In
the late 1930's, the British in at least one way prepared themselves
for war at close range. Early in 1937, shortly after King Edward VIII
abdicated in 1936 to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, the
British anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet Tom Madge, and the
film producer and director Humphrey Jennings organized a volunteer
group called Mass-Observation to record the daily experiences of men
and women throughout the United Kingdom. Their aim was to learn what
the British people experienced in everyday life and what they
actually thought about it. At first the project won few headlines.
Save for occasional splashes of local color the realities of
day-to-day living were never of much interest to the national press,
which busied itself in reporting what Harrison and his colleagues
regarded as mere sensational fiction--such as what "the British
people" thought about the King and Wallis Simpson. But by the
time George VI was crowned in May 1937, Mass-Observation was up and
running. Ultimately the project drew 500 volunteers and gained
results that qualified for national press coverage in a number of
ways. By coincidence, this took place in the same year as the
Germans' successful experiment in bombing a civilian target at
Guernica.
When the Luftwaffe arrived over London on 9 September 1940 M-O was
ready and soon directed its energies to the war effort. From that
date, through Coventry on 14 November 1940 to the end of the Blitz
with a final massive assault on London and Birmingham on 10 and 16
May 1941, Mass-Observation's volunteers kept journals and conducted
interviews to record what it was like to live through the Blitz at
ground level; teams of observers went anywhere the bombing was, often
while it was still underway. At a distance, American radio audiences
got their own version of the Blitz by listening to the radio
broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow, each one beginning with the famous
words, "This is London." His reporting won sympathy for
Britain's cause and did much to counter American isolationists, who
would not finally be silenced until Pearl Harbor.
Mass-Observation collected and stored thousands of recorded
interviews and reports of eye-witness observation, and these records
sometimes did contribute to the war effort, which in any case had
been all-out from the fall of France onwards. This archive also led
to an unexpected discovery. As Tom Harrisson reports in his memoir of
the wartime documentation of Mass-Observation in Living through
the Blitz (1976), everyone's memories about what they had
actually seen and reported during the war and what they remembered
thirty years later often turned out to be wildly different from what
actually happened, not least because everyone, from Churchill on
down, participated in what Harrison terms a "public
glossification" of war, both while it was going on and long
after it ended. In this respect the story of the Mass-Observation
project sounds more like the famous skit from Beyond the Fringe, "The
Aftermyth of War," than anything an historian could credit.
Harrisson rounds out the tale by noting that this surprising outcome
confirmed the pioneering work of the Cambridge psychologist Sir
Frederic Bartlett, whose Remembering: A
Study in Experimental and Social Psychology
(1932) concludes with this observation:
Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable, fixed, lifeless
and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or
construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass
of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little
outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language
form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most
rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation. (Bartlett 213)
The
work of both Bartlett and Harrisson will interest anyone who wants to
know how much we can know about what really happened in the past,
especially if what was happening happened to be war.
Compelling
and vivid as Harrisson's story is, one thing about war that Living
through the Blitz does not challenge is the orthodox view that
the greatest authenticity in any account of war belongs to those who
have been in it. Thinking about war has always given pride of place
to those who experience it at first hand, on the ground, in the sea,
or in the air: the veterans, the victims, and eye-witnesses to
conflict like the journalist Michael Herr, in his Vietnam war
reporting in Dispatches. We might well ask, How could it be
otherwise? If you are a civilian and don't know war at first hand you
risk being trumped every time for authenticity, since we have been
told over and over that only those who have actually been in war can
know what it is like.
The problem is that those who wait to go to war, who fear its coming,
or who never go to war at all but then have to deal with its
aftermath can live through experiences scarcely less challenging, as
Penelope in the Odyssey could tell you, or Clytemnestra in the
Agamemnon, or Primo Levi in his Auschwitz memoir If This Is
A Man, or the wives who welcome home their veteran husbands in
William Wyler's 1946 Academy Award-winning classic The Best Years
of Our Lives. Dread and foreboding about war are subjects just
as worthy of regard, and so are the attempts people have always made
to imagine what war can be like, or actually is.
