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Twenty-first century threats of H1N1 pandemic flu have tended to run themselves out not with a bang but a whimper, thanks to preventive vaccines and the willingness of our current political and medical authorities to risk panic in publicizing the flu's threat. Such communication was not the strategy in 1918 when, fearing a loss of morale that might compromise war efforts, politicians and the press maintained near-total silence about the pandemic-except in war-neutral Spain, whose press did cover the disease (for which Spain was rewarded primarily by being held accountable for it, at least at the level of nomenclature [Barry 171]). An oddly similar silence plagues the American literary tradition. Despite death tolls in the 50 to 100 million range (compared to some 9 million killed in the war itself, amply attested to in the era's poetry and prose), the Spanish flu receives only glancing reference among modernist writers.
Such silence is surprising. Just as literary treatments of sol- diers' deaths lament the youth of the victims ("Young blood and high blood, / Fair cheeks, and fine bodies" as Pound puts it in IV.81-82 of Hugh Selwyn Mauberly [1920]), Spanish flu, too, struck young and healthy adults rather than, as with more typical epidemic flu, primarily the very young and the very old. And the flu was ubiquitous in its effect, with global reach and pockets of mortality topping twenty-five percent. In his account of the pandemic, historian John Barry describes Philadelphia, for instance, facing near medieval conditions: carts to collect the dead went street to street, drivers calling out to alert stricken families of the possibility of corpse removal in a city where coffins were stolen during the night and mass graves became the unavoidable response to the infection's rapid, deadly spread (223, 327-28). Barry cites Victor Vaughan, head of the army's Division of Communicable Diseases, writ- ing at the time that civilization itself seemed only "a few more weeks" from disappearance, given the "mathematical rate of acceleration" he saw in the flu's transmission (365). So silence does not indicate lack of impact. No, as Catherine Belling puts it, "[p]erhaps the flu overwhelmed language in ways that war did not" (57).
For when the pandemic does appear in major American works, it is strangely...