William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

1979

These three novels deal respectively with the three greatest wars of this century and they each represent different — and ultimately unsuccessful — methods of tackling the awkward problem of war in fiction. War, thanks to television, is now familiar to us all. Not only have there been long and immensely popular documentary serials about the First and Second World Wars, but the slightest border raid or counter-insurgency operation is filmed and recorded by dozens of camera crews and reporters. The magazine shelves of any W. H. Smith testify to the popularity of war and its paraphernalia of equipment and hardware. It seems to be one of those subjects that we just can’t know enough about.

But curiously enough this plethora of documentary material, this mountain of close detail, seems scarcely to have affected the fictional presentation of war whether in novels, film or TV. There exists a wide gulf between what we can see for ourselves as the brute facts and the imaginative presentation of them. Admittedly the gap has narrowed in recent years as can be seen from the contrast between R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, but it remains, nevertheless, resolutely there.

The first point of contention, and one that raises significant doubts about serious war novels, is this. Any one man’s experience of war or battle — unlike, for example, tennis or bridge — has to be an exclusively subjective, quirky and highly personal affair. It will be a compound of his own intricate personality and the infinite variety of occurrences a war or battle provides. And yet one’s reading of any account suggests that the experience is instead fundamentally a common one; a moderately varied but essentially repetitive parade of stock attitudes and conclusions. Furthermore, the basic judgement of nearly all war novels runs along these sort of lines: “War is hell/shocking/depraved/inhuman but it provides intense and compensatory moments of comradeship/joy/vivacity/emotion or excitement.” What appears most damaging is not so much the fatuity of the idea but that this formula represents an orthodoxy in the fictional treatment of war that — with a few exceptions — is only paralleled in the pulpier forms of modern romance writing. This may be taken as unduly harsh, but it seems that writers of serious war fiction still consciously or unconsciously echo this position to such an extent that it is not only an inaccurate picture but can give rise to questions of irresponsibility.

The two basic errors behind this attitude are (1) a failure to come to terms with or to understand the true nature of battle (a fault shared with military historians) and (2) a tendency to qualify and to some extent condone warfare through the ennobling effects its “heightened awareness” imposes on the combatants. The first can possibly be explained by lack of experience or information but the second is an evaluative judgement that is so widespread that it has moved from the world of fiction to infect the more factual documentary or historical account and which has, not unnaturally, almost entirely influenced film or TV dramatizations.

Timothy Findley’s The Wars is a good example of the first problem. It tells the story of a young Canadian officer’s experiences of the First World War and his ultimate nervous collapse. The narrative moves forward and backward in time; we share the reflections of the archivist/author as he sifts through the family papers, we hear reminiscences of the long dead hero, extracts from a child’s diary and so on, gradually building up a composite picture of the young soldier. It’s sensitively and carefully done, but the setting of the war appears almost as a gratuitous extra, a vaguely glamorous and emotive background to the torments of the young man. World War I seems especially prone to this sort of treatment — for example, Susan Hill’s Strange Meeting and Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles from Babylon? — where the residual nostalgia of the period is all important rather than the war itself. Often the setting appears as a hindrance, something to be got out of the way as quickly as possible. For example, here Findley talks about a German-held ridge at Passchendaele:

The casualties were terrible, rising in numbers by the hundreds by the day. It seemed to be an impossible objective and it was here that many of the troops surrendered to the Germans rather than press on with the hopeless attack.

This reads like a second-rate official history: the words are so overworked and familiar that they have become virtually devoid of meaning. This is not entirely Findley’s fault; he has merely aligned himself with the conformity of style that continues to surround most descriptions of violent action. For, despite Hemingway’s revolution, the description of action by otherwise creditable writers remains in a lamentable state. And although Hemingway must be held responsible for much of the wrong-headedness that surrounds war fiction he was the first to sense the real inadequacy of writing about action and sought to change it. He succeeded nowhere more brilliantly than in the short linking sections between the stories in In Our Time. They still stand as a model of what can be achieved and Hemingway never quite recaptured their refined and precise tone. It was certainly absent from For Whom the Bell Tolls where Hemingway’s interests revolved more around notions of heroism, bravery and duty, and the exact and scrupulous recording of experience had given way to the perverse idea of “grace under pressure.”

This pervasive myth, and related versions of it, has probably replaced patriotism as the best reason for going to war, as can clearly be seen from any modern army recruiting campaign. It is possibly more prevalent in American fiction (where war is a favourite subject), prompted initially by Hemingway’s virility cult and reaching its flamboyant peak in Norman Mailer’s Why Are We In Vietnam? The existence of this attitude helps explain both the tragedy of My-Lai (and its innumerable unremarked siblings) and the farce of Lt. Calley’s trial. For Calley and his men the war was totally unlike anything they had been prepared for; and for the USA their soldiers just didn’t commit that sort of crime. Both sides had been deluded as to the reality of warfare. Significantly, only in Vietnam has this sensation of utter bafflement and disillusion on the part of the fighting soldier been adequately recorded though it is a common, if not the common experience of every conflict, shared by the French knights at Agincourt, the British at the Somme and the Marines at Da Nang. Confusion and mental disintegration are inevitable when one’s expectations of warfare have been conditioned — at the simplest level — by such things as Marvel Comic’s “Our Army at War” series, where the legendary Sgt. Rock of Easy company fights the good fight with an ascetic and almost saintly purpose. But the mood and tone are equally evident in more sophisticated writings from The Red Badge of Courage to the recent and wildly over-acclaimed Dispatches.

Nobody could be more sincere about war than Herman Wouk as his mighty 1,000-page opus War and Remembrance makes clear. It is part of a subgenre of war novels that begins with The Naked and the Dead and includes Jones’s From Here to Eternity and Shaw’s The Young Lions. The huge all-encompassing canvas, the cast of thousands, the flitting from continent to continent, the way lives interlock and events conspire together ultimately fail in the presentation of truth precisely because the novelist’s necessarily considerable organizational role looms above the fiction like a player at a chess board. And curiously it is also in the nature of these books to have very little action in them; we become more interested in the characters — will John marry Jane next leave, will Fred get promoted, etc. — than in their circumstances. Wouk goes one step beyond this too, acting as military historian, strategist and providing a layman’s guide to the Final Solution and the making of the Atomic Bomb, until the book sags under the weight of its good intentions.