Marking the centenary of the beginning of WWI

[Mike001]

I keep finding fascinating books, and they all turn out not to be PD for me . I shall make a post in the thread with these suggestions, in case anyone is interested.

Ruth

How about any of the following?

Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That
Siegfried Sasson's Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man
Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War

There's also Rudyard's Kipling's The Irish Guards in the Great War. Blunden, who served with the Royal Sussex Regiment and who writes very vividly criticised Kipling's account as too spare and unemotional. Kipling who was asked to write that regimental history -- his son had died with the Irish Guards -- seems to have felt that anyone who, like himself, hadn't served shouldn't treat the material as an exercise in literary expression and hence should tell the story baldly and let the action speak for itself.

But maybe Kipling's Epitaphs of the War would be a better choice if he's to be represented. He wrote some very fine short stories, too, one of the most interesting being The Gardener -- there's a twist at the end whereby you realise who someone really is and the whole of the story up to that point reads in a different way:

http://www.aftermathww1.com/gardener.asp


There's always Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front -- though that might be a problem inasmuch as the translations may be recent. And I suppose the same might go for Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, unfortunately. That would have added interest since Junger, unusually among many of the Great War writers, appears to have taken relish in the fighting, understanding it in a kind of Nietzschean way (not that Nietzsche would perhaps have relished real fighting himself!)

[RuthieG]

Thanks for the suggestions, Mike. Unfortunately all of those save Kipling's Epitaphs of the War (1922) and Jünger's original In Stahlgewittern (1920) in German are still in copyright in the US.

Ruth

[Mike001]

Thanks for the suggestions, Mike. Unfortunately all of those save Kipling's Epitaphs of the War (1922) and Jünger's original In Stahlgewittern (1920) in German are still in copyright in the US.

Ruth

How about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Ruth? It's a long time since I read it, but there must be an interesting representative passage in there ... somewhere. Is that PD?

Masefield? He wrote memoirs, too. I haven't read them, but they've got a reputation.

[RuthieG]

Ah, an interesting one. In the Public Domain in Europe, of course, as Lawrence died in 1935, so could be recorded for legamus.eu, but a problem in the US. There is a text known as the "1922 Edition" but:

He then proceeded to have eight copies typeset and printed on the presses of the Oxford Times, and this private edition became known as the "1922 Edition" or the "Oxford Text" of Seven Pillars. He made painstaking hand-written corrections to six of these copies and had them bound. (In 2001, the last time one of these rough printings came on to the market, it fetched almost USD $1 million at auction.) This time, instead of burning the manuscript, Lawrence presented it to the Bodleian Library.

It wasn't published again until 1926, much abridged, so unless one has the odd million to spare, it is no go here. See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom#Editions_in_print

None of Masefield's autobiographical works is out of coypright, either here or in the US.

Ruth

[Mike001]

If you think "Epitaphs of the War" suitable for what you're doing may I have a try at reading it. I think it could be interesting to do, and probably doable for an unpractised reader (i.e. me) since they're short pieces.

[RuthieG]

I'd welcome them. It's about 1200 words in total - probably 8-10 minutes.

Ruth

[RuthieG]

You may be interested to read how 12 million letters a week reached British soldiers during the First World War: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25934407

Some heartbreaking letters there.

Ruth

[RuthieG]

More interesting articles on the BBC site, including this one about the words which World War I brought into the English language: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26277732 and journalism and censorship: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zs9bwmn

With regard to the latter issue, there is an interesting article in the Strand Magazine of July 1917 entitled Confessions of a Censor Fighter by an American reporter which I am considering reading for the WWI collection. (William Gunn Shepherd (1878 - 1933), who also wrote the definitive account of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York.)

Ruth