Steven Marcus, discussing Wyndham Lewis’s novel The Revenge for Love (Regnery; 341 pp., $3.50), considers the predicament of those writers who in their revolt against provinciality and “barbarousness” in modern culture have themselves been led to embrace the worst elements of the culture they excoriate.
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Wyndham Lewis’s The Revenge for Love, written in 1937 and now published in this country for the first time, is a satirical exposure of Stalinist society in England at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Its virtues are numerous. Lewis shows a remarkably clear grasp of the consequences of the Communist ideology, its appeal, the personal motives that press for its embrace, the pretentious stupidity, neurotic extravagances, and ideological viciousness it fosters. He recognizes that sense of ubiquitous crisis which so often impells and obsesses the Stalinist and the rationalistic liberal: “They only seemed to get really happy when they proved up to the hilt that everything was as hopeless as anything and you might as well go lie down and die.” He knows too that “false politics, of sham-underdogs athirst for power—which treated the real poor, when they were encountered, with such overweening contempt, and even derision.” In fact, he knows—and presents with a large and genuine intelligence—almost everything we have learned about Stalinism and, even more important, the Stalinist personality. When his publisher writes on the dust-jacket, “The incredible thing . . . is that such a book could have been written in 1937,” one may wince at the complacency of “incredible,” but one must grant the point.
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Yet, as time passes, more and more people keep turning up who knew the truth about Communism earlier and earlier. Mr. Lewis is entitled to much credit for having been wiser in 1937 than so many others. But his novel is concerned, not with the fact that the Communist movement is evil, but with the cultural, moral, and personal consequences of that fact, and we must ask of such a novel something more than the virtue of not having been duped. From what higher cultural level does Mr. Lewis survey the low chicaneries and vulgarities of Stalinism?
We notice at once that his book is constructed without care and written without taste. Pigeons fly “to receive the coolness of the evening breezes into their overheated wing-pits”; a mouth is an “eating-hole”; “a gastronomic hiss” describes the smell of garlic; “transatlantic sex-ethics”; “massive coquetry”; “an appreciable accretion of seconds”; “the red beef of the lower gum”; and the adjective “Homeric” used whenever the writer wishes to evoke the sense of dimension and energy—these examples are taken merely from the first twenty-five pages. Lewis also loves the longest, most latinate words he can find, even if he doesn’t know how to use them. His style is not only tasteless, it is actively vulgar and philistine, and reveals essential qualities of the writer’s mind that are coarse and unintelligent. We can no longer believe of Lewis, as we can no longer believe of Ezra Pound, that his consistent failures of taste and perception are accidental to some important, though undiscovered, achievement; they are symptomatic of his mind and of its commitment
Those characters in the novel who stand in opposition to the Stalinists offer a good view of this commitment. Victor Stamp, a second-rate artist, swallows no ideology; he walks “with that lazy swagger that distinguishes the men of the Great Open Spaces of Anglo-Saxony.” His “broad and hostile shoulders belonged to Nature with her big impulsive responses, with her animal directness. . . .” Not indifferent to ideas alone, he is insensitive to everything else, and finally to himself. Jack Cruze, a prurient tax-accountant, a satyr, handy with his fists, comes in for Lewis’s approbation too; the author’s apparent joy in his description of Cruze beating up Percy Hardcaster, his fists working “like deadly hammers of gum-elastic,” is characteristic of what he admires: his hero is the “bushranger,” the tough, mindless animal.
It is this adulation of the indifferent, the brutal, and the stupid—much more than his incidental remarks about Jews, Negroes, and “dagos”—that takes the edge off Lewis’s satire. For his dislike of Communism is not prompted by an impulse toward something more decisive or humane; he hates Communism for the same reasons that he has contempt for any organization of people, and for most conscientious individuals: because organizations and conscientious individuals imply, in their very existence, efforts of the intellect, attempts at thinking, at making things consistent. Lewis’s polemics against abstract ideologies become, at bottom, a rejection of ideas in general; his chief impulse is towards those infantile tantrums which come from realizing that one’s own wishes do not totally control reality.
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In this excessive indulgence of the undisciplined expression of his own personality, Lewis belongs with certain other modern writers—Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robinson Jeffers, and even T. S. Eliot—who have been treated with an astonishing critical leniency that has permitted each to become the center of a cult. All these men are acutely sensitive to the vulgarity and barbarism of modern life, and feel deeply the inroads made by mass culture into the world of intellect. Yet, except for Eliot, they have reacted to this vulgarity and brutality by becoming, in their critical attacks on modern sociey, vulgar and brutal themselves. Permitting their often justified aggressive impulses to simplify their criticism of the world to the point where it invariably assumes the qualities they so abhor, they commit the one practically irredeemable error in the world of intellect: confusing literature and politics. Surely the relation between the two is close, but it is not absolute. The difference is in the nature of the demand that each makes upon the discriminating powers of the mind, and it is at this point that these writers have failed, introducing literary categories into politics and corrupting their literary sensibilities with the unsubtle slogans of political action.
