Killer’s Home: The Returning First World War Veteran in Modernist Literature

On the 13^th March Dr. William Blazek (Liverpool Hope University) presented the eleventh contribution to the Centre for American Studies’ 2013-14 seminar series, entitled, Killer’s Home: The Returning First World War Veteran in Modernist Literature.  In a deeply engaging, thorough and times rather moving analysis of the veteran experience in World War One, Blazek diverted from typical scholarship that focused primarily on the veteran for one that examined the effects their return had on their respective communities.

Blazek opened his discussion by noting that comedy has strongly skewed our perceptions of World War One, creating what he argued was a Blackadder-esque distortion that has omitted the darker qualities of the veteran experience.  He noted that the blurring of legal and illegal frameworks once veterans returned home caused one of the first initial contrasts between war and peacetime life, where in the example of murder, veterans found themselves lifted out of the legal status of killing.  It is this example, amongst many others that Blazek illustrated how the returning soldier posed a threat to the construction of the ideal of home or family life. 

This irreconcilability between war-time behaviour and peacetime norms was further demonstrated in his analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), and the two veteran characters of Abe North and Tommy Barban.  Both North and Barban find it difficult to adjust to life after returning home from the war, but utilise different strategies to deal with it.  North finds himself susceptible to the climate of post-war debauchery, and exhibits a sort of comic surrealism, what Blazek described as a Marx Brothers-like anarchic dynamism in his behaviour.  These comical qualities are however evidence of North’s status as a veteran, qualities Blazek argued were borne out of the chaos of the war and the lack of meaning that confronted the veterans of the war on their return home.  North’s nonsensical qualities, rather than being trivial, emerge from a hard cynicism that many veterans felt in realizing that they were never going to be able to adjust to the stability of peace-time life.  Barban in sharp contrast to North utilises his experiences of the war to control his behaviour.  In addition to this, he seizes the opportunities of post-war Europe, whilst North ignores it.  Barban’s showmanship and incessant machismo is in itself its own defence mechanism against the dissonance he finds in peace-time Europe, where Blazek’s description of Barban as the professional soldier is confronted by a world he finds difficult to adjust to.  Although both adopt different strategies to cope within post-war Europe, they both resign to the irreconcilability of peace-time life as men who have been permanently tainted by the horrors of warfare, what Blazek noted as their recognition of never being able to find new or unpolluted identities amidst the ashes of the war. 

In another example from Ernest Hemingway’s Soldier’s Home (1925), Blazek discussed the main character Harold Krebs’ own alienation from his home town after returning from the war.  Kreb’s inability to communicate his experiences of the war in his home-town, to voice the dark, sinister actualities of battle, leaves him retreating into an eternal silence.  Dr Blazek provided a further example in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and the character of Septimus Warren Smith, who suffers shell-shock and hallucinations of his deceased friend Evans.  In his analysis of Septimus’ incapacity for emotional intelligence, Woolf’s description of Septimus’ perception of viewing beauty through a pane of glass, Blazek noted that the returning veteran often stood as a reminder of the fragility of life in their local communities, and perhaps more starkly, as a reminder of a form of death that cannot be buried.  He continued with an example from Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918).  Following the shell-shocked character of Captain Chris Baldry as he returns home from the war, Blazek noted the stark irony in Baldry’s treatment of his home and local community as a form of certain death compared to the horrors of war.  This text, as Blazek noted, depicted the home and the local community as something not just alien to the returning veteran, but sometimes entirely threatening compared to the abnormal normalcy of warfare.  This was later reinforced in his examination of the classic returning veteran narrative in Homer’s Odyssey.  Blazek commented that Odysseus’s war-like manner shaped by combat is displayed in his dissonance upon returning home, which leads him to seek out additional adventures to quench his warrior-like thirst.  Additionally, and one that ties into his analysis of West’s The Return of the Soldier, Odysseus’ slaying of the suitors in the text’s conclusion once again signifies that even the home for the returning veteran is far from safe.

In what was one of the most well-received segments of his paper, Blazek concluded by discussing his own experiences of working alongside students and professors at university, a large number of whom were veterans of the Vietnam War.  He noted that the inconspicuous signals between veterans, often no more than a nod, were enough to identify themselves amongst civilians.  This fraternal marking of each other in peace-time America and within their new identities as professors or students was, Blazek noted, a reminder of the inimitable relations many veterans cultivated after the war towards each other.  It was also one that many, including Blazek, recognised and respected in those who had seen and returned from the horrors of warfare.  Dr. Blazek presented an enlightening analysis of World War One literature and the treatment of the returning veteran.  With reinforcement from post-war writers such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Woolf, and peppered with interesting and touching personal accounts of his own family’s involvement in the Great War, Dr. Blazek provided an excellent contribution to the Centre for American Studies’ 2013-2014 seminar series.

- By James Nixon

PGR at the University of Glasgow

                                                           

The Centre for American Studies 2013-14 seminar series at the University of Glasgow returns with Dr. Hazel Hutchison: “The Turn of the Page: Henry James in the 1890s” on Thursday 27^th March.  This will be hosted in Room 202, 4 University Gardens at 5.15pm.  All very welcome!

