Tag Archives: Jay Winter

The Book I Wish I Had Written

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The culture section of the Saturday edition of a major British newspaper runs a regular column in which celebrities in the arts are asked to identify subjects from their cultural life such as ‘The book I am currently reading’, ‘The instrument I wish I had learnt’ and ‘The last film that made me laugh/cry’. These lists are always fun to play along with but, while my answer to topics such as ‘My favourite piece of music’ has changed over the years, my answer to the regular question ‘The book I wish I had written’ has long remained the same: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell.

Celebrity answers to this topic tends to be couched in terms of either a personally inspirational text or a best-seller that made the author a lot of money. In my case, the answer arises from a mixture of both. I first read The Great War and Modern Memory as a freshman, a first year undergraduate in my first semester at university. I thought at the time that I wanted to be an English major. By the end of the year, I knew that I would be a history major. This shift was only in part down to Fussell’s pivotal work of cultural history (Geoffrey Parker’s lecture on the possible role of sunspots in the development of early modern military strategy also had something to do with it), but what the book undoubtedly informed was my commitment to history that took fiction as one of its primary sources. This would shape not only my undergraduate module choices but the topic of my senior essay (an analysis of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy and R.H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm trilogy as representations of the Western Front), but also my master’s and doctoral theses as well as almost every major work I have published since.

Of course, my view of Fussell’s work has evolved since then but that ‘heady mixture of literary criticism and cultural and historical analysis’ [1] remains deeply alluring as a point of reference not necessarily as a cultural history of the First World War, but as a pivotal moment in the cultural turn in First World War studies. As Ian Isherwood and Steven Trout argue in their excellent recent review article, ‘But It Still Goes On: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory at 50’, ‘the book is perhaps best approached as a an experimental study – a hybrid mixture … of  literary scholarship, cultural analysis, historical writing, and veiled autobiography.’ [2] This hybridity, if not Fussell’s argument about the centrality of irony to a Modernist paradigm shift in cultural expression, has gone on to inform the approach and ambition of major works in the field, including Samuel Hynes’ A War Imagined (1990) and Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995), as well as many of their students, among whose number I include myself. And, in ‘reigniting a debate from the late 1920s and early 1930s over literary treatments of the Great War and their portrayal of disillusionment supposedly shared by an entire generation’ [3], Fussell helped shape what we now define as the canon of British First World War literature as surely as any writer, publisher or critic of the ‘war books’ boom. We cannot understand not only how we in Britain and the US remember the First World War today, but how it is represented in contemporary cultural forms. Alice Winn’s almost constant references to Robert Graves’ Good-bye To All That in In Memoriam (2023) provides only the most recent testimony to Fussell’s historiographic influence.

It is, as Isherwood and Trout note, the representativeness of the authors selected by Fussell for analysis that lie at the heart of many of the critiques of his approach. Yet representativeness was never really the point: ‘Drawn … to highly literate, middle-class junior officers like himself (albeit members of a different army in a different war), he never intended to write a comprehensive study of British Firs World War literature or, for that matter, an exhaustive treatment of British culture before, during, and after the conflict.’ [4] But that debate, with its echoes of the critiques of Douglas Jerrold and Cyril Falls [5], highlights an issue that those of us who use fictional, semi-fictional and poetic sources in our research and analysis still grapple with today. No cultural history of the war can ever be comprehensive, either in breadth or depth, particularly when the conflict is considered in global rather than national terms. How do we choose which texts to focus on? How do we balance close reading of the symbolism of particular texts with broad claims about the culture in which they were produced and which they sought to shape?

It is here that Isherwood and Trout’s identification of the importance of autobiography to Fussell’s endeavour spoke most strongly to me. Unlike Fussell (or indeed Hynes), I am not trying to use my practice of cultural history to grapple with experiences as a former soldier. I make no claims to, as Fussell did, to sharing a bond of experience with the authors he selected for particular consideration. But I have always been aware of the extent to which my own personal preferences and youthful exposure to particular literary works has shaped the texts I have chosen to focus on (the work of Dorothy L. Sayers being the most obvious example), as well as my vulnerability to the critique levelled by Charles Carrington against Fussell, that the analysis of someone who wasn’t there can never be a true history of the war. Indeed, as a newly minted PhD, I was bluntly told by one ex-serviceman (himself too young to have served in the First World War), that my thesis on representations of wartime masculinities was worthless because I was not a man and had not myself served in the war. (My gender and age clearly trumped my nationality in this instance as my critic chose not to point out the fact that, like Fussell, I am an American.)

So I take comfort from Isherwood and Trout’s argument that ‘Fussell’s status as a cultural outsider … sharpened his insights … and emboldened him to say things that he might not have if he had been British…. [H]is distance from the war’s living memory enabled him to study the “troglodyte world” of the trenches and the mythology it produced with fresh eyes.’ [6]  Which is not to say that I necessarily take comfort from the text itself, which remains as challenging and provocative today in many ways as fifty years ago. For me today, the particular challenge of the autobiographical element is the most stimulating as I grapple with the ‘genealogical’ or ‘family history’ turn in social history, as exemplified by the work of Alison Light, Michael Roper and, most recently, Laura King. My family’s history doesn’t fit neatly with the history of the First World War, challenging cultural narratives of the war’s universality. But is this distance a handicap or a benefit? As I grapple with these questions as part of the process of writing my own book, The Great War and Modern Memory will continue to remain as much of an inspiration for my historical practice as it was when I first read it thirty years ago

[1] Ian Isherwood and Steven Trout, ‘But It Still Goes On: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory at 50’, The Journal of Military History, 89 (January 2025): 155-170 (160).

