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Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe (1982)

This is a good, chunky selection of British writing from the Second World War, poems and stories and essays either written and published during the actual conflict or memoirs of wartime experiences published a little later. It consists of 400 densely-printed pages in the Penguin paperback, and features work from some 56 authors: 18 prose writers and 37 poets.

Poets (37)

Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, Henry Reed, Edith Scovell, Henry Treece, Herbert Cory, C. Day-Lewis, Terence Tiller, George Barker, John Pudney, Charles Causley, Roy Fuller, Roy Campbell, Alun Lewis, W.J. Turner, W.R. Rodgers, Sidney Keyes, Mervyn Peake, Robert Graves, Rayner Heppenstall, Keith Douglas, R.N. Currey, Alan Rook, Fancis Scarfe, Timothy Corsellis, Kathleen Raine, F.T. Prince, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, William Empson, Stevie Smith, Vernon Watkins, David Gascoyne, Paul Dehn, T.S. Eliot, G.S. Fraser, Stephen Spender, W.J. Turner.

Short stories (9)

Elizabeth Bowen, William Sansom, William Chappell, Fred Urquhart, James Hanley, J. Maclaren-Ross, V.S. Pritchett, Glyn Jones, Elizabeth Berridge.

Factual memoirs/reportage (5)

  • Bryher – recalls her impressions of Blitz London upon her return to it from Switzerland
  • John Sommerfield – description of his squadron travelling through North-East India to the front line against the Japs in Burma
  • Richard Hillary – description of learning to fly a spitfire
  • Keith Douglas – how he disobeyed orders to rejoin his tank regiment in the desert west of Cairo
  • Denton Welch – a very home front story of being taken to meet the eccentric painter Walter Sickert

Essays (3)

By George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Virginia Woolf.

Structure

The pieces are divided into seven themed sections, being:

  • The City
  • The Sky
  • The Sea
  • Declarations
  • The Patient Khaki Beast (i.e the soldier)
  • Confessions and Conclusions
  • The Dark

Introduction

In his introduction the book’s editor, Ronald Blythe, explains that the 1930s was the decade of grand declarations, literary cliques and widespread left-wing or even communist confidence that the British establishment was about to be swept away in a wonderfully liberating revolution (traits I noted in my review of Robin Skelton’s Poetry of the Thirties).

The Spanish Civil War

However, a great deal of that fervour to change the world drained away during the three gruelling, disillusioning years of the Spanish Civil War (see my review of the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse) in which several of the youngest, keenest English poets were killed and those who survived were thoroughly disillusioned, above all by the revelation of Stalin’s willingness to betray the revolutionary cause in order to further Russia’s national agenda.

(Stalin didn’t want there to be a successful communist revolution in Spain because he thought it would alarm and alienate the governments of France and Britain, which he needed to keep sweet as potential allies against the obviously growing threat from Nazi Germany. Therefore Stalin did not want there to be a successful revolution in Spain. It took British communist volunteers in Spain a long time to grasp the Realpolitik of the situation and when it did, disillusion was total.)

And then the outbreak of the Second World War happened so quickly. The nationalist leader General Franco declared the Spanish Civil War over on 1 April 1939. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed four and a half months later, on 23 August 1939, and one week later, on 1 September, Hitler invaded Poland.

The people of Europe, and their writers, artists and intellectuals, were thrown into six long years of chaos, bloodshed and holocaust. The world had never before seen destruction and mass murder on such a scale.

Retreat to the personal

Against this background of political disillusion (on the Left), a widespread feeling that the entire political class had let them down, and the universal sense of forces too vast to comprehend tearing the world apart, the writers who flourished during the Second World War retreated back to the personal.

If there was a common theme found across many of the writers during the Second World War, it was the notion that the entire world was being darkened by vast totalitarian movements devoted to wiping out the personal life, to exterminating the individual. Therefore, the greatest protest against the forces of darkness was to assert the importance of individual thoughts and feelings. As so often, W.H. Auden managed to summarise the mood perfectly in his famous poem, September 1 1939.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

But Auden had left Britain for America in January 1939, and so was hors du combat. The writers left in Blighty, men and women, either too old to serve or conscripted into the forces, all had to find their own ways of expressing themselves and showing their affirming flames.

So what you have in this book is a wide range of personal reactions to the disaster the world found itself in, writings which are hard to generalise about because they are often so distinctive, not to say idiosyncratic: from the obliquely poetic short story of Elizabeth Bowen, to the intensely religious verse of Edith Sitwell, from the brisk no-nonsense memoir of Bryher to the visionary description of a torpedoed ship going down by James Hanley, from John Sommerfield’s larky description of a long journey by train, paddleboat, train and lorry to the front line in Burma to William Sansom’s brilliant accounts of being a firefighter in Blitzed London, the collection is characterised by its variety of location and event and style.

The collection itself is obviously divided into two distinct forms, verse and prose, with prose further sub-divided into fiction and factual.

Poetry

Having lived through the experimental Modernism and free verse of the 1920s, and the reversion to much more traditional forms with regular stanzas and regular rhyme schemes of the 1930s, poets of the 1940s felt free to pick and choose from either approach as suited their purpose.

So there’s quite a variety of verse forms, but I think I’m right in saying not much of it feels new. Not formally. But in terms of content, there is much that feels new, and I think can be divided into two broad categories, the realistic and the fantastical.

The New Apocalypse and Neo-Romanticism

The war saw an intensification of an aesthetic strand which had existed throughout the 1930s, an interest in the English countryside reimagined as a place of spirits and gods and paganism and Christianity interpreted in its wildest, most apocalyptic shapes. This trend had overlapped with some of the spirit of 1930s Surrealism and had been a reaction against the lucid, rational and political concerns of the dominant school of Thirties poetry.

In the fateful year, 1939, the best writings from this tradition were brought together in a volume titled The New Apocalypse with the result that a ‘movement’ of sorts was named after the book. To quote Wikipedia:

The New Apocalypse (1939)… was edited by J. F. Hendry (1912 to 1986) and Henry Treece. There followed the further anthologies The White Horseman (1941) and Crown and Sickle (1944).

The New Apocalyptics reacted against the political and social realism of the 1930s with its loving descriptions of factories and arterial roads and motorcycles and electricity pylons, and the belief that human nature was rational and could be rationally appealed to by rational argument. The name itself referenced D. H. Lawrence’s posthumous collection, Apocalypse (1931) and the poets in this tradition turned their backs on the Modern World and plunging into a heady stew of surrealism, myth, and expressionism. And then, of course, the world war broke out and quickly outdid their wildest imaginings of destruction, extreme situations and death.