Mary A. Favret's new book is likely to inspire a new respect for such
imaginings, as well as new questions about the familiar notion that
war can be truly experienced only by those who are wherever the
fighting is. War at a Distance concerns living and thinking
about war in an equally important way, possibly even more important
than knowing war at first hand, because even more widely shared: What
can war mean to those who are far away from it, and at what seems a
safe distance? The possibility that war could come down on people who
think they are dwelling with peace in their time can give these
ruminations great urgency, depending on the wit and imagination of
those who are doing the thinking. Favret has gathered some of best
poets and artists who began to engage in exactly this kind of
project.
As her subtitle indicates, she argues that Romantic poets and visual
artists led the way in giving us a perception about war at a
distance, and that it is one that we still live with today. For more
than twenty years starting in 1792, Great Britain and all of Europe
endured wars or the rumor of wars on a global scale, until Napoleon
was defeated for the last time in 1815, at Waterloo. Britain's
experience with those two decades of war created a new sense of
wartime that differed from what the eighteenth and earlier centuries
had known. The importance of this argument for better understanding
our own wars at a distance could not be clearer, but it is
characteristic of Favret's careful design that she does not belabor
the obvious relevance of her book. She helps us understand where we
now are in the mental landscape of war, and she recounts what has
gone into the creation of that landscape with an intricate and
challenging argument in which she reads and re-reads the same poetic
texts from different theoretical and historical perspectives that are
always rewarding. Whatever its reception in English literary history
and criticism may be, War at a Distance deserves to be read
and argued about in history, comparative literature and classics for
years to come.
Favret includes the great Romantic poets whom general readers might
expect to find, represented by poems like Coleridge's "Frost at
Midnight" and Wordsworth's "Ruined Cottage," which
Favret reads so persuasively that it's almost as if they had been
written to illustrate her argument. But the poet who did more than
any other to articulate what she means by "war at a distance"
comes from the generation before them. Influential and much admired
by Coleridge and others, including Marianne Dashwood in Sense and
Sensibility, William Cowper (1731-1800) may not be as familiar to
many readers today as he deserves to be. Many editions are available,
but Favret's readers should not overlook the magisterial Poems of
William Cowper in three volumes, edited by John D. Baird and
Charles Ryskamp for the Oxford Clarendon Press (1995). His greatest
work The Task (published in 1785) gives haunting voice to the
fears and discontents of people in a civilization at war, as in this
passage from book IV ("The Winter Evening"):
. . . I seem advanc'd
To some secure and more than mortal height,
That lib'rates and exempts me from them all.
It [the world] turns submitted to my view, turns round
With all its generations; I behold
The tumult, and am still. (IV: 95-100)
Here,
writes Favret, "a world hangs in nearly every line...a world of
barely discerned consequences and violence...the world' and its
putative distance are both the objects of his thought and the
enabling conditions of that thought" (23).
But
in the course of his poem, Cowper will move from this calmly detached
and rational frame of mind to what Favret calls "a closer, more
intimate sense of war" (23).
Like Edward R. Murrow in 1940, Cowper and his followers were
broadcasting the news of war at a distance, through poetry. (As
Favret notes, "broadcasting" is originally an agricultural
term, and I'll return to the significance of her use of this kind of
georgic etymology below.) All of them were engaged in mediations of
war, of various kinds, to convey the sensations and the emotional
states created by war to readers everywhere, no matter how far from
conflict they happened to be. This affect created by war can befall
anyone, anywhere, whether it be through poetry or the images of war
in pictures produced by painters and photographers. Her book ends by
expanding its range into the visual arts in the chapter "Viewing
War at a Distance" (187-239), which discusses Thomas and William
Daniel's pictures of the so-called Jewel in the Crown of the British
empire, India, in Oriental scenery. One hundred and fifty views of
the architecture, antiquities, and landscape scenery of Hindoo-stan
(1812-1816). She also effectively juxtaposes some of the first
photographic images of battlefields, such as the desolate terrain of
the Crimea where the charge of the Light Brigade took place in 1855,
with Mathew Brady's pictures of the American Civil War a few years
later. All of this constitutes visible proof of Susan Sontag's
aphoristic take on war in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003):
"War was and still is the most irresistible--and
picturesque--news" (War at a Distance, 190).
