Word: mowat
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NONFICTION: And No Birds Sang, Farley Mowat ·Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Carl E. Schorske · Misia, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale My Many Years, Arthur Rubinstein Sex in History, Reay Tannahill Show People, Kenneth Tynan · The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
Fear succeeds where the Germans do not. One of the myths of battle is that the tempered veteran loses his fear. In Mowat's case, the "Worm That Never Dies" grows stronger with each new holocaust. The change can be read in his progressive perceptions of death. An early casualty seems almost comic, "marching blindly to Valhalla" off a landing barge into a geyser of exploding water. A hard eye and grim taste for simile take over in a description of a dying German truck driver, "hiccuping great gouts of cherry-pink foam . . . to the accompaniment of a sound...
...time Mowat seeks temporary shelter in a blasted hut, and shares his rum with a dying German who got there first, the author is disarmed of illusion and no longer fit to wage war. In a letter to an un named intimate, he writes, "I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space." It is the unresolved anger of a soldier whose arms, legs, eyes and genitals are constantly threatened with mutilation...
...question remains: What took Mowat 35 years to write and publish this book? In an "Anti-Epilogue" that he says was written only at the insistence of his publisher, the author hurriedly speaks of old agonies, the balm of forgetfulness, and of his conviction that all wars are futile and immoral. There is even the ritual reference to what Wilfred Owen called the old Lie: "Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori"- how sweet and beautiful it is to die for one's country...
...Mowat was right. The statements are superfluous. And No Birds Sang needs no rhetoric. It can fall in with the best memoirs of World War II, a classic example of how unexploded emotions can be art fully defused...