In Memoriam
In Memoriam
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Alice Winn on In Memoriam
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A grief from another centuryThe Marlborough College student newspapers, digitized and posted online, cover the years 1913 to 1919. Winn found them while procrastinating on a screenplay, having gone looking for traces of Siegfried Sassoon in his old school archive. Sassoon wasn’t there. What she found instead was something no published war memoir could offer: boys writing for boys, in real time, with no retrospective distance.
They were the most devastating reading, because they begin in 1913 and portray these smug, naive, charming, funny schoolboys who fully expect to inherit the world. Then the war breaks out and they start dying — and it’s the boys at school who have to write the ‘In Memoriams’ [obituaries] for their older brothers and their friends.
Most of what gets written about war is written after the fact, by survivors reconstructing their experience for an audience who wasn’t there. The Marlborough papers were different, and Winn articulated exactly why their rawness hit her differently from every other primary source she had read.
The newspapers were written for the students, by the students, and they provided an incredibly raw and visceral window into the impact of war on a group of boys. It shrank the war down to the size of a school and made the tragedy so personal, so intimate.
By the time Winn found the archive, she had already abandoned three novels after failing to find an agent, and had redirected her energy to screenwriting. The grief she encountered in those school papers had nowhere institutional to go. Writing the novel was the only form the feeling could take.
I wrote the novel because I felt alone in a grief from another century, and I wanted other people to feel as I did.
The decision to build a love story between two men was not a departure from the archive. It was, Winn argued, the most historically accurate choice she could make. The poets and memoirists who defined how the war is remembered in English share a particular identity.
For whatever reason, queer artists were the main voices heard in this conflict.
Wilfred Owen, Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Edward Brittain: the synthesis of the archive and the queer literary tradition of the war made the central relationship feel, to Winn, obvious rather than chosen.
How she wrote it
A horrible little notebook and fifteen readersFor the battle sequences, Winn turned to Ernst Jünger’s memoir ‘Storm of Steel’, a German stormtrooper’s account of the Western Front, and worked through it with a specific goal: to make sure that every act of violence in the novel had a verified real-world source rather than an imagined one.
I wrote down every single instance of violence in this horrible little notebook I kept... I basically plugged them in — every terrible thing that happens to a person in In Memoriam is something I found in a first-hand description of world war one, so it’s not me fantasising about violence; it’s just descriptions of what happened.
The novel’s homosexual relationship required Winn to research a set of unspoken rules that governed boarding-school life in the Edwardian era, which she worked out largely from Alec Waugh’s ‘The Loom of Youth’. For the emotional and physical texture of the relationship itself, she went outside published sources entirely.
Male friends who are gay or bisexual were able to read what I’d written and give very generous pointers: ‘This specific thing wouldn’t be true to how I’ve experienced it...’ I followed their advice to the letter.
The novel’s two protagonists, Gaunt and Ellwood, hold views that a contemporary reader is meant to find uncomfortable. Winn was deliberate about that discomfort: giving them modern sympathies would have been a form of falsification, and she resisted it even when it complicated the reader’s ability to root for them.
Even Gaunt, who is the more modern of the two protagonists, disapproves of the war because he feels it will weaken the British Empire, which he takes as a given to be a bad thing... I was trying to make them realistic for their time.
The obituary columns embedded between the novel’s chapters, which share the book’s title, required Winn to rehearse something she had not anticipated: imagining the deaths of people she actually knew. She had set herself a target of twelve. She stopped at six.
I wrote In Memoriam for some of my male friends. I think I wrote about six of them. I was planning on writing 12, and it was just too disturbing. It was just a horrible exercise. [paraphrased from audio]
Pacing was managed empirically. Winn sent drafts to roughly fifteen readers and tracked not their general impressions but the precise page where each person put the book down. Any location that showed a cluster of stops got revised until the exit point disappeared.
I would look at that place and I would trundle that little bit. [paraphrased from audio]
The first draft took two weeks to produce; the editing took a year and a half. The revision process was less about expanding what was there than about sealing off every place a reader could comfortably stop.
What she wants us to sit with
The false world and the crack in the iceWinn pushes back against reading the novel as a straightforward anti-war argument. When NPR asked what she hoped readers would take from it, she directed attention not to the carnage but to the psychology of the two boys before the war reaches them: what they loved, and what it cost them to love something that was never real.
I think it — fundamentally, it’s a book about wistfulness and about complicated sort of nostalgia because I think Gaunt and Ellwood — they live in this little, idyllic bubble, where they never have to interact with anything ugly or violent. They benefit from empire without ever having to see any of the negatives. And so they’re kind of both a little bit in love with that world — that version of the world that never really existed. And then the World War tears apart all semblance of that false world.
The columns of names printed between chapters were a feature of the real Marlborough papers, and Winn gave them a specific structural job in the novel. She wanted readers to experience something of what it felt like to receive news that way: scanning for known names, dreading confirmation.
I wanted to get across that feeling of — you, the reader, are scanning the list to see if the characters you care about have survived or not. I think it must have just been such a terrible way to find out about acquaintances and loved ones.
The novel’s saturation in poetry, including the boys writing verse for the school paper and quoting poems to each other in the trenches, is not decoration. Winn connected the form to the specific circumstances of censorship and to the particular emotional pitch of very young people under pressure.
WWI is famous for its extraordinary poetry, perhaps because, in Britain at least, poems were less likely to be censored than other art forms. Also, my novel is about teenagers, and I think poetry is especially good at capturing the exquisite anguish of very young people.
Before finishing the novel, Winn had written about the Edwardian generation’s faith in the permanence of the world they knew. She recognized something of that faith in her own era, and the recognition shifted what she took from the research personally.
Writing the book has certainly made me feel extremely grateful for peace. I don’t take it for granted at all.