For Esmé, with Love and Squalor by J D Salinger

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There are two good reasons for writing about J D Salinger’s 1950 short story, For Esmé, with Love and Squalor. First, 6th June 2024 will be the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. And second, I recently heard a BBC radio programme about Salinger’s time as an American serviceman in England during the war, which forms the background to this story.

The story is in two distinct parts, or perhaps three, because a short introductory section makes it clear that the narrator is looking back from a happy and settled present day at events that took place sometime earlier.

A bored and lonely American soldier stationed in England in the run-up to D-Day is spending his day off wandering round the town in the rain. The church notice board catches his eye and he goes inside to watch the children’s choir practice. It strikes him that one particular young girl in the choir seems a bit different to the other children.

He meets the girl again later when she comes into the teashop with her governess and small brother. She detaches herself from the governess, comes over to the table where the narrator is sitting alone and strikes up a conversation. Esmé is poised and perfectly mannered in the English upper-class style. She is slightly precocious in her use of language, using words that are a bit beyond her years and not always quite correct. We find out that her father has been killed in the war. Her mother is also dead, but that is not explained.

The narrator has already told us that his fellow soldiers are solitary types and Esmé instantly says, to his surprise, “you’re at that intelligence school, aren’t you?”, perhaps explaining why that should be.

She gets the narrator to admit that in civilian life he is a short-story writer. She hopes that he will write a story for her. As we read on, we realise that the story we are reading is, as the title tells us, that very story. She hopes that he will return from the war “with all his faculties intact” and promises to write to him.

If that is the “before” part of the story, there is now an abrupt switch to “after”. The scene changes to occupied Germany at the end of the war. The narrator identifies himself as “Sergeant X”. A page of description makes clear that his war experiences have left him a dreadful state. He has spent some time in hospital. He chain-smokes but can’t taste the cigarettes, his gums are bleeding, and he can’t sleep. He has what we call today PTSD: “Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter like insecure luggage on an overhead rack.”

He contemplates a book by Goebbels left behind in the house the American soldiers live in. It belonged to a woman, an official in the Nazi party who the narrator himself arrested. There is an inscription in her handwriting: “Dear God, life is hell.”  

There is a fleeting reference to the Hurtgen forest. This was in fact the gruelling battle that Salinger himself was involved in. It’s also made clear that the narrator and his jeep-mate, “Corporal Z”, have been involved in the whole campaign, from D-Day to VE day.  

He takes out a letter from a pile of correspondence that he has put on one side and not read. It is letter from Esmé, enclosing the gift of her father’s watch, with its smashed face. This loving gesture from the young girl he befriended is the beginning of healing for him. He has been unable to sleep and suddenly feels very tired. The nightmare is over. He realises that his faculties are, despite everything he has been through, intact.

The story is only twenty-eight pages long, beautifully written and profoundly moving. It appears to be quite autobiographical, closely based on Salinger’s real-life wartime experiences. It makes its meaning as much by what is understated or not quite stated as much as by what is said directly. It brings home the very real human cost of the liberation of Europe, both for soldiers and civilians.

It’s also worth noting that Salinger’s state of mind after his experiences in the war influenced his descriptions of Holden’s mental troubles in his famous novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951.

Calmly we walk through this April’s day by Delmore Schwartz

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There were many fine poets in America in the twentieth century but Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) seems to have been rather overshadowed by those who came after him. He is perhaps best known today as Lou Reed’s mentor at Syracuse university and the inspiration for the title character of Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift.

Like some other poems I have written about here, I discovered this one in the Faber anthology, One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets.

There’s a word in the second verse that I had to look up: “theodicy”. It’s an attempt to explain the existence of evil in a world created by God.

This is a serious poem, a contemplation of one of the classic themes of poetry, the passage of time. From one specific day in 1937, the poem moves mainly back but also forwards in time. I passed a milestone birthday the other day, so the last five lines take on quite a significance for me.

Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day reminds me a bit of T S Eliot, with the language alternating between the modern and colloquial and phrases that seem somehow Elizabethan. 

Calmly we walk through this April’s day by Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn …)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn …)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn …)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(… that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
                   No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Bridge Guard in the Karoo by Rudyard Kipling

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In his selection A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, made in 1941, T S Eliot wrote that Kipling should not be seen as a bad poet but as a great writer of verse. He didn’t really give a clear definition of what he thought the difference between “poetry” and “verse” to be, though. Understandably, given the time it was published, his choice tended more towards the patriotic side of Kipling’s work.

Craig Raine’s 1991 selection included poems that Eliot had omitted, because Raine was keen to stress Kipling’s skill as a poet. The one below is an example. Kipling had already published his Barrack Room Ballads and this is a more poetic development of those perhaps, with the same concern for the plight of the ordinary soldier. It’s a military poem, set during a war, but it doesn’t describe combat. It was published in The Times in 1901, then included in the collection The Five Nations. It reflected Kipling’s experiences as an observer of the Boer War.  

It’s a wonderfully vivid evocation of the South African landscape and the isolation of the men guarding the bridge. It’s impossible to read without the scene coming clearly into one’s mind’s eye. It’s almost cinematic. Kipling’s precise choice of words, the short lines and the strong rhythm all contribute to the overall effect. Has a sunset ever been described in a better way than the second and third verses here? Notice also that as the sun sets and night descends, later in the poem, Kipling picks out the sounds that can be heard.

Whatever one thinks of the “verse” or “poetry” argument, I think this is Kipling at his very best and you won’t be surprised to find it is my favourite of his poems.

Bridge-Guard in the Karroo by Rudyard Kipling

 “ …and will supply details to guard the Blood River Bridge”

District Orders: Lines of Communication
—South African War.

Sudden the desert changes,
  The raw glare softens and clings,
Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges
  Stand up like the thrones of Kings—

Ramparts of slaughter and peril—
  Blazing, amazing, aglow—
’Twixt the sky-line’s belting beryl
  And the wine-dark flats below.

Royal the pageant closes,
  Lit by the last of the sun—
Opal and ash-of-roses
  Cinnamon, umber, and dun.

The twilight swallows the thicket,
  The starlight reveals the ridge.
The whistle shrills to the picket—
  We are changing guard on the bridge.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
  Where the empty metals shine—
No, not combatants—only
  Details guarding the line.)

We slip through the broken panel
  Of fence by the ganger’s shed;
We drop to the waterless channel
  And the lean track overhead;

We stumble on refuse of rations,
  The beef and the biscuit-tins;
We take our appointed stations,
   And the endless night begins.

We hear the Hottentot herders
  As the sheep click past to the fold—
And the click of the restless girders
  As the steel contracts in the cold—

Voices of jackals calling
   And, loud in the hush between,
A morsel of dry earth falling
  From the flanks of the scarred ravine.

And the solemn firmament marches
  And the hosts of heaven rise
Framed through the iron arches—
  Banded and barred by the ties,

Till we feel the far track humming,
  And we see her headlight plain,
And we gather and wait her coming—
  The wonderful north-bound train.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
  Where the white car-windows shine—
No, not combatants—only
  Details guarding the line.)

Quick, ere the gift escape us!
  Out of the darkness we reach
For a handful of week-old papers
  And a mouthful of human speech.

And the monstrous heaven rejoices,
  And the earth allows again,
Meetings, greetings, and voices
  Of women talking with men.

So we return to our places,
  As out on the bridge she rolls;
And the darkness covers our faces,
  And the darkness re-enters our souls.

More than a little lonely
  Where the lessening tail-lights shine.
No—not combatants—only
  Details guarding the line!

Grass by Carl Sandburg

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I don’t think Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) is as widely read in the UK as he has been in his native United States. Perhaps his declamatory, free verse style is more of an American taste. I had never even heard of him when I saw this poem displayed in a tube train carriage as part of the Poems on the Underground initiative some years ago. I think it was published in 1918.

