Battle Lines: Canadian Poetry in English and the First World War

Battle Lines

Battle Lines

CANADIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Joel Baetz

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Baetz, Joel, 1976–, author

             Battle lines : Canadian poetry in English and the First World War / Joel Baetz.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77112-319-8 (hardcover).—978-1-77112-329-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-77112-321-1 (EPUB).—ISBN 978-1-77112-320-4 (PDF)

   1. War poetry, Canadian (English)—History and criticism. 2. War in literature. 3. Canadian poetry (English)—20th century—History and criticism. 4. World War, 1914–1918—Poetry.  I. Title.

PS8147.W3B34 2018                     C811’.52093581                     C2017-905116-4

                                                                                                 C2017-905117-2

Front-cover image: For What? (oil on canvas, 1918), by Fred Varley, from the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum. Cover and text design by Angela Booth Malleau, designbooth.ca

© 2018 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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People were lost.… It was all part of the reaction to the early enthusiasm of World War I in the sense of collapse, spiritual collapse first taking place.… [And then you] had to start with the realization that so much of it has to be remade and replaced.

—F.R. Scott

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Battle Lines

1 War Is a Force That Brings Us Together

Douglas Leader Durkin’s Anthems, the Gender of War, and Helena Coleman’s Marching Men

2 We Are the Living

Rupert Brooke, John McCrae, and the Economy of Mourning

3 Dreaming about War

Robert Service’s War Journalism and Poetry

4 The Blunt Swords of Georgianism

Frank Prewett’s War Poetry

5 Battle Ground

Ross’s Wartime Modernism and Neo-Romantic Cliché

Conclusion: What Can Memberless Ghosts Tell?

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgements

I AM GRATEFUL TO the archivists and librarians at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and Pratt Library, McMaster’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian National Exhibition, the McMichael Gallery, the City of Toronto Archives, and the Canadian War Museum. I am also grateful to Tim Hutton for granting permission to have W.W.E. Ross’s work appear here. Orian Hutton has been similarly gracious in granting permission to reproduce Lawren Harris’s letter. David Youngs granted permission to publish a revised and extended version of my essay on Service, which had appeared in Canadian Poetry.

Thank you to Lisa Quinn, who expressed immediate interest in the manuscript and who held on to this project during its development. I am also thankful to Siobhan McMenemy, who steered this project through the press with equal and welcome doses of conviction and kindness. Matthew Kudelka’s keen editorial eye has kept me from some embarrassing mistakes. The external reviewers offered incisive and bold suggestions that made this project better. I am also thankful for the work of Clare Hitchens and Rob Kohlmeier, and the rest of the team at Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

All of my colleagues, past and present, at Trent have been exceedingly generous and encouraging. I am lucky to be part of such a vibrant and supportive department. Thanks are also due to John Lennox, Susan Warwick, Jonathan Warren, David Bentley, Brian Trehearne, Bruce Meyer, and Neta Gordon.

My family, extended and immediate, have all covered for me while I have worked on this book. They have made meals, looked after sick kids, welcomed my family into their homes, and offered me a thousand kindnesses, while I was thinking about poetry.

My dad has heard every word of this manuscript at least eight times. I am amazed that anyone writes a book without him. My mother always knew that books mattered—and made them matter to me.

My wife, Rodelyn Wisco, has given me many gifts, but the most important has been her patience; she always understood when I needed time to work, an early morning, a late night, an entire weekend. In her work, she has helped me remember that everyone suffers—and that that suffering needs to be recognized, not ignored or transformed. I held on to that idea as I wrote this book.

My children are light and giggles and questions and sweetness. Sometimes I would sit down at my desk at home and find a shaky I love you scrawled on an article I had been reading. Or I’d be writing away and a hug would come sailing down the stairs to me, at just the right moment. They have sustained me. I am truly fortunate.

Introduction

BATTLE LINES

IN THE SUMMER OF 1919, the Canadian National Exhibition had something for everyone. You could ride the Ferris wheel, carousels, or swings. You could try to win a prize from the carnies on the Midway, or you could stuff yourself with ice cream and popcorn. If you were the adventurous type, you might dare to go to the Bughouse on the Joy Plaza or take in one of the speedboat races down at the lake. If you were in the mood for something more relaxing, you could check out the Good Roads Exhibit in the Government Building or the newest brands of refrigerators, beds, and baby carriages in the Industrial Building, join a singalong at the Grandstand, or just watch the crowds come in through Dufferin Gate.¹ But if you were like hundreds of thousands of other Canadians that summer, there was one thing that you could not miss when you went to the CNE: the Canadian War Memorials collection.

