Extreme situations : literature and crisis from the Great War to the atom bomb

Certainly a special effort is needed today in order to write in a popular way. But at the same time it has become easier: easier and more urgent. The people has clearly separated from its top layer; its oppressors and exploiters have parted company with it and become involved in a bloody war against it which can no longer be overlooked. It has become easier to take sides. Open warfare has, as it were, broken out among the 'audience'. Nor can the demand for a realist way of writing any longer be so easily overlooked. It has become more or less self-evident. The ruling strata are using lies more openly than before, and the lies are bigger. Telling the truth seems increasingly urgent. The sufferings are greater and the number of sufferers has grown. Compared with the vast sufferings of the masses it seems trivial and even despicable to worry about petty difficulties and the difficulties of petty groups. There is only one ally against the growth of barbarism: the people on whom it imposes these sufferings. Only the people offer any prospects. Thus it is natural to turn to them, and more necessary than ever to speak their language. -Brecht, 'The Popular and the Realistic' 95,000 copies -far more than Sassoon ever reached. In the late autumn of 1914, as fighting got under way, Rupert Brooke was serving his country by telling it why it should be thankful for this splendid new war: Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, And half~men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love !3 This so struck the note that the 'God be thanked' sentence was used as a recruiting slogan. In 1916 the line about 'dirty songs and dreary' was taken out of context by The Review to use against the new anti~war poetry. Brooke was not actually giving a lead. On 8 August 1914, four days after the state of war with Germany was proclaimed, the Daily Mail announced that the country had 'passed from the twilight of sloth and indulgence into the clear day of action and self~sacrifice'. This view, which had the state and the mass newspapers on its side, gave way only slowly before a disabused and clear~eyed realisation of what was happening. All the classic poets we go to for true images of the war had begun by justifying it. For Sassoon in 1915, War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise, And, fighting for our freedom, we are free. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Literature and Crisis....Pages 1-11 Total War....Pages 12-64 The Russian Revolution and Stalinism....Pages 65-116 Decadence and Crack-up....Pages 117-137 The Nullity of the Slump....Pages 138-152 Social Tragedy....Pages 153-186 Thwarted Revolutionaries....Pages 187-209 The Literature of Unfreedom....Pages 210-234 Artists and the Ominous....Pages 235-252 Spain: Life Against Death....Pages 253-275 Collapse and Survival....Pages 276-287 Back Matter....Pages 288-308