Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I have not really finished with the writers who came under the spell of Egypt, but I thought of introducing some kind of digression. I shall present a number of British poets who lived or served in Egypt, and who, one way or another, were influenced by the country and the people. Some of them saw the best in Egypt, but, alas, and understandably, others saw the worst.

A question that was often asked after 1939 was: "Where are the poets of the Second World War?" Three names became famous during the First World War: Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, established poets who reacted to the War.

However, World War Two also created its poets, as it were. In fact, most of those who wrote poetry in World War Two had never written poetry before. Some of them never wrote poetry after it either, since they were killed. But their poems remained and saw the light, thanks to a group of enthusiasts. In reality, it was not a group, being more like two or three people who took it upon themselves to collect, examine, select and publish poems written during World War Two in the Middle East.

No wonder they called their first anthology Oasis and their second Return to Oasis. The names responsible for the preservation of this treasury of war poems were John Braun (known as John Cromer), Victor Selwyn, Louis Challoner, Erik de Mauny, Alan Freedman, George Norman, Sir John Waller and Darrel Wilkinson. I knew them all. In fact I still see those of them who are still living -- Braun, Selwyn, de Mauny, Waller, and Wilkinson.

These men are the trustees of Salamander, the literary group which I discussed in previous articles, and who were responsible for the publication of the literary magazine Salamander. There were also others who played a role in the process of putting the poetry on the map, notably Lawrence Durrell and G.S. Fraser.

I would like to reproduce part of what Fraser wrote as a kind of a second or third introduction to Return of Oasis.

"A war is one of the few periods of English history, in this century, when a large number of people who might not otherwise think of themselves as poets feel a need to write poems. The main themes of the poems of the two World Wars were very different. The two World Wars were the first wars in our history to use the bulk of fit young manhood of the nation, outside reserved jobs."

But the pattern in each of the two wars was different. World War I was a long static war of attrition in which neither side really achieved a breakthrough from a stalemate position. The poetry was, in the words of Fraser, varied "from the early romantic enthusiasm of Rupert Brooke or Julian Grenfell to the compassion and sense of pointlessness of Owen and Sassoon."

The poets of the Second World War, on the other hand, particularly those in the Middle East with whom I am concerned, faced a different situation. The war of the desert with first-rate commanders like Rommel and Montgomery on either side was mobile, exciting, horrifying in some ways, but much less costly in life than trench warfare. A feeling of almost enjoying the war, like some rough game, marks for instance the poems of Keith Douglas, perhaps the most famous of the poets.

The special feelings which the "Oasis poets," as they came to be called, express, are often a reaction to new, strange and picturesque surroundings, homesickness, loneliness, but not the pessimism of the First World War poems.

The universal theme of the Oasis poems seems to be less protest against war as such and more feelings of a personal kind shared by many soldiers and to some degree hopes for a better world after the war. They reflect both a sense of loneliness and camaraderie and the feelings expressed seem to be shared by most of the poets.

There were dozens of poets who wrote from Egypt, and to a great extent on Egypt. To mention just a few titles of their poems: "Egyptian Dance," "Egyptian Evening," "Maizenfield in Cairo," "Egypt," "Egyptian Sentry," "Corniche, Alexandria," "On a Return from Egypt" "Al Alamein" "Song of Egypt" "Landscape, Western Desert" "The Pyramid," "Egyptian Madonna," "Cairo Cleopatra," "Groppi's 1st January 1943," "Maleesh Aforethought," "Egypt," and many others.

As I said before, not all the poems are salutary. In fact, some of them are almost blasphemous. But such was wartime. Egypt, just like any country during a war, was full of contradictions, full of patriots who were ready to die for their country, and opportunists and money- grabbers who exploited the war.

There were great riches and sickening poverty, rumours that run amok, and spies and scandals. And besides all this there was a flourishing cultural life. Famous actors like Colin Keith and Johnstone Irwing visited Cairo, and there were Shakespeare recitals and Noel Coward with his humorous songs. There was Sybil Thorndike, en route to the Far East, reciting poetry, and Michael Macleamore of the Dublin Abbey Theatre.