Abstract
In this chapter I provide evidence that romance, as both genre and ideology, survived both World War I and the rise of competing modes like modernism and hardboiled. I investigate the commonplace that it didn’t survive these eruptions; survey the cultural field in which it did; and consider the narrative of “lost romance” and “the death of chivalry” as itself an expression of romantic nostalgia that whitewashes the history of warfare and the problematic past generally. I end by considering the new postwar iteration of the chivalric ideology.
The war changed all that.
—Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
I guess somebody lost a dream.
—Chandler, The Little Sister (final words spoken)
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Notes
- 1.
For a thorough and nuanced exploration of the ways in which Chandler actually could be considered a World War I writer, not in terms of explicit subject matter but in terms of the scars of trauma borne by his fiction, see Sarah Trott’s War Noir (2016). Trott’s view of Marlowe as a WWI vet with PTSD (absorbing Chandler’s own experience) perceptively complicates the view of him as a knight (particularly at 92–3 and 99–101). Unfortunately, the Marlowe-as-knight meme keeps incongruously butting in (see esp. 108–09 for the classic refrain, which recurs throughout). She is strongest—indeed, she is now the authority—on Chandler in the war. For her compelling analysis of my subsequent two quotations from Chandler’s letters, see 8–10 and 58.
- 2.
One could go on: barbed wire; flamethrowers; tanks; submarines; zeppelins; aerial bombings; the concept of “total war” not limited to combatants. For a concise overview, see Ferro (2002), esp. ch. 10, “Cannon Fodder and the New Art of War.”
- 3.
For “total war” in the Middle Ages, see Strickland (1996, esp. ch. 10), “War Against the Land: Ravaging and Attrition,” and ch. 11, “Total War? The Scots and the Routiers.” The phrase “total war,” coined in 1935 in the memoir of a German World War I general, was new; the phenomenon was not.
- 4.
Trenches were in fact established European military technique. Military historian John Keegan (2009) makes some incisive comparisons between the trenches of the American Civil War and the Great War (132), and between the two wars more generally (43, 50, and 355–57). For Chandler and the trenches, see Trott (2016, 35–6, 50, and 87).
- 5.
It is neither unexpected nor unique to find Weaver dubbing Robert E. Lee “the knight sans peur et sans reproche,” the oft-appropriated moniker of the Chevalier Bayard (1945, 276).
- 6.
On the “Infantry Revolution” of the fourteenth century that changed attitudes to chivalry, see Rogers (1999, 141–44). White (2013, 139) estimates 3.5 to 5 million French people died as a result of the Hundred Years War—as much as a quarter of the total population—most of them, of course, non-combatant commoners.
- 7.
As a related and fascinating point, scholar of the book Andrew Pettegree (2010) says that even in the wake of Don Quijote , chivalric romance escaped to street-level pamphlets and chapbooks (170); literary historian Henry Thomas concurs, adding the popular stage (1920, 179). Of course, such performances and ephemera tend not to live to tell their tales, skewing the record towards the “classics” that survive.
- 8.
See the thorough essay by medievalist Michael N. Salda, “William Faulkner’s Arthurian Tale: Mayday” (1994). Fascinatingly, John Steinbeck would later replicate this bibliophilic fastidiousness, traveling to London in search of vellum and a scribe that could reproduce fifteenth-century handwriting for the Dedication to his Maloryan The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (posthumously published in 1976). The impressive result can be conveniently viewed online as part of Pamela M. Yee’s online pamphlet for an exhibit at the University of Rochester’s Robbins Library (2013).
- 9.
Howey and Reimer (2006) list a whopping fifty English-language Arthurian publications in the war years 1915 through 1919 inclusive. For comparison, I added up publications during equivalent five-year windows at the height of the Victorian Arthurian revival: 1865 through 1869 saw twenty publications; 1875–1879 saw but nine; and 1885–1889 picked back up with thirty-two—all significantly smaller hauls than during the Great War. In equivalent five-year windows after the war, 1925 through 1929 spiked with ninety-one publications, then 1935 through 1939 dropped back down to wartime levels with fifty-nine. (My count includes parodies and burlesques and significant reprints of previously published texts; it excludes radio programs, films, fine art, and graphic design.)
To get a more comprehensive sense of the eras, I also counted publications in the twenty-five-year window preceding the decade of war—1885–1910—and the twenty-five-year window of World War I and after: 1915–1940. I counted 305 Arthurian items published in that pre-war window, and 411 items published in the wartime and postwar window. That’s a 25% increase in Arthurian production during and after the war.
My study is hardly scientific, but I believe that it does provide a compelling general sense of the increased viability of Arthurian fantasizing in the face of wartime trauma and its wake.
- 10.
Fussell skips the stanza in which Hodgson invokes romance by name, and overlooks the knightly sword imagery, when he discusses the poem in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975, 61).
- 11.
This was not rare. The same figuration occurs in a poem by Mildred Huxley from 1916—Galahads laid in the graves of Flanders—included in a 1919 volume entitled Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials (Girouard 1981, 305n20). For a consideration of the Great War as a “new Crusade with ‘knights’ on the front lines,” see Charles Brumm’s 1919 In Quest of the Holy Grail (Howey and Reimer 2006, 46).
- 12.
For more on this as a constitutive feature of modern Romantic movements, see Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s aptly titled Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001), esp. ch. 1.
- 13.
The unpublished entire first chapter, along with Fitzgerald’s commentary, was published in the Spring of 1979 in the journal Antaeus, edited by Daniel Halpern. It was subsequently printed as an appendix in the Hemingway Library Edition of Sun.
- 14.
The great Malory scholar Eugène Vinaver thought that they were independent stories, a still-controversial position. Malory’s own title was likely the more fitting The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table: see Stephen H. A. Shepherd’s concise overview in his Norton Critical Edition (Malory 2004, 1n).
- 15.
Chrétien refers to the “siècle qui fu jadis” in the Prologue to Cligés (1994, 291), “a cel termine” in Le Chevalier de la Charrette (1994, 537), and simply “lors” in Le Chevalier au Lion (1994, 711), which modern French translators give as “le temps jadis” and “en ce temps-là,” and American translator David Staines gives as “in olden days” and “in those days” (1993, 87, 186, and 257).
- 16.
- 17.
The scholar, Velma Bourgeois Richmond (2014), shares: “I was reared in the Deep South where myths of chivalry held sway long after the War Between the States.” This was written in 2014, mind you (1).
- 18.
For more on what this looks like in a British context, see Praseeda Gopinath, Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (2013). For an American version, or more precisely Anglo-American, we need look no farther than the critics who see Chandler salvaging chivalry via the lonely knight Philip Marlowe. I will offer a dissenting view in the next chapter.
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Rizzuto, A.D. (2021). The Long Goodbye: World War I, Romantic Nostalgia, and Chivalry’s Endless Death. In: Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3_3
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