REVIEW OF TOM FRENCH, THE LAST STRAW

This review first appeared in New Hibernia Review, Volume 22, Number 3 (Autumn 2018), 147-49.

A lyric poet by nature, Tom French concluded his fourth volume of poems, The Way to Work (Gallery Books, 2016), on an anomalous note—with a coda (his term) titled “1916” in which, provoked by the centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising, he reflects on “the gulf between the beautiful ideals read out to a handful / of rubberneckers and what has become of those ideals.” Notwithstanding the bit of international notice it gained for him in the form of an appearance on the radio program Open Source with Christopher Lydon, that poem is a pretty blunt reminder of a distinction once made by Robert Frost: “Poetry is about the grief, politics about the grievances.”

In The Last Straw (Gallery Books, 2018), French returns to his more natural pitch and register, characterized by an exactness of both word and phrase:

Everything that can be is disconnected.

        Our fire dies.  The starlings, nested

in the eaves, have settled.  We have cut

        the house adrift to sleep . . .

 He also returns to a form that he clearly feels at home in—the sonnet, mostly unrhymed and mostly deploying flexible lines that work variations on the conventional iambic pentameter pulse of that form.  Indeed, 50 of the 89 poems in The Last Straw are fourteen-liners, that formal structure (often three quatrains and a couplet but sometimes either two quatrains and two tercets or four tercets and a couplet) underscoring the rhetorical movement within any given poem.  The ending of “Tigh an Táilliúra, Carraroe” yields a typically pleasing example of French’s talent for “turning” a sonnet.  Describing in the two quatrains that open the poem how a customer in a pub suddenly “stands and dances to a jig on the radio,” French uses the final six lines to lead the reader to reflect, as he does himself, on the implications of what he witnessed:

That was thirty years ago.  I have seen

       men in the throes of dancing since,

but none like that man that morning,

who stays with me not because he was blind

       but because he did the only thing he could

when the tune came on.  He stood.  He danced.

That poem is one of a sequence, titled “After Hours,” set in pubs around Ireland.  The Last Straw includes four other sequences. In the seven poems comprising “Costa Blanca” the poet reflects both

gratefully and guiltily on the luxury of a family holiday in Spain during the current European immigrant crisis.  The fifteen poems that make up “Bank” afford a rich historical record of working a turf bank.  “Heywood” comprises seven poems recalling the poet’s education at the hands (at times literally) of the masters and the teachers at the Salesian College in Ballinakil, County Laois.  Focusing on the timepieces of two British soldiers during the Great War of 1914-18 (one of them the poet Edward Thomas), “Two Watches” engages with a subject and a theme that eventually emerge as central to the volume as a whole—in the famous words of British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen: “My subject is War, and the pity of War.  The Poetry is in the pity.”

In fact, some of French’s most compelling standalone poems appear to be inspired by the spirit of Irish soldier Francis Ledwidge that lives on in that star-crossed poet’s native County Meath, where French works as an Executive Librarian specializing in Local Studies. These include the truly wonderful blank-verse sonnet “Tattie Hokers,” which draws on the story of a battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders, a Canadian regiment, pausing on the march between Amiens and Albert in October of 1916 to help a French farmer pick potatoes: “They can’t resist / stacking rifles and throwing off backpacks // to postpone death . . .”  Imagining how “Mucking in here makes it peace time briefly,” French captures the pity of war indeed in his closing tercet:

The scent of potatoes brings back the bothy,

       straw mattresses arrayed on seed boxes,

the cow house swept out for men to lie down. 

 Another, “Unidentified Farriers, Western Front,” is obviously prompted by a photograph:

They have taken time out from the slaughter

       to enjoy the banter and be photographed

by a cameraman who steps from under

       a black cloth and carries their souls away.

In this decade of centennial commemorations in Ireland, French is a rarity among contemporary poets in his commitment to validating and valuing the upwards of 300,000 Irish-born soldiers, long marginalized by politics, time and history, who served in the British Expeditionary Force during the Great War.

One of French’s great strengths as a lyric poet is his capacity to find the makings of a poem in diverse, and sometimes obscure, corners.  These include his own personal experience as in a poem like “Kilcreene,” which records an intimate moment with an aging relative undergoing treatment at the Lourdes Orthopaedic Hospital in Kilkenny. Describing how he helped the old man undress and then watched him resign himself to bed, French writes:

                   I know now this is how a god lies down.

