The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce (1914)

Jünger, Ernst. Storm of Steel. 1920. Rev. ed. 1961. Trans. Michael Hofmann. Allen Lane. London: Penguin, 2003.

I recently bought a copy of Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel [In Stahlgewittern] (1920), one of those great classic First World War memoirs I'd heard of but never read. The translator, poet Michael Hofmann, after making a number of cracks about the howlers in the only previous English translation (by Basil Creighton - in 1929), claims that "unlike any of the other World War I books I've read, Storm of Steel has found its way into natural epic form" (p.xviii).

He also discusses the book's immensely protracted genesis: how it evolved from the original, heavily diaristic version published in 1920, through the "Nationalist" text of 1924 (the one translated by Creighton), then the more toned-down, nuanced narrative of 1934 (the only one available to the Nazis, who revered Jünger, though he did not return the favour), until its final substantive rewriting for the first edition of his Collected Works in 1961.

Ernst Jünger: Storm of Steel (1920)

Hofmann sees this multiplicity of texts as a distinct advantage:

The inspiration of most of the English [war memoirs] is lyrical or dramatic; they work with one-off contrasts and ironies; they fear repetition or excess of detail. They begin as they mean to go on, with misfortunes and reverses: [Robert] Graves shelled by his own artillery; [Edmund] Blunden's grenade instructor blowing himself up with a bad grenade; [Siegfried] Sassoon breaking a leg while riding before he ever gets to France. There is something bleakly - bracingly - comic about all three. … Storm of Steel leaves all that behind.

Certainly Hofmann is correct when he says that "there is nothing comic about Jünger whatsoever." Let's take that famous episode of the "Christmas truce," for example. Perhaps the most famous description of this is in Robert Graves's short story "Christmas Truce" (first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1962, and subsequently included in his Collected Short Stories (1965): 99-115).

Ernst Jünger (1920)

First, here's Jünger's account of Christmas 1915, from his chapter "Daily Life in the Trenches":

As Christmas approached, the weather seemed to worsen; we had recourse to pumps in our efforts to do something about the water. ["had recourse to" sounds like rather clumsy English to me: "were forced to use" would be my suggestion for something a bit more idiomatic. I wouldn't stress such a point if it weren't for the rather remorseless hatchet job Hofmann does (pp. xiv-xvi) on Creighton's earlier translation. His own seems to veer strangely between the wildly colloquial and the stiff and pedantic, but for all I know that's an accurate reflection of Jünger's prose style in German - Ed.] During this muddy phase, our losses also worsened …

We spent Christmas Eve in the line, and, standing in the mud, sang hymns, to which the British responded with machine-gun fire. On Christmas Day, we lost one man to a ricochet in the head. Immediately afterwards, the British attempted a friendly gesture by hauling a Christmas tree up on their traverse, but our angry troops quickly shot it down again, to which Tommy replied with rifle-grenades. it was all in all a less than merry Christmas. [pp. 58-59]

Robert Graves: Collected Short Stories (1965)

Graves, Robert. Collected Short Stories. 1965. Harmondsworth: Penguin, n.d.

Let's contrast this with Graves's version. Well, first of all, there's a frame-story. A couple of old soldiers are educating Stanley the "Polytechnic student", who's asked them to accompany him on a "Ban the Bomb" march. Impatient with their attitude, Stan bursts out:

"Oh, can it, Grandfather! ... You're a professional pessimist And you didn't hate the Germans even when you were fighting them - in spite of the newspapers. What about that Christmas Truce?" [p.101]

But the point, according to them, is not so much the "Christmas truce" itself, as its follow-up the year after:

"Tell this lad about the two Christmas truces," I said [to his mate Dodger Green, who's just dropped by], "He's trying to enlist us for a march to Moscow, or somewhere."

Stan's grandfather was wounded in hospital at the time, so he saw nothing of the complex festivities, football games, magic show, slap-up feed, which Dodger describes. Even then, in 1914, there were exceptions:

the Prussians weren't having any. Nor were some English regiments: such as the East Lancs on our right flank and the Sherwood Foresters on the left - when the Fritzes came out with white flags, they fired over their heads and waved 'em back. But they didn't interfere with our party. It was worse in the French line: them Frogs machine-gunned all the "Merry Christmas" parties … Of course, the French go in for New Year celebrations more than Christmas. [pp. 105-6]

When it came to Christmas 1915, however, Stan's grandfather takes up the tale:

"Keep in your trenches, Wessex!" [Colonel Pomeroy] shouted over his shoulder. And [Major Coburg] gave the same orders to his lot.

"After jabbering a bit they agreed that any bloke who'd attended the 1914 party would be allowed out of trenches, but none of the rest - they could only trust us regular soldiers. Regulars, you see, know the rules of war and don't worry their heads about politics nor propaganda; them Duration blokes sickened us sometimes with their patriotism and their lofty skiting, and their hatred of 'the Teuton foe' as one of 'em called the Fritzes." [p.112]

The party this time is a disaster. One of the British soldiers seizes the opportunity to take revenge for "a brother killed at Loos" [p.114]. Even though he only wounds rather than killing the German officer he shoots, the damage is done. The British colonel is court-martialled, and there is no further fraternising between the two sides. Stan's grandfather's conclusion is a pessimistic one:

"Now listen, lad: if two real old-fashioned gentlemen like Colonel Pomeroy and Major Coburg - never heard of him again, but I doubt if he survived, having the guts he had - if two real men like them two couldn't hope for a their Christmas Truce in the days when 'mankind', as you call 'em, was still a little bit civilised, tell me, what can you hope for now?" [p.115]

Dodger, however, has a less gloomy take on the whole affair: "… don't listen to your Grand-dad. Don't be talked out of your beliefs! He's one of the Old and Bold, but maybe he's no wiser nor you and I."

Hofmann's commendation of what he sees as the "Homeric" reticence of Jünger's version comes, in part, from its chronology:

As well as being one of the earliest books on World War I ["published long before the likes of Blunden, Graves, Remarque and Sassoon, all of which appeared in the later 1920s, at a classic ten-year distance from the events they describe, giving their public and themselves time to recover" (p.viii)], Storm of Steel is also one of the newest, and it seems likely that it gained in both respects. If one might put it like this, in addition to outflanking the competition by getting in ahead of them, Storm of Steel also outlasted them: the experience it offers the reader is both more immediate and more considered, more naively open-ended and more artistically complex, more Sartre-ish and more - what shall I say? - Paterian. [p.xiii]

Now it's certainly true that the contrast between Jünger's and Graves's version of Christmas 1915 does not come out heavily in favour of the latter. Graves's story is a bit neat, a bit magazine-ish, which is possibly why he did not include any of this material in his own "classic" war memoir, Good-bye to All That (1929 - also heavily revised in its 1957 edition, which rather makes nonsense of Hofmann's claims for the superior "consideration" Jünger was able to give his own book).

