The White Oxen

This novella, published in 1924, tells the story of Matthew Carr, an adolescent orphan in the care of an uncle and aunt. Matthew has little experience of meaningful relationships of any kind. The first profound interaction for him is with a herd of white oxen that he decides to feed with grass through a fence. The author describes subsequent friends in Matthew’s life as the equivalents of these white oxen: a connection of strangers which will never be close but which will have value. One case is described in terms of the loyalty of a pet:
“The fact was that Gabriel had begun to be irritated by Matthew. He sensed the dog-like fidelity behind his friend and it irritated him.”
When in his mid twenties, Matthew is said to have no meaningful social connections:
“People had no more meaning to him than the pavements he walked on.”

The author, Kenneth Burke (born 5 May 1897), was a student at Columbia University from 1916 to January 1918. He withdrew from his degree course in January 1918 as he was fearful that his studies were stifling his intellectual growth. Unlike his schoolmate and literary friend, Malcolm Cowley, who served with the American Field Service on the Western Front, Burke had no involvement in the war (his draft registration was done in June 1918).

Burke tells of a series of bereavements that shape the life of Matthew Carr:
his mother “getting up from her Grieg one evening, turning a white, frightened face towards her dozing husband and sinking dead to the floor”;
his father “slipping from a rock and breaking his neck, probably the only vigorous action of his career”;
his sister dying within two years of her father’s death.
There were undoubtedly many Americans who experienced the loss of all members of their family during this period and this novella imagines the social impact that this forced detachment of emotional ties could have on an individual life.

Boy

This novel, published in 1931, details the experience of Arthur Fearon, a 14-year-old boy forced into a tough adult world after having his schooling cut short due to his parents' poverty in an Irish district of Liverpool. He is terrified of his violent father and when he cannot cope with the demands of work in the docklands, he decides to stow away on a ship rather than face the wrath of his father. On the ship's journey to Alexandria, he is abused and taunted by most of the crew but receives some kindness from a few individuals. When they arrive in port, the boy is taken by one of the crew to the city's red-light district and introduced to a lust that he had not previously been aware of having. Before the ship leaves, he is determined to have another visit to the young prostitute.

The author, James Hanley (born 3 September 1897) was the Liverpudlian son of Irish parents. He left school in 1910 and went to sea in early 1915. In April 1917 he jumped ship in Saint John, New Brunswick and soon had joined the army at Fredericton, enlisting in the 236th Battalion. He served in France with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force in 1918. He was gassed near Bapaume, was invalided and subsequently discharged.

Although the author’s own experience informed this novel, he rejected the suggestion that some of the events had happened to him. Writing in 1953, the author outlines how he as young seaman “overhears a conversation on the bridge of a ship, from which emerges the terrible fate of a young boy, who is undoubtedly the central figure of Boy.” (reminiscences described in his son Liam Hanley's preface to a 1990 edition of the novel). The telling of a story of another boy who went through similar experiences to himself falls into the same pattern as many novels written by survivors of the First World War. Such writers, often shaped by survivors’ guilt, imagined the tragic death of someone like themselves.

There is little reference to the First World War in this novel. The central character, Arthur Fearon, when asked by his teacher to explain his distractedness in class, reveals that he's the only surviving child of his parents:
“I had one brother and sister. Both died during the war, sir.”
Note that he uses the word ‘during’ — it would be wrong to presume that they were killed in the war. If we presume that the strike which Arthur’s father has recently participated in was the general strike of 1926, then the novel is set about 1927. Arthur was, therefore, born about 1913. It would seem unlikely that his brother and sister were that much older than him that they would have served in the war. Perhaps they succombed to disease, such as the influenza pandemic (the death rate from this outbreak of 1918 was as high as 215 per 1,000 in Liverpool). 

Reinhold at the Front

This novella, published in 1931, is a fictional account of the experience of a young German soldier serving in Artois on the Western Front. It was published in English as part of a collection of his war stories with the title Changed Men.

