Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics 9780773586659

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dreams of a totalitarian utopia

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preface

Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia Literary Modernism and Politics leon surette

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011 isbn 978-0-7735-3811-5 Legal deposit third quarter 2011 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Quotations from The Works of Wyndham Lewis © by kind permission of the Wyndham-Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity).

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Surette, Leon, 1938– Dreams of a totalitarian utopia : literary modernism and politics / Leon Surette. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3811-5 1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Political and social views. 2. Pound, Ezra, 1885–1972 – Political and social views. 3. Lewis, Wyndham, 1882–1957 – Political and social views. 4. Politics and literature – United States – History – 20th century. 5. Politics and literature – England – History – 20th century. I. Title. ps310.p6s87 2011

821'.91209358

c2011-901883-7

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Baskerville

Acknowledgments

For my children Alison & Philip

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Contents

Preface xi Introduction

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i Dreams and Nightmares 19 ii A Twentieth-Century Renaissance 55 iii The War as a Symptom of Cultural Decay iv The Response to Fascism 139 v “Things Fall Apart” 181 vi Looking Back 235 Conclusion

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Appendix: An American Fascist 285 Notes 301 References 339 Index 353

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Preface

New Historicism tells us that we can only construct the past out of our own predilections, prejudices, and desires, that there is no possibility of an objective narrative about the past. The principle of reflexivity, which grounds this belief, cannot be denied. Certainly our knowledge is always partial, and always inflected by our cognitive make up. Fortunately, such inescapable relativity does not preclude scholars from marshalling evidence, engaging in analysis, and asserting the superiority of their version of the past over that of others. The impossibility of absolute truth and accuracy does not entail the impossibility of ranking versions of the past on the grounds of relative truth and accuracy. Literary scholars – insofar as they behave as historians, as narrators of the past – are in an even more complex entanglement than standard historians, for it is their task to reconstruct the engagement of literary figures with the world contemporary with them so as to expose or articulate their predilections, prejudices, and desires. The evidence on which such a reconstruction must be grounded is found in the literary figures’ accomplished works, any abandoned or abortive creative efforts that may be accessible, and casual remarks they have made on life and the times. All of this should be considered in the context of contemporaneous public events as well as the personal lives of the artists under study. In short, the literary historian’s task is not so much to reconstruct the past, as to reconstruct the version of the past concocted by those living it. Even New Historicists concede that there are some raw facts about the past that are beyond dispute. The Italian invasion of

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Ethiopia, the German Anschluss with Austria, Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Fall of France, the Blitz, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, Germany’s defeat, and the like are generally conceded to have taken place much as described in standard histories. What is not granted is the significance these events have in a grand narrative about world history. Niall Ferguson’s recent bbc series and accompanying book, The War of the World, attempts to reassign some of the blame for World War II – which he dates from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 up to the Korean war of 1950–53. Provocatively, he maintains that the “war that broke out then [in 1939] between Germany, France and Britain was nearly as much the fault of the Western powers, and indeed of Poland, as of Hitler” (313). But, in the event, this apparently outrageous judgment comes down to little more than the standard view that appeasement encouraged Hitler. More germane to my topic, Ferguson dismisses the involvement of artists and writers as insignificant players alongside more fundamental social and cultural forces: “Nearly all the dictatorships of the inter-war period were at root conservative, if not downright reactionary. The social foundations of their power were what remained of the pre-industrial ancien régime : the monarchy, the aristocracy, the officer corps and the Church, supported to varying degrees by industrialists fearful of socialism and by frivolous intellectuals who were bored of democracy’s messy compromises” (231). In a note he lists Yeats, Eliot, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ignazio Silone, and Martin Heidegger as examples of such “frivolous intellectuals.” Surprisingly, Lewis and Pound escape his scorn. But there was nothing frivolous about the engagement of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis in the political debates of their era. It is true, however, that their efforts were almost entirely inconsequential – except for their impact on their own lives and careers. It is precisely such interpretive analysis that is put under examination in the proposed study. The literary history of modernism has often been motivated by the desire to expose a grand narrative shared by modernist writers and at variance with that to which the literary historian in question subscribes. Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence have frequently been exposed as anti-democratic, Right-wing ideologues. Although these five are scarcely of one mind, they were, indeed, all