I kiss his stubbled cheek, his handsome face,

       and bear, in shopping bags, his clothes away.

Another is “Sisyphus in Cricklewood,” which tells of an Irish émigré to London who has worked “painting the one bridge for years”:

He’d been fresh off the boat when he began.

       An old hand showed him the ropes early on

and left him to it when he’d got the hang.

       Now he does it most days with his eyes closed.

Each new year he sets out for the far bank

       and, each new year, for the far bank again. 

Another is “Church of the Resurrection, Ballinfoyle,” an intriguingly respectful—even reverent—poem in essentially post-Catholic Ireland.  Inscribing “the priest and the sister above on the altar / who would pass for a couple of ancient lovers / passing the bread and wine to one another,” French grants them a grace and a dignity inflected with not even an iota of irony:

He loves her.  She knows where everything goes.

       Now they bow to the miracle of each other,

to the tabernacle which is their kitchen cupboard.

The recipient of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2001, the Dermot Healey Award in 2015, and the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in 2016, Tom French is a lyric poet of the first order. His poems are richly realized and a true pleasure to read.

FEAR ITSELF: GABRIEL CHEVALLIER, PATRICK MacGILL, AND THE GREAT WAR

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 26, Number 1 (January 2015), 13.

Just in time for the centenary of the Great War of 1914-18 (World War I), the publication in English of Gabriel Chevallier’s novel Le Peur (1930) is drawing deserved attention.  Translated by Malcolm Imrie as Fear and available in the handsome New York Review of Books Classics series, the novel is clearly infused with Chevallier’s personal experience as an infantryman in the French Army during the Great War.  Presenting the life of a soldier through extended passages inscribing equally the physical and the psychological trauma not just of combat but also of waiting for combat, it is a novel of unblinking witness.

Unlike Chevallier himself, who was “called up” to service, his protagonist, Jean Dartemont, enlisted in the army “against all my convictions, but still of my own free will—not to fight but out of curiosity: to see.”  Dartemont is an educated young man, an intellectual for whom war is initially a phenomenon to study.  About a third of the way through the novel, however, after he has been hospitalized with shrapnel wounds, his capacity to contemplate the nature of and the implications of his experience in the trenches, the dugouts, and the battlefields leads to a public admission that is also a pivot point for the “meaning” of the overall narrative.  At the hospital, he is provoked by the nurses who insistently ask him what he did at the front line: “I marched day and night without knowing where I was going.  I did exercises, I had inspections, I dug trenches, I carried barbed wire, I carried sandbags, did look-out duty. . . .”  When prodded by the nurses to elaborate, he clarifies: “Yes, that’s all . . .  Or rather, no, that’s nothing.  Would you like to know the chief occupation of war, the only one that matters: I WAS AFRAID.” 

For the willfully self-deluding nurses, Dartemont speaks utter blasphemy, but the patent truthfulness of his admission colors the rest of the novel after he returns to combat duty.  Eventually, he realizes that the only way to conquer his own cowardice is to expose himself wantonly to the inevitability of dying in this transparently futile war.

Reading Chevallier’s novel recently, I inevitably thought of an earlier novel of the Great War by Donegal-born man-of-letters Patrick MacGill (who happens to be buried in Fall River, Massachusetts).  MacGill’s most enduring contribution to the literature of the Great War may well be his three autobiographical narratives—The Amateur Army (1915), The Red Horizon (1916), and The Great Push (1916)—written in the very midst of his experience as a Rifleman (that is, a Private) in the London Irish Rifles regiment.  But he also published two Great War-centered novels—The Brown Brethren (1917) and Fear! (1920)—after his military service ended when he was wounded in the Battle of Loos in September of 1915.

Unlike most of MacGill’s fiction, Fear! is not an “Irish” novel per se: the narrator-protagonist is Henry Ryder, a barber from a nondescript English village who is conscripted into an unnamed regiment of the British Expeditionary Force and shipped out to France as the War continues to decimate the population of able-bodied Englishmen.  While the novel obviously borrows from MacGill’s own experience on the Western Front, it is really much more generic than specific in its detailed descriptions of night raids and marches, trenches and dugouts and billets, coarse camaraderie and lonely despair.

