Return of the Soldier to the New Jersey Turnpike

I was going on a really long road trip with my parents (see "Tess in the Blue Ridge Mountains") and since I was behind on my reading, and my mom likes books on tape, I bought a trial membership to audible.com and downloaded two books from my list--one, The Return of the Soldier, that my mom thought it sounded good, and one, Oliver Twist, that my mom didn't feel as sanguine about, but which was super long and was likely, in my opinion, to be full of funny voices that would entertain any number of family members. Incidentally, they're both books that one of my committee members suggested I add to my major list: Oliver Twist because he thought I had plenty of mid-career Dickens and needed to add some early Dickens, and Return of the Soldier because he thought I should have a WWI-era novel that wasn't modernist (although some people seem to consider it a modernist text, maybe on the basis of its historical context rather than on style.)
I didn't know anything about Return of the Soldier before listening to it, and I knew next to nothing about Rebecca West--my mom and I both associate her with Daphne DuMaurier for some reason. I figured she was a popular but respectable sardonic English novelist, maybe one of those writers that people who admire the Craft of Fiction also admire; Wikipedia says she was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century, which isn't inconsistent with my vague assumptions. She wrote essays and journalism and worked for women's suffrage, which is interesting--you don't necessarily get a clear sense of her politics or what kind of feminist she might be from Return of the Soldier, although she's talking about women's lives and writing about the war from a very female, domestic perspective.
I'm not sure that listening to a CD on the NJ Turnpike quite counts as reading a book, especially since I didn't take any notes or write any blog entries immediately after listening, so I'm pretty likely to read it for real, especially since it's 1) super good and 2) super short (it only takes about 2 hours to read it out loud.) But, two-and-a-half weeks later, here are some of the thoughts I (and my mom) had while listening to it in the car:

• Unreliable (and unlikeable) narrator! The Return of the Soldier is narrated by Jenny, the soldier’s cousin. It’s hard to tell initially what her relationship is to Chris (the soldier who’s gone to the front) and to his wife Kitty, with whom Jenny lives in the ancestral home (aside: here’s the classic Victorian* threesome, carried through into 1918. At a rest stop, over a fishwich and a diet coke, I told my mom about the Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Act!) There’s a nursery that Chris has insisted on keeping intact even though the baby has died, and Jenny doesn’t like to go in there but Kitty seems to have no problem with it—in the first scene she’s there drying her hair. Jenny’s initial portrait of their family’s life before the war is rosy—she and Kitty did everything they could to make Chris’s life beautiful and delightful—but the dead baby, combined with Jenny’s creepy fixation on Chris and a kind of lady-doth-protest-too-much overemphasis on their happiness, make you pretty suspicious of Jenny’s reliability. Also Jenny seems to be pretty awful—critical of Kitty (who turns out in the end to be pretty awful) and especially nasty in her snobby descriptions of Margaret, a middle-to-lower-class visitor who shows up with some bad news about Chris. Which brings us to . . .
• Hilariously nasty class issues. Jenny’s hilarious nastiness as a narrator includes repeated references to Margaret’s "creased skin," "cheap stays," and "pigskin handbag." Early on, when you’re not quite sure what to make of Jenny, and not quite sure how sympathetic she’s meant to be, you’re not quite sure whether West subscribes to this same snotty upper-class attitude. By the end of the novel you don’t think she does, and it’s clear she sympathizes with Margaret and thinks Jenny and Kitty are (to different degrees) stuck-up entitled overprotected weirdoes, but! It’s always interesting when you’re reading English people talking about class, because even if they think these class distinctions are unfortunate, they really seem to believe in them in a way American writers of the same era can’t quite achieve? Like even Edith Wharton. Could she really have been as nasty about class as Rebecca West is here? Certainly Dorothy Parker couldn’t. Mom and I kept commenting that Paul would enjoy all the class nastiness, it was so over-the-top.
