1918: Some Books From A Century Ago

1918.

On November 11 of this year the First World War finally came to an end. Millions had died in the conflict that began in August of 1914, and large sections of France and Belgium were nothing but wasteland after years of battle. But the end of the conflict was welcome news across the globe.  Bells rang and crowds surged into the streets. New York City was littered with 150 tons of paper and ticker tape after the festivities ended.

The U.S. didn’t enter World War I until April 1917, but in a little over a year and a half the country had sent 2,084,000 men and women overseas. Deaths in battle totaled 53,513, but like the Civil War, more died of illness and other causes—63, 195 non-combat deaths in total. The number of wounded was 204,002.

The euphoria of victory was accompanied by the tragedy of the flu pandemic of 1918 in which millions around the world, many of them young people, succumbed to the illness, usually in a short period of time. The flu appeared in America in January of 1918. By September of 1918 the second wave of the flu had appeared in New York City, Boston and Philadelphia and spread through forty-six states. Flu deaths far outnumbered battlefield losses in World War I. Nearly half a million people in the United States died from the flu.

A new political order was taking shape across Europe with the war’s end and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The first revolution in Russia occurred in February 1917, toppling the Czar’s government and resulting in the establishment of a provisional government, later to be overthrown by Communist revolutionaries in October 1917. In 1918 the Bolsheviks executed Czar Nicholas and his family and fought a civil war with the anti-Communist White Russians. Germany was also wracked with upheaval in this last year of the war. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated two days before the Armistice and a German Republic was proclaimed.

The United States, which had made some tentative steps towards being an international player after the Spanish-American War of 1898, found itself in a leadership role on the world stage with the war’s conclusion. In January of 1918 President Woodrow Wilson presented in a speech to Congress fourteen points he thought necessary for the war effort and peace terms in Europe, a list that was published and distributed throughout Europe.

1918 turned out to be a rough year for Eugene Debs, the famed union leader from Terre Haute, Indiana who has become a fixture here at Buckeyemuse. Debs, who had previously run four times as Socialist candidate for President, gave a speech at Nimisilla Park in Canton, Ohio in June of 1918 that the government ultimately interpreted as being in violation of the Espionage Act. This action against Debs by Wilson’s administration was controversial then and remains so today, as critics have charged that Debs was essentially just a citizen speaking his mind on issues important to him and those assembled. A number of federal officials were also initially reluctant to pursue Debs, but a U.S. attorney for northern Ohio named E. S. Wertz pushed for pursuit of the Midwestern labor leader.

Debs criticized a number of government policies in his address, including those on child labor. But he did not encourage resistance to the draft. His one statement on the war was the following: “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.”

Debs was indicted June 29, 1918 on ten counts of violating the Espionage Act  and arrested the following day. He was convicted on two of the charges at his trial that September and sentenced to ten years of prison. On April 13, 1919 he was sent to prison, where he stayed until his sentence was commuted by President Warren Harding on December 23, 1921. Debs was released from prison on Christmas Day.

One of England’s most gifted poets died in combat in early November of 1918. The brilliant Wilfred Owen was killed by machine gun fire in France as he led his men in an action along the Sambre-Oise Canal. The poet died on November 4, just one week before the Armistice. He left behind some of the most powerful and moving poetry of the First World War.

America also lost a poet during combat in this last year of the war. Joyce Kilmer, best known for his beloved and often parodied-poem “Trees” was killed in July of 1918. Kilmer had made a name for himself as poet, journalist, and editor prior to entering the war. He enlisted in the New York National Guard and was eventually assigned to the legendary 69th Infantry Regiment. He requested more hazardous duty and was leading a patrol when he was hit by a sniper’s bullet on July 30, 1918. He left behind a wife and four children.

For two of America’s future famous writers, love was in the air in 1918. Ernest Hemingway, who suffered serious wounds in July during a trench mortar attack in the Italian theater, fell in love with the American nurse Agnes von Kurowsky as he recovered from his wounds.

Their love affair lasted from the summer through the fall of 1918. She eventually rejected Hemingway, who was some years her junior, but the short-lived affair inspired the doomed romance of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in his famous novel of 1929, A Farewell To Arms.

Hemingway’s future friend F. Scott Fitzgerald met the woman he would eventually marry and who became part of a shared legend with her husband: Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama.

