The Owens Family: Post-Wilfred

149 REVIEWS 1. The Owens Family: Post-Wilfred Harold Owen, Aftermath. Lond: Oxford U P, 1970. £2.75 This book, though it spans the period from 1920 to the present day and is thus, strictly speaking, outside the scope of ELT, is nevertheless one of great interest to ELT readers. It is a sequel to the author's brilliant trilogy Journey From Obscurity and continues the story of Wilfred Owen's family, through Harold's autobiography. It is again an artist's book in which the post-war scene is vividly evoked. It was an era when too many men were seeking too few jobs, when money was short and opportunities hard to come by. Mr. Owen's dedication to painting enabled him to overcome much privation and semi-starvation as an art student in London before ill-health compelled him to leave London and become a farm-worker to secure himself a livelihood and the possibility of continuing his painting. His courage and obstinate persistence in the face of many difficulties and much unhappiness recall his struggles in volume II of the autobiographical trilogy. Just as in those youthful pre-war years he fought his way through to success as a ship's officer so in the hardships of the post-war years he finally achieved some degree of success in his chosen vocation with his "oneman show in the Claridge Gallery" (p. 177) in 193°. The book contains eleven plates reproducing various of his paintings and etchings of the 1920s and '30s. As in the three earlier volumes, Mr. Owen is at pains to show the essential goodness, gentleness and compassionate understanding of his father. Wilfred's hostility, it is clear, had its roots in his own mental attitude born, partially at least, of his overzealous devotion to his mother. To balance the account, Harold Owen's obvious antagonism towards his mother is brought out repeatedly . It seems to arise whenever in these adult years he returns home: "My father, with characteristic tact, avoided any reference to my appearance. Mary . . . said nothing, only looked apprehensive .... My mother could not resist stressing how ill I was looking"' (p. 5^)· Or again when Edmund Blunden visited the family to discuss his projected edition of Wilfred's poemss "Mother, with her possessive instinct to keep Wilfred entirely to herself, insisted on her absolute right to have the only say" (169). Apart from the occasional quotation from his poems the book has little to say about Wilfred. When he is mentioned, however, the old envy, the hostility never far beneath the surface in Journey Pgorc Obscurity, is still apparent. By being killed and thus perfecting his life in 1918, Wilfred had triumphed agains "My thoughts turned to Wilfred with desperate envy. How much I envied the 15° sweet peace and quiet that must be his now" (p. 60) or again, "I found myself envying Wilfred, so safely dead and at peace, with his struggle not only behind him but . . . with his own fight won for ever" (p. 127). Most of the other people who appear in the book are either members of the Owen family, or, not surprisingly, people connected with art or with farming. Siegfried Sassoon, however, remains on the fringe of Mr. Owen's life, an enigmatic character whom at first he "did not like . . . very much" (p. 8). From all personal accounts of Sassoon after the 1914-1918 war it appears that he was indeed an odd and private man and It Is not surprising that his constant rebuffs to Harold Owen left the somewhat impetuous painter "seething with anger" (p. 177). It is not its literary associations that make this book compulsive reading, though the fact that it completes the story of Wilfred Owen's family adds to its interest. What Mr. Owen has done most successfully Is to re-create a particular aspect of post-war England which, while it has often been spoken of in vague terms, has not before been so minutely examined. At the same time he has presented in vivid terms the efforts of a creative artist to fulfill his destiny against all odds and at no matter what personal cost. University of...