• Modernist or not? I’m interested in thinking more about why my professor described this novel as outside of or separate from modernism. What counts as a modernist novel? Feeling bleak about WWI? Check. Interest in psychology? Check. Experimental style? I think most people would say that West’s prose style and narrative technique is much less experimental than Woolf’s or Joyce’s—it’s a novel that can be followed even when you’re listening to it in the car with your mom in New Jersey, which may not be the case with Ulysses or To the Lighthouse (but who knows?)—but the unreliable narrator, as well as some other narrative moves that I’d like to examine more carefully in the print edition of the book, including Chris’s recollections retold by the narrator and embedded in the middle of the novel & the narrator’s strange reverie when she’s lying in the woods or whatever, suggest that West is looking for new forms, that she thinks this is a story that can’t be told using conventional narrative methods—which is a pretty modernist position. But on the other hand every interesting novel is experimental in some way—is doing something differently from its predecessors. I guess one distinction people might try to make is whether the author’s trying to make a traditional form serve a new purpose, or whether he or she is trying to scrap all traditional forms and start from scratch (and which one, really, does Pound’s “make it new” refer to? Obviously no forms get totally scrapped, but it’s interesting to think about what the referent for that “it” is—does the “it” refer to an old form that Pound wants the writer to renovate or refurbish for the future? Or to a new thing being made from scratch before our eyes?) Anyway, West’s sentences are pretty conventional narrative sentences, which makes them different from some of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness utterances and half-thoughts and associations. West’s prose style, incidentally, is pretty sweet.
• WWI from the Home Front. As I said earlier, this novel tells a story of the First World War from a very specific perspective: domestic, female, rural, upper-class. Jenny and Kitty are completely protected from the war, which means they’re pampered and sheltered, but which also means that Jenny suffers tremendously from her ignorance—she keeps having these nightmares about Chris running through the trenches or No Man’s land or something, blood and explosions everywhere. It’s not quite that lower-class women, or any women at all, would have had more information about what was happening to their husbands than Jenny and Kitty do, but there seems to be some correlation between their pampered and protected social position and their total ignorance and helplessness when it comes to Chris at the front and Chris as a wounded soldier. Kitty’s life is comfortable and nice, and so she’s not worried about Chris, and that also seems related to the fact that she doesn’t find out a long time that Chris has shellshock and is in a hospital. It turns out that she doesn’t know because Chris forgot to file an address with the War Office or something (I find this improbable—surely someone would have harassed him until he did, but maybe all those WWI bureaucrats were incompetent), but anyway, the women’s sheltered impotence seems important and interesting—especially given the fact that after the war, women had to take on a lot more responsibility in English life, not only because like half the men died, but because of this crazy emasculating shellshock phenomenon, which is What This Novel Is About.
• WWI in Real Time. Also super interesting is the fact that this novel was published in 1918, while the war was still going on. I’ve read a lot of novels about World War I written after the war, in retrospect, but it’s fascinating to read a novel that doesn’t have the benefit—or the dulling power?—of retrospect, a novel written when people were still waiting for many of these soldiers to come home, and when coming home sometimes meant only a brief respite before going back to the horrors of the front. It seems to me that WWI generated an unusual amount of real-time literature, actually—there’s this novel, and there’s all those war poets. Did other wars get this kind of up-to-the-minute literary coverage? Maybe during WW2 it was mostly movies. The Civil War had Walt Whitman. But maybe the horrors of WWI were so fresh and surprising that they kind of shocked these writers into needing to write about it immediately?
• Let's judge ladies by their maternal instinct! Here’s another novel where the most saintly, magical person you can be is a mom, and the most horrible person you can be is a mom who doesn’t care about her baby. Then there’s the loving spinster who is kind of a mom manquée—that’s a respectable kind of lady to be, too. Kitty really doesn’t seem fazed at all by her baby’s death, although she’s super upset that her husband doesn’t recognize her; anecdotal evidence that we still think this is the worst thing ever is the fact that Mom and I kept saying to each other, “Does she really not care about the baby? Maybe she’s just so deeply traumatized she can’t really talk about the baby? I hope it’s that she’s traumatized and not that she really really doesn’t care about the baby!” I kind of think that a lot of these authors who depict these monstrously bad moms aren’t necessarily criticizing the moms as much as they’re criticizing a society that creates these kind of helpless frivolous women who can’t be good moms or compassionate people (I’m thinking of Becky Sharp, who is terrible-but-amusing but also maybe doing what she thinks she needs to do to stay alive; David Copperfield’s first wife, who was pretty nice but was also incapable of being serious) but at the same time it seems kind of misogynist to write a character like Kitty: a baby-hating, husband-destroying, narcissistic, shallow, status-obsessed beauty. Like, are people really like that? And if they are like that, shouldn’t we have some sympathy for them beyond being like, “oh, society has made these terrible women whose helplessness has made them amoral”? Is pitting a good kind of woman against a bad kind of woman ever a legitimate feminist project?