Pound and Miller are perhaps the two best examples of writers who have been neglected by serious criticism and whose very deficiencies, left almost unnoticed, have stimulated the intellectually gullible, the parvenus of literature, to form cults around them. To my knowledge F. R. Leavis is the only critic who has troubled to show (first in the early 30’s, again in a recent review of Pound’s Letters) how hopelessly inadequate Pound’s notions of poetry, language, and literary tradition really are. And who has said that the famous Cantos are, almost entirely, a dull and boring poem, practically childish in emotional tone? As Lewis has petulantly revenged himself upon ideas, Pound has got even with the English language. The Cantos make no real demand—linguistically or intellectually. If one gets a few friends to decipher the scraps or foreign languages—and discovers how small Pound’s range in them is—one finds only the same old repetitious cant about money, the Jews, poetry, etc., etc. This man who was supposed to love language better than anyone of his age has done it the greatest disservice, for the Cantos do as much to minimize the range of communication as any poem can possibly do. And it is hardly surprising that the “greatness” of Pound’s poetry should be offered in extenuation of the viciousness of his ideas, for what Pound’s cult finds attractive in his poetry is precisely the kind of childish, irresponsible dabbling that produced his ideas.
As for Miller, two things are said about him: that he is a great artist and a great writer about sex. Yet Miller, like Lewis and Pound, has written almost nothing that does not show on every page the marks of haste, arrogant carelessness, and simple linguistic barbarism. He is one of the most consistently prolix writers in the history of literature; no Victorian novelist ever took half so long to describe a simple action as Miller does, and none of them made so much noise in doing it. And few know Less about sex than Miller; he is the complete and untouchable innocent, ignorant of the pains, fears, or profound pleasures of sex, forever bursting with fantasies of anarchic, uncomplicated, “free” experience.
With T. S. Eliot, of course, we are on different ground. Unlike the others, whose “strongest points” are actually their weakest, Eliot’s virtues are well-defined and concrete, and his attacks on modem society, even his expressions of anti-Semitism, are not accompanied by that pervasive vulgarity of thought and expression which is characteristic of Pound and Lewis, nor by the softness of style and profound verbosity of most of Miller or Jeffers. Eliot’s anti-Semitism may be symptomatic of the more general limitations of his thought and culture, but it has been given only occasional expression, and that more on the level of ideas than emotion, and it does not seem to me infectious. In any case, it is not anti-Semitism per se, or any of the particular prejudices they allow themselves, that is so disturbing in these writers. What is disturbing is the underlying stupidity, the general irresponsibility of mind and conscience; if Ezra Pound were a lover of Jews, he would still be Ezra Pound. T. S. Eliot’s achievement, if not independent of his anti-Semitism, is distinct from it. But it remains significant of the literary climate of our time that Eliot has never felt it necessary to retract or “explain” the things he has written about Jews.
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Criticism, as practiced today, has failed us here. Granted that one cannot expect writers to respond to criticism as if it were purely disinterested advice, there is still reason to believe that critical attention will affect them, and in some cases persuade them. There is much to be said for the 19th century with its Lockharts and Jeffreys, often vicious, but feeling always that they had a stake in new writing, and with its controversies, often virulent, but offering plenty of expression for really differing ideas. There has been, for example, no adequate information given the reading public about Wyndham Lewis’s own unparalleled career of intellectual irresponsibility, how he was within a short time sympathetic to fascism and Communism, how he has been anti-Negro, anti-Semitic, anti-intellectual, “anti” almost anything he could see. And now that in his latest book, America and Cosmic Man, he has come to embrace the modern world, he embraces it not for its true values, but precisely for its barbarousness and crudities.
Surely it is one of the tasks of criticism to make these things known. It has hardly done so. The literary cult is part of our lives, and we would not do away with it. Part of the critic’s job is to make its existence difficult by not indulging the cultists in that sense of exclusive possession and secret appreciation upon which they flourish. A small cult does little for a writer; if anything it hardens him in his errors. Criticism’s responsibility is the opposite; to open and expand, to let in the clear air. Its aim is still “disinterestedness.” (It is also within the function of criticism to comment on the opportunism of a publisher who seeks to exploit such a book as The Revenge for Love for its “timeliness” when the minimum of reflection makes it clear that this “timeliness” is entirely specious.)
One would like to believe that if Lewis had received intelligent criticism earlier, his considerable talent would not have wasted itself so thoroughly. T. S. Eliot once wrote that “sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.” Wyndham Lewis is one of those unlucky writers who has apparently been waiting a long while for sensibility to catch up with him; and now, not only has it caught up with him—it has left him far behind. It is Lewis who must do the overtaking if any criticism of him is to be more than flogging a dead horse.
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