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suspicious of liberal democratic capitalism, and hence interested in alternative ideologies. And it is undeniable that they tended to lean more toward fascism than communism, the two leading alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism in the mid-twentieth century. Since Hulme died in the First War and Lawrence died early in 1930, those two did not face the choices that the other three did. Pound, Eliot, and Lewis all lived through the Second World War, and survived into the Cold War. Critical commentary on these literary figures has inevitably tended to reflect the time of its composition. During the early years of the Cold War, most scholars were preoccupied with the monstrosity of the Nazi regime, and were keen to expose any fascist taint in canonized authors (Chace, Harrison, Heyman). As the confrontation between communism and capitalism took the hotter form of the Vietnam war, literary scholars participated in the radicalization spawned by that unfortunate military adventure. The scholars of this period condemned the modernist aesthetic for its elitism and the modernists themselves for a correlative ethnocentric imperialism (Dasenbrock, McDiarmud). In the post Vietnam era, the ubiquitous influence of continental neo-Marxist thought led literary historians to pillory the modernists for “logocentrism,” that is, for holding any positive views whatsoever (Morrison, North). Others focused on the monstrosity of the Nazi “final solution,” and pilloried particular modernists and all of their works as anti-Semitic and therefore partially responsible for that crime against humanity (Casillo, Jameson, Julius). More recently, others have explored particular aspects of the modernists’ cultural attitudes (Chinitz, Coyle, North, Rainey). There have also been accounts that attempt to contextualize the political postures of modernist writers (Perl, Redman, Trainer). It is in the spirit of these last that the current study would place itself. Unlike those studies, I will pay particular attention to the shifts and changes in my subjects’ views as they respond to new intellectual experiences and the political, economic, and martial events that shattered the confident post-Christian European civilization in which they grew up. Of course, there are other scholars who avoid the issue of political ideology altogether. Pre-eminent among these is Hugh Kenner, whose various studies of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis scrupulously avoid any mention of inappropriate political or racial opinions. There are many current scholars who follow Kenner’s New Critical

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approach to Eliot in whose work his engagement in political discourse is almost entirely obscured. (Longenbach, Bush 1983, and 1991, Nichols). And many of the younger scholars, who profess to correct the New Critical bias of their elders by contextualizing the work of the modernists, still avoid discussion of their disreputable interest in Right-wing political ideologies (Childs, Svarny, Tratner). Although not principally concerned to explore the political identities of his four authors (Yeats, Frost, Pound, and Eliot) in Modernist Quartet, the view Frank Lentricchia articulates of their political posture in his conclusion is one that I can endorse for Lewis as well as for Pound and Eliot, and that can serve as a kind of epigraph for the following study: The major political assumption of the modernists is that people in advanced Western societies desire, or would desire were they sufficiently intelligent about their circumstances, the originality and freedom of an authentic selfhood; that people should want what they, the modernists, want; that the serious artist is, or should be, the exemplary individual. Wanting to make the world possible for themselves - and why shouldn’t they? – Modernist writers believe that everyone would be happier if only they could become artists. The world would then be a decent place. Of course, they see that all the evidence points in the other direction. Virtually nobody wants what they wanted. In fact, given the flow of things, the possibility of (noncommercial) art and freedom, as they envision it, will simply be rubbed out of human possibility. That is what they tend to believe. (290) In the following pages I examine the political engagement and economic views of two American poets (Eliot and Pound), and a British painter and novelist (Wyndham Lewis), all of whom regarded democratic capitalism as 1) undesirable on cultural grounds, 2) (after the Great War of 1914–18) as disastrously prone to military conflict, and 3) (after the economic Crash of 1929) as dysfunctional. In an appendix, I also consider the career of an American former diplomat (Lawrence Dennis) who agreed with the last two criticisms, but was little concerned with cultural issues. All of these individuals either flirted with, or succumbed to, the undemocratic and/or anti-capitalistic ideologies on offer in their

