Keith Castelllain Douglas (1920-1944) despite being born at the Garden Home Nursing Home in the relatively affluent town of Tunbridge Wells did not have an easy childhood. His father, a retired army captain, set up a chicken farm in the mid 1920s which did not prove successful, the failure of which plunged the family into hardship. To add to this, his mother, Marie, collapsed with a long term health condition in his early infancy in 1924, which she never fully recovered from, and which led to the collapse of his parent’s marriage in 1928, and their divorce. For a decade, Douglas heard nothing of his father. When he did receive a message, in 1938, while at Oxford university, he ignored it. As he later wrote, `I lived alone during the most fluid and formative years of my life, and during that time I lived on my imagination, which was so powerful as to persuade me that the things I imagined would come true.’ Douglas has been born in Tunbridge Wells largely because of his mother’s links to the area, having spent her childhood in Cranbrook (see Desmond Graham, `Keith Douglas: A Biography’, Faber and Faber, London, Oxford University Press, 1974).
From 1928 he attended first Edgeborough School in Guildford, then Christ’s Hospital in Horsham (the alma mater of S T Coleridge), before going to Merton College, Oxford. It was there that his work attracted the attention of no less a figure than T S Eliot as well as Edmund Blunden (see entry for Blunden). He was romantically linked to Ying Cheng (Betty Sze) the daughter of a Chinese diplomat while a student. In 1941, he attended the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, before being posted in June that year to the Middle East, to take part in the war operations in the El Alamein offensive in 1942 in North Africa. He was to die in 1944, near Bayeux, during the D Day invasion of Normandy, after returning to Britain in 1943 and is buried in France. He is the best known of poets who wrote during the Second World War, a group who have enjoyed far less fame than their counterparts in the previous great war.
The striking aspect of Douglas’s biography are these recurrences of unexpected, rebellious behaviour. He was involved in an incident at his school in 1935 which had almost led to his expulsion, and throughout his time there regarded by teachers as intelligent but difficult. During El Alamein, against the orders of his leaders, his assumed command of a tank troop, earning a reprimand. Even his death was the result of adventurism, with him undertaking an unauthorised personal reconnaissance. It was during this that he was killed by a German mortar.
Douglas’s reputation was slowly enhanced after his death. His often ironic, detached, unmoralizing attitude was criticised by some as lacking soul and emotion. But for a world coming to the terms with the enormity of the inhumanity of the Second World War conflict, this tone became appealing and powerful. `Vergissmeinnicht’ is representative of this:
`Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.
The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.
Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.
We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.
But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.
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.’