Dead Reckoning

Bookish, solitary, and shy, with an unappealing character, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) had an unremarkable and rather dull life before the Great War. He was born in Shropshire, the son of a railway stationmaster. After leaving school he became a lay assistant to a vicar near Reading, then taught English for Berlitz in Bordeaux and tutored rich French children in the Pyrenees. He was emotionally immature and closely attached to his puritanical and possessive mother, fixated like Proust on her goodnight kiss. An unmanly sissy, uninterested in sports, he was desperate to escape his lower-middle-class origins. A self-appointed Welshman, embittered by the lack of a public school and Oxford education, he was also a snob and social climber, given to conversational clichés like “Oh rather” and “I should just think so.” Claiming to be the son of a baronet, he was a sensitive aesthete repelled by modern ugliness and attracted to beautiful boys. He became a poet to gain status and fame, and was launched by his verse into exalted literary and social circles. Reluctant to leave the sweet life in France, he remained “traitorously idle” when the war broke out and didn’t enlist until October 1915.

But Owen was transformed by his first experience on the western front in late 1916. He fell down a well and suffered a concussion. Blown up while asleep, he rejoiced at his surprising survival, but was shellshocked. During his year as a disabled officer he was sent to Craiglockhart hospital for nervous diseases outside Edinburgh, which one inmate described as “a magnificent hydro [spa] standing in palatial grounds fitted with all the comforts that man’s ingenuity can contrive.” Here he met and worshipped Siegfried Sassoon, who profoundly influenced his work.

Owen’s grim and bitter poetry was characterized by intelligence, vision, and compassion, and by a stoic lamentation for human suffering. The best Great War memoirs and novels—Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Aldington’s Death of a Hero and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front—were not published until 1929, but Owen and Sassoon captured the horrors as soon as they experienced them. Sassoon found Owen’s silent and solemn character “embarrassing,” and in his autobiography, Siegfried’s Journey, condescendingly called his acolyte “a rather ordinary young man, perceptibly provincial, though unobtrusively ardent in his responses to my lordly dictums about poetry.” It’s ironic that the doctors “cured” the officers, who suffered far greater casualties than the enlisted men, and sent them back to war to be killed in action.

Owen presciently exclaimed, “I know I shall be killed. But [war] is the only place that I can make my protest from.” He wanted to speak for all the unburied dead men who seemed to stare reproachfully at the living. In 1915 he felt “my life is worth more than my death to Englishmen.” Three years later, “in hasty retreat towards the Front,” he changed from egoistic to sacrificial and wrote, “I am much gladder to be going out again than afraid. I shall be better able to cry my outcry, playing my part.” His poignant subject was “War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” A week before the Armistice Owen was killed by pointblank machine-gun fire during an impossible attempt to cross a canal in northern France. The citation for his Military Cross states that “he personally captured an enemy Machine Gun in an isolated position and took a number of prisoners. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.”

Guy Cuthbertson writes, “I have attempted to give a fresh portrait of the man … by being selective and more thematic, and by placing him in new contexts.” He is convincing on Owen’s reading of Scott’s Marmion, Borrow’s Lavengro, Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, and Alec Waugh’s satire on public schools The Loom of Youth; on Owen’s friendship with C. K. Scott Moncrieff, who later translated Proust; on Owen’s chaste homosexual longings; and on his influence...