Of the many thousands of times that I have drawn a dusty nondescript book from a poorly-lit shelf in a used-bookstore during the past forty years, only once can I claim to have pulled down and opened an entirely unknown classic of American literature. Not that I recognized it as such at the time. Nor even now, on the eve of its re-publication by a university press, can its status as a lost classic be said to be a matter of general perception . . . But — I rush ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning . . .
Ten minutes walking distance from our house in Morgantown, in the early 1990s, was a used-bookstore of the old style: several thousand worthwhile out-of-print titles of history, literature, science, travel, art, music and the like. No romances, no self-help, no celebrity autobiographies, no junk. Very few paperbacks. No sales pitches or muzak, no Starbucks, no gimmicks. Some old comfy living-room chairs in out-of-the-way corners. A few foot-stools and a ladder or two for the high shelves. Drawers and bins of printed ephemera, a few drawers of old prints and old maps. If you liked to come in and be left utterly alone for two or three hours of pleasant browsing, no one said a word to you. If you were in the mood for some unpredictable, off-beat conversation about books or any other subject under the sun, the guy behind the counter was generally good for it — at least until the dawn of the computer age when every bookdealer in the world was faced with putting his entire stock online. Once that happened the conversation tended to dry up and to be replaced by the spectacle of the once colorful old codger of a bookdealer cursing hour after hour after hour at a computer screen. Once computers landed on the scene, like an alien invasion, the old havens of dust and suspended time and relaxed literate conversation were doomed.
I describe all this because it was the setting for a significant literary discovery. By the early nineties I had been reading the poets of the First World War seriously for a quarter of a century. I had read the poetry and the biographies and the criticism, and had a personal library of about a hundred volumes just about the poetry, together with a room in which every inch of wall space, floor to ceiling, even covering the windows, was filled with books about the First World War. Nearly every aspect of the war interested me, both military and the homefront, and I was as interested in, and sympathetic to, the movements against the war as I was in the war itself. But above all it was the literature and art of WWI which fascinated me, particularly the poetry.
So I remember very well the afternoon that I pulled one book in particular off a shelf in Wolf’s Head Books in Morgantown, West Virginia. I had been over the WWI section of the store more times than I wished to remember. I was certain I had looked into each book with some care. Every WWI title that comes into my hands is a title that I consider buying, and never having nearly the funds for books that I need, I take my time looking each one over. I knew, or thought I knew, every WWI title in that store. I was doing research for a book about my grandfather’s unit in France in 1918, and was particularly eager to add any American titles to my working library. But I was still very much focused on the literature, and the poetry, and on that day I found an American poet of WWI that I had never heard of.
As anyone familiar with WWI poetry knows, the American contribution to the body of war poetry was considerably weaker than that of the other combatant nations. Why this should be so was never obvious to me. I was familiar with all the usual arguments, that the Americans saw only a few months of combat and that the combat they experienced was not the paralytic year-in, year-out trench warfare experienced by the other major combatant nations, but was much more a warfare of open ground and rapid movement, ~~ of major engagements which were completed conclusively in a matter of weeks or days rather than of monstrously large, unwieldy operations which ground on inconclusively for many months.
Literary historians have pointed to these fundamental differences in experience as sufficient, even self-evident, reasons for the difference in the quality of poetry produced by American soldiers compared to British or European soldiers. The American soldier-poets, the Seegers and Kilmers, simply lacked the time to mature beyond a school-boy romantic view of warfare before they were either killed or the war ended. Their war was too short, and too, generally, victorious.
The trouble with this view is that it only works with the poets. With the novelists it was an entirely different story. At least one major, world-class novel of the war was written by an American — and one who had only a brief, and altogether peripheral experience of the war, Ernest Hemingway. His A Farewell to Arms is one of the indisputably great novels of the century, and one of five or six greatest literary works of the war. Other American novels — at least half a dozen come to mind — are significant works of literature, complex, searching and unflinching, and exhibit an understanding of the nature of war that is very far removed from the romantic idealisms of a Seeger or Kilmer.
