The Great War in modern voice

The First World War produced a blizzard of books. Many are still read. Yet one of the best has been largely forgotten. Written with a modern voice nearly 60 years after the war ended, Eric Hiscock’s The Bells of Hell has a life and freshness that you won’t find in the classic memoirs

Ypres, September 1918 (Imperial War Museum/Harry Guy Bartholomew)

The British literature of the First World War has an identity of its own as a body of work – something that from the second war lacks. It’s no mystery why. Most of those who fought for Britain did so on the Western Front; this gives the war literature a certain cohesion, as does the fact that many of the authors were from highly literate and privileged backgrounds, or were men of letters, or both.

Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Frederic Manning, Richard Aldington and Ford Madox Ford all fit into these categories. Posh non-literary figures also got in on the act (Anthony Eden, for example, whose Another World is rather good). It’s a peer group well depicted in historian Josh Levithan’s  splendid A Century Back blog, which is currently tracking the war day by day through their letters; it shows us how incestuous this world of pen and sword actually was. Yet not all of this cohesive body of work speaks to us directly now; sometimes the language can seem archaic and mannered. J.B. Priestley’s fragment Carry on! Carry On!, in his autobiographical Margin Released, is an exception (it was written much later). But much Great War writing, superb though it is, seems increasingly of its time.

Eric Hiscock’s The Bells of Hell Go Ting-A-Ling-Ling, by contrast, has sunk without trace. But because it was written nearly 60 years after the events it describes, its language has a freshness that is much easier for the modern reader than (say) Blunden, who is a wonderful writer but can feel very old-fashioned. To read Hiscock, by contrast, is like hearing about the war from a gifted raconteur in the pub. The gap in years means he can also look at the war with modern eyes, and be quite brutally frank.

Hiscock was born in 1900 and brought up in Oxford. His parents had met when both in service to an aristocrat, Lord Lane-Fox, and his father had later become a “scout” – domestic staff – in one of the Oxford colleges. Hiscock’s home was not a wealthy one, but seems to have been secure and cheerful. As the book begins, however, Hiscock joins the army – at the age of just 15. The army clearly knows he is underage, and he spends the next two years in Britain. (In this he is luckier than an old teacher of mine who had been sent to the Somme at 15, and who started crying when I asked him about it over 50 years later.)

The young Hiscock is shipped off to Edinburgh, where he makes the acquaintance of one Sergeant-Major Priestman. The latter is a regular who “had had a testicle shot off in the Mons retreat”, and who “bullied from Reveille at six in the morning ...to Lights Out at night, spitting venom. But at week’s-end, he was not averse to accepting hard cash for a forty-eight hour pass.” It reminds one of the famous wartime song (which Hiscock quotes):

When the bloody war is over,

O how happy I shall be...

No more crying out for furlough,

No more bribing for a pass,

You can tell the Sergeant-Major

To stick his passes up his arse.

In other words, never mind the mud and the lice of Flanders; you were bullied on a massive scale long before you got there. That’s something you won’t find so much in Edmund Blunden or Robert Graves (though Frederick Manning, who spent time in the ranks, hints at it more).

Hiscock does get to the front, in early 1918 when he is still some months underage. As he and his companions file into the trench for the first time, a sniper kills the sergeant (not Priestman) a few feet from him. “Possibly somebody did something about him as his lifeless body fell to the sodden duckboards ...but I think we just left him there. As [we] scrambled into the shelter my steel helmet caught a protuberance in the muddied roof. It was the knee of a khaki-clad corpse.” There is plenty more like this. One of the most evocative passages in the book, for me, is Hiscock’s description of repeated night journeys up to the trenches, on duckboards across the mud; it is a treacherous passage and it is not unusual for an overladen man to simply lose his footing and fall into the mud or a flooded crater below, never to be seen again.

