Rewriting and remembering: R.H. Mottram and the First World War, 1914-1971

Frayn, Andrew

Abstract

In this paper I examine the ways in which R.H. Mottram continued to rewrite the First World War throughout his literary career. The Spanish Farm Trilogy is deservedly a canonical text of that conflict, and the success of those first three novels enabled Mottram to become a professional author, leaving his job as a bank clerk. However, his subsequent work – comprising well over fifty single-authored volumes – is now little remembered, less read, and barely noticed critically.

In this paper, I examine briefly the Spanish Farm novels, outlining their intersecting narratives and careful accumulation of naturalistic detail, before taking the rest of his oeuvre as a case study to pursue two arguments. I examine the way Mottram revisits the war in later novels, moving from continuing worries about the change it wrought in Our Mr Dormer (1927), through its background presence in novels of Englishness and propriety such as The English Miss (1930) and Bumphrey’s (1934). In his moving and fascinating novels about aging and old age Time to be Going (1937) and Maggie Mackenzie (1965), written respectively in his fifties and eighties, the war takes on new importance as a historical palimpsest. In the former, written as another global conflict seemed increasingly likely, the narrator remembers grimly that ‘Wars were once things that had taken place far away and long ago’; in the latter, looking back through the lenses of the Second World War and the ongoing Cold War, the elderly titular protagonist worries that the lessons of past conflicts have not been learnt. I conclude by using this example to think about the relationship between canonical and popular literature, a continuing elision which necessarily affects the way in which we write the First World War.

Citation

Frayn, A. (2018, July). Rewriting and remembering: R.H. Mottram and the First World War, 1914-1971. Paper presented at Recording, Narrating and Archiving the First World War: International Society for First World War Studies Conference, Deakin University,

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Recording, Narrating and Archiving the First World War: International Society for First World War Studies Conference
• Start Date: Jul 9, 2018
• End Date: Jul 11, 2018
• Deposit Date: Apr 26, 2023