The New Death: American Modernism and World War I

Introduction

Introduction Never before in history has death been so prominent a fact. Always before it has been possible to avoid thinking about it. To-day no one can escape the constant presence, before his mind, of dissolution. . . . No one can forget them, no one can get away from them, those boys dead upon the battle-fields of Europe. . . . There is not one of us who has not thought more about death within the last four years than in a whole lifetime before. —winifred kirkland, the new death In 1918, the popular religious writer Winifred Kirkland described a change in American life: people were preoccupied with death as never before. The war raging in Europe, she claimed, made death “new.” So many men were dying; so many of them were the “shining best” of their generation. All Americans felt the loss, from the “humblest” to the “most intellectual.” What strikes her, though, is not primarily the numbers of dead. Instead, it is how people are dying and that, once dead, they often remain unburied. She writes not just of death but of “dissolution”: the grotesque physical breakdown of the dead body over time. She dwells on death’s physical texture and its duration. “The boys upon the battlefields have seen the forms of their comrades rot before their eyes for months. They write of the stench of putrefaction, of its colors and shapes.” The war, she insists, has put death’s sheer physical horror on display in an entirely unprecedented way; people feel compelled to talk and think about death in detail and at length, to dwell publicly on what “used by general consent to be shoved out of sight.” “From countless sources, familiar to every reader, comes testimony” of death. According to Kirkland, the ubiquity of dead bodies among these reports makes it possible to infer their presence , even in accounts by soldiers who try not to mention them. Indeed, she explains, some survivors “preserve a reticence that is even more evidence of their tortured senses.” Confrontations with death are so pervasive in the literature of the time that readers can recognize its intensity precisely, if paradoxically, by a tell-tale silence. Thoughts of death are “by their very intensity . . . new”; “one may well term this naked intimacy with facts formerly avoided, the New Death.”1 2 / THE NEW DEATH If Kirkland overstates the impact of World War I’s killing fields on Americans, subsequent commentators have almost universally done the opposite by understating it. The present work, taking Kirkland’s largely forgottentreatiseontheAmericanexperienceofdeathduringWorldWar I as its namesake, tests her proposition and finds her preoccupation with death to be typical of her time, rather than that of an outlier. It seeks to recover a moment when the war was recent and its pains were fresh and, in so doing, to reembed American novels of the postwar period within a context of pervasive death and unfinished mourning. The New Death: American Modernism and World War I interprets not only the words but the silences of its chosen texts. It identifies modern, mechanized, mass death as one of the signal preoccupations and structuring contexts of canonical American modernist writing—and this, despite the relative brevity of U.S. involvement in the conflict and its geographic distance from the war theaters. In so doing, it seeks to complicate Paul Fussell’s influential Anglo-centered literary history of the war, The Great War and Modern Memory, and its assertion that “the year 1928, a decade after the war,” produced “the first of the war memoirs setting themselves the task of remembering ‘the truth about the war.’”2 In contrast, The New Death posits that writers had been telling American readers “the truth about the war,” specifically about its unspeakable horrors (here euphemized by Fussell as “truth”), almost since the beginning of the war. Years before the emergence of canonical literature of postwar “disillusion,” audiences read popular literature of dissolution. When the war ended, the specter of mass death haunted survivors. Novelists responded by writing about male injury, death, and disappearance, even in texts where the war seems peripheral. A work such as Alexander McClintock’s Best O’ Luck (1917) exemplifies the literature of dissolution that informed Americans. Best O’ Luck, a first-person account of war experience on the Western Front, has been largely forgotten today. However it sold well and went into multiple editions in 1917 and is in many ways typical of a large corpus of popular wartime writing that, I suggest, forms...