Robert Graves

But one can't really have it all ways at once. Having read this encomium on Jünger's epic, it came as a bit of a shock to turn to the book itself. Even Hofmann grants that "Sometimes the progress seems slow and a little lumbering," combining all the various elements of the narrative into "one great narcotic experience." It is, not to put too fine a point on it, quite a boring book. At first, at any rate - certainly to readers used to the "one-off contrasts and ironies" of Graves, Sassoon and Blunden: their sheer story-telling ability, in other words.

This is not to say that I don't see Hofmann's point. There is a cumulative effect to Jünger's writing which is quite different to that of the great English and French memoirists and novelists of the war - different, too, from other German authors such as Erich Maria Remarque or Arnold Zweig. But "Sartre-ish and … Paterian"! Is he relying on the fact that no-one really reads Marius the Epicurean anymore, let alone Pater's less well-known works (with the possible exception of that one piece of prose poetry about the Mona Lisa which Yeats re-lineated and included in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse)? Hofmann himself admits:

I could never understand, unless it was for doctrinal political reasons, why Sartre, asked about Jünger, said merely: "I hate him." [p. xx]

Well, duh! Whatever the complexities of his relations with the Nazis, the fact that a good many of his problems with them stemmed from the fact that they weren't nationalistic enough (a bit like Heidegger, who saw Hitler and his mob of thugs as too "compromised by modernity" to preserve the purity of their Germanic ideals) might have something to do with explaining why so prominent an anti-fascist as Sartre might quite simply hate a silly old fool like Ernst Jünger.

Storm of Steel may or may not be a great book. It's certainly an interesting book - though frighteningly unreflective about the larger implications of the communal bloodletting Ernst and his comrades are indulging in (perhaps the "Homeric" quality Hofmann detects so readily in it comes more from the moral and ethical blindness displayed by the narrator than from any true approach to the unsentimental - though not, I would argue unfeeling - objectivity of the author of the Iliad).

I can't accept that it is any real rival to the great war memoirs of Blunden, Graves and Sassoon - or, for that matter, for the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg or Edward Thomas. Their humanity and compassion continues to speak to us over the century that has elapsed since the first Christmas Truce (if such an event ever really took place, except symbolically). Jünger, for me, is more of a horrible warning - of what happens when you subtract those elements from a person, either through nature or nurture, but instead simply train him to kill and be killed.

It's possible, then, that Hofmann is right, and Jünger has more to say to us this Christmas, as the Ukraine burns and ISIL marches on the beleaguered ancient cities of Mesopotamia, about the true nature of humanity right here, right now. I don't agree with his implicit denigration of Robert Graves and the other "English memoirists" as at least equally valid commentators on the nature of war, though. What's more, when one considers that Graves published his first book of war poems in 1916, and his last stories on the subject of the war in the 1960s, Hofmann's arguments for Jünger's "outflanking the competition" begin to look a bit flimsy, also.

Robert Graves: A Dead Boche (1916)

Here's a list of some classic WWI books from my collection (I haven't bothered to include very much fiction in this list, though of course Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Ford's Parade's End, and - more recently - Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy are all potentially relevant: not to mention well worth reading - or rereading, for that matter):

Richard Aldington (1892–1962)


1. Death of a Hero: A Novel. 1929. The Phoenix Library. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932.
2. The Complete Poems. London: Allan Wingate (Publishers) Limited, 1948.

Henri Barbusse (1873-1935)


3. Under Fire: The Story of a Squad / Light. 1916 & 1919. Trans. Fitzwater Wray. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1929.

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)


4. Undertones of War. 1928. London: Penguin, 1937.
5. The Poems: 1914-30. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)


6. Marsh, Edward, ed. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir. 1918. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1920.
7. 1914 and Other Poems. London: Faber, 1941.
8. The Complete Poems. 1932. London: Sidgwick & Jackson Limited / Melbourne: Hicks, Smith & Wright, 1944.
9. Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke. 1946. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1974.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)


10. Over the Brazier. 1916. Poetry Reprint Series, 1. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
11. Lawrence and the Arabs. Illustrations ed. Eric Kennington. Maps by Herry Perry. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1927.
12. Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. 1929. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929.
13. Good-bye to All That. 1929. Rev. ed. 1957. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
14. Collected Short Stories. 1965. Harmondsworth: Penguin, n.d.
15. In Broken Images: Selected Letters 1914-1946. Ed. Paul O'Prey. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
16. Seymour-Smith, Martin. Robert Graves: His Life and Work. 1982. Abacus. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1983.
17. Graves, Richard Perceval. Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited, 1986.
18. Seymour, Miranda. Robert Graves: Life on the Edge. 1995. Doubleday. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1996.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)


19. Collected Poems. Ed. P. J. Kavanagh. 1982. Manchester: Carcanet, 2004.

Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923)


20. The Good Soldier Schweik. Trans. Paul Selver. Illustrations by Josef Lada. 1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952.
21. The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War. Trans. Cecil Parrott. Illustrations by Josef Lada. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
22. The Red Commissar: Including Further Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk and Other Stories. Trans. Cecil Parrott. Illustrations by Josef Lada. 1981. London: Abacus, 1983.
23. Parrott, Sir Cecil. The Bad Bohemian: A Life of Jaroslav Hašek, Creator of the Good Soldier Švejk. 1978. London: Abacus, 1983.

David Jones (1895-1974)


24. In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu. 1937. London: Faber, 1963.
25. Hague, René, ed. Dai Greatcoat: A Self-portrait of David Jones in his Letters. London: Faber, 1980.
26. Matthias, John, ed. Introducing David Jones: A Selection of His Writings. Preface by Stephen Spender. London: Faber, 1980.
27. Blissett, William. The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935)


28. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. 1926. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1946.
29. Revolt in the Desert. New York: Garden City Publishing Company Inc., 1927.
30. Garnett, David, ed. The Essential T. E. Lawrence. 1951. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956.
31. Garnett, David, ed. The Letters of T. E. Lawrence. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1938.
32. Thomas, Lowell. With Lawrence in Arabia. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), Ltd., 1924.
33. Liddell Hart, B. H. ‘T. E. Lawrence’: In Arabia and After. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1934.
34. Lawrence, A. W., ed. T. E. Lawrence by His Friends. 1937. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1938.
35. Aldington, Richard. Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry. London: Collins, 1955.
36. Mack, John E. A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence. 1976. New Preface by the Author. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.
37. Wilson, Jeremy. Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T. E. Lawrence. 1989. Minerva. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1990.

Francis Ledwidge (1887–1917)


38. The Complete Poems. Introduction by Lord Dunsany. 1919. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited, 1955.

C. S. Lewis [as 'Clive Hamilton'] (1898–1963)


39. Spirits in Bondage (1919). In C. S. Lewis. Collected Poems. Ed. Walter Hooper. 1919, 1964. London: Fount Paperbacks, 1994.

