Our Journal: First World War Studies

Helen Gansevoort Mackay, a little-known writer from New York, spent much of her life in France, where she became Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. During the Great War she published a book of poetry and two books of sketches based on her work as a nurse. Like Ellen N. La Motte and Mary Borden, two other Americans now canonized for sketches composed while they worked together at a hospital in Belgium, Mackay was a modernist whose voice is self-mocking and ironic; her depictions of medical staff and soldiers are often satiric or starkly disillusioned. All three women had until 1917 somewhat greater freedom of expression than writers from nations at war. Intensely Francophile, Mackay focused on the destruction of bodies, homes, and the fabric of social life. She was highly praised by Richard Burton and several anonymous reviewers for her ‘emotional intensity’ and ‘tragic effect’. Unlike La Motte and Borden, however, Mackay has been forgotten, in part because of her diffidence as an untrained nurse, and in part because her vignettes were read for the lyricism of their descriptions rather than the crisp critical assessments of behaviour. This essay addresses the relationship between London, One November (1916), Mackay’s volume of poetry, and the prose sketches in Journal of Small Things (1917). The free verse of London, One November enabled a narrative mode in short lyrics, while it also exploited rhetorical structures beyond traditional metrical form. Her patterns of contrast and inversion capture social and psychological conflicts in wartime. In London, apostrophe and invocation use the metonymic power of lyric to bring to life places and objects as figures for those who in wartime are absent or dead. Description accumulates around roads or homes, conveying sensory perceptions to shape traces of a war narrative. Time may be frozen as lives are brought to a halt by a paralysing war wound, while individual moments point towards a history in process. Mackay’s experiments in prose correspond to those in her poetry, yet often invert her rhetorical strategies. In Journal of Small Things her prose poems and the progressive structure of a diary trace the curve of the war experience, plotted across fragmentary observations. At the same time, a lyric side of narrative emerges in the condensation to a momentary encounter or snapshot. The brevity of a sketch rhymes with curt observations about the age at which a soldier will die. Everyday observations are invested with contradictory structures that reverse the movement of a sentence in order to capture the emotions of a couple torn apart. The paradoxes of human behaviour expose the importance of pretence to sustaining war and drowning out doubts. Whereas the war was understood to unite a nation, Mackay addresses the separation between her privileged position and the rough poverty of those lower-class staff with whom she works at the Hôpital St Louis.

Key Words: Helen Mackay, London, One November, Journal of Small Things, Ellen N. La Motte, Mary Borden

Despite enjoying a sustained readership, William March’s Company K remains a surprisingly understudied examination of American soldiers in World War I. To date, just a mere handful of critical articles or book chapters have examined the novel in detail. March’s relentlessly anti-heroic themes, which now seem overly familiar (even clichéd) thanks to the popularity of works like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (the bestselling war novel of all time) and Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Paths of Glory, are perhaps part of the problem. But Company K is more than a war novel: on many levels, the book is about war writing. Indeed, March’s metafictional narrative plays with notions of representation and truth-telling in war literature in ways that anticipate Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This essay offers a new appraisal of Company K by focusing on its metafictonal features, which include the deployment of a novel-within-a-novel structure, and its iconoclastic form. To underscore the originality of March’s approach, as well as his implied scorn for the critical standards of his day, the essay first summarizes attempts by leading war-literature critics in the 1920s and 1930s to nail-down the relationship between war fiction and truth. This section of the essay spotlights the controversial French expert on literary testimony, Jean Norton Cru, as well as the English military historian Cyril Falls and two distinguished American men of letters, Archibald MacLeish and Malcolm Cowley, both of whom had strong opinions about what constituted a truthful depiction of the Great War. The essay then demonstrates how March’s novel rejects most of the assumptions put forward by these critics, both through its reflexive recognition of its own fictionality and through its subversive form, a transmedia blend of devices drawn from early cinema, modernist painting, and historical writing.

Key Words: Modernism, experimentation, narrative, form, metafiction, criticism, painting

A little-quoted line in the Treaty of Versailles declares that universal peace can ‘be established only if it is based upon social justice’. However, accounts of the Paris Peace Conference, both factual and fictional, demonstrate that such high rhetoric was often at odds with its context. While many American diplomats and socialites experienced the Paris of 1919 as a hothouse of political intrigue and lavish entertainment, drafted soldiers found themselves locked into menial service in a war that no longer existed. Meantime, back home, the abrupt end to the munitions industry and the return of veterans searching for work created havoc in already fragile labour markets, causing hardship, racial violence, and unrest. This article examines American attitudes to social justice in the volatile months around the signing of the Treaty. In order to explore the contradictory impressions of the Peace Conference and its impact, it draws on the papers of James Duncan, a Scotsman serving in Woodrow Wilson’s team, and examines literary representations of 1919 written in retrospect by writers such as Mary Borden and John Dos Passos. Employing a ‘multiperspectivity’ approach (Stradling 2003), this study offers interdisciplinary insights to this key moment in international affairs, domestic policies and social impact. It argues that, as in the Hall of Mirrors in 1919, different views can be sought from many positions to create progressive attitudes to work and social justice, and demonstrates that collaboration across contrasting perspectives is the essence of peace-making.