The most unexpected of Favret's many disciplinary border
crossings--and in my view, the most original and
exciting part of her book--is the foray she makes in Chapter Three
("War in the Air") into British weather (119-144). The UK's
famously humorous and ever-changing climate turns out to have deeply
influenced innovations that the Romantics achieved in imagining war
at a distance. The revolutionary advances in meteorology that
eighteenth-century science achieved transformed the way people saw
themselves in their personal landscapes. Poets learned from
scientists such as Luke Howard (1772-1864) that their once familiar
and uniquely personal weather was actually linked to weather
everywhere else in the world, and that the continual changes visible
at the local level were part of larger patterns that could be traced
throughout the world. In an innovation that recalls the earlier
Linnaean taxonomy established for living organisms, Howard devised a
Latin terminology for clouds (e.g., cumulus, nimbus, stratus)
that Favret characterizes as "universal yet transitive signs of
hidden and constant translation" (135). Learning to grasp this
new, worldwide network of climates could be as destabilizing and
unsettling to received opinion as war itself. After the discoveries
of Cowper and Howard, when Britain was almost constantly fighting
France and running an empire reaching as far as India, British
thinking about global war would go hand in hand with thinking about
global weather. "To understand the fugitive movements of weather
and war," Favret writes,
we must simultaneously situate them within the history of
meteorology, where, by the Romantic period, the nature and location
of weather were vexed; and within a history of wartime communication,
where again, location, temporality, and responsibility were problems.
The need to conceptualize a war in which Britain was vitally engaged
but geographically removed contributed to an expanded interest in the
weather, which only in the late eighteenth century could be
understood as a global system (126).
As
Favret explains, the Romantics poets' new perception of climate
upended long-standing conceptions in classical literature and other
traditions that would identify weather with the machinations of
immortal gods, somehow relating it to heroic codes of conduct.
To see her point, think of the opening scene of the Aeneid,
where Juno cons the wind god Aeolus into sending a storm to drive
Aeneas and the Trojan fleet away from their destined goal of Italy.
When Neptune brings this disturbance of his realm to a stop, the
first simile of the poem likens his exercise of power to that of an
orator who can stop a mob running out of control simply by the power
of his voice and the authority of his person. Does this storm
anticipate the war in Italy that comes in the second half of the
poem? Does Neptune's Olympian power politics presage Aeneas's defeat
of Turnus at its end? We could think of the famous storm scenes in
Shakespeare as well, but Favret's point is that this tradition of
linking weather with human history was fundamentally changed by the
science of Cowper's day. This point also illustrates one of the most
compelling things about War at a Distance as a piece of
criticism: this is the kind of book that encourages you to try out
its ideas on works you may already know, and then rethink them, just
as it makes you want to learn about the poets it discusses and the
critics who played a role in its writing.
I suspect this happens because Favret herself is given to making this
kind of move. She commends work that was just as important to her as
Cowper's poetry or Hudson's meteorology, namely, Kevis Goodman's
Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the
Mediation of History (Cambrdige, 2004). Since Goodman likewise
thanks Favret for her considerable help in her own work (Georgic
Modernity, xiv), it is not surprising that readers will find
signs everywhere in War at a Distance of their intellectual
cross-pollination. From Georgic Modernity and its carefully
argued interpretation of both Vergil's poem and the traditions it
inspired Favret learned how to construct her own highly original
argument focusing on Cowper's The Task.