John Masefield (1878-1967)


40. Gallipoli. 1916. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1935.
41. The Old Front Line, or The Beginning of the Battle of the Somme. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1917.
42. St. George and the Dragon. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1919.
43. Collected Poems. 1923. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1926.
44. Vansittart, Peter, ed. John Masefield’s Letters from the Front, 1915-1917. London: Constable and Company Limited, 1984.
45. John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works. Ed. Philip W. Errington. Pen & Sword Military Classics. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books Limited, 2007.

R. H. Mottram (1883–1971)


46. The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 1914-1918. 1924, 1925, 1926 & 1927. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)


47. Day Lewis, C., ed. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. 1963. Memoir by Edmund Blunden. 1931. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 18. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1977.
48. War Poems and Others. Ed. Dominic Hibberd. 1973. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 46. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1975.
49. Stallworthy, Jon, ed. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. 1985. London: The Hogarth Press, 1988.
50. Collected Letters. Ed. Harold Owen & John Bell. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
51. Welland, Dennis. Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. Revised and Enlarged Edition. 1960. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1978.

Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970)


52. All Quiet on the Western Front. 1929. Trans. A. W. Wheen. 1929. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930.

Frank Richards [aka Francis Philip Woodruff] (1883-1961)


53. Old Soldiers Never Die. 1933. Uckfield, East Sussex: The Naval & Military Press, Ltd., n.d. [c.2009].
54. Old Soldier Sahib. Introduction by Robert Graves. 1936. Uckfield, East Sussex: The Naval & Military Press, Ltd., n.d. [c.2009].

Jules Romains (1885-1972)


55. Verdun. 1938. Trans. Gerard Hopkins. 1939. London: Peter Davies, 1940.

Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)


56. Parsons, Ian, ed. The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg: Poetry, Prose, Letters, Paintings and Drawings. Introduction by Siegfried Sassoon. London: Chatto & Windus, 1979.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)


57. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1947.
58. Collected Poems 1908-1956. 1961. London: Faber, 1984.
59. The War Poems. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1983.
60. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man. 1928. The Faber Library, 1. London: Faber, 1932.
61. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. 1930. The Faber Library, 2. London: Faber, 1932.
62. Sherston’s Progress. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.
63. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man / Memoirs of an Infantry Officer / Sherston’s Progress. 1937. Published by the Reprint Society Ltd. by Arrangement with Faber and Faber. London: World Books, 1940.
64. Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920. The Albatross Modern Continental Library, 558. London & Paris: The Albatross Ltd., 1947.
65. Diaries 1915-1918. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Book Club Associates, 1983.
66. Diaries 1920-1922. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1981.
67. Diaries 1923-1925. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1985.
68. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet. A Biography 1886-1918. 1998. New York: Routledge, 1999.
69. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. A Biography 1918-1967. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 2003.

Charles Sorley (1895-1915)


70. Marlborough and Other Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916.

Edward Thomas (1878-1917)


71. Poems and Last Poems (Arranged in Chronological Order of Composition). Ed. Edna Longley. 1917 & 1918. Collins Annotated Student Texts. London & Glasgow: Collins Publishers, 1973.
72. Collected Poems. Foreword by Walter de la Mare. 1920. London & Boston: Faber, 1979.
73. The Collected Poems. Ed. R. George Thomas. 1978. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
74. The Annotated Collected Poems. Ed. Edna Longley. 2008. Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2011.
75. Thomas, Helen, with Myfanwy Thomas. Under Storm’s Wing: As It Was, World without End &c. 1926, 1931 & 1988. Paladin Grafton Books. London: Collins Publishing Group, 1990.
76. Hollis, Matthew. Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. 2011. London: Faber, 2012.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)


77. Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. 2003. London: HarperColllins, 2004.

Arnold Zweig (1887-1968)


78. The Case of Sergeant Grischa. 1927. Trans. Eric Sutton. 1928. London: Martin Secker, 1929.
79. Education before Verdun. 1935. Trans. Eric Sutton. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1936.

Escape


80. Evans, A. J. The Escaping Club. 1921. Penguin 202: Travel and Adventure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939.
81. Harrison, Major M. C. C., & Capt H. A. Cartwright. Within Four Walls: A Classic of Escape. 1930. Penguin 281: Travel and Adventure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940.
82. Hervey, H. E. Cage-Birds. 1940. Penguin 287. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942.
83. Jones, E. H. The Road to En-Dor: Being an Account of How Two Prisoners of War at Yozgad in Turkey Won Their Way to Freedom. 1929. The Week-End Library. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1930.

Historical


84. Allison, William, & John Fairley. The Monocled Mutineer. 1978. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1986.
85. Churchill, Winston S. The World Crisis: 1911-1918. 1923, 1927. Rev. ed. 1931. A Four Square Book. London: Landsborough Publications Limited, 1960.
86. Clark, Alan. Aces High: The War in the Air over the Western Front 1914-18. 1973. London: Fontana / Collins, 1974.
87. Lewis, Cecil. Sagittarius Rising. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
88. Liddell-Hart, Basil H. History of The First World War. 1930. Rev. ed. 1934. London: Pan Books, 1972.
89. Middlebrook, Martin. The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
90. Middlebrook, Martin. The Kaiser’s Battle. 21 March 1918: The First Day of the German Spring Offensive. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
91. Taylor, A. J. P. The First World War: An Illustrated History. 1963. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
92. Toland, John. No Man’s Land: The Story of 1918. 1980. Methuen Paperbacks. London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1982.
93. Tuchman, Barbara W. The Zimmermann Telegram. 1958. London: Constable, 1959.
94. Tuchman, Barbara W. The Guns of August. 1962. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1963.
95. Tuchman, Barbara W. The Proud Tower. A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914. 1966. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.
96. Wolff, Ian. In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign. 1958. London: Pan Books, 1961.

Miscellaneous


97. Bergonzi, Bernard. Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. London: Constable and Compnay Ltd., 1965.
98. Cross, Tim, ed. The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets & Playwrights. 1988. London: Bloomsbury
99. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 1975. Oxford Paperbacks, 385. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.
100. Fussell, Paul, ed. The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War. A Scribners Book. London: Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd., 1991.
101. Hayward, James. Myths and Legends of the First World War. 2002. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2010.
102. Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. 1990. London: Pimlico, 1992.
103. Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. 1997. Pimlico. London: Random House, 1998.
104. Korte, Barbara, with Ann-Marie Einhaus, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Stories. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2007.
105. Macdonald, Lyn. 1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War. 1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
106. Nichols, Robert, ed. Anthology of War Poetry 1914-1918. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1943.
107. Ricketts, Harry. Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War. 2010. Pimlico 860. London: Random House, 2012.
108. Silkin, Jon, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. 1979. Penguin Modern Classics. London: Penguin, 1981.
109. Stallworthy, Jon, ed. The Oxford Book of War Poetry. 1984. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
110. Stallworthy, Jon. Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War. 2002. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2003.
111. Winter, Denis. Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Why Robert Graves?