Another problem with the view that the Americans experienced only a brief, largely victorious phase of the war is that it misses entirely the actuality of the war for the unprepared, poorly-trained Americans. In a mere six months, a handful of American divisions suffered more fatalities than those suffered by Americans during the entire ten-year duration of the Vietnam war. In only three of those “brief, rapid-movement, victorious” engagements, my grandfather’s division, the 2nd, suffered a casualty rate of over 100%. While it is true that the Americans, for the most part, did not suffer the grinding, dehumanizing, month-in and month-out ordeal of trench-warfare, what the Americans did experience, particularly the first divisions to see combat, was little short of catastrophic. The German assessment of the Americans’ fighting ability gave them very high marks for verve and stubborness and physical courage, but noted that they suffered a casualty rate two or three times higher than necessary because of inexperience, poor judgement and downright foolhardiness. On many occasions, throughout most of 1918, the Americans suffered terrible punishment from machine guns and artillery fire at the hands of grim and seasoned German troops. There were many thousands of young American soldiers who were permanently maimed and traumatized by their experience in the First World War. So I could never believe that there was any necessary reason the Americans failed to produce poetry reflecting the darker realities of the war.
But, to return to the bookstore. One afternoon I pulled down a thin black book from the WWI section which I had previously overlooked. The spine was faded, and the lettering gone, which is probabaly why I had overlooked it until now. When I opened the book, I was immediately interested. I had never heard of John Allan Wyeth, or his book, This Man’s Army, but that in itself was not unusual. I have turned up dozens of obscure volumes of American war poems, published in small runs by obscure publishers, and even more often self-published. It was a time in history when poetry was enormously popular, and amateur poets from all classes and backgrounds, as numerous as leaves in a forest. The number of books of war poems published during and immediately after the war must be very large, and I have never failed to discover several new ones every year. So that I now held another such book in my hands was nothing noteworthy. But my first skim through the book told me I had found something unusual. For one thing, it was a sizeable collection of individual poems, and they were all located in France, during the war, with place-names for titles and with a chronological arrangement. No other book of war poetry I could think of employed such a systematic and documentary arrangement. It was laid out like a soldier’s journal. I scanned the list of French towns and place-names, and as soon as I saw Chipilly Ridge I guessed that the poet had been with the American 33rd Division. Later research would bear this out.
But what caught my attention most of all was that the book was one entire sonnet sequence. As it happened, sonnet sequences had interested me for a number of years, and I had only recently completed a sequence of fourteen sonnets describing my grandfather’s experiences at Belleau Wood. Wyeth’s sequence, however, was over fifty sonnets long, and reading through just a few of them at random, suggested that, not only were they very skillful sonnets, but they were unusually innovative. What was most exciting of all, was that they were not written in an elevated, formal tone, but in a straight-forward down-to-earth voice, often employing slangy soldiers’ dialogue, and filled with as many small particulars of life at the front as any of the best soldier-diaries that I knew of.
I immediately paid for the book and took it home and began researching. It was an undertaking which would last for several years, and was one long ordeal of incredible frustration. I could find almost nothing about Wyeth. This was years before Google, so I went to the university library in my town and started going through all the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literatures for about a twenty-year duration after the “World War”. I did find a handful of reviews, but almost no biographical information about him. In the card catalogs I quickly found a lengthy list of publications by a “John Allan Wyeth”, but this Wyeth was a famous surgeon born before the Civil War, so he could hardly be my WWI poet.
But then I located an anthology, published in the 1940s, of poems written by physicians. It was edited by Mary Lou McDonough, the wife of Capt Stephen McDonough of the Surgeon General’s office in Washington. Included in the anthology were three of John Allan Wyeth’s WWI sonnets and a brief biography of Wyeth which identified him as the famous surgeon, author, historian and Civil War veteran. The story was getting stranger and stranger.
Having conclusively identified Wyeth’s division, by the place-names in the poems, as the 33rd, I obtained the three-volume history of the 33rd Division and found John Allan Wyeth listed in the divisions General Staff as the divisional translater.
I also found a memoir by John Allan Wyeth of his Civil War years and discovered that when he rode with Morgan’s Raiders (as my own forebears had), he was only a boy, which meant that when he served with the 33rd Division, he would have been in his early seventies. Since Wyeth was a staff officer with the 33rd, and his primary duty was translation, this almost sounded plausible. Many of the senior officers in all the armies of the Great War were in their seventies.
Over the next few months I began making contact with as many WWI scholars and literary historians as would listen to me about Wyeth. I was fortunate to belong to a discussion list of several hundred WWI historians and enthusiasts hosted by the University of Kansas. No one on that list had ever heard of Wyeth, but a good many of them were interested to learn more about him, especially when I posted some of his sonnets for them to read. Many were also interested by the image of a Civil War veteran serving on the Western Front. Several listmembers came forward with other examples of Civil War veterans who served with the AEF in WWI in various capacities, although, if I remember correctly, none of them served near the front lines.