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day – whether on the Left or on the Right. On the Left they had the fairly well articulated ideology of socialism, which, prior to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was not sharply bifurcated into advocates of violent revolution and advocates of incremental parliamentary reform. In other words, to be a communist prior to 1917 did not entail either loyalty to a foreign regime, or commitment to revolution. Indeed, the Marxist variety of socialism had not yet completely purged the Proudhonian varieties, and the indigenous British Fabian variety has remained politically viable (barely) to this day. In short, to declare oneself a communist or socialist in 1912 or 1913 did not entail any disloyalty to one’s native land, though it certainly declared one’s hostility to capitalist democracy. Communism had been a spectre of impending revolution for nearly half a century before any of the men under discussion here were born. The Communist Manifesto was published during the abortive rebellions of 1848, and Proudhon’s declaration that “property is theft” was published eight years earlier in What Is Property? Socialism had widespread support amongst intellectuals in Europe, and was seen by many in the early years of the twentieth century as the inevitable face of European governance in a not distant future. However, socialism was as demonized in the United States of America in the early twentieth century as it is in the early twenty-first, rendering the Americans, Pound and Eliot, essentially immune to any flirtation with socialism, not to speak of communism. For example, in 1931 Pound boasted: “I was perfectly right 25 years ago in not bothering about socialism. It was not the affair of my time. The job of the last 25 years was for the writer or artist to get what there was to be got (artistically) out of the world extant” (“Fungus, Twilight or Dry Rot,” EPPP 5: 314). As we will see, Lawrence Dennis is an exception to the American immunity to Socialism, but he is rather a special case, and not an artist. The Right-wing movements in Europe prior to World War I were monarchist and aristocratic – in short, they represented the status quo. While the Peace of Versailles left the British Monarchy untouched, it closed the book on the Russian monarchy, the Habsburg Empire and the German monarchy. Woodrow Wilson intended the Peace to establish liberal, capitalist democracy throughout Europe. (Of course, it left the victors – Republican and Imperial France, and Monarchist and Imperial England – intact; indeed they gained new territories carved out of the defeated Ottoman

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Empire.) Some post-war Right-wing movements – notably the Action Française – clung to the old aristocracies, and the old religion. But the most vigorous did not. Mussolini created a new Right, unattached to the old religion and the old aristocracy – though threatening neither. He called it “Fascism,” and attached it to one of the more recent strains of socialism emanating from France – the Syndicalism of George Sorel. In place of government ownership of the means of production (the socialist and communist prescription) Sorel had recommended corporativist governance, called “syndicalism.” Syndicalism acknowledged the realities of factory production and the class solidarity of the proletariat, which grounded socialist and communist thought, and called for “syndics” or workers’ unions to be part of the structure of governance. Mussolini’s Fascist party claimed to be Sorelian in its social and economic policy. The party that Adolf Hitler took over in 1921 called itself the “National Socialist Democratic Worker’s Party,” and he self-consciously imitated Mussolini’s Fascism. (Its shortened form, “Nazi,” occludes that putative affinity of the party to socialism.) Prior to the economic crisis triggered by the crash of the New York stock market in October 1929, there existed a widespread consensus in Europe – embracing both the Right and the Left that democratic capitalism had had its day. The Crash and ensuing Great Depression of 1929–39 confirmed that belief. The belligerence of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and the oppression of its own people by the Soviet Union, together with the great transformation of capitalism undertaken in the American New Deal, and in Europe following World War II, rescued democratic capitalism. I completed the first draft of this study before the most recent financial collapse that has given rise once again to assertions that capitalism is broken. Many observers have pointed to the unravelling of the structural remedies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression as permitting predatory entrepreneurial activity to flourish once again, with predictable results. The economic collapse of the last century led to widespread calls from intellectuals and some politicians for political as well as economic reform, but the economic crisis of 2008–09 has not thus far led to calls for political reform. Instead, it is assumed that improved regulation of financial markets by government agencies is all that is required. There is no widespread dissatisfaction with, or distrust of, the institutions of governance as there was in the 1930s. There are, no