As historian David Taylor rightly recognizes in Memory, Narrative and the Great War (2013), MacGill’s autobiographical trilogy traces an arc of “disillusionment” with war.  This arc continues through Fear! and the frontispiece to the novel includes a note headed “What This Story is About”: “Patrick MacGill has been able to write about war as war actually is. . . . [T]he realism of ‘Fear’ will bring home to all the conviction that such things must never be allowed to happen again.”  While MacGill depicts many aspects of war in the novel, the exclamatory title foretells that its central subject will involve his extended revisiting of a motif he had introduced in the opening chapter of The Red Horizon, set on the ship transporting him and his fellow London Irish Rifles across the English channel early in 1915: “What will it be like, but above all, how shall I conduct myself in the trenches?  Maybe I shall be afraid—cowardly.  But no!”  This question becomes an obsession for Private Henry Ryder.

As a novel, Fear! contains a lot of filler.  Chapters and long passages detailing basic training at Salisbury Plain, sketching the various “characters” who populate the rank and file of Ryder’s company and section, dramatizing life behind the lines in estaminets and billets, and inscribing the abrupt shift from enervating tedium to frenetic action read more like vignettes than as contributing elements to a distilled storyline.  What emerges from the baggy plot, however, is a compelling meditation—Henry Ryder’s, but really Patrick MacGill’s—on fear.

Not surprisingly, MacGill’s Ryder experiences an “epiphany” strikingly similar to that of Chevallier’s Dartemont regarding the short odds of dying in combat.  But Ryder’s perspective is complicated by a story told by one of his seasoned section mates of the execution by firing squad of a deserter: “I felt as if I were the guilty man myself, that I was guilty of the failing for which L___ died.”  For all of their similarities—and there are many, underscoring the universality of the experience of the Great War not just for British and French soldiers but, implicitly, for those on the other side of the barbed wire divide as well, the Germans—MacGill’s and Chevallier’s novels diverge on the basis of this incident, resulting in very different narrative resolutions.

Chevallier’s Dartemont actually survives his wanton rush to combat and he survives the War altogether, which allows him by way of his memoiresque narrative to bear unvarnished witness to the brutal reality of war.  The final chapter of Henry Ryder’s story is “Written by Another Hand”—a coda-like conclusion by which MacGill allows the reader to infer Ryder’s fate after, as he puts it matter-of-factly, “I have run away from the battle.”  Earlier, Ryder had parsed fear into three categories.  The first is “jelly fear,” which “slackens the guts, numbs the brain and takes the stuffing from the spine.”  The second is “reckless fear”: “What the devil does it matter now?  You don’t care!  You stop at nothing!  Forward! and let me get at them!  Six inches cold steel, six feet cold clay!  Bullets fly, shells burst!  Let them!”  The third category is “calculating fear”: “you are quite calm, a normal being, weighing the pros and cons of the occasion.  Able to fit your movements to your mood, you advance, consider, take cover, study your environment and obey orders.  But this moment is not lasting.”  Clearly, Ryder has succumbed to that first fear in the manner foreshadowed by his section mate’s story of the executed deserter.

Yet, finding himself in the ruins of an old church, Ryder looks to a damaged crucifix for guidance to resolve his dilemma.  Left at a loss—Christ at least had a mission “to die for the sins of men”—he arrives at a simple understanding of how his cowardice relates to the overall devaluing of life and humanity that, as an increasingly transparent “war of attrition,” the Great War clearly amounted to: “It matters not—nothing matters.  I’ll die, anyway.  Who fires the bullet doesn’t matter.  I’m going back to the firing line. . . .  I’m going back.”