What brought it back into my mind more recently? I think it must have been an article about the Ukraine war that I read not long ago, illustrated with a photograph of a trench that could have come from the first world war.

Nothing changes, I thought and that is the message of this poem. War seems to be a permanent part of the human condition. People forget. They don’t like to think about it, so nothing changes. The personification of the grass in this straightforward and direct poem represents the process of forgetting.    

Grass by Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                             I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
                                            What place is this?
                                            Where are we now?

                                            I am the grass.
                                            Let me work.

Oft in the Stilly Night by Thomas Moore

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Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was an Irish poet and composer and a friend of Byron and Shelley. Oft in the Stilly Nightwas part of his major poetic work, Irish Melodies, a group of 130 poems set to music, some of which was by Moore himself. Performances of these in London created interest in the Irish Nationalist cause.

I suppose we have to wonder whether this should be considered a poem or a song lyric. I came across it in The Oxford Book of English Verse. I have never heard the musical version. It was chosen for that volume by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, where he gave it the title The Light of Other Days. But then, he included quite a lot of verses that might be considered songs, many of them by that old favourite “Anonymous”.

Song lyric or poem, it is powerfully nostalgic, with the “slumber’s chain” metaphor nicely extended to describe “the friends, so linked together”. I find it rather similar to The Old Familiar Faces by Henry Lamb and it speaks to the same emotions.  What starts as “Fond memory” becomes “Sad memory”.     

Oft in the Stilly Night by Thomas Moore

Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood’s years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm’d and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus, in the stilly night
Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.

When I remember all
The friends, so link’d together,
I’ve seen around me fall,
Like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.

Messmates by Henry Newbolt

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Henry Newbolt’s naval poems of the late nineteenth century often tend to be rousing ballads that celebrate Britain’s naval history. They tell tales of great admirals and famous battles of the past. Messmates is a bit different though, closer to Kipling perhaps in its concentration on the ordinary seaman and rather sadder in tone.

A word about the maritime language used here. “Watch” is roughly equivalent to “shift”, the division of time on board ship. But it also means the team to which a sailor is allocated, so keeping a “lone watch” emphasises the isolation of the man who has died and been buried at sea. And on a sailing ship, the mess was the area in which a group of men lived, ate and slept, so a messmate was a member of a close-knit team.

The page layout and spacing is Newbolt’s own and I have taken it directly from Collected Poems 1897–1907.

Messmates by Henry Newbolt

He gave us all a good-bye cheerily
   At the first dawn of day;
We dropped him down the side full
      drearily
When the light died away.
It’s a dead dark watch that he’s
      a-keeping there,
And a long, long night that lags
      a-creeping there,
Where the Trades and the tides roll
      over him
   And the great ships go by.

He’s there alone with green seas
      rocking him
   For a thousand miles round;
He’s there alone with dumb things
      mocking him,
And we’re homeward bound.
It’s a long, lone watch that he’s
      a-keeping there,
And a dead cold night that lags
      a-creeping there
While the months and the years
      roll over him
   And the great ships go by.

I wonder if the tramps come near
      enough
   As they thrash to and fro,
And the battle-ships’ bells ring clear
      enough
   To be heard down below;
If through all the lone watch that
      he’s a-keeping there,
And the long, cold night that lags
      a-creeping there,
The voices of the sailor-men shall
      comfort him
   When the great ships go by.

The Old Year by John Clare

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This one speaks for itself, really. I was looking for a poem for the New Year. I felt that I couldn’t use Tennyson’s Ring Out, Wild Bells again, so I had a look and found The Old Year by John Clare (1793–1864).

John Clare is probably best known today for two things. The first of these is that he had some kind of mental breakdown that led to him spending the later part of his life in what was then known as an asylum. It was during this time that he wrote his well-known poem I Am.