Eric Kennington: Robert Graves (1929)

I suppose that the upcoming anniversary of the outbreak of war in August, 1914 has got me thinking again about the literature of the First World War. Having recently read Harry Rickett's excellent book Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010), I realised just how little I knew about so many of the writers he mentions. Some, admittedly, sound more interesting as people than poets: Robert Nicholls, for instance. It did get me daydreaming of a systematic re-reading of some of my favourites, though.

Probably first and foremost among these is Robert Graves. Just last year I managed to acquire the missing volumes of his nephew Richard Perceval Graves' rather soupy (but nevertheless indispensable) biographical trilogy about his uncle. I'd read them before, but they did remind just how long and complex - and strange - a time "old Gravy" (to quote Siegfried Sassoon's nickname for him) had of it: all those books, all those projects, all that basking in the sun in the Balearic Islands (or, rather, sitting inside reading and typing in Deyà, Majorca).

In fact it was rereading Sassoon's own (lightly fictionalised) autobiographical trilogy, Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress that got me going again on Graves (whom he calls, in context, "David Cromlech"). They were very different people, and their friendship did not long survive the war - though it was really the advent of Laura Riding, Graves's principal model for the "White Goddess" that clinched it. That, and some rather tactless demands for money on Graves's part ("Why keep a Jewish friend unless you bleed him?" as Sassoon rather chillingly remarked in a verse letter to RG).

George Charles Bereford: Siegfried Sassoon (1915)

Rather than personalities, then, I thought it might be best to concentrate on Graves's undoubted successes, his unequivocal masterpieces, if you like. In my opinion there are (at least) five of them:

1. Memoir: Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929)
   • Revised edition (1957)

The concensus of opinion now seems to be that the best version of this "early autobiography" to read is the 1929 one, published shortly before Graves's departure for Majorca with his new muse, Laura Riding. The 1957 revision, which is the one I first read myself (and which is most readily available) tends to soften the abrupt and eccentric typography and sentence structures of the original text, althrough it does expand on certain details (notably Graves's relationship with T. E. Lawrence). The awkward truth is that neither version is entirely satisfactory on its own: you really have to read both to appreciate the full force of Graves's imagination in full cry.



Robert Graves: Good-bye to All That (1929)



2. Fiction: I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius (1934)
   • Claudius the God and his Wife Messalina (1934)

Ever since this book was dramatised by the BBC in the 1970s, it has needed little introduction (there was an earlier attempt to film it in the 1930s, with Charles Laughton as claudius, but that ended up on the cutting room floor, unfortunately). It remains by far the most convincing and entertaining revisionist history of the early Caesars, despite all the myriad attempts to supplant it since. It's also the most immediately accessible and readable of Graves's historical novels, despite the fascinating material included in many of the others.



Robert Graves: I, Claudius (1934)



3. Speculative Non-fiction: The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948)
   • Amended and Enlarged Edition (1961)

It's hard to describe this book accurately without making it sound like the work of a raving lunatic. Graves's speculations take him from the stone age to late antiquity, and include "solutions" to any number of unsolveable riddles and conundrums. It has to be experienced to be believed, but there's no doubt that no-one has ever written a more explosive book on the true nature of the poetic imagination.



Robert Graves: The White Goddess (1948)




4. Translation: The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass (1950)

It may seem a little surprising to include a mere translation here, but I do feel that this one stands out from Graves's many solid achievements in this genre. There's something about his deadpan delivery which enables Apuleius' masterpiece to shine out, unimpeded by the clumsy literalism which so many of his other modern translators have clung to. It stays in print for a good reason: because people enjoy it more than any of the rival versions.



Robert Graves, trans.: The Golden Ass (1950)




5. Classical Scholarship: The Greek Myths (1955)
   • Revised edition (1960)

The successive editions of this work incorporated more and more of Graves's increasingly out-there conjectures about the ancient Greeks (the contention that "ambrosia" was magic mushrooms, for instance), but for sheer concision and completeness, it's hard to fault this work. It offers multiple versions of most of the stories, together with clear source notes and - admittedly speculative - explanations of some of their stranger features. In other words, it emphasises the dynamic and fluid nature of myth, rather than clinging to a single interpretative paradigm. That's one reason it's still of use 60 years after its first publication.



Robert Graves: The Greek Myths (1955)

Some would add to this list his bizarre series of speculations about Christianity, culminating in the massive Nazarene Gospel Restored (1954) - and including along the way such eccentric works as My Head! My Head! Being the History of Elisha and the Shulamite Woman; with the History of Moses as Elisha related it, and her Questions put to him (1925), King Jesus (1946), Adam’s Rib and Other Anomalous Elements in the Hebrew Creation Myth: A New View (1955), Jesus in Rome (1957) and Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis (1964).

Robert Graves & Joshua Podro: The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1954)

For me, that's a step too far. But I certainly acknowledge that this was - first to last - one of the subjects which most consistently interested Graves, from the very first poem in his Collected Poems, "In the Wilderness," about Jesus's meeting with the "guileless young scapegoat," to his later works of Biblical reconstruction, many of them written in collaboration with Talmudic scholar Joshua Podro.

The Nazarene Gospel Restored: blurb

But why no poetry? Graves was, after all, a poet first and foremost. I have to say that my enthusiasm for his poetry has waned over the years, though I still like a lot of the pieces included in his own successively winnowed-down volumes of Collected Poems, culminating in the 1975 volume which was the last he personally oversaw.

This has now been supplanted by the three-volume Carcanet edition of his Complete Poems (also available as a single volume, without the apparatus and textual variants). I suppose there would be an argument for including that, too, among the "indispensible" works of Graves. There's a lot there to take in, though, and certainly a lot that he personally repudiated along the way.

Robert Graves: The Complete Poems (2000)

As a supplement to my usual habit of listing all the books which I, personally, own by Robert Graves (and there are many), I thought it might be best to begin by discussing Manchester poetry publisher Carcanet's fifteen-year Robert Graves project.

