibiting such qualities, afterwards the students show remorse of sorts towards the labourers they have beaten up and buy them a great many drinks at the local pub on their way home.15 Lawrence and Hardy’s influence was also discernible in Prewett’s candour about things rarely discussed in print at that time such as sexual immorality and desire, human urges for personal power and glory and the venal horror of squalor felt by even the most morally worthy in society. The Chazzey Tragedy discussed rural prostitution casually, the hero Costar ‘revels in day-dreams of his own nobility in sacrifice’ and he impregnates the local barmaid purely to satisfy a lust that disgusts him. Meanwhile, the book’s heroine Emily is ultimately irritated and bored by the hovels of the poor: ‘There was no point, no purpose, no conclusion in anything said or done in the cottages. She was nauseated by the congestion, the slattern dirty clothes, the stale odours, the loud scolding monotonous talk.’16 Overall, the novel gave Prewett an important opportunity to explore his slowburning passion for farming life and its traditions of understanding. In this, his work resonated deeply with that of the popular Northamptonshire ruralist H. E.

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Bates, who portrayed the land as a living, responsive entity dynamically engaged with those who made a living upon it. Bates wrote in The Fallow Land in 1932: The land was something more than the earth; the earth was something vague, primitive, poetic; the land was a composite force of actual, living, everyday things, fields and beasts, seed-time and harvest, ploughing and harrowing, wind and weather; bitterness and struggle; the land was an opponent, a master.17

Prewett encapsulated and developed such thinking within a series of mesmeric, detailed portraits of seemingly simple rural activities such as moving livestock or calming a startled horse. His description of a labouring man stolidly going about the hacking, bending and binding needed to trim a hedge and then sort what resulted into usable materials so there was no waste, generated profound respect in the reader both for the work itself and for those with the capabilities to carry it out. The following excerpt gives a sense of how Prewett used descriptive style to mirror the methodical nature of the task itself: The hedge has been untrimmed for some fifteen years. Elm saplings had sprung up to twenty feet high, elders and brambles had spread some yards into the meadow, and, in places, the thorn had died, leaving gaps which had been stopped with bundles of branches. The labourer, first of all, cut away the brambles and trimmed the hedge to a smooth face on either side. Then he slashed the slim straight thorn, hazel and elm half through and, bending them flat, laced the smaller growth around them. Where there grew an abundance of strong wood, he cut out the biggest, trimmed it, and piled it on one side for firing. Where the hedge was thin he drove stout stems into the ground and laced the slashed horizontal growth into it. In front of him the hedge was rank and broken, behind him it was a tight, neatly-bound wall.18

This sort of careful, purposeful attention to the work of sustaining the rural landscape and implicit respect for those who kept up the skills with which to do so is a seam that runs throughout the novel. Elsewhere in the story, Prewett showed his understanding of the constant diligence and attention to detail needed to make a farm tick and be profitable. As one farmer reminds his manager before bedtime: ‘Good night, Bob, an’ do thee keep an eye on polishin’ the harnish and’ greasin’ the carts, an’ rub down the cows’ teats for thyself ‘a marnin, an’ do thee run a hand ower the hosses’ fetlocks; – ‘tis on they small things as a farm pays’. The tragedy within the novel is not so much the death of its flawed hero as the wider disaster of English society’s loss of respect for the land and its husbandry. Even the squire, whose financial interests are defended by events, feels this loss acutely and ends the novel unhappily. ‘I feel more than ever now’, the squire frets,

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‘that the landed interest of England, her mainstay for so long, must give way to the manufacturing class. I see a new England rising up, an England actuated and governed by money.’ He half-wishes Costar had won out: ‘I might have lost my property, even my life, but that wouldn’t have mattered, to avoid the death of the countryside.’ The condemned Costar experiences the same ‘death-in-life’ sensations that plagued Prewett post-war. Waiting in prison to be hung, Costar feels already dead and is tortured by a ghost version of himself – his ambitious, contending self that had cherished learning and worked to save his fellow labourers. This ‘insistent phantom . . . beckoned him out of his choking cell into the green fields and wide woodlands’. His ghost self terrifies Costar far more than the impending horror of his death by hanging. He fantasizes about getting free of it and in his final moments hurries the parson’s recitation for the condemned of the Lord’s Prayer. Costar ends the novel eager for death because he was ‘already dead beyond recall, except this flesh. He was not blind to those final agonies of the body, but they were nothing to the bliss of release from that phantom self.’19 In this way the president of the immortals ended his sport with Carter Costar, much as he had with Tess d’Ubervilles in Thomas Hardy’s novel of 1891.20

Publishing on country life, marriage and a son Next, Prewett moved to Henley-on-Thames in April 1934 to take on the influential role of inaugural editor of The Farmer’s Weekly. This is a publication whose iconic yellow pages may be familiar to readers from their role in the opening scenes of the successful British film Four Weddings and a Funeral. Prewett’s colleague from the institute, M. Messur, made the move with him. Owned by press barons Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere of Daily Express and Daily Mail fame, The Farmer’s Weekly began publication in June 1934, with the intention of addressing the interests of the large-scale, progress-orientated tenant farming class. Its strapline proclaimed it ‘the newspaper of the soil’. The first issue had an article from S. O. Ratcliff, president of the National Farmers’ Union, which set the newspaper’s tone as an important voice within British agriculture. Prewett was a true success as editor. The Farmer’s Weekly’s circulation was 75,000 each week five months after launch and it sold over 100,000 copies per issue throughout the 1930s. Prewett’s influence helped make the paper attractive and dynamic, not least because he gave it added dimension by having articles on country life through the ages. An associated Farmhouse Fare book was also

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released in 1935, full of recipes from country housewives, and this sold in the hundreds of thousands. However, disputes with the paper’s owners about how the publication should develop eventually led to Prewett walking out. Sometime late in 1935, he was persuaded by author and journalist J. W. Robertson Scott to take on the role of assistant editor at Idbury, Oxfordshire, of another magazine, The Countryman.21 Prewett had previously been a contributor, but now a full-time job gave him the chance to urge for governmental intervention to protect British farmers and their way of life on a new scale. The idea was that the The Countryman would be a unique, non-partisan forum where issues that really mattered in relation to agricultural policy were aired. Ironically, Scott’s magazine was associated by many with the notion that country life in England was idyllic, despite Scott himself having written a bestseller in 1925, England’s Green and Pleasant Land, that bemoaned the grim conditions at the time for most of those who worked the land. As in Prewett’s The Chazzey Tragedy, Scott was appalled at how taxes and death duties had caused a flurry of land sales and the break-up of large estates post-war. As a result, the moral/religious concept of stewardship over large parcels of land that had made life more tolerable for the working rural poor had gone into abeyance. Prewett felt he did a lot to put The Countryman on a proper footing, but found working with the people involved surreal and toxic. It is unlikely to have helped that Prewett was a hard-drinking, snuff-taking libertine and Scott a teetotaller. Prewett wanted to see a magazine in print that covered different ground from Country Life or Field, with a really worthwhile ‘high standard of thinking and production’. Given the subsequent and ongoing international success of the British magazine Country Life, his commercial instincts on this point were precisely wrong. He wanted ‘no sport, no gardening snippets, no scenery for scenery’s sake, no architecture except the important business of houses to live in’ and instead, ‘country character, humanised natural science and thoroughly practical knowledgeable articles on rural economics and society, giving a lead to national planning, some preservation and worthwhile improvement in local government and social conditions’.22 By 1937, Prewett and The Countryman had parted ways and he had set up his own rival publication nearby at Bourton-on-the Water. It was called Country Scene and Topic. He took with him from The Countryman his future wife, Dorothy Pollard, and Victor Bonham-Carter, a young writer who would become known for his books on rural and military themes. Country Scene and Topic lasted just three issues and the writers gained a reputation among the locals for sexual intrigue, likely because it was thought Prewett was still married to Madeline

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Clinkard when he began his relationship with Dorothy, whom everyone knew as Polly. Prewett and Polly eventually married in March 1939 at Chelsea and their son, William, was born in 1941.

Endings: Surviving but not escaping war According to Robert Graves, Prewett joined a bomb disposal squad in Birmingham during the Second World War, was later employed by the Air Ministry at H. Q. Fighter Command, and was sent as adviser to the Supreme Command in South-East Asia working as Mountbatten’s administrator for food distribution in the British Crown colony of Ceylon. While in Ceylon, which in 1948 achieved independence and became known as Sri Lanka, he continued to write poetry. One of his notable poems from this period was ‘Cold Loving’, an ode to the Cotswold from the tropics that set forth all the good feelings the area encapsulated for him. Prewett retired from the Air Ministry because of ill health in 1954 to live in a cottage in the village of Fifield, near Idbury with Polly and his son. According to the Canadian critic and writer Bruce Meyer, ‘Prewett spent his last years growing vegetables and cacti, raising tortoises and living in an unheated garden shed attached to his house in Fifield.’23 In March 1954, Prewett wrote to Taos, New Mexico, to tell his old Garsington artist friend Dorothy Brett that he had retired just a few weeks prior ‘with a faulty heart’. He remembered fondly the happiness at Garsington when they had both been young, but admitted he saw no-one they knew from those days. It was an isolation, Prewett wrote, ‘largely of my own choosing’. He told Brett, ‘You were true, where much was show.’24 Prewett ended his life tending his garden, taking false succor from the whisky glass. He bequeathed his poems to his Air Ministry colleague, Dr Mary Allan, hoping correctly that Graves would ensure they were published. Prewett considered his poems ‘his only true wealth’ and Graves, who numbered Prewett ‘among the few true poets’, felt it his duty to ensure that his friend’s work saw print. In his introduction to the poems, Graves contextualized Prewett explicitly as indigenous, noting, ‘Though he does not mention the strain of Iroquois blood in his mother’s family, it was manifest in his high cheek-bones, dark colouring, graceful walk, and fiery heart.’ It was rare, Graves lamented, to find a dedicated sensibility like Prewett’s in any age and particularly so in 1964.25 One of Prewett’s poems, ‘The Cloud Snake’, described crossing along the ridge road between the Cotswolds’s Windrush and Evenlode river valleys. It strongly

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suggests that the struggle to escape his depression and fear stemming from the war never left him. As with another of his exceptional poems ‘Kelso Road’, ‘The Cloud Snake’ invoked the dark thoughts sometimes conjured by the fading light at the end of a long walk. Significantly however, in this poem the poet described being able to make the transition from one vale to another, undaunted by the cold wind and blackness: As I came upon the hump of the wold I must cross in the sun’s afterglow, A black snake of cloud stretched itself on the ridge And I was afraid to brave it for the valley below. Beyond lay the lighted lowland where I would be, And lighted behind me was the sister vale: Dark only the ridge under the snake of cloud And cold the subtle east wind its tail. My shelter lies in the moonlight beyond, I am not daunted by a snake of black. So I run onward, so runs the cloud before, Trailing the frosted east wind in her track. The blue stars dance before me and behind, Beneath them I know the east wind is not cold. Do not freeze and fear me on this height, I only seek to pass from vale to vale of the wold.26

In its inscription of emotional and moral decisions onto the landscape, ‘The Cloud Snake’ is reminiscent of Robert Frost’s better known 1916 poem ‘The Road Not Taken’. Like Prewett, Frost was an unsuccessful farmer and at times a depressive, but sat out the war at a farm he bought in 1915 in Franconia, New Hampshire. In contrast, Prewett’s poem is that of a deeply scarred veteran, one only too aware of his insignificance in relation to the natural world. His poetic persona in ‘The Cloud Snake’ humbly overcomes fear in order to make a transition he compares to the journey through life into what lies beyond. Peace and the natural world took on ever deeper resonance for Prewett as he approached death. His poem ‘Plea for Peace’ stands as a warrior’s lament and a demand that what he experienced be avoided and the land be protected in future, at any cost. It reads: A steep valley overhung by trees And a ditch ripple, noiseless, nosing its way

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Where dwell all seasons quiet and at ease, Nor bird nor shine but comforting peace all day. Let the plain be bare, wide and lone That hides the valley, the noiseless rill: Brack be the water, slippery the stone So there be peace, peace and quiet still.27

Towards the end, Prewett attempted to dry out at a hospital at Craignure on the Isle of Mull.28 According to his son, Prewett and Dorothy reconciled prior to his death despite profound difficulties in their relationship, and she was by his bedside when he died on 16 February 1962 at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness. Prewett was buried nearby on the beautiful glacial ridge of Tomnahurich Cemetery. His gravestone is small, originally of white marble and located in the thirteenth lair at two removes from the cemetery’s most prestigious section.29 Prewett’s resting place is special, one of the most picturesque burial grounds in the UK with, when the trees permit, arresting views over Dalneigh and onward to Kessock Bridge. Its terraces are lined with the same Irish yews that so delighted Prewett at Garsington, along with eighteenth-century plantings of oak, beech, sycamore and Scots pine. Fittingly for someone whose war trauma made him so often sense the presence of death in life and sometimes feel dead himself while alive, the place where Prewett lies has been spoken of for many generations as somewhere the living and the dead interact. Sixty-five metres above Inverness plain, it is steeped in ancient lore and mystical stories. Its Gaelic name is Tom na h-lubhraich, meaning ‘Hill of the Yew Trees’. It has many of the topographical attributes of an ancient ritual site including cists, a prehistoric carved stone ball and a passage grave at nearby Dunain Woods dating from 3000 BC. Tomnahurich is where the thirteenthcentury prophet Thomas the Rhymer is held to have gained his gift for truth-telling from the Queen of the Elves and the site of a ‘sleeping hero’ tradition where the spectral army of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his Fenian men are said to sleep, ready to rise up and defend Scotland when they hear the call.30 It is also appropriate that Prewett rests alongside around 164 other graves of veterans including those of fellow Canadians. An impressive First World War memorial in the shape of a cross with an inverted sword presides at the very top of the cemetery hill. His gravestone bears the inscription, ‘Frank Prewett – Canadian Poet’. Frank ‘Toronto’ Prewett never escaped the war, but he survived it. As he explained in one poetic fragment: We are mad after thirty years We who live are mad in the peace

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I left my life there, kept its fears; From the regiment is no release.

On the battlefield Prewett considered himself at one with the men with whom he fought and with their deaths, on one level, he died too. He could never recapture the collective strength he felt as a member of a battalion, what he called ‘the thousand men who make a beast’. His poem ‘The Survivor’ ends: While the shells crashed we were strong Grenade and sniper we defied: Now I am old, stay overlong For in those many men I died.31

Prewett’s dream was to create a poetic vision of rural harmony rooted in indigenous values and to protect the British farming landscape he loved. Everything about land, farming and nature fascinated him, the rhythms of flora and fauna and the people who worked the soil and their language, wisdom and habits. His life’s work, as he put it, was ‘to translate the man to the fields and the fields to the man’.32 How might we evaluate such a complex individual – one so deeply embedded in war and its traumatic legacy, in colonial history, in love of the earth and of man working in balance with it? The task is all the more difficult in an age of borders, marked by the building of walls and the policing of boundaries within cultures and in relation to identity and its expression. Walls and borders are deemed necessary when migration poses a risk to established orders and relationships. Today’s mass migration of people is a case in point, but so too is the migration of sympathies, ideas, behaviours and ‘authentic’ truths. Prewett could easily be slotted into existing narratives about imposters or hoaxers, even though the extent to which the people around him really believed he was indigenous is uncertain. Certainly, he fits the description put forward by recent imposter analysts, notably Christopher L. Miller and Rosmarin Heidenreich. He could be described as an intercultural imposter, one who used a position of comparative dominance (although he would not have seen it that way) to pass himself off as a member of a less privileged group about whom there was a market for information and association. Viewed in these terms, Prewett is a cultural appropriator, yet another thief of sovereign identity rightfully owned by the peoples upon whose land his peoples settled. Yet making a list of such figures is difficult and messy because of the sympathy each member’s unique history generates and the legacies of racial,

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class, gender and economic oppression that lead to imposter behaviour. Heaping blame and opprobrium upon the head of the imposter risks re-inscribing the very ‘polarities of race’, to use Laura Browder’s phrase in her book Slippery Characters, that most of us now decry.33 Disrupting inequality through impersonation is an act of resistance, even if it also carries with it the potential to harm another group. This aspect is too often forgotten within analyses that revel in unmasking the heartache, lies and self-destructive behaviours that tend to accompany imposterism.34 Prewett decided to tell dominant groups a story they want to hear. There is a long history of indigenous peoples amusing themselves in this way, from the Caribs who told Columbus the gold and many-headed cannibals he sought existed just over the horizon, to the Torres Strait peoples who confirmed the preposterous racist notions of Rivers and his fellow academics. We could add to this list the young Samoans who told Margaret Mead they were as sexually promiscuous as her 1960s reading public wanted to be themselves, and the local West African who took money from the American writer Alex Haley with tales of an ancestor named Kunta Kinte. Intercultural love, theft and creativity are often intimately bound together. Arguably, the best writers consciously lose touch with their own identities in order to convince us of the greater truths inherent in their art. ‘Like it or not, all writers are ‘cultural impersonators’, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr, once said, reminding us that writing is often about making something true on one level using what is false on another. For the Garsington coterie, literature was entirely its own kingdom, a place of play and performance with its own hierarchies, laws and values. Such ideas link back to Aristotle and the sanction he bestowed upon mimesis and the pleasure it has always generated for humankind. ‘The poet’s task’, Aristotle said, ‘is to speak not of events which have occurred, but of the kind of events which could.’35 One way to get beyond the limits of what can be gained from delineating the contours of imposterism or active transculturalism, is to think instead about what underpins this designation and what it tells us about the modern condition. Prewett re-positioned himself as indigenous in the wake of profound grief, distress and sadness caused by war. He undertook a process of re-imagining, often a life-saving choice for those who survive histories too limiting from which to prosper or too traumatic to fully remember. In the conclusion that follows, Prewett’s poetry is contextualized in relation to transtemporal traditions of protest. It suggests that his war experiences are best understood in terms of ‘soft’ primitivism, an essential element of modernity.

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Prewett’s experience of trauma and his retreat into an adopted primitivist identity connects outwards to larger intellectual changes that characterized the years from the turn of the century until the 1930s. This conclusion contextualizes the wider transnational primitivist impulse of which Prewett’s behaviour was part and links it to seismic intellectual developments within the natural sciences, psychology and literature. Viewed through this larger lens, Prewett’s trauma poetry and adoption of an indigenous persona is brought into relief as an articulation of protest memory. The memories of trauma Prewett deployed worked to subvert and challenge national representations of the war. His expression of what I term ‘soft primitivism’ was a response to a need to recover an authentic self in the wake of combat-induced trauma and to resist aspects of modernity. It was a personal expression of nostalgia that used an adopted mythologized indigenous identity to resist a world that appeared to lack a recognizable link to the values of past.