Yet some at least of this can be found in many books (though perhaps not quite so vividly). What marks this book out, besides its contemporary feel, is its frankness. Hiscock doesn’t bother with the King and Country nonsense. Instead we hear how months of bully-beef wrecks his digestion so that he will be seriously ill in later years. We hear how he gets his penis bitten by a vengeful French girl after he decides, as the last minute, not to have intercourse with her (she was, “it turned out, a diseased nymphomaniac”). It’s played for laughs but then he quietly tells us, at the end of that passage, how a fellow-soldier later catches a dose at the end of the war and shoots himself rather than go home to his family.

But perhaps the most extraordinary part of this book is Hiscock’s own court-martial for cowardice.  As he recounts it, he injures himself accidentally while cleaning his rifle, and has been accused of doing it deliberately to get himself repatriated. The accuser, a Lieutenant Clarke, is (according to Hiscock) a homosexual jealous of Hiscock’s friendship with another man. It is impossible to know if this account is correct; one could, I suppose, find the transcripts of the court-martial if they exist, but they might not settle the case. For what it is worth, Hiscock is acquitted and returns to combat – incredibly, he is returned to the same unit, which must be dangerous for Clarke – and serves until his discharge in 1919. This does not suggest cowardice. Yet a quite startling number of men were convicted; most were not actually shot, but over 300 were, and Hiscock would have been well aware he was on trial for his life. If one does take Hiscock’s account at face value, it demonstrates that this war put ordinary men at the mercy not just of the enemy, but of the very worst of their own people.

Hiscock survives the war and goes on to take part in the postwar occupation of Germany – itself fascinating, as there are few enough accounts of the post-WWII occupation, let alone of this one. The book ends back in Oxford as he picks up the thread of his life. In these last parts he describes friendships with two intellectual homosexuals in some detail. In the book he also talks about feelings of love for other soldiers. Hiscock does not appear to be especially prejudiced against homosexuality, and his attitudes seem fairly liberal for 1976, let alone 1918. I have heard it suggested that Hiscock himself had repressed feelings for men, not uncommon at that time. But I do not see why his sensitivity towards others’ sexuality should be ascribed to that. It may be that, having spent much time at close quarters with other men in his youth, he was forced acknowledge the existence of diverse sexuality; after all, he was also (if the Clarke story is true) nearly killed by its consequences.

There is much that in The Bells of Hell that is grim but in the end, oddly, the book itself isn’t. Hiscock writes warmly of his parents, of his life in Oxford and of (for example) fishing for Sunday breakfast with his father at Godstow. He seems to have been aware of his luck in surviving the war. The book is also peppered with character sketches, often wry and funny (I loved the forger and general spiv, Vanner). And the various fumbling sexual adventures show a keen sense of the ridiculous.

The Menin Road, by war artist Paul Nash (Imperial War Museum)

I first read this book in 1991 and never forgot it, to the extent that I decided to track it down 25 years later. I found it as startling and vivid as I did before, and wondered why it has not had the impact of other books about the first war. Hiscock went on to a successful career in advertising and Fleet Street, and married Romilly Cavan, a novelist and playwright who also wrote some early TV scripts. The Bells of Hell was published by Desmond Elliott’s Arlington Books, a small company but a distinguished one. It did also get a brief release as a paperback. But its impact seems to have been small. Hiscock was not of the officer class that still dominated publishing and criticism in the 1970s, and it may be you still had to be an Oxbridge poet, or at least of the slaughtering classes, before you were really allowed to write about the Great War.

If so, that is our loss, because there are things that those classes would not have questioned, or seen in quite the same way. Wars are not just about what a country does to its enemies; they are about what it does to its own people in the process, and the way in which men like Clarke, or people of a certain class, can suddenly wield huge authority over those of another. That is something we could perhaps remember in our own times, when some would have us believe that it’s only foreigners who are our enemies.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

We, the people

Since 2016, populism has changed the political map of the western world – and there’s plenty more to come. But what is populism? Does it have shared roots with fascism? And who are “the people”? Two books – one new, one old – have something to tell us

The year 2016 saw the election of Donald Trump in the US, the Brexit vote in the UK, post-coup consolidation of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and the near-election of Norbert Hofer in Austria. The year that follows will see bids for power by Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in The Netherlands. These people are widely dismissed as “populists”. But what does that even mean?

