Guerres imaginaires

Mark West (University of Glasgow) considers the literature of invasion:

On the 19 March 1906, the Daily Mail began the serialization of William Tuffnell Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, an "invasion-fantasy" in which Germany invades Britain. Its enormous popularity was no doubt helped by a marketing strategy that included sending actors in German military uniforms to march down London's Regent Street. It sold over a million copies and was translated into 27 languages. One marker of its success was a film version entitled If England Were Invaded, released in October 1914.

From, I.F. Clarke, 'Future-War Fiction',
Science Fiction 24:3 (1997)

The book couches events as a military history, incorporating excerpts from journals and military descriptions of troop movements. Convinced that Britain was in constant threat of invasion by the Germans, Le Queux stresses the importance of preparation and training and devises a British resistance called the "League of Defenders" who manage to incite an uprising against the invading hordes.


The phenomenal success of The Invasion of 1910 testifies to the popularity of what I.F. Clarke calls “Future-War Fiction”, in the wake of the Paris Commune in 1871 and Germany’s unification. Writers across Britain, France and Germany imagined variations on “The Next Great War”, “der nächste Krieg”, and “La Guerre de demain”. H.G. Wells would go as far, in The World Set Free (1914), as to imagine a bomb so massive in its destructive capabilities that its use as a deterrent would lead to a new era of peace on earth.

Clarke suggests that the tone of this "massive European interest” in the next great was was a "cheerful language of anticipation", a language by no means limited to the military minds that first wrote such stories. Is it, then, a great leap between such popular fictions and the martial language of early Modernists, such as F.M. Marinetti and his gang of Futurists?

The Futurist Manifesto
in Le Figaro 20 February 1909

In his “Futurist Manifesto” of 1909, Marinetti describes how "like young lions we ran after Death". Singing "the love of danger", they "glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture". These are "beautiful ideas worth dying for", lit by "the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons".

If, as Virginia Woolf asserted, 1910 ushers in a new mode of human character, it was long in the making; and wide in its reach, too. Change of this kind embraces not merely the artistic consciousnesses of those that went to the Grafton Galleries in the last months of the year. These future-war tales and fantasies suggest a longing for change. There is a desperate desire in these “fantasies of the future” for what Clarke calls a “newer universe”. Of course, as we know now, the realisation of such a desire would have a terrible “human” cost.

"And so you are going abroad..." T.S. Eliot in 1910

1910 was the year that T.S. Eliot graduated from his first degree at Harvard; it was the year he published his first poem ('Humoresque: After Jules Laforgue'); and it was the year he travelled to Paris to hear Henri Bergson lecture.
According to some, Eliot's sojourn in Paris was life-changing. Lodging at 151 bis rue St Jacques, Eliot took French lessons from Alain Fournier (author of Le Grand Mealnes) and befriended a fellow-lodger, Jean Verdenal. In The Making of an American Poet, James E. Miller speculates that this friendship with Verdenal constitutes the first great gay love of Eliot's life - and his first great loss: Eliot marked Verdenal's death in World War I by dedicating Prufrock and Other Observations to his memory.

Charles-Louis Philippe

Miller suggests that Verdenal is a strong presence in The Waste Land too, one that lies behind the figure of Phlebas the Phoenician. A memory of Verdenal informs the vision of the lilac girl in 'The Burial of the Dead', he argues; and, more tenuously, he suggests that a boat trip to St Cloud with Verdenal lies behind the 'Damyata' section of the 'What the thunder said'.
There are more convincing, material influences upon Eliot to be traced from this period too. It seems that Verdenal introduced him to l'Action Français - Charles Maurras' right-wing movement, an influence upon Eliot in the 1930s; and Fournier introduced to Jacques Rivière, secretary to La Nouvelle Revue Française (established in 1909) and an associated group of writers, including André Gide. In turn, it is likely that Gide's tribute to Charles-Louis Philippe in November 1910 helped to introduce Eliot to Philippe's work, particularly Bubu de Montparnasse, which strongly influenced the urban landscapes of Eliot's early published poetry.

