THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

and dedication as an artist and critic. His best-remembered and most commonly revived plays, Time and the Conways
(1937), When We Are Married (1938), and the mystery An Inspector Calls (1947), show a mastery of the conventional
‘well-made’ form and a tolerant sporting with human folly. The two comedies in particular tend to reinforce the
virtues of common sense and stolidity rather than to challenge preconceptions as to the nature of society or the role of
the theatre.
R(obert) C(edric) Sherrifl's distinctly unreassuring dramatic account of life in the trenches of the First World War
in Journey’s End was translated from the Apollo Theatre (where it had been produced in December 1928 by the Stage
Society) to the Savoy in January 1929. It ran for 594 performances before transferring to yet another West End
theatre. Sherriff (1896-1975) never wrote anything more striking (though he had some later success in the theatre and
with screenplays for the film-director Alexander Korda). Journey’s End combines realism with the kind of restraint
which is expressive of far more than the stiff upper-lip heroics of idealized British officers. Its novelty lay in its stark
portrayal of male relationships strained by an uncomfortable intimacy with discomfort, psychological dissolution, and
death. It brought a frank representation of wastage and violence to the London theatre which served as effectively as
Wilfred Owen’s posthumously published poetry to stir unreconciled and unhappy emotions in ex-soldiers and to
exemplify the pity of war to those who had not been required to fight.
Retrospect and Historical Memory: Graves and Jones
The success of Jurney’s End on the London stage in 1929 coincided with the publication of the English translation of
Erich Maria Remarque’s powerful and phenomenally popular anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im
Westen nichts neues). Writing in The Criterion in 1930 the poet, critic, and ex-combatant Herbert Read (1893-1968)
argued that the human mind had ‘a faculty for dismissing the debris of its emotional conflicts’ and that only now,
after a significant hiatus, did veterans feel ready yfor the spiritual awakening and All Quiet was the touch that
released this particular mental spring’. As Read’s three poems (published together in 1933 as The End of a War)
themselves suggest, the 1930s were remarkable for a variety of delayed retrospects on the ‘Great’ War. These
retrospects were shaped as memoirs, as novels, as collections of verse, and as experimental interfusions of verse and
prose. As with the novels of Aldington and Ford and Siegfried Sassoon’s fictionalized autobiography, completed in
1936, Robert Graves (1895-1985) felt prompted to public confession and evaluation. In his highly coloured
autobiography, Goodbye to All That (1929, partly revised 1957), Graves describes a sense of alienation from post-war
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student life in Oxford which he shared with his friend and former fellow officer, the poet Edmund Blunden (1896-
1974). Everything in their delayed studies was ‘translated into trench-warfare terms’ and Graves was apt to find the
lectures he attended interrupted by ‘a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Bethune-La Bassee
road’. It was, however, through his Oxford acquaintance with one of the rare ‘heroic’ figures to emerge from the war,
T(homas) E(dward) Lawrence (1888-1935), that Graves may have begun to recognize the fictional potential of feeling
along an extended chain of connection between the present and the experience of the remoter past. The already
‘legendary’ Lawrence, deeply drawn to the continuities and raw grandeurs of Arab culture, was at work on his
romantic account of his desert campaigns which he published, for private circulation, as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
in 1926, and which was posthumously released to a highly receptive wider public in 1935.
By his own account, Graves had begun to write his own autobiography in 1916 in the form of a novel, though he
was obliged to ‘re-translate it into history’ for Goodbye to All That. The processes of translating and intermixing also
determined the nature of his string of popular first-person historical novels which began in 1934 with I, Claudius. His
choice of narrator was striking. Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, the future Emperor of the Romans and
the successful colonizer of Britain, may be cast as an idiosyncratic and decidedly unheroic autobiographer, but he
remains the central actor in the evolution of a large historical drama. Most historical fiction, from the time of Scott
onwards, had employed observant, passive, fictional protagonists who stood on the sidelines of history. Although his
attempts at valour are chiefly notable for their extreme discretion, birth and accident determine that the historical
Claudius must fulfil his recorded destiny as Emperor. His is essentially a sordid, upper-class family history rather than
an analysis of the growing pains of post-Republican Roman society, but it is animated with philosophical reflection
and with a series of highly entertaining grotesqueries (notably the portraits of the Empress Livia and of her protégé
Caligula). I, Claudius and its successor, Claudius the God, and his wife Messalina (also 1934), repackaged Roman
history for an age which had begun to witness the decline of classical studies but which, conversely, had seen the rise
of a new, imperially ambitious Italian autocrat, Benito Mussolini. None of Graves’s subsequent historical fictions had
quite the flair and modern relevance of his first.