A. L. Kennedy
DAY
288pp. Cape. £16.99.
978 0 2224 07786 6
People are different when they come home from war, and so are the people they come home to. Back in Ithaca at last, Odysseus is only recognized when his wet-nurse notices a familiar scar on his leg. She is washing his feet at the time, a better welcome than most veterans receive. Suspicion, ignorance and outright hostility greet many. For their part, returning soldiers find home no less incomprehensible. Wolfgang Borchert, who served in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front and whose 1947 play Draussen vor der Tür (The Man Outside) is a high point of Heimkehrer literature, wrote from experience in his essay “Generation ohne Abschied”: “we are a generation without homecoming, since we have nothing to which we could come home”. Marked and changed by their experiences, veterans have been militarized, brutalized and subjected to unthinkable horrors, yet they often have no corresponding rites of re-entry, no obvious means of reintegration into peacetime society. Frequently blamed for wars in which they had little choice but to participate, former combatants are reminders of what civilians might prefer to forget. There are a variety of reasons why those who have fought in a war find it difficult to describe the experience to those who haven’t, but prominent among them is that their listeners are simply not equipped, mentally and imaginatively, to understand what they are hearing.
Writers who take on war as a subject must also wrestle with the complex impossibility and necessity of its representation. Increasingly, what is written about is aftermath (the word originally referred to the second growth of grass after the first had been mown or harvested, and it is easy to see the link with generations of young men mown down on the battlefield). What is beyond being spoken or written of nevertheless records itself on the body and in the tissues of the mind, where it resides until summoned forth by certain stimuli. A noticeable trend in war novels is to exploit the narrative potential of these residual bodily records. The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (flashbacks, nightmares, adverse reaction to particular cues) are, after all, the stock-in-trade of leitmotif-led fiction. The result is that writers write about war by not writing about it, or by not writing about it directly. Amy Lowell’s poem “Patterns”, for example, is about a woman waiting in a garden. Only five lines out of more than a hundred refer to the fact that her lover has been killed in action, but we learn something about the war he has been in because we realize its effect.
For all these reasons, A. L. Kennedy has found in war the subject that her art cries out for. Hallmarked by the slow release of information and narrative peristalsis, her novels and stories deal in hidden abuse, concealed emotions, failure in communication and casual, everyday violence, themes for which conflict is the natural territory. So, in her elegant new novel, Day, a Second World War veteran, Alfred Day, is troubled by thoughts he would prefer to forget. Storms make him nervous – “A lot of us don’t do well with bangs, not now” – while a herring-gull makes him think of take-offs, which remind him of flying, which recalls his dream, “the one with the gashes and spatters of fire”. Kennedy’s characters often blank out aspects of their existences – memories of violence, actions while drinking, consciousness itself – but never has the process rung so true.
Alfred Day is working-class, the son of an abusive fishmonger (the father’s domestic violence is typical of Kennedy, but it seems superfluous in a work where there is so much other horror). We first meet him after the war, in 1949, when he is back in a prison camp in Germany, this time as a film extra rather than a “Kriegie”. In London, he works in a bookshop belonging to a conscientious objector called Ivor, and describes himself as an “autodidact” (“horrible word, autodidact, but one of the first you teach yourself”). From the beginning of the novel, we know that Alfred has survived the war, but we don’t know how he got the scar on his upper lip (only that he is growing a moustache to avoid having to look himself in the eye in the mirror); nor do we know what trauma he has experienced or what happened to Joyce, the woman who drifts in and out of his consciousness. (The subplot involving Joyce is one of the less successful parts of Day: when Kennedy’s characters fall in love, they tend to do so at first sight, irreversibly, paralysingly – and rather implausibly. Alfred is no exception.) From the ersatz prison camp, Alfred’s thoughts are inex-orably drawn back to the time when he enlisted in the RAF, becoming a member of a Lancaster bomber crew. There isn’t a false note in the scenes with the crew: their camaraderie and superstitions are utterly convincing. As he is short, Alfred has the position of rear gunner. From his turret in the tail of the plane, he looks out for possible dangers. The analogy with looking back into the past, alert to the flak of painful thoughts, is obvious, but the figurative potential of the gun- turret is not overdone. As in Randall Jarrell’s poem, “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”, someone is washed out of the plane with a hose, but it is a different crew member, and the “familiar gun-turret sting from looking at nothing” is Kennedy’s observation, not Jarrell’s.