• Fate! There seems to be some kind of conflict in the novel between people’s natural propensities/true selves/true destinies and the perversities of society and the war and whatever, which artificially alter these true destinies. I wonder if I can relate any of this to Hardy! I will think about it. Anyway, the worst part is where the two babies each only had half a life. They were supposed to be ONE BABY. What does it mean to have all this magic stuff in a book that also seems really interested in psychology? Maybe people who are interested in psychology are actually also very interested in magic?
• Psychology! This novel is chock full of Freudian theories about the unconscious and frustrated urges and stuff but they never mention Freud. I am curious about how much research West did about shellshock and psychoanalysis and stuff (and is the psychology she is drawing on entirely Freud? Or are there some weird other English versions of psychoanalysis floating around?) and how much of this is just fantasy. Like, when you get shellshocked can you really get a kind of amnesia that transports you to the precise year 1903? That seems bizarre. They can’t have known that much about shellshock in 1918, right? So maybe she’s just going for it. Also, hilarious that the psychologist is like, “Oh, I never thought of trying to make people happy! I just make them normal again.” Also, interesting that Margaret’s maternal/true-wifely intuition is smarter than scientific psychological training. Also, the psychologist’s explanation of Chris’s amnesia is extremely domestic and personal—he must not have been happy at home, because he forgot to register an address—and weirdly seems not to take into account the extreme trauma of the war. I guess the war trauma is the immediate cause, but he’s explaining the specific form Chris’s PTSD takes, or whatever. But it also points to the ways in which this novel is not really that much about the war, until the end, when we realize if Chris gets cured he’s going to have to go back to the front!
• PRETTY SERIOUS SPOILERS FROM HERE ON IN:
• The tricky title! You think it's because the soldier has come back from the war, but it's also that they are trying to get his personality to come back. And then at the end when he does it's the worst! and it makes him be a soldier again! It really gets you thinking about who and what a soldier is. Is it the man who goes off to war--the man his family loves, the man who's ready to make sacrifices for his country? Is it the role of soldier itself? Does that role change the man? And this novel not only raises the question of whether being a soldier changes the man you sent away to war--a question that becomes pretty common in literature about World War I--but also the question of whether we really know who these men are when they leave, and why. Like, Chris's shell-shock is presented as something that helps him escape the literal nightmare of being a British soldier--the trenches, the gas, the tanks--but also maybe the class expectations that are also tied up in being the kind of British subject who becomes a British officer, privileging money and family expectations over some kind of authentic self, a kind of natural self that seems to emerge in Chris's madness.
• What was the right thing to do? The novel makes a pretty good case for it being a good idea to leave Chris in the happy place he’s in, but then Margaret and Jenny both independently decide they have to bring him back (through showing him the kid’s shirt, or a stuffed tiger or something). It seems inevitable, because novels don’t usually end with people choosing blissful ignorance, but why is it inevitable? Jenny’s explanation seems to be that in the end Chris will be humiliated, made a figure of public mockery by his amnesia, especially as he ages. I need to read the ending again, but I think Margaret just kind of feels like it’s wrong to withhold the truth. The Wikipedia summary of the novel is like, “they have to decide whether to let him remain safe in his amnesia or make him recover and go back to the war”—the use of the word “safe” kind of implies that it’s a Matrix-y red-pill-vs-blue-pill choice, and keeping him in “safe” ignorance is ignoble and weak and easy, but on the other hand the “safe” amnesiac self is also very clearly presented as Chris’s authentic self, one that hasn’t been tortured into neurosis by social conventions and the war. I guess it’s one of those novels that affirms the social order while regretting the social order. It is mad depressing when Kitty is all triumphant that he’s come back, but also (as I have said before) I feel bad for Kitty getting portrayed as an evil proponent of Society because it is rough that this always happens to girls in novels.

*not that the lovers + confidant system originated with the Victorians. It totally happens in Julie, for example. French people! And is a staple of the epistolary novel in general, but usually in those the dude has a confidant too, and there is more sex. So by the 19^th century the extramarital sex dropped out, as well as the male confidant?