Walsh, Jeffrey. American War Literature, 1914 to Vietnam. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982.

A wide investigation of war literature from WWI, WWII, and Vietnam. Isolates and explores representative themes and styles in the context of each war. Offers close readings of Hemingway and E.E. Cummings connecting literary modernism with the angst of military modernism.

“In such contexts war literature revealed its true political nature as ideological battleground as well as offering its readers a formal representation of warfare” (Walsh 3).

“compose a picture of deep angst, and indeed much war literature has, as its raison d’etre, a trajectory of protest” (Walsh 4).

“The myth of a lost generation of soldiers is one of the most potent imaginative impulses and orientations in the traditions of American war writing” (Walsh 5).

“America possesses a popular tradition of gunpowder and glory war literature . . . two popular novelists, Sidney Lanier and john Esten Cooke, serve as exemplars, for they fed the public with chivalric images of the soldier and of the genteel conduct of the war” (Walsh 14).

“What is curious though, in the case of poets such Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer is that they continued to write broadly within this tradition and to uphold its values when their experience of battle must have dictated otherwise. There is an extraordinary disparity at times between the public rhetoric of Seeger’s patriotic poems and the starkness of his private letters which portray the misery and death of his fellow soldiers” (Walsh 15).

“One of the clearest illustrations of the failure of American writers to grasp the reality of the war occurs in Edith Wharton’s short novel The Marne (1918)” (Walsh 17).

“Scott Fitzgerald in his short story ‘The Last of he Belles’ also contributes to the cultural glamorization of the war . . . In his fictional version of the soldier’s life, a heavily myth-dominated one, war has something of the illusory nature of fairy tale, where the young man romantically enters the field of battle in order to become a heroic ‘young crusader’” (Walsh 18).

“Every war has two histories in literature: it has its own internal history in which literature may record a particularity of circumstance; and it has another history, its place in that wider history of ents and nations that transcends the immediate and interprets situations more comprehensively in time. The most effective war writers are generally those who manage to live long enough after their military service to unite both kinds of history” (Walsh 25).

“Only art, the hero [The Enormous Room] hypothesises, has the potentiality to explode false social myths and discredit mechanistic ways of thinking” (Walsh 44).

“Like Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut later, E.E. Cummings envisioned war as manic incoherence whose illogic demanded a formal enactment commensurate to its madness” (Walsh 45).

“In such a world of loss and Angst, where war, alienation and death move deterministically at the core of behavior, no institutions either public or private can provide shelter against the larger social and cultural upheavals. The artist faced with evidence of disintegration mimes through his art responses to disorder” (Walsh 51).

“Both novelists [Hemingway and Cummings] exhibit the modernist instinct for breaking down in order to rebuild; in both instances stultified and conventional language, taken to symbolize defunct ideas and values, is rejected in favour of regenerative and innovatory language practice which is counteractive to war’s decimation” (Walsh 58).

Barbusse, Le Feu and Dos Passos Three Soldiers: “Ernest Hemingway, writing of Three Soldiers, praised its seminal influence” (Walsh 69).

“Such an impulse towards affirmation and renewal is wholly typical of the writing of lost-generation novelists” (Walsh 94).

First World War novels: “displayed impulses towards renewal and reconstruction”; “a faith in the potentiality of the hero to perform significant morally affirmative acts” (Walsh 112).

“The war novel treats modern civilization through the fictional attempts made by the novelist to order the larger experience of military conflict and to evaluate its human consequences” (Walsh 149).

“Considered as an extended imaginative discourse, American Second World War poetry presents considerable difficulty for anyone seeking to map out a critical diagram or model. The diversity of war poetry, written by both civilians and combatants alike, resists facile survey or definition, and probably all the critic can usefully achieve in an introductory study is to identify certain nodal points that seem to represent principal poetic configurations” (Walsh 152).

