mewsings in August 2021

Although it’s far too well known in the English-speaking world by its translated title, Remarque’s original German title, Im Westen nichts Neues, means something more like “Nothing New on the Western Front”. While the English title conjures up a deceptive lull before the storm, the original German is an ironic comment on the death of yet another soldier, and perhaps a whole generation, being nothing sufficiently new to be worth reporting.

The novel was first serialised at the end of 1928, then published in book form in January 1929. It became an instant bestseller. By the end of that year more than thirty translations had appeared, followed in 1930 by an Academy Award-winning Hollywood film directed by Lewis Milestone (and produced by Carl Laemmle Jr., of Universal Horror fame). When the film reached Germany, the National Socialists, newly voted into being the second largest political party in the country, campaigned to have it banned for its supposed negative take on the “reputation of the German soldier”. They saw their success on this front as their first major victory over democratic Weimar Germany. (When they achieved full power in 1933, Remarque’s novel was one of the first books to be publicly burned.)

As a novel, All Quiet on the Western Front doesn’t really have a story. (The very lack of anything by way of a change in the narrator’s fortunes — a way out of his Hell — let alone one due to his own actions, could well be part of the point.) There’s nothing he can do but go where he’s told to go and try to survive. Rather, the novel does its best to present us with all the basic types of situation a WWI foot-soldier might have found himself in: initial training in bootcamp, waiting for orders near the front, at the front and under fire, on leave and unable to adjust, on duty guarding POWs, back at the front and stuck in no-man’s-land, one-on-one combat with an enemy in a bomb crater, in hospital watching fellow patients being taken one by one to the Death Room, then back at the front once more…

From the start, it feels like a sourcebook of all those telling moments you find in so many subsequent novels, films, and TV shows, which illustrate the brutality and horror of modern warfare in a single image. One after another, like a series of trump cards being laid down, you get them in single-paragraph snapshots: helplessly listening to screaming, wounded horses; watching a beloved friend dying in a hospital and wondering who will get his boots (“For us, it is only the facts that count. And good boots are hard to come by.”); the young recruit the narrator takes under his wing, telling him all the tricks on how to survive at the front, only for a random chance to blow him away; the wounded comrade the narrator carries back singlehandedly for medical help, only to find, on arrival, he’s been dead for some time…

What will quickly become clichés of modern warfare fiction are all there: the comrade who, despite the privations of the front-line, can always get hold of those little luxuries; the ultra-strict training officer who goes over the top in breaking his charges; the old men at home who know all about how the war should be fought; the dead enemy soldier with the photo of his wife and child in his wallet… But there are also so many scenes you don’t get in subsequent films and fiction, and which must have really been shocking to those first readers — those who hadn’t witnessed such scenes themselves — for instance, when the narrator and a fellow soldier pass an all-but denuded forest, and speculate idly on why the corpses hanging in the trees are all naked. It’s because they’ve been blown out of their uniforms, it’s just a thing that happens.

What probably seemed among its most notable qualities back then — and certainly one that riled the Nazis — is it’s not pro- or anti-German. It takes no real political sides at all. As the translator of the edition I read, Brian Murdoch, points out in his afterword, Remarque’s narrator almost never uses the word “enemy”. The soldiers are all too aware that the people they’re fighting are simply recruits like themselves:

“‘It’s funny when you think about it,’ continues Krop. ‘We’re out here defending our homeland. And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well. Which of us is right?’”

To these foot-soldiers, the war’s no longer a thing to win or lose, it’s a thing to endure and survive — and survive at the most basic level:

“We set out as soldiers… we reach the zone where the front line begins, and we have turned into human animals.”

Remarque’s main point, though, is how the war was harshest on one specific generation:

“Things are particularly confused for us twenty-year-olds… The older men still have firm ties to their earlier lives—they have property, wives, children, jobs and interests, and these bonds are all so strong that the war can’t break them. But for us twenty-year-olds there are only our parents, and for some of us a girlfriend.”