Beginning with the three volumes of Complete Poems mentioned above, they've reprinted, in handsome, well-edited new editions, the following texts - often in new, definitive versions. I've put in bold the ones that I myself own - or have on order at present:

Robert Graves: Selected Poems, ed. Patrick Quinn (1995)

1. Selected Poems, ed. Patrick Quinn (1995)


2. Collected Writings on Poetry, ed. Paul O'Prey (1995)


3. Complete Short Stories, ed. Lucia Graves (1995)


4. Complete Poems, Volume I, ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward (1995)


5. Complete Poems, Volume II, ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward (1997)


6. The White Goddess, ed. Grevel Lindop (1997)


7. I, Claudius & Claudius the God, ed. Patrick Quinn (1998)


8. The Sergeant Lamb Novels, ed. Patrick Quinn (1999)


9. Complete Poems, Volume III, ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward (1999)


10. Some Speculations on Literature, History and Religion, ed. Patrick Quinn (2000)


11. Complete Poems in One Volume, ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward (1999)


12. Homer's Daughter & The Anger of Achilles, ed. Neil Powell (2001)


13. Greek Myths, ed. Patrick Quinn (2001)


14. [with Laura Riding] Essays From 'Epilogue' 1935-1937, ed. Mark Jacobs (2001)


15. [with Laura Riding] A Survey of Modernist Poetry & A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, ed. Patrick McGuinness and Charles Mundye (2002)


16. The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr Milton & The Islands of Unwisdom, ed. Simon Brittan (2003)


17. Antigua, Penny, Puce & They Hanged my Saintly Billy, ed. Ian McCormick (2003)


18. The Golden Fleece & Seven Days in New Crete, ed. Patrick Quinn (2004)


19. Count Belisarius & Lawrence and the Arabs, ed. Scott Ashley (2004)


20. [with Raphael Patai] The Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis, ed. Robert A. Davis (2005)


21. King Jesus & My Head! My Head!, ed. Robert A. Davis (2006)


22. {with Alan Hodge] The Long Weekend & The Reader over Your Shoulder (2006)


23. Goodbye to All That and Other Great War Writings, ed. Steven Trout (2007)


24. Translating Rome: Apuleius' The Golden Ass; Lucan's Pharsalia; Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars, ed. Robert Cummings (2010)


25. [with Joshua Podro] The Nazarene Gospel Restored, ed. John Presley (2010)

Robert Graves & Joshua Podro: The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1954 / 2010)

It's a terrfiyingly ambitious project. They've republished all 14 of his historical novels; all his short stories; all of his poetry; a substantial selection of his essays, works of non-fiction and translations; as well as the most substantive of his collaborations with Laura Riding.

I'd really like to own the entire set, but one must be sensible - and, after all, I have most of the others in their original editions. The only serious deficiency in my own collection is their new edition of The Nazarene Gospel Restored (with significant revisions and additions). It seems to have gone out of print almost as soon as it was published. They do list it as "reprinting" on their website, though, so I do have hopes of being able to purchase it soon at a non-prohibitive price.

Mati Klarwein: Robert Graves (1957)

Robert Ranke Graves
(1895-1985)

Poetry:


1. Graves, Robert. Over the Brazier. 1916. Poetry Reprint Series, 1. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.


2. Graves, Robert. Poems 1926 to 1930. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1931.


3. Graves, Robert. Collected Poems 1965. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1965.


4. Graves, Robert. Poems 1968-1970. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1970.


5. Graves, Robert. Poems: Abridged for Dolls and Princes. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1971.


6. Graves, Robert. Collected Poems 1975. London: Cassell, 1975.


7. Graves, Robert. Complete Poems, Volume 1. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Manchester & Paris: Carcanet & Alyscamp Press, 1995.


8. Graves, Robert. Complete Poems, Volume 2. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1997.


9. Graves, Robert. The Complete Poems in One Volume. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. 2000. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.

I have the two remaining volumes of Complete Poems on order, but haven't received them yet. Volume I is certainly impressively scholarly (if a little overwhelming), though.



Fiction:


10. [Graves, Robert. My Head! My Head! Being the History of Elisha and the Shulamite Woman; with the History of Moses as Elisha related it, and her Questions put to him. London: Martin Secker, 1925.]


11. Graves, Robert. I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius. 1934. London: Arthur Barker Limited, 1936.


12. Graves, Robert. Claudius the God and his Wife Messalina. 1934. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1947.


13. Graves, Robert. ‘Antigua, Penny, Puce’. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.


14. Graves, Robert. Count Belisarius. 1938. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954.


15. Graves, Robert. Sergeant Lamb’s America: A Novel. 1940. Vintage Books. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. / Random House, Inc., 1962.


16. Graves, Robert. Proceed, Sergeant Lamb. 1941. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1946.


17. Graves, Robert. Wife to Mr Milton: The Story of Marie Powell. 1943. Chicago: Academy Chicago Limited, , 1979.


18. Graves, Robert. The Golden Fleece. 1944. Pocket Library. London: Cassell & Co., Ltd., 1951.


19. Graves, Robert. The Golden Fleece. 1944. London: Hutchinson & Co (Publishers) Ltd., 1983.


20. Graves, Robert. King Jesus. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1946.


21. Graves, Robert. King Jesus. 1946. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1983.


22. Graves, Robert. Seven Days in New Crete: A Novel. London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1949.


23. Graves, Robert. Seven Days in New Crete. 1949. Introduction by Martin Seymour-Smith. Twentieth-Century Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.


24. Graves, Robert. The Isles of Unwisdom. London: Readers Union / Cassell & Company Ltd., 1952.


25. Graves, Robert. Homer's Daughter. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1955.


26. Graves, Robert. They Hanged My Saintly Billy. 1957. A Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1962.


27. Graves, Robert. ‘Antigua, Penny, Puce’ and They Hanged My Saintly Billy. 1936 & 1957. Ed. Ian McCormick. Robert Graves Programme. Ed. Patrick J. M. Quinn. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2003.


28. Graves, Robert. The Big Green Book. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. 1962. A Young Puffin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


29. Graves, Robert. The Siege and Fall of Troy: Retold for Young People. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1962.


30. Graves, Robert. Collected Short Stories. 1964. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.


31. Graves, Robert. Complete Short Stories. Ed. Lucia Graves. 1995. London: Penguin, 2008.

I think there are a few more children's books, and an early novel written in collaboration with Laura Riding - No Decency Left (1932), not to mention his "re-written" version of Dickens, The Real David Copperfield (1933), to collect, but otherwise I think that's all his published writing in this form.




Non-Fiction:


32. Graves, Robert. Poetic Unreason and Other Studies. London: Cecil Palmer, 1925.


33. Graves, Robert. English and Scottish Ballads. 1927. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. 1957. London: Heinemann, 1969.


34. Graves, Robert. Lars Porsena, Or The Future of Swearing and Improper Language. 1927. London: Martin Brian & O'Keeffe Ltd., 1972.


35. Graves, Robert. Lawrence and the Arabs. Illustrations ed. Eric Kennington. Maps by Herry Perry. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1927.


36. Graves, Robert. Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. 1929. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929.


37. Graves, Robert. Good-bye to All That. 1929. Rev. ed. 1957. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.


38. Graves, Robert. Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. 1929. Ed. Richard Perceval Graves. Providence, RI & Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 1995.


39. Graves, Robert, & Alan Hodge. The Long Weekend: a Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939. 1940. London: Readers’ Union Limited, 1941.


