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sponds, that is, to his poems' harsh, disabused vision of the war and,
technically, to their subtle, decisive use of half-rhymes which helped
effectively to dispose of the chiming sweetness of much Georgian
verse. It was this second force which impelled him to return to
France not as "an officer and a gentleman" but as a writer. The
letter is, after all, about his coming-of-age as a poet, and it was
in
the context of this newly matured power that he made
his
decision
to return to the front.
It
seems, literally, to have been a decision:
he had already seen a great deal of active service and, as a result,
had been hospitalized with shellshock. Moreover, his poetry had
brought him powerful friends, one of whom, Proust's translator Scott
Moncrieff, worked
in
the War Office and had been using
his
in–
fluence to get Owen a safe posting in England. It may, then, have
taken as much effort and organization to return to the fighting as to
stay away. What drew him back, I think, had nothing to do with
heroism and everything to do with poetry. The new powers he felt
in
himself seem to have been inextricably linked with the strange, un–
precedented vision he had had in France:
But chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all the faces in
that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see
in England, though wars should be in England; nor can it be seen
in any battle. But only in Etaples.
It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for
it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit's.
It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize h. And to
describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.
That numbness - beyond hope, despair, terror and, certainly, beyond
heroics - is, I think, the final quantum to which all the modish
forms of twentieth-century alienation are reduced. Under the energy,
appetite and constant diversity of the modem arts is this obdurate
core of blankness and insentience which no amount of creative op–
timism and effort can wholly break down or remove. It
is
like, for
a believer, the final, unbudgeable illumination that God is not good.
A psychiatrist has defined it, in more contemporary terms, as that
"psychic numbing" which occurs in an overwhelming encounter with
death? That is, when death is everywhere and on such a vast scale
1.
Robert
Jay
Lifton.
Deafh in Life: The Survivors of Hiroshima.