The Canadian War Memorials collection was just one of many reminders at the CNE that year that Canada had just come out of a war (see Figure 1). It was the Victory Year Celebration, as the organizers called it. There were reunions for the soldiers, daily airplane fights staged by famous Canadian aces (Colonels Barker and Bishop), and parades, demonstrations, speeches, and dinners—all to honour those men who had come home and to remember those who had not. During the closing ceremonies, Ontario Premier Sir William Hearst pointed out the significance of that year’s fair. The Exhibition, he reminded his audience, has been a great factor in connection with war work, not only stimulating matters of patriotism, but in teaching increased production and thrift and all lessons necessary for war purposes.²

The jubilant parades and solemn speeches were undoubtedly popular attractions at the fair that year, so popular in fact that the visiting Prince of Wales cancelled his final visit after being mobbed by well-wishers who were keen to congratulate him on the Empire’s recent victory;³ but the Canadian War Memorials collection drew the most attention by far. On the fair’s busiest days, well over ten thousand visitors walked through the doors of the Fine Arts Building, eager to see what had been billed as The Art Sensation of the World.⁴ An assembly of more than four hundred paintings, sculptures, and lithographs from artists ranging from Augustus John to Wyndham Lewis, from Paul Nash to A.Y. Jackson, the Canadian War Memorials collection was an unprecedented gathering of war art, on all matters of the war, in nearly every style, by artists from all the Allied countries. For its size and scope, for its range in style and subject matter, the collection was nothing less than impressive.

Figure 1 Poster for the Canadian National Exhibition in 1919. (Print lithograph by J.E.H. MacDonald, 1919. Reproduced by permission from Canadian National Exhibition Archives, Toronto)

According to its guidebooks, promoters, and admirers, the collection provided Canadians with two opportunities. First, it gave them a chance to see what the Globe called a magnificent and lasting artistic record of [Canada’s] noble share in the war.⁵ The collection’s artists had been granted extraordinary access to the front line—better than most journalists—and this gave their paintings an educational value, showing Canadians aspects of the war they could otherwise only imagine.⁶ Second, the collection gave Canadians an opportunity to celebrate the arrival of radical and innovative forms of art. New Yorkers had already experienced the thrills and horrors of Cubism and Impressionism at the Armoury Show; but most Canadians had yet to lay their eyes on anything other than traditional or romantic forms of art. For art critic and curator Paul Konody, this was the real virtue of the Canadian War Memorials collection; it was not a homogeneous assembly of realistic portraits and romanticized battle scenes. In the collection’s gift book, he wrote: To make the collection truly representative of the artistic outlook during the momentous period of the great war examples of all conflicting tendencies had to be included.… The aim was bound to be diversity rather than uniformity.⁷

But not everyone liked the exhibition for the same reasons as Konody. For many Canadians, its real attraction was not artistic diversity; it was the opportunity to affirm their own beliefs in traditional styles and their own conservative and comfortable ideas. If the reviews are any indication, the centrepiece of the collection for the Canadian public was John Byam Shaw’s The Flag (1918) (see Figure 2).⁸

Traditional in style and sentiment, familiar (because of its resemblance to Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square and Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe),⁹ Shaw’s painting stood out against the eccentricities of the freakish and futuristic work, the cubist monstrosities, and the modernist rubbish that lined the walls.¹⁰ Unlike Night Bombardment, which later would be derided in the Star Weekly as nothing more than a drunken fantasy incapable of giving any real idea what the war was like, The Flag offered Canadians a chance to verify in a public venue the sacrifice and nobility of their soldiers.¹¹ As a Toronto World critic commented, of all the paintings in the collection, The Flag left

the most lasting impression. It is intelligible to every class of observer. The dead soldier lying in the relentless clutch of the grim monster of war is the centre of interest of a representative group of every class of humanity, the young, the old, the middle-aged, the rich, the poor, those of high rank and low, the toiler, the idler, the parent, the child, the lover, the friend, the servant. All are gripped in that terrible clutch.… Such glorious art … raises no problem of color or medium and style.¹²

That interpretation is decidedly provocative. It amplifies some of the painting’s key features (and ignores others) in order to celebrate the painting as an accessible rendition of a community’s worship of a national figure. According to the logic of the review, the appeal of the painting is that it encourages the viewer to participate in a worshipful community. The prominence of the flag and the unpopulated space in the painting’s lower centre draw the viewer’s attention and invite him or her to become one of the community members standing at base of the statue (see Figure 3). In this way, The Flag wraps its observers in the same blanket of national sentiment that covers the dead soldier and ensures that the group of people who surround and worship him recognize him for what he is: the personification of a young nation that was noble enough and courageous enough to risk its life and help win the war for Mother England.