And as she shows, to read Cowper is to be led inevitably back to
Vergil. At the center of literary traditions mediating the distance
between war and its wider audiences lies the middle poem he composed
between his Theocritean Eclogues and Homeric Aeneid,
the Georgics. Ostensibly a poem adapting Hesiod's Works and
Days to Roman measure, it teaches all there is to know
about the prosaic subject of cultivating the earth in furrows
(versus), but in verses (also called versus) marked by
such richly figurative language that it has long been recognized as
one of the densest poetic texts in classical literature. Here as so
often in Latin poetry the alleged poverty (egestas) of the
Latin lexicon that Lucretius complains of in De Rerum Natura
works to the advantage of the poet. The multiple meanings of that
single word versus--a line of verse, a furrow in the
soil--exemplify in microcosm the complexity of Vergil's project. The
Georgics are self-consciously middle poems in both a literal
and figurative sense, condensing allusion to Homer, Hesiod,
Lucretius, and much of the rest of earlier Greek and Latin poetry
into verse of such complexity that it is easy to believe ancient
testimony that Vergil completed no more than one line a day in the
seven or more years it took him to compose a poem of not quite 2,200
lines. The Georgics are not for the literal-minded. In their
instruction about such seemingly prosaic subjects as crop rotation
and bee keeping, these ways of working the land become figures for
understanding the workings of human civilization, not least its
propensity to wage war.
So
the Georgics are wonderful poetry, their competing
interpretations are legion, and joining in the fray is not for the
faint of heart. It is as challenging to write persuasive criticism
about them as about any other field of Classics, including Homer or
Greek tragedy. In the late 1970s the Oxonian Jasper Griffin declared,
"The reader who has duly confronted Coleman, Otis, Segal,
Bradley, Wender, Wilkinson, Wankenne, Coleiro, Hardie, Joudoux,
Wormell, Otis again, Parry, Putnam, Cova, Chomarat, and Stehle, feels
dismay; perhaps despair."
("The Fourth 'Georgic,' Virgil, and Rome," Greece &
Rome, Second series, Vol. 26, No. 1 [Apr., 1979] 61). Griffin
overcame whatever despair he had by thoughtfully presenting his own interpretation as the latest word on the subject.
It
sure wasn't the last. Twenty years later the American classicist
William Batstone observed, "Despite the innumerable labors of many critics, Virgil's
Georgics remain one of the most fundamentally intractable
works of ancient literature." ("Virgilian Didaxis: Value and Meaning in the
Georgics," Cambridge
Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale [Cambridge, 1997]
125). Then
Batstone tried his hand at them, too. Not for him or Griffin what
Achilles' soldiers
do in the Iliad when Thetis brings the shining new arms made
by Hephaestus:
Awe-struck, the Myrmidons all turn'd away
Their dazzled eyes, and, trembling, fled the place.
(Iliad 19.14-15, trans. Cowper)
Happily
a number of books have succeeded in speaking to many Vergilians and a
wider critical audience in English and comparative literature. Two
that were particularly helpful to Goodman were Christine Perkell's
The Poet's Truth (1989) and Joseph Farrell's Vergil's
Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic (1991), and
they were well chosen. Perkell and Farrell exemplify modern Georgics
criticism at its best.
Yet however much the Georgics may or may not challenge modern
classicists, Vergil's middle poem was not so intimidating to the
poets of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and
with the inspiration of Goodman's Georgic Modernity Favret
explores that particular Romantic readership with great skill.
Cowper and others were able to turn to Vergil for inspiration, not
least because John Dryden's 1697 translation of what he termed "the
best poem by the best poet" had already made the Georgics
available to a wide readership for a century and more. At the
beginning of her Introduction Goodman quotes a passage near the end
of the first Georgic that prefigures an important theme in
both her book and Favret's. A skillful lexicographer and
philologist, Goodman quotes the original Latin with a prose
translation (Georgics, I. 493-497), but we can see her
point just as well through the Dryden version:
scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis
agricola incurvo terram molitus aratro
exesa inveniet scabra robigine pila,
aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanis,
grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris.
Then, after length of time, the labouring swains
Who turn the turfs of those unhappy plains,
Shall rusty piles from the ploughed furrows take,
And over empty helmets pass the rake--
Amazed at antique titles on the stones,
And mighty relics of gigantic bones.
As
Goodman explains, Vergil is alluding to his own violent present, with
the Roman civil wars only recently concluded. In this passage those
wars are conceived as a temporally remote events whose relics--rusty
piles and empty helmets--are unearthed at some distant point in the
future. Playing on the double meanings of the Latin versus--a
line of verse turned out by a poet, a row in the soil turned over by
a plow--she argues that "historical presentness is often turned
up' by georgic as unpleasurable feeling: as sensory
discomfort, as disturbance in affect and related phenomena that we
variously term perceptive, sensorial, or affective" (Georgic
Modernity, 3-4). You can see here the germ of the ideas that
would lead eventually to War at a Distance.