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doubt, many reasons for the different response today – not least among them is the existence of a system of “safety nets” which ameliorate the impact of unemployment in the short term. There was very little other than bread lines and work camps on offer in the thirties. Equally important, I believe, is broad familiarity with the failure of both the Right-wing and Left-wing regimes that arose in Italy, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the wake of the 1914–18 war. Instead of radical reform of political institutions, opinion leaders in the democracies today look to regulation and international cooperation as the best road to restored prosperity. Pundits point to the success of regulation in the 1940s and after, and to the disastrous consequences of international belligerence in the same period. So far, at least, no country, and no party within a country, is advocating military adventure as the best solution to the economic crisis. Instead military adventurism is deplored as more likely to exacerbate the crisis than to ameliorate it. Nonetheless, the world is once again experiencing military belligerence amid the risk of world-wide economic collapse. I cannot claim that the following discussion provides any insight into our present difficulties, but perhaps our present difficulties might lead my readers to cut my subjects some slack.

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Introduction

dreams of a totalitarian utopia

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Introduction I think there will be a certain literary activity in London after the war. I think that my friends Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis are the ablest literary men in London, and I hope we can do something. T. S. Eliot, 17 November 1918. Letters, 251

One constant we will find in the cultural and political commentary of Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot is their hostility to the liberal democratic capitalist countries in which they were born and in which they pursued their careers. That hostility was based on two factors: first, their distrust of the mass man created by the mass circulation press, photography, the phonograph, the cinema, and ultimately the radio; second, their belief that the immense wealth created by industrial societies was poorly and inequitably allocated: too little went to the populace at large and to artists, and too much to the captains of industry and the military. I will consider their distrust of the mass first. They perceived that a culture suitable for mass consumption would have no place for men of genius like themselves, nurtured on the great cultural achievements of the past, and devoted to the task of adding to them. Their distrust of the common man and woman entailed misgivings about the pieties of “government by the people.”All three believed that governments elected by universal suffrage would inevitably be a charade, disguising governance by a coterie of powerful individuals and interests. In short, they believed that popular democracies, such as Britain, France, and the United States of America, were in fact oligarchies. Since none of them had any particular distaste for government by the few, one might have expected them to be well disposed to such a state of governance by a coterie of powerful individuals. However, they all objected to the oligarchs governing the “democracies” because

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they were not men of education, culture, and talent like themselves – nor even men of charm and good intentions, as were many of the politicians whose strings the oligarchs pulled. In short, they believed that the democracies were ruled by the wrong “few.” They tended to contrast the Middle Ages or the Renaissance – periods when they imagined that men of culture ruled Europe through the mechanisms of the Church and the Crown – with their own time when the ruling elites were industrialists, merchants, and bankers with no pretence to, and no interest in, culture. No doubt their picture of pre-industrial Europe was heavily coloured by wishful thinking and imperfect knowledge of the actual political and social structures prevailing then. Although all three expressed nostalgia for pre-industrial Europe, only Eliot invoked it as a model that might serve as a template for reform of contemporary political and social structures. Indeed, all three devoted much more energy to commenting on the unsatisfactory state of current political and social organization than on the articulation of an alternative. Their failure to articulate an alternative social, cultural, and political structure renders the title of this study somewhat moot. I have stuck with it on the grounds that they all believed themselves to be on the threshold of a new age, and “utopia” is the best term available for hopeful reformers. Nonetheless, all three attached themselves to one or another of the proposed or actual contemporary alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the social and political views of Lewis, Eliot, and Pound were not primarily motivated by a hope to establish any particular social or political model – at least not initially – but rather by distaste for the social and cultural status quo in which they found themselves. They believed that historical forces were combining to bring about a new political and cultural dispensation, and that it was their destiny to play a role in the formulation of that new dispensation. Michael North, in The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, distorts and then mocks Pound and Eliot for holding such a romantic view of the role of the artist – without acknowledging its Romantic provenance: “Historical change in Pound’s thinking, as in Eliot’s, is, it now appears, both conscious and unconscious, willed and fated. His image of the artist is of an isolated individual who by sheer will power ushers in a new age of collective greatness against the opposition of the col-