George Barker

In this volume the Apocalyptics are represented by poems by Henry Treece and George Barker. Blythe includes in his book a very useful 21-page section called ‘Notes on Contributors’ which gives potted biographies and select reading lists for all his authors, and spends half a page explaining Barker’s motivation: the preface to the Apocalypse volume spoke of ‘word explosions’, of their poetry’s ‘air of something desperately snatched from dream or woven around a chime of words, are the results of disintegration, not in ourselves, but in society…’ (G.S. Fraser, another founder member of the New Apocalyptics, quoted page 376).

But to be blunt, I dislike the examples of Barker’s poetry given here. If this is the best, I’m not impressed.

From Sacred Elegy by George Barker

From this window where the North Atlantic
Takes the crow in my mind home in a short line
Over the kissing fish in the wave, and the mine
Where the sailor clasps his death as mermaid like
Sex of a knife in the depth, from this window
Watching I see the farewelling seasons fall
Ever between us like rain. And the lachrymal
Memory, trailing its skirts, walks like a widow
Across those seas looking for home. O my Dido
Heart! Sail, sail the ships ever away from us all.

The phrasing and some of the obscurity which derives from it seems wilful. ‘Farewelling’ sounds like a schoolboy attempt to be interesting. The kissing fish in the wave seems pitifully inadequate to describe the Atlantic Ocean. The reference to Dido at the end kills it for me; falling back on classical references only highlights the main text’s weakness. Possibly, if you are predisposed to an anti-rational, pagan view of the world, this might ring your bell. But reading it in 2024, it felt strained and dated.

Henry Treece

Henry Treece is much more direct and therefore attractive:

From In The Beginning Was The Bird by Henry Treece

In the beginning was the bird,
A spume of feathers on the face of time,
Man’s model for destruction, God’s defence…

Though the third line is notably weaker than the first two (because over the top, grandiloquent, too much). And the word ‘spume’ instantly recalls W.B. Yeats’s much more powerful use of the same word in his wonderful poem Among Schoolchildren:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings…

Blythe’s note on Treece tells us that he went on to write an enormous number of books for children or young adults, often about the Dark Ages i.e. Arthur’s Britain, the Romans, the Vikings and so on. You can already feel that in this charming and simple poem.

Lincolnshire Bomber Station by Henry Treece

Across the road the homesick Romans made
The ground-mist thickens to a milky shroud;
Through flat, damp fields call sheep, mourning their dead
In cracked and timeless voices, unutterably sad,
Suffering for all the world, in Lincolnshire.

And I wonder how the Romans liked it here;
Flat fields, no sun, the muddy misty dawn,
And always, above all, the mad rain dripping down,
Rusting sword and helmet, wetting the feet
And soaking to the bone, down to the very heart . . .

It’s a big idea, which I don’t have the scholarship to verify, but I wonder whether the 1940s Neo-Romantic urge to write about the mysterious countryside, pagan beliefs, spirits and so on, after the war went into children’s fiction, went into all those novels about Roman Britain, by authors like Henry Treece or Rosemary Sutcliffe, which I read as a boy in the 1960s.

Dylan Thomas

Some critics tried to lump George Barker and Dylan Thomas together as founders or exponents of a broader literary movement called ‘Neo-Romanticism’. This label works better in the world of art and painting than in literature. In painting there was a definite turning away from the urban towards nostalgic, if highly stylised, sometimes nightmarish, depictions of the English countryside, but a countryside under stress, prey to visions and strange atmospheres. Not Constable’s England at all. (Neo-Romanticism in art.)

But although critics tried to rope him into these movement, Thomas wasn’t interested. Dylan Thomas was just 24 when the war broke out and Blythe amusingly tells us that he took it as a personal affront, a calculated attempt by the world to blunt his promising career. Nevertheless, he produced some fiery, clanging verse responses to the war. Blythe acutely points out that in several of his most famous wartime poems (Ceremony After A Fire Raid and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London) Thomas ignores the statistics, the general headlines, and – as per Blythe’s thesis – zeroes in on the particular, in each case on one particular victim of the Blitz.

From A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death…

Here is Thomas reading it himself:

This is in a different class from the Barker. Nobody could compete with these ringing declarations. Thomas seemed to have tapped deep into the wellspring of some pagan power, tapped ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’.

Edith Sitwell

Thomas may be associated with New Romanticism but he is sui generis, one of a kind, his grandiloquent poetry buttressed by the amazingly sonorous power of his readings. But out in the same paddock as Barker and Thomas were the more brittle but just as apocalyptic visions of Edith Sitwell. As Blythe points out, Sitwell’s wartime verse had travelled a long way since ‘the rhyming tomfoolery’ of the 1920s and the best of it uses Christian imagery to achieve a genuine sense of tragedy.

From Still Falls the Rain (The Raids, 1940: Night and Dawn)

Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet

On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross,
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us…

Here she is reading it:

T.S. Eliot

The godfather of Modernist poetry was T.S. Eliot and the war saw him complete the epic undertaking of the Four Quartets, four long meditations on death and history and society, underpinned by his complex and sophisticated understanding of Christian faith. They are Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940) The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942).

These poems are unlike anything before or since in their complexity of structure and interlinking themes and images. To briefly summarise, each one is set in a specific rural location (hence the names) and then uses a physical description of this location and its historical associations to weave a complex web of ideas about time, history, reality and religion.

The Quartets are among the absolutely top masterpieces of twentieth century poetry in English and Blythe makes the super-sensible decision to quote the fourth and final one, Little Gidding, in its entirety. Here is the second part of section 2, a sustained homage to Eliot’s hero, Dante, in which he envisions himself walking through the glass-strewn streets of London after an air-raid and encountering a mysterious stranger, much as Dante walked through hell encountering strange figures in the flickering half-light of the underworld.

From Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting…

Magnificent. Simple language, simple syntax, but a weird and brooding atmosphere leading up to the spooky final line…

Little Gidding online

Soldier poets

Away from the grandeurs of the London literary scene and its professional writers was the completely different category of soldiers, sailors and airman who wrote poetry and prose. The three most famous British soldier-poets of the Second World War are Keith Douglas (1920 to 1944), Alun Lewis (1915 to 1944) and Sidney Keyes (1922 to 1943). See how young they all died (24, 29, 21).

I have to say straight away that my favourite poet of the Second World War is Keith Douglas. It might not be a totally true generalisation, but it seems, working through this selection, that the further away you were from the fighting, the more gorgeous, visionary and surreal your writing became (Sitwell, Raine, Barker, Thomas), whereas the closer you were to the fighting, the more precise, detailed (and sometimes banal and everyday) the writing became, as soldiers, sailors and airman tried to nail down precisely what it felt like – to fly a Spitfire (Richard Hillary), to be aboard a torpedoed ship (James Henley), to be stuck in an infantry camp behind the lines during long hours of rainy boredom (Alun Lewis).

