Smith / Bulawayo / Winterson 1914-Goodbye to All That

Writers on the Conflict Between Life and Art
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78227-120-8
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

A wide-ranging collection of reflective essays, to mark the centenary of the conflict that changed the world. In this collection of essays, ten leading writers from different countries consider the conflicts that have informed their own literary lives. 1914-Goodbye to All That borrows its title from Robert Graves's 'bitter leave-taking of England' in which he writes not only of the First World War but the questions it raised: how to live, how to live with each other, and how to write. Interpreting this title as broadly and ambiguously as Graves intended, these essays mark the War's centenary by reinvigorating these questions. The book includes Elif Shafak on an inheritance of silence in Turkey, Ali Smith on lost voices in Scotland, Xiaolu Guo on the 100,000 Chinese sent to the Front, Daniel Kehlmann on hypnotism in Berlin, Colm Toibin on Lady Gregory losing her son fighting for Britain as she fought for an independent Ireland, Kamila Shamsie on reimagining Karachi, Erwin Mortier on occupied Belgium's legacy of shame, NoViolet Bulawayo on Zimbabwe and clarity, Ales Steger on resisting history in Slovenia, and Jeanette Winterson on what art is for. Contributors include: Ali Smith - Scotland Ales Steger - Slovenia Jeanette Winterson - England Elif Shafak - Turkey NoViolet Bulawayo - Zimbabwe Colm Toibin - Ireland Xiaolu Guo - China Erwin Mortier - Belgium Kamila Shamsie - Pakistan Daniel Kehlmann - Germany 'Tender, compassionate humanity' Peter Conrad, Observer 'A global gathering of essayists here reimagine the war from a variety of vantage points' Guardian 'This superb collection of essays by some of today's leading writers stands out among the many books commissioned to mark the centenary of the First World War.' The Lady Lavinia Greenlaw's poetry includes The Casual Perfect and A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde. Other works include The Importance of Music to Girls and Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland. She was the first artist-in-residence at the Science Museum, and received the Ted Hughes Award for her sound work Audio Obscura. Her work for BBC radio includes documentaries about Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, the darkest place in England and Arctic light.

Ali Smith is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Her novels include The Accidental, There but for the and, most recently, How to Be Both, winner of the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She was born in Scotland and now lives in Cambridge.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Ali

Bulawayo, NoViolet

Winterson, Jeanette

Shamsie, Kamila

Kehlmann, Daniel

Steger, Ales

Mortier, Erwin

Sha, Elif

Shafak, Elif

Tóibín, Colm

Guo, Xiaolu

Greenlaw, Lavinia

Weitere Mitwirkende

Authors, Various

Leseproben

Did you know about this? I say to my father. There was a German linguist who went round the prisoner-of-war camps in the First World War with a recording device, a big horn-like thing like on gramophones, making shellac recordings of all the British and Irish accents he could find.

Oh, the first war, my father says. Well, I wasn’t born.

I know, I say. He interviewed hundreds of men, and what he’d do is, he’d ask them all to read a short passage from the Bible or say a couple of sentences or sing a song.

My father starts singing when he hears the word song.

He sings the first bit in a low voice then the next bit in a high voice. In both he’s wildly out of tune.

Listen, I say. He made recordings that are incredibly important now, because so many of the accents the men speak in have completely disappeared. Sometimes an accent would be significantly different, across even as little as the couple of miles between two places. And so many of those dialects have just gone. Died out.

Well girl that’s life in’t it? my father says.

He says it in his northern English accent still even though he himself is dead; I should make it clear here that my father’s been dead for five years. We don’t tend to talk much (not nearly as much as I do with my mother, who’s been dead for nearly twenty-five years). I think this might be because my father, in his eighties when he went, left the world very cleanly, like a man who goes out one summer morning in just his shirtsleeves knowing he won’t be needing a jacket that day.

I open my computer and get the page up where, if you click on the links, you can hear some of these recorded men. I play a couple of the Prodigal Son readings, the Aberdonian man and the man from somewhere in Yorkshire. The air round them cracks and hisses as loud as the dead men’s voices, as if it’s speaking too.

So I want to write this piece about the first war, I tell my father.

Silence.

And I want it to be about voice, not image, because everything’s image these days and I have a feeling we’re getting farther and farther away from human voices, and I was quite interested in maybe doing something about those recordings. But it looks like I can’t find out much else about them unless I go to the British Library, I say.

Silence (because he thinks I’m being lazy, I can tell, and because he thinks what I’m about to do next is really lazy too).

I do it anyway. I type the words First World War into an online search and go to Images, to see what comes up at random.

Austrians_executing_Serbs_1917.JPG.

Description:

English: World War 1 execution squad.

Original caption: “Austria’s Atrocities. Blindfolded and in a kneeling position, patriotic Jugo-Slavs in Serbia near the Austrian lines were arranged in a semicircle and ruthlessly shot at a command.”