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lectivity of the present. It is the isolated individual who really represents the race, who enacts its destiny” (158). What I see as a distortion is the implication that Pound and Eliot believed races to have destinies to be enacted. This is guilt by association. No doubt Hitler held such a belief, but there are no grounds for thinking that Pound and Eliot did – nor for thinking that Lewis did. From North’s tacit semi-Marxist or Hegelian posture, historical change can only be the result of impersonal forces which impel individual human beings to behave in ways that will fulfill the purposes of those forces. Such a belief is the true nature of historicism – not nostalgia for the past as North argues (see chapter 2, note 10). However, North and I agree that Eliot and Pound, at least, saw themselves as ushering in a new age. They saw themselves as heralds of that anticipated new dispensation rather than the authors of it. Hence, their role was to identify it and the champions who might bring it to pass, rather than to formulate it, still less to establish it. However, as events unfolded, their self- appointed role as heralds tended to migrate towards that of propagandists for the views or political actors they saw as fostering the social and political dispensation they desired. Their notion that they could play a significant role in shaping the future can be seen in retrospect to be Quixotic – and certainly proved in the event to be overweening. But their belief that artists were architects of cultural change was a legitimate inheritance from their Romantic and Victorian forbears – even though they were loath to acknowledge it. So far as I know only Pound (Literary Essays, 371) cited Shelley’s extravagant assertion that artists are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but they all acted as though they agreed with him. Wyndham Lewis had an equally exalted view of the artist as an arbiter of culture, but his bent was more negative than those of the other two, being more inclined as he was to diagnose the age’s illness than to suggest a therapy. As we have seen, Eliot did come to advocate a Hobbit-like state of agrarian bliss in which men and women are subsumed in the natural cycle of birth, copulation, and death – a rhythm that he had portrayed with such distaste in “Sweeney Agonistes.” In the archaic rustic scene Eliot sketches in “East Coker,” the cycle is sanctified by religious belief. In the modern urban environment satirized in

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“Sweeney Agonistes,” it has no such sanction. In Eliot’s mind monarchy is the political corollary of the agrarian community celebrated in “East Coker.” Never as atavistic as Eliot in his political vision, Wyndham Lewis came to recommend strongman rule, on the models of (successively) Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as a kind of prophylactic to protect society from the ills he saw in contemporary society. Whereas Eliot became ever more atavistic in his political dreams as he grew older, Lewis finally saw the folly of putting one’s faith in a tyrant and reverted to an acceptance of parliamentary democracy. Like the early Lewis, Pound thought a tyranny on the fascist model was the best form of government for the time. Pound was later than Lewis in hitching his wagon to fascism, and he hung on longer – seeing the nullity and malignity of fascist ideology only very late in life. I will argue that their regrettable enthusiasms for disreputable or impractical nostalgic political structures was a consequence of their fear of the cultural consequences of popular democracy in an electronic age, more than a reflection of a reprehensible taste for regimentation, oppression or bellicosity. Of course, as individuals, they must still bear the opprobrium that attaches to those who countenance brutal tyrannies even if their motivation was to avoid what they regarded as the even worse option of cultural disintegration. I believe that, if we are fully to understand the political choices of the period, we must engage in an effort of historical imagination. While it is true that Mussolini’s fascism was avowedly authoritarian in practice and jingoistic in rhetoric, it was not clear in the 1920s that his belligerent rhetoric would culminate in a European war. More importantly, we need to appreciate the degree to which bolshevik communism was seen as a real and potent threat to the capitalist democracies. Fascism promised to preserve industrial capitalism and the benefits it had brought the European bourgeoisie. In Zeev Sternhell’s words: “The fascist revolution sought to change the nature of the relationships between the individual and the collectivity without destroying the impetus of economic activity – the profit motive, or its foundation – private property, or its necessary framework – the market economy. This was one aspect of the novelty of fascism; the fascist revolution was supported by an economy determined by the laws of the market” (Sternhell, 7, my emphasis). Socialism, of course, promised to overturn precisely those features