Apart from the historians on the Kansas discussion list, I had little success raising any interest in Wyeth. I contacted anyone I could find on the web who was associated with WWI poetry, sending them examples of Wyeth’s war sonnets, but almost no one responded. While the general historians were interested, the literary historians were asleep. It was as though the existing solar system of WWI poetry was such a settled affair that no one would entertain the possibility of a new planet. Not even the poems themselves could spark a reconsideration. Part of the fault for this was probably mine. I didn’t try contacting any of the major literary historians in this field since, having no credentials myself, I didn’t know how to bring Wyeth to their attention without being dismissed as just one more half-baked enthusiast championing a mediocre unknown poet. My mistake was in thinking I would receive a better hearing from less well-known literary historians.
Finally, once I moved away from the WWI literature specialists, I was able to find a literary critic who showed a genuine interest in Wyeth. I had already been in correspondence with Dana Gioia for some time on the subject of New Formalism (see Blood in the water: literary wars ), so at least I didn’t need to introduce myself. I sent him a copy of the book and asked his opinion. To make a long story short, Dana shared my opinion about the quality of the poems and my surprise that he seemed to be completely unknown. Dana was certain, in fact, that Wyeth must be known in at least some WWI literature circles, as the field was so thoroughly researched and written about. Dana would later write that he was sure I was wrong about Wyeth being a Civil War veteran, but over the months that we discussed Wyeth he never expressed this doubt to me, or at least not directly. What he did express surprise about was the few poems I had discovered by Wyeth written around the turn of the century and published in Harper’s. These poems, while composed in skillful rhyme and meter, were completely conventional and tame, and nothing like the later war sonnets. Dana thought it quite an anomoly for the poet of the conventional lyrics to have transformed into the poet of the innovative war sonnets. It wasn’t that such transformations were unusual in themselves; one only need compare the early romantic poems of Owen to his war poems to find a similarly dramatic transformation, occuring within a much briefer timescale. What was unprecidented in the Wyeth case is the age of the poet. Such transformations in style and outlook are not uncommon in younger poets; they are unheard of in a poet in his seventies.
I found the idea of such a late transformation as anomolous as did Dana, but with McDonough’s unequivical identification of the Civil War veteran with the WWI poet, and no evidence to the contrary, I had to proceed under the assumption that the two men were the same. In the meantime I continued to research the question.
Dana recommended that I not only continue to research Wyeth’s life, but that I work on an introduction to his poetry, comparing his work to the other war poets and perhaps indicating early Modernist elements in his poetry. I responded that while I felt competent to write a short biography of Wyeth, I thought that he, Dana, was much better suited to writing a literary assessment of his work. Dana’s understanding of literary Modernism was much greater than mine (my interests lay more with the Romantics and Victorians), as was his technical knowledge of prosody. On the other hand, my knowledge of the military history of both the Civil War and World War I was more extensive, so we soon went our separate ways with Wyeth.
For several years then, Gioia and I were largely out of communication, but I received occasional news that his work on Wyeth was proceeding. Dana published one or two brief essays on Wyeth’s literary significance, together with several of Wyeth’s sonnets, and also arranged to have three sonnets included in the anthology Twentieth-Century American Poetry, of which he was one of the editors. I completed a fairly long biographical essay on Wyeth, describing in some detail his Civil War experiences, several decades of literary and medical work and, finally, his service with the 33rd Division in 1918. This was published on what was at the time the largest World War I site on the web, Mike Iavarone’s Trenches on the Web, which had an extensive section on the literature of the war. Together with my essay, half a dozen of so of Wyeth’s war sonnets were reprinted.
During the long interim in which Gioia and I were out of touch, we each learned independently that the WWI Wyeth was the son of the Civil War Wyeth. Dana had confirmed this through a search of the public records and then by contacting the family. I received confirmation from the owner of Trenches on the Web, who was contacted by Wyeth’s family after they had read my biography of Wyeth on his website.