WWII Writers: “The recent past of warfare had been so thoroughly assimilated that the poet, such as Shapiro or Ciardi, who spoke of the continuity of war as a contingent social reality could assume that his educated readers shared his own dislike of patriotic rhetoric. Although some poets, such as Walter Benton, satirized the language of propaganda, this tradition of anti-war writing was by and large so well established that its potentialities had been exhaustively exploited earlier by such men as Cummings. This common ground between poet and reader, the shared dislike of war, presented civilian poets with the opportunity of writing of war with a conviction and authority that non-combatant writers of twenty years earlier did not possess, as a sequence of fine poems by such poets as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore and Allen Tate clearly proves” (Walsh 154).

“The most typical Second World War poet wrote like John Ciardi, in an ironic and slightly self-mocking tone” (Walsh 154).

“In the Second World War, the fight against fascism provided a ready legitimation for the involvement of the United States, and the American nation through its supply of material resources and manpower could fairly claim to have played a major part in the defeat of Nazism. Vietnam was different in that the war produced a backlash of public opinion, and ultimately it was impossible to win either militarily or politically” (Walsh 185).

“the fabrication of new myths” (Walsh 188). Catch-22; Slaughterhouse Five

“the symbolization of war as a labyrinth has now become firmly established in the way that earlier myths had been” (Walsh 189).

“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the idea of all-pervasive catch has become the most widely accepted image of battle Pentagon-style, its structures and forms” (Walsh 189).

“the nature of hegemonic relations” (Walsh 189). About Catch-22.

“His novel exploits the departure fro literal truth in order to arrive at a representation of the monolithic power of modern institutions, in this case conveyed through the metaphor of the army’s hierarchy. Such bewilderment experienced by the reader throughout the novel seems warranted if Catch-22 is read in this way as a new kind of satire, one whose elaborate fabrications communicate a profound national Angst” (Walsh 190-191).

“Heller’s sustained satire . . . suggests that the thrust of war writing in the sixties changed focus, from the heroic struggles of the battlefield to the absurdities of the communication process itself” (Walsh 191).

“Modern war in Catch-22 appears essentially to be an administrator’s war” (Walsh 192).

“traditional concepts of worth and epic heroism . . . prove obsolete and invalid . . . the Soldier in White, for example, parodies the wounded soldier-hero” (Walsh 194-195).

“The novel’s sophisticated formal debate is conducted internally within the first chapter when Vonnegut engages in one of his favourite occupations, the undermining of genre. Speaking in his own voice, he attacks by implication fiction which treaties war as a glamorous activity. He mocks the pedantry of the war writer by describing this own clumsy attempts to make fictional capital out of the war” (Walsh 196).

“Slaughterhouse Five reverses almost all of the generic traditions of the Hemingway-Mailer-James Jones combat-centered line of war fiction: the novel contains no scene of fighting; its controlling image of war is not the epic sweep of battle but the devastation of a beautiful undefended city and the mass death of its innocent citizens. Whereas previous traditions, and one thinks primarily of its extremities in, say, the Edenic and belle-lettristic metaphors of Alan Seeger in the First World War, often emphasized the litanies of battle as a ritual of imitation” (Walsh 196-197).

“Vonnegut utilizes such freedoms in a number of ways, principally to dramatise the uninterrupted rhythms of war, given expression in the novel through the simultaneity of the Second World War and Vietnam” (Walsh 199).

“Wilfred Owen, the English war poet, faced a similar problem in writing of the Frit World War, and his solution was to exploit as a working tradition the language of certain Romantic poets, such as Keats and Shelley, whom he admired and occasionally living ones such as Sassoon, blended with a modern technical knowledge. Such a resonant literary language supplied Owen with locutions in which he could speak compassionately bitterly and ironically in turns and write poetry counteractive to the dead rhetoric of slogan makers and politicians. I want to argue that Michael Herr’s idioms, drawn from a variety of contemporary sources, supply him with a vigorously esoteric analogical language in which to write of Vietnam. He writes epic biography in the slang rhythms of the street and the counter culture” (Walsh 204).

“The war is presented in a language that opposes it” (Walsh 206).