As
centenaries go 2012 is not a bad year. My mother was born 100 years ago today
on the 12th October 1912, although
many other events are probably more significant to the general public.
As it happens, 2012
marks the centenary of a number of literary events: Virginia Stephen marries Leonard Woolf; Frieda von
Richthofen meets D. H. Lawrence; Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore brings
translated work to England and impresses William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound,
among others; Harriet Munroe founds Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in Chicago
(with Ezra Pound as foreign editor); describes its policy as: “The Open
Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for
never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors
hope to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school.
They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today,
regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor
will the magazine."; and ‘H.D.’ [Hilda Doolittle], Richard Aldington and
Ezra Pound meet in the British Museum tearoom to discuss ‘Imagist’ poetry.
A number of new
books were published in 1912: Joseph Conrad – The Secret Sharer; Zane Grey – Riders of the Purple Sag;
James Weldon Johnson – The Autobiography
of an Ex-Coloured Man; D. H. Lawrence – The Trespasser;
Stephen Leacock – Sunshine Sketches of a
Little Town; Thomas Mann – Death in Venice; Carl Jung – Theory of Psychoanalysis; Robert W. Service - Rhymes of a Rolling Stone;
Rabindranath Tagore - Gitanjali;
Walter de la Mare - The Listeners, and
Other Poems; T. E. Hulme
- The Complete Poetical Works;
Rudyard Kipling - Collected Verse; and
Jean Cocteau - La Danse de Sophocle.
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| The morning after Passchendaele |
The
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom seeks to establish a number of centenary
celebrations relating to the Great War (1914-1918) starting in two years time
in 2014. I cannot understand why one would seek to celebrate the beginnings of
a war that was one of the most disastrous events in history, e.g. The First Battle of Passchendaele took place on 12th October 1917 in the Ypres Salient area
of the Western Front, west of Passchendaele
village, during the Third Battle of Ypres in World War I. The death toll made this the blackest day
in New Zealand history. The casualties all round were horrendous. Two years
earlier on the 12th October 1915, British nurse Edith Cavell was executed by a German firing
squad for helping Allied soldiers escape from Belgium.
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| Edith Cavell |
These
events are remembered as they should be, on the 11th November, which
marks the end of war in 1918. The remembrance of the end of war is far more
important for a nation. Individual celebrations of cruelty and stupidity are
hardly worthy. That they form part of history is sufficient. Let those with
particular recollections of particular events deal with those memories in their
own fashion. Do not celebrate the acts of war but do celebrate its end and
those whose sacrifice brought about that end. I am not suggesting we forget history, but not all historical events, in my view, are suitable for national celebration. Just a thought.
At least I remember my mother, and maybe some of my friends and relatives do as well. That is quite enough.
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