‘Somewhat mechanical,’ comments Montague Beckwith, the
shell-shocked officer in Andrew Cowan’s First World War novel Worthless Men, of his suffragist
sisters’ minds, ‘though exceptionally well-oiled.’ The same faint praise might
be applied to the story at large. Cowan confides in an afterword that ‘the
origins of this novel lie in some interviews I conducted in my mid-twenties
while setting up an oral history archive in Norwich’, and this daunting ancestry can show.
Details and observations emerge with more insistence than sprezzatura.
The novel’s structure is meticulous, its apparatus
unstartling. The present, apparently become the natural tense of government for
historical fiction, stays on. The old modernist vogue for Aristotelian unities
keeps us in one market day and one town, waiting for the Tommies (and cows) to
come home. Restrictions of grammar, time and place are relieved by the freewheeling
recollections of five characters; three members of the younger generation, and
(featuring more occasionally) two of their parents. At one point we meet a
factory-hand called, plausibly enough, Mr. Rivett, and Worthless Men is indeed a thing of bolts and rivets. In wartime,
after all, every component matters.
The first and last mind’s eye the reader experiences in Worthless Men is that of Walter Barley,
a small, plucky, industrious lad, enlisted much too young (we find out why,
slowly). Cowan can be maddeningly close with information, but he’s relatively free
with Walter’s situational USP. From the moment Walter, missing in action,
witnesses his mother and sister discussing his (just) possible return, it’s
fairly clear that, as they can’t see him or hear his interruptions, he must already
be beyond this life. Yet Cowan is teasingly physical in describing this ghost,
‘lice-ridden’ from the moment of his materialisation, his pockets full of ‘fluff
and tobacco strands’, his fingers wincing at the still-sharp quill of a
carefully preserved white feather.
Walter is a kind of everyman’s Hamlet, his tragedy already
run. His father is an absent drunk, and he believes his mother to be carrying
on with the local butcher. Cowan convinces us through the son to (mis)judge the
mother accordingly, while the butcher’s trade permits reiterative echoes of
Wilfred Owen. One notion neither Walter nor the novel channels is spiritualism,
the craze that was to riddle the post-war bereaved. Although Worthless Men is a work of social
history quite as much as it is of fiction, Cowan offers the presence of ghosts
as an exclusively literary device, rather than a socio-historical phenomenon.
Perhaps he felt his novel had space to examine only one discredited
pseudo-science, for both its plot and characters are steeped in discussion of
eugenics. The title Worthless Men itself
comes from a monograph by Gerard Oram, which makes the point that First World
War private soldiers were executed overwhelmingly more often than officers
because of institutional military disdain for ‘working-class stock’. Cowan’s
two eugenic theorists are the officer, Beckwith, and the pharmacist, Dobson.
Beckwith is a particularly articulate voice but also the least nuanced
character; a rapist and murderer, a proto-fascist, and, of course, a gentleman.
The closest thing he has to a positive human quality is despair. Dobson, domestically
a pathetic and pompous tyrant, but an indispensable, informed medical resort
for the city’s poor, is more interesting. His inseparable enthusiasms for
contraception, abortion, and eugenics provide an unsettling comparison to contemporary
orthodoxies and heresies.
The story’s real battlefield is Gertie Dobson, who acts both
as Walter’s belle dame sans merci and
Beckwith’s would-be Tess Durbeyfield. Brought up as the Dobson marriage’s
daughter, her heritage proves to be more complicated, in a twist that crossbreeds
romance and eugenics. Her first name would appear to be borrowed from Joyce’s lovely
cripple, desirable and repellent, perfect and flawed. This Gertie’s flaw is
backwardness, indeed near-imbecility by Dobson’s and Beckwith’s standards. But
her moral innocence, which allows her, for example, to treat her father’s
theories as harmless peculiarities, comes as an attractive relief.
