War, Memory, and Eros

I’ve blogged here before about the work of Paul Fussell, and fate has thrown me an opportunity to do so again.

Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism when it appeared, and re-reading it today it is not hard to see why. A book primarily about the British experience in the First World War, it is one of the most beautifully written and evocative scholarly books on war I have ever encountered, strange as it may seem to call a book on horror and tragedy and waste “beautifully written.” It’s a rare example of a book that I think every English speaker who aspires to be well-educated ought to read.

So to my considerable delight, I discovered that Sterling Publishing has recently put together a handsome illustrated edition of Fussell’s classic. My copy arrived in the mail last week, and I have been examining it with great interest since. I even found something of interest for ErosBlog.

Fussell has a section entitled “Mars and Eros,” in which he discusses, among other things, the way in which the homoerotic tradition in Victorian and Edwardian Britain influenced the way the war, and in particular soldiers in the war, were perceived and represented. (The ways in which art, particularly literature, structures people’s experience of events is a central theme of the book.) This is a rich topic, worthy of whole books in itself, and the compilers of the new edition came up with a picture of this memorial as an illustration:

This is the “Boy David” memorial to the Machine Gun Corps in London. The inscription on it reads “Erected to commemorate the glorious heroes of the machine gun corps who fell in the Great War.” And fell they did: according to the Wikipedia article on the MGC, of 170,500 officers and men who served in the First World War, 12,498 were killed.

More than all the adult men in the town I grew up in. More than all the male students at a pretty large university. Most of them young, some of them probably still in their teens. Cut down.

And they are memorialized with this:

A beautiful boy. An erotic image of one, I think few would deny.

Inappropriate on a war memorial? No. Entirely appropriate. A reminder of what war takes away.

Jane’s Victory In Europe

As today, May 8, is VE day, it seemed only appropriate to contribute a timely ErosBlog post.

I have always admired Paul Fussell as one of our most elegant writers on war. An infantryman gravely wounded in France in March 1945 who went on to become a Professor of English, Fussell has given us three magnificent books on the British and American experience in the First and Second World Wars: The Great War and Modern Memory (about the First World War), Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, and Fussell’s own memoir of his experiences as a soldier and after, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic.

Wartime contains a chapter entitled “Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Far Too Little,” which might be of especial interest to ErosBlog readers. Fussell comments on the sparseness of erotic material available in the British and American world of the 1940s:

“Now, when the urban newsstand flaunts its pornographic wares which, if not heady enough, can be eked out with materials available at the nearest Adult Bookshop, and when your local X-rated film theatre routinely and legally depicts scenes formerly viewable only at stag parties, it is impossible to realize that things were once quite otherwise….There was no Playboy_ or Penthouse or Hustler and certainly no Squeeze, Rapture, or Adult American Dreambook. The sexiest magazine generally available was probably Esquire, with its drawings by “Petty” and “Varga” [sic?] of languorous girls with immensely long legs — thought more exciting then than now — and precisely delineated breasts.”

One wonders how our boys in uniform got through the war at all. Fussell goes on to say:

“Throughout the war the London Daily News ran a comic strip depicting a scantily-clad ‘Jane,’ much relished by the troops. Only on VE-Day did she go so far as to take off everything. This created a sensation, and many were not sure what they thought about it.”

I’ve often wondered about this particular May 8, 1945 strip. You can find some stuff on the Internet about Jane, but my casual search didn’t turn up the strip to which Fussell was referring. I had always imagined some sort of erotic payoff for the victors.

In a sense this turned out to be true, but not as I had imagined. Recently I acquired a book that contained the strip as part of its center plates, right adjacent to a portrait of a smiling Clement Atlee. (The book is Peter Clarke’s The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire.)

Jane prepares to celebrate VE-Day.

This leads to an unfortunate scene…

..that concludes with a joke in dubious taste.

Echoing a sentiments found in Clarke and Fussell, I must say that there seems to have been quite a shift in social mores between then and now. Or even between then and 1970. In 1945, a Playboy pictorial would have been beyond the pale. But something that looks suspiciously like a group assault on a young woman was the occasion for a joke in a widely-read newspaper.