In this respect – in terms of clear, convincing description of what it’s like – Richard Hillary’s prose memoir of training as a Spitfire pilot, and Keith Douglas’s memoir of the war in the desert leading up to the Battle of El Alamein, are the standout pieces.

But it is striking that Douglas is the only author featured in this selection as both a poet and a prose writer. Something about his mentalité made him write memorably in both forms. For me, it’s his precision, his ability to get to the point. This doesn’t mean his poetry is prosey. It is as full of metaphor and vision as much other poetry. It’s just that the metaphor and imagery are subsumed, in his best poems, into a kind of laser-like accuracy.

From How to Kill by Keith Douglas

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost…

There’s plenty of simile, rhetoric and artifice about this but somehow it also has a shining clarity. It certainly lacks any sentiment or bullshit, just what it feels like to aim and shoot another human being.

It’s assisted by the preciseness of the half rhyme (also known as ‘imperfect rhyme’, ‘slant rhyme’, ‘near rhyme’ or ‘oblique rhyme’). Thus ball/kill; man/-pen; long/sang. As you read or hear it you sense that there’s a formal structure, a half-rhyme scheme, and yet the absence of exact rhymes prevents it from being predictable, makes it much closer to speech, like the speech of a man talking to you.

Of course it isn’t, and in fact lines like ‘This sorcery/I do’ has an Elizabethan feel to the syntactical reversal of the ordinary everyday phrase (‘I do this sorcery’) and the vocabulary likewise.

The subtle half rhymes, the use of unexpected sentence structures, the ultra-modern subject matter and yet the knowing echoes of much older verse (are there echoes of Dr Faustus in ‘Being damned, I am amused’?) makes for an utterly brilliant read, rich in resonances and enjoyments.

Prose descriptions

Prose is more suited to descriptions of action. Thus two of the most vivid pieces are heart-in-the-mouth descriptions and/or stories of being a fireman during the Blitz by William Sansom. In both you are really right there as the vast flaming wall of a warehouse shivers and then topples towards him and his firefighting crew.

I liked John Sommerfield’s description of being part of a squadron which has to undertake an epic journey across North-East India by train and paddleboat and train again to get to the ravaged frontline with the Japanese in Burma.

What a lot of writers from the period share is a tremendous clarity of style and thought. Thus Richard Hillary comes across as very self-absorbed but he describes with wonderful clarity the experience of flying a Spitfire. Keith Douglas conveys with similar clarity the experience of being a tank commander in the excerpt from his memoir of war in the desert, Alamein to Zem Zem.

The memoir of London during the Blitz written by Bryher (pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman) is snobbish and self-serving (she keeps on about how she warned everyone about the Nazis since 1933 but would they listen? No, the fools) but also displays great clarity of description in her encounters with shop assistants or soldiers during the Blitz.

Essays

George Orwell

Rather as T.S. Eliot towers over the poets by virtue of the depth and breadth of his vision, in respect of clarity of thinking and prose style George Orwell towers over all the other prose writers. His essay in defence of P.G. Wodehouse (who foolishly and naively made a handful of radio broadcasts for the Nazis in 1940) is a masterpiece of clarity and honesty, and insights.

Orwell makes it clear he’s got hold of as many of Wodehouse’s writings as possible as well as the transcripts of his German broadcasts, and tried to clarify the events surrounding them i.e. he has done as much homework as possible. And then he proceeds to make a convincing case, based on the arguments that:

  • Wodehouse had no idea how his broadcasts would be interpreted
  • he had absolutely no political sense
  • he had been interned by the Germans for a year and so had missed the intensification of the conflict during 1940
  • that the fuss being kicked up about him was really a ruse by the media-owning classes (e.g. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail) to distract attention away from their own much more seriously pro-Hitler, appeasement attitudes

But it’s not only the clarity of the argument but the many insights it throws up along the way which make it still such an interesting read. For example, Orwell shows how both American and German critics in different ways had completely misunderstood Wodehouse. They thought he was a merciless satirist of the English upper classes. Orwell shows how Wodehouse was a dyed-in-the-wool, public school member of those classes and that all his tomfoolery comes from inside the worldview and is full, ultimately, of love and respect for it.

Arthur Koestler

I’ve reviewed Koestler’s two most famous books, the novels Darkness at Noon (1940) and Arrival and Departure (1943). They contain much vivid detail but are a bit ‘muddy’ in their thinking by which I mean the logic of the arguments, specially in Darkness, are harder to remember than the plight of the central character (an old Russian Bolshevik in prison having been arrested as part of Stalin’s purges).

The Koestler piece here is his short essay The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) which gave its title to a collection of essays published at the end of the war. It goes some way to explaining why Koestler turned into such an old bore, publishing some 25 volumes of essays and explorations in the coming decades and becoming steadily more irrelevant.

Koestler proposes a ‘spectrum of philosophies’ which stretch from ‘the Commissar’ at the materialist, scientific end of the spectrum to ‘the Yogi’ at the spiritual, metaphysical end. The Commissar wants to change the individual from outside, the Yogi wants to change the individual from within. This is precisely the kind of clever-sounding intellectual conceit which has bugger-all relevance to the real world and gives rise to a surprising amount of high-sounding verbiage in such a short space. It sounds fine but everything it deals with – Fascism, Communism, Democracy, Art, Science – it does so in a shallow, superficial way. I found it unreadable and consider it the only actively bad piece in the book.

Short stories

Elizabeth Bowen

Broadly speaking, the closer they stick to the subject, the more effective the prose works tends to be. Not always, though. The selection kicks off, not with any scene of battle, but with a ghostly and evocative description of a young couple walking round London in the Blackout after a bombing raid has departed. The young woman explains to her soldier boyfriend that she makes sense of it all, the Blitz, the chaos, by imagining the city is the fantasy city of Kôr, mentioned in Henry Rider Haggard’s adventure novel, She.

After this arrestingly atmospheric opening scene the story shifts to the domestic embarrassment of the young lady having to take her boyfriend back to the poky, cramped flat she shares with a girlfriend, and everyone’s general embarrassment and inconvenience. Yet the story is full of sly insights and perceptions just on the edge of consciousness, a subtle poetry of the periphery.

At half past ten, in obedience to the rule of the house, Callie was obliged to turn off the wireless, whereupon silence out of the stepless street began seeping into the silent room.

It took me a moment to realise that ‘stepless’ means empty of people and therefore with no sounds of stepping, of people walking. It’s a tasty sentence and the story is full of just such odd obliquities. It made me want to read more Elizabeth Bowen.

Fred Urquhart

There are other striking experiments. Fred Urquhart (‘described by one critic as the foremost Scottish short story writer of the twentieth century’) is represented by a story about potato pickers in a part of deeply rural Scotland which I didn’t catch because I barely understood the intense dialect he has his characters talking in. It is a war story because it is set during the war and the tattie pickers observe planes flying overhead, which all leads up to the climax when a German bomber crashes and blows up a few miles away.

