168 chapter 5the same time showing how they are dependent on these same forms in the
hospital.
The Hydra received enough financial support by September 1917 that the
editorial committee pleaded for more submissions and a different cover for
what was to be the “new series” in November 1917 (the month of Owen’s dis-
charge). “We make a last appeal for an attractive cover design—a promising
futurist thing, if you will; anything but a future promise” (September 29,
1917). We may read a grim humor in his phrase, “future promise.” In the fan-
tastic new cover (see figure 5), the rigid military forms of the original cover
picture (with its austere-looking officer standing in front of the square hospital
building ) are blasted away by the fluid drawing of a soldier propelled back-
wards by a shell blast shaped like the multi-headed hydra, both a classical refer-
ence and a gesture to the former use of the hospital. The hospital is barely vis-
ible, perched up on a hill in the far right corner, and the scorched earth below
resembles the pocked moonscape of Owen’s 1917 poem, “The Show”: “a sad
land, weak with sweats of dirth, / Grey, cratered like the moon with hollow
woe” (155). The soldier has lost hold of a book; in both this drawing and the
cartoon about Rivers, literature’s ability to heal is dramatized and, ultimately,
questioned. It is as if, in some small way, these artists demonstrate that literary
form cannot possibly contain the horrific and fantastical visions of a world
blown apart and scorched by war.
Owen attempted to steer the magazine toward his own literary aspirations
by begging for more verse submissions in every editorial. Though Owen
printed two of his own poems in the magazine (anonymously), his editorials
provide indirect mediation on coming to terms with the different require-
ments of therapy at Craiglockhart, and show how his own poetic writing
might be read for “marks” of neurasthenic disconnection from time’s proper
marching. In many places in the magazine we see the contrast between Brock’s
methods, geared toward work and activity, and Rivers’s, geared toward expres-
sion of repressed experiences. Unlike Sassoon’s characterization of Rivers’s
methods, in which the doctor asserts control over a passive patient’s chaotic
psyche, Brock’s patients are hyperaware of their own active attempts at con-
trol. Brock writes:
In the act of normal individual functioning . . . all the elements of time
are involved. [The subject’s] present action bears relation not only to his
actual circumstances but is based on his past experience . . . and reaches
forward into his future. The action of a neurasthenic does not show this
equilibrium, this evenly-balanced flow . . . the attention of the neuras-
thenic may become temporarily arrested upon some element of his past
or future experience, and he develops a worry or definite phobia.^46