Richard Luckett on a poet too talented to be left-wing

A newspaper headline of the early 'forties, Wars Bring Good Times for Poets, invoked Roy Campbell to write one of his tartest epigrams; only the "Leftwing Muse" offered, vulture-like, the pickings of conflict to her. votaries — true•poets, Campbell implied, followed his example in joining up and serving in the ranks, where good times were irrelevant. The gyrations of the Leftwing Muse were certainly remarkable: witness the Communist Scottish Nationalists who wrote poems in which Scots soldiers and Russian soldiers were seen as embracing a common cause which ultimately equated Hitler and England as the enemy. But such equivocation was not, in this instance, Campbell's target; what he was attacking was the ethos of the rear which pervaded the whole war-poetry boom.

The First World•War had seen a similar boom, but this had two distinct phases. The poets who attained popularity during the duration of the war surfed on the wave of interest set up by the Georgian anthologies; they had little in common with the poets whose poems, although often written during the war, were read and admired after the war — poems often bitterly condemnatory of that conflict. The poets of the Hitler War profited from some of the factors that had made the reading of verse popular in 1914-18: the association between poetry and patriotism fostered by Shakespeare's Histories, the curtailment of ordinary amusements, a sharpened appetite for experience of all kinds. But they had also grown up with a knowledge of the work of Sassoon, Rosenberg, Graves, .and, above all, Wilfred Owen. Whilst he was an officer cadet, in the autumn of 1940, Keith Douglas embellished a photograph of himself in uniform with a surround in the manner of French memorial pictures, a halo, and, for a motto, the 'old lie' itself:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

It illustrates, accurately enough, the ironic legacy of 1914-18. Poets sensed the opportunity and publishers were compliant (if short, of paper). But both poets and public had learnt from the aftermath of the previous war, and war itself had changed. In 1942 the publishers of Alun Lewis's Raider's Dawn used the fact that he had been stationed in England for the last year as a recommendation: "Whereas men like Owen and Sassoon were severed from home by the continuous horror of the trench massacres he has been with the civilians in the bombed cities as well as with the soldiers in their isolated camps." Thus Lewis was "able to express a completer understanding of the World War than could the poets of ... 1914-18." The poets who had experienced the full horror of Flanders never forgave Brooke either for the tone of his war poems or for the fact that he had published

them before experiencing the action which, in tne event, he was destined not to see. The poets of 1939 knew that it would be wrong to imitate Brooke; some of them were also happy to take their predecessors' disillusion as absolving them from any duty to take an active part in the conflict.

Keith Douglas quoted Owen, and admired Owen, but he never sought to use Owen as an excuse. "As a child," he once wrote of himself, "he was a militarist." If he was a militarist after childhood it was only in a limited sense.

He was fascinated by weapons, and a staunch member of the Christ's Hospital OTC; he signed up only days after the declaration of war. Yet he was also intolerant of authority and of distinctions of rank, bored by many aspects of soldiering, observant of the horror of war, and emphatic that he was a civilian in uniform rather than a soldier proper. He began Alamein to Zem Zem, the posthumously published prose narrative of battle in the desert, by disclaiming any intention of writing "as a soldier"; he aimed to set things down as might a country visitor at a great show, or a "child in a factory""When I could order my thoughts I looked for more significant things than appearances." He wrote, that is, as a poet. Here he came full circle. For Douglas believed that if a poet was to write about the war he must do so from first-hand experience

of the fighting — he must, of necessity, be a soldier for the duration. To have suffered the

Blitz was not enough, nor did the muse unveil herself to land girls and "desperately intelligent conscientious objectors." It was as though the quality of experience in war could be defined by proximity to the front line. At Oxford Douglas rode a horse and, despite membership of the Labour Club (for the sake of the dances, Mr Graham tells us), espoused reactionary views in his editorials for The Cherwell. The fact that the Yeomanry

regiment which he joined was originally mounted added to its appeal. He used

medieval models for some of his drawings (to which Mr Graham does not do justice, though he reproduces a good number). And as a sol dier he made no attempt to dissemble his

contempt for line-of-communications troops and the tail of the army, recording how the

men who stayed furthest from danger were excited by a single corpse in a puddle or posed, filthy and unkempt, when press photographers wanted a shot of the "victorious troops." It is not surprising that, when El Alamein threatened to start without him (he