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of the economic organization of capitalist democracies, while retaining democratic, parliamentary government. Communism offered even more to the working classes, but at the cost of some – as it turned out, a great deal of – violence, and unexampled tyranny. For the man in the street (if he believed the propaganda of the two factions) it came down to which he most desired – political clout or economic security. On this analysis it is hardly surprising that fascism had many admirers. In hindsight it is common to see fascism as virtually equivalent to nazism, and to regard both as monstrous and criminal tyrannies bent on enslaving the world. But no one – not even its most virulent opponents – saw fascism in that light in the 1920s. On the other hand, many saw Soviet Russia and international communism in exactly that light. Indeed, world revolution was official Comintern policy – though, of course, enslavement was not (see Kolakowski, 738). And we need to recall that even though Lenin endorsed violence as a political instrument, the worst bolshevik excesses did not take place until the 1930s – and were long denied by Western communists (see Judt, 200–11). In The Political Identities of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Michael North acknowledges the appeal that fascism had for many in the twenties: “Revulsion against fascism now runs so strong that it is almost impossible to recall why it was once so seductive. Hindsight into its internal contradictions makes it seem intellectually as well as morally shameful. And so it was. But allowing men like Pound to avoid contradiction was the source of its power. fascism promised to fulfill the individual and to restrain individualism, to set free localities and professions and to meld every group into one great whole, to liberate the particular from iron abstractions and to find one great abstraction to fulfill every particular” (165–6). North’s general thesis – with which I agree – is that Marxism and fascism both presented themselves as critiques of liberal capitalism. But missing from his influential study is any acknowledgment that Marxism was equally “intellectually as well as morally shameful,” and that its promise to free the poor from their misery and the oppressed from their bondage proved to be just as illusory as fascism’s promise “to liberate the particular from iron abstractions” – whatever that means. Of course, it is not the case that revulsion against Marxism “runs strong” in the academy. Indeed, the case is

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quite the contrary. I hope in this study somewhat to redress the balance. One reason that socialism/communism did not appeal to Pound, Eliot, and Lewis is that they were initially more concerned with cultural matters than with economic ones. They were all persuaded that popular democracy would inevitably destroy European culture because the oligarchs, who they believed to be the true government, would cater to the tastes and aspirations of the mass in order to retain power. They were acutely aware that the great cultural and scientific advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth century had been achieved in a period of limited franchise and firm class structures, and before the advent of the photograph and the cinema, technical innovations that vastly enlarged the reach of cultural artifacts into the lower classes.1 Those technological developments, in conjunction with the popular press, created a new entity, a new sort of consumer of cultural products – the “mass.” Although the notion of the urban mass as a new class, with a particularly debased aesthetic taste, had been articulated in the late nineteenth century, Ortega y Gasset defined it for the twentieth century in his influential The Revolt of the Masses, published in1930: “Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is ‘mass’ or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself – good or ill – based on specific grounds, but which feels itself ‘just like everybody’ and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else” (11–12). As such the “mass” was thought to be peculiarly manipulable, and therefore an uncertain foundation for a society, a culture, or a state. With the advent of universal male suffrage, the common man had political power, and therefore had to be appeased. Huddled together in cities and industrial towns, the deracinated (“alienated” in Marxist argot) individuals who formed the mass were thought not only to lack any individuality, but also to be devoid of a shared identity such as the settled (and illiterate) peasants of the pre-industrial era were supposed to possess. The peasant was seen to be embedded in ancient cultural traditions and social practices, which – together with the absence of any means of mass communication – rendered it difficult to manipulate him. The stability of

