The wimp who gave voice to the war

Today, we think of Wilfred Owen as the greatest poet of World War I, the one who most memorably captured the brutality - and the futility - of the fighting.

But it’s safe to say that this would have astounded almost everyone who ever met him. A woman who sat next to him at a dinner in 1917 recalled that he was so hopelessly tongue-tied that he replied ‘Oh rather’ and ‘I should just think so’ to everything she said.
As for the poems published in his lifetime (there were only four) - they were desperately watery affairs, full of thee’s and thou’s and palely drooping maidens. But then came the war and everything changed.

Within a matter of months, Owen went from being a fey innocent to a battle-hardened veteran. In the process, something remarkable happened to his poetry. Out went the wateriness and in its place came tautness, indignation and a succession of unforgettable images.

The big mystery of Owen’s life is what caused this change. Was it simply the experience of battle, or did something else happen to unlock his poetic genius? Guy Cuthbertson suggests that a blow on the head might have been partly responsible.

In March 1917, a few days before his 24th birthday, Owen fell down a well in the village of Bouchoir on the Somme and suffered concussion. Afterwards he had a succession of blinding headaches. By May, his manner was reported to be ‘peculiar’ and his memory confused.

Declared unfit for general service for six months, he was packed off to Craiglockhart convalescent home in Edinburgh. And it was there, encouraged by his fellow poet - and patient - Siegfried Sassoon, that Owen began to write in earnest.

However tempting a subject Wilfred Owen might be to a biographer, he’s also a very tricky one. Much of his life - indeed pretty well all of it until he went to the trenches - seems to have been almost entirely incident-free. Born in Shropshire in 1893, his father worked on the railways, while his mother had once had ambitions as an artist.

Small - just 5ft 5in as an adult - and rather puny, Owen was, throughout his life, a tremendous mummy’s boy. In many respects, he never stopped being a child.

As Cuthbertson cleverly points out, this is far from being a disqualification for being a poet - quite the reverse. From John Betjeman with his famous teddy bear, to Philip Larkin with his fascination with Beatrix Potter, English poetry is full of men who forever kept at least one leg in short trousers.

When he was five, the Owens moved to Birkenhead. Young Wilfred didn’t care for this at all - he found nearby Liverpool ‘detestably sordid’. But when the family moved to Shrewsbury when he was 14, he didn’t much like that either. As well as being ‘vile’, it was very dull.

By now another of the central strands in Owen’s character was starting to show through. He was a colossal snob - as an adult, he even took to pretending he was the son of a baronet.

Growing up, he had few friends - and those he did have tended to be many years younger than he was. While Cuthbertson concedes that Owen’s fondness for the company of young boys might strike us as a bit iffy, he concludes that ‘it is highly unlikely it was sexual in any real way’. But then it seems quite possible that Owen never had any real sexual experiences.

The poet Robert Graves referred to Owen as a ‘passive homosexual’ and claimed he was in love with Siegfried Sassoon, but there’s never been any evidence to back this up.

Owen’s ambition, he told his mother, was to be a great poet. In fact, it looked as if his life was going to be spent drifting aimlessly around continental watering holes doing bits of teaching here and there. He was in the Pyrenees when war was declared in July 1914 and showed no inclination to get involved. ‘The war affects me less than it ought,’ he admitted.

For a while he toyed with the idea of trying to join the Italian cavalry - mainly because he liked the uniform - but in the end he decided to stay put. It wasn’t until late 1915, with conscription imminent, that Owen joined up. Sent off to France as a 2nd lieutenant, he found his men to be ‘expressionless lumps - dogged, loutish and ugly’.

Yet however grim the conditions and disagreeable the company, it slowly dawned on Owen that war just might give him the subject he had been seeking. Not that he was ever anti-war - ‘I hate washy pacifists,’ he declared shortly before he died.

He was, however, acutely aware of the gap between the empty blather of the generals and the reality of life at the Front.

When Owen went to Craiglockhart, he thought his war was effectively over. By August 1918, though, he was back in France. He swiftly won a Military Cross - for capturing a German machine gun and taking several prisoners - and as the fighting shuddered to a close, was already looking forward to returning to his mother.

Then, on November 4, he was shot while crossing the Sambre-Oise canal. At home in Shrewsbury, his parents were listening to the church bells ringing out to mark the Armistice when the telegram arrived with the news of his death.

At times, you get the sense that the lack of incident in Owen’s early life has driven Guy Cuthbertson to the point of distraction. In an attempt to bulk out his narrative, he crams in references to other writers with whom Owen had some - often very tenuous - connection. Thus, when he mentions Shrewsbury, he tells you about almost everyone of note who ever stopped off for a sandwich there.

Even John Lennon gets in on the act when Cuthbertson writes about Owen’s time at Birkenhead - both of them ‘lower-middle-class dreamers who longed for a more glamorous elsewhere’. Yet far from adding anything to the story, all these references only clog it up. Somewhere in here is an elegantly written, penetrating and stirring biography - but you have to scrape away an awful lot of topsoil to find it.