Literary Fascism
The Reactionaries: A Study of the Anti-Democratic Intelligentsia.
by John Harrison.
Schocken. 224 pp. $6.00.
In Book v of A Vision, which is dated February, 1925, Yeats wrote:
A civilization is a struggle to keep self-control, and in this it is like some great tragic person, some Niobe who must display an almost superhuman will or the cry will not touch our sympathy. The loss of control over thought comes towards the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation—the scream of Juno’s peacock.
In its syntax it reminds us of “Leda and the Swan”; in its tone it recalls “The Second Coming.” In all its notes it sends the scream of Juno’s peacock through an entire generation. We hear it in Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (1925), in D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926), in Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God (1930), in Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), in Yeats’s The Tower (1928). Mr. Harrison’s book is a study of this scream. “It is a strange and disturbing phenomenon,” he says, “that five of the greatest literary figures of this century, Yeats, Lewis, Pound, Eliot, and Lawrence, were attracted by Italian and German Fascism before the Second World War.” This is, to Mr. Harrison, the particular form of the scream. And he asks: “Why is it that great creative artists can totally reject a liberal, democratic, humanitarian society, and prefer a cruel, authoritarian, bellicose society?” Mr. Harrison tends to answer his question by begging it: this is the form his bewilderment takes. Wise after the event, he cannot even conceive the possibility that the event might have been different.
Meanwhile he has prepared an indictment which would not stand in any court of law. I am afraid he has not done his homework. The body of the book is a study of his five writers, but he does not study them as writers, poets, novelists. He makes no attempt to register the strain of their art, to feel the violence of their imagination. At the start he promises to consider the presumptive relation between their political tendencies and their styles, but he does not keep his promise. Now and again he tries to impugn the literature by impugning the politics, but this is merely the pious hope that poets write better when their sentiments are congenial. I have often wished that this could be demonstrated. But the relation between feeling and style is more ambiguous than Mr. Harrison allows. Besides, at the back of his bewilderment there is a certain poverty of response which threatens to disable his entire work. This is particularly evident in his chapter on Lawrence. To him, Lawrence’s concern with blood and sacrifice is “near-lunatic.” Lawrence was lucky, it seems, to catch malaria and be driven out of New Mexico: if he had stayed any longer he would have gone mad. Besides, what on earth was he doing in New Mexico, “of all places”? This is jolly stuff, but it is unlikely to touch the more profound matters at stake.
Indeed, Mr. Harrison’s thought tends to be rough and ready. His chapters are mere approximations. Writing of Eliot, he quotes a passage from The Criterion (December, 1928), saying of it that it exhibits “an extreme intellectual approach to politics, and is simply a defense of the status quo.” This is not so. Mr. Harrison forces Eliot into the rough pattern which he has already drawn. He does not make his pattern conform to the facts. Indeed, in that particular issue of The Criterion, Eliot’s contributions are entirely in line with standard liberal opinion. The first editorial deals with censorship in Ireland, referring to a recent essay in which Yeats raised the matter. The Free State Government had drafted, Yeats wrote, “a bill which it hates, which must be expounded and defended by Ministers full of contempt for their own words.” The editorial quotes this sentence and goes on to speak of censorship as “indefensible.” The enforcement of the bill “would reduce Ireland to barbarism.” The next comment seems to me extremely cogent and fair: “The situation thus summed up casts, of course, an interesting light upon popular government in general, and upon democratic tyranny.” In the essay itself, “The Literature of Fascism,” Eliot reviews five books on the subject, but he declares that he is interested in one question, and one only; “whether Fascism is the emergence of a new political idea, or the recrudescence of an old one.” He concludes, incidentally, that as a religious faith Fascism is “humbug,” that it does not contain any new idea of general interest. Eliot came back to the matter in the July, 1929 issue of The Criterion. Fascism now seemed, as an idea, thoroughly sterile; “the natural idea for the thoughtless person.” It is “a combination of statements with unexamined enthusiasms.” “In the success of a man like Mussolini (a man of ‘the people’) a whole nation may feel a kind of self-flattery; and the Russian people deified itself in Lenin. Both Italy and Russia seem to me to be suffering from Napoleon-ism.” It is quite clear that Eliot, faced with an English society which had not entertained a single new political idea since Fabianism, was checking to see whether there might be anything fruitful in Fascism. His conclusion was “no”; there was nothing. I do not say that this is the whole story, but it is a part of it which Mr. Harrison chooses not to tell. Eliot makes no bones about his feeling that democratic government in England was already “watered down to nothing.” “From the moment when the suffrage is conceived as a right instead of as a privilege and a duty and a responsibility, we are on the way merely to government by an invisible oligarchy instead of government by a visible one.” This is at least an arguable position. On the face of it, there is nothing stupid or vicious in those words. Indeed, Eliot could claim to be defending true democracy. “The modern question,” he says, “as popularly put is: ‘democracy is dead; what is to replace it?,’ whereas it should be: ‘the frame of democracy has been destroyed: how can we, out of the materials at hand, build a new structure in which democracy can live?’”