40. Graves, Robert, & Alan Hodge. The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1943.


41. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. 1948. Amended and Enlarged Edition. 1961. London: Faber, 1977.


42. Graves, Robert. The Common Asphodel: Essays on Poets and Poetry, 1922-1949. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949.


43. Graves, Robert. Occupation: Writer. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1951.


44. Graves, Robert, & Joshua Podro. The Nazarene Gospel Restored. London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1953.


45. Graves, Robert. Adam’s Rib and Other Anomalous Elements in the Hebrew Creation Myth: A New View. With Wood Engravings by James Metcalf. 1955. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1958.


46. Graves, Robert. The Crowning Privilege: The Clark Lectures 1954-55; Also Various Essays on Poetry and Sixteen New Poems. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1955.


47. Graves, Robert. The Crowning Privilege: Collected Essays on Poetry. 1955. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959.


48. Graves, Robert. Greek Myths. 1955. Rev. ed. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1958.


49. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 2 vols. 1955. Rev. ed. 1958. Rev. ed. 1960. Pelican Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


50. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 2 vols. 1955. Rev. ed. 1958. Rev. ed. 1960. Introduction by Kenneth McLeish. Illustrations by Grahame Baker. 1996. London: The Folio Society, 2000.


51. Graves, Robert. Steps: Stories; Talks; Essays; Poems; Studies in History. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1958.


52. Graves, Robert, & Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. 1964. An Arena book. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1989.


53. Graves, Robert. Mammon and the Black Goddess. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1965.


54. Graves, Robert. The Crane Bag and Other Disputed Subjects. 1969. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1970.


55. Graves, Robert. Difficult Questions, Easy Answers. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1972.


56. Graves, Robert. Collected Writings on Poetry. Ed. Paul O'Prey. Robert Graves Programme. Ed. Patrick J. M. Quinn. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited / Paris: Alyscamps Press, 1995.


57. Graves, Robert. Some Speculations on Literature, History and Religion. Ed. Patrick Quinn. Robert Graves Programme. Ed. Patrick J. M. Quinn. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2000.


58. Graves, Robert, & Laura Riding. Essays From 'Epilogue' 1935-1937. Ed. Mark Jacobs. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2001.

This is the hardest genre of Graves-iana to collect - he wrote so many books of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction, sometimes with different titles (and even different contents) for the UK and US editions. As you can see, I have been fairly assiduous, but there are still many gaps in my holdings.




Translations:


59. Apuleius, Lucius. The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass. Trans. Robert Graves. Penguin Classics. 1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950.


60. Apuleius, Lucius. The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass. Trans. Robert Graves. 1950. Rev. Michael Grant. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.


61. Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de. The Infant with the Globe. Trans. Robert Graves. Trianon Press Limited. London: Faber, 1955.


62. Galvan, Manuel de Jesus. The Cross and the Sword. 1882. Trans. Robert Graves. Foreword by Max Henríquez Ureña. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1956.


63. Sand, George. Winter in Majorca. 1855. Trans. Robert Graves. With José Quadrado's Refutation of George Sand. Mallorca: Valldemosa Edition, 1956.


64. Lucan. Pharsalia: Dramatic Incidents of the Civil Wars. Trans. Robert Graves. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956.


65. Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius. The Twelve Caesars. Trans. Robert Graves. 1957. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.


66. Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius. The Twelve Caesars: An Illustrated Edition. Trans. Robert Graves. 1957. Rev. Michael Grant. Ed. Sabine McCormack. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.


67. Graves, Robert, trans. The Anger of Achilles: Homer’s Iliad. London: Cassell, 1960.


68. Graves, Robert, & Omar Ali-Shah, trans. The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam: A New Translation with Critical Commentaries. 1967. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


69. Graves, Robert. The Song of Songs: Text and Commentary. Illustrated by Hans Erni. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., Publisher, 1973.

The only translation I'm aware of lacking is Georg Schwarz's Almost Forgotten Germany (1936). There may well be others I don't know about, though. There's a good deal of translation in some of the books on mythology.




Edited:


70. Richards, Frank. Old Soldiers Never Die. 1933. Uckfield, East Sussex: The Naval & Military Press, Ltd., 2009.


71. Richards, Frank. Old Soldier Sahib. Introduction by Robert Graves. 1936. Uckfield, East Sussex: The Naval & Military Press, Ltd., 2009.

Graves is alleged to have done a good deal of editing work on both of these books of war memoirs by "Frank Richards" (born Francis Philip Woodruff).




Secondary:


72. Seymour-Smith, Martin. Robert Graves: His Life and Work. 1982. Abacus. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1983.


73. Graves, Robert. In Broken Images: Selected Letters 1914-1946. Ed. Paul O'Prey. London: Hutchinson, 1982.


74. Graves, Robert. Between Moon and Moon: Selected Letters 1946-1972. Ed. Paul O'Prey. London: Hutchinson, 1984.


75. Graves, Richard Perceval. Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited, 1986.


76. Graves, Richard Perceval. Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940. Viking. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1990.


77. Graves, Richard Perceval. Robert Graves and the White Goddess, 1940-1985. 1995. Phoenix Giant. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1998.


78. Seymour, Miranda. Robert Graves: Life on the Edge. 1995. Doubleday. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1996.

Probably the best of these biographies is Miranda Seymour's - there's no getting over the completeness and detail of Richard Perceval Graves' rather family-centred version of his uncle's life, though. Martin Seymour-Smith's is well written but (I'm told) unreliable on details. Probably the letters give the best sense of the man himself.

Robert Graves in Krakow (1974)

Agnostic vs. Atheist

Michelangelo: Creation of Adam (c.1511-12)

There was an embarrassing moment at our house this Christmas when I opened up one of my presents only to find that it was a copy of Richard Dawkins' autobiography. My mother - who is religious - made a few muttered remarks about Dawkins' general arrogance and "refusal to debate," and even my brother - who isn't - started in on poor ol' Rich.

What is it about Richard Dawkins? Why is he such a bugbear? I guess there's a certain intransigeance in his defence of the strict Darwinian party line, but it's interesting that other equally inflexible ideologues don't seem to generate the same amount of heat.

Richard Dawkins: An Appetite for Wonder (2013)

I was reading his book The God Delusion last year - "The statements was interesting, but tough," as Huckleberry Finn remarked of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress - when I had a little epiphany (so to speak).

Essentially, I suddenly understood the true meaning of the word "atheist," and the reason why people who label themselves thus are so resistant of the apparently more placatory term "agnostic."

An atheist, I'd always been taught, is someone who asserts the absolute impossibility of the existence of God. Given that providing an absolute proof of the non-existence of anything is a virtually impossible task, Thomas Huxley's compromise term "agnostic": one who simply refuses to claim definitive knowledge on the subject, had always seemed more intellectually defensible to me.

