Novelists From England

"As Sassoon's wartime diaries reveal, he was an extremely complex character, troubled by his homosexuality and anxious to prove his manliness in combat and so to earn the respect, perhaps even love, of his men. Also, as a poet first and foremost, he was never at ease with the majority of his fellow officers whom he found boorish, dull and snobbish, hence his delight in meeting other poets and literary men such as Graves, Owen and de Sola Pinto. Both on his own account, and for the reputation of poets, he wanted to prove himself a hero and did so in several gallant actions. But in seeking to protest against what he thought of as the excessive suffering of his men in an unduly prolonged war he allowed himself to be influenced by pacifists who had little respect for men in uniform and were disappointed that he did not provide publicity for their cause by going to prison."

"Freyberg inveighed against the Georgian Poets and reproached me for holding a brief for Siegfried Sassoon. I maintained that, having fully demonstrated his personal physical courage, he had earned the right to exhibit moral courage as a pacifist without laying himself open to the charge of cloaking physical cowardice under the claim of moral courage. Freyberg is very uncompromising in his condemnation and, with some justice, says it is offensive to come back and say, "I can't lead men to their death any more"—it implies a monopoly of virtue, as if other officers liked doing it because they acquiesced in their duty. He thought the poem called "The Hero" caddish, as it might destroy every mother's faith in the report of her son's death. Certainly Siegfried Sassoon breaks the conspiracy of silence, but sometimes I strongly feel that those at home should be made to realise the full horror, even to the incidental ugliness, as much as possible."

"Just after we came up from dinner, two young men came—one very shy, the other to all appearances very much at his ease. The former was Siegfried Sassoon. He was in khaki: at first I only noticed his sticking-out ears and obvious embarrassment, but a closer scrutiny revealed great charm and a certain sweetness and grave strength in his countenance. I felt much drawn towards him, but had no conversation with him. Nichols, on the other hand, was twice introduced to me by the zealous hostess and we spent the remainder of the evening side by side. He was a thin alert face and is quick and agreeable to talk to—he expressed great admiration for Siegfried, both as poet and soldier. They have both had shell-shock. For Siegfried, he claimed astonishing valour. They each read some of their own poems... Siegfried in a terse, laconic style... Siegfried's have a brilliant, grim irony."

"Deep in my morning time he made his mark And still he comes uncalled to be my guide In devastated regions When the brain has lost its bearings in the dark And broken in it’s body’s pride In the long campaign to which it had sworn allegiance."

"O fathering friend and scientist of good, Who in solitude, one bygone summer’s day, And in the throes of bodily anguish, passed away From dream and conflict and research-lit lands Of ethnological learning, — even as you stood Selfless and ardent, resolute and gay, So in this hour, in strange survival stands Your ghost, whom I am powerless to repay."

"What voice revisits me this night? What face To my heart’s room returns? From the perpetual silence where the grace Of human sainthood burns Hastes he once more to harmonise and heal? I know not. Only I feel His influence undiminished And his life’s work, in me and many, unfinished."

"October's bellowing anger breakes and cleaves The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves For battle's fruitless harvest, and the feud Of outrage men. Their lives are like the leaves Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown Along the westering furnace flaring red. O martyred youth and manhood overthrown, The burden of your wrongs is on my head."

"I'd say — "I used to know his father well; Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap." And when the war is done and youth stone dead, I'd toddle safely home and die — in bed."

"If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base, And speed glum heroes up the line of death."

"Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives."

"Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows. In the great hour of destiny they stand, Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows."

"Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans... Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed."

"Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell, While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke. He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, Sick for escape,— loathing the strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead."

"I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize."

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest."

"I must add that in the light of subsequent events it is difficult to believe that a Peace negotiated in 1917 would have been permanent. I share the general opinion that nothing on earth would have prevented a recurrence of Teutonic aggressiveness."

"The visionless officialized fatuity That once kept Europe safe for Perpetuity."

"Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom."

"Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell, and those who institute it are criminals. Were there even anything to say for it, it should not be said; for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages."

"I think basically what we were doing was laughing at the authoritarian figures we grew up under. ...you know it’s nonsense, this assumed authority that's been given to you by teachers, by military figures, by police, by judges, and it's all pretending, "we know what's going on on this planet" and it's all bullshit. And I think that Python was quite good at getting rid of those inhibitions, and I think it's why it's still appealing to the young."

"I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart and funny and subversive at the expense of authority."

"Basically, the Germans came to us and said, "We don't have a sense of humour.""

"American Beer is a lot like making love in a canoe - it's fucking close to water."