Again, in writing of Yeats, Mr. Harrison takes some pains to misunderstand the words on the page. Practical politics was for Yeats, he says, “the dirty piece of orange peel in the corner of the stairs as one climbs to some newspaper office.” This is a phrase from The Trembling of the Veil. Mr. Harrison thinks it so compelling that he repeats it three pages later. But in fact he misinterprets the words. Yeast was giving a fanciful account of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy:
One imagined his youth in some little gaunt Irish town, where no building or custom is revered for its antiquity; and there speaking a language where no word, even in solitude, is ever spoken slowly and carefully because of emotional implication; and of his manhood of practical politics, of the dirty piece of orange-peel in the corner of the stairs as one climbs up to some newspaper office; of public meetings where it would be treacherous amid so much geniality to speak or even to think of anything that might cause a moment’s misunderstanding in one’s own party.
This means that Yeats despised the culture of the middle-class shopkeeper, the fumblers in a greasy till. He detested the kind of political activity that Joyce describes in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” But the orange-peel is not his image for practical politics, an activity to which he chose to devote many years of his life. What Yeats wanted was a liaison of spirit between folk and aristocracy, peasant and prince; “rule of kindred” based on independence and personality. Indeed, Fascism had a better chance of his approval than, say, Nazism, because its most spectacular version was enacted on his beloved Italian soil and he couldn’t help believing that somewhere beneath those marching boots one could hear the sweet sounds of Urbino, “the wise Duchess,” and Lady Emilia giving the theme. So he found it easy to mistake Mussolini for the Duke Frederick and Gentile for Castiglione and to think of them all in civilized association with Parnell, John O’Leary, Kevin O’Higgins, and the great immortals. Besides, it was precisely because he had no real power in Ireland that he was determined to speak out. There is no reason to think that, if he had been given power, he would have used it to extreme purpose. Mr. Harrison makes no imaginative effort to understand what was going on in the Ireland of 1919-1936, or to see why it incited violent thoughts in Yeats. “Desire some just war,” Yeats wrote, “that big house and hovel, college and public-house, civil servant . . . and international bridgeplaying woman, may know that they belong to one nation.” If you can’t understand why Yeats wrote that and other violent things, you can’t even begin to grasp the politics of modern literature.
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On Pound, Mr. Harrison is a little rueful. The verse is too hard to follow, the economic theories are only Major Douglas, but poor Pound was an innocent abroad. “Pound’s political unworldliness” accounts for a lot. So much is forgiven him because he has, in recent years, confessed much. Go thou and sin no more. Again, it is an approximation. In this account it is not necessary to cope with the words. In Thrones, Canto 102, Pound gives a Chinese ideogram which I cannot read, followed by this:
But the lot of ’em, Yeats, Possum,
Old Wyndham had no ground
to stand on
Black shawls still worn for Demeter
in Venice,
in my time,
my young time . . .
Mr. Harrison thinks that this means that Yeats, Eliot, Lewis, etc. “were not firm enough in their support of Fascism.” On the contrary, it seems to mean that the trouble with the political sentiments of these writers was that they had no relation to their soil, whereas the Fascists were articulating “the spirit of the place,” the genuine Italian tradition. There is a lot to be said for this view. Indeed, Eliot himself warned that “sound political thought in one country is not to be built upon political facts in another country.” It was not merely a matter of transport. It had to be the “speech of the place,” to use a phrase from another idiom; not “enclosures of hypotheses.”