Gioia got back in touch with me in late 2006 with the news that he had arranged for a reprinting of Wyeth’s This Man’s Army with the University of South Carolina Press. It was to appear as part of their “Great War Series” edited by the distinguished F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli. I thought this was the ideal place for Wyeth’s book to reappear. I knew of Bruccoli for several reasons. In the 1970s he had edited a “Lost American Fiction” series for Southern Illinois University, and had overseen the reprinting of Thomas Boyd’s war novel, Through the Wheat, a novel about Belleau Wood and Soisoons which I knew well because Boyd and my grandfather had served in the same brigade. I also knew of Bruccoli because his collection of WWI memorabilia was second to none in the country and was well-known to historians of the American effort in the war. The Great War Series, under whose banner Wyeth’s sonnets were to appear, was a small series of reprinted “lost literary classics” from the war. Bruccoli had a well-deserved reputation as a leading authority on WWI literature, especially, so it was a surprise both to him and to Gioia that he had never heard of Wyeth. Bruccoli’s surprise was magnified, and tinged with some chagrin, when Gioia informed him that Wyeth was a Princeton man. As it turns out, Bruccoli was a Princeton man as well.
Bruccoli was eager to include Wyeth in his Great War Series, and immediately began pushing to get the project underway. At this point Gioia requested that I be included in the project and be given the assignment of writing a detailed military history annotation for most of the individual sonnets. This represented a departure from the earlier books in the series, each of which consisted of only an introductory essay together with the work itself. None of the books had annotations.
Dana called me first, to update me on developments and ask me to write the annotations, and his phonecall was followed soon after by a letter from Bruccoli. Bruccoli and I then spoke by phone several times and the project was underway. I had only a month to complete the project. In the end I sent Bruccoli forty type-written, single-spaced pages, which constituted more material than the sonnets themselves. Bruccoli cut them down by about half. Dana’s introduction took somewhat longer to prepare, but by early summer 2008 things were nearly ready for the press. At this point I got into a dispute with the general editors of the press about changes in capitalization and wording made to my notes to bring them in line with the press’s sytlistic guidelines. I had taken great care to ensure that my annotations adhere to the military usage of the period, especially in regards to unit designations, so I was greatly alarmed, when my notes were returned to me as proofs, to discover that editorial havoc had been wreaked on my work. Widespread changes to capitalization and word order made many of the unit designations suddenly incorrect, even non-sensical. I contacted a number of WWI historians and editors and asked their opinion on particular points, before sending my objections to the Press. Unfortunately my concerns for historical accuracy and their concerns for sylistic standards had little common ground, and a deadlock quickly ensued. I turned to Bruccoli for assistance and advice, at which point I learned that he had recently been diagnosed with a rapid terminal cancer and was already out of the picture. (I later learned that Bruccoli had had similar disputes with the editors of the Press himself). In any case, there was a renewed push to finish the book while Bruccoli was still alive, and my dispute with the editors was threatening to derail the whole process. At this point Dana stepped in, got everyone to cool down and step back, and to start talking to each other again. I made a last pitch to have the most damaging of their changes removed, but decided I would cease to dispute their changes beyond that point. In the end I had to live with the majority of their changes, and felt fortunate to have the capitals restored to “Western Front” and “Armistice”, and certain crucial word-order changes to unit designations restored. I was glad that I was able to contain some of the damage, but sorry that I had handled the situation as stupidly as I had, so that Dana had had to step in and sort things out. In the end all my objections and stonewalling caused me to miss the original deadline by about a week. I made sure that I turned in the following (and final) set of proofs well ahead of schedule.
Sadly Matthew Bruccoli did not live to see his reprint of the Wyeth sonnets as a finished book, but at least he knew that the last kinks had been ironed out and that the book would appear on schedule. The book is scheduled for release in October, 2008.
The catalog for new releases by the University of SC Press for the Fall season of 2008 has been released, and out of 37 new scholarly titles in a range of fields, Wyeth’s This Man’s Army is the opening selection, and the only book allotted a two-page spread and color photograph of the cover. Bruccoli would have been pleased. See: http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/2009/3779.html
Gioia’s introduction to the book has also just appeared as the lead article in the Summer 2008 issue of The Hudson Review. A quotation from the article appears on the back cover: Seen in the context of American and British World War I literature, the importance and singularity of Wyeth’s This Man’s Army becomes clearer. It is the most ambitious, representative, and succesful poetic venture by an American combatant in the Great War, and it is also probably the only volume that stands comparison with the work of the best British soldier poets.
JA Wyeth, passport photo, 1920
