THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

stanza ambivalently struggles to suggest an answer:
The plains were their cricket pitch
and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences
brought down some of the runners. Here then
under the stones and earth they dispose themselves,
I think with their famous unconcern.
It is not gunfire I hear but a hunting horn.
The aristocratic dead ‘dispose themselves’ as elegantly as the heroes of romance, seeming to die according to the
dictates of form and good manners. Yet the horn that finally drowns the guns might be as much Roland’s Olivant as it
is that of a hunting squire.
Alun Lewis (1915-44), born and educated in Wales, rarely poses in his poetry as a specifically Welsh poet-at-war
(the peacetime lyrics ‘The Mountain over Aberdare’ and ‘The Rhondda’, and the wartime ‘Destruction’ and ‘A Welsh
Night’ are exceptional). Of all the distinctive soldier writers of the Second World War, Lewis is the most assertively
civilian. Despite its military title, his often reprinted first volume, Raiders’ Dawn (1942), pays tribute to another
unwilling soldier, Edward Thomas, and to the English landscapes most associated with him. The much anthologized
‘All Day It Has Rained ...’ evokes the tedium of life in an encampment in ‘the skirmishing fine rain | And the wind
that made the canvas heave and flap’. It ends with a sweet-sour inconsequent-consequential recall:
[p. 576]
And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard’s merry play,
Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
To Shoulder o’ Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
On death and beauty — till a bullet stopped his song.
Lewis’s own brooding was prophetic. His second volume of poems, Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets, was published
posthumously in 1945 (he was killed accidentally in Burma ‘by a pistol shot’). Although the volume’s striking title
derives from the description of a war-horse in the thirty-ninth chapter of the Book of Job, there is little of the warhorse’s
exhilaration (‘he paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men’) in
the poems themselves. Lewis arranged his volume (subtitled ‘poems in transit’) in three parts: the first variously
describing a tense, waiting England, the second the voyage to the East, the third India. It is in the third section that
his particular interest in landscape is revealed as he uncomfortably comes to terms with the alien contours, the harsh
light, and the dry wastes of India (in, for example, ‘The Mahratta Ghats’, ‘Indian Day’, and ‘Observation Post:
Forward Area’). ‘I’m as restless and fidgety as a man on a deserted platform ... India! What a test of a man’, he wrote
in one of his last letters home. His best poems marvellously suggest this reluctant, deracinated, restlessness.
Faced with the demand that writers ‘speak up in freedom’s cause’, C. Day-Lewis asked himself ‘Where are the
War Poets?’ In a resultant poem he arrived at the compromised conclusion that the best that an artist could do in the
Second World War was to ‘defend the bad against the worst’. Day-Lewis, like many others, may have been troubled
by the uneasy compromises of those German artists who had accepted, but not necessarily endorsed, the National
Socialist regime. The question of a British artist’s response to the Second World War, and to the concomitant threat
of a dissolution of inherited cultural values, was frequently raised in the years 1939-45 and the idea of a co-operative
struggle which united all classes against an external enemy was actively exploited by Government propaganda. Few
established artists, even the famously ‘detached’ ones, remained untouched by the mood of embattled Britain. ‘Now
and in England’ seemed like a historical imperative. Creativity both embraced and countered the evidence of
destruction.
In one of the most strikingly aflirmative and original novels of the war-years, Joyce Carey’s The Horse’s Mouth
(1944), an artist-hero paints a mural of the Creation on a threatened wall. Carey (1888-1957) allows the last word to
his ageing, unconventional, unsentimental, Blake-obsessed painter-narrator, Gulley Jimson. Jimson has painted the
wall in a state of indifference to its prospective demolition, to rumours of war, and to the approach of his own death.
On his death-bed he both thanks God for ‘that indefinable something’ which is, for him, ‘the final beauty of a wall’,
and he equates prayer with a full and lusty enjoyment of life. His picture, a wry footnote to the novel explains, proved
to be as impermanent as his wall. For Carey and his hero, however, the very act of making was in itself a gesture