James Hanley

Far more experimental is James Hanley’s piece, Sailor’s Song, an account of a torpedoed ship going down and a handful of men surviving by clinging to a raft which ought to be grittily realistic but is actually done in the style of Walt Whitman, with both the Ship and the Sea singing, describing their song and the human characters referred to with a kind of Biblical anonymity.

Glyn Jones

A different tone is presented by Welsh short story writer Glyn Jones’s story, Bowan, Moragan and Williams, which is a larky portrait of a boy and his family and friends and friends’ families in a tight-knit Welsh community, where everyone is odd and eccentric. I particularly liked the friend’s relative who is so nervous of other people that he speaks in an increasingly shrill voice and jams the napkin ring into his eye socket as if it is a jeweller’s eyeglass. The war is peripheral to this gallery of likeable eccentrics.

Elizabeth Berridge

Not so the very short story by Elizabeth Berridge in which a woman’s flat in the city is burgled and smashed up (when she’s not there), but she’s been living for some time in a retirement home with a snug community of friends and, after going with the police to examine the wreckage, she enjoys embellishing the description on the train back to the retirement home, relishing the opportunity to make her friends’ flesh creep with this appalling example of society going to the dogs… Only to arrive at the home that night and discover it wildly on fire, having been bombed and all her friends killed. The starkness of the facts and the protagonist’s inability to process what has happened are beautifully captured.

Summary

Except for a handful of poems by the obvious gods – Auden, Eliot, Thomas, Douglas – the short stories are, on the whole, more varied and powerful than any of the poems. This last story by Berridge, stands symbol for the countless millions of people who, although physically unharmed, had their lives ruined and their minds scarred by the appalling, meaningless violence of war.

Credit

Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe was first published in 1966. References are to the revised 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

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The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Four: The Glorious Licking Continues by Jaroslav Hašek (1923)

Chapter One – Švejk in a transport of Russian prisoners

At the end of Volume Three, Švejk, acting as orderly to the 11th march company of the 91st Infantry Regiment of the Austrian Army, had been sent ahead by his commanding officer, Lieutenant Lukáš, to scout out a village in Galicia, southern Poland, where the command could billet.

Švejk ended up on his own and came across a Russian prisoner of war who had a) escaped from his captors b) stripped off by a lake to go skinny-dipping. Terrified, the Russian gets out further along the lake and legs it. Like a numpty, Švejk tries on the Russian’s uniform for fun and is promptly arrested by a passing troop of Hungarians.

Švejk tries to explain that he’s a Czech, a fellow subject of his Imperial Highness, but the Hungarians don’t speak Czech and, reasonably enough since he’s wearing a Russian uniform, take him for a captured Russian.

It’s only at a roll-call later, when the officer asks if anyone speaks German and Švejk steps forward, that he is able to explain to someone that he is actually a Czech not a Russian. However, the officer Švejk explains all this to, an ‘interpreter sergeant-major’, doesn’t believe him and insists he is a Jew since all the German-speakers they’ve caught have been Jews.

(There is a digression while the sergeant demonstrates how perfectly he has his orderly trained, by making him walk round the office on all fours and bark like a dog.)

And since the Jews are ‘intelligent’, the ‘interpreter sergeant-major’ sets ‘Švejk the Jew’ to record the name of all the other prisoners in the camp. This leads to comedy since the prisoners come from a broad cross-section of nationalities and have weird and garish names, like Muhlahaley Abdrachmanov or Davlatbaley Nurdagaljev. Which leads Švejk to tell them all off for not having sensible easy-to-pronounce names like him and his fellow Czechs. Not that any of them understand him.

‘Švejk had experienced much in his life, but all the same these Tartar, Georgian and Morodvin names simply would not stick in his head’

Švejk returns to the office to find the interpreter sergeant-major drunk (as he had got sloshed he had taken to his favourite habit of setting adverts from the newspapers to the music of the Radetzky March and singing them at top volume, p.676). Švejk tries to explain his predicament again, but the sergeant-major slowly falls asleep and then off his chair onto the floor.

Next morning Švejk is sent to help with the rebuilding of the huge fortress at Przemyśl. This is being supervised by one Major Wolf. Wolf asks the assembled prisoners if any of them speak German and Švejk steps forward, but when he explains that he is in fact Czech, Wolf immediately jumps to the conclusion that he’s one of the many Czechs who have defected to the Russians and got caught.

Wolf is all for hanging Švejk there but is prevailed upon to carry out a minimum of formalities and so sends Švejk to garrison command, hoping to gain merit from his astuteness. Here Švejk is thrown into a dirty cell, kicking out a Polish prisoner who shouts something rude at him in the process. There are lots of mice in the cell which make a comfortable home in Švejk’s mattress, which he doesn’t mind, and triggers a digression about cats in the military, how some good mousers were given medals, while other cats which failed in their mousing duties were hanged.

The door opens and another Czech is thrown into Švejk’s cell. It becomes clear to the reader that he is an agent provocateur, who’s been tasked with entrapping Švejk by getting to talk about how he defected to the Russians. A bit of exposition explains that the Austrian authorities knew Czechs were deserting but didn’t know how many or whether they were being organized into regiments under the Russians. All this the spy hopes to extract from Švejk but Švejk, of course, is too simple, or simple-clever, to fall for his game and replies with a selection of characteristically long-winded and confusing stories, anecdotes about people he knows back in Prague, sticking to his story that he changed into a Russian uniform for a laugh and this is all a big misunderstanding, which eventually convinces the spy he is a simpleton.

Švejk is then hauled in front of a kangaroo court which uses ‘evidence’ gathered by the informer to incriminate him, but once again Švejk sets off on a long rambling story, this one about a Mr Božetěch who got into trouble for going for a swim in a lake and meeting a nice man and splashing about for ages, till the man made his excuses and left and when nice Mr Božetěch got out, he found a note where his clothes had been, saying the other man was a tramp who’d apologetically stolen his clothes. Mr Božetěch reluctantly got into the tramp’s dirty clothes and on the way back into Prague was arrested for vagrancy.

Because of language difficulties the prosecuting officer decides this Mr Božetěch must be a dangerous traitor, too!

Leading the kangaroo court is General Fink von Finkenstein (p.690) who has been put in charge of rebuilding Przemyśl fortress. His favourite hobby is hanging people and the text quotes a letter he’s written to his wife describing the jolly larks he has hanging people who sometimes manage to escape or evade punishment. Fink closing the letter with love and kisses for his son, little Willi (p.691).