In his short new book What is Populism?,  Jan-Werner Müller, Professor of Politics at Princetown University, suggests we don’t have an answer to that question. He then supplies one. A populist, he states, is someone who claims to identify with “the people”.  S/he rejects everyone else.  How “the people” are defined is left conveniently vague, but it is made clear that everyone not fitting that description is an outlier, a deviant, or, worse of all, part of an unresponsive “elite” against which s/he is leading a popular rebellion. Thus their views need not be taken into account. The populist, says Müller, is therefore inherently anti-pluralist – they cannot be a democrat. Yet they can present themselves as exactly that, through their claim to represent the popular base. 

The first part of this definition – identification with something called “the people” – is not new, but Müller presumably wouldn’t claim it was. What may break new ground is his suggestion that this identification makes the populist inherently anti-pluralist, because any definition of “the people” must exclude stakeholders in the polity that don’t meet it. Given the diversity of modern

societies, it’s fair to guess that a big percentage of the people won’t be “the people”. A quick glance at Trump and Britain’s Brexit advocate Nigel Farage bears this out. Trump actually didn’t win the popular vote in 2016, even though he won the electoral college; so his definition of “the people” may be missing a few “people”. As for Farage, the Brexit referendum was won 52-48%. Yet both men insist that “the people” have spoken.  (After the November election, we were treated to the sight of these men celebrating their victory over “the elites” in a gold-plated lift at Trump Tower.)

Should we worry about populists? After all, a leader whose politics make no sense will be called out in the end. The trouble is that they can do a lot of damage first. One reason is that, as Müller says, the populists can present themselves as democrats, although to him they are inherently not. “The danger is ...that [populism] promises to make good on democracy’s highest ideals (Let the people rule!). ...That the end result is a form of politics that is blatantly antidemocractic should trouble us all.” He supports this last point with a discussion of the way populist governments of the left and right have behaved in Hungary, Venezuela and Poland. 

Müller has less to say about the way we must react to populism. He does talk about the safeguards that have been built into European constitutions since the war, but says little about the ways in which democracy has been defined, and then protected from populist capture. He could for example have raised the “tyranny of the majority” arguments set out by the Founding Fathers and by John Stuart Mill, and make the case for representative government. Müller has written widely about politics and government elsewhere, and it may be that he wished this book to be concise, with a precise focus; it explains and defines populism, and that is all it sought to do. But I believe that, having explained why populists can’t be pluralists, he could also have set out the ways one preserves pluralism.

What Müller does do, is to demand that we confront, but also engage with, populism. “I reject the paternalistic liberal attitude [of] therapy for citizens ‘whose fears and anger have to be taken seriously’,” he says. But he also rejects exclusion of populists from debate, pointing out that this will simply support their contention that the “popular will” is excluded from the “system”. I think he is right on both counts.

I would prefer to have read more in this book about the constitutional pluralist structures that can protect us from populism.  I would also have liked to see more analysis of why voters respond to populist leaders who clearly don’t have their best interests at heart. But perhaps these discussions would have blunted this concise, readable little book. Müller’s main purpose was simply to define populism – and he has certainly done that.  Moreover his definition of populism as inherently anti-pluralist is a well-argued and elegant warning. As Trump apparently said in May 2016, “The only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything.”  If you’re not sure you’re one of Trump’s “the people” (or Farage’s, or Wilders’s, or Erdoğan’s), the populist vision of democracy does not include you.

***

But what if you feel that vision does include you – and it is the first time that anything has? Populism is, by definition, about identity politics – a point Müller acknowledges. In a time of growing social alienation, to be offered an identity, a place in a group, even a mass-identity, can be persuasive. If Peter Fritzsche is right, we may have been here before.

Fritzsche is Professor of History at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published widely on European and especially German history. In 1998 published a book Germans into Nazis. This took a fresh look at why the Germans ushered Hitler into power in 1933. His thought-provoking book attempts to answer the question by casting aside the conventional explanations – Versailles, the Depression, reparations – and looking at the dynamics of division in a society and the desire for unity.  These explanations seem especially topical and urgent now, given current trends in Western politics.