Photo by Underwood and Underwood. (War Dept.)
EXACT DATE SHOT UNKNOWN NARA FILE:
165-WW-179A-8 WAR & CONFLICT BOOK NO. 691
(Released to Public).

There’s a row of uniformed men standing in a kind of choreographed curve, a bit like a curve of dancers in a Busby Berkeley. They’re holding their rifles three feet, maybe less, away from another curved row of men facing them, kneeling, blindfolded, white things over their eyes, their arms bound behind their backs. The odd thing is, the men with the rifles are all standing between two railway tracks, which curve as well, and they stretch away out of the picture, men and rails, like it could be for miles.

It resembles the famous Goya picture. But it also looks modern, because of the tracks.

There’s a white cloud of dust near the centre of the photo because some of these kneeling men are actually in the process of being shot as the photo’s being taken (EXACT DATE SHOT). And then there are the pointed spikes hammered in the ground in front of every one of the kneeling prisoners. So that when you topple the spike will go through you too. In case you’re not dead enough after the bullet.

Was never a one for musicals, me, my father says.

What? I say.

Never did like, ah, what’s his name, either. Weaselly little man.

Astaire, I say.

Aye, him, he says.

You’re completely wrong, I say. Fred Astaire was a superb dancer. (This is an argument we’ve had many times.) One of the best dancers of the twentieth century.

My father ignores me and starts singing about caravans and gypsies again. he sings. .

I look at the line of men with the rifles aimed. It’s just another random image. I’m looking at it and I’m feeling nothing. If I look at it much longer something in my brain will close over and may never open again.

Anyway, you know all about it already. You don’t need me. You did it years ago, my father says, at the high school.

Did what? I say.

First World War, he says.

So I did, I say. I’d forgotten.

Do you remember the nightmares you had? he says.

No, I say.

With the giant man made of mud in them, the man much bigger than the earth?

No, I say.

It’s when you were anti-nuclear, he says. Remember? There was all the nuclear stuff leaking onto the beach in Caithness. Oh, you were very up in arms. And you were doing the war, same time.

I don’t. I don’t remember that at all.

What I remember is that we were taught history by a small, sharp man who was really clever, we knew he’d got a first at university, and he kept making a joke none of us understood, he kept saying, and we all laughed when he did, though we’d no idea why. That year was First World War, Irish Famine and Russian Revolution; next year was Irish Home Rule and Italian and German Unifications, and the books we studied were full of grainy photographs of piles of corpses whatever the subject.

One day a small girl came in and gave Mr MacDonald a slip of paper saying, Please, sir, she’s wanted at the office, and he announced to the class the name of one of our classmates: Carolyn Stead. We all looked at each other and the whisper went round the class: Carolyn’s dead! Carolyn’s dead!

Ha ha! my father says.

We thought we were hilarious, with our books open at pages like the one with the mustachioed men, black as miners, sitting relaxing in their open-necked uniforms round the cooking pot in the mud that glistened in huge petrified sea waves over their heads. Mr MacDonald had been telling us about how men would be having their soup or stew and would dip the serving spoon in, and out would come a horse hoof or a boot with a foot still in it.

We learnt about the arms race. We learnt about Dreadnoughts.

Meanwhile, some German exchange students came, from a girls’ school in Augsburg.

Oh they were right nice girls, the German girls, my father says.

I remember not liking my exchange student at all. She had a coat made of rabbit hair that moulted over everything it touched, and a habit of picking her nose. But I don’t tell him that. I tell him, instead, something I was too ashamed to say to him or my mother out loud at the time, about how one of the nights we were walking home from school with our exchange partners a bunch of boys followed us shouting the word Nazi and doing Hitler salutes. The Augsburg girls were nonplussed. They were all in terrible shock anyway, because the TV series called had aired in Germany for the first time just before they came. I remember them trying to talk about it. All they could do was open their mouths and their eyes wide and shake their heads.

My father’d been in that war, in the Navy. He never spoke about it either, though sometimes he still had nightmares. , our mother would say (she’d been in it too, joined the WAF in 1945 as soon as she was old enough). My brothers and sisters and I knew that his own father had been in the First World War, had been gassed, had survived, had come back ill and had died young, which was why our father had had to leave school at thirteen.

, he said once when I asked him about his father. . When he died himself, in 2009, my brother unearthed a lot of old photographs in his house. One is of thirty men all standing, sitting and lying on patchy grass round a set of First World War tents. Some are in dark uniform, the others are in thick white trousers and jackets and one man’s got a Red Cross badge on both his arms. They’re all arranged round a sign saying SHAVING AND CUTTING TENT, next to a man in a chair, his head tipped back and his chin covered in foam. There’s a list of names on the back. The man on the grass third from the left must be my grandfather.

We’d never even seen a picture of him till then. One day, in the 1950s, after my parents had been married for several years, a stranger knocked at the door and my mother opened it and the stranger said my father’s name and asked did he live here and my mother said yes, and the stranger said, who are you, and my mother said, I’m his wife, who’re you? and the stranger said, pleased to meet you, I’m his brother. My father said almost nothing when it came to the past. My...