This is one more example of the numerous places where the book is spookily prescient of the horrors of the Second World War. Again and again Hašek describes the complete lack of respect for human life, and – as here – the positive enjoyment anyone in a position of power on the Eastern Front appears to have taken in humiliating, tying up, kicking, beating, hanging or shooting anyone more vulnerable and helpless than them. The reader remembers the poor Ruthenians who were being rounded up from far and wide, tied up, kicked and beaten and probably worse, which Švejk’s regiment saw from their train in Volume Three.

It’s also the second example of someone in power innocently writing home and expecting their wife to revel as much in torturing and killing people as the letter-writer does, without recognizing any clash or incongruity.

The point is, many people wring their hands to this day wondering how the smart and sophisticated Germans, the country of Bach and Goethe blah blah blah, could have carried out the Holocaust.

One not very funny conclusion to draw from The Good Soldier Švejk is that many, many officials, all across the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe, held these same inhumane attitudes, demonstrated a complete indifference to human life and suffering, decades before the Holocaust and all the other horrors of the East commenced.

In a way, you could say that the Holocaust was like the values of Eastern Europe (of Russia with its generations of pogroms and Poland with its entrenched anti-semitism) as demonstrated in this book and others like it, encroaching into central and western Europe.

In the end a persistent major in the kangaroo court insists that they try and contact this 11th march company of the 91st regiment that Švejk keeps going on about, to check his story. Fink is forced, grumpily, to acquiesce.

The chapter ends with some comedy about a new character, one Chaplain Martinec. Chaplain Martinec is ‘one of those few who still believe in the Lord’ and was so disgusted by the drunken antics of his vicar that he volunteered to join the army to get away from him.

This was, of course, jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, as he is appointed to the command of General Fink, who turns out to be another drunk and womanizer. Under his influence Martinec finds himself coerced into joining the general for drinks on a daily basis, which sometimes lead him to get completely drunk, at which point the General orders up a couple of pretty fillies to entertain them. Afterwards the chaplain feels disgusted with himself, and is starting to believe he deserves a daily flogging.

General Fink calls the chaplain in, tells him they’ve got a chap in gaol he’d like to hang and be done with it (Švejk) but he’s a Catholic so, reluctantly, he’s agreed to let him (Švejk) have some ‘spiritual consolation’ before they string him up. Fink sends Martinec to tender to Švejk’s spiritual needs.

Chapter Two – Spiritual consolation

The shortest chapter in the book, at a mere nine pages, is a kind of set-piece example of how Švejk’s good-humoured idiocy, and his non-stop barrage of long, inconsequential stories, can reduce even the strongest man to blubbering bewilderment.

Švejk and Chaplain Martinec at the optimistic start of their relationship

For example, Martinec barely manages to explain that he’s a chaplain before Švejk leaps in to commiserate with him for being banged up in prison, asks him to sit beside him on his prison bunk and launches into a complicated story about five chaplains he once knew.

Then the chaplain has barely offered him a cigarette before Švejk launches into another long story about waitress of easy virtue who brought a paternity suit against eighteen of the customers of the café where she worked, and when she had twins, they each turned out to have genetic elements of all eighteen, plus the café owner thrown in for good luck.

Martinec had prepared a long speech full of worthy sentiments about how the Emperor was Švejk’s lord and master on earth and he owed him his loyalty etc, but is now finding it hard going against the vast tide of Švejk’s peasant eloquence. He just about manages to utter that he’s here for ‘spiritual consolation’, which Švejk hilariously misinterprets to mean that the chaplain is seeking spiritual consolation from him, Švejk.

Which triggers a really long anecdote about a Mr Faustyn who was a porter in a local hotel to Švejk in Prague and used to procure women for the hotel’s guests. He prided himself on taking highly specific orders – for fat or thin women, tall or short, clever or dumb, blonde, brunette or redhead – and being able to fulfil it in ten minutes flat.

He always prided himself on not taking money from the women – he was not a common pimp – though he did present the hotel customers with carefully itemised bills. Now, in the story, he turns up on Švejk’s doorstep, distraught. Someone has accused him of behaving like a common bawd, him! Mr Faustyn! Who has such high standards!

Now he shares a bottle of rum with Švejk then asks him to throw him out of the third floor window and end it all, he can’t cope with the shame. So Švejk being Švejk, simply agrees, manhandles drunk Mr Fausyn over to the window and throws him out. To demonstrate how he did it, Švejk grabs Chaplain Martinec, pulls him up to where he’s now standing on his bunk and then…. drops him onto the floor.

Because, Švejk goes on to explain, drunk Mr Faustyn had forgotten that Švejk had moved flat, to the ground floor. Švejk had simply pushed him out the ground floor window and the drunk had rolled onto the pavement. As he has just dropped Chaplain Martinec to the cell floor.

Martinec is realises that he is dealing with a madman and bangs on the door and shrieks to be let out. Švejk watches through the bars as the chaplain goes across courtyard accompanied by guards and gesticulating wildly. Obviously a madman, thinks Švejk, probably taking him off to the mental ward. And he starts singing merrily.

As I say, a textbook example of how Švejk’s a) stolid unflappability and b) relentless cheerfulness and c) unstoppable torrent of long inconsequential stories, reduces character after character to drivelling idiocy.

The chaplain reports to General Fink’s office to find a number of other officers drinking heavily attended by ladies of the night who, the more the chaplain complains about Švejk and how he obstructed his plans to give him spiritual succour, laugh louder and louder and throw cigarettes at him and put their legs up on the table so he can see their knickers, and Chaplain Martinec feels the claws of Beelzebub reaching out for him!

Chapter Three – Švejk back in his march company

Ah, there was me thinking the Russian uniform gambit would mean abandoning forever all the other characters we’d come to know so well. But hooray! Švejk is reunited with them!

The major who had argued they don’t hang Švejk straight away was attending the party at the General’s. In the middle of it he leaps to his feet and drunkenly declares he’s going to interview the prisoner, blusters and insults his way past the guards and sits on Švejk’s bunk, demanding to know where the prisoner. ‘Sir, humbly report I am the prisoner,’ Švejk replies, and the major passes out on his bed.

Alcohol, drinking to excess and passing out really are the recurrent troop in the novel.

Next morning the major wakes up horribly hungover to have Švejk tell him a typical story about a man he knew back in Prague, a professional mourner who’d come to the pub and get drunk but somehow manage to sleep on his formal top hat without ever denting it.