Ultimately, that devaluing—or its implied opposite, a revaluing of life and humanity—is at the heart of both Patrick MacGill’s Fear! and Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear: “such things must never be allowed to happen again,” indeed.  In the midst of reading these two relentlessly bleak novels, I happened also to pick up The Missing of the Somme (1994), a meditation on remembrance by Geoff Dyer.  He too engages with the issues of fear and cowardice, musing that “Perhaps the real heroes of 1914-18 . . . are those who refused to obey and to fight, who actively rejected the passivity forced upon them by the war, who reasserted their right not to suffer, not to have things done to them.”  He then goes on to describe how the family of one Private A. Ingham of the Manchester Regiment, who died on 1^st December 1916, had believed for years that he had simply “died of wounds.”  But when his father was finally informed that he had been executed for desertion or cowardice, he insisted on this inscription being added to the military headstone marking his grave in the French village of Bailleulmont:

SHOT AT DAWN

ONE OF THE FIRST TO ENLIST

A WORTHY SON

OF HIS FATHER

I believe that both MacGill and Chevallier would salute that gesture.

A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY . . . OR TO SLANE

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 25, Number 2 (February 2014), 13.

For the past few weeks, I have been thumbing back and forth through a massive hot-off-the-press coffee table book, The Great War: a Photographic Narrative.  A project of Great Britain’s Imperial War Museums, the book offers a starkly candid photographic record of the horrific reality of life in the various “theatres” that constituted World War I: the trenches and the battlefields of the Western Front, of course, but also the beaches and the slopes of Gallipoli, the Zeppelin-bombed streets of England, the deserts of the Middle East, and the high seas.  For the most part, this gathering of images is not for the faint of heart.

Obviously, the publication of this book anticipates the centenary of The Great War—1914-1918.  It thus holds intrinsic interest for anyone invested in Irish matters: more than 200,000 Irishmen enlisted in the British forces and more than 30,000 died in combat.  No doubt the next four years will see this under-written chapter of Irish history given its long overdue attention—and appropriate commemoration—by scholars, by the Irish government, and by the general public.

I must admit that I have a personal investment in all of this: my Irish-born paternal grandfather enlisted in the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment in September of 1914 and served in France and Belgium from July of 1915 until the end of the war in November of 1918.  After he was demobbed in 1919, he relocated to New York City where he married his Irish sweetheart, who had emigrated before the War.  An Irishman to the core, for the rest of his life he remained proud of his British military service and of the decorations he earned—a Victory Medal and a British War Medal, each recognizing general service during the Great War, and a 1914/1915 Star recognizing specifically his service in France in 1915.

As a private in the 12^th (Service) Battalion of the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment, my grandfather was involved in many of the major engagements on the Western Front: both Battles of the Somme (1916 and 1918), the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) in 1917, and the Final Advance in Picardy in 1918.  Each of these is represented in The Great War: a Photographic Narrative.

But of all the photos in the book, one in particular caught my eye immediately—and continues to hold my focus—as an indelible “emblem” not just of my grandfather’s experience but more broadly of “the Irish experience” on the Western Front.  The photo, taken in Flanders, appears on page 373 of the book.  Snapped by Lieutenant John Warwick Brooke, an official British Army photographer, it is captioned matter-of-factly: “Stretcher-bearers of the Field Ambulance Corps carry a wounded man through deep mud, near Boesinghe, Ypres Salient, Belgium, 1 August 1917.”  The day that photo was taken, my grandfather’s battalion was in the immediate vicinity, on march from a training camp about 10 miles away in Proven to bivouacs in Elverdinghe, about a mile short of Boesinghe, en route to what would be known as the Battle of Langemarck in mid-August.

I visited Boesinghe (now spelled Boezinge) and environs last year and was immediately struck by the distinctive character of the landscape there: just as the photo records, it is unrelentingly flat, stretching out as far as the eye can see, punctuated only occasionally by small clusters of farm buildings.  Standing in the midst of that vast expanse almost a century after my grandfather, I tried to imagine how he “experienced” it.  Born in Borrisokane, Co. Tipperary, he grew up in Clara, Co. Offaly: thus, like the large majority of Irishmen of rural, village, or small-town stock who served in the British Army, he would have been accustomed to a much more textured and contoured landscape—white-washed thatch-roofed cottages in rolling fields enclosed by tumble-down stone walls, twisty roads and lanes overarched by rich leafage, meandering rivers and brooks, perhaps furzy mountains rising in the distance.  The description of Flanders proffered by historian John Keegan in his book The First World War underscores the contrast: “There is one of the dreariest landscapes in Western Europe, a sodden plain of wide, unfenced fields, pasture and plough intermixed, overlying a water table that floods on excavation more than a few spadefuls deep.  There are patches of woodland scattered between the villages and isolated farmsteads and a few points of high ground that loom in the distance behind the ancient walled city of Ypres.  The pervading impression, however, is of long unimpeded fields of view, too mournful to be called vistas, interrupted only by the occasional church steeple and leading in all directions to distant, hazy horizons which promise nothing but the region’s copious and frequent rainfall.”  Obviously, the emptiness my grandfather saw all around him in Flanders would have felt truly foreign and utterly disorienting.

