Belle de Jour

This psychological novel, published in 1928, is set in Paris. The central character, Séverine Sérizy, is the wife of Pierre, a successful doctor. On first appearance they are happily married and very much in love. From the very beginning of the novel, however, we understand that Séverine is haunted by a random act of sexual abuse by a visiting handyman at the age of eight. This causes her to pursue a daytime profession as a prostitute in a brothel as she seeks to re-experience the violent event of her childhood. This might easily be regarded as a perversion but it is often reported that child abuse has deep psychological impact on victims when they reach adulthood. At the brothel she becomes the favourite of Marcel, a drug lord, and her life becomes increasingly dangerous through this connection to the criminal underworld. Meantime she attempts to keep her domestic life separate from her life as her alter ego, Belle de Jour. The novel was adapted into a 1967 film starring Catherine Deneuve.

The author, Joseph Kessel (born 10 February 1898), though born in Argentina, spent much of his early childhood in the Russian city of Orenburg. His Litvak (Lithuanian Jew) family moved to France in 1908. The author was educated in schools in Nice and Paris. He volunteered in 1917 for military service, serving first in the artillery and then as an observer in Squadron 39 of the French air force. After the war he worked as a foreign correspondent. His first novel was published in 1923 and his third novel, The Captives, won the prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l'Academie française in 1927. During the Second World War he worked as a war correspondent before resuming his flying career in the Resistance.

When Séverine becomes involved with Marcel, she comes into the sphere of crime boss, Hippolyte, a Syrian. He explains to Séverine how much he owes Marcel:
“Maybe I better tell you how it is. See Marcel’s a guy once saved Hippolyte’s life. Get that straight. That’s more than if he were my son, I mean.”
Similarly many debts of loyalty were forged on the battlefield when a soldier saved a comrade’s life.

The Silver Trumpet

This novel, published in 1925, was a forerunner of the allegorical and philosophical novels of C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien. Set in the kingdom ruled from Mountainy Castle (geographical references suggest it might not be far from Shangri-la, another fictional location in Central Asia), on one level the author employs the typical devices of the traditional fairy tale (witches, magic, enchanting music, princess in a tower, a toad that must be kissed). On another level, however, the author explores difficult political themes of the early twentieth century, including warfare and rebellion. Central to the turmoil in the kingdom is a rebel princess who disguises herself and goes into the streets to foment civic unrest. Her objective is absolute power rather than any reform that would benefit the common people. In this respect, the author gives an accurate assessment of the warped intentions of populist leaders on the left and on the right in the aftermath of the war.

The author, Owen Barfield (born 9 November 1898) grew up in London. In early 1917 he was conscripted into the army and served as a wireless officer in the Royal Engineers. He later wrote, “I was quite anxious not to be in the infantry... because I think the average expectancy of life of a young infantry officer by the time we'd got to 1916 or 1917 was about three weeks after he had got out there.” After lengthy delays, he received his commission as a second lieutenant in 1918 and was waiting to be sent abroad when the armistice was signed. He was sent to Belgium for six months of mostly inactive service before going to Oxford to commence his English degree. There he befriended C.S. Lewis (who I will read later this year as part of this project). Lewis regarded him as “the best and wisests of his unofficial teachers”. After the publication of this novel, Barfield pursued a literary career for some ten years before working as a solicitor in London until his retirement in 1960. Among the works published during his active retirement was the influential novel Worlds Apart, in which C.S. Lewis features in the guise of a theologian called Hunter.

During a period of famine in the kingdom, the rebel princess tries to bring about a rebellion for her own benefit:
“ ‘Citizens,’ she would cry, standing on a tub in the market-place, ‘fellow citizens, we've had enough of this! What happened last night? What will happen again tonight?’ and she would pause, as though waiting for a reply. Then, as there was none, she would reply herself: ‘Why this will happen — some of us will be cold. Some of us will be frozen! All of us will be hungry!’ And from the crowd of listeners would come a loud growl of assent... When she had finished her speech, the people would gather into knots and talk in low voices, threatening to march up to the castle and drag the king from his bed and kill him.”
She also brought together disenchanted princesses from other kingdoms and “was telling them all to go back to their own countries, in disguise, and there... arouse rebellion and discontent among the citizens.” She “was promising, if they would do this, to make them all queens of those countries” but “she had no intention at all of doing any such thing”. Instead she thought she would “when they are all in confusion... make [the King] send great armies among them and... subject them all to [her] rule.”