Key Words: Versailles, Paris Peace Conference, peace-making, social justice, multiperspectivity, 1919

Considerable attention has been given to American writers, including poets, who in the 1920s expressed disillusionment with US participation in the war. As such, these writers participated in a Modernist critique of the ideologies that supported US efforts to use the war as a lever to propel the United States into pre-eminence in a global capitalist system. My article focuses, rather, upon the ways that some poets during the war were already satirizing or otherwise resisting the US world hegemonic project. This iconoclastic work appeared in two distinct forms. On the one hand, some poets often affiliated with marginal political groups, sought intentionally to expose the socio-economic and self-interested underpinnings of ideologies of family loyalty, social altruism, democracy, and the rule of law that were promulgated to justify US intervention. Most vociferous in these critiques were socialist poets, particularly Arturo Giovannitti and Ralph Chaplin, but other critics were affiliated with the most militant branches of the Woman’s Peace Party, such as Florence Tuttle and Bernice Evans. On the other hand, an implicit critique of the idealistic rhetoric justifying US intervention might also be found in certain poems honestly depicting the technologies of modern warfare, even if the poets in question sought a neutral or supportive stance towards the US war effort. Such work was produced both by soldier poets such as John Allan Wyeth and Baker Brownell and by civilians like John Curtis Underwood, a voluminous Whitmanian chronicler of the war. Exposing the hollowness of patriotic cant already during the war years, these poets stressed the cruel facts that the war would not be won by that side with the better principles or less hypocritical ideological formations, but by that side more successful in employing the killing potential of industrial tools and mass organization.

Key Words: Poetry, United states, World War One, mobilization, modernism, modernity

While women working as nurses had been a staple in films with war settings since the beginnings of narrative film, the early 1930s saw a short cycle of Hollywood films which placed women at the centre of the war film. One of the first of these was War Nurse (1930), produced at MGM and directed by Edgar Selwyn. Another, a year later, was The Mad Parade, a film distributed by Paramount and directed by William Beaudine. The two films did unremarkable business and their critical reception ranged from lukewarm to outright hostile. Yet this cycle is an illuminating instance of the Hollywood system’s negotiation with the evolving public memories of the Great War. Both films were efforts to widen the appeal of the war as a film subject to the assumed interest of women audiences. They drew attention to women’s agency, their experiences and their ability to deal with male weakness and aggression, both physical and sexual, and in the process offered an alternative perspective on desire at the Front that had remained underexplored in the male adventure film. In these films the Front and the environments surrounding it were ‘a forbidden zone’ where the term was polysemic, forbidden in terms of the threat of death, sexual exploitation, and violence, but also in the promise of escape from moral strictures. In this environment, straight-talking vernacular was a coping mechanism. This chapter outlines how Hollywood scriptwriter Becky Gardner incorporated slang and wisecracking as a technique of realism and as a means of sidestepping censorship in constructing an alternative public memory of the Great War.

Key Words: Women scriptwriters, war nurses, slang, flapper, censorship, war film, prostitution

This article begins by identifying the significance of the idea of reconstruction to US political and cultural discourse in 1919, across a range of registers. These included Black civic leaders and authors’ call for a reconstruction of US race relations, and also the reconstruction plans launched by the government to rehabilitate wounded US veterans into the postwar workplace. I suggest a parallel between these reconstructive energies and the way the entire field of US First World War studies has been reconstructed in recent years, capped by the surge in scholarly activity occasioned by the war’s centennial. The article offers a brief survey of some of the most prominent features of that activity in literary and cultural studies, including the decentring of literature as the undisputed centre of the cultural record of the war, the recovery of war texts by nurses and African American authors, and a revisiting of how the literature of modernism engaged the conflict. The piece then turns to how memorial is a particularly significant aesthetic and social form for us to consider the legacy of the First World War in America after the centennial, an issue inseparable from the new National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C. I argue that the memorial is inclusive in ways that reflect the highly current (and charged) debate about the place of war memorials in broader US society, but is also deliberately noncommittal about the place of the First World War in the narrative of national history. The continued lack of popular consensus around the meaning of the war for the US that this decision signifies, I conclude, places the scholars involved in the recent re-evaluation of the conflict as particularly central to framing understandings of the war for a new generation.

Key Words: American literature, First World War, memorials