The gun-turret sting is one of the many instances in the novel in which Kennedy suggests that the body remembers experiences even if the mind discards them. Alfred has forgotten the feeling of not wanting to be killed, but his body, frequently surprising him with its learned ability to fight, has not. The “sour” reek of new bandages and the odour of Hanson, “the smell you would get if you slept with your guns”, stay with Alfred beyond the war and bring it back to him. A mark of his experiences is that he now sees the world in military terms. A fellow extra’s pitted skin reminds him of shrapnel explosions. Thunder “blitzes” and lightning “tears like shellfire”. Rendered forever tactical, his eyes note the points in himself and others that are susceptible to injury, calculate where bombs will fall, and work out how buildings will be wrecked: “you see targets beside targets: nothing but targets”. Playing catch with a cricket ball at night with the rest of the crew, he teaches himself to see in the dark, because “all of them had to learn a way to see where you couldn’t see”.
Seeing where, or what, you couldn’t see: Day is about the invisible, the hidden and the ways in which war alters and conceals its alterations. Its most thoroughgoing alteration is to convert a body into body parts – “you don’t like it, what he’s turned into” – but there are other physical transformations, subtler than this though no less irreversible. Drill assists Alfred’s metamorphosis into “his altered self, his best guess at how a Sergeant Day would be”. The physical demands of flying the Lancaster leave their mark on the crew: after the first few ops, the bones in the skipper’s hands change, giving him a visible sense of grip. It is difficult, literally, to come down to earth after a flight: legs are clumsy, the body too light. The bombing raids turn Alfred into a “red, loud, hunting thing”; in the prison camp, hunger brutalizes him: “you caught yourself hoarding, savage, feeding: mind shut”. The forced march to the camp reduces him to “a thing that crept and lost its voice and couldn’t shiver”. And if the circumstances of war delete his former self, he also does what he can to conceal his own experiences. A specialist at hiding – “Time was, I could have hidden you anything” – the last thing Alfred has secreted away is himself, taking refuge in the bookshop, “the street door locked and bolted against people”.
Despite these efforts at concealment unwanted memories intrude. Kennedy uses military metaphors for the process. Alfred supposes that bits of dream will always work out through him now, “the way that tiny shrapnel splinters would sometimes break up through his skin”. While the film prisoners tunnel to freedom, he imagines he could “tunnel right through to the place where he’d lost himself”. Phosphorus is a substance that follows its own nature, but let it touch you and it will burn you to the bone: “its true self is a harmful thing and so you keep it closed away”. Hints accumulate to suggest that whatever phosphorescent experience Alfred is enclosing will shortly flare into the day. Kennedy keeps a tight grip on the pace of the revelation – Alfred must still remember slowly and selectively – and there is nothing simple about what is brought to light. Guilt must take its place alongside trauma and loss. If war resists representation, then, it also facilitates it. The subject teems with figurative possibilities for conveying the kind of damaged psyche Kennedy specializes in. Looking out rearwards from the gun-turret, tunnelling to freedom, shrapnel embedded in the skin: the imagery seems to flow naturally. Kennedy skilfully controls the flow, avoiding portentousness. The same sure touch is found in the period detail, which is perfectly judged: no clunky brand-name dropping here.
One of the final things that Alfred finds out is that some experiences can be covered up permanently. Another extra in the film, Vasyl, brutalized by the Nazis, has committed atrocities during the war. Nonetheless, reinvented as a victimized Ukrainian, he gains entrance to Britain, because the powers-that-be want to replenish lost stock: “either that comes from the colonies and refugees whose cultures are very unlike our own, or we take in lads like your Vasyl, who were misled in their youth, and we live in a country which stays Christian and white”. A land not fit for heroes then: Kennedy gestures towards the failures of the post-war welfare state. Gunners like Alfred and conchies like Ivor are already irrelevant in the victory belonging to “spivs and Whitehall Warriors” and, therefore, like much else, are simply hidden, men who will always “stand at the edge of important pictures”.
As the film actors tunnel, Alfred thinks about “the dark, the numb gap he could tell was asleep inside him”. At the centre of Day, there is a similar dark space. Tracing its vestiges, physical and mental, A. L. Kennedy has written a fine novel about the Second World War by knowing what not to expose to the daylight. On the last page of Day, she thanks the Imperial War Museum Reading Room. Such acknowledgements appear rather often now in war novels. If not quite badges of courage, they are stamps of authenticity, certifying that the requisite tour of duty has been completed in the library. In showing this, they simultaneously expose the absence of first-hand experience and remind us that we know war by its remains.
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Kate McLoughlin is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her book, Martha Gellhorn: The war writer in the field and in the text, will be published this year.