(c) Houghton Library

It's striking that Eliot should turn to another written source to make sense of Paris. Biographical speculations aside, it's certain that this period saw significant developments in his poetry. According to Christopher Ricks' edition of his poetic notebooks (Inventions of the March Hare), it was during Eliot's stay in Paris that fragmentary scraps of verse began to cohere into 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' (a discarded passage, 'Prufrock's Pervigilium' shows the heavy influence of Philippe) and in November 1910, Eliot composed the first section of 'Portrait of a Lady' (a poem that closes with the narrator's departure for Europe). In other words, this is the period in which Eliot starts to shrug off his reliance upon Laforgue and write his earliest and most striking mature verse.

A Century, a Lifetime and a Comet

Celebrating the appearance of Halley's Comet in April 1910, Tom Coles (University of Glasgow) ponders comets and periodisation:

"I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out  together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." 

Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark  Twain, A Biography,
Ch. 282 ‘Personal Memoranda’

Halley’s Comet means almost as much to me as it did to Mark Twain: I was born in early 1986, around the time when it last appeared, and in 2061 when it next approaches close to Earth I suppose I will not be too sad, like Twain, if I leave with it. As a period of study, the 75 years that the comet takes to return is curious, perhaps more useful than the equally arbitrary 'century'. A century tends to be the default time-frame of the rise of empires, the dominance of an art-form, the epoch of a revolution. It has become the primary frame through which we view history, even if we often have to make it ‘long’ and ‘short’. The century is always followed by another century; it is a method of linear chronology that invites concepts of procession or improvement.

We risk fetishizing a unit of time of our own making. In contrast, a comet offers an image of the same object returning unimproved, unadorned, for its own reasons - but measurably. The problem is that one hundred years in any direction is that it is just out of reach. It exists as a social rather than a personal memory. A hundred years is simply a hundred years: within it much can happen while little changes, or much can change with little happening. The world a hundred years ahead or behind is an older or younger peer. The orbital period of Halley’s comet, a single transit of a lump of rock, ice and gases around the sun is, on the other hand, a lifetime. It seems longer, somehow, than a century.

Tycho and Kepler were able to place the comets beyond the moon; to make further roads out of a geocentric totalised world-view; to chalk one up for rationalism. They participate in what Gabriel Josopovici has described in his recent Whatever Happened to Modernism?  as part of a “powerful myth, that of the Renaissance as the triumph of the individual after centuries of subservience to authority and tradition… of light coming out of darkness and the myth of the emancipation of the individual…” (p.11). How does the symbol of this comet, which Halley proved to be engaged in an almost eternal return, fit in with a procession of knowledge unwinding its secrets? If there is no permanent triumph, but only return, how do we create a narrative of our own and others' lives within history?

This contradiction, that the scientific universe is guided by stronger and more rigid rules than those of any social or cultural system that previously claimed to govern our worlds, is what Schiller calls the disenchantment of the world: it is the difficulty that we have when our problems are too satisfactorily explained. Explained in so rigorous a fashion their very rationalism, meeting our needs perfectly, becomes a sort of magic in itself. Knowing that Halley was coming back in 1910 didn’t stop people from claiming that it threatened cataclysm – its very predictability seemed terrifying. The millennial feeling is perhaps the overburdening of what we know to be an arbitrary date. It is simply another day, but because it is ‘simply another day’ how could it possibly survive the weight of expectation we have placed upon it?

Josipovici suggests that to argue over the ‘beginnings’ (and endings) of Modernism as occurring at one date or another, is short-sighted: instead we should be looking at what in the past is still present for us, where we still live in the same space. Rather than looking for what has left or arrived on a certain date, it may be better to look for what came back.

Mark Twain did, after all, die the day after the comet’s appearance, as he promised, on the 21^st April 1910. He was seventy-five. His autobiography, which has been under a publication ban, is to be published in November 2010, one hundred years (and a few months) after his death, as, for his own reasons, he insisted.