This is a generation that went straight from school to the front line, egged on by ultra-patriotic schoolmasters preaching heroism and a greater Germany, and who had no chance to experience anything like the life they’d been brought up to expect. Suddenly, once the shells started falling, they find it has all been a lie, and none of them has had the chance to build up any experience to the contrary:

“They [our teachers] were supposed to be the ones who would help us eighteen-year-olds to make the transition, who would guide us into adult life, into a world of work, of responsibilities, of civilised behaviour and progress—into the future… But the first dead man that we saw shattered this conviction. We were forced to recognise that our generation was more honourable than theirs…”

Education suddenly means nothing, because it had all been preparation for a completely different world:

“Nobody taught us at school how to light a cigarette in a rainstorm, or how it is still possible to make a fire even with soaking wet wood—or that the best place to stick a bayonet is into the belly, because it can’t get jammed in there, the way it can in the ribs.”

Something underlined most poignantly by another comrade’s death:

“Bertinck has been hit in the chest… After a few minutes he sinks down like a rubber tyre when the air escapes. What use is it to him now that he was so good at mathematics at school?”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) had written one previous novel, published in 1920, under his birth name Erich Remark. He changed the spelling of his surname to the older Remarque (his grandfather’s name) to distance himself from that first novel, Die Traumbude, which he’d begun before the war. It has, apparently, never been translated. (The middle name “Maria” he changed — his original being Paul — in tribute to his mother.)

After having his writing banned by the Nazis, he moved to Switzerland, then to America, and then back to Switzerland in 1948, where in 1958 he married ex-Mrs Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard. He published a kind-of sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back, in 1931.

Without planning to, I’ve been working through some Carnegie Medal winners recently, starting with Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows, then Margaret Mahy’s The Haunting. I’ve written about Penelope Lively’s teen fiction before, but this is her Carnegie Medal winner, from 1973. (And just as both Westall and Mahy were the only writers to have won the Carnegie twice, Lively is the only writer to have won both the Carnegie and the Booker Prize.)

The Ghost of Thomas Kempe has been described (by Colin Manlove, in From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England) as “the best of Lively’s books in the fantastical vein”. Manlove goes on to say it’s “possibly indebted to Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man” as it “deals with an unnatural survival from the past”, though Lively’s previous YA books also dealt with an “unnatural survival from the past” — and I’ve heard that her adult fiction does too, though in a non-supernatural way — so no influence from Amis is necessary.

In Kempe, James Harrison and his family have just moved into East End Cottage in Ledsham, Oxfordshire, a small town that seems to encapsulate Lively’s picture of the world as a place whose heart belongs to the past, but which is slowly being crowded out by modernity:

“It was a very old place, half way between a village and a small town, and had, somehow, the air of being dwarfed by the present. New housing estates were mushrooming now on two sides of it, but the centre remained as it must always have been…”

Just before James takes residence in his new attic bedroom, it, too, has been modernised, by builders who found (and broke) a small sealed bottle in the wall by the window. Unwittingly, they’ve released the ghost of Thomas Kempe Esq., who died in 1629. A restless, poltergeist-like spirit, Kempe is itching to get back to his old ways of making himself rather bullyingly useful to the people of Ledsham, offering such services as “Sorcerie, Astrologie, Geomancie, Alchemie, Recoverie of Goodes Lost, Physicke”. He decides James is to be his apprentice (and representative), and begins posting notices around the town to let it be known that “I doe once more practise my arte and cunninge in this house.”

But nobody wants “Sorcerie, Astrologie, Geomancie”, etc., nowadays, so Kempe starts attacking what he sees as his modern rivals. He trashes the local GP’s office (“Physicke”), causes havoc in an archaeological dig (“Recoverie of Goodes Lost”), interferes with the TV whenever it shows a weather forecast (that, too, being one of his services), and generally gives the police, the vicar, and an elderly neighbour, Mrs Verity, who Kempe decides is a witch, a hard time.

