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HANLEY (James)
The German Prisoner.
With an Introduction by Richard Aldington. 1st Ed., 36pp., frontis. by William Roberts. Privately Published by the Author, 9 Wilton Road, Muswell Hill, N.10. [1931].
#59695
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A grotesque, uncomfortable short story, in which two unlikeable working class soldiers, thrown together in camaraderie by the war, find themselves lost in a shellhole in no-man's-land when an equally lost German soldier blunders in & surrenders to them. Their needless, sadistic, sexually-laden torture of the man, until he dies at their hands, is unimaginable; with some sort of justice the two British soldiers are shortly afterwards killed instantaneously by a German shell. James Hanley, a writer more popular with the critics than the public, was a Liverpool-born Irishman of humble origins. As a young man he was in the Merchant Navy until deserting & joining the Canadian Army, with which he served in France. He was no stranger to outrage as another work, published the year before this one, was banned under obscenity laws (titled 'Boy', it concerned a boy in the merchant service & his abuse at the hands of seamen & officers on his ship). Richard Aldington, who had become vehemently anti-war by this time, sponsored this private publication (if commercially published it might well have shared the fate of 'Boy') & justifies what would seem to be the gratuitous brutality of its writing & of its characters in his Introduction: having dismissed 'professional novelists' ("I am sick of them, you are sick of them, we are sick of them; probably they are sick of themselves-they ought to be. I want something new, something with vigour & life, however coarse & violent." He continued: "'The German Prisoner' is a terrible story, terrible as the reality it expresses with so interesting a mixture of realism & symbolism... How much his story brings back-the long dragging march up the line, the assembly in the jumping-off trenches, the awful plunge of the attack, the world-splitting flashes of the artillery, the crash of shells, the smoke, the horror & annihilation. 'But,' it will be said, 'there are so many dreadfully dirty words in the talk of these two men. Even though they are tortured to madness, we cannot sympathise with men who talk like that.' Well, you ought to. You were not afraid to send men to hell, you did everything you did to get them there, & congratulated yourselves on your patriotic fervour. Gentlemen! here are your defenders; ladies! here are the results of your charming white feathers. If you were not ashamed to send men into the war, why should you blush to read what they said in it..." The very striking, specially commissioned frontispiece by William Roberts, in the cubist style, depicts the two Tommies with the barely conscious German, & is a fine introduction, in & of itself, to what lies ahead. Edition limited to 500 copies "for sale to Private Subscribers" of which this is numbered 25. Orig. maroon cloth, gilt titles to front & sp., VG. See illustrations on our website.
£225
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