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Europe had rested, it was supposed, on the sturdy intransigence of the settled peasantry. The urban proletariat, in contrast, represented a malleable mass easily manipulated by the popular press and the cinema. Men of the pen and the brush feared – not implausibly – that they had no hope of influencing the mass through their books and paintings. And – more alarmingly – they believed that the oligarchs controlled the press and the cinema, which could influence the masses. Since in nations with universal suffrage whoever controlled the mass controlled the state, it was not a great leap to believe that modern “democratic” states could be nothing other than oligarchies. On this analysis, the only alternative to rule by a secret oligarchy was either monarchy or tyranny. They apparently believed that monarchs or tyrants would be more susceptible to the influence of men of the pen or brush than would the masses or the oligarchs. Marxism offered one form of tyranny, and it represented an everpresent menace to industrial democracies. Clearly the mass was vulnerable to the Marxist promise of a socialist utopia in which the proletariat – another name for the “mass” – would rule. Marx even called the first stage of communism, “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Of course, in Marx’s version the classes would eventually disappear, at which time the state itself would wither away, leaving a classless society devoid of religion, and probably art as well – for so long the handmaiden of religion. Since the subsequent history of communist states has revealed that the communist state resists withering away as vigorously as do royalist or capitalist ones, perhaps our trio can be forgiven for eschewing the Marxist solution.2 The guardians of high culture that Lewis, Eliot, and Pound saw themselves to be, were duty bound to oppose both the capitalist oligarchs and the levelling Marxists, since they saw both as equally inimical to cultural achievement. However, they feared Marxism more because it threatened individual liberty, and they believed individual liberty to be a sine quae non of true artistic achievement. While the oligarchs would, in their view, debauch the masses by appealing to the lowest common denominator, the Marxists would be no better, for the rule of a lumpen proletariat would, they believed, inevitably discard – or even prohibit – high culture.3 They believed that the only way to preserve high culture was to co-opt the political leadership. That would be impossible in a pseudo

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democracy in which the oligarchs manipulated the masses through the mass media. But it would be possible, they imagined, for men of culture like themselves to influence a tyrant or dictator. Eliot’s manifest interest in popular cultural practices, as exhaustively documented by David Chinitz in T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, is not a counter-indication of his distrust of the masses. On the contrary, Eliot’s effort to incorporate popular modes – notably the burlesque style of Sweeney Agonistes, his “Choruses” for the pageant The Rock, his late effort at popular drama, and finally Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – evince a desire to “reach” a popular audience so as to “raise” its cultural level. That is not to say that Eliot was incapable of enjoying popular culture, for Chinitz has demonstrated beyond doubt that he did take pleasure in the English music hall. But however much Eliot’s admiration for music hall performers like Marie Lloyd and Little Tich was genuine, his principal interest in them was to co-opt their popular modes for his highbrow purposes. Similarly the “cracker barrel” style occasionally adopted by Pound is designed to reach down to a popular audience, rather more than to co-opt popular culture for high art. That sort of strategy had to wait for works such as Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Can.” As Chinitz points out, “a phobic response to popular culture was intellectual gospel in both Britain and the United States ... the ‘serious and grim picture of culture under capitalism’ was held in common by thinkers on both the Left and the Right ...” Although Eliot was “less doctrinaire on cultural matters than most of his contemporaries” (171), he participated in the general anxiety that a dumbing down of cultural products was probable if not inevitable. Lewis, perhaps even more than Eliot and Pound, distrusted popular culture profoundly. In The Lion and the Fox (1927), he registered his admiration for the grandees of the Renaissance, and his contempt for his contemporaries very clearly – whether communist or capitalist: The thing that it should be far more difficult for us to-day to understand, the thing that separates this time, from that so completely, is precisely the respect and worship, almost, of learning and the powers and graces of the mind, which the renaissance showed. ...