There are many examples that one could cite to show how Favret builds
on Goodman's reading of the poets. To take but one example, Book 4 of
The Task ("The Winter Evening") demonstrates how
Cowper turns war into a temporal experience that starts with the kind
of georgic perception we can see in Vergil's original Latin or
Dryden's version of it, and then moves beyond it, "making war
into wartime." This new wartime emerges in the person of the
post-boy who brings the latest news from abroad.
Hark! tis the twanging horn! o'er yonder bridge...
He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
With spatter'd boots, strapp'd waist, and frozen locks,
New from all nations lumb'ring at this back.
True to his charge, the close-pack'd load behind,
Yet careless of what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the desin'd inn:
And, having dropp'd th'expected bag, pass on.
He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,
Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief
Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
To him indiff'rent whether grief or joy. (IV. 1...5-15)
Favret's
reading of the post-boy passage well represents her sensitive eye and
ear for poetry:
The solitary youth with his makeshift uniform and purposive air, not
a stranger but a familiar figure who arrives with trumpeting and
departs whistling, performs a national service while standing in for
so many absent and awaited young men gone to war. The post-boy offers
the poet and reader fleeting contact--and fleeting consolation:
however unexpected or disabling the burden he unloads, however
unanswerable the questions he prompts, his coming and going
nevertheless inscribe a secure rhythm ordering the upheaval. And
whatever the effect of his news, the young man performs his duty
unscathed--pace mud and frozen locks. He is more than a
messnger; he is an impassive figure of translation, condensation, and
displacement: disburdening his own body of a load of pain and grief,
he converts the war into a matter of reading, its "grief perhaps
to thousands" packaged for consumption while he himself remains
immune to feeling, "indiff'rent" (60).
It
requires no great stretch of the imagination to see here the same
kind of cheerful indifference and persistence that so characterize
the media of our own day, with the same endless, ever-changing news
cycle that we now complain of, and then follow to the point of
addiction. The volume and the intrusiveness have increased, but in
most respects the movement is already there in Book IV of The
Task, coming from remote wars and disasters that move ominously
into our presence.
In a poem first published in 1785, then, we encounter "the
dislocated experience that is modern wartime: the experience of war
mediated, of time and times unmoored, of feeling intensified but also
adrift" (9). These are large claims and War at a Distance
does more than substantiate them. By the end we have learned not only
a great deal about William Cowper and the later Romantics' poetics of
war. We have gained a new way to think about our own time's unending
wars at a distance. To signal that new way, Favret begins her book
not with Cowper or Vergil, but with a poem by the American poet C. K.
Williams. Written in the winter of 2003 during the buildup to the U.
S.-led invasion of Iraq, "The Hearth" begins with memories
of a friend blinded and scarred by napalm during the American war in
Vietnam, and moves eventually to the coming war at a distance in both
time and space.
But in fact I wasn't listening. I was thinking,
As I often do these days, of war;
I was thinking of my children, and their children,
of the more than fear I feel for them,
and then of radar, rockets, shrapnel,
cities razed, soil poisoned
for a thousand generations; of suffering so vast
it nullifies everything else. (41-48)
This
recent poem about a distant war still in progress is emblematic of
both the range of Favret's argument and the intersections her book
creates between the study of wartime literature and the study of
affect, the emotional states people fall into in response to wars
that they and their governments are conducting at a distance.
*
Panegyrics are of limited use, even when books deserve them, and I
would like to end by suggesting some aspects of war at a distance
that Favret does not touch on--nor, for that matter, so far as her
highly rewarding study of mediation goes, does Goodman. As
accomplished readers of the OED, both scholars know
very well that while the now widely-used term "mediation"
develops out of Latin formations from the adjective medius,
the actual word mediatio is post-classical. (Its history is
well presented in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, VII
526-527 s.v. mediatio.) Mediation figures importantly in
Augustine's writing about Christ as the mediator between human beings
and god, participating in both mortal and divine aspects. In so far
as He is incarnate as a human being, Christ is connected with man,
but in so far as He is the Son of God, He is divine. He is the
mediator between humanity in its fallen state, since we are all
children of Adam and Eve, and at the same time He is the only power
that can unite us with God (Confessions 10. 43). Augustine
bases his influential exposition on a doctrine that originates in the
New Testament, where the Greek word for "mediator" mesitês
was translated by Jerome as mediator and then likewise by
the King James scholars as "mediator," as in Hebrews
9.15.