Primitivism and intellectual change The First World War has routinely been portrayed as a threshold, a point of transition when historical change became more obvious than before. The approach was popular in the 1960s and was epitomized by Barbara Tuchman when she referred to the last gathering of Europe’s monarchy in 1910 at the funeral of Edward VII as a moment when ‘on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting’.1 According to British prime minister David Lloyd George, the war that ensued was a ‘deluge . . . a convulsion of nature . . . bringing unheard of changes in the social and industrial fabric’. The sense that this was an exceptional juncture in human history was also a theme within the poetry of the time, from Rupert Brooke’s militaristic cry ‘Now, God be thanked who has matched us with this His hour’ to Charles Sorley’s description of the war as ‘a chasm in time’.2 More recently, the idea that the war represented a profound

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break with all that had gone before has been critiqued as a myth linked to the popular books that appeared in the decade following the war’s end.3 However, extending the time frame of analysis beyond the war itself allows for recognition that fundamental cultural responses involving changes in values occurred in the decades surrounding the conflict that were reactions to profound scientific, intellectual, geopolitical and economic shifts. Elementary concepts which had previously guided human behaviour on earth were re-evaluated before, during and after the war years. This was a cultural change that reverberated across disciplinary and intellectual boundaries. For example, Newtonian notions of mathematical predictability and causality were displaced by a new awareness of a sub-atomic meta-world (via the work of Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac). This new conceptual world was mind-blowing, dynamic and relative and not comparatively stable, like the everyday. Cognizance of it transformed the world into an unseen river of constant change.4 By 1927, modernist quantum scientists, like modernist literary writers, were mulling over the slipperiness and unreliability of language as a vehicle for transmitting meaning. Niels Bohr, in dialogue with Werner Heisenberg, developed his contested idea of complementarity as a universal physical principle. It called into question the idea of reality in space-time and owed a debt to Albert Einstein’s work from the 1910s on wave-particle duality.5 Just as the sub-atomic world could not be experienced directly, neither could the idea of an unconscious reality. Sigmund Freud was explicit about this correspondence between the behavioural and physical sciences as early as 1900. He wrote: The unconscious is the true psychical reality: in its inner nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.6

Some were convinced such new knowledge heralded potential disaster. In 1919 William Butler Yeats prophesied ‘The Second Coming’ and decreed, ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’, while Oswald Spengler’s two 1914–17 volumes, translated in 1926 as The Decline of the West, described the period as the dismal end not just of German supremacy but of the whole 1,000-year-old Western cultural project, including the United States. Not everyone knew about or accepted these developments, but a cloud of awareness settled like dust in the most far-flung and surprising places. Freud,

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Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler were producing influential work that suggested that humans were controlled not by moral and rational forces, but by immoral and irrational ones. These ideas owed a debt to Fredrich Nietzsche and his work from the 1880s dismantling the idea of a unified self or ‘I’.7 The overall message was that man was more prone to primitive desires and impulses than had been supposed. His was an animal, multiple nature, rather than a discretely human and morally cohesive one. The repressed unconscious was liable to erupt, rather in the way populations subjugated by superior nations were prone to rebel and overthrow their masters. Thus, Freud called the unconscious ‘an aboriginal population of the mind’. The metaphor invoked the repeated uprisings exposed in the popular press – the ‘Great Rebellion’ in British India of 1857, the Irish Fenian Rising of 1867, the Herero and Nama peoples’ uprising in southwestern Africa from 1830 to 1907, and the late-nineteenth-century Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche wars in the United States.8 Fear about Western decline was linked to a raft of modernist re-evaluations of cultures previously thought of as ‘primitive’ and inferior. The desire swelled to seek solace in versions of primitive or ‘previous’ cultures. Such a desire is in Vorticism, is part of the Dadist project, helps explain Gauguin in Tahiti, the Expressionist love of ‘primitive’ art, Bartok recording folk songs in Hungary and Romania at the beginning of the century, Delacroix’s attraction to desert Arabs, the artistic obsession of the Bridge group with versions of African art and Tolstoy and Kandinsky’s delight in Russian peasantry. The impulse to retreat into some version of the pre-modern characterized the behaviour of many after the First World War, including key thinkers such as Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Pound, who had a particular hunger for the ideal and was not himself a combatant, was convinced that the best had died in the war ‘For an old bitch gone in the teeth. For a botched civilization.’9 In the United States, despite indigenous numbers reaching an all-time low of 248,000 at the beginning of the century, the desire to ‘salvage’ their cultures and somehow acquire the personality-sustaining aspects of their communities led to a mania for collecting indigenous materials for domestic interior design, for commercial entertainment and to advance the museum movement. A similar impulse to reconnect with lost sensuality and vigour also fed an obsession within dominant culture for jazz music and African American communities in Harlem. These cultural and intellectual developments happened at a critical juncture in the shift towards American domination of the globe, a point when the United States’ colonial dividend and shrewd geopolitical actions gave it unique economic leverage. The war made America the world’s banker and allowed

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Wall Street to profit on an unprecedented scale from Allied war debt.10 The world’s moral, political and social focus gradually began to orientate around an America whose isolationism subsequent to the war accentuated the ongoing flow of benefit towards it. By the late 1920s, the dollar took over from the pound as the key international currency and a global financial system that had been unprepared for financial calamity in 1914 changed forever. The war made manifest how fundamentally interconnected the world’s financial markets had become, a reality whose implications we continue to reckon with as the ramifications of the financial meltdown of 2007/8 and pandemic lockdowns that began in 2020 continue to play out.11 The best minds of the era sensed aspects of incipient or actual change on multiple levels. As early as 1910, Virginia Woolf noted that convention within society had fundamentally altered. ‘All human relations have shifted’, Woolf wrote ‘– those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.’ She was aware of a pervasive new personal vision present in all classes, a desire for art and ‘things of the spirit’ at a time of trade union unrest, suffragette agitation, parliamentary rows over taxation and coming revolt in Ireland. As she saw it, ‘the prevailing sound of the Georgian age’ was ‘the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction’.12 The texture Woolf gave during this period to awareness of the self, to shifts in the personal internal comprehension of the real, was her great gift to thought.13 Her acuity about amorphous yet pervasive cultural change linked backwards to another keen observer of his times, William Morris. His 1890 utopian novel, News From Nowhere, had dreamt of a world liberated from the divisions that beset the times, alienated every class from its wider community, kept most in abject wage slavery and prevented them from enriching communion with unpolluted nature. Tellingly, Morris has his cheerful and deeply physically engaged citizens of a future utopia refer to each other routinely as ‘neighbour’. It was this sense of community, shared purpose and understanding that by the late Victorian period seemed relegated to the past. Although Woolf and others were aware of continuities with the previous Victorian era, many thinkers from the beginning of the century felt they were, as D. H. Lawrence put it, ‘smashing the frame’.14 Even seemingly small things were recognized as indicative of the new outlook. For example, when Leonard Woolf returned to England from Ceylon in 1911, he marvelled that middle- and upper-class people had begun to use Christian names instead of surnames and now kissed each other when they met instead of shaking hands.15 This was an

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everyday lessening of social distance representative of different understandings of right relationship between groups and individuals. Such changes in sensibility and consciousness were changes war crystallized rather than instigated. The war was not a simple watershed, but Philipp Blom’s characterization of the immediate pre-war years as a time of vertigo, velocity and cultural instability and of the post-war world in the West as somehow irrevocably fractured, nevertheless captures something important. The nation in 1914 was not unlike a pot about to boil over. As a famous, mocking book published in the mid-1930s pointed out with an excess of force, in England the war worked to preserve hierarchies that were facing energetic attack in 1914.16 Social, political and cultural unease was reflected in the voices of a number of influential establishment figures who cried out for a means of making pure again conditions that seemed sordid and in need of reorganization. For example, the then-mature art critic Edmund Gosse hoped in 1914 that – ‘the flashing of unsheathed sword’, might serve as ‘sovereign disinfectant’, a means of purging art and everything else of hedonism and decay. The same impulse underpinned the popular war sonnet ‘Peace’ by Rupert Brooke. As is well known, Brooke imagined soldiers ‘as swimmers into cleanness leaping’. Even Wilfred Owen admitted in an 8 August 1914 letter, ‘it is true that the guns will affect a little useful weeding’.17 This impulse, to leave behind the stagnant, the fetid and the cloying and to find redemption in battle, was linked to wider issues that seemed politically, socially and culturally intractable. To many, there were problems that were wholly unresolvable by conventional means, part of a malaise that could be sensed across the globe. As Thomas Mann put it in August 1914, ‘This worldat-peace, which has now collapsed with such a shattering uproar – weren’t we all basically fed up with it? Hadn’t it turned rotten from sheer comfort?’ Postwar, Ernst Jünger wrote of the same ennui, which produced, he felt, a desire for corpses. ‘A long period of law and order, such as our generation had behind it, produces a real craving for the abnormal, a craving that literature stimulates. Among other questions that occupied us was this: what does it look like when there are dead lying about?’18 In sum, this was a juncture when key figures were ‘moved by the past’ in Eelco Runia’s configuration of the term. That is, they actively desired a headlong plunge into group becoming and deliberately sought out discontinuity with what had gone before.19 Much of what men such as Gosse wanted to see displaced came to be identified as German modernism, but it was part of English culture too. This is not to suggest that the disparate impulses for change at this time were evident in different countries in the same way or with the same force (arguably

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modernism as conventionally defined was much further advanced in France and Germany in 1914 than in Britain), or to suggest that modernist desires were felt only by élites and that no dialogue existed between high and popular culture. Furthermore, there is little evidence of an impulse to discard everything about the past instantly. To the contrary, folk art in Europe or aspects of ‘primitive’ culture were actively sought out as a means to resist or smash the stultifying conventions of the nineteenth century.

Primitivism and The Rite of Spring Primitivism was at the heart of a supreme artistic creation of the war years, the 1913 ballet about primeval blood sacrifice, The Rite of Spring. It premiered at the exquisite Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris performed by Igor Stravinsky’s company, the Ballets Russes. Its music was perhaps the most important single piece of the twentieth century and it exploded the whole edifice surrounding how music communicated. Instead of the languid elegance characteristic of classical works such as Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the audience was confronted by pounding, syncopated rhythms, weird tonality, odd metre, displaced, dissonant musical accents and jarring, bent, toes-inwards, jerking, staccato choreography performed and dreamt up by Vaslav Nijinsky. He danced en pointe, something few other males did at the time. His choreography, combined with Léon Bakst’s sumptuous setting, Stravinsky’s harmonically consistent but disconcerting music and Serge Diaghilev’s production of a story all about death, caused a near-riot. Reportedly, the police were called. The prime mover in the ballet’s genesis was Russian designer Nicholas Roerich, later nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize because of his work fostering international agreement on the conservation of heritage. A spiritual seeker, synthesizer and bridge-builder across world traditions, he was an exceptional amalgam of occultist, anthropologist, folklorist, archaeologist, historian and painter. The Roerich Museum in New York today remains devoted to him as a painter and devotee of knowledge and beauty. His vision for the ballet stemmed in great part from his study of a twelfth century compendium of early pagan customs known as the Primary Chronicle and Alexander Afanasyev’s mid-nineteenth-century work on pre-Christian history and Russian fairy tales.20 Roerich never intended the ballet be received as an attack upon haute bourgeois culture, nor did he intend for its choreography to be understood as a crime against grace, Western self-discipline, sexual morality and order. He had

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originally named the ballet ‘The Great Sacrifice: A Tableau of Pagan Russia’ with the intention of showing the sacrifice of a virgin girl before the elders of her group in an attempt to propitiate the gods of Spring. The Rite of Spring as performed set out to invert and explode what had gone before, to take ballet beyond its élite classical Italian and French forms and join it elementally with the ancient, the collective and the primitive. Thus, no pointe shoes or pink slippers, only dancers in bearskins with long braids, simple cloths and painted faces looking like Native American Indians from the Great Plains in traditional garb. Stravinsky said that when the idea for the ballet first appeared to him in a dream, he had imagined dancers ‘rolling like bundles of leaves in the wind’ at its convulsive beginning, and towards its end, ‘stomping like Indians trying to put out a prairie fire’.21 Even though the square-toed dancers danced to music with polyrhythms interpreted at the time as being African, primitivist notions about Plains Native Americans and their link to nature were creatively significant. ‘I want the whole of my work’, Stravinsky wrote to the Russian Musical Gazette in 1912, ‘to give the feeling of the closeness between men and the earth, the closeness between the lives of men and the soil, and I sought to do this through a lapidary rhythm’.22 Like fellow composer Maurice Ravel, Stravinsky was a member of Les Apaches, a group of predominantly homosexual artists and intellectuals formed around 1900. They took their name from a violent Parisian street gang known for mugging the middle class who in turn had been given the name because their lawlessness mirrored what the public had learnt of indigenous American Apachean peoples in dime novels and newspaper reports. The last Apachean band to be hunted down and made to abandon their nomadic lifestyles were forced to settle in Oklahoma Territory in 1886. They were led by the Bedonkohe shaman known as Geronimo or ‘Goyathlay’. Cochise or ‘Cheis’, another famous Chiricahua Apache, had led a further spectacular uprising in 1861. The European public learnt almost nothing from the media of the specifics of these reciprocally violent stages in non-indigenous colonization.23 However, given Stravinksy’s membership of Les Apaches and Roerich’s transnational cultural sensibility, it is unlikely that the creative intention behind the The Rite of Spring ballet was simplistic. Much of the negative contemporary response to the ballet, as well as Modris Eksteins’s response to it some seventy-six years later in his book, The Rite of Spring, revolved around primitivist fears of the cultural Other, rather than Roerich or Stravinsky’s intention. Roerich had sought to capture something of ‘the beautiful cosmogony of earth and sky’ and to depict ancient man welcoming life-giving spring through

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sacrificing to Yarilo, the Sun God. Audiences reacted as they did because they comprehended almost nothing of the ritual and ceremony within the ‘primitive’ context presented. They came expecting to see dance within a European tradition they understood and instead were presented with representations of the sacred within a cultural matrix about which they knew nothing. They reacted to an artistic message that seemed to say that life and death was decreed by fate, that violence was necessary for the regeneration of the group, and that existence itself was tragic and amoral. The violent response to what was performed on stage was rooted primarily in the audience themselves rather than in what was depicted. It was a disjuncture Roerich remarked upon: I remember how during the first performance the audience whistled and roared so that nothing could even be heard. Who knows, perhaps at that very moment they were inwardly exultant and expressing this feeling like the most primitive of peoples. But I must say, this wild primitivism had nothing in common with the refined primitiveness of our ancestors, for whom rhythm, the sacred symbol, and refinement of gesture were great and sacred concepts.24

The ballet triggered and reflected a long-standing European and Euro-American desire to find a set of projected characteristics in others they did not wish to acknowledge in themselves. These characteristics were socially problematic and included the desire for abandoned and promiscuous sex, for murder and for the opportunity to act collectively without morals as an unthinking human herd. The best way to understand The Rite of Spring is to apply the thinking of psychologist Melanie Klein. She described how individuals in groups can come to see others not as people with histories and cultural contexts discrete from their own, but as aspects of themselves they do not wish to own. A ‘schizoid depersonalization’ occurs that demonizes the other but saves the individual within the group from radical and painful introspection.25 The cultural reaction to The Rite of Spring was an acute expression of just such a set of primitivist impulses and projected imaginings.

Protest memory and trauma poetry Prewett’s primitivism was also bound up with the desire for change. His trauma poetry articulated protest memory in the sense that it set out to counter dominant narratives and alter the future. Such a protest impulse was easier to discern after

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1917, as Edmund Blunden pointed out. He wrote: ‘[T]here could scarcely have been one mind in a hundred thousand that did not rebel’, but at the beginning of the war such disquiet was silenced by inner voices that whispered, ‘You can’t – the battalion depends on you’, or perhaps, ‘Nerves – will you give way?’ By 1917, Blunden explained, ‘the articulate voice of rebellion was heard’ and by then, ‘it was high time’. Blunden was yet more explicit about the centrality of protest within the war literature of the times when he reflected in the 1930s. ‘Most of this literature has been in prose, and in protest’; he wrote, ‘and still, there is need for protest, and though Journey’s End arouse the sympathies of millions from London to Tokyo there is need’.26 Prewett’s trauma poetry was a form of protest because it sought to update symbols rather than add to what Paul Ricoeur calls the ‘sedimented symbolism’ of a romanticized past and to record counter-memories that were intended to force a reframing and refocusing of the war. Prewett’s emphasis upon the local, the immediate, the personal and psychological demanded revision of things held up as universal within national representations.27 It was an example of the ageold creative concern for better forms of truth, for what D. H. Lawrence called ‘pure, passionate experience’. Lawrence articulated the laser-like desire the war prompted for better, more accurate representation with increasing vehemence as the war dragged on. ‘The essence of poetry with us in this age of stark and unlovely actualities’, he wrote, ‘is a stark directness, without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection anywhere. Everything can go, but this stark, bare, rocky directness of statement, this alone makes poetry, today.’28 What Lawrence described had antecedents in previous decades. Walt Whitman had practiced it after his experience of the suffering caused by the American Civil War. He spent three years as a volunteer tending to the wounded in the Washington hospitals near the battlegrounds in Virginia and Maryland after his brother was wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. He made over 600 visits, giving out affection and ice-cream to men who were part of what would ultimately be six million sick and 400,000 wounded and injured on the Union side.29 In 1864, the experience contributed to Whitman suffering a physical and emotional breakdown, but it also became the tap root of his body of work. He said of his seminal collection Leaves of Grass, ‘my Book and the War are one’. It led his readers into intimate connection with the suffering wrought by a war where unparalleled death and casualty were magnified by poor hygiene and limited medical knowledge. ‘Whoever you are’, Whitman wrote, ‘follow me without noise, and be of strong heart’.30 His focus was bodies tortured by violence and the ultimate democracy of suffering and death, but throughout,

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he remained a supporter of the Union cause who recognized the necessity of war. His Drum-Taps set of poems grew from his time bringing consolation to the wounded and was published in 1868 as part of the collection Poems of Walt Whitman. His work was read by many in Germany and Britain during the war and admired by Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Harold Munro, Ivor Gurney and Frank Prewett.31 The group conventionally known as the modern war poets are torchbearers of Whitman’s tradition, a tradition dedicated not to a simplistic antiwar message, but to testifying to the soldier’s suffering and to giving voice to those whose stories would otherwise not be heard. Key figures within this group communicated a record of hardship and trauma that was a protest against what war entailed, but not a blanket condemnation of the need for war or a denigration of the political commitments its soldiers fought and died for. Rather, the work of poets such as Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Frank Prewett was subversive in that it intended to bring records of experience to bear upon the assumptions of militarism. The literary articulation of protest memory must not be confused with pacifism.32 Dr H. R. Rivers expressed this nuance formally in relation to Sassoon, noting in 1917 that his ‘shell-shocked’ patient was not an ‘ordinary pacifist’ because ‘he would no longer object to the continuance of the War if he saw any reasonable prospect of a rapid decision’.33 The number of absolute literary pacifists of note in this period was small. Ottoline Morrell’s pacifism was rooted in her Christian beliefs and she and her husband were against war as a means of resolving disputes, as were Frances and Ralph Partridge. However, most often those now thought of as within the orbit of the ‘Bloomsbury group’ objected to the First World War on moral and political grounds, but not in an absolutist sense. Even Bertrand Russell, who was disgusted by war, was never dogmatic in the pacifism he espoused. The irony of his 1918 prison sentence for violating the Defence of the Realm Act was that it came just as his pacifism was becoming more limited. As he eventually characterized it, his stance towards the war was simply ‘one of intense and passionate protest’.34 Lytton Strachey, who physically was among the weakest of the Garsington-Bloomsbury set, endured considerable risk to make clear that he was not an absolute pacifist. Although it could have meant prison, Strachey refused to say that there were no circumstances under which he would fight. Instead, he maintained his conscientious objection to this Great War and the specific way it was being promulgated. Almost all of the well-known literary figures associated with protest over the management and nature of the First World War remained committed to fighting

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for their country. In contrast, consistent, principled pacifist writers who made deep sacrifices for that cause such as Max Plowman, author of A Subaltern on the Somme, have never received widespread consideration and did not produce comparable bodies of work.35 Sassoon, as discussed in this volume, returned to fight in 1918 after his famous protest; Graves, who said of himself, ‘I’m a sound militarist in action however much of a pacifist in thought’, tried to join the Royal Welch Fusiliers once again in 1939; Prewett served again in the Second World War; even Edmund Blunden, who loathed war and the army and who remained haunted by what he had experienced and wracked with survivor guilt, joined up again in 1940 to teach at Oxford University’s Officer Training Corps.36 Other important voices, such as Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Francis Ledwidge died in battle fully cognisant of the odds. A number of ‘tragedy’ poets were decorated for bravery, notably Sassoon and Owen. Owen was awarded a Military Cross (M.C.) for capturing a significant number of prisoners and a German machine gun after most of his company had been killed on 4 October 1918. He died facing heavy machine gun fire trying to make a bridge so his company could cross the Sambre Canal. Sassoon also won an M.C. early in 1916 for saving the wounded from no-man’s land and for capturing a trench full of Germans. For a number of soldier poets, the sort of intensity and sense of sacrifice attached to battle by early poets such as Rupert Brooke was an anathema. Charles Sorley, for example, deplored how Brooke’s poems overplayed the necessity of duty – what he called ‘merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances’. He went on to explain, ‘it was not that they gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them.’37 Granular study of Prewett and his post-war social and literary milieu reveals something other than the either/or mode of thought, by which reckoning historical figures are either for the war or against it, of the ‘masses’ or against them, a swallower of propaganda or an arch enemy of nationalism. Instead, perhaps a majority of the best known ‘war poets’ emerge as complex thinkers, capable of conceptualizing in terms of both/and. That is, they could both object to what war involved and continue to risk their lives in support of it. They could abhor the obscene irony of a war of unprecedented technological violence being talked of with the high diction of the past, but still testify to the value of comradeship and take solace in older languages of loss and consolation. The best war writing from this perspective, in both poetic and prose form, was not emptied of all values, merely of empty ones.38 Thus the Imagist poet T. E.