Thomas H. Huxley: aka "Darwin's Bulldog"

Dawkins, however, asks how many people nowadays would claim to be "agnostic" on the subject of the existence of Zeus, or Odin, or Osiris, or any other member of the traditional mythological pantheons? Not many, if any (to paraphrase our local rapper Scribe). In other words, we don't take the question seriously enough to bother with entertaining the notion that Hermes or Aphrodite might actually be hovering about, listening in on our thoughts and conversations.

They could be, mind you. It's ridiculously improbable, but not by any means impossible. So perhaps one should declare agnosticism on the question of the existence of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction also ...

Why don't we? Because (I suspect) in these cases, at least, we don't feel that the burden of proof should lie on the unbelievers. It should lie firmly with the true believers (if there are any). If Odin is real, I'd need to see some proof of it. And it had better be pretty convincing proof.

David Hume, in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) reminds us that "A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence." This principle has been popularised by Carl Sagan (among others) in the form: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." In the absence of that extraordinary evidence, I'm going to go on assuming that there's no Odin. I don't know there isn't - but I see no legitimate reason for postulating the possibility in the absence of really compelling evidence.

Allan Ramsay: David Hume (1711-1776)

How does this apply to the atheist / agnostic debate? Well, my epiphany (if that's what it was) consisted simply of the recognition that the term "Atheist" should be taken to apply to a default position, rather than being confused with a statement of belief.

I don't know that there's no God. But my default position is that there isn't - since no-one has yet shown me the extraordinary evidence required to substantiate such an extraordinary claim (and not for want of asking, either). Occam's razor states that "It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer": in other words, as a basic postulate of argument, one should always go for the most economical of the various hypotheses available, the one which requires fewest assumptions.

This default position seems to me best labelled "Atheism". Like a Huxleyan Agnostic, I claim no special knowledge, assert no conviction of non-existence: just as none of us bother to with Odin, Thor, Hermes and the rest. They could all be real, but there's no particular reason to suppose so. The real problem with the Huxley position, however, is that it implies an equal probability for the existence or non-existence of God (in whatever form one wants to conceptualise such a teleological being - or "law of the universe", impersonal ethical principle, etc. etc.)

I don't think that it's reasonable to see these positions as equally plausible. Given two models of the universe: one naturalistic, subject to verification by scientific experiment, and deducible from phenomena which do indeed demonstrably surround us; the other dependent on a nebulous Catch-22 notion called "faith," which by its very nature precludes the necessity (or even possibility?) of objective verification, there's really no contest for me.

History, too, is on my side in this, I'm afraid. When one looks at the number of people throughout the millennia who have claimed to have a hotline to some almighty spirit who just happens to be in accord with everything they're planning to do, while being irrevocably opposed to everything their opponents are up to, I would ask simply how many of those people you actually still believe in? The rivalry between the twin tribal deities "God" and "Gott" on the Western Front in the First World War is one classic example, amusingly outlined by Robert Graves in his war memoir Goodbye to All That.

Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That (1929)

I really don't want to be unnecessarily provocative on this subject, obviously a sensitive one. I simply want to explain why atheism is a perfectly sensible intellectual stance, and does not imply that one is automatically an adherent of a complete alternative belief system comparable to a religion. Nor, I would argue, does it involve any assertion that one is in possession of absolute proof of the non-existence of God (or any other supernatural entity, for that matter).

In the absense of convincing proofs, however, one has to position oneself somewhere. Virtually all of us moderns have already decided, willy-nilly, to take up an "atheistic" position on Ishtar, Amun-Re, Tangaroa and all the others. If you think for a moment, I think you'll acknowledge this to be so.

Why, then, should you be indignant if someone takes up the same position vis-à-vis any other belief system? You may well be making an exception in one particular case - and you might even be correct in doing so. But until you can actually prove it, can't we just continue to examine the evidence of the natural world - which should be a complex enough task to satisfy anyone?

Fantasy literature can be fun, and rewarding in many ways, but you don't have to believe in the objective existence of the Kingdom of Westeros to enjoy watching Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones (2010- )

How many Eskimo words are there for snow?

[Death of a Good Metaphor]

I remember once at a party at Scott Hamilton's having quite an acrimonious exchange with one of my fellow-guests over the number of Eskimo words for snow. For years I'd been reading in virtually every book of pop-etymology I picked up that the Eskimos so lived and breathed snow, that they had 16 different words for it - or 32 different words for it - or 44 different words for it ("falling snow" - "sitting snow" - "impacted snow" - "wet-bad-driving-snow" - "good-dry-building-snow" etc. etc. etc.) Just like we (or some of us) talk about "earth" and "soil" and "loam" and "dirt" and "dust" and "mud" (or even "tilth"), I suppose.

I'd been enlarging on my theory that this was complete bullshit to the assembled company, mainly because each book gave a different number for these alleged words for snow, but also because none of them supplied any source for this information beyond some other piece of journalism by one of their bonehead colleagues. What is an Eskimo, anyway? Nowadays people tend to use the word "Inuit" instead. But of course this piece of facile PC'ness had been added to various versions of the fact (or "factoid").

Scott's friend erupted at this deluge of smartypants scepticism, and claimed that he personally had visited a museum somewhere in the north of Finland (I think it was) - in the Lapp country, at any rate - and had seen inscribed on the wall of the museum a huge plethora of terms which did indeed represent the full range of Eskimo (or Inuit) terms for snow. There it was, in black & white, carved in stone, in the sacred museum of time!

Collapse of stout party. I can't say I was totally convinced by his asseverations, but I was impressed by his vehemence, and he'd certainly succeeded in trumping my own point - which was mainly that people repeat anecdotes rather than checking them, and that they have a tendency to embed themselves in our cultural bedrock like mini-urban legends.

[New Media Lab]

Well, the other day I picked up a very interesting book (at a library sale, for $1), entitled Faking Literature (2001), by no less eminent a personage than Ken Ruthven (late of Canterbury University, author of the controversial Feminist Literary Criticism: An Introduction (1984) among many other weighty tomes). And what did I find on p.89?

Another ineradicable misconception provides the title of Geoffrey K. Pullum's The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (1991), a book which popularised Laura Martin's exposure of the myth that the Inuit and Yukik languages (homogenised as "Eskimo") exhibit scores of words for different types of snow, when in fact 'Eskimo has about as much differentiation as English does for "snow" at the monolexemic level: snow and flake'.

I couldn't help but feel rather vindicated when I saw that (incidentally, isn't that term "monolexemic" great? I guess it just means on the level of single words ...) But I can't claim that it came as any real surprise.

Further investigation online revealed the following, from a site called Language Log:

The story about Inuit (or Inuktitut, or Yup'ik, or more generally, Eskimo) words for snow is completely wrong. People say that speakers of these languages have 23, or 42, or 50, or 100 words for snow - the numbers often seem to have been picked at random. The spread of the myth was tracked in a paper by Laura Martin (American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 418-423), and publicized more widely by a later humorous embroidering of the theme by G. K. Pullum (reprinted as chapter 19 of his 1991 book of essays The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). But the Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation called postbases. The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others - very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.