The second is that in 1841 he absconded from the asylum in Essex and walked the eighty miles back to his home at Northborough in North Cambridgeshire. It took him four days.

In the poem below, I assume that the word “cot” in the second verse is short for “cottage”. The “time once torn away” line makes me wonder if Philip Larkin was inspired by this poem for the line “time torn off unused” in his poem Aubade.

The Old Year by John Clare

The Old Year’s gone away
     To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
     Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
     In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbour’s face,
     In this he’s known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
     Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they’re here
     And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
     In every cot and hall–
A guest to every heart’s desire,
     And now he’s nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
     Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
     Are things identified;
But time once torn away
     No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
     Left the Old Year lost to all.

    

Old Man at a Cricket Match by Norman Nicholson

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I found Old Man at a Cricket Match by Norman Nicholson (1914–1987) online almost by chance. I had never heard of this fine poet, but a little research reveals that he lived almost all of his life in the town of Millom in Cumbria, where he was born.

He was not part of any poetic trend, movement or literary “school”, although he was influenced in his depiction of the northern landscape by W H Auden. He had no real connection with the London literary world, although he was published by Faber. I suspect that, like a few other poets, he might have been discovered and encouraged by T S Eliot.

He seems to me to be the poetic equivalent of the kind of painter who is dismissed with a sneer as “provincial”. But as Robert Frost put it: “In order to be universal, you must first be provincial”. I think Nicholson’s poetry deserves to be much more widely known.

I like the vivid imagery in this poem and the slightly unusual use of language, the word “mending” perhaps being part of the local dialect.

I’m not quite sure when the poem was written. I’ve seen it dated 1956, and I believe it was included in Nicholson’s 1972 collection, A Local Habitation, which takes its title from lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “. . . .and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”    

Old Man at a Cricket Match by Norman Nicholson

‘It’s mending worse,’ he said,
             Bending west his head,
Strands of anxiety ravelled like old rope,
     Skitter of rain on the scorer’s shed
                 His only hope.

             Seven down for forty-five,
             Catches like stings from a hive,
And every man on the boundary appealing —
     An evening when it’s bad to be alive,
                 And the swifts squealing.

             Yet without boo or curse
             He waits leg-break or hearse,
Obedient in each to law and letter —
     Life and the weather mending worse,
                 Or worsening better.

Mrs Bathurst by Rudyard Kipling

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Rudyard Kipling’s story Mrs Bathurst was published in 1904 and reveals Kipling as a rather more modern writer than he is usually considered to be.

The plot makes use of the cinema and it may well be the first piece of fiction to do so. The fractured style of the story may be modelled on the cinema, rather in the way that one can see the early poetry of T S Eliot making use of cinematic imagery.  

The term “It” to describe a woman’s appeal to men appears here, a usage that Kipling is thought to have invented, to go alongside the many phrases he added to the language. What makes the story feel modern is the way it is told and it may be that part of what Kipling is telling us here is the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone else.

On the South African coast, just after the Boer war, the narrator is sitting and talking to his railwayman friend, Hooper. They are then joined by a royal marine, Pritchard, and a sailor, Petty Officer Pyecroft, who is a recurring Kipling character. At first the story seems to be going nowhere, as the four men chat about the idea of going absent without leave, as opposed to desertion.

But as the tale progresses, the first-person narrative gives way to dialogue. The narrator is merely a convenient device to set the scene for the anecdote that follows. There is no authorial voice or viewpoint. The tale is told in a fragmented way, mostly by Pyecroft, who does not quite understand the events he is recounting. As he says “all I know is second-hand so to speak” and there is no help given to the reader to interpret any of this.

He tells of his shipmate Vickery’s obsession with a Mrs Bathurst who kept a small hotel for sailors in Auckland, New Zealand. It’s never made clear exactly what the relationship between Vickery and Mrs Bathurst might have been in the past. The marine, Pritchard, is also familiar with her and the hotel and he describes to the others what she is like.