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Hulme could criticize pacifists and the General Staff, and characterize the war as ‘a necessary stupidity, but still a stupidity’. Hulme saw the need to fight, in this case the need to defeat Prussian militarism, as a requirement comparable to the need to build walls as a defence against the encroachment of the sea. He died from receiving a direct hit from a shell in 1917. Owen, who was killed in action the following year, had an equally complex understanding of his role within war, calling himself ‘a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience’.39

Yeats and the exclusion of protest memory This central theme of protest embedded in immediacy of experience was at the heart of W. B. Yeats’s distaste for the bulk of the poetry produced by those who fought and explains his exclusion of Owen’s work from the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Although the volume included four poems by Sassoon, these were comparatively bloodless and leant more towards elegy than realism. Thinking in depth about Yeats’s devaluation of the poetry rooted in the First World War soldiers’ experience brings their creative innovations into focus and gives Prewett’s poetic contribution broad critical context. Garlanded with the Nobel Prize for poetry in 1923, Yeats was an establishment yet aspirant figure in the 1920s. This partly explains the painter Mark Gertler’s reaction when he encountered him at Garsington. ‘I have never met a more pompous and theatrical humbug of an Irishman than Yeats. I escaped from the room as quick as I could.’ A middle-class, Protestant, Southern Irishman, Yeats’s rise was linked to his associations with the gentry. He used his genius, as one lady remarked perceptively, to make a gentleman of himself.40 By 1916, he had even managed to buy a Norman tower in southern Galway in which to live called Túr Bail’ I Liaigigh, or to give it the phonetic English name Yeats preferred, Thoor Ballylee. This tower was part of an Irish estate where Yeats had always felt deeply at home, itself a remnant of the British empire, the small Georgian mansion of Lady Gregory where he spent most of his summers from 1897 until her death in 1932. Despite Yeats having a sense of irony about owning Túr Bail’ I Liaigigh, the property is symbolic of wider cultural and aesthetic conflicts that help explain his reticence about acknowledging the value of Owen’s poetry and that of a number of other protest poets. To Yeats, the true poet was an independent voice, a spiritual intellectual, whose attention should be trained to the loftiest of objectives including the quest to tap into the great unity of being that was said to encompass the universe.

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He therefore disdained the protests of middle-rank soldier poets of the British empire. Employing the sort of logical inversion favoured by Oscar Wilde, Yeats held that tragedy should lead a poet to joy, ‘passive suffering’ was simply not an appropriate theme. For Yeats, Owen and poets like Prewett were overly concerned with hurt and the immediate, personal nature of combat. As Yeats put it in a 1911 essay, ‘Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.’ Pity, a central theme for Owen, had none of these attributes. For Yeats, pity was simply a passing grace, to use a phrase of H. G. Wells’s character Mr Britling in the 1914 novel that bears his name.41 As such, pity was a fruitlessly transitory avenue for the poet, who should be set instead upon the noble quest of achieving the transgenerational, the interpersonal and the utopian. The same romance prompted the critic and sometime Garsington habitué John Middleton Murray to declare that Sassoon’s poetry expressed ‘nothing, save so far as a cry expresses pain’. It is noteworthy that neither figure experienced combat: Murray was declared medically unfit and Yeats was forty-nine in 1914. Both considered the raw expression within First World War combat poetry ephemeral, not a harbinger of trends for the future. They deemed Owen and his fellow poets simple propagandists, not figures making the poetic form their own at a crucial juncture, creating in poetry ‘a momentary stay against confusion’ in the face of newly unleashed forces, in Robert Frost’s phrase. Yet Yeats sensed that their form of immediacy was revolutionary and betrayed this suspicion in his belittlement of Owen as a ‘sandwich-board man of the revolution’. However, in dismissing the poetry of First World War trauma, both Yeats and Murray forgot poetry’s ancient roots as history and its important role within world oral traditions as an aid to the memorization of warnings. This legacy is at least as old as the third millennium Epic of Gilgamesh and the Greek Illiad. Instead, Yeats advocated forgetting, arguing ‘it is best to forget [war’s] suffering as we do the discomfort of fever’. In so doing, he advanced a twentieth-century process that has made poetry increasingly subcultural and inward-facing. He helped displace the central mission of the poet: to use literacy to raise the awareness of the nation or, as Stéphane Mallarmé put it, to provide ‘a purer meaning to the words of the tribe’.42 Yeats’s attraction to essences and élites meant the complexity and ambivalence of much British First World War poetic testimony appeared unsavoury to him. It brought to the fore questions about the nature of war, national identity, leadership and social authority that he preferred be left out of the poetic realm and about which he changed his own stance sometimes from poem to poem. Poetry’s

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task, in his view, was to make history, not to concern itself with pain. This was both a political and an aesthetic choice. Yeat’s version of Irish nationalism and national liberation was not one that could readily acknowledge the Great War as a shared Irish experience where 65,000 Catholics and 53,000 Protestants fought on the same side. Thoroughgoing engagement with Owen’s poetry would have made this shared suffering much harder to sidestep. Yeats could position himself relative to civil war and post-colonial conflict, but his vision faltered when confronted with the political, psychic and aesthetic complexities and dualities that accompany war on a global, mechanized, transnational scale. Poetry, for the great pathfinder of the modern form, was a ‘high horse’ that became ‘riderless’ without the simplicity of binary romantic distinctions.43 Robert Graves, also of Irish extraction, rankled at this sort of romanticism. He laughed at Yeats’s pretensions and refused Yeats’s permission to reprint any of his poems in the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Graves and Riding also made fun of the lack of ‘reality’ in Yeats’s famous poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, wittily quibbling that linnets are not in fact found flying about in the day and furthermore, the keeping of beehives in ‘nine bean rows’ is unsafe.44 Yeats, in sum, clung to notions of noble sacrifice that some of the strongest poetic voices arising from the war era sought to unseat. To have embraced the work of writers such as Owen, Sassoon and Prewett would have required that Yeats wed the wild spirit of his imagination to concrete fact, a task his father, in exasperation, suggested he address in 1921.45 In contrast, Owen’s primary concern was with truth-telling and poetry came second to the larger imperative to warn about the reality of war. ‘The true poets’, as both he and Prewett maintained, ‘must be truthful’. For Owen, this was a political and critical choice arrived at through reading Sassoon’s ‘trench life sketches’. They led Owen to a complete re-prioritization. ‘Shakespeare reads vapid after these’, he wrote, ‘I think if I had the choice of making friends with Tennyson or with Sassoon I should go to Sassoon.’46 Yeats’s dismissal of Owens’s work prompted contemporary comment, but the notion that great literature should concern itself only with the universal, that suffering was personal and therefore could not generate solidarity, was prevalent at the time. Even so, the question of how increasing awareness of suffering could be reconciled within modern life recurred. For example, it was mulled over by the character Mr Scogan in Aldous Huxley’s 1921 comic novel, Crome Yellow, a book held to be about the artistic set that surrounded Ottoline Morrell at Garsington during the war. One character, Mr Scogan, thought of as an amalgam of the writer H. G. Wells, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and

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the writer Norman Douglas, was a committed rationalist who pondered how hardened the world had become to suffering following the war. ‘The Black and Tans harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti slaughter their poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted.’ He went on: At this very moment, the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.

Scogan admits to the book’s gormless hero that although at the beginning of the war he imagined he felt some sort of empathy and fellow feeling for those who fought on his behalf, after a few months he was forced to admit that in fact he felt nothing of the sort. ‘One is always alone in suffering’; he intoned, ‘the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.’47 It was against just such a compartmentalizing of experience that protest poetry rebelled. The questions it raised about the relationship of suffering and sacrifice to national well-being were as pertinent during the First World War as they were when Voltaire published Candide in 1759 in the midst of the Seven Year’s War, another conflict that involved all of Europe’s major powers. When Voltaire’s character Candide realizes the globally interconnected nature of human suffering, he is forced to reconfigure his faith in Panglossian optimism. This happens after he meets a slave who has been mutilated and pinioned to the ground by his Dutch slave trader master. The slave explains to Candide and his servant Cacambo that his hideous condition ‘is the price of the Sugar you eat in Europe’.48 Voltaire in Candide, like Sassoon, Blunden, Gurney, Graves and Prewett within their poetry, was urging his readers to connect silos of experience, to link national policies with individual human distress. The point was not to revel in relating the experience of suffering, but to foster a new realization of interconnectedness through literature. After experiencing combat and reading Sassoon’s poetry, Owen knew in a visceral and corporal sense that creative writing needed to be in intimate interrelationship with human pain and with the great, concrete realities that weigh upon human choices. Sassoon’s poems were a watershed, in Owen’s mind, unlike anything that ‘has ever been written or ever will be written’ that displaced and made antique every prior critical lodestone. Owen sought poetry’s return to

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its oral and social roots and its liberation from the cultural pedestal upon which it had been placed and once there, grown abstract, ahistorical and utopian. Yeats, therefore, made a specific choice in disconnecting this deeply modern imperative from the literary enterprise embodied in the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. The protest poetry of the First World War was moral and didactic, on one level an exemplary fulfilment of Matthew Arnold’s assertion that poetry is ‘a criticism of life’. As a poet and critic, Arnold had heralded a new phase of slippage between the literary and the moral in the Victorian era, but the soldier poets of the first global conflict demanded that the moral and actual no longer be parsed separately from the literary and the beautiful. They reflected ‘a main movement of the mind’ in culture, to use Arnold’s phrase, within the Anglophone sphere.49

Soft primitivism Frank Prewett is an instructive example of one man’s response to modernity as he experienced it during and after the First World War – a retreat into a mythologized version of the primitive. Ironically, such recourse most often serves to advance many of the same modernizing processes that made the original recourse appear attractive. This phenomenon, whereby modernity advances through a process of flow and lesser counterflow, was convincingly illustrated in the American context by T. J. Jackson Lears in his study of antimodernism from 1880 to 1920. Lears traced an American shift from a Protestant to a therapeutic world view that was reinforced by antimodern sentiment. However, at the same time, this shift served hegemonic needs that required Americans accept routinized work and bureaucratic rationality. The modern search for authenticity, which Lears characterizes as a ‘vision of the self in endless self-development’, was in fact ‘perfectly attuned to an economy based on pointless growth and ceaseless destruction’. There are, of course, other readings of the impact of antimodern and primitivist impulses, but Lears is undoubtedly right that the individualized nature of primitivist dissent within modernity works to limit and disperse its ultimate impact.50 In adopting an indigenous identity as his own in the wake of his traumatic experiences during the first global technological war, Prewett enacted and articulated soft cultural primitivism. That is, he articulated a form of unquietness about how things had become that has been a constant within the Western tradition. Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas recognized primitivism as a

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cultural constant in 1935 in Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, but struggled to define it. ‘Cultural primitivism’, Lovejoy and Boas explained, is ‘the discontent of the civilized with civilization, or with some conspicuous and characteristic feature of it. It is the belief of man living in a relatively highly evolved and complex cultural condition that a life far simpler and less sophisticated in some or all respects is a more desirable life.’51 Boas traced cultural primitivism back as far as the Greek Cynics and their quest for freedom. They held closeness to nature, since it offered greater freedom from societal norms, as an ideal.52 ‘Soft’ and ‘strong’ forms of cultural primitivism link to the development of modernity as both a reaction to it and as constitutive of it. Both relate to specific understandings of time and to mankind’s desire to use the past to affect the future. ‘Strong’ primitivism reflects the desire to thrust forward by deliberately going backwards, by forcefully recreating or reinstating the past. Since the past can never be precisely re-created or fully recalled, this inevitably leads to the imposition of an invented version of the past upon the present. Examples of strong primitivism include Nazi Germany and the contemporary ISIS (Islamic State) regime. In each case, there is an attempt to enforce a version of an idealized past within the present. For Nazi sympathizers, this has been a Teutonic vision of regeneration through eugenics; for ISIS, it is a version of the seventh century CE.53 Soft primitivism is a symptom of the individual’s need to find a personal connection to an authenticity felt to be prevalent in the past but lacking in the present. Ultimately, however, it circulates within sets of cultural and other markets that serve modernity’s purposes.54 Both soft and strong primitivism are likely to become psychologically unsatisfying because the idea of the primitive is a category and a temporal concept, rather than a dynamic way of being. The search to recover varieties of primitivism, whether by broadly imposing a version of it upon the present (strong) or by choosing to adopt selected aspects of it within modernity (soft) is doomed to fail because the true focus of concern is not with the past at all, but with needs and absences felt by the modern self.

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Notes Introduction 1 They are ‘figures of memory’ in Jan Assman’s phrase. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: Beck, 1977). 2 Robert Graves, ‘Introduction’, in The Collected Poems of Frank Prewett, Frank Prewett (London: Cassell, 1920), viii. 3 The phrase describing Ottoline Morrell as ‘the daughter of a thousand earls’ is attributed to Lytton Strachey and was probably meant partly as an insult. 4 Frank Prewett to Clementine Waring, from Garsington, 6 September 1919, e2/117, NRS. 5 See Frank Prewett to Edmund Blunden, 10 December 1921, Edmund Charles Blunden Coll., Recipient series, HRHRC. Robert Graves described Prewett in the Introduction to the CPFP in a way that was as descriptive of himself as it was of Prewett. He claimed that Prewett had explained that his daemon ‘had told him to attempt the simple beyond simplicity, the sensuous beyond sense, the distainment of mere fact’. CPFP, viii. 6 For examples of fossilized language, steeped in a particular understanding of the ‘timelessness’ of the English landscape, see Edmund Blunden’s The Face of England (New York: Longman’s, Green & Co, 1932) and Siegfried Sassoon’s Rhymed Ruminations (London: Faber, 1940). 7 Frank Prewett, HRC, 17 October 1919. 8 This is Ronald Hoffman’s term. See Ronald Hoffman, ‘Introduction’, in Through a Glass Darkly: Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), vii–viii. 9 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (New York: G.P. Putnam’s & Sons, 1918), vii. 10 Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates: Thoughts and Impressions of a V.A.D. (London: William Heineman, 1918). 11 Leopold von Ranke [1885] quoted in J. D. Braw, ‘Vision as Revision: Ranke as the Beginning of Modern History’, History and Theory 26, no. 4 (December 2007): 47. Robert Graves said he was ‘a sound militarist in action however much of a pacifist in thought’. Robert Graves to Edward Marsh, 12 July 1917, quoted by Richard Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926 (New York: Viking Press, 1987), 177.

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12 Duane Niatum, ed., Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth Century Native American Poetry (San Francisco: Harper, 1988); Joy Porter and Kenneth Roemer, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Andrew Wiget, ed., Handbook of Native American Literature (New York: Garland, 1994; Routledge, 2012). Prewett is listed simply as a Canadian with little reference to the fact he spent most of his life in Britain in Joel Baetz’s Canadian Poetry from World War 1: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 13 Joel Baetz, Battle Lines: Canadian Poetry in English and the First World War (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2018), 106. 14 Published in Punch, 8 December 1915, 468. 15 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 30 January 1921, Lady Ottoline Morrell Coll., 17.6: Frank Prewett Correspondence, HRHRC.

Chapter 1 1 Frank James Prewett, ‘Three Broadcast Talks (1954): Farm Life in Ontario Fifty Years Ago’, in The Selected Poems of Frank Prewett, ed. Bruce Meyer and Barry Callaghan (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1987), 81. 2 For more on Toronto’s history see Donald B. Smith, ‘The Dispossession of the Mississauga Indians: A Missing Chapter in the Early History of Upper Canada’, Ontario History 73 (1982): 67–87 and Leo A. Johnson, ‘The Mississaugua-Lake Ontario Land Surrender of 1805’, Ontario History 83, no. 3 (1990): 233–53. William Woodworth responding to Carl Benn at the Humanitas Festival First Nations History Lecture Series, Toronto, 21 June 2006. 3 This area is also home to Wyandotte Nation and Petun or Tobacco People who are Iroquoian-speaking. On Native runaway boys, see Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 1 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 580 and R. Niezen, Truth & Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). See also Paul O’Donnell and Frank Coffey, A History of the Arthur Area (Arthur: Municipality of Arthur, 1971), 580 and Jean F. Hutchinson, The History of Wellington County (Grand Valley: Landsborough Print, 1997). 4 Frank James Prewett Alumni File, A2003-0005/139, Department of Alumni & Development, University of Toronto Archives. Arthur Henry Prewett (24 October 1860 to 2 November 1937); Clara Hellyer, (28 May 1860 to 15 September 1949). My thanks to the Prewett family for access to their digital family tree within which

Notes

5 6 7

8 9

10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17

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James Hellyer (6 September 1833 to 19 December 1903) is listed as having married Jane Langdale (25 October 1839 to15 April 1920) in 1859 in Canada. The family has roots from the mid-1800s in Arthur Township, Wellington County, Ontario. Robert Graves, The Poetry Book Society Bulletin 43 (December 1964), Frank Prewett Fonds, LAC. Prewett, Frank James, Student UC, 1912-1915, Accession A73-0026/368(41), University of Toronto Archives. Prewett, ‘Three Broadcast Talks (1954)’, 81–95. Although recent research such as Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) has suggested that Victorians were not as austere and puritanical as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians suggested, this was not Prewett’s experience that of his friend Strachey or of Bertrand Russell. See C. P. Stacey, ed., Historical Documents of Canada: vol. 5, The Arts of War and Peace 1914-1945 (Toronto: MacMillan, 1972), 568–9. John A. Macdonald, ‘Speech in the Confederation Debates’ (Parliamentary Debates on the Subject of the Confederation of the British North American Provinces, Quebec, 6 February 1865), 44. Acting High Commissioner to Prime Minister, 29 May 1915, Documents on Canadian External Relations, Department of External Affairs, 1967, 73–4. Prewett should have been granted his third year in absentia as a result of his joining the Eaton Machine Gun Battery in February 1914; Frank James Prewett, Transcript Card, Office of the Faculty Register, A89-0011/75, Academic Records 1812–1975, University of Toronto Archives; G. W. L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 (Ottawa: Duhamel, 1964), 535. Arthur R. M. Lower, Colony to Nation: A History of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). Frank Prewett to Prof. James Mavor, 11 February 1915, The James Mavor Collection., MS Col. 119. WW1 Correspondence, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Quoted in SPFP, 4. Henry Borden, ed., Robert Laird Borden: His Memoirs, vol. 2 (Toronto: MacMillan, 1938), 622–3; Montreal Star, 8 December 1914; Derby to Haig, 9 November 1917 in Robert Blake, ed., The Private Papers of Douglas Haig, 1914-1919 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952), 266; Private comment of Sir Robert Borden in Letters to Limbo, ed. Henry Borden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 6. William James, ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’, New York: The American Association for International Conciliation 27 (February 1910): 8. Frank James Prewett, Transcript Card, Office of the Faculty Register, A89-0011/75, Academic Records 1812-1975; RG 9, 111, Vol. 731, M-16-2, LAC; see also Andrew Coppolino, ‘A Canadian in the Garsington Circle: Frank Prewett’s Literary Friendships’, Studies in Canadian Literature 12, no. 2 (1987): 273–89.

