This weekend marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, which took the lives of an estimated 5,000 Michigan residents and wounded another 15,000. All told, more than 117,000 U.S. soldiers’ lives were lost either on the battlefield or due to accidents and 204,000 others were wounded. A Nov. 21, 2010, article in the Traverse City Record-Eagle notes that – by the time the United States joined the war effort – its population was 92 million, and the percentage of war fatalities represented 0.13 percent of the total population.
Beyond the permanent guests admitted to Flanders Fields and elsewhere, there exist today other, very real, costs perpetrated by the Great War. In fact, the conflict ushered in an age of anxiety three decades before W.H. Auden found the words adequate to describe another era of spiritual torpor. The British poet and painter David Jones, a veteran of the Somme offensive, declaimed World War I as “the Break” – the precise chronological moment when humanity divorced itself completely from history and embraced the trophy wife of technology.
American-born poet, critic and essayist T.S. Eliot observed in “The Wasteland” that the war rendered an anthropological and existentialist quandary upon Western civilization from which it would more than likely never fully recover. Tank warfare, aerial combat and the crowning jewels of human endeavor up to the first 14 years of the twentieth century were employed now solely for the destruction of human life and (seemingly to some writers of the time) the entirety of the race’s preceding achievements.
Not that everything was rosy prior to the war. Both Jones and Eliot viewed the war as evidence of already declining religious faith and its aftermath as finalization of the rupture. Eliot’s editor was firebrand Ezra Pound. Pound vacillated between literary genius and traitor (of which he was found guilty after the subsequent worldwide conflagration, avoiding execution only through incarceration in a mental hospital). In “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” Pound wrote that the war succeeded only in killing a “myriad” of the culture’s best and brightest: “For an old bitch gone in the teeth/For a botched civilization,” leaving readers with the indelible impression Pound viewed the war as a tremendously wasteful effort waged on behalf of “two gross of broken statues/For a few thousand battered books.”
The art world before the war as well discarded the former order as bourgeois, patriarchal and conformist. Liberation from the status quo led to art intended to shock, including the clamor of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and the highly eroticized ballet of Vaslav Nijinsky and Sergei Diaghilev. “Make it new,” Pound intoned, and so they did in a manner that devolved art to the realm of worship only for its own daring, its inventors and the lucre it generated.
As noted by Modris Eksteins in his Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, some artists went so far as to characterize the act of war itself as art – not only as a tonic for staid European culture but actually desiring all-out warfare as a visual canvas of twisted metals, gas masks, foxholes, barbed wire, explosions and the bodies of mangled human bodies. Once again Pound: “The age demanded an image/Of its accelerated grimace,” and this it received in spades.
The war served as the demarcation of sorts. Much of the art before it can be seen as moral in nature while post-Armistice art commonly celebrates materialism if not outright hedonism. This is not to denigrate all Modernist and postmodern art. In fact, there is much in both canons to admire. Aesthetic prudence for critics isn’t inherently predicated on prudery. Eliot, for all his Anglicanism, for example, was a staunch defender of James Joyce’s racy Ulysses, even found the work of Henry Miller worthwhile (I myself do not) and was quite the fan of Groucho Marx.
After the Great War, however, the genie was out of the bottle, leading to works meant only to shock, dismay or anger would-be censors and art consumers in general. These works lacked what Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke declared an attempt to reflect the “moral imagination” of which he wrote: “Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.”
The eminent Russell Kirk summed up: “It is the moral imagination which informs us concerning the dignity of human nature, which instructs us that we are more than naked apes. As Burke suggested in 1790, letters and learning are hollow if deprived of the moral imagination…. Such imagination lacking, to quote another passage from Burke, we are cast forth ‘from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.’”
While the Allied defense against the Boche onslaught eventually succeeded, Western civilization succumbed not only to such works of great beauty and insights into human dignity as Jones’ In Parenthesis and Eliot’s Four Quartets, but as well currently perceived “classics” as William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch and the unprintable title of an Andres Serrano photograph. More’s the pity.
Bruce Edward Walker is a Morning Sun columnist.