Fitzgerald met Zelda on September 7, 1918 in Montgomery when he was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Alabama. Fitzgerald was a lieutenant in the 9th Infantry Division at the time.

Incidentally, Camp Sheridan played an important role in the history of the 37th Infantry Division, also known as the Buckeye Division, which consisted of Ohio National Guard members. Men from the Buckeye Division trained at Camp Sheridan in 1917 before deployment to Europe.

The distinguished historian Henry Adams died in 1918, the same year his  famous work The Education of Henry Adams appeared. This book, which he had first privately printed in 1907, is an intellectual autobiography of one of America’s most esteemed historians and teachers who was the grandson of American presidents and the son of a prominent American diplomat. The book is especially notable for his attempt to understand the changes that had swept American life since his youth.

A number of important works of American literature concerning life in the Midwest appeared in 1918. The most prominent of these is Willa Cather’s My Antonia.

My Antonia is the story of both Antonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants in Nebraska, and her friend Jim Burden. Antonia is the daughter of a cultured man, a musician, unprepared for the tough life of the Great Plains, but his daughter Antonia is a woman who rises to the challenges of the rugged mid-American soil. Jim Burden narrates the book. He is a man who leaves this world to attain an education and a level of culture, but he is drawn back to the world of his childhood and the story of Antonia. Through both of these characters we see a struggle that is with us today—the pull away from a rural world to one beyond the countryside’s horizons and the desire to stay in this world and make one’s own place. The book is one of Cather’s best and was a special focus of the Willa Cather Foundation’s annual conference during the late spring of 2018.

There is often a poignant theme sounded in many works of older Midwestern literature—the loss of an earlier pioneer tradition and community to the forces of modernity. This note is strongly sounded in Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, which garnered Tarkington a Pulitzer Prize in 1919 and was made into a memorable motion picture by Orson Welles of Wisconsin that was released in 1942.

The Magnificent Ambersons tells the story of the Amberson family and their eventual decline in a city similar to Indianapolis. The family attains wealth and prominence in the years after the Civil War only to see its fortunes wane with the onset of the twentieth century and America’s increasing industrialization. Its central character is the spoiled scion George Amberson Minifer. We see George struggle as his family’s fortune and influence fade, although George eventually develops more strength of character. The family’s elegant neighborhood is based on Woodruff Place in Indianapolis, which features a wonderful assortment of Victorian homes.

When the New Year rang in on January 1, Sherwood Anderson was a year and five months away from the publication of his seminal work Winesburg, Ohio. He had already published two novels: Windy McPherson’s Son in 1916 and Marching Men in 1917.

In early 1917 Anderson experienced a surge of creative energy that resulted in a series of free verse poems later published in 1918 as Mid-American Chants. In 1916 Anderson had traveled to New York, been warmly received and seen as a vital new voice emerging from the Midwest. The experience both exhilarated and overwhelmed Anderson, but it also inspired in Anderson a vision of himself in a kind of bardic role, speaking for the region’s importance to America’s communal and spiritual life.

In the poems Anderson writes often of the fertile Midwestern earth and one of the crops most closely associated with the region—corn. The cornfields stretching across the land are a symbol of the region and the nation’s fecundity and stand opposite the destructive power of industrialism. Mid-American Chants isn’t a strong piece of work, but it is an interesting look into the increasing creative confidence filling Anderson at the time. It seems to reflect a greater sense of sureness about the value of his Midwestern background and experience. In May of 1919 Winesburg, Ohio appeared—which would secure his place in the American canon.

Carl Sandburg’s Cornhuskers also appeared in 1918. It is true that Sandburg, as a poet in the Whitmanesque populist tradition, had some of the faults associated with this strain in American writing—looseness and repetition being two examples—but some of his best work is found in his early volumes, and Cornhuskers is a strong piece of work. Midwestern themes and scenes are important in this volume. Omaha, Illinois and Chicago are referenced, and railroad men, washerwomen and other workers appear throughout the collection. The ancient world and the landscapes of Europe during the First World War are present as well. The first work in the collection is a longer poem entitled “Prairie.” This particular poem is rich in both natural and industrial imagery and is a broad-lens view of life in the Midwest.