But The Flag cannot sustain that interpretation for very long. There is something odd about the painting that the World’s review does not mention, and the popularity of Shaw’s work says more about the desire of its audience to celebrate Canada’s war effort than the picture’s actual content. Its audience and reviewers were eager to take note of how it worked—formally, to subdue the grim monster of war, and thematically, to tie together its various figures. In fact, however, The Flag is preoccupied with raising some key questions about the identity of that soldier, his relationship with the flag, and their relationship (the soldier’s and the flag’s) with the community that has gathered around them and the gigantic bestial monument that looms in the background. The ostensible national and colonial hero of the painting—the lionized soldier who rests at the feet of the English war lion—is, on close examination, a difficult idol for the community that surrounds him. He is both the hero of war and its victim. He is both protected by the English lion and in the clutches of the beast of war. Moreover, the soldier, with his crooked neck and partly concealed body, is a broken and obscured man, crushed and covered by a brilliant flag with a damaged base. Lying at the prominent and unspoiled base of a metaphor for England, this soldier is both the inspiration for and an impediment to communal coherence. His presence and association with the flag draw the attention of the people who surround him, but they have difficulty looking at him and at one another.

Figure 2 Most reviewers determined that John Byam Shaw’s The Flag was the centrepiece of the Canadian War Memorials collection. (Oil on canvas by John Byam Shaw, 1918, CWM 19710261-0656, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum. Reproduced by permission of Canadian War Museum)

Figure 3 Viewers at the CNE in 1919 gather around The Flag. (Photograph, 1919, CWM 19900076-410, George Metcalf Archival Collection, Canadian War Museum. Reproduced by permission of Canadian War Museum)

The Flag, its content and reception, provides a useful starting point for this discussion of Canadian poetry in English about the First World War. To put it simply: this book is about the soldier who lies in the middle of Shaw’s painting and the poets who wrote about him. Canadian writers were eager—just as eager as British ones—to put their thoughts and feelings about the war into verse. From Charles G.D. Roberts to A.J.M. Smith, from Anna Durie to Douglas Leader Durkin, from John Daniel Logan to Helena Coleman, from Duncan Campbell Scott to W.W.E. Ross, Canadian poets wrote about the war and its aftermaths—and when they did, they wrote mainly about the Canadian soldier and the community that gathered about him, in ways that are more complex and more compelling than anyone has realized.

Almost every Canadian poet writing in English—professional or amateur—wrote about the war, that soldier, and his attendant community. The period was one of the most prolific moments in literary production and consumption in Canadian history. Thousands of Canadian writers and readers routinely turned to books to understand the war, and nearly as many decided that poetry was the best way to express or discover their feelings and ideas about the war and its origins, participants, and consequences. In all the Allied countries, war books of every kind were popular, and Canada was no exception. Just a few months into the war, the book business was already booming. By December 1914 the publishing industry’s trade magazines were filled with ads like the one that opened that month’s issue of Bookseller and Stationer, urging store owners and salespeople to START NINETEEN FIFTEEN AGGRESSIVELY, take advantage of the glut of war books on the market, and push meritorious war books to the utmost. And there were a lot to choose from. As the ad noted, the interest created by the great conflict in Europe has occasioned almost unprecedented activity in the book world.¹³

It is difficult to determine precisely how much activity there was. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but there are a few rough estimates from people inside the publishing industry. During the war, the public libraries in Winnipeg and Toronto, for instance, reported 38 and 50 percent increases in the demand for books—figures they attributed to a burgeoning interest in the events in Europe.¹⁴ Canadian bestseller lists were crammed with books about the war. From 1914 to 1920, almost half were war books.¹⁵ In Canadian Bookman, Hugh S. Eayrs, soon to be named president of Macmillan’s Canadian branch, took stock of the war books bought and sold between 1914 and 1918 and offered these numbers: In over four years of war Canadian publishers have probably [published] at least one thousand different war books, all of which have had sales varying from one hundred only to twenty-five, thirty and forty thousand.¹⁶ His estimates proved to be true. Canada in Khaki (1917), a compendium of poems, songs, stories, essays, and cartoons about the war, sold forty thousand copies in the first week alone; and the first instalment of Max Aitken’s Canada in Flanders (1915) sold well over 250,000 copies.¹⁷ Another reviewer had a different way of measuring the output during the war. During the last four years, books upon the war have … been piled on my desk almost literally by the ton.¹⁸