My Friends

This novel, published in 1924, is set in Paris. The narrator and central character, Victor Bâton, has survived the war but is living in poverty and loneliness. The novel deals with his attempts to make new friends, revealing his hopes for five possible friendships and his subsequent disappointment in each case. As Donald Breckenridge observed, “Bove captured the experience of a lost generation of war veterans. He recorded the odious aftereffects of the armistice with its widespread unemployment and the growing disaffected and largely reactionary working class.”

The author, Emmanuel Bove (né Bobovnikoff, born 20 April 1898), was the son of a Ukrainian Jewish father and a Luxembourgish mother. He grew up in Paris in the care of his mother, his estranged father being absent for much of his childhood. Aged 14 he was already aspiring to be a novelist when his father and his new English wife sent him to boarding school in England. The outbreak of the war caused him to return to France and he spent the war years in poverty, trying to find a means of becoming a writer. He was called up for military service in 1918 but the armistice intervened before he could see action. He began his fiction career in Vienna in 1921, writing pulp novels under the non-de-plume Jean Vallois. In 1922 he returned to Paris to work as a journalist. He sought out a literary mentor and Colette was instrumental in securing the publication of his first novel under his own name. This and subsequent novels were well received and in 1928 he won the prestigious Prix Eugène Figuière for The Coalition.

In the first chapter, we learn how the central character, Victor Bâton, feels sorry for himself when challenged by a shopkeeper to buy a newspaper he was reading in the shop:
“I wanted to tell her that I had been in the war, that I had been badly wounded, that I had won a service medal, that I was receiving a pension, but I immediately saw that it would be no good.”
Respect or sympathy for the war veteran was in short supply. In another encounter, however, he does receive concern and goodwill from a manufacturer who gives him money to buy a new suit and an introduction for a job in his factory:
“ ‘Were you in the army?’
‘Yes, I was.’
I showed my injured hand.
‘Ah, you were wounded; in the war, I hope.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you draw a pension?’
‘Yes, sir... three hundred francs a quarter.’
‘So that's invalidity benefit at fifty per cent.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have a job?’
‘No, I don't.’
I added immediately:
‘But I'm looking for one.’
‘Your case is interesting. I'll do something for you.’ ”

Beach Beyond

This novel, published in 1923, combines the sense of adventure and mystery in the style of Enid Blyton with a more serious political consciousness, shaped by socialism and idealism. The central character, Merrick, is a young clerk who, as a confident sea swimmer, has been seconded from his office duties to serve as a lifeguard at the secluded seaside resort where his boss and some business friends have developed a simple idyll. His responsibility is to prevent the recurrence of a recent drowning tragedy. This remote unorthodox community is discovered by a young, terminally-ill, Utopianist  millionaire and with his small army of converts he attempts to coerce the Beach Beyond families to join his new society on an ocean island he has purchased.

The author, Jean Curlewis (born 7 February 1898), grew up in Mosman on the north shore of Sydney Harbour. Her mother, Ethel Turner, was a prolific author. She was educated at the Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School in Darlinghurst. In the aftermath of the First World War she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a relief nurse in Sydney during the severe influenza epidemic. While serving she contracted tuberculosis and she died of the disease in 1930. In the early 1920s she regularly contributed stories to a Sunbeams, a children's supplement, edited by her mother, in The Sunday Sun. Her first novel, The Ship That Never Set Sail, was published in 1921 and three novels followed in the following three years. She used the same illustrator, John Macfarlane, as her mother had engaged for her children’s books.

