When one considers the years around and after WWI, influenza certainly falls to the bottom of the list of events – and writers of that time certainly thought so too, if the lack of clear mention in their work is to be considered.

Retracing back to 1918 Europe, a time of darkness and discourse, one of the first pragmatic reasons we could argue for would be censorship. With the war ending and a need for organisation and unity, governments strictly forbade the media from spreading any information regarding the pandemic of the time, whether to prevent panic or to obscure their poor post-war financial situation, as well as the terribly mismanaged flu situation that got out of hand much faster than these struggling countries could control. With the only exception being Spain, which had not participated in the First World War and whose press remained, therefore, neutral in terms of censorship and could consequently provide information on the matter, promptly causing it to be branded “the Spanish flu”.

The United States, on the other hand, downplayed the seriousness of the flu, hoping to upkeep public morale and distract the people from yet another devastating chapter in recent history (and later refused to acknowledge that the epidemic had, in fact, started in Kansas itself, rather than Spain, its namesake).

Where historians focused on the great political and military shifts of the time, their lack of attention regarding the pandemic may have also related to classicism, as it mostly affected weaker, more exposed parts of the population – leaving the affluent and politically significant figures mostly well and therefore offering less exposure to the flu historically when it came to important figures. The events that followed the 1918 epidemic tremendously overshadowed the flu itself, and, like many other countries, the US, where the flu actually started, felt the need to “forget” such a dark and negative aspect of history and effectively sought to erase it, starting from history books.

Yet what of literature, poetry and journalism with a little more spine than fear of censorship? Most argue that the writers of the time ignored or outright avoided mentioning the Spanish flu, yet others beg to differ – Dr. Outka’s article from 2014, “Wood for the Coffins Ran Out”: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic discusses the effect of the epidemic as shown from the eyes of four different writers, among other factors of their time.

She looks at the connections between modernism, the Great War, and the 1918 influenza epidemic through literary representations of death, trauma, grieving, and corpses that seem to hold great weight in these writings, described by authors Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Wolfe, and particularly showcasing Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” She points out that World War I dominates literary discourse and literature, casting the pandemic in a secondary role.

She also explains the three waves of the epidemic and how the increasing death toll affected people who were not near the front lines of the conflict, previously mostly immune to reminders of death, as the war casualties were not sent home to receive proper burials.

On a broader level, no one knew, in 1922, whether the flu would return, as virulent as ever, or whether another war with Germany would unfold. More corpses were always possible. Eliot here participates in a kind of modernist mourning/anti-mourning: he records the desire to push the dead away, to bury grief and move on, and at the same time he insists that the memory of these bodies will always return.

(Outka, 2014, p. 956)

Another interesting outtake that stands out is that of Scerri & Grech (2020), who, in their paper “Representation of the 1918 epidemic in poetry,” wrote the following in their abstract: “As an illness, it erases the collective suffering; as a virus, it offers a degenerate body”. This line makes an interesting connection stand out, as Outka also mentions this in a different way in her 2014 paper, where she analyses how T.S. Eliot’s letters, after he survived the flu himself, were plagued by his own frustrations regarding the aftereffects of the illness – mental disarray and decay.

Much like Scerri & Grech’s point, this illness left marks not even censorship could erase, even if we missed them the first few times around. Peter Fifield also makes a similar point in his book “Modernism and physical illness – Sick books” (2020), where he particularly analyses Woolf’s pieces, stating that in Woolf’s case, there was a vague connection between her writing and her health. Physicians saw Woolf’s writing as a sign of her sickness, while Woolf saw it as a “rehabilitative practice”.

When touching upon Elliot’s poetry, he finds that this undermines what his more intimate writing on disease hinted at, connecting illness and artistic sensitivity, as illness is nearly always a sign of the decadent contemporary society in Eliot’s poetry. Though each writer treats illness in a unique way, there are many parallels across the various sections. Woolf, Eliot and others all seemed to have fluctuated between different interpretations of the same illness – both Eliot and D.H. Lawrence are brought up as an example of wrestling with the idea of illness as a metaphor and indirectly addressing the subject of diseases in their writings.

Essentially, while it does first seem as though the 1918 epidemic had little to no effect on its time, despite its catastrophic imprint upon mankind, perhaps there is in fact a much stronger aftertaste of those events in modernist literature after all. While epidemics and illness in general are less imposing and impressive than wars and deaths of glory, their mark is quite distinct in the human psyche, and they always rear their head through the folds of literature – humanity always returns to the things that hurt or confused it in order to try to rationalise its experiences and the impact they had upon it.

Infectious diseases are an invisible enemy with little dramatic effect and impact when compared to wars, where the enemy is clear and the crimes are written in blood. Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” contains the line that illness doesn’t have a plot, and to an extent, we may find that it also applies here – a story without a driving plot provides no motive to continue following it, much like an illness that repeatedly offers the same struggle day after day. Perhaps that could be an excuse for the lack of distinct reference in literature regarding the 1918 epidemic, or it could simply be the human need to project our biggest woes onto our creations, no matter how subtly or openly, and perhaps, accidentally.

References

Fifield, P. (2020). “Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books”. Oxford: OUP.
Hogarth Press. (1930). “On being ill”. Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press.
Scerri, M. & Grech, V. (2020). “Representations of the 1918 Pandemic in poetry”. Research and Humanities in Medical Education. 7.
Outka, E. (2014). “Wood for the Coffins Ran Out”: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic. Modernism/modernity 21(4), 937-960.