roderick watson
Two’.^10 Theanthologist Brian Gardner has also commented on a shift of emphasis
in the 1940s towards a wider and less eclectic literary audience, with publications
such as thePenguin New Writingseries: ‘ ‘‘Leave this book at a Post Office when
you have read it, so that men and women in the services may enjoy it too,’’ was the
advice ofNew Writing.’^11 Nor did Fraser lose touch with the literary scene at home,
for even in the Army he corresponded with other poets. In 1941, for example, he
contributed to, and wrote an influential introduction for,The White Horseman,an
anthology of the ‘New Apocalypse’ group, edited by fellow Scot J. F. Hendry and
Henry Treece. (Fraser was serving in Perth at the time, but his work had little in
common with the movement, and he soon disavowed it.)
The remarkable literary contribution of the desert war in particular (one has
only to think of Keith Douglas, Vernon Scannell, Sidney Keyes) is all the more
striking for the fact that so many of the leading Scottish poets of that generation
(and virtually everyone mentioned in this essay) found themselves in the same
theatre of action. Fraser was posted to North Africa in 1941. In the same year
Hamish Henderson arrived with the 51st Highland Division as an intelligence
officer; Robert Garioch and Sorley MacLean were posted to Egypt with the Royal
Signal Corps; while 21-year-old Edwin Morgan was on his way in a troopship,
trained as a stretcher-bearer for the RAMC. In June 1942 Garioch was captured
outside Tobruk; MacLean was wounded that November at the Second Battle of El
Alamein; and George Campbell Hay arrived to serve with the RAOC in Algiers and
Tunisia. Henderson survived the desert to take part in the invasion of Sicily and to
follow the War the length of Italy. Hay also saw service in Italy and then Greece
before being invalided home from Macedonia in 1944. (It never happened, but it is
not too difficult to imagine a moment when all six of them might somehow have
met on leave—perhaps in some Cairo cafe with Fraser presiding. Certainly they all ́
knew each other, or knew of each other by mutual friends or correspondence.)
The theatre of the 1939–45 conflict was truly global, and its literature, lacking the
single traumatic focus of the Great War’s trenches, was to prove equally disparate.
While poems were written about the heat of battle, many more invoke the boredom
or misery of training, the weather, the delights and discomforts of military routine,
cooking, camping, missing home, travel to far-flung places, or the social mix to be
found in a citizen army scattered across the turning world. So it was that thousands
of letters on such subjects were posted home, and Victor Selwyn—remembering
the 800 contributors to hisOasis—proposed that this soon led to ‘writing articles
(^10) Victor Selwyn, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Schools Oasis(1982), quoted in<http://www.
salamanderoasis.org/news/ 11 obituary-selwyn-victor.html>.
Brian Gardner, ‘Introductory Note’, inidem(ed.),The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939–1945
(London: Methuen, 1999), p. xviii.Penguin New Writingwas edited by John Lehmann. For a dense and
fascinating account of the literary scene and the proliferation of small magazines in wartime Britain
in the 1940s, see Andrew Sinclair,War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the ’Forties(London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1989), esp. ch. 7.