The central character, Merrick, is too young to have seen active service during the war. Many of the other male characters, however, were probably survivors of Gallipoli and the Western Front — although the fathers at Beach Beyond seem much older and wiser than Merrick, they have little children and are probably still young men. A minor character, Carstairs, for example, is described as an “English lad... with shrapnel chest wounds and a collapsed lung”. The author introduces several familiar features of the First World War mindset to the plot of the novel: young men facing imminent death; an armed enemy; and the determination of prisoners to escape. In one scene, Carstairs has organised a surf carnival but the weather conditions are severe and as a war veteran recognises the threat to life and wants it to be cancelled: “If I let it go on, we'll have a tragedy — if not several” and is willing to risk his job rather than “have the murder of 22 men on [his] hands”. Many young Australian officers had similar conviction at Gallipoli.

Through the Wheat

This novel, published in 1923, is a harrowing account of the combat experience of a brigade of United States Marines on the Western Front beginning in March 1918. The central character, William Hicks, had been “nine interminable months” in France prior to the events described in the novel but had yet to see “real action”. Many of the characters he describes in his novel are close representations of the actual personnel in the author’s platoon (for example, the platoon leader is referred to as Lieutenant Bedford; in Boyd’s platoon the leader was Lieutenant David Redford). This is largely a description of terrible bravery. One critic urged the reader to discard Stephen Crane’s iconic Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage:
“Take your copy... remove it respectfully from your library shelf and bestow it in the attic. For it is obsolete. It is superseded.”

The author, Thomas Boyd (born 3 July 1898), grew up in Ohio, the son of a Canadian father who died before Thomas was born. He was still at high school in Illinois when in May 1917 he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He served in France with the 3rd Platoon of the 75th Company. He received a citation and the Croix de Guerre honour for his part in the rescue of wounded soldiers near Vierzy on 19 July 1918. He was invalided by gassing on 4 October during the assault on Blanc Mont but returned to duty as part of the army of occupation in Germany. After being discharged in July 1919 he became a newspaper reporter in Minnesota. By 1921 he was responsible for a weekly literary page in the St Paul Daily News and had opened a bookshop. He became acquainted with important young writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, who were both born in Minnesota. Fitzgerald encouraged him to write about his war experiences and this led to his first novel, Through the Wheat.  Fitzgerald successfully lobbied to have it published after it was originally rejected. It was followed by another war novel in 1924, a collection of war short stories in 1925 and a sequel to Through the Wheat in 1935. In addition he had written two historical novels and several biographies prior to his sudden death in January 1935.

Boyd’s description of the carnage of the battlefield is both devastating and poignant. In one scene, Hicks is part of a group sent to bury the bodies of those killed:
“The late afternoon sun shone upon a group of mounds of fresh-dug dirt. Each mound was marked by two rough sticks, made to form a cross, at the juncture of which a small aluminium disc bearing a number was fastened.
After another day of combat, the careful collection and burial of bodies had been overturned:
“The ground was a dump-heap of bodies, limbs of trees, legs and arms indpendent of bodies, and pieces of equipment. Here was a combat pack forlorn, its bulge indicating such articles as a a razor, an extra shirt, the last letter from home, a box of hard bread. Another place a heavy shoe, with a wad of spiral puttee near by. Where yesterday’s crosses had been erected, a shell had churned a body out of its shallow grave, separating from the torso the limbs. The crosses themselves had been blown flat, as if by a terrific wind.”

A Week

This novel, published in 1922, is set in a small town in the Ural mountains. As the title suggests, the action takes place in a single week in the spring of 1921. While a party of soldiers is out of town to obtain wood for fuel, the town is attacked by a peasant force seeking to overturn the Communist revolution. The central character, Gornuikh, aged 19, emerges from the days of slaughter as the chief official of the town’s administration, replacing senior party members who had been killed in the revolt.