Whether measured by weight or numbers, a good many of those war books were collections of poetry written and read by Canadians. In general, poetry had a much different reputation and a much different function than it does now. In the early twentieth century, it served a very public role. It was not unusual to turn to a poem to discover or confirm your understandings of any number of topics, from municipal politics to Canadian values to even the origins and aftermaths of war. Magazines—especially Maclean’s, which carried a good range of war poems, some of them by Robert Service alongside drawings by Lawren Harris—regularly published poetry that reflected on the month’s events. Newspapers typically had a Poet’s Corner, which offered a dozen or so poems, most of which were about the war. People routinely looked to poetry to find out what other people were thinking about the war and to experience a depth of feeling that otherwise would have been inaccessible. In 1916, an anonymously penned article in Bookseller and Stationer—still well stocked with ads for the latest War Books You Can Sell or Books on War or Literature of the War—remarked that poetry was the genre that Canadians preferred: Judging from the plethora of verse manuscripts bearing on war themes which have been submitted to the publishers during the last year or so one would be tempted to believe that every second Canadian left at home was writing poems on the war.¹⁹ For W.D. Lighthall, venerable editor of Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), there were enough poets affected or inspired by the war to be called the After-War School.²⁰

With so many collections of poetry on the market, it is understandable that a few critics had some misgivings about the literature’s overall quality. There were rumblings about its unevenness. Some of it was too bloodthirsty; some of it got important facts wrong; some of it was too simple: these were the most common complaints. Of the ton of war books piled on the desk of that anonymous reviewer at the Bookman, at least 96 percent deserved nothing more than a speedy oblivion.²¹ In an address to the Pacific Northwest Library Association, University of British Columbia librarian John Ridington suggested that the present war … produced an enormous bulk of poetry [but] … little that promises to be immortal.²² Even John Daniel Logan, one of Canadian war poetry’s ardent supporters, had some minor reservations. While he could detect a spiritual and poetic renascence … in the contemporary poetry of Belgium and of France, he could not say for certain that the same was afoot in Canada; the best of it is all good poetry—originally conceived, but whether there is a genuine renascence in Canadian poetry I cannot say.²³

And neither can anyone else. Since the initial flurry of activity and attention, Canadian First World War poetry has rarely rated a mention. Twenty years later, by the time the Second World War started, it had disappeared almost altogether, with only John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields appearing in Canadian anthologies and literary histories. Nowadays, ask someone about Canadian poems from the First World War (or tell them you are working on a book about them), and most people will mention McCrae’s In Flanders Fields and then quickly run out of names and titles. Which is strange. Nearly all the other countries that fought in the war, from Australia to France, have book-length studies about their First World War literatures, even those that (like the United States) have not adopted that war as a crucial episode in their national narrative, as Canada has. Moreover, historians and political scientists have examined Canada’s experience of the war and its aftermaths with tremendous depth and sophistication. Desmond Morton, J.L. Granatstein, Jonathan Vance, Tim Cook, and many others, have made sizable contributions to an already crowded field. For their part, contemporary Canadian novelists have turned and returned to the First World War for inspiration. From Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977) to Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005), Canadian fiction writers have uncovered new and occasionally controversial stories about the First World War.²⁴ In fact, there have been so many recent war novels that a few years ago, writing for Maclean’s, Brian Bethune said that the First World War novel is the eternal story that Canadians keep writing over and over again.²⁵ Yet so little is known about the period’s poetry, why it was ignored, and how it reorients current understandings of Canadian literary history. This book aims to correct that oversight.

THE COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE WAR POETRY

The traces that this war poetry left behind as it fell from view suggest that there are three distinct but related assumptions about it that explain why it has remained unappreciated and unstudied for so long: it is too patriotic, it is too simple, and it has had no influence since the end of the war. That tripartite reputation coalesced almost immediately after the war ended and has held sway since then; and it has been convincing enough to discourage further thinking about the poetry of the period. But none of these three reasons stand up to scrutiny. The next pages lay bare that long-standing reputation. The rest of the book offers a robust alternative reading of the poetry and its place in Canadian literary history.

The belief that Canadian