Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, edited by John Greening
O.U.P. 2015 978-0-19-871661-7 £30 (pp. 512)
It was Edmund Blunden’s daughter, Margi, who pointed out a few years ago (in The Deceitful Calm, 2006, with Rennie Parker) that his ‘Ancre Sunshine’, written in 1966, is probably ‘the last poem about the war published by any surviving soldier poet’:
Here half a century before might I,
Had something chanced, about this point have lain,
Looking with failing sense on such blue sky.
And then become a name with others slain.
Alongside his poetry, however, Blunden continued for most of his life to revisit and revise the prose account of his wartime experience that he had begun back in 1924, Undertones of War. And in his new edition of Undertones, John Greening suggests that it is probably on the strength of this prose rather than of his poetry that Blunden survives, a century on, as more than just ‘a name with others’.
For some readers, it might seem that Undertones has become a success despite itself. ‘Odd as dreams’, to borrow a phrase of Blunden’s own (‘Les Halles d’Ypres’), the book is in Greening’s words ‘often highly ornate, lacking any clear narrative . . . [and] abound[ing] in obscure literary allusion.’ No matter how familiar we may now feel we are with the landscape and experience of the Western Front, this impression of oddness is surely still to some extent due to the sheer otherness of what the book seeks to record; as Blunden himself recognised, in the ‘Preliminary’ to his first edition, perhaps it could be understood fully only by those who had been there. Yet, at the same time, what emerges particularly clearly from Greening’s fascinating edition is just how controlled a choice was the wry, oblique, allusive style Blunden adopts in Undertones.
As Greening shows, this was neither the first not the last of his prose – let alone his poetical – renderings of the war. For example, from the end of October 1916 Blunden was the regimental diarist for the 11th Royal Sussex. At the same time, he was keeping his own personal diaries (Greening includes extracts from 1917). But in neither case do his entries enforce an impression that Blunden was heading inevitably towards Undertones of War. Indeed, what was probably his first attempt at a retrospective account, De Bello Germanico (1918), is in a style much more conventional, much less subtle and distinctive, than Undertones – ‘noisy, with a depressing forced gaiety then very much the rage,’ in Blunden’s own caustic judgement (‘Preliminary’ again); still ‘very much in the spirit of 1916’, as Greening more charitably describes it, printing extracts in his Notes for comparison with Undertones.
Blunden’s own manuscript title-page (one of the many illustrations Greening includes) shows that Undertones was drafted during 1924-5-6. Over the course of Blunden’s lifetime, the book went through innumerable reprints and new editions, and he seems to have spent a deal of time revising, refining, rephrasing and generally tinkering with it. The resulting history of the text of Undertones is, as John Greening outlines it, complex and (ultimately) baffling, with Blunden continually, compulsively engaged in more or less ‘slight corrections and additional observations’. Greening works from the text of the first impression (1928-9), adding extensive notes that chart textual variations over the years, and one of the pleasures of this new edition is to be able to explore the range of public and private materials that (with the generous help of Blunden’s family) he has assembled around the text of Undertones. A major source is the copy of the first edition that Blunden gave to his Japanese lover-cum-secretary, Aki Hayashi, into which he added a myriad handwritten annotations – information, explanation, illustration – all carefully authenticated with the initials ‘E.B.’
Blunden’s persistent return to the same territory perhaps in part signals a recognition of the need to try and open it up to those who had not been there; nevertheless, his amendments are often finicky, and it can be difficult to grasp exactly what he was seeking to achieve by them. In the case of his first readers in Japan, however, the nature of the need was more obvious, and so Greening gives us, for example, not only Blunden’s annotations for Aki but also his introduction to the Japanese edition (in a 1936 letter to his editor, Takeshi Saito), in which he maps out the topography of the entire British sector of the Western front, from Ypres to the Somme. Greening includes in his text a couple of Blunden’s own sketch maps, but this reader at least might have welcomed a few more maps to help track the movements of Blunden and his comrades (for instance, through the woods and tracks of the Ancre valley).
And then, of course, there are the poems. Blunden included – in his own slightly arch, self-deprecatory term – ‘A Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations’; here, with welcome directness, Greening adds thirty or so more. Recognising how the poetry and prose often interact, and taking his lead from Blunden’s son-in law Martin Chown (in his Companion Guide to Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War), Greening also links these additional poems chapter by chapter to the text of Undertones. They provide yet further evidence of a half-century spent revisiting the war.
In this extensive and absorbing new edition, John Greening does for Edmund Blunden something of what Jon Stallworthy did for Wilfred Owen with his Complete Poems and Fragments in 1983. (It’s a pertinent comparison, perhaps, given that Blunden was a key figure in Owen’s literary afterlife.) Neither editor’s work is about the making or breaking of reputation: in both cases, this seems safe. Rather, it is about making available a range of materials sufficiently comprehensive for informed judgement to be made about the real nature of the writer’s achievement. Having survived the war, Blunden had the opportunity, denied to Owen, of revising his work and controlling its publication. To this extent, Blunden’s work is much more ‘finished’ than Owen’s. But what Greening’s edition of Undertones brings out most strikingly is how, for Blunden, nothing about the war was ever entirely over.
Paul Norgate
Wolverley, Worcs.
March 2016