The author, Yuri Libedinsky (born 10 December 1898), was born in Odessa but grew up in the Ural mountains. He joined the Communist Party in 1920 and was a political commissar in the Red Army during the Civil War. Following the success of his debut novel (this one), he became involved in the Oktyabr literary movement that promoted proletarian literature. He wrote numerous political novels, including several set in the Caucasus. Two volumes of memoir were published, one in 1958 and another posthumously in 1962.

During the conflict between the Communist forces and the rebels, there are several instances when the First World War is recalled. In one scene, Seletsky, a battalion commander, “was riding from end to end of the battalion, assuring himself over and over again that everything had been done as it should have been done... machine guns in the centre and patrols sent out on the right flank, together with cavalry scouts”. He ponders the essence of warfare and thinks back seven years when he “led his company to the attack and was full of enthusiasm and dreamed of a heroic death for Russia” but then remembers how “in the opaque gloom of the trenches, what with illness, contusions and wounds, this enthusiasm had withered.”

The Prisoners of Mainz

This memoir, published in 1919, is a rare firsthand account of the ordinary experience of English prisoners of war in Germany in the last months of the war. It also provides an honest perspective of the widespread deprivation and malnutrition in Germany that had a devastating impact on the morale and welfare of the prisoners of war as well as the society outside the camps. The memoir includes illustrations by Captain Raphael Theodore Roussel, 3rd Battalion, Connaught Rangers, who was a fellow prisoner-of-war at the fortress of Mainz.

The author, Alec Waugh (born 8 July 1898), was the son of Arthur Waugh, a well-regarded author and literary critic. He received a commission as a lieutenant in the Dorset Regiment in May 1917. He was already a published author before he saw action on the Western Front. His semi-autobiographical novel, The Loom of Youth, based on his schooldays at Sherborne School in Dorset, was published in 1917 and sold well. At various points in The Prisoners of Mainz the author refers to a manuscript for another novel that he has been working on while a prisoner. His younger brother, Evelyn, was also drawn to a literary career and is today famous for his Brideshead Revisited and his Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour.

Alec Waugh was captured in the major retreat of late March 1918. After travelling for a fortnight, the contingent of prisoners arrived at Karlsruhe before being transferred to a new camp at Mainz. In a subsequent memoir he described his period of detention as an education: “The seven months I spent in the Citadel at Mainz were my equivalent for a university.” (Chapter 6 of My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits). Part of that sentiment is connected to the cultural activities and conversations he enjoyed with like-minded prisoners but it also reflects a sense of coming of age through the hardships of confinement. The prisoners were always hungry:
“I honestly believe that the Germans gave us as much food as they could... but it was precious little... There was only one proper meal a day: lunch. We then got two plates of soup, three or four potatoes and a spoonful or two of beetroot or cabbage.”
In this context, he discovered his friend Milton Hayes enjoying what Waugh deemed a strange selection of books (Lorna Doone, Pickwick Papers and The Knave of Diamonds). Hayes, though, saw the connection:
“Gratification of appetite. All these accounts of big meals and luxury. That's what gets over. People don't want psychology. But they'll smack their lips over the dresses and feasts in The Knave of Diamonds; and then look at the venison pasties in Lorna Doone and the heavy dinners in Pickwick. That's what people want. They have not got these things; but they want to be told that they exist somewhere and that they are there to be found.”

On his safe return to France at the end of the war, the author savoured the opportunity of proper nourishment:
“After having lived on tinned meats for eight months, it was a thrilling experience to find a menu that comprised fried sole and grouse, Brussel sprouts and iced grapes. Over my first dinner I took three hours.”




Although “as military regulations state... it is the duty of every prisoner of war to make immediate and strenuous effort to escape”, the fortress at Mainz proved impregnable. One officer, Colonel Wright, was persistent in attempting escape and almost successful:
“He had waited till it was quite dark and had carefully watched for the moment when the beat of the outside sentry carried his warders out of earshot. He had then lowered himself from the wall; and it was here that his luck deserted him. For a couple of lovers had selected that particular part of the battlements as a shelter for their amorous dalliance. And the point at which Colonel Wright... landed was removed from them by scarcely a dozen yards...He was instantly detected.”