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18 These are the accounts of Frank Ferguson, H.J. Elliot and Willard Melvin quoted in Tim Cook, Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918, vol. 2 (Toronto: Penguin, 2008), 47–8. 19 See Gregory Smithers, ‘Why Do So Many American Think They Have Cherokee Blood?: The History of a Myth’, Slate, 1 October 2015, http:​/​/www​​.slat​​e​.com​​/arti​​ cles/​​news_​​and​_p​​oliti​​cs​/hi​​story​​/2015​​/10​/c​​herok​​ee​_bl​​ood​_w​​hy​_do​​_so​_m​​any​_a​​ meric​​ans​_b​​eliev​​e​_the​​y​​_hav​​e​_che​​rokee​​_ance​​stry.​​html. On Canadian ideas about indigenous immunity to ‘shell-shock’ see, Timothy C. Winegard, For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press), 115. 20 Indigenous population enumeration is always complex and there is no exact figure for how many indigenous peoples fought in the First World War. Indigenous people were eventually excluded from conscription in part because it was inadmissible as a result of treaties struck with the British Crown. 21 The sniper grandson of the Métis leader and ‘father of Manitoba’, Louis Riel, also fought and died with great bravery. 22 Calfskin: ‘The First World War Deeds of Mike Mountain Horse’, The Esplanade Museum and Art Gallery, Medicine Hat, B-52.111. 23 Mike Mountain Horse, My People the Bloods, ed. Hugh A. Dempsey (Calgary: Glenbow-Alberta Institute & Blood Tribal Council, 1979), 30, 103, 110. 24 Albert Kick enlisted with his brother Enos in 1916 and died 1 October, 1918. See also Russel L. Barsh, ‘American Indians in the Great War’, Ethnohistory 38, no. 3 (1991): 276–303. 25 Mountain Horse, My People the Bloods, 143. 26 Unknown Newspaper, ‘Canadian Indians Showing Their Loyalty in This War’, 6 May 1916, quoted in Winegard, For King and Kanata, 130. 27 Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 5. For more on German fantasies about Indians, see C. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden and Susanne Zantop, eds, Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). 28 Mountain Horse, My People the Bloods, 139. 29 For more on the Iroquois, see Dean Snow, The Iroquois (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) and Gail D. MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 30 For more on Longboat, see Jack Batten, The Man Who Ran Faster than Anyone (Toronto: Tundra Books, 2002) and Bruce Kidd, Tom Longboat (Toronto: Fitzhenny & Whiteside, 1980). 31 Helmuth von Moltke, ‘Defensive and Offensive (1874)’, in Molke on the Art of War: Selected Writings, ed. Daniel J. Hughes (Novato: Presidio, 1993), 52.

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Chapter 2 1 Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War & Death, trans. A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner (New York: Moffat, Yard & Co, 1918); Edward Porter Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate: A Critical Narrative (New York: Scribner & Sons, 1907), 302. 2 ‘To Whom It May Concern’, Charles Hewson, Testimonials on Prewett, 3 July 1923, LMS-0171, LAC. 3 Most within these four notebooks, dated 1914 to 1921 Radcliffe Science Library Special Collections, the University of Oxford, was published in Prewett’s Poems (Richmond, 1921) and The Rural Scene (London, 1924). The notebook from Brittany, France is MS. Don.d. 20(2); the flip-top notebook is Ms. Don.d.20 (4); Ms.Don.d.20 (3) has ‘War, they mysterious ways’; Notebook (1) is half ripped out. 66, 48, 70, 50 leaves. 4 Charles Delvert, review of Témoins, Revue des Mondes, 1 December 1929; Douglas Jerrold, The Lie About the War (London: Faber & Faber, 1930). 5 Otto Dix, ‘War Diary, 1915 to 1916’, quoted in Eva Karcher, Otto Dix (New York: Crown, 1987), 14. 6 Paul Nash to his wife, 16 November 1917, in Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings, Paul Nash (London: Faber & Faber, 1949), 210–11. 7 Charles Delvert, Carnets d’un fantassin (An Infantryman’s Diary), 29 March 1916, ed. Alan Michel (Paris, 1935), 184. 8 Graves quoted in The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 170; Robert Graves, Goodbye To All That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 217; Edmund Blunden, The Poems of Edmund Blunden 19141930 (London: Cobden-Sanderson 1930). 9 From ‘Limbo’, by Graves, Robert (1895–1985). The Robert Graves Copyright Trust via First World War Poetry Digital Archive, accessed 15 June 2020, http:​/​/ww1​​lit​.n​​ sms​.o​​x​.ac.​​uk​/ww​​1lit/​​colle​​ction​​s​​/ite​​m​/337​​9. 10 Wilfred Owen in Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 431. 11 Tawney quoted in Guy Chapman, A Kind of Survivor (London: Cassell, 1975), 63–5; David Jones, In Parenthesis, 1937 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 75. 12 Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber, 1952), 538–9. 13 Quoted in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989; repr., New York: Mariner Books, 2000), 151. 14 A. P. Herbert, The Secret Battle (London: Methuen, 1929), 106. 15 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘Repression of War Experience’, in Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 192.

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16 Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon in Harold Owen, ed., Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, 664, 429. 17 Guy Chapman, A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography (1935; repr., Leatherhead: Ashford Buchan & Enright, 1985), 188, 217–18. 18 Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 435. 19 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War [1928] (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982), 128; R. B. Talbot Kelly to ‘Tiny’, Summer, 1916, quoted in R. G. Loosmore, ‘Introduction’, in A Subaltern’s Odyssey: Memoirs of the Great War 1915-1917, R. B. Talbot Kelly (London: William Kimber, 1980), 19. 20 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Counter-Attack’, in Collected Poems 1908-1956 (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), 68; Louis Mairet, Carnet D’Un Combattant, 11 February 1915 to 16 April 1917 (Paris: George Crès & Co., 1919), 294. 21 ‘Slimescapes’, in Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 35–72; Patrick McGill, The Great Push: An Episode of the Great War [1916] (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000), 114. 22 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1915 [1933] (London: Virago, 1979), 252–3. 23 Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (London: J.M. Dent, 1916), 17–18. 24 Ivor Gurney, Collected Letters, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (London: Carcanet, 1991), 90. 25 Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat & Identity in World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 181. 26 See Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in TwentiethCentury Warfare (London: Granta, 1999); John T. MacCurdy, War Neuroses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), 14. 27 Robert Graves, Goliath and David (London: Chiswick Press, 1917). 28 ‘The Bombardment’, in SPFP, 50; ‘My Bride Is Battle’, in CPFP, 40; ‘The Girl Near the Billet’, in CPFP, 9. 29 Nicholas Mosley, Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1976), 237; Kate Thompson, ed., Julian Grenfell, Soldier & Poet: Letters and Diaries, 1910–1915 (Caxton Hill: Hertfordshire Record Society Publications, 2004), 237. 30 Charles Carrington (Charles Edmonds), Soldier From the Wars Returning (New York: David McKay, 1965), 95; Carrington, A Subaltern’s War (London: Peter Davies, 1929), 72–83. 31 Alfred O. Pollard, Fire-Eater: The Memoirs of a VC (London: Hutchinson, 1932), 43–4; Robert Graves, ‘Introduction’, in Old Soldiers Never Die (London: Faber, 1964), 1; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Écrits du temps de guerre (Paris: Grasset, 1965), 229–39; Adolf Hitler, ‘Chapter Five’, in Mein Kampf, vol. 1, A Reckoning (Munich: Verlag, 1925).

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32 See for example Brian Bond’s admiration for the stoicism and patriotism of Charles Carrington, who, as Charles Edmonds, was author of A Subaltern’s War, 1929, and of Soldier from the Wars Returning, 1965. 33 Owen and Bell, Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, 591. 34 Junger’s is a flawed but fascinating book that has utopian notions that post-contact indigenous tribal life was so irresistible to Euro-American settlers that the arrow of assimilation only went one way, from settlers to tribes. In truth, there is a long and textured history of indigenous assimilation towards settler communities and their technology. Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (London: Harper Collins, 2016). 35 William Broyles, Jr., ‘Why Men Love War’, Esquire, November 1984, 55–66; Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare. For discussion of war being traumatic for most men, see John Horgan’s problematic but stimulating, The End of War (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2012). 36 Guy Cuthertson and Lucy Newlyn, eds, Edward Thomas: Prose Writing : England and Wales, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 576; Edward Thomas, ed., This England: An Anthology from her Writers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915), preface; Edna Longley, ed., Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Taret: Bloodaxe, 2008), 79; Gurney, Collected Letters, 17; P. J. Kavanagh, ed., Ivor Gurney: Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), 141, 203. 37 Gurney, Collected Letters, 92. 38 H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through [1916] (London: Stark & Black Publications, 2014), 155. 39 Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front (1920; repr., London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 123. 40 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: A Novel, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995), 704–5. 41 Mike Mountainhorse, My People the Bloods, ed. Hugh A. Dempsey (Calgary: Glenbow-Alberta Institute & Blood Tribal Council, 1979), 143. 42 César Méléra, 16 June 1916 [Diary], Verdun, Juin-Juillet 1916 (Paris: Les Éditions de la Lucarne, 1925), 34–5. 43 Jünger, Storm of Steel, 274; ‘Breakfast’ by Wilfrid Gibson, The Nation, 17 October 1914. My thanks to Artur Porter-Simons for bringing my attention to this poem and providing interpretative help. 44 Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon in Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, 664, 429. 45 Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon, 10 October 1918, in Wilfred Owen, Collected letters, 431. 46 See Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 214; Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters, 505. 47 FP Fonds, 1990-12 Box 2, LMS-0171, LAC.

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48 ‘A Homecoming to Earth’ was enclosed with Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, nd., GD 372/119, Lennel Papers, NRS. 49 Quoted in Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behaviour of Men in Battle (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 209. 50 Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin, 1982), 258–68. 51 See Anne Chisholm, Frances Partridge (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009), 42; Nicholas Fox Weber, The Bauhaus Group (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009), 40 and Emma Hanna, The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 26. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s television series The Great War was inspired by one of the producers being the son of an underage soldier who almost died from being buried alive following a gas attack. 52 Saint Odhran may or may not have been buried voluntarily. See George Francis Scott Elliot, The Romance of Savage Life: Describing the Life of Primitive Man, His Customs, Occupations, Language, Beliefs, Arts, Crafts, Adventures, Games, Sports (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1908), 256. 53 The best book on this topic is Jan Bondeson’s remarkable, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2001). 54 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 219–52. There is greater acceptance today that repression, especially of meanings, need not always be unconscious. For a discussion of the concept, including prior to Freud, see Matthew Hugh Erdelyi, ‘The Return of the Repressed’, Behavorial and Brain Sciences 29, no. 5 (2006): 535–43. Neuro-imaging offers hope of further light on both repression and active forgetting or suppression, which war trauma victims often attempt. Trauma affects the lateral prefrontal cortex, see Michael Anderson et al., ‘Neural Systems Underlying the Suppression of Unwanted Memories’, Science 303, no. 5655 (January 2004): 232–5. 55 Such a stylistic journey is traceable in work by Canadian authors who had different experiences, such as Charles Yale Harrison, author of the archly cynical novella Generals Die in Bed and Bernard Freeman Trotter, the Maple Leaf romantic poet. Trotter died in May 1917, just after his parents received his poem ‘Ici repose’. It upheld the idea of the nobility of death in battle but was unapologetically candid about the banal consequences of exhausted survival in the wake of combat. See Charles Yale Harrison, Generals Die in Bed: A Story from the Trenches (New York: William Morrow, 1930); Bernard Freeman Trotter, A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems of War and Peace (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1917). 56 In Edward Marsh, ed., Georgian Poetry: 1920-22 (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1922), 145.

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Chapter 3 1 See Cathy Caruth’s landmark edited volume, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) where trauma association is contextualized in relation to PTSD and as a ‘crisis of truth’ (p. 6), and her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative & History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1997), and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 (London: Virago, 1987). 2 For a discussion of resonances between trauma theory and contemporary literature, see Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 3 Jay Winter, ‘Shell-shock and the Cultural History of the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 7–11. For a discussion of how the incorporation of Asian, African and Latin American experiences might historicize and limit the applicability of psychological trauma as a post-Enlightenment, liberal humanitarian term, see Mark S. Micale, ‘Toward a Global History of Trauma’, in Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War, ed. Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 289–305. 4 In The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception [1963] Foucault wrote, ‘the exact superposition of the “body” of disease and the body of the sick man is no more than a historical, temporary datum’, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1973), 3. 5 Charles S. Myers, ‘A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock’, The Lancet 185, no. 4772 (13 February 1915): 316–20. 6 For a provocative discussion of timelessness as it relates to unconscious wounds and modernity, see Tim Armstrong, ‘Two Types of Shock in Modernity’, Critical Quarterly 42, Issue 1 (April 2000): 60–73. 7 This is true over time and across nations. For more, see Anthony Babington, Shell Shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1997). 8 Donald Lee Anderson and G. T. Anderson, ‘Nostalgia and Malingering in the Military During the Civil War’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 157. 9 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edn. (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 1980): 236–9. Levels of PTSD appear to have increased following the 1991 Gulf War by only a limited amount, and PTSD is not currently the most prevalent or severe mental health issue facing the UK military. For more, see Khalid Ismail et al., ‘The Mental Health of UK Gulf War Veterans’, British Medical Journal 325 (2002): 576–9.

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10 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (London: Virago Press Ltd, 1978), 42, 133. 11 Rose MacCauley, Non-Combatants and Others (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916); Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (New York: The Century Co., 1918); John Buchan, The Three Hostages (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924); ‘Mary Postgate’, reprinted in Rudyard Kipling, A Diversity of Creatures (New York: Doubleday Page & Company, 1917). 12 Susan Grayzel, Women & the First World War (London: Routledge, 2002); Tracy Loughran, ‘A Crisis of Masculinity? Re-writing the History of Shell-Shock and Gender in First World War Britain’, History Compass 11, no. 9 (2013): 727–38; Santanu Das, Touch & Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Christine Hallett, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 206–23. 13 Trevor Dodman, Shell Shock, Memory and the Novel in the Wake of World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 14 Sharon Baughman Shiveley et al., ‘Characterisation of Interface Astroglial Scarring in the Human Brain after Blast Exposure: A Post-mortem Case Series’, The Lancet 15, no. 9 (August 1916): 944–53; Benjamin Brodie, ‘Injuries to the Spinal Cord’, in Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, Royal & Medical Chirurgical Society (London: Longman et al., 1837): 118–64; F. W. Mott, ‘The Effects of High Explosives on the Central Nervous System’, The Lancet 1, no. 4824 (1916): 331–8; T. R. Elliott, ‘Transient Paraplegia from Shell Explosions’, British Medical Journal 2, no. 2815 (1914): 1005–6; Bernd Holdorff and Tom Dening, ‘The Fight for “traumatic neurosis,” 1889-1916: Hermann Oppenheim and His Opponents in Berlin’, History of Psychiatry 22, no. 4 (2014): 465–76. See also Edgar Jones, Nicola T. Fear and Simon Wessely, ‘Shell Shock and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: A Historical Review’, American Journal of Psychiatry 164, no. 11 (2007): 1641–5. 15 Great Britain, War Office, Report of the War Office Committee Enquiry into ‘Shell Shock’ (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office 1922), 92. 16 The 80,000 figure is found in Martin Stone, ‘Shell-shock and the Psychologists’, in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, vol. 2 (London: Tavistock, 1985), 242–71 and Babington, Shell-Shock, 168. The figure on veteran pensions is from Eric Leed, No Man’s Land, 185. 17 Babington, Shell-Shock, 121. 18 Montague David Eder, War-Shock: The Psycho-Neuroses in War Psychology and Treatment (London: William Heinemann, 1917), 8. 19 See Mark O. Humphries and Kellen Kuchinski, ‘Rest, Relax and Get Well: A Re-Conceptualisation of Great War Shell Shock Treatment’, War & Society 27, no. 2 (2008): 89–110; W. H. Rivers, ‘Preface’, in War Neuroses, John T. MaCurdy

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), 9. Evidence suggests that class also had significant impact within German diagnosis and treatment, see Gundula Gahlen, ‘“Always Had a Pronouncedly Psychopathic Predisposition”: The Significance of Class and Rank in First World War German Psychiatric Discourse’, in Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War, ed. Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 81–113. 20 MacCurdy, War Neuroses, 126. 21 In Winter, ‘Shell-shock and the Cultural History of the Great War’, 11. Peter Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 22 See Ernst Simmel in Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses, Sigmund Freud et al. (London: The International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1921), 36. For discussion of ideas on sleep, memory and brain plasticity, see Phillipe Peigneux et al., ‘Sleeping Brain, Learning Brain: The Role of Sleep for Memory Systems’, Neuroreport 12, no. 18 (21 December 2001): AIII–A124. See also Matthew P. Walker and Els van der Helm, ‘Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing’, Psychological Bulletin 135, no. 5 (2009): 731–48. Other recent studies, Michelle C. Dumoulin Bridi et al., Scientific Advances 1, no. 6 (3 July 2015): 1; Seibt and Frank, Communicative & Integrative Biology 5, no. 5 (2012): 491–5, suggest that at a molecular level, sleep may be important for forms of neural plasticity consolidation, including memory. Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison, ‘The Function of Dream Sleep’, Nature 304 (July 1983): 111–14. 23 ‘Captain B’ quoted in Harvey Cushing, From a Surgeon’s Journal 1915-1918, (London, 1936), 489–90. 24 Half Moon Street in Mayfair was the Soho of its time, a bohemian, theatrical quarter beloved of ‘confirmed bachelors’ since the 1880s. Oscar Wilde had socialized in the area, particularly at the Abermarle Club and Burlington Arcade. A primary character in his play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, is Algernon Moncrieff, who leads a secret double life, is lustily hungry and has chambers in Half Moon Street. 25 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, n.d., Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6: Frank Prewett Correspondence, HRHRC. 26 Owen was encouraged at Craiglockhart to focus on another story about fighting giants, the myth of Antaeus and Hercules. 27 Freud, S. (1950). Entwurf einer Psychologie [Project for a scientific psychology]. In M. Bonaparte, A. Freud and E. Kris, eds, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse [The Origins of Psychoanalysis] (London: Imago Publishing), 371–466. (Original work published 1895). 28 See J. Orbach, The Neuropsychological Theories of Lashley & Hebb (Lanham: University Press of Arizona, 1998) and Amy L. Mahan and Kerry J. Ressler, ‘Fear Conditioning, Synaptic Plasticity & the Amygdala: Implications for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, Trends Neurosci 35, no. 1 (January 2012): 24–35.

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29 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night: A Romance (London: Penguin, [1934] 1986), 186. This connection has led to a discussion of the death drive as described by Freud and ‘shell-shocked’ figures within modernist British fiction by Wyatt Bonikowski, Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in PostWorld War 1 British Fiction (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 30 See K. R. Eissler, Freud as An Expert Witness: The Discussion of War Neuroses between Freud and Wagner-Jauregg, trans. Christine Trollope (Madison: International Universities Press, 1986), 59, 64, 72. See also Cynthia J. Tsay, ‘Julius Wagner-Jauregg and the Legacy of Malarial therapy for the Treatment of General Paresis of the Insane’, Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 86, no. 2 (June 2013): 245–54. On psychiatric ethnic prejudice, see Joanna Bourke, ‘Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of “Shell-Shocked” Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914-1939’, Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 57–69. 31 For harsh contextualization of Yealland, see Showalter, The Female Malady, 181; H. Binnevald, From Shell-Shock to Combat Stress: A Comparative History of Military Psychiatry (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), 111; P. Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neuroses and the British Soldiers of the First World War (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 7, 74. For a rebuttal, see Stefanie C. Linden et al., ‘Shell Shock at Queen Square: Lewis Yealland 100 Years On’, Brain: A Journal of Neurology 136, no. 6 (2013): 1976–88. 32 Lewis R. Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare (London: MacMillan, 1918), 138. 33 Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, 1916–1920 (London: Faber & Faber, 1945), 75. 34 See ‘Admission & Discharge Books’ held at Craiglockhart, MH 106/1889 –MH 106/1908 War 940.41241 GRE Bib. 237628, Lt. F.G. Prewett 421#. 35 See Christopher Hassell, A Biography of Edward Marsh (London: Longmans; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 495; Richard Slobodin, W.H.R. Rivers: Pioneer Anthropologist, Psychiatrist of the The Ghost Road [1978] (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 62, 68. On Rivers as Prewett’s psychiatrist, see Bruce Meyer, ‘Introduction’, in SPFP, 5 and Coppolino, ‘A Canadian in the Garsington Circle: Frank Prewett’s Literary Friendships’, 276. Robert Graves wrote of Rivers treating ‘Sassoon, Owen, and Frank Prewett’, see Hassall, A Biography of Edward Marsh, 495; however, Owen’s biographers suggest he was mistaken in relation to Owen who was treated by Dr Arthur Brock, see Dominic Hibberd, ‘A Sociological Cure for Shellshock: Dr Brock and Wilfred Owen’, Sociological Review 25 (1977): 377–86.