And for this reason he is the mediator of the new testament, that by
means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were
under the first testament, they which are called might receive the
promise of eternal inheritance.
I do
not know whether specialists in media theory and media studies ever
stray into theology; they would probably think they have no reason
to. But when it comes to the imagination of wars at a distance it
might be useful to try, because there is good evidence that in
Cowper's time others in Europe were thinking just as hard and just as
creatively as he and his successors were about war at a distance.
While advances in the science of meteorology would naturally be of
interest to them, and might captivate them as much as they did
Cowper, they were also powerfully influenced by Christian doctrine.
This can be illustrated by what happens when another kind of artist,
a composer, turns to setting the text of the Eucharist to music.
A long tradition of Christ's mediation between God and humanity
underlies the liturgy of the Eucharist, especially as it assumed the
form of the Tridentine Mass, which dated from the Council of Trent in
1570 and which remained the same until 1962, when it was revised
under Pope John XXIII. As the text to which any musical setting of
the mass had to conform, it was unchanging and unchangeable. While
there could be different versions of the Mass Ordinary, as in a
Requiem Mass or shorter versions such as the Missa Brevis,
celebrants and congregations would expect a fixed and familiar text.
The challenge to the composer was to create a new setting of it by
his musical invention.
The doctrine of Christ as mediator between God and humanity is
central to the mass and the source of its attraction for believers,
since this kind of mediation is the blessing repeatedly sought in the
mass from start to finish. By contrast, the mediation that
preoccupies both Goodman's and Favret's work involves only this
world. In this respect they are once again on the same page. They are
focused on the impact of the Enlightenment and empirical science on
British literary life. Admirable as their discussions are, you
wouldn't know from either of them that there was such a thing as a
Christian conception of mediation, as much in England as across the
Channel and far to the east. Even the illiterate as well as the
modestly educated in Christian Europe would know what such mediation
entailed. Any composer who set the Ordinary of the Mass to music for
the faithful confronted a distance that did not merely traverse the
globe or a set of meteorological zones, but one that soared beyond
this world entirely--to wherever you think God the Father and God the
Son happen to abide. When a composer working in this tradition wants
to bring the life of this world into the spiritual realm of the
Eucharistic experience, the mediations that result can be complex.
The greatest living composer of Cowper's time offers an instructive
example. In 1795 Franz Josef Haydn was summoned back from London to
Austria by his newest patron, the next generation's Prince Esterházy.
He had spent some of his happiest times in a difficult life and
marriage during his stays in England, where he was universally
admired and honored. He received a doctorate from Oxford, and many of
his greatest later symphonies and quartets were written for audiences
in England. But with his homeland under increasing danger of French
invasion, he saw many signs that Napoleon would soon be turning his
armies towards Vienna--as he eventually did. Back in Austria, then,
Haydn devoted much of his energies in his final years to the
composition of his great oratorios The Seasons and The
Creation and a half dozen masses. One of the first was composed
and performed in 1796, which he entitled Missa in tempore belli,
Mass in Time of War. In German it is also known as the
Paukenmesse, or Kettle-Drum Mass ("kettle drum"
being the English term for the usual musical term "timpani").
Both these titles are worked out in the music: Haydn's own words
describe the temporal circumstance of the mass, while the German
nickname reflects what is most memorable and distinctive in a
performance of it.