The major brushes Švejk off and makes his way back to his apartment where he discovers General Fink strangling his batman (once again, we note the casual brutal violence of the entire officer class) in a bid to discover the major’s whereabouts. We discover the major is named Major Derwota,

The General furiously throws at the major a telegram ordering that Švejk be sent to his company at the Galician town of Wojalycze. They summon Švejk and make him tell his story again. The General says out loud that the man must be an idiot, prompting a classic exchange:

‘The fellow is a complete imbecile,’ said the major to the general. ‘Only a bloody idiot would put on a Russian uniform left on the dam of a lake by goodness knows whom and then get himself drafted into a party of Russian prisoners.’
‘Humbly report, sir,’ Švejk said, ‘you are right. I do sometimes notice myself that I’m feeble-minded, especially towards evening when…’
‘Shut up, you ox,’ the major said to Švejk and turned to the general to ask what they should do with him.
‘Let his brigade him him,’ the general decided. (p.716)

This little exchange summarises the essence of the book: Švejk confronted by angry officials, his harmless deflection of their anger with his idiot’s simplicity, his tendency at the slightest provocation to set off on another long wandering anecdote, and the casual, sweary brutality of the official response.

So the hanging general is forced to let Švejk be despatched back to his regiment at Wojalycze.

Švejk is put under the supervision of four soldiers each of different nationality, an epitome of the multicultural Empire – a Pole, a Hungarian, a German and a Czech. I found it very telling that the corporal in charge (the Czech, as it happens) is described as being a) a cowman i.e. an illiterate peasant, and that therefore b) he is very brutal. He is not intelligent to win respect by intelligent decisions; all he has is his jumped-up power. Extend that principle across millions and millions of junior officers and petty tyrants right across Eastern Europe and the region’s tortured history makes more sense.

I laughed at the way the Hungarian only knew two words of German, Jawohl and Was?, so that the German explained things at great length to him, the Hungarian nodding and saying Jawohl, Jawohl all the way through, and then when the German had quite finished, saying Was?, so that the German started all over again.

They escort him by train to Wojalycze where, after some typical confusion at the station, Švejk eventually, by page 720, arrives at brigade headquarters for his regiment. He finds that command of brigade staff has been given to Colonel Gerbich who is an affable incompetent who suffers from bad gout. When it hurts he shouts and yells at everyone. When it fades away, he invites all the officers to his rooms to tell them dirty stories.

Now, as Švejk is ushered into the colonel’s presence, we discover that irascible Lieutenant Dub is in the room, who promptly leaps to his feet and starts berating Švejk as a deserter etc while Švejk bemusedly puts his side of the story in his usual placid, untroubled way.

Lieutenant Dub ranting at the Good Soldier Švejk in front of gouty Colonel Gerbich

(By the way, we learn that in the few days that Švejk’s been absent Lieutenant Dub a) made a recovery from his cholera attack and b) was showing off his horsemanship skills when  he rode into a marsh where he had to be rescued by soldiers with a rope during which he suffered a mild concussion and as a result is even more angry than usual.)

The gouty colonel overrules Lieutenant Dub’s ranting and orders Švejk to go and get a proper uniform, collect some pay, and catch a train back to his company.

Švejk arrives in Żółtańce to find real confusion – he is near the front line now and sees baggage and artillery trains, soldiers from all regiments milling about. Disturbingly the so-called ‘Reich Germans’ (Germans from Germany, not Austria) are far better provisioned and turned out than the scruffy Austrians, strolling round in their gleaming boots, handing out cigarettes and chocolate to their poor colleagues – but what makes it disturbing is that Hašek crowds of Jews milling round, waving their hands and lamenting the burning of their villages, and ‘every moment’ gendarmerie patrols bring in another terrified Jew who they accuse of spreading false news, and then proceed to beat and whip them till their backsides are ‘lacerated’ (p.725).

After being shouted at by more army bureaucrats, a rare friendly officer tells Švejk his company are billeted in the village of Klimontów. He makes his way there to discover them in the biggest building in the village, a school (which, he waspishly points out, was built by the Polish authorities in this predominantly Ukrainian region in order to increase Polish influence: it’s hard not to see the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a kind of permanent battlefield between competing national groups).

We have seen Jews being whipped, it’s true, but in Volume Three we also saw entire communities of Ruthenians being rounded up, tied up, and beaten. Now we learn that on the tree outside the school was recently hanged a Greek Catholic vicar.

Here Švejk is reunited with his friends and we re-encounter big bearded Baloun, permanently starving hungry who is just getting into a fight with the occultist cook, Jurajda, who is making sausage meat in the school kitchen. Upstairs Captain Ságner is cursing the Jewish merchant who’s sold the regimental officers a concoction of crude corn spirit coloured yellow with onion peel juice which he claimed was finest Napoleonic brandy.

Švejk strolls into the battalion office which is empty except for the one-year volunteer, Marek, who you will remember has been commissioned to write a history of the regiment and has risen to the occasion with glee, fabricating all sorts of heroic escapades for the regiment as a whole and inventing all kinds of glorious deaths for its members. This is a simple idea which I found epically funny as it allows Hašek to satirise all sorts of heroic writing which glorifies war.

Obviously, they’ve barely got chatting before Švejk is off telling numerous digressive anecdotes – ‘There was a preacher who…At U Brejsku there was a cellarman years ago…In Nusele there is a certain Mr Hauber and…’ plus an off-colour story about a soldier who comes across a woman on all fours scrubbing the floor, spanks her once on his vast bum, spanks her twice, spanks her a third time and since she doesn’t move, hoiks up her skirt and has his wicked way with her… only for her to turn round at the end and reveal the face of a 70-year-old and cackle.

Marek says Švejk hasn’t changed at all, and Švejk goes upstairs to the first floor where the officers are awaiting the arrival of the feast prepared by the occultist cook. He walks in just as his name was being mentioned and takes Captain Ságner and Lieutenant Lukáš by surprise, the latter once again horrified and appalled at the reappearance of his bad penny.

They throw things and swear at Švejk until he retreats back to the kitchen where he’s reunited with the rest of the boys. Here Baloun tries to wangle some of the roast meat and sauce which the occultist is preparing, giving long descriptions of meals from freshly slaughtered animals back home, but Jurajda kicks him out and gives a morsel of bread dipped in sauce to Švejk (p739).

Quartermaster Sergeant-Major Vaněk is plunged into gloom at Švejk’s return because it is going to throw his carefully calibrated company accounts, based on Švejk’s disappearance. He was hoping Švejk had drowned 🙂

Marek bursts through the door to announce that Lieutenant Dub with the young puppy, Cadet Biegler. Dub is furious as usual, and lays into Švejk who is his usual imperturbable self. There’s a very funny account of how Cadet Biegler has survived the supposed cholera (which he never had, as explained in volume three, chapter one) but has emerged from prolonged treatment in cholera hospitals with such weakened bowels that he has to visit more or less every WC he sees, and missed every train and every connection because he was visiting all the WCs between the hospital and regiment, but he finally made it back, brave boy! This fact, that Cadet Biegler is, from now onwards, going to be condemned to get stuck in every possible public convenience is rich with comic potential, made all the more preposterous because we are told that Biegler spends all these hours on the can replaying the great battles of the Austro-Hungarian army throughout history.