The author, Paul Alverdes (born 6 May 1897), was the son of an army sergeant who himself had written about his experience of war (Hermann Alverdes, Mein Tagebuch aus Südwest: Erinnerungen aus dem Feldzuge gegen die Hottentotten. Oldenburg, 1906). He was educated at a school in Düsseldorf and enlisted, aged 17, at the beginning of the war. He served at the Somme and was severely wounded by a gunshot to the throat. In the short story, The Next Man, he writes about a similar injury for one of his characters:
“a crossing bullet caught the boy in the throat and he fell headlong over the dead man with his face on his. But he sprang up again at once and, pressing the handkerchief to the wound, staggered back and fell at the sergeant-major's feet. By a miracle the arteries of the neck were not severed or at any rate they did not bleed for the moment; and so, scarcely able to breathe and quite unable to speak, he was got back that night to the nearest field hospital on that sector of the front. The surgeon at once performed an operation to help him breathe more easily and it met with some success.”

One of the features of the novella is how the author describes the beauty of nature alongside the horrors of war:
“They were a draft for a Rhineland artillery regiment which had stayed where it was ever since the armies had dug in. It was the end of April 1915 and the chestnuts were just in blossom.”
The colour on the trees and the music of birdsong contrast with the painful sights and sounds of the battlefield:
“The blackbirds were singing already in the chestnut trees and the starlings chattering among the ruins. Now and again, however, a report like the snapping of a tightly-stretched wire broke ominously on the ear, or a sharp whisper passed over, as though for the fraction of a second a jet of steam was forced through a narrow vent. A hollow explosion was heard aloft that turned into a shrill singing sound and the shrapnel bullets pattered among the branches, or whipped through the grass, or went crashing and smacking against the walls. Then everything was still. Cautiously and tentatively the blacbird began to sing again...”

Sometimes the sounds of beauty and horror get muddled in the mind of the soldier. In the story The Next Man a soldier wakes at dawn:
“There'll be another fine day again soon, he thought. Above him too and all around there were numbers of birds singing. But then he became aware that it was the whistling and twittering of rifle bullets.”

Dance Night

This impressive novel, published in 1930, is set in a working-class community in smalltown Ohio in the years immediately before the First World War. The central characters are Jennia St Clair, toughened by an upbringing in an orphanage, and Morris Abbott, whose irascible father is normally absent from home. Neither of them having strong parental models to guide them, they construct their own ambitions to pursue and at the same time look to gain each other’s approval in the absence of a father or mother who will bless them.

The author, Dawn Powell, often gave her birth year as 1897. In fact she was born in Ohio on 28 November 1896 and so I have moved her to that year's section of my reading list. Her own childhood was unsettled and often unhappy and her portrayal of Jennia and her younger sister, Lil, as girls abandoned by their mother, reflects much of her own experience, even though she was never herself in an orphanage. Her mother had died when Dawn was seven years old and she was persecuted by her stepmother. It was only after she fled her father and his second wife to live with an aunt that she began to have confidence in herself as she received encouragement from her guardian to express herself creatively. She graduated from Lake Erie College and began a career as a freelance writer. Dance Night was her third novel and she considered it the best of the 15 that she wrote. Her biographer, Tim Page, has recently tried to give her the acclaim that she did not quite receive during her lifetime: “I don’t like using gender labels but I really do think Powell is our finest woman writer.”

Jen is haunted by loss and dreams of rescuing her younger sister, Lil, from the orphanage and of being able to support her:
“People last such a little while with me. There's no way to keep them, I guess. Everybody goes away — that's why I've got to go back for Lil because I know how terrible it is to be left always — never see people again.”

Beyond that she aspires to being successful as a dancer in one of the big cities. Morry wants to make it in business and be respected in the community but struggles to have enough self-confidence:
“Nobody would ever listen to Morry Abbott — and worse yet he could never in this world get up the nerve to approach them. The snappy young Abbott of his fantasies might calmly tap Hunt on the shoulder and tell him just what was what; but nothing, to the real Morry, was worth the anguish of going to a man and quite out of a blue sky telling him your own private little dream of a lovely place to live.”
At the end of the novel, neither Jen nor Morry have found genuine fulfilment even though they manage to achieve some aspects of their dreams.