Fritzsche’s thesis is that the First World War was crucial to the rise of Nazism, but not in the way that has been assumed. Conventional explanations have focused on the humiliation of the Versailles treaty, territorial losses and reparations. According to Fritzsche, many postwar parties opposed these; the Nazis were nothing new in this respect. If we want to understand the real role of WW1 in the rise of Nazism, we should start not in 1918 but in 1914, and look at the way it made the Germans feel one people, even though they had been that in theory for over 40 years. Facing attack from outside in 1914, Germans coalesced into what “the Kaiser called the Burgenfrieden, the “peace of the fortress”, [which] promised to resolve the divisions between workers and the middle classes, between socialists and conservatives, [and] between Protestants and Catholics.”

This was important in a divided country. Fritzsche points out that (for example) Prussian voters were divided into property classes, the highest of which were allocated votes of greater value. The popular mobilization brought people together for the first time in a sense of common purpose and resulted in an unprecedented level of civic engagement – the Volksgemeinschaft, the community working as one. A side-effect was that it meant the stratified society of imperial Germany was no longer viable. But it was not satisfactorily replaced.

The new civic engagement never went away. But in the 1920s it was expressed through a series of interest groups, and parties linked to different professional or trade bodies. It was not a substitute. When the Nazis arrived, however, people did feel a sense of common purpose. The way the Nazis did this was, for Fritzsche, far more important than Versailles or reparations, which were already the subject of political discourse. As to anti-semitism, he does not deny its existence in pre-1933 Germany, but does not see the Nazis as having any ownership of it then – all parties were somewhat anti-semitic – or find any evidence that most Germans supported anything like a “final solution”. It is the Volksgemeinschaft that is important here.

Is Fritzsche right? Perhaps only Germans can answer this, but I feel he is onto something, if only because he provides an explanation for Nazism that does not rely on Germans being a weird, separate species. After all, no human is. I know plenty of Germans. They do not have two heads. A reviewer of this book in the Jerusalem Post commented that “Historians examining nations over periods of time have somehow to find a balance between what is inherent in a people and what is not, in order to attempt explanations of national attitudes and conduct.” But can you, in fact, have such a balance – is there anything “inherent in a people”? It is an important point, as ascribing Nazism to the German character has induced a dangerous conviction in other countries that they would never behave as the Germans did. Could any historical phenomenon be repeated by any country, given the right circumstances?

Fritzsche doesn’t answer that question, and he doesn’t speculate on the broader implications of his theory. He leaves that to the reader, which is perhaps what a good historian should do. But one notes that many people in Western countries seem to feel that their sense of identity is threatened, and do not feel that any entity represents them collectively. Neither, it seems, do many Americans. In fact they seem to feel that there is no single national life, no conversation, that includes them, and few fora for civic engagement. Neither left nor right answers these concerns. In this situation, many will turn to those who claim to speak for them and against “the establishment”, and who promise to return their sense of belonging. These trends at least partly underlie the Brexit vote in Britain, the meteoric rise of Trump in the US and the growth of populist right-wing movements in Europe. If Fritzsche’s thesis is correct, could the German pattern be replicated elsewhere?

Fritzsche quotes Hitler’s dictum that the nationalists forgot the social and the socialists forgot the national. Hitler forgot neither. Given people’s feelings of powerlessness against business, globalization and a perceived loss of identity, this is an important point.