It would have felt utterly hostile as well.  As Mark Holborn observes in his Editorial Note to The Great War: a Photographic Narrative, the heavy bombardment of the countryside by both German and Allied artillery, a distinguishing feature of the War itself, altered the already spare landscape: “Landmarks were eradicated and trees vanished.”  In the summer of 1917, nature too conspired to make the area even more inhospitable, as weeks of rain combined with the high water table to create the absolute quagmire captured in the photograph—some of the stretcher-bearers are up to their knees in mud.  According to some accounts, thousands of soldiers actually drowned in the mud of Flanders, which in places was ten feet deep.  For my grandfather and his fellow displaced Irishmen serving on the Western Front, trudging toward battle through those unspeakably miserable fields of Flanders would have given very literal meaning to that popular marching song of the day, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary . . .”

But there is no need to take just my word on that.  While my grandfather left behind no written account of his time on the Western Front and while the stories he told my father and his siblings have become blurry over time, the sensation of alienation—and of homesickness—that I imagined for him as I stood there in Boezinge last year has been registered by others, including celebrated poet Francis Ledwidge.  Born in 1887, Ledwidge grew up and was educated in Janesville, an area on the outskirts of Slane, Co. Meath.  (His boyhood cottage is now a museum honoring his memory.)  In 1914, he enlisted in the 5^th Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and saw action as a Lance Corporal first at the Dardanelles in 1915 and then in Serbia (where he injured his back).  In December of 1916, he returned to active duty, this time in the border area of France and Belgium with the 1^st Battalion of the Royal Inniskillings.

A prolific poet since his mid-teens, the 29-year-old soldier continued to send verses home to his literary patron, Lord Dunsany, who oversaw their publication in book form both during Ledwidge’s lifetime and after his death.  Written on February 3^rd, 1917, shortly after he arrived at the Western Front, “In France” typifies how Ledwidge’s poems emphasize the bucolic and the romantic, keeping at literary arm’s length the horrific realities of battlefields and trench warfare:

The silence of maternal hills

Is round me in my evening dreams;

And round me music-making bills

And mingling waves of pastoral streams.

Whatever way I turn I find

The path is old unto me still.

The hills of home are in my mind,

And there I wander as I will.

Clearly, the memory of those hills around Slane afforded Ledwidge consolation in the midst of the alien landscape and the lethal environment of the Western Front.  In fact, in “Spring,” a poem dated March 8^th, 1917, he allows a flight of imagination to transport him back to Meath—to a rural landscape noisy with larks and magpies and wood-doves and kingfishers and bursting with primroses and daffodils and water-lilies and daises—until the final two lines bring him back to the here and the now of the War: “And peace wraps all those hills of mine / Safe in dearest memory.”

But the poem of Ledwidge’s that speaks most poignantly to me as I picture my grandfather passing through Boesinghe in early August of 1917 is titled simply “Home.”  Like “Spring,” it catalogues pastoral life in Ireland, but in this case the memories of home are awakened by the singing of a bird in war-ravaged Belgium:

This is a song a robin sang

This morning on a broken tree,

It was about the little fields

That call across the world to me.

Written in July of 1917, “Home” was one of Francis Ledwidge’s last poems.  The poet was killed at Carrefour Rose, a crossroads in Boesinghe, in a German shrapnel attack on July 31^st, 1917, the day before Lieutenant Brooke took that memorable photograph of the stretcher-bearers in that same forbidding countryside.  A memorial to Ledwidge stands at the very spot where he was killed.  He is buried a quarter mile away in Artillery Wood Cemetery.  I visited both of those sites last year and paid my respects to the poet.  I remembered my grandfather too.