• was attached to a Divisional staff) Douglas set out for his regiment in defiance of orders. Perhaps the rigour of Douglas's attitude is one reason why he has never been properly appreciated. The original edition of Alamein to Zem Zem, the only one to reproduce all Douglas's illustrations, is hard to find and printed on paper that is pitifully impermanent. The poems have now twice been collected, but there is little sign that he is much read. Des

mond Graham's biography is therefore particularly welcome, not only because he has collected much material that would otherwise. have perished, but because he takes Dougla entirely seriously as a poet. The evidence of this will not be found in any exposition of Douglas's work, but is implicit in his choiceof quotations and his determination to establish as full a record as possible of Douglas's life. There are points when this threatens to become uncritical; the repetition of much that can be found in Alamein to Zem Zem seems unnecessary. But Douglas, whose own work

became so stringently spare and pared, must create for anyone who writes about him fun

damental problems of proportion, and what Mr Graham has done is to solve these with tact and grace. His illustrations are as apt as his quotations. For anyone whd wants to know the pattern of Douglas's life, who his friends were, what he read, when he wrote a particular poem, this will be the definitive work.

One of the fascinating things that Mr Graham brings out is that Douglas's life did have a pattern, that this is not merely a cofl.

venient device of the biographer. Douglas was killed in action three days after D-Day; Ger man prisoners whom he had talked to in North Africa told him that when they got to Europe the Allies would "have their work cut

out," and he fully expected that his own work would come to an end. He did not seriouslY imagine that he would survive the war. But this anticipation of death must not be co0.

fused with the flirtation that we find in his contemporary, Sidney Keyes. Whilst Keyes

was never properly possessed by the death_ wish he was undoubtedly fascinated by it, for it formed the basis of the romantic explora. tion of his enemy's psychology which was 50 often the stimulus of his verse. For Douglas, however, death was simply a fact, an incisive

and bounding line that could be used to,

sharpen the definition of living, seeing an writing. It also served as an exorcisnt,

purifying his writing by revealing the falsities

of those ideas, images and, above all' cadences, that he derived from Auden and

Yeats. If Douglas, early on, was apt to see

himself as the horseman variously invoked bY both these poets, but by Yeats most notablY, it was a tendency that had passed by the last year of his life. Then his own capacity to see things as they are, not as they seem, matlef each line his own, and a seeming roughness 0, surface nothing of which he need be ashameo. In fact this harsh texture disguises and conn

terpoints the greatest technical resource, with assonances and complex rhyme patterns a feature of almost every poem: a way of saying as distinctive as the way of seeing.

The other quality that Douglas's poems have is gesture, not in a rhetorical sense, but in the sense of movement present within the poems, observed, recorded, yet deliberately incomplete. The final statement is notable for its absence, and its absence is precisely a Part. of what Douglas is saying. Since the war a dim apprehension of his state of affairs h9! been responsible. for much turgid nonsense' Douglas's achievement was that, faced bY death, he was still concerned to read the world around him as it was. Mr Graham 5 book, for all its excellencies, is no more than. a gloss on the seven or eight poems that make Douglas the greatest English poet of the Hitler War; its merit is that it heightens cit?r sense of the hieratic quality in Douglas a work, the scribing-out of completed action that he attains in "I think I am becoming t; God" or his poem on the Egyptian sentrY Alexandria:

Everywhere is a real or artificial race of life, a struggle of everyone to be master or mistress of some hour.

But of this no scent or sound reaches him there.

He leans and looks at the sea: Sweat lines the statue of a face.