Chapter 4 1 A recent examples of unleavened praise of Rivers is John Forrester’s ‘The English Freud: W.H.R. Rivers, Dreaming, and the Making of the Early Twentieth-Century

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Human Sciences’, in History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past, ed. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 71–104. 2 Pat Barker, Ghost Road (London: Viking, 1991), 212, 58. Barker conflates a modern, expanded concept of masculinity with a fantasy of Rivers as a deeply enlightened cultural broker in The Ghost Road. Rivers is imagined emerging from a cave in Melanesia and having a cultural relativist epiphany such that ‘for a moment he was in the same position as these drifting, dispossessed people’ (London: Viking), 119–20. 3 See Fiona Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe: Soldiers, Medics and Pacifists (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 13 and Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment & Recovery in Britain, 1914-1930 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 4 See Ian Gordon Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology: W.H.R. Rivers and his Cambridge Disciples in the Development of Kinship Studies, 1898-1931 (London: D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1981), 298–300; Haidy Geismer and Anita Herle, Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography on Meluka since 1914 (Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2010); Layard quoted in Jeremy MacClancy, ‘Character & Disciplinary Convention: John Layard, Jungian & Anthropologist’, in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict & Others: Essays on Culture and Personality, ed. G. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 50–71. For a discussion of how John Layard’s 1942 book, Stone Men of Malekula, figures within contemporary land disputes in Vanuatu, see Haidy Geismar, ‘Stone Men of Malekula: An Ethnography of an Ethnography’, Ethnos 74, no. 2 (June 2009): 199–228. 5 See Hans Binneveld, From Shellshock to Combat Stress: A Comparative History of Military Psychiatry, trans. John O’Kane (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), 120. 6 W. H. R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (London: Kegan & Paul, 1923), 132; Grafton Elliot Smith in W. H. R. Rivers, Psychology & Ethnology, ed. G. E. Smith (London: Kegan & Paul, 1926), xvii. 7 Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 556–7. 8 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Repression of War Experience’, in Counter-Attack, and Other Poems (London: Heineman, 1918); W. H. R. Rivers, ‘Repression of War Experience’, in Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of PsychoNeuroses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 167. 9 Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 88. 10 Siegfried Sassoon, Diaries, 1914-1918, ed. Sir Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 90. 11 Sassoon, Diaries, 1914-1918, 239, 246. 12 See Editorial, The Hydra: Journal of the Craiglockhart War Hospital, no. 10 (1 September 1917), WPC. 13 F. C. Bartlett, ‘Cambridge England, 1887–1937’, American Journal of Psychology 50, (1937): 97–110; J. MacClancy, ‘Unconventional Character and Disciplinary

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Convention: John Layard, Jungian and Anthropologist’, History of Anthropology 4 (1986): 50–71; L. E. Shore, ‘W.H.R. Rivers’, The Eagle, Vol. 2 (Magazine of St John’s College Cambridge, 1923), 9; ‘To a Very Wise Man’ appeared in the privately printed Picture Show, 1919; ‘Revisitation’, 1934. Robert Graves also published praise of Rivers and his approach to dreams in Poetic Unreason (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 99–101; F. C. Bartlett, ‘W.H.R. Rivers’, The Eagle, 1922, 14. 14 See Joseph Babinski and Jules Froment, Hystérie-Pithiatisme et troubles nerveux d’ordre réflexe en neuerologie de guerre, 2nd edn (Paris: Masson, 1918), 219. 15 Nonne quoted in Eissler, Freud as An Expert Witness, 318–19. 16 Charles S. Myers, ‘The Influence of the Late W.H.R. Rivers’ (Presidential Address to the Psychology Section of the British Association, 1922). 17 See Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology, 52. 18 M. D. Eder, War Shock: The Psycho-Neuroses in War Psychology and Treatment (London: Heineman, 1917), 145; Charles S. Myers, Shell Shock in France: 1914-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 55. 19 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 1–64, 38; ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’ [1914] in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Feud, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 147–56. 20 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘An Address on the Repression of War Experience’ (delivered before the Section of Psychiatry, Royal Society of Medicine, 4 December 1917), The Lancet, 2 February 1918, 173. 21 Today psychiatrists, but generally not psychologists, can prescribe drugs, the use of which has grown exponentially. Compared with therapeutic drugs and CBT, psychoanalysis is often considered a long-term and expensive treatment option and its use is now much reduced particularly in the United States. Yet biological psychiatric techniques are palliative rather than curative. Recent advances in neuroscience have yet to yield treatments and it may yet be the case that some version of psychoanalysis will again be central to mental health treatment in the future. 22 Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 148–9. 23 Jonathan Miller, ‘The Dog Beneath the Skin’, The Listener, 20 July 1972. Jonathan Miller’s father had Rivers as his PhD supervisor and also studied under Henry Head. 24 R. L. Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde [1886] (New York: Bantam Books, 1981); Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo delinquent (Milan: Hoepli, 1876); Pierre Janet, L’automatisme psychologique: essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de L’activité humaine (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889); Freud, ‘Studies on Hysteria’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund

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Freud, vol. 2 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955); Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology [1905] (New York: Longmans, 1925); Pierre Janet, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria: Fifteen Lectures Given in the Medical School of Harvard University (London: MacMillan, 1907). 25 At Torres, the indigenous assistants included Tom, Jimmy Rice, Ned Waria and Debe Wali. All of Rivers’s research with indigenous peoples was carried out via indigenous informants able to translate into only limited English. Lewis Henry Morgan dedicated The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois to Ely S. Parker and their ‘joint researches’ (Rochester: Sage & Brothers, 1851). 26 Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Archibald Constable & Co, 1897). Perhaps only the fallen angel the Devil can be said to have a more profound duality at the core of his personality. 27 For more, see Robert M. Young, ‘Chapter Five’, in Mind, Brain, Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 28 Darwin did not believe that species developed or ‘progressed’ according to any fixed law. See Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859), 314. For a trenchant attack upon the blight of primitivist thinking within anthropology, see Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth [1998] (New York: Routledge, 2005). 29 Slobodin, W.H.R. Rivers: Pioneer Anthropologist. Born an American, Slobodin worked with the Dene (Gwich’in) peoples above the Arctic Circle but was excluded from academic employment in the 1950s as a result of the committee chaired by Senator Joe McCarthy. A recent attempt to ‘show that human scientists sometimes challenged authoritarian and hierarchical ideologies’ that uses Rivers as an example is Erik Linstrum, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 2; C. S. Myers, ‘On the Permanence of Racial Mental Differences’, in Papers on Inter-Racial Problems Communicated to the Universal Races Congress held at the University of London July 26–29, 1911, ed. G. Spiller (London: P.S. King & Son, 1911), 73–9. 30 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Vision’, in Physiology and Psychology Part 1: Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), 45. 31 A. Haddon, ‘The Saving of Vanishing Knowledge’, Nature 55 (1897): 305–6. 32 For more on Haddon’s efforts to stage indigeneity, even involving the use of make-up, see Paul Peppis’s chapter ‘Salvage Ethnography, Cultural Cross-Dressing, and Autoethnography in A.C. Haddon’s Head-Hunters: Black, White, and Brown’, in Peppis, Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 17–55.

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33 Morgan’s work, particularly the foundational publication within American anthropology, The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, Iroquois (1851), entrenched notions of human social evolution as proceeding through stages of ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’. Despite the logical inconsistency involved, it was dedicated to and created with the Seneca military figure and politician, Ely. S. Parker. See Joy Porter, To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) and Scott Michaelsen, ‘Ely S. Parker and Amerindian Voices in Ethnography’, American Literary History 8, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 615–38. 34 See W. H. R. Rivers, Psychology & Politics and Other Essays (London: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1923), 36–7. 35 Haddon Papers, University of Cambridge Library, 1048. The author admits to potential analytical bias here, being both Irish and having lived for many years near Barrington. 36 See Jude Philp, ‘“Everything As It Used To be”: Re-creating Torres Strait Islander History in 1898’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 21, no. 1 (Centenary of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, 1999): 58–87; T. H. Huxley, 15 June 1848, The Huxley File, 2 Voyages of the Rattlesnake, Clark University; W. H. R. Rivers, The History of Melanesian Society, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 3. 37 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics’, Journal of Anthropological Institution of Great Britain and Ireland 30 (1900): 82; W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas (London: Macmillan, 1906). 38 W. H. R. Rivers, Kinship and Social Organization, ed. W. J. Perry (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), 4, 8. 39 W. H. R. Rivers and H. Head, ‘A Human Experiment in Nerve Division’, Brain 31 (1908): 323–450; L. S. Jacyna, Medicine & Modernism: A Biography of Henry Head (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 3, 123. 40 Quoted in Jacyna, Medicine & Modernism: A Biography of Henry Head, 144–5. The term ‘protopathic’ is from Middle Greek and means ‘first affected’. 41 F. C. Bartlett, ‘W.H.R. Rivers’, The Eagle 62 (1968): 156–60. 42 Henry Head, ‘Obituary notice of William Halse Rivers Rivers’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B77, (1923): i–iv; Rivers and Head, ‘A Human Experiment in Nerve Division’, no. 3: 444. 43 The prepuce has ten times more encapsulated touch receptors than the glans. See Christopher J. Cold and Kenneth A. McGrath, ‘Anatomy and Histology of the Penile and Clitoral Prepuce in Primates: An Evolutionary Perspective of the Specialised Sensory Tissue of the External Genitalia’, in Male and Female Circumcision, ed. George C. Dennison et al. (New York: Springer, 1999), 21. See also Alberto Gallace and Charles Spence, In Touch with the Future: The Sense of Touch from Cognitive Neurosciences to Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 297–9.

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44 Rivers and Head, ‘A Human Experiment in Nerve Division’, 405–6. 45 Rivers did, however, have strong visual memories of the house where he had lived up until the age of five, excepting the upper floor. He suspected that a memory linked to this floor lurked just below his consciousness. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious, 12–13. 46 See Rivers, The History of Melanesian Society, 2 vols. 47 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘The Ethnological Analysis of Culture’, Presidential Address to Section H, British Association for the Advancement of Science, Nature 87 (1911): 356–60; Recorded by Elliot Smith, ‘Preface’, in Threshold of the Pacific, C. E. Fox (London: Kegan Paul, 1924), vi. 48 It appears Smith was set up, since he confirmed the Piltdown man had a primitive ape-like brain after examination of an endocranial cast rather than the actual find. See ‘Material Relating to Piltdown Man’, 1913m GB 133 GES/1, University of Manchester Special Collections, UK. 49 Henry Head, ‘Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased: William Halse Rivers Rivers, 1864-1922’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, XCV.-B (1923): xlvi. 50 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘The Concept of the Morbid in Sociology’, in Psychology & Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1923); W. H. R. Rivers, ‘The Psychological Factor’, in Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia, ed. Rivers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922). 51 See ‘Sir Sydney Russell-Wells: Obituary’, British Medical Journal 2 (July 1924): 134.

Chapter 5 1 I take these dates from the ‘Admission & Discharge Books’ held at Craiglockhart, MH106/1888 – MH 106/1908, Prewett #421, Sassoon #478. Prior commentary conflicts as to when Prewett and Sassoon met. Andrew Coppolino states that Prewett was seriously wounded in 1916 or 1917, then convalesced at Craiglockhart under the treatment of Dr Rivers and here he met Sassoon, but also that Sassoon was at Lennel in 1917 and met Prewett there, Coppolino, ‘A Canadian in the Garsington Circle: Frank Prewett’s Literary Friendships’, 276 and Andrew Coppolino, ‘“While the Shells Crashed we were Strong”: The Life of War Poet “Toronto” Prewitt’, Canadian Military History 8, no. 1 (2012): 35. See also Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey 1916-1920, 75. Bruce Meyer has Prewett wounded in Spring 1918, ‘Frank Prewett’, in Profiles in Canadian Literature, ed. Jeffrey M. Heath (Toronto: Dundurn, 1991), 57. Prewett, however, was at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1918 since he wrote with great affection to Lady Clementine Waring from there in January, 1918, Lennel Papers, NRS. 2 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 10 December 1919, GD 372 116/13, Frank Prewett Papers, NRS.

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3 My thanks to Dave McFadden as manager of Lennel Care Home for much information, from the fact that Beatrix Potter caught fleas during her stay, to the existence of an underground tunnel at Lennel that lead to a ‘Marriage House’ where from the mid-nineteenth century runaway couples could quickly marry and evade the laws requiring three weeks’ notice be given. Dave’s descriptions of Lennel hauntings, and of the malevolent spirit that once tried to push a care worker off the house’s dome, are a chilling reminder of the power of place. 4 William Brown, ‘The Treatment of Cases of Shell Shock in an Advanced Neurological Centre’, The Lancet 2, no. 17 (August 1918): 197–200. 5 The party was to launch a perfume, Nuit Persane. It built upon the extravagant success of the 1910 Mardi Gras, held at the Albert Hall, London. 6 The rise of deceit in antebellum America is explored in James W. Cook’s The Arts of Deception: Playing With Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) See also Mark A. Schneider, Culture and Enchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4. 7 Arthur Parker wrote on the back of a photo of himself taken at the Six Nations Reserve at Brantford, Ontario, ‘Dressed in Sioux costume at 500th anniversary of the founding of the League of the Iroquois. Indians to be recognized as such must “play” Indian!’ See Porter, To Be Indian, 142, 242. See also P. J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Publications, 1998). 8 For more on this theme, see Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schafer, eds, The Imposter Narrative in North American Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). 9 Grey Owl achieved further notoriety in 1999 when Richard Attenborough produced a feature film of his life starring the ex-James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan. Albret Braz has produced a revealing discussion of the fascination with Grey Owl of the powerful media figures David and Richard Attenborough in Intersections between Canadian Literature and Film, ed. David R. Jarraway (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013), 169–82. 10 Long Lance may have had indigenous ancestry. His mother, Sallie Carson, was told she had Croatan, now known as Lumbee, ancestors. A contrasting story of ‘passing’ across racial divides from the previous century is explored by Angela Pulley Hudson in Real Native Genius: How An Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 11 Grey Owl quoted in Anahareo, Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl (Toronto: Paperjacks, 1972), 173. For more on Belaney/Grey Owl, see Donald B. Smith, From the Land of the Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1990). 12 Anahareo, Devil in Deerskins, 187. 13 Grey Owl fits neatly into Northrup Frye’s depiction of Canada as place perplexed, less by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by the riddle ‘Where is here?’, and as yearning

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for the idyllic environmental ‘peaceable kingdom’ represented Edward Hicks’s paintings of the 1830s. See Northrop Frye, ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada’, in Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 220. 14 For more on British social hierarchies, ornamentalism and empire see David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How The British Saw Their Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2001). 15 For a fascinating excavation of Woolf ’s role in the Dreadnought hoax see Panthea Reid, ‘Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen, Julia Margaret Cameron, and the Prince of Abyssinia: An Inquiry into Certain Colonialist Representations’, Biography 22, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 323–55. See also Polly Bagnall and Sally Beck, Ferguson’s Gang: The Remarkable Story of the National Trust Gangsters (Swindon: National Trust Books, 2015). 16 Matt Houlbrook, Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 17 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity & Authenticity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 18 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey 1916-1920, 75. 19 Siegfried Sassoon to Robert Graves, 4 March 1919, The Robert Graves Manuscripts, SIUSCRC. 20 Siegfried Sassoon quoted in Donald Precosky, ‘Frank Prewett, a Canadian Georgian Poet’, Studies in Canadian Literature 4, no. 2 (1979): 136; Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 15/2/1919, GD 372/114, 1-31x, NRS. 21 Siegfried Sassoon, Picture Show (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1919). 22 Siegfried Sassoon, Diaries 1920–1922 (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 162; Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 6 November 1919, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6, HRHRC. For discussion of Prewett as part of Sassoon’s journey towards acceptance of his homosexuality, see Helen McPhail and Philip Guest, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon: On the Trail of the Poets of the Great War (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2001), 172. 23 Owen and Bell, Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, 485–7. 24 Siegfried Sassoon, Diaries 1914–18, ed. Sir Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 162. 25 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 12 October, 1918, GD372/11, NRS; Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 20 November, 1918, from Christ Church, Oxford, 17.6 Correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC; Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 18 February, 1919, GD 372/112, Lennel Papers, NRS. 26 Quoted in Byron Farwell, Mr. Kipling’s Army: All the Queen’s Men (New York: Norton, 1981), 110. 27 Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber, 1972), 425, 496.

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28 For a discussion of Sassoon as a fractured soul, see Paul Edwards, ‘British War Memoirs’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15–33. Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 425. Tennant was rumoured to be the model for Evelyn Waugh’s beautiful, anguished character Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisted. After Tennant ended his relationship with Sassoon, Tennant spent much of the next seventeen years in bed. On his dual personality, see Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches (London: Duckworth, 2003), 260. 29 From Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey 1916-1920, 105; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer [1930] (London: Faber, 1973), 230–1. 30 See Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That [1929] (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 265–3. 31 Sassoon, Diaries: 1914–1918, 133. 32 Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through [1916], 130. 33 J. R. Ackerley described Sassoon at this time as ‘sweet, kind, loquacious, absentminded, lonely, dreadfully self-centred and self-absorbed’. Ackerley in John Stuart Roberts, Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999), 298. See also Sassoon, quoted, 318; his death described, 331. 34 Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress, 147. 35 Sassoon quoted in Dame Felicitas Corrigan, Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage (London: Gollanz, 1973), 17. 36 John Bell ed., Wilfred Owen: Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 328. 37 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, n.d., Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6: correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. 38 Hassall, A Biography of Edward Marsh. 39 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, from Christ Church, Oxford, 20 November, 1918, GD 372/112/1-11, Lennel Papers, NRS. 40 Frank Prewett, ‘Lark Song’, The London Mercury VII, no. 37 (November 1922): 14. Another Prewett poem composed in 1918, begins ‘I went into the fields of love’, and ends in dedication to ‘him who never could love easily’, LMS-0171 F22 Prewett, Frank clippings, LAC. 41 Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transectional Types of Men and Women (London: George Allen, 1894), 42–3; Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk: A Study in Social Evolution (London: George Allen, 1914). 42 Robert Graves had also written to Carpenter and shown bravery bordering on recklessness in combat. 43 Sassoon, Diaries 1914-18, 45, 50, 51, 53. Siegfried Sassoon 1950s poetry notebooks, MS Add.9852/1, Cambridge University Library.

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Chapter 6 1 Robert Graves to Edward Marsh, 15 May 1915, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 2 Philip Larkin, ‘Graves Superior’, The Guardian, 1958, 4 in Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 183. 3 Robert Graves, The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry 1922–1949 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 283–4; Robert Graves in ‘A Toast to Ava Gardner’, in Food for Centaurs: Stories, Talks, Critical Studies, Poems, Graves (Garden City: Doubleday & Co, 1960), 35–48. 4 Similarly, conservative critics often make great play of the supposed dangers of conflating war literature fictional characters with their actual counterparts despite the distinct possibility that a fictional self may reveal far more than any composite history gleaned piecemeal via written records. Robert Graves, But Still It Goes On (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), 41–3; Robert Graves, ‘More War Books’, Nation & Athenaeum 10 (August 1929): 629; Robert Graves, ‘Correspondence: The Garlands Wither’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 June 1930, 534. 5 ‘A Jest too Deep for Laughter’ is the title of Part IV of Wyndam Lewis’s satire Tarr, originally published in 1916/17, later appearing as Tarr (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928). The second quotation is from Lewis’s own autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering, (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937), 6. 6 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That [1929] (London: Cassell, 1957), vii, 439. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 62. 8 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 13. 9 The Edmund Blunden annotated volume is housed in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English & American Literature, New York Public Library. The Sassoon annotated volume is housed in the James Marshall & Marie Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. 10 See the bestseller Falsehood in War-Time (London: Allen & Unwin, 1928) by Arthur Ponsonby, an MP who, like Philip Morrell, opposed the war. See also, Mariel Grant, Propaganda and the Role of the State in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). 11 Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 72. 12 Frank Prewett to Robert Graves, 16 November 1925; Robert Graves, The White Goddess (London: Faber, 1948), 11–12. 13 Prewett notebooks, Radcliffe Science Library Special Collections, University of Oxford, Ms. Don.d. 20(3). 14 Frank Prewett to Robert Graves, 11 September 1921; 22 February 1925;16 November 1925, F1-8, LAC.

