March 28, 2014 4:52 p.m. ET
When Wilfred Owen discovered that Shelley used to visit the sick and poor of the Thames Valley, he was overjoyed: "I knew the lives of men who produced such marvelous verse could not be otherwise than lovely." This is not the usual view. There are too many cases of great poets who were selfish, cold and cadging, indifferent to the welfare of their nearest and dearest—Percy Bysshe Shelley himself not excluded. But Wilfred Owen was a lovely man.
Wilfred Owen
By Guy Cuthbertson
Yale, 346 pages, $40
His life was as short as Keats's. They both died at the age of 25, but their lives feel shorter still, because these slight, bright-eyed men come across as so incurably youthful. Owen had a special affinity for children of all ages, and he thought that any true poet ought to be childish. "Now, what's your Poet, but a child of nine?" he once asked.
But, like Keats, whom he worshiped, Owen also had a sharp intelligence and a searing wit, which makes the reader jump out of any sentimental reverie. His verse is intensely realistic and direct. And so are his letters. Guy Cuthbertson, author of the latest biography of Owen, rightly says that the letters achieve "Matthew Arnold's aim for literature, that it should see the object in itself as it really is." There is no English poet, except Keats again, whose letters I would rather have by my bedside.
It is a pity then that Mr. Cuthbertson does not quote as copiously from them as did the poet Jon Stallworthy in his wonderful 1974 life of Owen. Instead Mr. Cuthbertson tends to wander off into digressions on other writers and artists who don't really seem to have much do with Owen. In the space of two pages discussing Owen's teaching English in France in 1913-14, he gives us little riffs on Joyce in Berlin, Toulouse-Lautrec in Bordeaux and Isherwood in Berlin. Elsewhere we are told about the painter Augustus John's concussion, W.H. Auden's ideal college for bards and a character called "Mr. Owen" in a novel by Agatha Christie. I'd prefer more of the poet and less of this motley cast.
Wilfred Owen was born in 1893, the son of a stationmaster on the Welsh borders. Mr. Cuthbertson seems keen to prove that Owen was not really Welsh at all, although his name and his short stature suggest otherwise. Besides, at Oswestry, Shrewsbury and Liverpool, where he was brought up and educated at unremarkable schools, he was surrounded by Welshmen who had spilled over the borders. I don't think it's too fanciful to see something Welsh, too, about his flaring-up and forgiving nature and the easy way he made friends when he wanted to, although his temperament was shy and naturally aloof.
Owen was certainly resentful about the start in life he was dealt. Mr. Cuthbertson rightly points out that few writers want to be lower-middle-class—especially if they feel, as the Owens did, that they had come down in the world since Wilfred's grandfather had lived in a big house and served as mayor of Oswestry. It was "a terrible regret" for Wilfred that he did not go to Oxford instead of Reading, a dim college that was scarcely yet a university. But even his complaints of his modest origins were partly playful, as was his father Tom's occasional claim that he was really a baronet in disguise. And his family was not without artistic ambition or talent. His father had a fine operatic tenor, his mother loved art galleries, and his brother became an artist and a writer too. Owen had an unquenchable gaiety that made people seek his company. He said himself, "you would not know me for the poet of sorrows."
Was he gay in the modern sense, and how relevant was this to his life as a poet? Gay-ish, and not very, Mr. Cuthbertson suggests, and convincingly so. The impression he gave to his friends was virginal, even sexless. There is no doubt that the most important thing in his life, apart from poetry, was his mother, Susan, to whom he wrote unceasingly: "I stand (yes and sit, lie, kneel & walk, too,) in need of some tangible caress from you . . . my affections are physical as well as abstract—intensely so." She certainly mothered, if not smothered, her eldest son. Well into his teens, she was still peeling his apples for him. Yet Owen did not feel short of experience. He said before he joined the army in 1915: "I know I have lived more than my twenty-one years, many more; and so have a start of most lives."
He had not volunteered with alacrity. In fact, he was tempted to dawdle on at Bordeaux, where he was teaching. Rather than being keen to make the supreme sacrifice, "I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of this deflowering of Europe."
But join up he did, and he turned himself into a popular and efficient officer with the same brisk dispatch that he had mastered the techniques of verse—and added a few of his own, notably those slithery half-rhymes that give his elegies such a haunting quality (leaves/lives, ferns/fauns, cauldron/children). From the start, he had none of the illusions that are romantically attributed to war poets: "I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and the face-to-face death, as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one's own mouth (for all are devil ridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious."
It is impossible to read a life of Owen, as it is a life of Keats, without coming close to tears. And Mr. Cuthbertson's heart is in the right place. But he seems strangely eager to hurry over those tragic last two years as if they were too much for him. There were three momentous episodes in Owen's war service in France: when he was blown up at St. Quentin in April 1917 and invalided home with shellshock; then, after his return to France in September 1918, when he won the Military Cross in a ferocious hand-to-hand attack at Joncourt; and finally, on Nov. 4 that year, when he was killed leading his company across the Ors Canal under relentless shell and machine-gun fire. Up to the very last, Owen described all this with his unforgettable candor and vivacity in his letters, while the military archives make clear in detail just how suicidal the missions were. Unfortunately, each time Mr. Cuthbertson telescopes what happened into a couple of sentences. Here's a snatch of what we are missing, from an Oct. 8, 1918, letter to his mother:
All one day we could not move from a small trench, though hour by hour the wounded were groaning just outside. Three stretcher-bearers who got up were hit, one after one. I had to order no one to show himself after that, but remembering my own duty, and remembering also my forefathers the agile Welshmen of the mountains I scrambled out myself & felt an exhilaration in baffling the Machine Guns by quick bounds from cover to cover. After the shells we had been through, and the gas, bullets were like the gentle rain from heaven.
The news of his death reached his parents at noon on the day the Armistice was declared. The bells were still ringing in the local church when the little chimes at the Owens' front door announced the fatal telegram.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
—Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
Wilfred Owen's orisons are still ringing in our heads.
—Mr. Mount's books include "Cold Cream" and "The New Few, or a Very British Oligarchy."
