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The divided self?
Pat Barker’s First World War trilogy continues to come up with interesting stuff for this centenary year. Like this, from The Eye in the Door. Psychologist Rivers asks a patient, Captain Manning (no, not Captain Mainwaring!), what he thinks of “the strict Freudian view of war neurosis”. This is apparently the view that the all-male environment of war, with its high emotional intensity, plus the experience of battle, arouses suppressed “homosexual and sadistic impulses” and that “in vulnerable men, this leads to breakdown.” Manning replies:
“‘Is that what you believe?’
“Rivers shook his head. ‘I want to know what you think.’
“‘I don’t know what makes other people break down. I don’t think sex had much to do with my breakdown.’ A slight smile. ‘But then I’m not a repressed homosexual.’”
Rivers presses him for an answer. Manning replies:
“‘I’m just trying to think. Do you know Sassoon’s poem The Kiss?’
“‘The one about the bayonet. Yes.’
“‘I think that’s the strongest poem he’s ever written. You know, I’ve never served with him so I don’t know this from personal experience, but I’ve talked a lot to Robert Graves and he says the extent to which Sassoon contrives to be two totally different people at the Front is absolutely amazing. You know he’s a tremendously successful and bloodthirsty platoon commander, and yet at the same time, back in billets, out comes the notebook. Another anti-war poem. And the poem uses the experience of the platoon commander, but it never uses any of his attitudes. And yet for once, in that one poem, he gets both versions of himself in.’
“‘And of course it’s crawling with sexual ambiguities …’”
Well, more of the sexual ambiguities later. But for now here’s the poem itself:
“To these I turn, in these I trust –
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal,
I guard her beauty clean from rust.
He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.
Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.[1]
I’m not absolutely sure to what extent “he gets both versions of himself in” here. But there it is.
[1] Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems, Faber & Faber, London (1983), p. 29. Sassoon explains the poem’s imagery: “A famous Scotch Major (Campbell) came and lectured on the bayonet. ‘The bayonet and the bullet are brother and sister,’ he said.”
The First World War: a soldier’s declaration
Unlike Wilfred Owen (see previous blog), Siegfried Sassoon survived the war. But in July 1917 he made the following statement against it:
“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.”
The statement was read out in the House of Commons on 30 July and reported in The Times on the 31st. He remained in the army, was wounded in the head on 30 July 1918, was sent home and put on indefinite sick leave. He officially retired from the army on 12 March 1919. He continued to write prose and verse.He died in 1967.
Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration has at its centre the real-life encounter between Sassoon and army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers at Craiglochart in 1917 (Penguin Books, 1992, and no doubt reprinted subsequently).
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