If someone says to you, “I represent you. You, the people,” you have come home. You have an identity, and have no need to share it with those with whom you do not identify, whether they be Jews, Poles, Gypsies, perceived welfare scroungers, Goths or gays. They are not “the people”. But you are. As Jan-Werner Müller explains in What is Populism?, this is the nature of the beast.  Meanwhile Peter Fritzsche’s Germans into Nazis invests the Nazi phenomenon with a universality that makes this book crucial in this time when, once again, it is the strident and divisive who claim to know who “the people” really are.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

Houston, we read you

I’ve just read two recent books set in Texas suburbia – and they’re character-driven, inventive and humane

Texan literature is nearly 500 years old. That’s if you count the extraordinary adventures of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. He was put ashore in far-away Florida in 1528, along with other members of a Spanish expedition, charged with reaching the modern-day Tampico in Mexico, which the expedition commander believed to be only a day or two’s march away. It was of course closer to 1,500 miles. Virtually no-one from the party survived, but Cabeza de Vaca did and left an extraordinary account of his journey through Texas and his (cordial) relations with the natives. La Relación y Comentarios del Gouernador Aluar Nuñez Cabeca de Vaca was completed in 1537. Its author was later appointed governor of present-day Argentina and Paraguay, where the settlers grassed him up to Madrid for being too nice to the natives. But with La Relación, he left us what is, I suppose, the first piece of Texan literature.

AnonMoos/Darwinek

Not everyone who has travelled through Texas has been as impressed as Cabeza de Vaca. According to the Texas Handbook Online, Frederick Law Olmsted – the famed landscaper whose works include Central Park – recorded  in Journey Through Texas (1857) “a grim picture of slavery-ridden East Texas, indicting the people as crude, the food as bad, and the level of civilization as negligible.” But the 20th century has, by all accounts, seen quite a vibrant literature emerge in Texas, and it has produced distinguished pieces such as Katherine Ann Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. The most prominent Texan writer today is probably Larry McMurtry, known for the Lonesome Dove series but also the joint screenwriter for the film version of E. Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain.

I’ve just read two recent books by Texan, or part-Texan, writers. Kevin Cole was born in New York and now lives in Europe, but was brought up in Houston. Kristin Joyce Stevenson is from Austin; she too lived in Europe for some years, but has recently returned home. Their novels are rooted in their home towns. Both books are highly intelligent and very character-driven, and they are well worth your time.

Days of Throbbing Gristle

It’s 1987. Sam Hay is a 17-year-old from a grotty part of Sheffield in England. His parents are dead, his sister a recovering alcoholic. Not a lot to lose really, so he enrolls as an exchange student and heads for high school in Houston. Totally amoral and nihilistic, he means to make his McMansion host family fund him through college. Along the way, he’ll slag off everything about them, their suburb, his American fellow-students and Texas in general while doing as many drugs as possible. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it happens. Over the course of this long but gripping book, Sam’s going to be slammed up hard against his own cynicism, and forced to think about values. But when he does, it might just be too late.

I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like Kevin Cole’s Days of Throbbing Gristle. (The title is likely significant, but more of that anon.) It is a tour de force on two levels. First, it certainly works as a coming-of-age story. The story’s told entirely through Sam’s eyes; it needs real skill to do character development that way, but Cole can do it. You start to see that Sam’s contempt for others, and his monstrous cynicism, come in part from anger. It takes Sam a long time to accept what an utter shit he has been to those around him. In the meantime he uses someone for sex and then rejects them in a way that will have awful consequences. He also accepts the loyalty and friendship of others but despises them, and gives them nothing in return. Only at the end does he realize they might have understood him better than he thought. 

However, the book’s not just about Sam. It is also a quite savage look at 1980s Texas suburbia. Cole’s plot device of looking through the eyes of an English exchange student lets him describe it from an outsider’s viewpoint. He serves up a big parade of characters –a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a teenage gay tortured by his sexuality, skinheads, metal fans, strippers, struggling workers and assorted lowlifes, drug-dealers and drunks. The cast includes Sam’s soulless hosts, Neil and Donna – the latter, especially, is an authentic suburban monster. Yet in a series of casual conversations Neil has with Sam, you get to understand what has formed these people. In general, no-one in this book is two-dimensional. Seeing them, and Houston, through Sam’s eyes also works because although he’s a shit, he’s a very funny one. He’s dragged to a rodeo: “I could think of better things to excite deranged senses than wandering round an ammonia-scented fairground, gazing at cattle sporting epic lengths of snot hanging from snouts.” He handles it by dropping acid.