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15 Robert Graves, ‘A Letter from Wales’, in Poems About War, ed. W. Graves, rev. edn (New York and London: Moyer Bell, 1990), 72–6. 16 ‘The Kelso Road’, HRHRC; also Bruce Meyer and Barry Callaghan, eds, Selected Poems of Frank Prewett (Toronto: Exile Editions Ltd, 2000), 44. 17 William McDougall, An Outline of Abnormal Psychology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 267, 289–92. 18 Frank Prewett, ‘The Soldier’, in CPFP 34; ‘To Death’, in CPFP, 31. 19 ‘If I Unfold My First’, in SPFP, 76; ‘Soliloquy’, in SPFP, 73. 20 Frank Prewett, ‘I Stared at the Dead’, in CPFP, 10. For more on Janet’s contribution to understanding of depersonalization see Onno Van der Hart and Rutger Horst, ‘The Dissociation Theory of Pierre Janet’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 2, no. 4 (1989): 1–11. For current thinking, see Arvid Guterstam et al., ‘Posterior Cingulate Cortex Integrates the Senses of Self-Location and Body Ownership’, Current Biology 25, no. 11 (April 2015): 1416–25; R. A. Lanius et al., ‘The Dissociative Subtype of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Rationale, Clinical & Neurobiological Evidence, and Implications’, Depression & Anxiety, 29 (16 March 2012): 18 and Daphne Simeon and J. Abugel, Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder & the Loss of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 21 See Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. Brian Murdoch (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 85–6. 22 Edmund Blunden quoted in Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 98. 23 Sassoon quoted by Jean Moorcroft Wilson from unpublished material in the hands of a private collector. See Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet, A Biography 1886-1918 (New York: Routledge 1999), 526. 24 Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 176; Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 153. For an insightful discussion of trauma’s aftermath that puts much stress upon the restorative nature of the individual’s retelling the story of how trauma occurred, see also S. J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 25 Sassoon, Diaries 1914-18, 21 26 Siegfried Sassoon to Ottoline Morrell, 4 September 1918, quoted in ‘Introduction’, in SPFP, 6–7.

Chapter 7 1 Borden Papers, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa; Henry Borden, ed., Robert Laird Borden: His Memoirs, vol. 2 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969), 157.

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2 Testimony for F. J. Prewett by Percy Simpson, Oriel College, University of Oxford, 31 July 1923, LMS-0171, LAC. 3 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 15 January 2018, 28 May 1919, 15 February 1919, Lennel Papers, NRS. 4 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 15 February 1919, GD 372/114; 9 August 1921, GD 372/122/3, Lennel Papers, NRS. 5 See Humphrey Burton and Maureen Murray, William Walton: The Romantic Loner A Centenary Portrait Album (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22–4, 42–5. Little is known about Walton’s emotional/sexual life at this time, but he had affairs with women such as Zena Naylor and was very happy indeed for a period with the German aristocrat, Imma von Doernberg. He dedicated the piece Siesta (1926) to Tennant. 6 ‘Willie’ was eventually able to write to Siegfried Sassoon with news of a ‘miracle’ – wealthy patron Elizabeth Courtauld left him the magnificent sum of #500 per annum and disposal of the capital in the event of his death. William Walton to Siegfried Sassoon, 6 February 1932, in The Selected Letters of William Walton, ed. Malcolm Hayes (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 71. 7 See ‘The Quiet Garden’ (Frank Prewett), MS dated November 1922, British Library Add. MS 54404, Published Augener, 1923, First performance 23 January 1923, Chelsea Town Hall. For more on Gardiner, see Stephen Lloyd, H. Balfour Gardiner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 8 Prewett states this in a letter to Ottoline Morrell, n.d., Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6: correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. 9 It is thought Waugh’s Brideshead drew upon the architecture of Castle Howard in Yorkshire, but was also based upon Madresfield, a moated house in the Malvern Hills near Worcestershire. See Jane Mulvagh, Madresfield, the Real Brideshead (Stanbridge: Dovecote Press, 2008). 10 Mark Gertler painted a charming picture of Garsington as a place to work in a letter to Dora Carrington, 12 September 1917, in Mark Gertler, Selected Letters, ed. Noel Carrington (London: Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd, 1965), 150–2. See also Mark Gertler to S.S. Koteliansky, August 1919, 175. Lady Cunard and Sir Thomas Beecham engaged Gertler to paint scenery and bought a painting for 10 pounds, Gertler to Dora Carrington, 21 November 1915, 103–4. 11 W. B. Yeats, ‘Ancestral Houses’, first published in The Dial and The London Mercury, January, 1923. 12 See Andrew Hann and Madge Dresser, eds, Slavery and the British Country House (Swindon: English Heritage, 2013). 13 ‘Garsington’ by Frank Prewett, Radcliffe Science Library Special Collections, University of Oxford. One of four hand-worn notebooks Ref: Ms. Don.d. 20 (3). 14 Frank Prewett, ‘The Green Hills of England’, n.d., Lady Ottoline Morrell, 17.6: correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC.

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15 Frank Prewett Flip-up Notebook, Ms.Don.d.20(4), dated 30 December 1919, RSLSC; Ottoline Morrell to Robert Graves, n.d. in Paul O’Prey, Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914-1926 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 286. 16 Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 2 June 1926 in Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection (London: Century Books, 2017), 1644. 17 Historic England deem Garsington Manor to have been built in the late sixteenth century on the site of buildings owned by Abingdon Abbey. Philip Morrell bought the house along with 360 acres, for GBP 8,400 in 1913. Garsington takes its name from Old English meaning ‘grassy hill’. 18 Geoffrey Scott, ‘The National Character of English Architecture’, in The Chancellor’s Essay: MCMVII (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1908), 34. For more on Scott and Berenson, see Richard M. Dunn, Geoffrey Scott and the Berenson Circle: Literary and Aesthetic Life in the Early Twentieth Century (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998). 19 See Robert Gathorne-Hardy, ed., Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell: A Study in Friendship, 1873-1915 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 46, 227. See also Country Life, 18 March 1982. The yew courtyard seen at night was one of the things that made Ottoline first fall in love with Garsington. See Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 46, 227. 20 From after the Second World War until 1981/2, Garsington was owned by the well-connected diplomatic official and amateur historian John Wheeler-Bennett and his wife Ruth Risher. A friend of Basil Hart-Davis, Wheeler-Bennett found employment at St Anthony’s college and perpetuated the Great Man school of history. 21 The author and her family extend their thanks to Rosalind Ingrams, who owned Garsington from 1982 until comparatively recently, and to her daughter Catherine for their kind hospitality and advice. The sense of Garsington being a living theatre at this time was expressed by Mark Gertler, writing to S. S. Koteliansky from Garsington, August, 1919, Carrington, Gertler, Selected Letters, 175. See also Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, The Partisan Review (Fall 1964): 515–30. 22 Lawrence used the term in reference to young homosexual intellectuals. D.H. Lawrence to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 19 April 1915, George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, eds, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Volume II 1913-16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 319. 23 Ms Crocker’s (1864–1941) biography detailed many sexual encounters, including a naked orgasmic experience when an old man in China played a stringed instrument. Utterly consumed with passion, she later woke up with an Irish attendant wafting smelling salts under her nose in a Ladies Dressing Room. See Aimée Crocker, And I’d Do It Again (New York: Coward-McCann, 1936). 24 Lytton Strachey came from landed and well-connected stock, but circumstances meant he suffered until towards the end of his life from a lack of funds and found

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himself forced to write so as to have money. His sexual adventurousness could be said to have exceeded Ottoline’s given that he enjoyed a relationship that involved sexual punishment with the last great love of his life, Roger Senhouse. See Virginia Woolf, 29 July 1918, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Quentin Bell, vol. 1, 1915-1919 (London: Hogarth Press, 1977). 25 Flyleaf quotations, Gathorne-Hardy, Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell. 26 As a young woman, Ottoline walked meditatively in the sisterhood’s ilex grove, a garden motif she carried over to Garsington. See Gathorne-Hardy, Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 42, 57, 175. 27 Gathorne-Hardy, Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 87, 125. 28 Lytton Strachey to Dora Carrington, 28 May 1917, unpublished letter held by the Strachey Trust. Reproduced in Sandra Jobson Darroch, Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975), 204. 29 Gathorne-Hardy, Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 129, 159, 217, 248. For more, see Ruth E. Taylor, ‘Death of Neurasthenia and Its Psychological Reincarnation: A Study of Neurasthenia at the National Hospital for the Relief and Cure of the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queen Square, London, 1870–1932’, The British Journal of Psychiatry 179, no. 6 (December 2001): 550–7. 30 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Penguin, 1971), 18. 31 Gathorne-Hardy, Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 280. 32 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Henry Holt, 1922); Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 6, Time Reimagined, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Henry Holt, 1922); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway [1925] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 157. 33 Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 85. See also chapter two of Elizabeth Ramsden Eames, Bertrand Russell’s Dialogue With His Contemporaries [1989] (New York: Routledge, 2013). 34 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 188–9. 35 Virginia Woolf quoted in Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, eds, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovish, 1975), 364. 36 Wittgenstein in R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), 262. 37 Keynes quoted in The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, ed. Stanford Patrick Rosenbaum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 87–8. For more on Leonard Woolf ’s opinions on Moore’s influence, see the same volume, 133–41. The Bloomsbury sense of unworldliness Keynes described, where ‘wealth, power, popularity or success’ are ostensibly despised, is still sometimes fashionable among Cambridge University undergraduates. It remains a coping strategy for those who struggle, as key Bloomsbury figures did, with the burdens of inherited wealth and the results of generations of privilege.

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38 In other respects, the character Captain Grimes shares little with the Garsington set. He appears in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall [1929] (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 133. Daisy Buchanan appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby [1925], ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 167. 39 Keynes quoted in The Bloomsbury Group, ed. Rosenbaum, 93–5. 40 Like Sassoon, Prewett had a particular affinity with horses. He described going for a ride on a year-old hunter in a letter composed at Garsington to Clementine Waring: ‘He was quiet, but seemed puzzled at the thing on his back and the nudges in the ribs. I am quite weak again about horses.’ 28 August 1919, NRS. 41 Dora Carrington to Lytton Strachey, August 1919. 42 Franz Kafka, ‘Wunsch, Indiener zu werden’, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, vol. 1 (1950; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2004), 30. 43 Gertler, Selected Letters, 209. 44 Mark Gertler to S. S. Koteliansky, 20 January 1921, Banchory; Mark Gertler to Carrington, 1 October 1925; Mark Gertler to S. S. Koteliansky, 3 April 1930; Gertler, Selected Letters, 197. Despite regular trips to the sanatorium, Gertler’s depression overwhelmed him in the final decade of his life and he gassed himself in June 1939. In April, 1930, he had complained to Koteliansky that Ottoline ‘does rather get bored with one – in a way – when one ceases to perform’. The woman who perhaps was the love of his life, Dora Carrington, had also killed herself in 1932, not long after the death of the object of her deepest affection, Lytton Strachey. 45 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 27 December 1919, 17.6 Correspondence by Prewett; 13 March 1920, HRHRC. 46 Prewett, ‘The Red Man’, in CPFP, 5. 47 ‘The Farm Labourer’, in SPFP, 64. On Indian ‘survivance’, see Gerald Vizenor, ed. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008) and as a beginning on Indian conditions at the beginning of the twentieth century, Frederick E. Hoxie, The Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). Another of Prewett’s lonely ‘plodding’ poems describing a figure walking is ‘Country Road’. In this case, the poet is chilled and alone on a deserted road and ignored by a woman. For Prewett’s gypsy fantasy with Ottoline, see Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 14 April 1920, Lady Ottoline Morrell Coll, 17.6 correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. 48 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 5 August 1919, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6: correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. 49 Prewett’s archive contradicts the view of his relationship with Ottoline that appears in Miranda Seymour’s Ottoline: Life on a Grand Scale (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), 417–19. The contradiction occurs again in relation to why ‘Toronto’ stole from the Morrells, 442.

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50 See 1918/19 poem by Frank Prewett, 1990-12 Box 2, LMS-0171, LAC. 51 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, n.d., 24 August 1919, 9 December 1919, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6: correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. Readers may remember The Moult as a seaside location for the television show Poirot. 52 Frank Prewett to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 9 July 1919, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, HRHRC. 53 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 13 September 1919, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6: correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. 54 See, for example, David Forsyth, ‘Functional Nerve Disease and the Shock of Battle’, Lancet 2 (1915): 1399–403. For a valuable discussion of the significance of post-combat impotence to Elaine Showalter’s depiction of the First World War as a ‘crisis of masculinity’, see Laurinda Stryker, ‘Mental Cases: British Shellshock and the Politics of Interpretation’, in Evidence, History & the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914-18, ed. Gail Braybon (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 154–71. 55 Frank Prewett to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 8 October 1919. Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6, HRHRC. 56 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, Garsington, 30 July 1919, GD 372/114 1-31x, NRS.

Chapter 8 1 See Jeffrey K. Taubenberger and David M. Morens, ‘1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics’, Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1 (January 2006): 15–22; Frank Prewett to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 9 July 1919, 18 February 1920; Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, HRHRC. 2 Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 245. For more on the conflicts bred by the formation of a continent of nation states rather than empires, see Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Allen Lane, 2016). 3 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 3 October 1919, 17 October 1919, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6: correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. 4 Frank Prewett to Clementine Waring, 5 January 1920, NRS. 5 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 22 June 1920; 26 June 1920, Lady Ottoline Morrell Coll, 17.6 Frank Prewett Correspondence, HRHRC. On Ottoline’s visit to Canada at this time, see Bertrand Russell to Ottoline Morrell, 17 December 1920, Bertrand Russell Papers, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collection, 1073–492.

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6 Carrie Derick, ‘Professions and Careers Open to Women’, in Women of Canada – Their Life and Work. National Council of Women of Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Agriculture, 1900). 7 Frank Prewett to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 5 September, 5 November 1920, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6, HRHRC. 8 Frank Prewett to Lady Ottoline Morrell, n.d., 17 October, 17 November 1919, 5 September 1920, 18 February 1920, 14 April 1920, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6, HRHRC; Frank Prewett to Robert Graves, 21 October 1924. F1-8 Correspondence, Frank Prewett Fonds, LAC. 9 Richard Harris, Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban 1900–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 162, 169. 10 Frank Prewett to Prof. James Mavor, 11 February 1915. The James Mavor Collection. MS Col. 119. WW1 Correspondence. Box 7., Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. 11 ‘Where the Wind Lies’, in CPFP, 14. 12 Frank Prewett, ‘Salcombe Bay’, 1919, F.20, LMS-0171, Frank Prewett Fonds, LAC. 13 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 5 January 1920; 12 January 1920; 26 January 1920; 3 April 1920, 14 April 1920; 11 May 1920 Humber Bay, Ontario, Frank Prewett to Major Waring n.d., GD372 116/10 Lennel Papers, NRS. 14 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 0/9/1919, GD 372 116/1; 1/11/19, GC 372 116/9; 25/9/1919, GD372 116/1; Eddie Marsh to Lady Clementine Waring, 31/5/1919, GD 372/120; ‘The Strange Ballad of Tom Beuly’ is enclosed with a letter from Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine, 23/1/1919, GD 372 119/1-32; ‘Pride of Women’ is enclosed with a letter from Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 23/1/1919, GD 372 119 1-32, Lennel Papers, NRS. 15 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 6 March 1920, Lady Ottoline Morrell, 17.6 correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. 16 ‘The Tragedy of Michael Farraday’, F.20, LMS-0171, Frank Prewett Fonds, LAC. For more on indigenous themes within horror, see Joy Porter, ‘The Horror Genre and Aspects of Native American Indian Literature’, in The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, ed. K. Corstorphine and L. Kremmel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 45–60. 17 The phrase is attributed to concert talks by Robert Hunter Bell. See also Speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto, 1858 in F. R. C. Clarke, Healey Willan: Life & Music (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 281. 18 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 26 January 1920; 10 February, 22 June 1920, Humber Bay, Ontario, Lennel Papers, 116/25, NRS. See also Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 14 April 1920, HRHRC. Prewett’s mother was active in the Women’s Christian Temperance movement. 19 See Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, 1916–1920, 199; Frank Prewett to Clementine Waring, 13 March, 3 April 1920, NRS.

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20 Frank Prewett to Clementine Waring, 11 May 1920, NRS. 21 Frank Prewett to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 18 February 1920, 14 April 1920, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6, HRHRC. 22 I am grateful to Muriel’s daughter Constance Sparrow Trussler who made Prewett’s poem ‘A Song of Hope (s.o.)’ 6 May, available to Carol W. Fullerton who in turn wrote ‘Frank Prewett: A Fragment of a Biography’, Canadian Poetry Studies/ Documents/Reviews, no. 24 (Spring/Summer 1989). 23 Frank Prewett, ‘These Are Not Public, Please.’ n.d., Lady Ottoline Morrell, 17.6 correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. Also: ‘To Muriel’, in SPFP, 78. 24 ‘Plea for a Day and a Night’, in CPFP, 15; ‘The Void Between’, in SPFP, 38; ‘The Captive Bird’, in CPFP, 21; ‘I Went A Mile’, in CPFP, 25. ‘The Captive Bird’ echoes the message within another Prewett poem ‘You and I’, in SPFP, 69. 25 ‘The Void Between’, in SPFP, 38. 26 ‘Seeking Perfect’, in SPFP, 60. 27 ‘My Love’, in SPFP, 62. 28 ‘Seeing My Love But Lately Come’, 45; ‘In Deep Night’, 52; ‘Come Girl, and Embrace’, 35; ‘I Shall Take You in Rough Weather’, 74; ‘The Captive Bird’, in SPFP, 42; ‘Simplicity’, in SPFP, 67. 29 ‘Do Not Go Away So High’, in CPFP, 13; ‘The Pack’, in CPFP, 28. 30 Frank Prewett, ‘I Hastened to See My Girl’, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 35.4: poetry mss., HRHRC. 31 In the same letter Prewett also railed against the seeming certainties of the Victorian era, ending his letter, ‘I Prefer War, Flu and Despair’. Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 11 January 1921, from London, UK; 18 February 1920, Lennel Papers, NRS. See also, Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, Humber Bay Ontario, 24 July 1921, e2/117, NRS. 32 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 30 January 1921, Lady Ottoline Morrell Coll., 17.6: Frank Prewett Correspondence, HRHRC. 33 See, for example, Janet K. Watson’s argument in Fighting Different Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 187, that disillusionment with the war was ‘part of the construction of memory, not experience’ and that the post-1928 war book boom was ‘much more about life after the war than about the war itself ’.

Chapter 9 1 From Prewett’s poem ‘The Survivor’, in SPFP, 75. 2 May Wedderburn Cannan, The Splendid Days (Oxford: Blackwell, 1919), 79. 3 See Paul Fussell, ‘Arcadian Recourses’, in The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 231–69; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 281.

