Book Review: Partisans & Poets

Reading Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War, in which the author uses a Gramscian analysis to prove that the pacifists and radicals didn’t accomplish anything in their opposition to the war. The fact that they kept the US out of war until 1917 and remained powerful enough then that Wilson delayed for nearly two months after the Germans restarted unrestricted submarine warfare before he finally declared war does not apparently count as an achievement.

Do the radicals ever actually accomplish anything in this kind of analysis? It always seems to boil down to “The radicals did this which may seem like an achievement, but they didn’t manage to create utopia and also anyway their achievement was totally co-optable by the Conservative Forces of Evil so it doesn’t count.”

It is super boring reading books when I can basically summarize the argument of every chapter before I even read it.

Also, I’m pretty sure that if we make “completely non-co-optable” our standard of success, then every reform movement - nay, every movement in the history of the world, anywhere on the political spectrum! - was a failure, because people are capable of interpreting art in ways that seem diametrically opposed to any straightforward reading of it. Look at Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the US,” which Reagan used as his campaign song!

Left-wing academics really ought to know this. Isn’t the eminent slipperiness of meaning one of the main points of deconstruction theory? Saying, “This kind of imagery would later become a staple of pro-war propaganda” is all but meaningless, because any kind of imagery can be twisted to mean almost anything you want it to.

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The valiant author also seems to have decided that any response to World War I other than doctrinaire pacifism was a priori wrong, and, moreover, that anyone who changed their mind about the was not responding to the fact that the war kept changing, but had simply allowed themselves to be brainwashed by propaganda.

He doesn’t present this as a proposition that he intends to defend, mind; he simply assumes that it is true and bases his analysis on it. Because clearly the highest duty of the historian is to strap historical figures to a Procrustean bed composed of modern-day, left-leaning, social justice morals and assail them for failing to fit. All while piously insisting that it is not the historians’ place to judge.

Postmodern histories overflow with sort of contradiction. (I would call it hypocrisy, but I’m not sure these historians are sufficiently self-aware to be hypocrites.) They have a pious horror about the idea of judgment, but that doesn’t prevent them from judging the hell out of everything.

Book Review: The Wind Boy

The local library has special children’s classics section. On the one hand, this is very convenient for me. They have all the Green Knowe books! And I can finally read The Wind in the Willows! Etc.

But I wonder if segregating out all the classic books makes actual children less likely to read them - if only because they aren’t on the regular shelves to stumble over by browsing.

Anyway, in the course of discovering this special shelf, I stumbled on Ethel Cook Eliot’s The Wind Boy, which I’ve been meaning to read for years. It features Gentian and Kay, a pair of refugee children - the book is deliberately obscure about exactly which war they are refugees from - who are having a hard time of it, because the rest of the villagers think they’re weird.

But who should appear, but a girl with a dress “the color of sunlight on a brown forest path when the sun is low behind the trees” and “sandals that looked as though she had made them herself out of bark and braided weeds.” Her name is Nan, and she has come to be their housemaid/nanny/etc, never mind they can’t pay.

It’s a bit like Mary Poppins, although the focus remains firmly on Kay and Gentian rather than their magical nanny. Gentian is named after a flower that has “all the sky folded around in its soft fringes.” This is, as you may be guessing, a book with a lot of nature imagery. As well as Mary Poppins, it reminds me a bit of a grown-up version of Barbara Newhall Follett’s The House without Windows

Grown-up, both in the sense that it has rather more plot and character development, but also in that it lacks the peculiar moral anarchy that gives Follett’s book its charm. The Wind Boy is a book with a number of morals, not least of them being “I don’t care if they talk funny, be nice to refugee children.”

But Nan and the fairies - or Clear Children, as they’re mostly called - although charming in themselves, also seem to be a metaphor for religious ideas, just as the Magic is a religious metaphor in Burnett’s The Secret Garden. (As a side note: Nana specifically tells us that she’s not a Clear Child or a fairy. It’s not at all clear what she is, which makes her the most interesting character to me.)

Perhaps the most obvious morality play is the scene where Gentian is weaving herself a nightgown of “starry-brightness” - dark blue fabric that seems thin but is so deep that you seem to be looking into it, like the night sky, to see the stars glimmering - and the weaving tangles up every time she has a selfish thought.

It also, peculiarly, tangles when she thinks how nice it would be to weave a robe for her mother. “This is kind of a robe each one must make for oneself,” the Twilight Girl, who taught her to weave, tells her gently. I’m not sure what life lesson we are meant to learn from this. (Balancing the duty you owe to others and the duty you owe to yourself is a common theme in early twentieth-century girls' books, though.)

In any case, it’s a rather sweet book, and I liked it enough to get Ethel Cook Eliot’s The Little House in the Fairy Wood, which is available free on Kindle. I don’t know if anyone else shares my strange affection for peculiar old children’s books with lots of nature, a little philosophizing, and outcroppings of fairies, but The Wind Boy is a good example of it if you do.