Our Journal: First World War Studies

In the years before 1914, Edward Dent had devoted his youth to establishing music as an academic subject, and the performing arts and literature as essential elements of ordinary life. He built up a creative nexus in pre-war Cambridge, and the young men in his circle, many of them homosexual, began to take the unprecedented step of becoming professional musicians and artists. When the first crop of his carefully nurtured and highly talented students went off to war he was at first devastated. But his practical side took over, and he spent the rest of the war engaged in writing and translating for the pacifist Cambridge Magazine. In an atmosphere of increased stifling of any form of dissent, he built up a new circle of like-minded young men, mostly through a vast correspondence, which became a kind of forum for ideas kept alive in the direst circumstances. When the war ended, Dent and his circle were able to carry on where they had left off, establishing theatre, music and opera for all. This paper focuses on how music in particular was kept alive through Dent himself, and his correspondence with Arthur and Kennard Bliss, Denis Browne, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Clive Carey, Rupert Brooke and J.B. Trend.

Key Words: Arthur Bliss, Kennard Bliss, Rupert Brooke, Denis Browne, Clive Carey, J.B. Trend, Ralph Vaughan Williams, pacifism, homosexuality

This essay explores the significance of fugue to Virginia Woolf\‘s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway. Its focus is twofold: it considers the significance of the medical term ‘hysterical fugue’ to Woolf\‘s representation of shell shock, and it provides an innovative reading of the ‘fugal’ form of this novel. Tracing the detailed parallels between the structure of Woolf\‘s text and that of musical fugue, it explores the implications of Woolf\‘s use of this musical form for Mrs Dalloway\‘s national, gender and class politics.

Key Words: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway , fugue, J.S. Bach, shell shock, hysterical fugue, literature and music

This article tells the history of the British musicians, especially composers, who were interned at the camp established by the Germans on the Ruhleben race course near Berlin. Historically Ruhleben is particularly interesting because it became self-governing. Those musicians held at the camp who were later celebrated included Ernest MacMillan, Benjamin J. Dale, Bryceson Treharne, Roland Bocquet, Edgar Bainton, Quentin Morvaren, F. Charles Adler, Carl Fuchs, Leigh Henry, Frederick Keel, Percy Hull, and Edward Clark. Examples of the music written at Ruhleben are discussed. Illustrations are taken from the author\‘s set of the rare camp journal In Ruhleben Camp.

Key Words: Ruhleben Civilian Internment Camp, British civilian prisoners in Germany, First World War poetry, composers in the First World War, Ernest MacMillan, Benjamin J. Dale, Bryceson Treharne, Roland Bocquet, Edgar Bainton, Quentin Morvaren, F. Charles Adler, Carl Fuchs, Leigh Henry

This article looks at the song cycle Ludlow and Teme, written by Ivor Gurney in 1919. Gurney set poems from A.E. Housman\‘s A Shropshire Lad (1896), which were popular with many composers in the early twentieth century. However, Gurney\‘s recent war experience and his own war poetry tell a very different story from Housman\‘s pre-war poetic versions of the military. The article examines the complex relationship between the songs and their texts. It looks at how Gurney, a poet and composer, uses Housman\‘s words to write songs that both embrace and attack the military, exploring in music the same themes with which his own war poems are concerned.

Key Words: Ivor Gurney, A.E. Housman, Englishness, English song, army, First World War, Vaughan Williams, war poetry, A Shropshire Lad , Ludlow and Teme

This essay explores the modernist Fauvist dynamic of the little magazine Rhythm (1911–1913) and its effect on the aesthetic development of two of its contributors, Katherine Mansfield and Frederick Goodyear. The irony of the magazine\‘s aspiration towards brutality is considered in relation to Mansfield\‘s ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (probably written in 1915), an account of a sexual escapade into a restricted military zone in France; her sonnet addressed to her brother, who was killed in a training accident in France in 1915; and a post-war story, ‘The Fly’. Frederick Goodyear\‘s Bergsonian essay in Rhythm, with its resonant phrase nostalgie de la boue, is compared with a poem he wrote shortly before his own death in the trenches in 1917.

Key Words: Rhythm , Katherine Mansfield, Frederick Goodyear, Fauvism, First World War literature

Broadcasting was one of the principal means by which the affective, social, and political meanings of Armistice Day were constituted in British culture, and music programming was crucial to that process. In the years leading up to its nationalization in 1927, the BBC was inventing itself; and its varying approaches to the selection and scheduling of specific musical repertoire for 11 November over that period have much to tell us about changing responses to the Great War, as well as conflicting notions of national identity, modernity, and tradition. Building on recent historical and musicological scholarship, this article examines the basis of Armistice Day programming decisions at the BBC; reconstructs the internal dialogue surrounding specific works, genres, and composers; and illuminates processes of canonization whereby Elgar\‘s wartime cantata The Spirit of England emerged pre-eminent over works such as John Foulds\‘s A World Requiem.

Key Words: anti-nationalism, Armistice Day, broadcasting, clairaudience, commemoration, Edward Elgar, John Foulds, Field-Marshal Earl Haig, internationalism, Maud MacCarthy, modernism, modernity, music of the First World War, nationalism, non-sectarianism, occultism, Protestantism, John Reith, ritual, Roman Catholicism, sectarianism, socialism, spiritualism, theosophy

Poets of the Great War drew constantly on the poetry of earlier centuries. Very little of it was written by soldier poets – Homer may have been a warrior but Shakespeare, for example, or Wordsworth, Keats, and Whitman certainly were not. When Arthur Bliss, himself a serving officer in the Great War, came to commemorate his brother and friends who had been killed, he did so in Morning Heroes (1930), a ‘symphony for chorus, orator and orchestra’. Although he included one poem by Owen and another by Robert Nichols, pride of place went to the Iliad and to Whitman. For the next generation, however, the Great War had become the definition of war itself, just as the work of its soldier poets had become the definition of war poetry. When, after the Second World War, Britten, himself a non-combatant, came to write his War Requiem, it was almost inevitably to the words of Wilfred Owen that he turned. This piece will explore some of the meanings and consequences of that shift.

Key Words: Arthur Bliss, Benjamin Britten, heroism, Iliad , Wilfred Owen, poetry of the First World War, requiem, Robert Nichols

Christopher Isherwood focuses on the self within his writing. The importance of identity is closely associated with what he calls his ‘complex of terrors’ connected to war. Isherwood presents a mythologized self-analysis that engages with images of the First World War, especially the heroics of war. Thinking in paradoxical terms of the Truly Strong Man and the Truly Weak Man, Isherwood felt inferior because he had not faced the ‘test’ of war. This paper engages with Isherwood\‘s early novel The Memorial and his ‘autobiography’ Lions and Shadows. It looks at questions of identity, weakness and strength, as well as Isherwood\‘s rebellion against a generation whom he not only blames for the war that took his father from him, but also for his feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.

Key Words: Christopher Isherwood, masculinity, First World War, literature and psychology