So maybe there's a bit more to the misunderstanding than a simple untruth (I still wonder what actually was written up on that museum wall in Lappland. Maybe it's the Lapps who have lots and lots of words for snow. Or for "reindeer," for that matter. Or maybe that friend of Scott's was just totally full of shit ...) The story clearly doesn't mean what most people want it to, though: i.e. that we have lots of words for the things that preoccupy us most. It was, after all, the historian Gibbon who commented (long before Borges popularised the idea in his classic essay "The Argentinean Writer and Tradition" ) that the Koran, the sacred book of the Arabs, contains no references to their principal means of transportation, camels.

[Mush!]

The large number of Eskimo words for snow is, in short, not a fact but a factoid. And what exactly is a "factoid"? Ruthven has some light to shed on that subject also. The word can apparently be traced back to Norman Mailer's 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn: "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or a newspaper." But what began as a word for pieces of pseudo-information about the alleged habits or tastes of celebrities has now had to be extended over the whole field of pseudo-information - the stock-in-trade of Monty Python's immortal Hackenthorpe Book of Lies:

Contains over 60 million untrue facts and figures - Amaze your friends! - Did you know ... that El Greco's real name was E.L. Grecott? ... that Chuck Berry wrote many of Shakespeare's plays? ... that the Everly Brothers turned down a knighthood?

• Did you know that Moslems are forbidden to eat glass?
• Did you know that the oldest rock in the world is the famous Hackenthorpe Rock, in North Ealing, which is 2 trillion years old?
• Did you know that from the top of the Prudential Assurance Building in Bromley you can see 8 continents?
• Did you know that the highest point in the world is only 8 foot?
• Did you know that Milton was a woman?

These are just a few of the totally inaccurate facts in THE HACKENTHORPE BOOK OF LIES - all of them guaranteed false! ...

Well, of course that last one, about Milton being a woman is quite correct. Robert Graves even wrote a novel about his/her cross-dressing ways, Wife to Mr Milton (1943), so it must be true.

[The Situationist]

A propos of Robert Graves, though, he's also the source for one of the most fascinating examples of the evolution from fact to factoid in his WW1 memoir Goodbye to All That (1929):

I was outraged to read of the Germans' cynical violation of Belgian neutrality. Though I discounted perhaps twenty per cent of the atrocity details as wartime exaggeration, that was not, of course. sufficient. Recently I saw the following contemporary newspaper cuttings put in chronological sequence:

When the fall of Antwerp became known, the church bells were rung [i.e. at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany]. - Kölnische Zeitung.

According to the Kölnische Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress was taken. - Le Matin.

According to what The Times has heard from Cologne, via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken, have been sentenced to hard labour. ­- Corriere della Sera.

According to information which has reached the Corriere della Sera from Cologne, via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down. - Le Matin.

[Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That. 1929. Rev. ed. 1957. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 60-61].

Isn't that great? “Living clappers to the bells"! Especially as Le Matin is actually repeating a distorted version of a rumour it's already passed on once -- kind of like chewing your food twice, before and after digestion.

It's funny, yes, but it’s also kind of pernicious. German soldiers who actually had committed brutal war atrocities in Belgium got off scott-free for the most part because so much media bias and irresponsible rumour-mongering had contaminated the public record.

That’s also (presumably) why Holocaust historians, having watched the ”poor little Belgium" saga unfold (not to mention the collective amnesia which swallowed up the massacre of the Armenians during the same war, for that matter), resolved to be so minutely circumstantial in their documentation of Nazi atrocities.

They were right to be careful. About as many people would believe in the Holocaust as currently believe that NASA landed on the Moon if they hadn’t been so scrupulous.

So what am I suggesting in this somewhat rambling post? I'd like to suggest that a little more attention be paid to the hierarchy of genres: specifically, to the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.

Can anyone think of an occasion where (so-called) faction has actually succeeded in accomplishing anything worthwhile? It’s hard to think of any. "A truth that's told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent" said Blake. A lie (or "fiction") that's mixed in with the truth is even more pernicious, I'd have thought. It's hard enough to get reliable information on any subject without idiots adding in their own fibs or repeating each other's.

Mind you, I have no problem at all with avowed fiction - in any and all of its guises. I'm happy to read historical novels, watch dramatisations, revel in anachronisms, muddy the waters myself with any alleged "fact" (or page reference) in any of my own poems or stories.

I don't have any quarrel with C. K. Stead's editing a selection from Katherine Mansfield's letters and journals, and then following it up with a novel called Mansfield in which he "imaginatively reconstructs" the milieu of Kathy and D. H. Lawrence and all their freaked-out friends. All power to him. That seems a perfectly straightforward procedure to me.

I do have a problem with Lloyd Jones publishing a "travel book" (Biografi, 1993) about Albania which records a fictional quest for a (non-existent) Dentist who was supposed to have spent the latter part of his life masquerading as the Dictator Enver Hoxha's double. Especially when the Albanian part of the book is doubled by an account of an (equally fictional) New Zealand short-wave radio enthusiast called Cliff Dalziel who used to tune in constantly to Radio Tirana.

The furore over this little venture into the postmodern clearly soured him on such exercises, though (see further Chris Else's excellent article on the controversy - 'Fact or Fiction: The Curious Case of Biografi,' in Landfall 189 (1995): 38-65.) When he turned his attentions to the troubled island of Bougainville a few years later (Mr Pip, 2006), it was obvious that he wasn't going to allow any troublesome genre questions to rear their heads this time.

Now, I happen to find the teenage Bougainvillean girl who narrates Mr Pip about as convincing as a member of the Black-and-White Minstrels doing a James Brown impersonation. But that's just a matter of taste. Clearly other people like the book, or it wouldn't have been nominated for so many awards. Personally, I find Biografi a much more beguiling and skilful piece of writing.

But, as Chris Else so cogently points out, if you allow yourself to fictionalise every detail of your allegedly "factual" account so relentlessly as Jones does, you end up serving up a kind of second-hand version of Kafka's Castle instead of conveying anything idiosyncratic about Albania itself. Else had the street-cred to say so, too, as he'd lived and worked there himself for a couple of years in the seventies. It's arrogant and shallow, basically. Readers may not readily detect the difference, but somebody will.

So next time you find yourself spouting off about how many Eskimo words there are for snow, or telling the story about that friend-of-a-friend of yours who got served up a Kentucky Fried Rat, just think for a moment about where you got the information from, and whether it's really worth repeating until you know it's true.

I know it might leave most of us with nothing much to say at the next party we get invited to, but maybe that wouldn't be such a tragedy, either.