The trouble is, because Kempe cannot be seen, and because he mentions James’s name as his apprentice in several of his notices — and because most of his activity takes place in the Harrison household, around James — James gets the blame. James was a bit of a troublemaker beforehand, but quickly comes to resent being blamed for (for instance) pulling the chair out from under the vicar the moment before he sits down, or altering a pharmacy prescription for his sister’s cough to something more herbalistic. He certainly resents the suggestion he might have thrown a brick through someone’s window or chalked insults on Mrs Verity’s wall.

But James is caught between two intolerables. He doesn’t want to be Kempe’s apprentice (which would be just encouraging the self-important old so-and-so, and trapping himself into doing all sorts of things he doesn’t want to do, like having to tell the archaeologists to stop their work, or convincing the people of Ledsham Mrs Verity is a witch, and probably having to learn Latin, too), but if he resists, the poltergeist activity kicks off, and his parents simply blame him for all the breakages and nasty tricks. When he says it’s a ghost, they take that to be one more desperate attempt at the “it wasn’t me” defence. His sister, used to being at odds with him, won’t listen. Even his new friend, bespectacled Simon, never wholly believes. As James says:

“Nobody believes in him except me… And I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.”

If The Ghost of Thomas Kempe wasn’t basically humorous, it could easily be awful for James, considering how harassed and isolated he becomes. It’s not like Lively’s previous go at the theme of a sorcerous personage from the past being summoned into the present (The Whispering Knights) where it’s three children who summon a witch, so at least there’s three of them to share the burden — and it’s definitely their fault. Nor is it quite like William Mayne’s It, another book on the same theme, whose protagonist finds herself singled out for the unwanted devotions of a witch’s familiar, because in her case she’s believed when she talks to an adult about it, it’s just that the adult can’t do anything to help. In fact, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe has close ties with both the other Carnegie winners I’ve reviewed recently, as they’re all about children having to deal with troublesome supernatural incursions while being blamed for their ill-effects, with varying degrees of isolation and distress. (Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows is the one whose protagonist is most responsible for the supernatural incursion, but only because he has the most emotional baggage to deal with anyway.)

One theme that pops up in Kempe but doesn’t get fully developed is when James starts to become aware of his own childhood as just one more aspect of the flow of history. He’s startled, for instance, to find old Mrs Verity telling tales of how naughtily she behaved as a girl, and so comes to see her as still partly a child. And the historical Arnold Luckett (a boy of James’s age who dealt with a bout of Kempe disturbances in the previous century, who James reads about), pops up as an old man in a portrait in the local school. In both cases, we see childhood put in its context as a stage of life that leads to adulthood, but also never quite goes away.

Perhaps we’re supposed to see Thomas Kempe’s selfish insistence the world returns to his idea of how it should be as a form of childishness? Certainly, his poltergeist tantrums are. And the inverse of that idea — the idea that being a child is like being a ghost — comes out in James’s realisation that “as far as most grown-ups were concerned, children were invisible”, therefore ghost-like, but also likely to cause poltergeist-like trouble.

Among Lively’s YA books, I still prefer The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy, perhaps because of its slightly more serious tone and folk-horror feel of dealing with things pagan, primal and dangerous, but as far as Lively’s “unnatural survival from the past” theme goes, I think The Ghost of Thomas Kempe is more successful than her other two YA books I’ve covered, Astercote and The Whispering Knights (though it doesn’t have as adventurous a conclusion as either).

The Ghost of Thomas Kempe was read by Ronald Pickup on Jackanory in December 1977, and adapted into a US TV movie in 1979, which sets the action in a modern-looking house in the USA, thereby immediately compromising the influence-from-the-past theme. I haven’t watched the whole thing, though (the one version on YouTube has a weirdly warping picture), so it may improve.