Harold and Wilfred Owen: Toward Two Careers

132 have been omitted and more work by Sorley, Nichols, Grenfell, Owen and Rosenberg included. Most readers would also find the book more useful if each poet's work had been printed together instead of being scattered throughout the book under quite meaningless headings. Purdue University H. E. Gerber 5. Harold and Wilfred Owen: Toward Two Careers Harold Owen, JOURNEY FROM OBSCURITY. WILFRED OWEN 1893 - 1918. II. YOUTH. Lond: Oxford U P, 1964. 35/-; $5.60. In choosing to write his "Memoirs of the Owen Family" rather than a straight biography of his brother Wilfred, Mr. Harold Owen chose well. Any other decision would have deprived his readers of a great deal of this fascinating and graphic second volume which deals with the years 1912 - 1914. For Wilfred and Harold childhood was over and the close family circle was already breaking up: Wilfred, in the vain hope of furthering an academic career, had gone to Dunsden Vicarage as an unofficial assistant curate: Harold, despite his artistic ambitions and ability, was told that he could no longer be a financial burden to his parents. It is with his attempts to break away from home and make a life for himself that much of this book is concerned, for at the age of fifteen he went to sea as an apprentice in a Merchant ship. Henceforth the two brothers saw little of each other. Harold, after a calamitous first voyage which almost became his last, spent a brief period at home attempting to settle to a job as a railway clerk; then he returned to sea again and by the end of this volume he has become an outwardly hard and tough young ship's officer. Wilfred decided that his career did not lie in the Church, so, sacrificing his academic ambitions, he left Dunsden and took a poorly paid post in Bordeaux with the Berlitz School of Languages. If Wilfred was central to the first volume of JOURNEY FROM OBSCURITY, it is not true to say that he is central to this. What lies at the heart of this book is Mr. Owen's first sea voyage to India with its dramatic tension and brilliant evocation. During this voyage it is borne in upon him that if he achieves anything, it must be achieved without assistance from home: ",,,pangs of homesickness attacked me so that I wished very hard I was with [my famiIy]....what before had only been an undefined feeling of separation became a conviction that from now on I would have to travel alone." (p. 122) It is indeed a volume of self-discovery and the "tough young 'hard-case' ship's officer" (p. 292) of the closing pages is a very different person from the youthful art student of the beginning. Yet, whilst finding himself, Mr. Owen succeeds in revealing, at least to some extent, the other members of his family to his reader. What surprises us most is the complete absence of parental guidance and understanding for the two gifted young men. Wilfred, it is true, was favoured and privileged, actively by his mother and acquiescently by his father, but no real interest was taken in his hopes and ambitions . Neither parent appeared to have much faith in the abilities of any of the children and consequently the Owen household was not used to much encouragement: "Both my mother and father seemed possessed with fierce determination...that none of us should harbour in our small bosoms confidence in ultimate success." (p. 56) Had the two brothers been closer to each other in their youth, not merely physically but spiritually as well, they could perhaps have provided some of the essential companionship which each one lacked. As it was, they pursued their paths alone and Harold was left to muse with admiring envy on Wilfred, "...he knew now where 133 he wanted to arrive; the details and the manner of his travelling were still obscure and difficult, but his beacon was lighted and clear...." (p. 291) This volume carries the story of the Owen family to the eve of the First World War. If the next volume maintains the high standard of the first two if will...