[2] Isherwood and Trout, ‘But It Still Goes On’, 158.

[3] Ibid., 160.

[4] Ibid., 160.

[5] Douglas Jerrold, The Lie About the War: A Note on Some Contemporary War Books (Faber & Faber, 1930); Cyril Falls, War Books: A Critical Guide (Peter Davies, Ltd, 1930)

[6] Isherwood and Trout, ‘But It Still Goes On’, 168

In which the saga concludes (sort of)

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Those of you who follow me on Twitter may remember a series of tweets attached to the hashtag #thesagacontinues.  These related to the writing of a paper on cultural representations of shell shock which I was struggling with.  One part of the problem was that I was extremely intimidated by the line-up of participants at the conference, Aftershock: Post-traumatic Cultures since the Great War, where I was presenting the paper, an extraordinary pantheon of academic specialists including Jay Winter, Mike Roper, Simon Wesselly, Sophie Delaporte and Fiona Reid, among many others.  Reading the participants list felt a bit like reading the bibliography of my PhD.

Well, the conference, held at the end of May, has been and gone and was much more enjoyable than my agonized tweeting might have predicted.  It was a pleasure to meet up again with colleagues such as Jay and Mike who I haven’t seen since my move to Leeds.  It was even more of a pleasure to make the acquaintance of others whose work I either have admired from afar or whose exciting research (into the trauma suffered by Second World War RAF ground crew or French films of shell shock, to give just two examples) I encountered for the first time.  The papers presented were, as might be expected, extremely stimulating.  Particularly exciting from my perspective were Sophie Delaporte’s discussion of psychological trauma in relation to Freud’s ideas about the encounter with death, which has forced me to completely rethink my own attitude to Freudian theory, and Mike Roper’s paper on his current project interviewing the children of First World War ex-servicemen on their experiences of childhood which looks to be yielding a wealth of original and fascinating information.  I also acted as commentator on a panel of papers well outside my own field of expertise, dealing with the interactions between civilians and soldiers of contemporary conflicts, which gave fascinating perspectives on the problems of that individuals have in making transitions between the identities of civilian, soldier and veteran.

There was also a great deal of networking (some over one of the tastiest conference dinners, in a unique restaurant in Christiania, that I have ever had), with the happy result that I was able to add three more speakers to the roster of the workshop I am running in October.

Oh, yes, and the paper went quite well in the end, with it even being described as ‘lovely’ by one person!  More usefully, I realised that the other problem I had had with writing it is that I was attempting to squeeze the subject matter for a book into the space of 20-minute paper.  At some point in the future I am going to need to write something substantial on representations of trauma in 20th century popular culture.  It is a subject I keep coming back to, time and again.  Some day I am going to have to research it much more fully and lay that particular ghost of my Phd. to rest.

So the saga has concluded successfully.  Well, almost.  Two months later and I am still waiting for my expenses claim to make its way through the new(ish) on-line system…

Commemorating War

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Unlike most weekends, which are spent ferrying the children to swimming lessons and singing classes while trying to catch up with the housework, I spent most of the past weekend at a fascinating workshop on commemorating war which brought together a number of military and naval historians to discuss ideas about the upcoming commemorations for 2014-18. (And lest you think my house is now a complete tip, my husband got on with the chores, so actually it looks somewhat cleaner than it normally does on a Monday.)

There was far too much discussed to cover in one post, so I will be coming back to what was discussed over a very intense day and a half, but one of the most interesting discussions resulted from Gary Sheffield’s talk on ‘Jay Winter and the Commemoration of the First World War.’ Following a brief survey of Jay’s work, Gary then looked at the legacy of his theories and the implications for 2014-18.

Now, a small disclaimer: Jay supervised my undergraduate thesis and my MPhil and was a huge influence on my decision to pursue an academic career. One of his influences on the study of the First World War has been a concerted effort to bring military and cultural historians of the war together in dialogue, an aim that I hope influences my work. Certainly I do strive to balance my love of social and cultural history with an awareness of the military details that shaped the trends I explore, which is why I am currently going so deeply into the history and organization of the RAMC at the moment. Gary’s main point, however, was that Jay’s idea of the memory boom helps to reemphasize victimhood as central to our understanding of the war, something that, he pointed out, has been picked up on in Cameron’s announcement of national plans for commemoration. The dates chosen are those of battles that are interpreted primarily as defeats, with no mention of the final campaign (the 100 days) which one the Allies the war, a fact which prompted a letter from the Western Front Association to the Independent. (Scroll down). In addition (a point I had not picked up on before), the school visits being funded are to soldiers’ graves, not battlefields which places the emphasis not merely on victimhood but sacrifice. Gary’s point was that children won’t actually be getting a sense of what the war was like by walking the landscape of battle but it also raises the point of whether those who survived the war are to be commemorated. Having worked extensively on the history of disability and the war, I am all too aware of how little is remembered and understood of those who returned to civil society, many wounded in body and mind, and who struggled to reintegrate. The majority succeeded, but not, I would hazard, without significant cost. Their stories are seldom told.

It was fascinating to hear a critique of the announced plans from the perspective of military history, and a reminder that military and cultural historians are often trying to tell a similar story, albeit from differing perspectives, and raise similar concerns about the way in which we remember and commemorate the war. The problems that we all, as historians, face in making these concerns public was the subject of an equally interesting presentation by the historian of the South African War, Professor Fransjohan Pretorius, who was involved with the commemorations in South Africa a decade ago. But that talk was itself rich enough that I think I had better return to it in another post.