The finale with its striking visual image of two charred corpses is provided by Hooper, who has dropped hints about this earlier in the tale. One body can only be identified by false teeth and a tattoo, and the identity of the other remains a mystery. Different parts of the story have been told by Pyecroft, Hooper and Pritchard, who were more witnesses to events than participants, and the reader must piece it all together as best they can. Everything has been seen from the outside.

Not every question raised by the story is answered at the end. What exactly took place in the meeting between Vickery and the captain of his ship before he was sent ashore? And at the very end it appears that Hooper is going to remove the false teeth from his pocket but thinks better of it.    

The use of the film image of Mrs Bathurst herself is very interesting. It’s mentioned that someone in the audience jumps when they see the image of the train pulling into the station. Was Kipling familiar with the story about the audience reaction to the Lumiere Brothers’ first showing of their film or was this the true source of it?

There is also the question of just why Vickery is so obsessed with the film of Mrs Bathurst. He thinks it was taken in London, gets drunk after seeing it, then insists on going back to see it again four nights in a row, with Pyecroft in tow to confirm that it is indeed her on the screen. It has been suggested by Dr Oliver Tearle that Mrs Bathurst is dead. There are hints in the story that this may be so. That interpretation would make it a sort of ghost story. On the other hand, it is very difficult now when we are surrounded by moving images of people both alive and dead, to feel the impact that early films made on their first audiences.

However one reads it, this is certainly one of Kipling’s most cryptic tales. In his memoirs he wrote about his method of writing, which was to cut, lay the story aside for a while then go back to it and cut some more. He considered that what had been cut would have a lingering influence on the words that remained. One can see how this story might have been written in that way.

Rather ironically perhaps, there is no known surviving film footage or audio recording of Rudyard Kipling himself.

High Wood by John Stanley Purvis (Philip Johnstone)

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I found this poem printed in a copy of The Old Front Line by John Masefield. It’s quite appropriate that it should be there because it uses a similar conceit. Just as Masefield describes the 1916 Somme battlefield from an imagined future after the war has ended, High Wood imagines the old trenches becoming a tourist attraction in peacetime.  

John Stanley Purvis wrote it under his pseudonym of Philip Johnstone in 1918. He served as a lieutenant in the war and was invalided out of the army after the battle of the Somme. It took the British three months to capture the German stronghold of High Wood in that battle.

He is not particularly well-known among the Great War poets, but deserves to be remembered for this striking poem. Its realistic and cynical tone still seems modern, resembling the work of Siegfried Sassoon, perhaps, rather than any of the other famous names.

It’s a reminder of how the first world war is the dividing line between two different ways of thinking about war and that after poems like High Wood, it was no longer possible for the more heroic sort of war poems, such as those by Tennyson or Newbolt, to be written.   

The poem has gained in force, because today we can see that exactly what he predicted came true. And after all this time tourists still visit the first world war battlefields.

High Wood by John Stanley Purvis (Philip Johnstone)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is High Wood,
Called by the French, Bois des Fourneaux,
The famous spot which in Nineteen-Sixteen,
July, August and September was the scene
Of long and bitterly contested strife,
By reason of its High commanding site.
Observe the effect of shell-fire in the trees
Standing and fallen; here is wire; this trench
For months inhabited, twelve times changed hands;
(They soon fall in), used later as a grave.
It has been said on good authority
That in the fighting for this patch of wood
Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men,
Of whom the greater part were buried here,
This mound on which you stand being…
                                                            Madame, please,

You are requested kindly not to touch
Or take away the Company’s property
As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale
A large variety, all guaranteed.
As I was saying, all is as it was,
This is an unknown British officer,
The tunic having lately rotten off.
Please follow me – this way…
                                                the path, sir, please,

The ground which was secured at great expense
The Company keeps absolutely untouched
And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide
Refreshments at a reasonable rate.
You are requested not to leave about
Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange-peel,
There are waste-paper baskets at the gate.

1918