But Days of Throbbing Gristle is also dark. The darkness seeps in via Scott and Iris, two drug dealers who have espoused a cruel form of film-making as a performance art and who preach a deep nihilism. Their chief acolyte likes to listen to the English punk band Throbbing Gristle. Cole doesn’t say so, but Throbbing Gristle were performance artists before they were musicians. Is he trying to warn us, through Scott and Iris, through Sam, that amorality, nihilism, selfishness and self-display are dead ends? Each reader’s going to work this out for themselves.

The book isn’t perfect. There are some text errors here and there – words misplaced or consistently misspelled (Cole writes very well and I think these are software glitches, not mistakes). Also, the book is long. It kept my attention, but some readers might flag a little.

  

Even so, Days of Throbbing Gristle is very good indeed. Sam and his friends are going to stay with me for quite a while, as will a lot of the scenes – the rodeo on acid; a tawdry lapdance; a day with petty crooks and people-smugglers; and Donna losing it with her teenage daughter. There’s also an unexpectedly lyrical sojourn in the Texas Hills; this was one of the best chapters for me. This is a savagely observed and very funny book, but it also has hidden depths, and a certain compassion for its characters. I hope there’s more to come from Kevin Cole.

Frankie & Cash

No book is easy to write. But for a thriller, romance or genre book, there are probably ground rules a writer can follow. A novel that depends almost entirely on characterization is extremely hard to do. In Frankie & Cash Kristin Joyce Stevenson does pull it off, creating a small but vivid cast of characters; when you think you’re done with the book, they stay with you and you go on thinking about their motivations, what shaped them, and exactly what they meant to each other and why.

The book opens in Austin, Texas. It’s the present day and narrator Anita, a woman in her late 30s, is sitting in a bar with Cash, a man of about the same age. They’re waiting for Frankie, who’s back on a rare visit after the death of her father. Frankie knows she’s going to see Anita, after a gap of many years. She doesn’t know she’s going to see Cash again. As the narrative of this meeting proceeds, Stevenson skillfully interweaves it with the story of these three people’s intense relationship when they were teenagers in suburban Austin 20 years earlier. This “back story” moves to San Francisco as the three make their way through a haze of drugs and booze. One of them struggles with mental illness. And throughout, there are underlying themes of thwarted ambition, tangled friendships and jealousies, and shadows from difficult childhoods.

When the three come together in Austin after so long, we’re wondering how they will interact, and whether each will recognize what the others have become. Meanwhile there’s a series of vignettes from the trio’s lives. They experiment with drugs and sex, first in Texas and later in San Francisco, where they face the forces that finally lever them apart. When they come together years later, we see them reverting to type, and see, more clearly, what went wrong. One of Stevenson’s skills is that she knows what to say and what to leave out. This isn’t a long novel (about 55,000 words – much shorter than Throbbing Gristle). But a lot is inferred rather than explained. You’re not usually told “Frankie did X because Y”, and that’s why these three stay with you; you want to know what was really going on, and you know the answer is in there somewhere.

We’re also left asking about social media. Thirty years ago, tracking down someone from your youth was a paper-chase or a series of phone calls, and often the trail went cold. Unless you really wanted to find someone, you probably wouldn’t bother. Today it takes seconds to enter a name. Even if someone no longer uses the same surname, they can likely be tracked through mutual acquaintances. So you can now find someone easily after 10 or 15 years. But should you? Why did you part in the first place – and will anything really have changed? At the end of the book, it turns out that that the three cannot all handle these questions equally well.

Both Frankie & Cash and Days of Throbbing Gristle are striking in the way they depict people, the way they think of and relate to each other, what they want from others, and why. Frederick Law Olmsted  might have been right in 1857. But the level of civilization, it seems, isn’t negligible now. 

 Mike Robbins's novella Dog! is available as an ebook for just 99c (US) or 99p (UK), or as a paperback, from  Amazon (US, UK, and all other country sites), Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Indigo, iTunes and more. Find all his books on Amazon here.

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