Hewison's Under Siege

Robert Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939-45. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977.

One lesson World War I teaches us is that fervent nationalism and bitter disillusionment alike can generate notable literature. Equally, a lesson from World War II is that the wearying performance of a sour duty cannot.

Under Siege can tell of no Rupert Brooke, eager to leap into the front line as though into a bath of clean, cold water. No Wilfred Owen comes forward to press his heresy of ‘the same old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est/Pro patria mori’ on the complacent civilians at home. Both responses would have appeared thoroughly out of place to the soldier writers of 1939-45 who saw death in battle not as sheer butchery imposed by incompetent politicians and generals but as one of the unpleasantly necessary consequences of stopping Hitler. There were few ideological differences of the kind common in 1914, and many writers voluntarily harnessed themselves to the propaganda machine. As war began, the prevailing mood was in any case one of numbed pessimism, with gurus like H.G. Wells predicting global catastrophe and the immediate onset of a new Dark Ages. All these things sapped creative energy.

Hewison’s book documents such facts in detail and helps to prove that when cultural conditions are inauspicious even a vigorous literary circle can leave behind it a very small residuum of literature. Many a page of works cited, even those by familiar authors, can pass without producing a jolt of recognition in the reader. Hewison does his best with this unpromising material. He makes the rather desperate claim for the 40-odd published versifiers killed in action that ‘these were war poets whatever their achievement’. Well, yes. It remains cruelly true that few, probably none of them, would in peacetime have survived critical attention. Henry Reid’s ‘Naming of Parts’ is the most famous poem of the war years. Reid survived, but who has heard of him otherwise or can recall a single other work by him?

Under Siege is a rather uneasy blend of literary criticism and history. Statistics about paper production jostle with potted assessments of major works like Four Quartets which have only their dates of composition to relate them to the war. Hewison is most effective as a social historian in his account of London’s blacked-out Bohemian life. However, the concentration on London sometimes produces a curious effect, as when he asserts recklessly that ‘everyone’ started to read War and Peace: the capital sounds like a cosy R&R base with the killing and dying somewhere well over the horizon.

One puts down Under Siege with the impression that literature owes World War II a considerable but indirect debt. Totalitarianism was halted: the creative mind which, as Orwell said, is a beast that won’t breed in captivity, was for the moment protected. Prolonged rumination on the experience of total war at length yielded results like Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. But there is nothing in this book to shift us away from the common view that the immediate harvest was small. It was a bad time for writers.