In a flashback we learn that Lieutenant Dub and Cadet Biegler have had the most ferocious argument, which began when Biegler was camped out in a WC which Dub wanted to use, and then continued on into the car which they got to drive them from brigade HQ out to the regiment, and got worse on the way.

As Dub and Biegler pursue their argument upstairs to the officers quarters, in the kitchen the lads have finished feasting deep on the pork soup he occultist cook has made and conversation has a rich, post-prandial feel to it, with the cook revealing that he used myrtle instead of marjoram in the soup, in fact myrtle he found in the rather dried-up wedding garland hanging in a village house. The owners didn’t take too kindly to him impounding it.

The occultist cook Juradja requisitioning the wedding garland of myrtle from Galician peasants

This leads into a discussion about herbs and spices in cooking, which triggers an anecdote from Švejk about a butcher who one drunk day mixed up his spice box with a packet of insect powder which he tipped into the sausage meat and to his amazement it went down a treat, people stormed his shop to get it and, funny to tell, it also killed all the insects and bugs so that the town where it happened became one of the cleanest in Bohemia.

Then Marek goes on about the delights of iced soup, Vaněk mentioned frozen goulash, and Švejk is just starting a story about a Lieutenant Zákrejs who was always aggressively threatening to turn poor squaddies into various forms of food (like beaten steak or mashed potato) when there’s a piercing scream from upstairs.

It is the continuation of the argument between Dub and Biegler. Dub was greeted with a great roar when he entered the room because a) all his brother officers were by now very drunk on the filthy liquor supplied by the Jewish merchant and b) they are all taking the mickey out of him for his riding accent with merry yells of ‘Welcome cowboy!’ and the like.

A little offended, Dub is soon handed a glass of the ‘cognac’ while poor Biegler is more or less ignored, and finds a chair in the corner. Dub meanwhile, beginning to be affected by the booze, raps on the table and stands to make a speech about patriotism.

And that is where the book ends abruptly, Jaroslav Hašek dying suddenly of heart failure on 3 January 1923. Thank you, Jaroslav.

Thoughts

And you know the quirkiest thing about this 750-page-long novel about the First World War? Švejk never hears a shot fired in anger. He never actually arrives at ‘the front’. He never sees any fighting (the aftermath of shelling, networks of trenches and damaged buildings, for sure, but no actual fighting). In fact, I think that nowhere in the novel is a shot actually fired at all. It is a 750-page-long novel without any actual fighting in it!

OR maybe that’s part of its satirical intent. Because as you reflect back over the long sprawling text, you realise most of the conflict, of the violence, came not between nations; although there is doubtless vast bloodshed and massacre going on between nations, what we mostly see is violence between classes, the most obvious violence of the book being carried out by furious police, state officials and army officers against ordinary citizens and ordinary soldiers.

Credit

This translation into English of The Good Soldier Švejk by Cecil Parrott was first published by William Heinemann in 1973. All references are to the Penguin Modern classic edition, published 1983.

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The Good Soldier Švejk – the life of Jaroslav Hašek

The Penguin edition of The Good Soldier Švejk features a fascinating introduction by the translator Cecil Parrot, which includes an outline of the life of its author, the Czech journalist, agitator and scapegrace, Jaroslav Hašek.

Hašek’s life is arguably more exciting and improbable than the plots of most novels, and it helps that Parrott tells it in a deadpan way which brings out its Švejkian improbability.

Early years

Hašek was born in 1883, the son of an impoverished school teacher who proceeded to drink himself to death, setting the tone for the little boy’s life. At the tender age of thirteen Hašek was sent out to work in a chemist’s and began to develop a taste for dissipation. By the age of 16 he had also taken a liking for vagrancy, taking long trips through Moravia, Slovakia, Hungary and Galicia, supporting himself by begging and hanging out with gypsies and vagabonds and beggars.

In 1902 he got a job at the Slavia Bank but soon lost it for going AWOL on more of his long, penniless hikes. He then tried to make a living by writing but from 1900 to 1908 only got slight newspaper articles published, not enough to live on.

He had early shown signs of being an anti-social trouble-maker. In 1897 (aged 14) he’d enthusiastically taken part in the anti-German riots in Prague, tearing down police posters, wrecking symbols of the Hapsburg Monarchy, helping set fire to the yard of a German civilian. In 1906 he joined an anarchist group and went on demonstrations and agitations, which led to regular arrests and short spells of imprisonment.

In 1907 Hašek became editor of the anarchist journal Komuna and gave lectures to audiences of workers. He was put on a watchlist by Austrian police informers, until he was arrested and sentenced to a month in prison for assaulting a policeman during a protest.

True love

Meanwhile, he’d fallen in love with Jarmila Mayer, the daughter of a Prague decorator, but her father insisted that if he was to win her hand, Hašek better change his ways. In 1908 he was arrested a mere twice but Jarmila’s family continued to think him unsuitable husband material and removed her from Prague. Hašek took a train to her country hideaway to try and see her, but had no money for a return ticket and, characteristically, walked the 60 miles back to Prague.

In 1909 Hašek made a renewed attempt to earn his living by writing and produced 64 short stories (!), most of them published in Karikatury, a magazine edited by Josef Lada, who was to create the famous illustrations for The Good Soldier Švejk over a decade later. Hašek succeeded a friend as editor of a magazine called Animal World, though he was soon sacked for making up invented animals – an incident attributed to the one-year volunteer, Marek in Švejk (pp.323-328).

In 1910, amazingly, having worn her and her family down, Hašek finally married his Jarmila – and also managed to write 75 short stories. In 1911 Hašek published in Karikatury the first of his stories about the Good Soldier Švejk. In 1912 a set of them was collected in a volume, The Good Soldier Švejk and Other Strange Stories.

Hoaxing and politicking

Meanwhile, Hašek took his practical joking and hoaxing to a new level when he pretended to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into the river at Prague. After he was fished out, he was sent to a lunatic asylum, which presumably forms the basis for the asylum episode in volume one of Švejk.

Hašek then set about setting up a ‘cynological’ institute, having stumbled across this grand-sounding word in an encyclopedia, the institute being not much more than a pet shop specialising in dogs. Again, no coincidence that in the novel Švejk is a dog seller by trade.

Hašek then set up his own political party – The Party of Moderate and Peaceful Progress Within The Limits of the Law, a name which is clearly satirical in its po-facedness – and stood as a candidate in a general election, although in his public speeches he ridiculed the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and all its works.

In 1913 his marriage to Jarmila ended. They had a baby son, Richard, who Jarmila took back to live with her parents. Left to his own devices, Hašek reverted to hard-drinking, losing a job at a Prague newspaper for attacking the political faction which ran it. Slowly he abandoned all attempts at respectability and eventually went underground, off the grid. For a while he lived with his friend Josef Lada, writing stories and cooking. He was, by all accounts, an excellent cook.