"Typical Hollywood crowd - all the kids are on drugs, and all the adults are on roller skates."

"Always look on the bright side of life."

"Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride 'Their name liveth for evermore' the Gateway claims. Was ever an immolation so belied As these intolerably nameless names? Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime."

"Who will remember, passing through this Gate, The unheroic Dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, — Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones? Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own. Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp; Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone, The armies who endured that sullen swamp."

"You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go."

"To lose a passport was the least of one's worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe."

"Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land.""

"At least half of my life’s many mistakes can be safely put down to impetuosity: the other half derive from inertia."

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion... Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even disappear. The importance of Parkinson's Law lies in the fact that it is a law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which that growth is controlled."

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."

"Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay."

"Expenditure rises to meet income."

"It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow."

"Delay is the deadliest form of denial."

"The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself."

"A perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse."

"Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is."

"Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably exist, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love's name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred?"

"Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored."

"The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas."

"Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know."

"Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real."

"Organised religion has corrupted one of the purest, most powerful and sustaining things in the human condition. It has imposed a middle management, not only in our politics and in our finances, but in our spirituality as well. The difference between religion and magic is the same as what we were talking about earlier – I think you could map that over those two poles of fascism and anarchism. Magic is closer to anarchism."

"The shaman is not a priest, the shaman has no secret knowledge, he is equivalent to the hunter. He has a specific skill that is subjugated to the needs of the group. He is prepared to take drugs, go loopy, visit the underworld, bring back knowledge and tell everybody. He’s not keeping a secret knowledge. Originally priests were instructors, they passed out the mysteries and revelations to the masses. Increasingly, they say ‘you don’t need to have a religious experience, we are having that for you. That’s what we are here for.” Eventually, they start saying ‘you don’t need to have a religious experience, and neither do we. We’ve got this book about some people who – a thousand years ago – had a religious experience. And if you come in on Sunday, we’ll read you a bit of that and you’ll be sorted, don’t you worry.” Effectively a portcullis has slammed down between the individual and their godhead. ‘You can’t approach your godhead except through us now. We are the only path. Our church is the only path.’ But that is every human being’s birthright, to have ingress to their godhead."

"If you look at early shamanic texts and cultures, the magical powers that the shaman hopes the gods might give him, flying, turning into animals, invisibility, poetry – as if poetry was a magic power. As if it was the equivalent of turning into a dog or flying. As if. What does this tell us? Maybe there was a time when we could legitimately ask the gods for it as a gift. But we know there aren’t any gods, and that they can’t give those gifts, so the best thing we can do is go to church, listen to the lesson and hope we don’t burn. Have no direct contact with whatever form of god we choose to worship. It’s like the magical or spiritual equivalent of the big flaw in Marxism. Karl Marx, lovely geezer, very humane, a bit middle class but we’ll gloss over that, but his big flaw was that when he said “The reins of society will inevitably rest in the hands of those who control the means of production” didn’t take into account middle management. All the people who get between those with the means of production and the society. That translates onto a spiritual level as the shift from our earliest beliefs, which are all shamanic."

"In the bardic tradition, art was understood as magic, the guy who could paint on the cave wall, he was a magician. The idea of representation was a magical idea. Then something happened, and then we all started to believe we were entertainers, and it was just a job, an aesthetic Thatcherism was imposed and we all thought “oh shit, there isn’t an art union and we’re lucky to have a job. We better accept that we’re just the court jesters, and all we are here to do is keep the masses happy, write some more pot-boilers, we are magicians, we are not gods.” Which in fact we are. We just forget that. We forgot our searing power and lost it, as a result. This is not a searing power coming from an elite of artists that I’m talking about, this is an inherent human power that all of us have the possibility of contacting."

"There are books that have devastated continents, destroyed thousands. What war hasn’t been a war of fiction? All the religious wars certainly, or the fiction of communism versus the fiction of capitalism – ideas, fictions, shit that people make. They have made a vast impression on the real world. It is the real world. Are thoughts not real? I believe it was Wittgenstein who said a thought is a real event in space and time. I don’t quite agree about the space and time bit, Ludwig, but certainly a real event. It’s only science that cannot consider thought as a real event, and science is not reality. It’s a map of reality, and not a very good one. It’s good, it’s useful, but it has its limits. We have to realise that the map has its edges. One thing that is past the edge is any personal experience. That is why magic is a broader map to me, it includes science. It’s the kind of map we need if we are to survive psychologically in the age that is to come, whatever that is. We need a bigger map because the old one is based on an old universe where not many of us live anymore. We have to understand what we are dealing with here because it is dangerous. It kills people. Art kills."