Why has a novel of acknowledged literary value been excluded not only from the canons of both Canadian and American fiction but also, even more surprisingly, from the canon of WWI fiction? Just what makes a work canonical has been one of the questions posed by the Theory revolution of the past few decades. Keith's description of it as a "little-known. The anomaly of Harrison's novel-occasional high praise combined with increasing neglect-is perfectly caught in W. Yet praise like this has not resulted in the novel entering the canons of either Canadian or war fiction. And in We Wasn't Pals (2001), an anthology of Canadian literature of the First World War, the editor, Barry Callaghan, recalls a conversation with Joe Rosenblatt in which Rosenblatt called it "the great war novel. John Moss claims that Generals Die in Bed is "possibly the best novel in English to have come out of the First World War" (162). And his name does not even merit a mention either in the 6th edition of The Oxford Companion to American Literature or in the recent A New History of American Literature (2009), edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors.Īlthough Harrison has virtually disappeared from American literary history, he has fared slightly better among critics of Canadian literature. Stanley Cooperman mentions Harrison only in passing in his World War One and the American Novel (1967). He has certainly not been honoured in his own country.
That Harrison was an American working as a reporter in Canada when the First World War broke out, and that, shortly after the war ended, he returned to the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life, may partly account for the novel's marginal status in the canons of both Canadian and American fiction.
Although the subject of fierce debate when it appeared and despite occasional high praise, it has never achieved the canonical status and hence the critical attention afforded such well-known Great War novels as Eric Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Frederic Manning's Her Privates We (1930), or by such memoirs as Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928).
Absent from both these studies, however, and from the canon of WWI literature, is Charles Yale Harrison's novel Generals Die in Bed (1930). The canon of Great War poetry and fiction has been firmly established at least since Bernard Bergonzi's Heroes Twilight (1965) and, a decade later, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975).