Careless People: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Inventing The Great Gatsby

Welcome to the blog for the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies at the University of Glasgow. Yesterday, 17^th October 2013, the Centre was pleased to welcome Professor Sarah Churchwell (Professor of American Literature at the University of East Anglia) to the first of the Centre’s 2013-2014 seminar series. In collaboration with the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, and as part of the 'English and American Literature Lecture Series', co-sponsored by the Centre, Churchwell discussed ‘Careless People: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Inventing The Great Gatsby.’ Below is this listener’s brief summary of the lecture.

The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, is a timeless American classic. Since its release in 1925, it has captivated generations, becoming one of the most widely read books in the world. In what proved to be a highly popular event – the lecture theatre was literally bursting at the seams – Prof. Churchwell described her attempts to piece together the chaotic and inchoate world behind Gatsby in her new book, ‘Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby.’ Using diary extracts, newspaper cuttings, and letters, Prof. Churchwell sought to examine the real-life events of 1922, including a gruesome double murder, to show their influences on the famous novel.

According to Prof. Churchwell, 1922 was a remarkable year, which began with the publication of ‘Ulysses’ and ended with ‘The Waste Land.’ In seeking the origins of Gatsby, Prof. Churchwell shows how Fitzgerald reflected the stories around him. The major news story at that time was that of the murder of Eleanor Mills, a married woman, and her lover Edward Hall; who were shot through the head near an abandoned farmhouse, their love letters scattered around the corpses. The murder of the adulterous couple held America spellbound and largely dominated the headlines whilst Fitzgerald was in New York. Prof. Churchwell points out a number of echoes with this and the story of Tom Buchanan's affair with Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby.

In recreating the world of New York before the Great Depression, Prof. Churchwell also set out to debunk myths of the time perpetuated since in Hollywood films and lazy scholarly works. One such myth was that of fashion, or more specifically, the length of a lady’s dress. Through her research of newspapers in 1922, Prof. Churchwell demonstrated that the dresses often depicted in adaptions (films or theatre) of Gatsby since are in fact those of the late 1920s, and not 1922. On her PowerPoint, Prof. Churchwell showed the audience pictures of dresses in 1922 – which were a lot longer than assumed. This might seem trivial, but as Prof. Churchwell argued, in discovering the context of Gatsby, it is imperative to recreate the world exactly as it was. For example, with wit and insight Prof. Churchill further described the great lengths she went to in crafting her book (she spent four years trying to pinpoint the date that Fitzgerald returned to New York from the Midwest to begin working on Gatsby). Like finding a needle in a haystack, Prof. Churchwell described her elation at discovering the date - September 20^th, 1922 – through a lost telegram.

Moreover, one man who has been overlooked proved pivotal to Prof. Churchwell’s analysis of the time. Burton Rascoe was the literary editor for the New York Tribune in 1922 and according to Prof. Churchwell his writing offered important glimpses into the time. His ‘A Bookman’s Daybook’ column was littered with information related to various parties he and Fitzgerald attended, which Prof. Churchwell argued provided the motif for the Gatsby parties. Through researching this man, Prof. Churchwell uncovered a diamond in the rough – a letter from Fitzgerald to Rascoe in which he explains his motivations behind Gatsby.

Prof. Churchwell then described another example of how Fitzgerald’s fictional landscape was based on reality. In his own drive to Manhattan from Great Neck (which is called West Egg in Gatsby), Fitzgerald, like Gatsby, would have driven west along Northern Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue to the Queensboro Bridge, crossing the Flushing River about midway. There in the 1920s the road passed through a former swamp, which had gradually filled with household garbage and coal ashes. On city maps the area was labelled the Corona Dumps; Fitzgerald called it the valley of ashes.

Prof. Churchwell concluded by showing that when Fitzgerald died in 1940, he largely considered himself a failure – Gatsby had sold only seven copies in the last year of his life, and his complete works had earned him a grand total of $13.13 in royalties. But following World War II, with new attention the meaning of Gatsby began to emerge and the book began to sell, and it now occupies a central place in the American canon.

In her lecture, Prof. Churchwell mixed biography, history, literary criticism and the compelling story of a true crime murder mystery to create a brilliantly detailed picture of the story behind a classic. With its release still due in the US (coming early 2014), this very carefully researched and well-crafted piece of literature by Prof. Churchwell provides an important contribution to the scholarly discussions on Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, and America in the roaring 20s, discovering where the fiction comes from and how Fitzgerald poetically presented modern America through his tale. Prof. Churchwell’s lecture was informative, and as suggested by its attendance, was highly popular.

By Joe Ryan-Hume

PGR at the University of Glasgow

The Centre’s seminar series continues with Dr. Randall Stephens (University of Northumbria) ‘The Devil’s Music: Religion and Rock in the 1950s South.’ This will be held on Wednesday 23^rd October in Room 208, 2 University Gardens, at 5:15pm. All very welcome!