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4 Reid, Broken Men. 5 Jon Stallworthy, Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War (London: Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2002), 139. 6 ‘Out of Nothingness’, in SPFP, 63. 7 ‘All Earth Rejoiced’, in SPFP, 58. 8 ‘Hated By Stars’, CPFP, 27; ‘I Went Out Into the Fields’, in CPFP, 3. 9 ‘You Use Me With Dread’, in CPFP, 37. 10 ‘Rain Descends’, in CPFP, 33; ‘Can I Bind a Bud?’, in CPFP, 32. 11 ‘If Life Be Happiness’, in SPFP, 51. 12 ‘Earth Song’, in SPFP, 70. 13 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel M. Weber and Shierry M. Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 362–3. 14 See Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 15 Edward Thomas, ‘As the Team’s Head-brass’, in Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna Longley (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2008), 124. 16 ‘Spring Offensive’, in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), 169. 17 Michael Longley, ‘Edward Thomas’s Poem’, in Snow Water (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2004), 480. 18 If dock leaves do cure nettle stings, no scientific consensus explains why. The phenomenon has been linked to the placebo effect, see Nicholas Humphrey, The Mind Made Flesh: Essays From the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 255–60. The idea that plants exist in pairs intended by God (sting/antidote) links back to the German nature mystic Jakob Böhme and his work The Signature of All Things (De Signatura Rerum) and Other Writings, 1621, trans. John Ellistone (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1912). 19 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, 5/5/1919, GD372/114; 10/12/1919, GD 372 116/13, Lennel Papers, NRS. The artist Gabriel Atkin sketched ‘The Golden Cross’, a dining group that included Osbert Sitwell, Wilfred Childe, Gerald Crowe, Frank Prewett, Sacheverell Sitwell, Atkin, V. da Sola Pinto, Sassoon and Thomas Earp. 20 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 3 December 1919, Lady Ottoline Morrell Collection, 17.6: correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC; Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, Islington, Toronto, 14 April 1920; 24 July 1920, e2/117, Lennel Papers, NRS. 21 Frank Prewett to Clementine Waring, 8 July 1921, NRS. 22 Frank Prewett to Clementine Waring, 8 July, 25 July, 18 September 1921, NRS. 23 Siegfried Sassoon, Diaries 1920–1922, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber, 1983), 113. 24 Siegfried Sassoon, 21 September 1921 in Diaries 1914–18, 86: Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 16 November 1918; Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, October 1921, 17.6:

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correspondence by Prewett, HRHRC. For more on the connection between stomach pain and trauma see J. Katz et al., in Serge Marchand et al., Mental Health and Pain: Somatic Psychiatric Components of Pain in Mental Health (New York: Springer, 2014), 125–6; Moeller-Bertram et al., ‘Specific Pain Complaints in Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Screening Positive for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder’, Psychosomatics 55, no. 2 (March–April, 2014): 172–8. Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, from Rome, 9 October 1921, & from Garsington 25 July 1921, Lennel Papers, NRS. 25 Siegfried Sassoon to Ottoline Morrell, 5 April 1921, HRHRC. 26 Frank Prewett to Lady Clementine Waring, from Garsington, 8 July 1921, 14 July 1921, 25 July 1921, 18 September 1921, Lennel Papers, NRS. 27 See Letters of Ottoline Morrell, 4 August 1923, HRHRC. 28 Siegfried Sassoon testimonial, 30 May 1923, LMS-0171, LAC. 29 For more, see the illustrated book by Merle Armitage, Taos Quartet: In Three Movements (1950), n.p. Unknown binding. 30 See also M.F. Ashley-Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942). 31 Prewett still corresponded with Ottoline, see FP to Lady Ottoline, 13 January 1926, HRHRC, Edmund C. Blunden Collection. See Charles S. Elton, Animal Ecology (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1927). 32 Frank Prewett to Robert Graves, 7 June, 19 May 1924, LMS-0171, LAC. 33 Frank Prewett to Robert Graves, 11 September 1921; Robert Graves to Frank Prewett, 1930; Frank Prewett to Robert Graves, 21 June 1924 F. 1-8, Frank Prewett Fonds, LAC. See also Miranda Seymour, Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (London: Doubleday, 1995), 105–6. 34 FP to Edmund Blunden, 7 September 1923; 21 June 1925; Edmund Charles Blunden Collection, Recipients series, HRHRC. 35 Dave Youngs has told the author that his mother has no memory of meeting her father and that family records suggest the last contact was when she was eighteen months old. 36 Frank Prewett to Robert Graves, 22 February 1925; 16 February 1925, F.1-8, LAC. 37 Graves, Goodbye to All That, 321; Meyer, ‘Frank Prewett’, 58. Madeline’s beauty was remarked upon by Robert Graves in a letter to Sassoon, 13 July 1926 in Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914–1946, ed. Paul O’Prey (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 167. Letters in Prewett/Youngs family possession shared with the author: Frank Prewett, Tubney Farm to Robert Graves, 10 March 1924; 10 April 1924.

Chapter 10 1 Much of what Prewett was doing presaged ‘precision farming’ and the current movement to bring scientific, highly technical practices to farm production.

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5 6

7 8 9

10 11

Notes Quotation, C. S. Orwin, ‘Preface’, in Frank Prewett, The Marketing of Farm Produce, Part 1: Live-Stock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), v–vi. Another key publication by Prewett in this period was A Survey of Milk Marketing in Derbyshire, June 1928 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). For more, see AE/6 Director’s Report, 1930, Oxford University Archives. As reported in the Oxford University Gazette, 22 January 1930, 274. For more on ‘Oxford Between the Wars’, see Brian A. Harrison, ed., The History of the University of Oxford; The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 143–6. Haber also developed poison gas, initially deployed at Ypres in 1915 where Prewett served. Haber also helped to develop Zyklon B, used in the Nazi gas chambers during the Second World War to murder a great many, including Haber’s own nieces and nephews. Quotation: Report by Institute for Research in Agricultural Economics, Oxford University Gazette, Vol. LXII, 1931–2, 281. On the Ministry grant squeeze at the institute, see Oxford University Gazette, Vol. LXIV, 1933–4, 342. See for example, Stanley M. Bligh and F. J. Prewett, Progress in English Farming Systems: II The Improvement of Upland Grazings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); for a list of Prewett’s publications in this period see Oxford University Gazette, 1 March 1933, 352; 13 December 1934, 251. Frank Prewett, The Countryman, July 1929, 240. For more on the ramifications of industrial farming, especially the introduction of antibiotics into animal feeds since the 1940s, see Ellen K. Silbergeld, Chickenizing Farms & Food: How Industrial Meat Production Endangers Workers, Animals & Consumers (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016). See Frank Prewett to Mr Harold Raymond, 7 August 1931, CW 41/12, URSCS. Prewett discusses Freeman in a letter to Harold Raymond, 14 December 1931, CW 41/12, URSCS. See Robert McFarlane, Landmarks (London: Penguin, 2015); The Wild Places (London: Granta, 2007). The ‘New Nature’ genre has been critiqued for the gentle and sublimated nature of its place-orientated eco-politics. See Joe Moran, ‘A Cultural History of the New Nature Writing’, Literature and History 23, no. 1 (Spring, 2014): 49–63. Frank Prewett, The Chazzey Tragedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), 2. Prewett’s view of enclosure has much more in common with that of J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760–1832: A Study in the Government of England Before the Reform Bill (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1911), than with that of more recent commentators who have downplayed the suffering of the rural poor and argued that they ‘saw little change of significance’. See J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution (London: B. T. Batsford, 1966), 52 and G. E. Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to Its Causes, Incidence and Impact, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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12 Rural dialect speakers represented as stupid still blights British media, as for example, within the long-running BBC Radio 4 series The Archers. 13 ‘Novels of the Day: A Village Machiavelli’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 May 1933, 6. Reviews generally of the book were poor, including that provided by Prewett’s brother-in-law, well-known Toronto journalist Gordon Sinclair. 14 Prewett, The Chazzey Tragedy, 139. 15 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London: Macmillan, 1929), 25; Prewett, The Chazzey Tragedy, 245. 16 Prewett, The Chazzey Tragedy, 110, 164, 177. 17 H. E. Bates, The Fallow Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932), 71. 18 Prewett, The Chazzey Tragedy, 115. 19 Prewett, The Chazzey Tragedy, 115, 123, 263, 305. 20 The phrase is from the translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound Thomas Hardy used at the close of ‘Tess of the d’Ubervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented’, The Graphic, XLIV, July–December 1891. 21 See Frank Prewett to Mr Harold Raymond, 21 May 1929, CW 41/12, URSC; 1 October 1930, CW 41/12, URSC. 22 Frank Prewett to Harold Raymond, CW 65/16, URSCS. 23 The house, now listed, is next to the St John the Baptist Church and has the name Old Housing. 24 Prewett to Dorothy Brett, 29 March 1954, Dorothy Brett Coll., 12.4, HRHRC. 25 Graves, ‘Introduction’, in CPFP, vii–viii. 26 Frank Prewett, ‘The Cloud Snake’, in CPFP, 20. 27 ‘Plea for Peace’, CPFP, 41. 28 This information is courtesy of Dave Youngs, son of Frank Prewett’s daughter, Jane Youngs. 29 Prewett described Raigmore as ‘a circus hospital, the clown part of the circus’. Frank Prewett to Mary Allan, 5 January 1962 in Prewett/Youngs family possession. Prewett’s grave is several rows from the main cemetery drive at Class 3, Section 36, Lair 13. In Victorian times, Class 1 was the most prominent with the seventh section talked of as being for paupers. 30 It is also said that the Queen once paid two fiddlers to entertain her. When the fiddlers returned to their homes, rather than a single night, 200 years had passed. When they heard a priest intone God’s name they crumbled into dust. For more, see Lizanne Henderson and E. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 31 ‘The Survivor’, in SPFP, 75. 32 Frank Prewett to Ottoline Morrell, 30 January 1921, Lady Ottoline Morrell Coll., 17.6: Frank Prewett Correspondence, HRHRC. 33 Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 7.

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34 Christopher L. Miller, Imposters: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Rosmarin Heidenreich, Literary Imposters: Canadian Autofiction of the Early Twentieth Century (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2018). Heidenreich’s meticulously researched study does not include Prewett. Its use of the terms ‘half-breed’ and ‘half-caste’, 7, 9, 116, is problematic, as is the implication within her analysis that there is anything necessarily concerning about Pauline Johnson’s ‘performance’ of both Mohawk and English identities, 4. 35 See Aristotle, The ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 40 and comment, 178. It is worth noting, however, that Aristotle also linked poetry to civic morality, which cultural appropriation attacks. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘Authenticity, or the Lesson of Little Tree’, New York Times, 24 November 1991. I owe the conflation of love and theft in this context to Eric Lott’s exemplary intervention, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy & the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Conclusion 1 Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August: The Outbreak of World War 1 (New York: MacMillan co, 1962), 29. 2 Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley: A Biography (London: Cecil Woolf, 1985), 167. 3 See Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990); Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 4 This delighted W. Heisenberg, one of the founders of modern physics, a discipline consistently impelled by the idea of demonstrating ultimate unity. As he put it, ‘Heraclitus was the first to announce that the static view of nature is illusory and that the universe consists basically of processes manifested in an endless “becoming”, with “due measure”.’ Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper Collins, 1958, 2007), 44–5. 5 For a discussion of the philosophical ambiguities and problems with complementarity as an idea, see Simon Saunders, ‘Complementarity and Scientific Rationality’, Foundations of Physics 35, no. 3 (2005): 347–72. 6 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, vol. 5 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 613. 7 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1972–80), 507.

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8 Freud described the unconscious as ‘einer psychischen Urbevölkerung’ in ‘The Unconscious’, [1913] in Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte et al., 18 vols (London: Imago, 1940–1968), 195; vol. 18 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1968). For further discussion of the insurgencies that erupted in colonial and imperial contexts around the world as reflected through literature at this time, see Nicole M. Rizzuto, Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 9 In Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Part 1 (London [John Rodker]: The Ovid Press, 1920). 10 David Lloyd George on 25 December 1915 quoted in Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931 (London: Allen Lane, 2014), 1. Tooze is the most recent scholar to make the point that the First World War secured American dominance. For a contrary view, that the war only accelerated a process in train since 1800 in the United States that would in any case have led to its current position of global hegemony, see Paul Kennedy’s persuasive ‘The First World War and the International Power System’, International Security 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984). 11 Much of the financial success of the United States as war broke out is due to Secretary William A. McAdoo of the US Treasury who flooded the banking system with emergency currency. For more on this specifically, see William L. Silber, When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America’s Monetray Supremacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and Richard Roberts, Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 12 Woolf arbitrarily put a date on an alteration that she nonetheless knew to be tangible. Virginia Woolf, Essays, vol. 1 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), 321, 184, 334. 13 Virginia Woolf ’s oeuvre is sensational but I agree with her contemporary Edward Morgan Forster, that at heart, it is also vague. See Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 134. 14 D. H. Lawrence, The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Henry Moore, vol. 2 (London: Heineman, 1962), 286. A spate of insightful recent books have argued for continuity rather than change in this period but ultimately these arguments reveal more about present priorities than the imperatives of the past. Jessica Feldman in Victorian Modernism has argued against the idea of a rift at this time within literary aesthetics, instead making claims for a coherent ‘Victorian modernism’ stretching from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Simon Joyce has suggested that a significant longer-term influence has been obscured by Bloomsbury and that we should look again at The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Similarly, Steve Ellis in Virginia Woolf and the Victorians argued that Woolf was primarily

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‘post-Victorian’. Others claim that modernist change can actually be traced to 1922 when a Constellation of Genius occurred. See Kevin Jackson, Constellation of Genius: 1911-Modernism Year One (London: Hutchinson, 2012). However, the contemporary feeling that definitive change was afoot from around 1910 is what is most significant and deserving of chroniclers’ attention. A useful defense of the tangibly new in this period can be found in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’, in Modernism 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (New York: Penguin, 1976), 19–55, 68. 15 Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 35. 16 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England: 1910-1914 (1935; repr., New York: Putnam, 1980). 17 Edmund Gosse, ‘War and Literature’, Edinburgh Review 220 (October 1914): 313; Owen, Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, 273. 18 See Hanno Helbling, Vorwort, in T. Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2001), 8; Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front [1920] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 22–3. 19 Eelco Runia, Moved By the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 20 See The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, ed. and trans. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953). Afanasyev published around 600 fairytales and folktales, one of the world’s largest collections. See Alexander Afanasyev, Russian Folk Tales (1976; repr., New York: Pantheon Folktales and Folklore Library); Jack Zipes, ‘Afanasyev, Aleksander’, in The Oxford Companion to Folk Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Pieter C. van den Toorn, Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring: The Beginnings of a Musical Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 14–15. 21 Quoted by Robert Craft, ‘The Rite of Spring: Genesis of a Masterpiece’, Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 1 (Autumn–Winter 1966): 30. 22 Igor Stravinsky to the Russian Musical Gazette, November 1912, quoted in Robert Craft, ‘100 Years On: Igor Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 June 2013. 23 For more on the Southern Athabaskan language speakers known as the Apache, see James L. Haley, Apaches: A History & Culture Portrait (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997) and Eve Ball, Indeh, An Apache Odessey (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980). 24 ‘Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947)’, 29 May 1913, Nicholas Roerich Museum, http:​/​/ www​​.roer​​ich​.o​​rg​/ro​​erich​​-biog​​ra​phy​​.php. 25 For discussion of the motives for projective identification, see H. Rosenfeld, ‘Contribution to the psychopathology of psychotic states: The importance of

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26

27

28 29

30 31 32

33 34

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projective identification in the ego structure and the object relations of the patient’, in Problems of Psychosis, ed. P. Doucet and C. Laurin (Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica, 1971); republished in E. Spillius, ed., Melanie Klein Today, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1988). See also Hanna Segal. Psychoanalysis, Literature and War: Papers 1972–1993 (London: Routledge, 1996). Edmund Blunden, ‘The Real War’, The Atheneum, 10 December 1920, 807. Reprinted in Poetry of the First World War: A Casebook, ed. Dominic Hibberd (London: Macmillan, 1981), 54–5; Edmund Blunden, ‘Introduction’, in An Anthology of War Poems, ed. Frederick Brereton (London: Collins, 1930), 69–75. Paul Ricoeur, De l’interprètation (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965), 486. On countermemory, see George Lipsitz, ‘Myth, History & Counter-Memory’, in Politics & the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Literature, ed. Adam J. Sorkin (Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1989), 161, 162. D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (New York: Heinemann, 1932), 312. At least 360,000 died on the Union side; and perhaps 750,000 in the war overall. For recent thinking on Civil War mortality figures, see J. David Hacker, ‘A CensusBased Count of the Civil War Dead’, Civil War History 57, no. 4 (December 2011): 307–48. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 5th edn. (Washington, DC: J.S. Redfield, 1872), 286, 12. Martin Taylor, Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches (London: Constable, 1989), 46. Neither is the articulation of protest memory a reinscription of ‘war gnosticism’. The phrase is found in James Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’, New Literary Criticism 30, no. 1 (1996): 204–15. Here Campbell accuses critics of the past of being ‘ideological’ for prioritizing the voices of those who had seen combat. He equates critical respect for protest within the poetry of combat in this period with a lack of cognizance or respect for all other forms of suffering or other experience during wartime. The possibility that the war protest of poets such as Owen and Sassoon could align with a contemporary female protest agenda, is not considered. Rather, it is assumed that the war poets’ hatred of female jingoism signalled a blanket antipathy to all women and that their wish to educate meant they also heaped blame upon all quarters of the civilian population. Such an approach is problematic, not least because it makes the committed defence of civilians by poets who saw combat, despite injury and periods of recuperation, difficult to explain. W. H. R. Rivers, ‘Medical Case Sheet’, Ts. P233, Document Archive: Siegfried Sassoon (London: Imperial War Museum). Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 11, 1914-1944 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968), 78. See also Olivier Esteves, ‘Bertrand

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Russell, The Utilitarian Pacifist’, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XX–1 (01 May 2015): https://doi​.org​/10​.4000​/rfcb​.308. 35 Plowman regarded W. H. R. Rivers, the psychologist he shared with Sassoon at Craiglockhart in 1917, as a ‘fundamental ass’. See Max Plowman, July 4, 1918 in Bridge Into the Future: Letters of Max Plowman, ed. D. Plowman (London: A. Dakers Ltd., 1944), 127; Mark Seven, A Subaltern on the Somme (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1927). 36 Robert Graves to Edward Marsh, 12 July 1917, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 37 Charles Sorley quoted in, 1914-18 in Poetry: Anthology Selected and Edited by E.L. Black, ed. E. L. Black (Aylesbury: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971), 129. 38 The phrase is also used by Samuel Hynes in A War Imagined, 119. 39 See Robert Ferguson, The Short, Sharp Life of T.E. Hulme (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 235–42; Owen to Susan Owen, 16 May 1917 in Wilfred Owen Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 461. Owen’s seeming inconsistency in this regard has troubled commentators who tend to require a standard of uniformity of approach in protesters that is almost never applied to those more accepting of the status quo. Such critics, for example, make much of Owen’s Anglican background but under-emphasize his use of Christian tropes to plead for awareness in his readers of the realities of war. See Adrian Caesar, Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 40 The mansion at Gort, Galway, was actively demolished by the Irish state in 1941 but the tower lives anew. The comment about Yeats having made himself a gentleman through his genius can be found in Violet Martin to Edith Somerville (1901) in Gifford Lewis, ed., The Selected Letters of Somerville & Ross (London: Faber, 1989), 240. 41 Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through [1916], 110. 42 Robert Frost, ‘The Figure of a Poem’, in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). W. B. Yeats, ed., ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Book of Modern Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), xxxiv–xxxv. John Middleton Murray, ‘Mr Sassoon’s War Verses’ (review of Counter-Attack and Other Poems), in The Evolution of an Intellectual (London: Richard Cobden-Sanderson, 1920), 71. From Mallarme’s 1879 sonnet on Edgar Allen Poe, ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’. See Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 71. 43 Yeats did include in the anthology Julian Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’ which spoke of the ‘joy’ of combat. Some of the same conflicts are discernible in Seamus Heaney’s treatment of the Irish Catholic nationalist poet and British army soldier Francis

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Ledwidge in the poem ‘In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge’; W. B. Yeats, ‘J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’, in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, vol. 4, Early Essays, ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein (New York: Scribner, 2007), 246; quotation from Yeats’s poem ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’, in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, vol. 1, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 249. Seamus Heaney, Field Work (London: Faber, 1979), 59–60. 44 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Pamphlet Against Anthologies [1928], in Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry & A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, ed. Charles Mundye and Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 205. 45 John Butler to William Butler Yeats, 30 June, 1921, J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W.B. Yeats and Others, 1869-1922, ed. Joseph Hone (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1946), 282. 46 From Wilfred Owen’s manifesto for the volume Disabled and Other Poems, quoted in Three Poets of the First World War: Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg & Wilfred Owen, ed. J. Stallworthy and Jane Potter (London: Penguin Classics, 2011), 110; Bell, Wilfred Owen: Selected Letters, 269–70. 47 Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow [1921] (London: Vintage Books, 2004), 83–4. 48 See René Pomeau, ed., The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 48 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1980), 195–6. For more on the historical resonances of 1759, see Frank McLynn, 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). 49 Bell, Wilfred Owen: Selected Letters, 269–70. See Matthew Arnold, ‘The Study of Poetry’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966–78). 50 See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), xviii, 306–7. See also Lears’s subsequent volumes that further emphasize persisting primitivist countertendencies within modern American culture: Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994) and Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003). 51 Although Boas went on to develop ideas about ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ cultural primitivism in an entry in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas in 1968, I do not consider these analytically useful given that primitivism so rarely exists in the discrete forms Boas set out. It is more appropriate to think simply of cultural primitivism existing in degrees of strength, since each element of Boas’s subdefinitions can and frequently is expressed simultaneously. Boas subdivided primitivism into two types: chronological, which holds that the earliest stage of human history was the best, and cultural, which holds that all additions to the ‘natural’ condition of mankind have been negative. Cultural primitivism he then further divided into a ‘soft’ form,

