The Great War and the Language of Modernism (review)

In a Criterionreview of several World War I novels, Herbert Read remarked: "The whole war was fought for rhetoric—fought for historical phrases and actual misery, fought bypoliticians and generals and withhuman flesh and blood, fanned by false and artificially created mob passions."¹ It is a commonplace of textbook history that the Liberal ideals of prewar England—built upon the pillars of reason and progress—met their Waterloo on the Somme. In The Great War and the Language of Modernism, Vincent Sherry restores key works by Eliot, Pound and Woolf to their original intellectual context; in particular, the highly charged political situation in wartime London. In so doing, he attempts to reveal the ways in which the radical experimentation of a generation of London literary modernists, who came to maturity in the twenties, struck directly at the rhetorical abstraction that an earlier generation of Liberal rationalists had used to justify the mass slaughter of the Great War. In some ways, Sherry's thesis inverts the conclusions Donald Davie drew regarding the modernist dislocation of syntax and disregard for a tradition of logical articulation. For Davie: "the abandonment of syntax testifies to a failure of the poet's nerve, a loss of confidence in the intelligible structure of the conscious mind, and the validity of its activity."² That way, Davie implied, led to authoritarian politics, madness, or both. Sherry, on the other hand, sees the modernist deconstruction of Liberal reason as a salutary reaction to what Pound trenchantly called "liars in public places." Following Wyndham Lewis's categorization of T. S. Eliot as a "Pseudo-Believer," Sherry employs I. A. Richards's formulation of the "pseudostatement"—an acknowledgement that many linguistic acts, including poetry, do not primarily consist in asserting propositions—as a term capacious enough to embrace the manifold ways in which the "antic rationality" or "spoof logic" of English modernism exposed the propositions of Liberal reason as inconclusive, fatuous, or mendacious.

Sherry gets around the objection that both Pound and Eliot intermittently voiced support for the war against Germany with the novel argument that these "(ex-) colonial poets" deployed postcolonial mimicry to subvert the wartime rhetoric. Thus, the flights of Augustan sententiousness in Pound's "jocoserious" Homage to Sextus Propertiusmock the contemporary imperial war effort. Sherry exaggerates the extent to which previous critics have missed this capricious "reverse echo," and yet it is certainly daring to suggest that Pound (a later apologist for Il Duce's New Roman Empire), not to mention Eliot (the celebrant of Virgil and Kipling), had once been in the postcolonial vanguard. In a series of dazzling close readings, the "comic pomposities and pseudo sagacities" of Eliot's Poems 1920 are said to perform "somersaults on the speech and episteme of English Liberal reason." Eliot's purpose, it transpires, was a symbolic destruction of the Liberal intelligentsia's "pseudostewardship" of British cultural tradition. Sherry imagines the lawns of Garsington as a contested site where Eliot stealthily bumped off those Liberal acquaintances he loathed. "The sacred wood of England's Nemi grove holds up for advantage the ruined clerisy of British Liberalism" he comments (157). All the same, Sherry winces at the "graspy needs" (189) of this American opportunist and his conquest of literary England. Here lies the book's contribution to the ongoing debate surrounding Eliot's anti-Semitism, which Sherry sees as the "defensive aggressiveness of the arriviste" who finds in "the stereotypically pushy Jew" an "oblique but severe mirror" (201). Anti-Semitism, then, was the dark underside exposed by the social upheaval of the war: "In their fashioning of the Jewish caricature, Eliot and Pound represent—and respond to—their worst fears about themselves." (199)

The authors of "Gerontion" and "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," as Sherry knows, had not fought in the warm rain nor walked eye-deep in hell. Ford Madox Ford, a war propagandist...