The Marne, one of Edith Wharton’s lesser known books, was published in 1918. Wharton, the renowned American novelist best known for works such as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, had a deep devotion to war work in France and the Allied cause, and The Marne was born out of this commitment. The Marne tells the story of a young American boy traveling in France with his family at the start of the First World War. They witness the war’s impact on French life. Several years later, after he is eighteen, the boy returns to France and serves as an ambulance driver.

As is always the case with these posts commemorating books of a century before, I like to include works published outside the United States. Lytton Strachey’s groundbreaking work of biography Eminent Victorians appeared in 1918. Lytton Strachey tells the story of four notable English Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and George Gordon. The book is known for its fresh and irreverent take on noted figures from the Victorian era and a willingness to see them not as secular saints of the 19th century British Empire but as flawed human beings.

Strachey was a literary journalist and biographer who was part of the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals in England. He is one of the central figures in the film Carrington (1995), which details the story of Strachey and his friend and sometime lover Dora Carrington, played by Emma Thompson, and their relationships with other people in the Bloomsbury circle. Jonathan Pryce portrayed Strachey in the film.

Tarr by Wyndham Lewis appeared in 1918. Lewis is a fascinating figure, a gifted visual artist as well as writer who was born in his father’s yacht off the coast of North America in 1882. He trained as an artist and spent a number of years in France, becoming a member of the group of artists and writers known as the Vorticists, whose number included T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein. During the First World War he served as an artillery officer and later as a war artist.

Lewis was a man of strong opinions, and his writing often took on artists and culture of the 1920s, with James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and the above mentioned Bloomsbury Group being objects of his attack. No stranger to controversy, Lewis was attracted to Fascism in the 1930s but later repudiated his views and wrote approvingly of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the democratic traditions of the United States and Canada.

Tarr concerns the adventures of two men who are artists in Paris. Tarr is an Englishman; Kreisler is a German. The book follows the men through their adventures in the art world and their relationships with various women. The artist Kreisler has a Hitler-like quality. The book was first published in serialized form in The Egoist in 1915-1916, then published in book form in the U.S. and England in 1918. Lewis revised and expanded the book and republished it in 1928.

One of the first literary fruits of the 1917 uprising in what became the Soviet Union appeared in 1918: Alexander Blok’s The Twelve. Blok was a Russian symbolist poet and playwright born in 1880 whose first work had appeared in 1903. Blok had been drafted into military service in 1916 and later became an official in Kerensky’s provisional government tasked with interrogating the Czar’s ministers before the Soviet revolution occurred. The Twelve is a narrative poem about twelve Red Army soldiers–a profane version of the twelve Apostles– led by a Christ figure who commit acts of revolutionary violence. This poem is generally considered Blok’s greatest work. It was also one of his last. He died in 1921 of heart disease.

A famous work of history appeared in 1918: Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Spengler is known for his idea that civilizations have their life cycles of growth, maturity, and decline and that history is not some linear process of growth. The work is deeply pessimistic and has influenced writers and thinkers who have studied it and argued with it since its publication. One example is the American poet Hart Crane, who read The Decline of the West as he worked on sections of his famous long poem The Bridge.

The New Year would bring historic events such as the onset of Prohibition and the Versailles Conference. It was 1919, but the Roaring Twenties had begun.

Patrick Kerin

References:

Much of the information for this post is found in the books themselves and critical material–prefaces, introductions and other writing—included with these editions.

Here are the other resources that have been helpful:

Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature. Second Edition, Fully Revised and Enlarged. General Editors: Jean-Albert Bede and and William R. Edgerton. Columbia University Press, New York, 1980.

Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. Fourth Edition. Edited by Bruce Murphy. Harper Collins Publishers, New York, New York, 1996.

What Happened When: A Chronology of Life & Events in America by Gorton  Carruth. Signet (Penguin Group), New York, 1991.

The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade by Frederick J. Hoffman. Revised Edition. The Free Press, New York, New York, 1965 edition.

Russian Literature Since The Revolution by Edward J. Brown. Collier Books, New York and London, 1963.

The Portable Twentieth Century Russian Reader. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Clarence Brown. Penguin Books. Viking Penguin Edition, 1985.

Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist by Nick Salvatore. Second Edition. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1982, 2007.