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which holds that the best life is the life without toil, and a ‘hard’ form, the doctrine that man is happiest when not bothered with arts and sciences and when living life at its simplest. Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1935), 7; George Boas, ‘Primitivism’, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P. Weiner, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner & Son, 1968), 577–98. 52 Possibly, this is what originally prompted the development of language for early man – the desire to express what so often accompanies the passage of time and human aging, namely, the sense that ‘Things aren’t what they used to be. They were better before.’ 53 For more on the prevalence of primitivism within Judeo-Christian and Muslim faiths, see Vincent J. Cornell, ‘Tradition & History in Islam: Primitivism in Islamic Thought & Scripture’, in Tradition & Modernity: Christian & Muslim Perspectives, ed. David Marshall (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 7–24. Key thinkers who have discussed the relation between Islam and modernity such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, have been at pains to differentiate Islamic concerns to achieve spiritual return from romantic nostalgia. See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘Reply to ShuHsien Liu’, in The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 27, The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn et al. (Peru: Open Court Press, 2000), 274. 54 I consider neo-primitivism a form of soft primitivism. See Victor Li’s discussion of neo-primitivism and its persistence in The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture and Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

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Index Afanasyev, Alexander  204 American post-war dominance  202 Anahareo (Gertrude Bernard)  98. See also Indigenous Canada Arnold, Matthew  214 Asquith, Raymond  158 Aubrey House Hospital for Officers  67, 128 authenticity  214–15 Babinski, Joseph  74 Bagnold, Enid  5 Barbusse, Henri  38 Barker, Pat  53, 61, 70 BBC Radio ‘Country Topic’ talks by Prewett  185 Bell, Clive  143 ‘Ben’, Prewett-Hellyer family orphan farmworker  16 Blunden, Edmund  1, 3, 33, 38, 44, 116, 123, 128, 132, 158, 180 and protest  207–9 Poems ‘Pillbox’  63 ‘Third Ypres’  165 Boas, Franz  79–80 Bonham-Carter, Victor  192 Bosch, Hieronymus  38 Both/and thinking  210–11 Brant, Cameron  22. See also Indigenous Canada Brett, Dorothy  2–3, 12, 141, 146, 178, 193 Brittain, Vera  38, 57 Brock, Arthur  67, 72 Brooke, Rupert  203 Broyles, William  42 Buchan, John  57 buried alive  46–52 Campbell Scott, Duncan  119 Canada affinities with Britain at outbreak of war  2, 17–20, 29, 156

agricultural innovation  183–5 (see also Toronto) consumerism, conformity, lack of artistic opportunity  154–7 Governor’s Diamond Jubilee fancy dress ball  96 myth surrounding involvement in first world war  153, 156 poetry  6–8, 119, 158 post-war  127 Prewett on First Nations Canadians  147 Indigenous Canada  13–15, 21–6 poets  6 (see also Anahareo (Gertrude Bernard); Cameron D. Brant; Haudenosaunee/ Iroquois; Indigenous schools; Mike Mountain Horse/’Miistatisomatai’; Pauline Johnson; Pegahmagabow, Francis; Saugeen Nation; Thayendanegea/Joseph Brant; Tom Longboat; Transcultural indigenous figures and élites) ‘Captain Swing’  187 Carpenter, Edward  109 The Intermediate Sex  109 Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk  109 Carrington, Dora  49, 136, 145–6 Carr Saunders, A. M.  179 Chapman, Guy  36–7 Charcot, Jean-Martin  54–5, 59 Clinkard, Madeline  179–80, 193 The Countryman  185, 192 Country Scene and Topic  192 Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh/ ’Dottyville’  67, 70–3, 93 cultural appropriation/imposterism  196–7 De la Mare, Colin  92 De la Mare, Walter  2, 132

284

Index

Delvert, Charles  32–3 depersonalization  123 Dodge Luhan, Mabel  178 dressing up and pretending  95–6, 100 Eaton Machine Gun Brigade  20 Elliot Smith, Grafton  88 Elton, Charles  179 Faradism  65 The Farmer’s Weekly  191 Faulks, Sebastian  53 Ferguson’s Gang  100 First World War and modernism  200 as watershed  199–200 First World War trench combat experience discomfort/filth  35 fear/death  35–8 infestation, 34–5 monotonous food, 33, 38 positives  39–43 rain/ice  33 sleeplessness/noise  33–4 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  57 Tender Is the Night  64 Forster, E. M.  2, 132 Foucault, Michel  54 Freeman, H. W.  179, 186 Freud, Sigmund  29, 122 ‘afterwardsness’/nachträglich of trauma  64 Beyond the Pleasure Principle  76 links sub-atomic and subconscious  200 and primitivism  201 ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’  76 on repression and being buried alive  50 Studies in Hysteria  79 ‘talk therapy’ and traumatic neurosis  75–7 testimony at Wagner-Jauregg malpractice trial  65 Frost, Robert  194, 211 Fussell, Paul  1 Gardiner, Henry Balfour uses of Prewett’s poetry for ‘The Quiet Garden’  129

Garsington  2, 124 beloved by Prewett  149 comparison with Brideshead  130 gardens  135 height of fashion  134 as theatre set  130–6 Georgian poetics  50 Georgian Poetry, 109, 128 Gertler, Mark  2, 3, 109, 130, 141, 146, 178, 210 ghosts/double or parasitic selves  62, 91 and Graves  180, 199–200 and “living death” concept, Theodor Adorno  173–4 and Sassoon  111, 119–20 within work by Prewett and Edward Thomas  168–73, 191 Gibson, Wilfred  46 Gomme, Lionel  136 The Goons  117 Gosse, Edmund  124, 203 Grant, Duncan  136, 141 Graves, Robert  1–2, 39, 41, 85 approach to truth  114 ‘Goliath and David’ poem  39 Goodbye to All That  5, 111, 114–16 high opinion of Prewett  113, 119, 181, 193 Irishness  114 at Islip  180 ridicules Yeats  212 and Rivers  180–1 on Sassoon’s ‘shell-shock’  105, 111, 119 The White Goddess  117–18, 178 Grenfell, Julian  40 Grey Owl (Archie Belaney)  93, 98–9 Gurney, Ivor  42–3 Haber, Fritz  184 Haddon, Alfred Cort  81–2 Half Moon Street  63, 107–8. See also homosexuality Hardy, Thomas  2 Hardy, Thomas discusses Prewett’s work  132 influence upon The Chazzey Tragedy  189, 191 Haudenosaunee/Iroquois  13–17. See also Indigenous Canada

Index Head, Henry  85 opinion of Rivers  89 Studies in Neurology  87 Hebb, Donald  64 Heinemann, William  2 Hellyer, Clara  15, 158 Herbert, A. P.  36 Hewson, Charles  29, 128, 179 Hitler, Adolf  41 homosexuality  71, 75, 86–8 at Garsington  135 Sassoon’s introduces Owen to Robbie Ross  107–8 Hughlings Jackson, John  78 Huxley, Aldous  2, 132 Crome Yellow  212 indigenous battle prowess  24–6. See also Indigenous Canada Indigenous Ontario school runaways  14–15. See also Indigenous Canada James, William  20 Janet, Pierre  60, 79, 122 Jenkins, Vivienne  3 Jerrold, Douglas  32 John, Augustus  136, 141 Johnson, Pauline  26–7. See also Indigenous Canada Jones, David  35 Jones, P. H.  47 Joyce, James  170 Jünger, Ernst  24, 43, 203 Kafka, Franz ‘The Wish To Be A Red Indian’  145–6 Keynes, John Maynard  144–5 Kipling, Rudyard  57 Klein, Melanie  206 Koteliansky, K. K.  2 Kaurareg of the Isles of Kaiwalagal  84 Lawrence, D. H. caricature of Ottoline  140 on Garsington  132–3 influence upon The Chazzey Tragedy  188 and poetic truth  207 “smashing the frame” 202

285

utopia named “Rananim’ at Taos, New Mexico  178 Layard, John relationship with Rivers  71–4 Ledwidge, Francis  209 Lennel House  67, 70, 93, 120 Les Apaches  205 Longboat, Thomas Charles (Tom)  25–6. See also Indigenous Canada Long Lance, Chief Buffalo Child (Sylvester Clark Long)  93, 97–8 Lucas, Netley  100 Macauley, Rose  57 MacCurdy, John T.  39 McCrae, John  50 McDougall, William  121 McFarlane, Robert  186 Madox Ford, Ford  116 Maghull Military Hospital  71 Mallarmé, Stéphane  211 Mann, Thomas  44 Mansfield, Katherine  2, 57, 132 Marsh, Edward  2, 102 critiques Prewett’s poems  158 relationship with Mark Gertler  109 and Robert Graves  113 supports Prewett  128 and Winston Churchill  109 Masefield, John  2, 129 May, Karl  25 Meiklejohn, Roderick  108 Messer, M.  183 Middleton Murray, John  2, 211 Milk Marketing Board  185 Mississauga peoples  14 modernity  215 Monro, Harold  2 Moore, G. E.  143–5 Morgan, Lewis Henry  78, 83 Morrell, Lady Ottoline  1, 31, 35, 47–8, 124. See also Julian Vinogradoff aristocratic background  138 beauty  136 comparison to Proust’s Mme Verdun  142 Hermione Roddice caricature  140 law of inverse proportion  141–5 lovers  136 neurasthenia  139–42 pacifism  208

286 response to Sassoon’s formal protest  106 unfulfilled sexually by Prewett  149–50 visits Canada  165–6 Morrell, Philip  133, 137–40. See also Julian Vinogradoff Garsington farm  176 illegitimate offspring  136 pacifism  208 swindled by Prewett  178 Morris, William  202 Mott, Frederick  59 Mountain Horse, Mike /’Miistatisomatai’. See also Indigenous Canada buried alive  48 Mountain Horse family, Blood Indian Reserve  22–5, 44. See also Indigenous Canada Mutism response to ‘shell-shock’  61 Myers, Charles S.  54, 61, 75–6 primitivist ethnography  82–3 theory of multiplex personality  79 in Torres  81 Nash, Paul  33 nature reconceived as a result of war, 175 neurasthenia  140 Nietzsche, Friedrich  115 Nijs, Maria  136 Nonne, Max  75 Oppenheim, Hermann, 59 Owen, Wilfred  3, 33, 35–6, 41 buried alive  46 critiqued by W. B. Yeats  210–12 death  124 decorated for bravery  209 at Half Moon Street  108 protest  208, 210 Sassoon  70, 72, 102, 107 ‘shell-shock’ treatment & Craiglockhart  67, 72, 108 ‘Spring Offensive’  175 truth  212 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 210, 214 pacifism  208–10 pandemic  153 Parkdale, Toronto  17

Index Partridge, Ralph buried alive  48–9 pacifist  208 Passchendaele, conflict  1, 23, 26, 29, 54 Pegahmagabow, Francis  24. See also Indigenous Canada Perl, Daniel  58–9 “playing Indian” 1, 97 Poe, Edgar Allan  48 Poiret, Paul  95 Pollard, Alfred  41 Pollard, Dorothy/ ‘Polly’  192, 195 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)  56, 58 Potter, Beatrix  94 Pound, Ezra  2, 132 ‘power farming’  184 Powys, T. F.  186 Prewett, Bill (William)  6, 193 Prewett, Frank abandons wife Madeline Clinkard  181 achieves commission  20 adopts indigenous/‘Toronto’ identity  21–5, 93–5 alcoholism  160, 193, 195 alienation from/ affinity with the natural world  168–75, 195 anti-semitism  156 blown up  46–7 ‘blue and gold existence’  150, 162 buried alive  46–51 claims to be indigenous  146–7 combat experience  29, 39, 46–8, 62–5 combat sexual encounter  40 (see also ‘The Pack’) compared to Rudolph Valentino  3, 102 (see also Valentino, Rudolph) contemplates Morocco job due to poverty  151 and cultural appropriation/active transculturalism  196–7 death  195 depression  103, 149, 164, 181 discussed critically as indigenous  6 early life  13–17 enlistment  18 farming, chickens, cheese, poverty and theft from Morrells  175–8

Index farming sensibility  190–1, 195–6 good looks & bisexual appeal  3, 102 Half Moon Street  108 harsh religious upbringing  16–17 haunted/ ‘phantom rid’ by war dead  30–1 organ music lessons from Healey Willan  159–60 at Oxford University  94 on peasants  16 popularity at Garsington  145–52 relationship to Georgian poetics  50 sexual ambivalence  148–54, 162–4 ‘shell-shock’ experience  63, 151, 181 suffocated by Canadian conformity  154–60 treatment by/exposure to Rivers  67 within Canadian literary history  7–8 Novel The Chazzey Tragedy  186–92 Play The Tragedy of Michael Farraday  158 Poems: ‘All Earth Rejoiced’  171 ‘The Bombardment’  39–40 ‘The Captive Bird’  162 ‘Card Game’  43–6 ‘Clad All in White She Ran’  148–9 ‘The Cloud Snake’  193–4 ‘Come Girl, and Embrace’  163 ‘Do Not Go Away So high’  164 ‘Earth Song’  173 ‘Epigram’  47 ‘The Farm Labourer’  118 ‘Garsington’  132 ‘Hated By the Stars’  171 ‘A Homecoming to Earth’  47 ‘If I Unfold My Fist’  122 ‘If Life Be Happiness’  173 ‘In Deep Night’  162 ‘I Shall Take You in Rough Weather’  163 ‘I Stared At the Dead’  123 ‘I Went a Mile’  162 ‘I Went Out into the Fields’  171–2, 186 ‘The Kelso Road’  120, 194 ‘Lark Song’  109 ‘My Bride is Battle’  40

287

‘Out of the Nothingness of Earth’  47, 171 ‘The Pack’  164 ‘Plea for Peace’  194–5 ‘Please for a Day and a Night’  162 ‘Pride of Women’  158 ‘Rain Descends’  172 ‘The Red Man’  147–8 The Rural Scene  128, 178 ‘Seeing My Love But Lately Come’  162 ‘Seeking Perfect’  163 ‘Simplicity’  164 ‘The Soldier’  121 ‘Soliloquy’  122 ‘The Somme Valley, June 1917’  50 ‘The Survivor’  196 ‘To Canada’  19–20 ‘To Death’  121 ‘The Void Between’  162–3 ‘You Use Me With Dread’  172 Prewett, Jane  181 primitivism  51, 204 and The Rite of Spring  204–6 and ‘shell-shock’ diagnosis  60–1 ‘soft’ primitivism  197–9, 214–15 protest memory  198 critical exclusion by W. B. Yeats  210–14 and trauma poetry  206–10 Proust, Marcel In Search of Lost Time  141–3 Ranke, Leopold von  6 Remarque, Erich Maria  123 REM sleep  62 repression  66 and Sassoon  72 Riding, Laura  114, 116, 180 Rivers, W. H. R.  1–2, 36 commonalities with G. E. Moore  143–4 Conflict and Dream  77 empathetic reciprocity  74–7 ‘epicritic’ thinking on human evolution  86 and Freudianism  70 health  83 influence of Grafton Elliot Smith  88–9

288

Index

Instinct and Unconscious  89 intellectual achievements  77–80 Labour Party MP  90 Melanesia  69 and poetry  88 portrayal by Pat Barker  70 primitivist thinking  77–81, 83 relationship with Graves  67, 180 relationship with Sassoon  67, 70, 90 Sassoon’s mental anchor  74–5 ‘shell-shock’ diagnosis and class  60– 1, 71–2 socialism  90, 105 treatment of/exposure to Prewett  67 Robertson Scott, J. W.  192 Roerich, Nicholas  204–6 Rogers, Will  25 Rosenberg, Isaac  3, 33–4, 36, 209 Ross, Robbie  63, 107–8, 124 Royal Field Artillery  20 Royal Welch Fusiliers  2 Russell, Bertrand  85, 90, 132, 143, 208, 212 Sassoon, Siegfried  1–2, 37, 46 admission to Craiglockhart and Lennel Hospitals  105 The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston  104 creative impact upon Wilfred Owen  212–13 decorated for bravery  209 expansive death  107 ‘Fancy Dress’ poem about Prewett  102 financially supports Prewett  176 ‘Foot Inspection’  110 Fox Hunting Man  115 ghost persona  111 homosexuality  107 narcissistic nature  107 not ‘ordinary pacifist’  208 and Ottoline Morrell  73, 125 poetic protest  208 and Rivers  60, 70–3, 105, 111 Rivers his mental anchor  74–6 ‘shell-shock’  106, 110 shot in the head by his own sentry  70 smitten by ‘Toronto’ Prewett  66, 101–3

socialist period  105, 110 “Soldier’s Declaration” protest  70, 104 and Stephen Tennant  105 ‘ruminant onlooker’ concept  124 trip to Rome with Prewett  177–8 “trouserish” incident with Prewett  176–7 use of fire opal/’pocket heaven’ during combat  35 visits Prewett in Canada, 160 Saugeen Nation  14, 118. See also Indigenous Canada “sheer time” in combat  46–52 ‘shell-shock’/neurasthenia  53–68 and class/cultural privilege  60–1 debate over organic-v-psychological causes  58 experience of  62–4 and gender  56–8 incidence and diagnosis  59–60 interdisciplinary context  53–6 treatment options  64–7 use of term in this book  54 Sickert, Walter  141 Sitwell, Edith  132 Sitwell, Osbert  128 Slee, Muriel  161 ‘Soft’ cultural primitivism  197–9, 214–15. See also primitivism Somme, Battle of  1–2, 32, 33, 37, 48, 50, 61, 106, 119, 121, 157, 209 Spencer, Herbert  78 influence on Rivers  80–1 ‘Stong’ primitivism  215 Strachey, Lytton  2, 145 approach to biography  5–6 conscientious objection to First World War  137 Eminent Victorians  135 habituée of Garsington  132 love interest Ralph Partridge  48 not an absolute pacifist  208 opinions on Ottoline Morrell140 reviews Prewett’s work  128 Strampelli, Nazareno  184 Talbot, R. B.  37 Taphephobia  48 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre  41

Index Tennant, Stephen  105, 129 Thayendanegea/Joseph Brant  22 Thomas, Edward  42, 209 affinities with Prewett’s view of the natural world  168–75 The Icknield Way /’Rain’ prose  169–74 time as a casualty of war  123 Todas peoples  84 Tomnahurich Cemetery, Inverness  195–6 Torres Straits Expedition  80–2, 90 Toronto, Canada and ‘dark energy’  14. See also Canada; Indigenous Canada Transcultural indigenous figures and élites  97–100. See also Indigenous Canada Trauma, psychological. See also PostTraumatic Stress Disorder relationship to combat activity  39, 54, 56 Tubney experimental farm, Oxfordshire  167, 179–81 University of Oxford  94 Agricultural Economics Research Institute  167, 181 Prewett at Christ Church  127–30 Prewett returns to Oxford from Canada  165 Prewett ‘shell-shocked’ at  103, 128 University of Toronto  18, 160 Valentino, Rudolph  3, 102 Verdun, conflict  29, 32–3, 45 Vimy, conflict  1, 23, 26, 29, 44, 97 Vinogradoff, Julian  112, 146–7, 179. See also Ottoline Morrell; Philip Morrell

289

Vittoz, Roger  139 Voltaire, 213 Walton, William  128–30 Waring, Lady Clementine  3, 47, 103 Waring, Major Walter  93, 157 Warner-Jauregg, Julius  65 Wells, Herbert George  38, 43, 75, 90, 212 Mr Britling Sees It Through  106 West, Rebecca  57 Whitman, Walt  110 Leaves of Grass  207 Willan, Healey  158 Woodworth, William (Mohawk, Six Nations tradition-keeper)  14 Woolf, Leonard  2, 85, 132, 143–4 Woolf, Virginia  2, 57, 85, 132, 137 Dreadnought Hoax  99–100 on G. E. Moore  143–4 on modernism  202–3 opinion of Garsington  133–7 Ottoline Morrell and Mrs Dalloway  142 pursued by the Morrells  133 treatment by Henry Head  85 Yealland, Lewis  65–6 Yeats, W. B.  2, 129 ‘Ancestral Houses’  131–2 critically excludes poetic protest memory of First World War  210–14 ridiculed by Mark Gertler  210 ‘The Second Coming’  200–1 Ypres, conflict  1, 21–2, 29, 32–8, 41, 50, 101, 128, 158, 165 Zola, Èmile  49

290