Marina MacKay: Ann-Marie Einhaus, The Short Story and the First World War

Summary

Set in the late 1920s when there was a major surge of Great War books, Patrick Hamilton's Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1952) has as its protagonist an impostor masquerading as a 1914 war hero. Among his fellow frauds is a hapless Major who has seen no active service and yet specialises in the poetry of remembrance:

Mention of Passchendaele, he felt, would be most inspiring … It furnished almost as many rhymes as ‘[Flanders] Field’. There was ‘fail’ (‘Shall we then …?’). There was ‘bewail’ (‘Who shall …?’). There was ‘gale’ (‘Midst War's great …). And ‘pale’, and ‘dale’, and ‘veil’, and ‘hail’, and ‘quail’, and ‘flail’, and ‘nightingale’, and ‘grail’ (holy, naturally), and ‘vale’, and innumerable smashing ones.

Great War poetry has turned into a compendium of floridly archaic clichés.

In view of the lasting dominance of trench poetry as the authentic voice of the First World War, it is refreshing to turn to Einhaus's recovery of perhaps the least known of literary forms through which contemporary readers understood their war experience. Einhaus shows that the topical short story was a tremendously popular medium in wartime, notwithstanding its near-total invisibility in our literary memory of the war. As evidence of its marginal status she cites the memorably perverse tendency of anthologies with some version of the phrase ‘war stories’ in their title to incorporate virtually no short stories whatsoever; meanwhile, hundreds of actual war stories languish in back issues of the defunct magazines in which they briefly flourished. The side-lining of the popular Great War story is exacerbated, Einhaus argues, by our critical tendency to return to the same examples, such as stories by canonical modernists like D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield.