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Biographies
Keith Castellain Douglas was born on 24 January 1920 at Tunbridge Wells, Kent. An only child, from the time his father returned from army service he became fascinated with all things military, playing incessantly with toy soldiers. When he was four years old, his mother contracted encephalitis, an illness that was to affect her for years. At six, Keith was sent to board at Edgeborough School at Guildford, Surrey, and two years later, his father walked out, never to return. As a result, the eight-year-old boy became, in effect, responsible for his mother.
School days
The headmasters at his prep school labelled him 'bumptious and aggressive'. When he went on to Christ's Hospital at Horsham, Surrey – a public school that specialised in taking children whose parents couldn't afford to pay for this type of education – he was equally difficult. According to the poet Ted Hughes, 'his whole childhood can be seen both as a nursery for his peculiar alienation, or what he called his "long pain", and as a forcing house for the unusual strain of independence in his character.'
Christ's Hospital did provide him with a structure and a security that was missing at home, and it fostered his gifts – the first poem in his Collected Poems was written when he was just 14. By December 1936, he was copying his poems into an exercise book under the headings 'Earlier Efforts', 'Transitional Stage', 'Translations' and 'Later Style'. But what made him special also branded him a defiant outsider. The only place where he seemed to find a sense of purpose was in the school's Officer Training Corps.
When he left school in 1937, he was seized with an anticipation of the coming war, and felt that it was an end of an era. In his poem 'On leaving school' (1937), he wrote: 'it is awkward/Realizing happiness seems just to have started/And now we must leave it.'
At Oxford
He entered Merton College, Oxford in 1938 to read English, and was there when war was declared in September 1939. He immediately enlisted, but his call-up was deferred and he returned to his studies. It was a particularly intense time for him. He edited the Oxford University literary journal Cherwell and developed a public persona as a poet. One of his tutors was the poet Edmund Blunden, who immediately recognised his student's promise. Blunden had fought in the trenches during World War I, and memories of that war and guilt at his own survival were important themes in his writing.
While still at Oxford, Douglas also fell in love with a Chinese girl, whom he later immortalised in his poem 'The prisoner'. But even at the height of his soaring emotions, he felt a premonition of death: 'but alas, Cheng, I cannot tell why,/today I touched a mask stretched on the stone-/hard face of death.' This was to become a constant feature of his work. In one of the last poems he wrote at Oxford – 'Canoe' (1940) – he toyed with the idea that this would be his last summer alive and, if he were to return, it would be as a ghost, the River Thames becoming the River Styx.
Into the army
In 1940, he entered the army and trained as a cavalry officer at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, leaving his collection of poetry with Blunden in the hope that he could get it published. In February 1941, he was commissioned into the 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanry and, by August, had arrived in the Middle East. After recovering from an ear infection in Palestine, he joined the cavalry regiment, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, as a staff officer and was soon in the North African desert training for tank warfare.
His fellow officers were all aristocrats or rich men's sons, and Douglas was, by turns, fascinated and exasperated by them. Again he found himself the outsider: he, the son of a housekeeper, simply could not fit
Into battle
While the rest of the regiment was gearing up for action, Douglas was sent to Alexandria to teach camouflage and then to HQ at Wadi Natrun. On 23 October 1942, the battle of El Alamein began; after four days, Douglas could bear it no longer. Against orders, he left HQ, commandeered a lorry and joined his regiment in the desert – an action that, in less desperate times, could have led to court martial. But he went unpunished: the regiment had lost 16 of its 22 officers and needed reinforcements.
It was Douglas's first taste of war and he found it exhilarating. It affected his poetry critically. Gone was the lyric poet - he was now an existentialist. In August 1943, he wrote to his friend J C Hall:
I suppose I reflect the cynicism and the careful absence of expectation (it is not quite the same thing as apathy) with which I view the world … To be sentimental or emotional now is dangerous to oneself and to others. To trust anyone or to admit any hope of a better world is criminally foolish, as foolish as it is to stop working for it.
The critic Harry Blamires thinks that Douglas's state of mind greatly influenced his poetry:
For him war intensified and purged the sombre integrity of an already wounded spirit, ruthless in its rejection of shallow consolation and of easy verbalism. His early awareness of death, sharpened by battle experience, gave a sense of urgency to his work that left no time for cultivation of grand or lyrical graces.
The war poems
On 15 January 1943, Douglas was wounded in action at Wadi Zem Zem, and was sent to Palestine to recover. During the six weeks he spent there, he began his unemotional narrative of the fighting – From Alamein to Zem Zem, which he later illustrated with fine paintings - and his first group of war poems. One of these, 'How to kill' – which Ted Hughes was to describe as 'quite perfect in its way' - is chilling in its conclusions: 'How easy it is to make a ghost.' To Douglas, he was damned as a killing machine with a soul, committing murder.
The battle of El Alamein had lasted three weeks. In 80 days, the 8th Army had advanced 1,400 miles, a feat unparalleled in military history. It had also left 19,000 Allied and 25,000 German troops killed or wounded. In 'Vergissmeinnicht' (German for 'Forget-me-not'), Douglas remembers coming across a German corpse and imagines the latter's girlfriend seeing this: 'For here the lover and killer are mingled/who had one body and one heart./And death who had the soldier singled/has done the lover mortal hurt.'
And after being so scathing about the aristocrats in his regiment, Douglas now had a new respect for their old-fashioned values, as seen in his poem 'Sportsmen': 'How then can I live among this gentle/obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?'
According to Douglas's biographer Desmond Graham:
Each poem was a report on experience, but with Douglas in a dual role, as victim/killer, satirist/eulogist, observer/centre of feeling. Lucidly and with a control which was more disquieting than a show of emotion, he had enabled his poetry to live on the nerve of experience.
Preparing the collection
Released from hospital, Douglas rejoined his regiment in Egypt and, later, in Tunisia (where he was promoted to captain), but he took no further part in the fighting, which finally ended on 14 May 1943. In mid-December, he arrived back in England for three weeks' leave, armed with Turkish delight for his friends, who found him much the same, if quieter and gentler. In his absence, he had become a published poet with Selected Poems in company with his friends J C Hall and Norman Nicholson.
At the end of his leave, he went back into training, this time for D-Day. In February 1944, he received a contract from Poetry London for a collection of his poetry, which he intended to call Bête Noire. During leave – and one occasion of AWOL – he worked feverishly to get the collection ready. His publishers felt that he was intent on tying up all loose ends, whether his poems were going to be published or not.
One of his editors, G S Fraser, has left us with a description of Douglas at the time:
When I met him during the war … what moved me was the extraordinary poise and maturity of so young a man, the gallantry and courage which, however, did not imply any false romanticising of war: though the external, objective approach which he needed in order to steady his nerves, might give a careless reader a false impression of emotional, not merely technical, hardness … Had he lived, [he] might have become a great poet, and a leader and model for younger men.
Douglas became involved with publisher's assistant Betty Jesse, who also recognised an urgency in him, founded on his extremely strong belief that he was going to be killed. He thought himself to be in love with Betty and, in April 1941, wrote her a long letter in which he asked her to go to bed with him (she didn't).
D-Day and death
On 6 April, he was moved to a top-security camp for final training in sea-borne invasion. Exactly two months later, he was in command of a tank troop in the main assault on Gold Beach in Normandy. As he waited to embark on the journey across the Channel, he wrote 'Actors waiting in the wings of Europe':
Everyone, I suppose, will use these minutes
to look back, to hear music and recall
what we were doing and saying that year
during our last few months as people, near
the sucking mouth of the day that swallowed us all
into the stomach of a war.'
He never finished the poem.
The regiment helped liberate Bayeux and then, on D-Day + 3, arrived outside the little village of St Pierre. The 24-year-old Douglas and a comrade left their tank and walked towards the village, which was full of Germans. A mortar shell exploded directly above his head, killing him instantly without leaving a mark on his body. The chaplain buried him by a hedge near where he died.
Douglas's legacy
Following his death, Keith Douglas's poetry was almost forgotten. Poetry London eventually brought out his Collected Poems in 1951, but it soon sank without a trace – 'too late,' according to one of its editors, G S Fraser, 'to cash in on the vogue for war poetry and too early to appeal to an interest in the Second World War as past and over, as history.'
However, one or two of his poems persistently appeared in anthologies, and in 1964, Ted Hughes, a great admirer of the poet, edited and provided an introduction to the Selected Poems. Two years later, a new collected edition was published with an introduction by Edmund Blunden, which was followed by another, this time edited by Desmond Graham, in 1978.
However, the best indicator of Douglas's growing fame was the poll run by the Poetry Society in 1984, when he appeared as one of the Top 10 poets most favoured by the society's members.
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