At the start of the war Hašek carried out another notorious hoax, checking into a famous brothel-cum-hotel in Prague under an assumed Russian name and putting it about that he was spying on the Austrian General Staff. The police surrounded the hotel and moved in to nab this high-ranking spy – only to realise they had only captured the hoaxer and ‘notorious hooligan’ Hašek. He was given five days in prison.

By this stage anyone familiar with Hašek’s novel, The Good Soldier Švejk will recognise in Hašek’s biography not only specific incidents (the dog selling, the animal magazine) but, more tellingly, the fundamental rhythm of the novel, in which the dim and incorrigibly innocent hero is repeatedly arrested and interrogated by all manner of authorities, civil and military, all across Bohemia and Austria, sentenced to short spells in the clink, released, meets,drinks and chats with friends until he gets into trouble again, is hauled up by more authorities, questioned, and sentenced to another brief spell in the cells. And so on.

Hašek in the Great War

In 1915 the 32-year-old Hašek was drafted to the 91st Infantry Regiment, the same regiment to which his creation Švejk is assigned. And just like Švejk, Hašek was sent with the regiment to České Budějovice in southern Bohemia, then via the outskirts of Vienna to Királyhida in Hungary, and so East to the Front in Galicia (southern Poland).

Like the name of the regiment and its itinerary, Hašek barely bothered to change the names of the real-life people he served with. Thus a Lieutenant Lukáš, who Hašek knew in the regiment appears in the novel as… Lieutenant Lukáš, and his company commander Captain Ságner appears as…Captain Ságner, while Švejk shared an office with one Quartermaster Sergeant-Major Vanék who turns up in the novel as… Quartermaster Sergeant-Major Vanék 🙂

Hašek wasn’t long at the Front before he was captured, on 23 September 1915 after the Russians overran the 91st regiment’s position. The Russians treated their captured fellow Slavs worst of all the different ethnic groups of prisoners of war. Hašek was sent to a POW camp near Kiev, and then on to another one in the Urals.

The Czech Legion

But when Hašek learned that the Russians were supervising the formation of a volunteer unit recruited from Czechs and Slovaks to fight against the Germans, he immediately applied and was accepted. His journalistic experience meant he naturally gravitated towards a job in the propaganda unit. The Czech Legion also published its own journal and it was in this that Hašek published a second series of stories about Švejk titled The Good Soldier Švejk In Captivity. It was published as a book in Kiev in 1917.

Characteristically, however, Hašek soon got into trouble for his outspoken opinions, and for lampooning the leadership of the Legion. Nonetheless he continued in anti-Austrian and pro-Czech stance, and was also a strong Russophil, supporting the Romanov dynasty right up until it was overthrown in the October 1917 revolution.

The Czech Legion had an odd history, the powers that be deciding to send it East to Vladivostok with the plan that it would take ship across the Pacific, then train across America, then ship across the Atlantic, to join the French fighting the Germans on the Western Front. In the event, nothing like that happened, the Czechs becoming caught up in the Bolshevik revolution, and ended up fighting the Red Army and among themselves.

Hašek had always though travelling round the world to get to the war was bonkers, and so had headed to revolutionary Moscow where, in a surprising move, he joined the Bolshevik Party. Thus when the Bolsheviks signed a peace with Germany in March 1918, the Czech Legion declared them enemies to Czech independence and Hašek, for his alliance with them, a traitor. The Red Army sent Hašek to Samara in Central Asia where he agitated among the soldiers of the Legion and set up a recruiting office for the Czechoslovak Red Army. But when Samara fell to the Legion – which at one stage controlled large areas surrounding the Trans-Siberian Express – he had to flee his fellow countrymen in disguise.

As the Red Army stabilised the military situation and the Bolsheviks cemented their hold on power, Hašek set out to make a career within the party. In December 2018 he was appointed deputy Commander of the town of Bugulma. Based on this experience, he wrote a series of humorous stories about a small town in Russia.

In 1919 Hašek was appointed Secretary of the Committee of Foreign Communists in the town of Ufa, then Secretary of the Party Cell of the printing office of The Red Arrow magazine, then next year Head of the International Section of the Political Department of the Fifth Army. What had happened to the drunken wastrel and ne’er-do-well? Astonishingly, he gave up drinking and led a sober, responsible and orderly life for the thirty months of his Bolshevik membership.

Back to Prague

Towards the end of 1920, however, a visiting delegation of Czech Communists asked him to come and help the party in his homeland, and he was allowed to leave, turning back up in Prague in December 1920. Here he started writing articles for Rudé právo, the newspaper of the Left Wing of the Social Democratic Party, which was to become the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

Hašek had brought a wife back from Russia, Alexandra Lvova, some said a relative of a Russian royal, though she was in fact a print worker he met at one of the Bolshevik papers. It proved difficult to get a job. Now he was considered not only a notorious hooligan and anarchist, but a deserter, a traitor and a Bolshevik. He started drinking heavily again.

The Good Soldier Švejk

But he had returned from his adventures with a plan for a novel, a big novel, and in 1921 he started writing The Good Soldier Švejk, a huge comic novel about an unsinkable simpleton who floats through life getting into endless scrapes with authority without ever losing his cheerful optimism.

Hašek planned the book to be in six volumes (each of the existing volumes is about 220 pages long in the Penguin translation) but, at least a first, no reputable publisher would touch it, and so Hašek was forced to publish the first volume privately.

However, to everyone’s surprise, it sold and a publisher committed to bringing out the second one, paying Hašek enough money to buy a modest cottage in the countryside east of Prague, where he dictated the following volumes. Dictated, mind.

Jaroslav Hašek and Alexandra Lvova, Lipnice, October 1922

But, alas, nearly thirty years of hard drinking and irregular living had taken their toll. Hašek fell ill and died of heart failure on 3 January 1923. The only mourners at his funeral were his 11-year-old son Richard and a few friends. He’d had got half way through the fourth volume when he was struck down.

A friend, Karel Vanek, gamely completed this fourth volume, but his continuation is never included in definitive editions. Three and a half volumes is all we have, although they make a whopping 750 pages in Parrott’s Penguin translation.

Themes

So what themes emerge from Hašek’s life that are relevant to his great novel?

  1. vagrancy – living life on the move, constantly coming to new locations, into new situations
  2. alcohol – the universal solvent and social glue – all good chaps naturally bond and unwind over a glass of beer or a bottle of wine
  3. police – continual trouble with the police resulting in arrests, detetntions in custody and short prison sentences
  4. army – life in barracks training, then war, then being a prisoner of war
  5. Josef Lada – the friend for most of his adult life, who published his stories, who he lived with for a while, and who went on to create the illustrations for The Good Soldier Švejk which helped seal its popularity

Related links

The Good Soldier Švejk

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by Simon on October 10, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 10, 2019

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