These are details. The main defect of Mr. Harrison’s book is that he is only interested in ripping political ideas from the poems and novels in which they appear; not at all interested in the engagement of those ideas with the poetic imagination. This is to say that he is interested in ideas and only ostensibly in literature. So his own mind is the typical bourgeois liberal mind of his generation. Its force is the force of the typical; its weakness is the fact that it is no more than typical. This is to say that Mr. Harrison’s mind has none of that quirky imaginative vigor which would make it more than typical. What it represents is what every other bourgeois liberal mind represents; but no more. This is why he writes approximations; essays in the typical. The book is full of misprints, many of the quotations are wrong, and this would matter if it were another kind of book. But it does not matter here. If a phrase from Yeats’s “Blood and the Moon” comes out as “Laughter-headed Burke” instead of “haughtier-headed Burke,” there is a sense in which this approximation, one in four on that page, is more congenial to Mr. Harrison’s book than the accurate version. Transcribing “All Souls’ Night” he puts in “corner” where Yeats wrote “quarter,” and again in a crazy way it seems appropriate. If you are not proposing to read the stuff very carefully there is no point in transcribing it with any attention. It is not surprising that Mr. Harrison writes of these poets and novelists as if they were a gang of wretched journalists, Beaverbrook hacks.
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Part of the difficulty is that Mr. Harrison cannot conceive of a profound case that might be directed against the kind of mass society which we have today, or the kind of democracy which determined English life between the wars. He does not understand the sense in which liberal democratic life is, as Pound called it in the ABC of Economics, “a mess of mush.” Or the forces which drove Yeats to write “Lapis Lazuli,” or anyone at all to conceive a “sympathy with the abyss.” In The Lion and the Honeycomb R. P. Blackmur spoke with something of that profundity. His theme was the New Illiteracy, “the development of energy without a corresponding development of intelligence.” The fact that much of his thought was animated by his reading of Henry Adams makes no difference. That book is not the work of a reactionary, in Mr. Harrison’s term, but it implies in its distress the sense in which bourgeois democracy has already failed. I do not ask Mr. Harrison to share this sense; but I ask him at least to confront the genuine issues which incite it.
There was a moment when I thought he was going to do this. It was the eleventh hour in his book, the summary near the end. But it would still have been possible. Mr. Harrison was speaking very well, arguing that “Yeats, Lewis, Pound, and Eliot were really interested in society only in so far as it would allow the arts to flourish.” Then he said that these writers “based their political and social criticism on the same principles as their imaginative writing and literary criticism.” They “transferred their value-judgments from aesthetics to politics.” This is extremely illuminating. It might be developed further by referring to Veblen’s concept of “trained incapacity”; meaning that one is often prevented from seeing certain possibilities by the fact that they are not allowed for in the grammar of his professional skill. Training in one direction is a disability in another. Skill, a particular vision, is also a squint. It might be argued that the modern poet, trained in one way, is for that very reason disabled in other ways, including ways readily available to less talented men, It is common in philosophy to derive an ethic from an aesthetic. It is equally natural to derive a politics from the same source. Think of modern aesthetics for a moment. The single idea which goes without dispute in the Babel of modern critical theory is the primacy of the creative imagination. It bloweth where it listeth, but it is deemed to be indisputable and imperious. It gives no quarter. It does whatever it wants to do. Above all, we are admonished to think of it as singular and unanswerable. Indeed, it is odd that we have accepted such an authoritarian notion in aesthetics while choosing to be scandalized by its counterpart in politics. The poet is free to deal with his matter as he wishes, to use words in his own way. It is universally conceded that he may impose himself, his own particular sense, whatever form it takes. Much of this thought is descended, in the English line, from Coleridge, who said in the Biographia Literaria that the primary imagination is the finite counterpart of God’s creative act, “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” The modern understanding of imagination assumes that order is imposed upon experience by those exceptional men, the few, who are capable of doing so; that it is natural for such men to do this, as an act corresponds to a prior capacity; and that the rest of us should appreciate those men for doing what we are incapable of doing. It seems clear, for instance, that Wallace Stevens’s idea of the poetic imagination implies a politics of self-determination: call it capitalism. It would be possible, presumably, to devise an aesthetic theory which would chime with a democratic politics; but no theory of this kind has made any mark in modern literature. If you start with the imagination, you imply an elite of qualified men. The relation between this elite and the masses is bound to be a critical relation; as Kenneth Burke said that the law of the imagination is, “when in Rome, do as the Greeks.” In The Necessary Angel Stevens refers to the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, Washington. General Jackson, Stevens remarks, is raising his hat in a gay gesture, saluting the ladies of his generation. “One looks at this work of Clark Mills and thinks of the remark of Bertrand Russell that to acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.” I was reminded of this passage by reading some of the more facile parts of Mr. Harrison’s book.
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