World War I

ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 Victorian-Tractarian-Roman Catholic world that Hopkins inhabited, it is more likely that sex would have been seen as sublimated religion. For all its eccentricity (in the root sense of the word) Martin's biography is a good read. Still, it should not be recommended to the incautious lest they fall into the trap of thinking its central premise true when it is merely possible. G. B. Tennyson University of California, Los Angeles World War I Samuel Hynes. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. New York: Atheneum, 1991. xiv + 514 pp. $29.95 WITH THE PUBLICATION of this third and final volume of his "trilogy" devoted to the years of the Great War and the decade immediately following, Samuel Hynes has consolidated his already formidable reputation as the leading historian of English culture of the first half of this century. The two earlier volumes—The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968) and The Auden Generation (1977)—have already assumed authoritative status even in Britain, to the point of now being attacked by a younger generation there as the "orthodox" view. So that it would appear that the American Hynes, along with the Americans Paul Fussell, Hugh Kenner and the late Richard Ellmann, have now become the chief shapers of contemporary English as well as American memories of that momentous period which saw both the apex of British political and cultural prestige and the beginning of its decline. Not that the Americans necessarily present a unified front. Part of the reason, one suspects, why Hynes has chosen for his latest book a title that focuses on the imagination is because that word contains a hint that Fussell's celebrated emphasis on memory may be misleading, that even those who lived through the war and fought in it were compelled to conceive of it imaginatively before they could remember it literarily, historically or otherwise, and that it is primarily this imagined view (or Myth, as Hynes more habitually calls it) that we who live and write near the close of the century now "remember." To a lesser degree, perhaps, Hynes's title also functions as a kind of disclaimer: namely, that this is the First World War as he imagined it, or, going a step further, that anyone writing on so vast and climactic a subject is compelled to resort to the imagination if that subject is to be presented with any shape and coherence, if, in other words, it is to become comprehensible. 470 BOOK REVIEWS A War Imagined fittingly, therefore, begins with that specialist in imaginary narratives, the septuagenarian Henry James, desperately ruminating in August 1914 about the end of civilization, not merely in the sense that it was mortally endangered by a powerful and seemingly barbarous enemy, but in the sense that it would necessitate a wholesale revaluation of what that civilization had apparently wrongly believed (imagined?) itself to have been all about. "This process of historical revision," Hynes tell us, "would occupy English artists and critics throughout the war, and for many years after. Out ofthat re-assessment would come post-war Modernism and the dominant moods of the interwar years; it would be the most important and most wide-ranging cultural change in modern English history." The First World War, then, was a cultural watershed, one which radically redefined the relation of the present to the past, eventually producing by the time it was over (along with nearly a million British dead) five quite distinct "generations ": the "Old Men" who had run the war to its bloody and uncompromising conclusion; the "Edwardians," also old but with minds not quite so rigid or senile; the "Pre-war Avant-Garde"—Pound, Ford et al.—who at the close of hostilities were either dead, in exile or in disarray; the actual "War Generation" who had fought in the war, along with those others who, though they had not participated, had nevertheless viewed with dismay the victimization of the young by the old (e.g., Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot); and, finally, the "Post-War Generation," or people who only came of age after 1918. Most of Hynes's attention is directed at...