The Mass in Time of War brings war straight into the text of
the Eucharist. There Haydn mediates war every bit as much as the
English Romantic poets were doing, while at the same time celebrating
the mediation offered by Christ, the intercessor and mediator to whom
the believer prays. In the Mass's opening Kyrie, the first
four measures are piano but in the fifth measure at the word
"Kyrie" there is suddenly a surprising, loud chord
with a fortissimo timpani roll, the first indication that the
timpani are going to play a prominent role. While they are present in
other movements, the kettle drums are most prominent where you would
least expect them, in the concluding prayer to the Lamb of God, the
Angus Dei. Since the mass aims above all else to save souls,
this is a prayer for each communicant's personal peace, building on
Philippians 4.7, "And the peace of God,
which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds
through Christ Jesus." Haydn's Mass in Time of War
ends with a powerful inflection of this prayer.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
War
is very much at a distance in Haydn's setting of the opening of the
Agnus
Dei.
The tempo is Adagio,
and the trumpet, the other musical instrument that signifies the
military, also acquires a prominent role. The timpani start after the
evocation of the Lamb of God and his attributes, with the word
miserere,
"Take pity on us." This prayer
for peace thus has an ominous sound to it; the effect is like the
distant rumblings of thunder or cannon over the horizon. This is
followed by an Allegro con spirito and then a faster più
presto setting of only the plea, Dona nobis pacem. It is
the same word pacem as ever, but as it is inflected through
Haydn's music it begins to sound like something the very opposite of
peace. At present there are only so-so recordings of the Kyrie
available on You Tube and other on-line resources. For a great
one that brings out this effect--or as Goodman and Favret might
prefer, the affect it creates--I recommend Leonard Bernstein's 1973
performance with the New York Philharmonic, where the reverberations
in this finale are at their most thrilling, thanks to the cavernous
spaces of the National Cathedral in Washington.
In Haydn's setting the alternation between forte
and piano
is orchestrated in such a way that the last word of the text, pacem,
is at once the word of a prayer, and the sound of war's threat to
that prayer. Without resorting to a musical score, let me try by
typographical approximation to suggest what Haydn's orchestration and
choral writing create. The fortissimo
measures and the insistently repeated words are in caps, while I've
put the drawn-out, three measures of pianissimo
in lower-case type. And I've added an exclamation mark that isn't in
the Mass's Latin text to represent the vehemence with which these
final words are sung. The final twenty measures (144-164) of the
Agnus Dei
would then look like this:
PACEM, DONA, DONA, DONA, DONA NOBIS PACEM! PACEM!
(Fermata or grand pause before the final cadence)
pa......cem, pa....cem, PACEM! PACEM!
War
is at a distance in the Paukenmesse,
and then, at the end, with the trumpets and timpani at full volume,
it is as present and unavoidable as the kettle drums that give it its
German name. Is the ending of the Missa
in tempore belli therefore a prayer
for peace? or for victory? Are those our Austrian trumpets
and drums we are hearing at the end, or the enemy's? The answer to
such questions is not as important as the fact that Haydn's music
inspires us to ask them.
There are many differences between the poets
and visual artists that War at a
Distance expounds and this musical
setting of the Ordinary of the Mass. And in Haydn's music there are
two kinds of mediation at work simultaneously, the sacred and the
secular. But The Task
is also concerned with the sounds of war. Not long after the passage
in Book IV about the coming and going of the post-boy, Cowper writes
The sound of war
Has lost its terrors ere it reaches me,
Grieves but alarms me not. I mourn the pride
And av'rice that make man a wolf to man,
Hear the faint echo of those brazen throats
By which he speaks the language of his heart,
And sigh, but never tremble at the sound.
(The Task, IV. 100-106)
The sensibilities of Cowper and Haydn differ in many ways, but aren't
both of them trying to convey the same thing to their readers and
listeners? What is the Mass in the
Time of War about, if not war at a
distance?
I don't pose such questions to suggest that Favret has left
out something she should have included, or even should have thought
about. I offer them as an example of the kind of ripple effect
reading War at a Distance
can have, as it inspires readers to rethink, reread, or rehear what
they have heard or read before, and thought they understood. (My
sincere thanks to Charles Beye, David Rosen, and the Editor for their
considerable help.)
James
Tatum is Professor Emeritus of Classics at Dartmouth College. His
books include The
Mourner's Song: War
and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam (Chicago, 2003) and African American
Writers and Classical Tradition
(Chicago 2010), co-authored with William W. Cook.
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