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... You would not recommend yourself to a sovietic commissar by a display of literary talent or a seductive eloquence, quite the contrary; you would arouse his greed and suspicion, and he would have you under lock and key very rapidly. The contemporary magnifico or multimillionaire is, similarly, notorious rather for his furious dislike of any accomplishment different from his own – especially if it involves a hint of some disobliging superiority. (88) Scorning the common man and woman, they dreamt of influencing those who held the levers of power – much as Machiavelli had attempted with The Prince.4 Pound, for example, believed – quite erroneously – that he had the ear of Mussolini, and on the strength of that delusion sailed to New York early in 1939 to meet senators and President Roosevelt, so as to present them with his solutions for the world’s ills. Neither Lewis nor Eliot was so naïve, but they both produced prodigious quantities of polemical prose in hopes of influencing political events. Though their efforts were less grandiose – and less disastrous – than Pound’s, they were equally ineffectual. Their marked preference for monarchs or dictators over demagogues reflects their faith in the educated intelligentsia and their distrust of the uneducated masses, rather more than any strong tyrannical tendencies. After all, they relied exclusively on the art of persuasion, having neither the means nor the desire to force their views on others. Of course, admitting that they were dyed-in-the-wool elitists will do their reputations no good in the egalitarian climate currently dominant in the academy. But the fact that both Hitler and Mussolini were wildly popular in their respective nations should give pause to those who place implicit trust in the wisdom of the common man and woman. Dr. Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, employing the public address system, radio, and cinema to great advantage in the Third Reich, earned Hitler even greater approval than Mussolini ever achieved. Even the manifest evil of the Final Solution failed to damage Hitler’s popularity among non-Jewish Germans. And the butcher, Stalin, was loved and revered by his own populace despite murdering and imprisoning so many millions of them, and not having the insulating factor of selecting his victims by race. Nor did Stalin have a propagandist of Goebbels’ tal-

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ents. In short their distrust of universal suffrage was not entirely misplaced, even though the alternatives proved to be even worse. I would not want my readers to think that I accept their analysis of political movements and systems. Clearly Pound and Lewis were wildly wrong to place their faith in fascism/nazism as an ideology that would preserve high culture against the ravages of the masses. Their fear and scorn of communism, on the other hand, has proven to be more justified. Most importantly, it must be admitted that they were excessively pessimistic about the consequences for high culture of the increasing influence of mass taste as the cultural “market” became more and more dispersed. Even with the advent of radio in their middle age, of television in their old age, and of the Internet and personal audio devices after their deaths, high culture has survived. And – more to the point – it has suffered less in the democracies of Europe and the Americas than it has in the tyrannies of Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Americas. And they were not complete Luddites. Eliot – the most backward- looking of the three – used the radio to disseminate his views, and even permitted Murder in the Cathedral to be produced as a film. Pound, too, used the radio to vent his hatred for the enemies of Italy – which happened, unfortunately for him, to include his native land. What I do argue in their defence is that they found themselves in the midst of unprecedented political and military upheavals – World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Depression, the rise of fascism/nazism, and, finally, World War II. Given the scale and number of the cultural, economic and political shocks experienced by their cohort group, it is scarcely surprising that they committed errors of judgement. At the same time, it has to be admitted that the label of “reactionary” often applied to them does fit – if stripped of its Marxist provenance. They did view with alarm the prospect of the triumph of mass culture, and they did look for bulwarks against it in undemocratic and elitist political structures.5 What they wished to preserve and to advance was the bourgeois culture in which they were raised. Their models – at least in their youth – were primarily the giants of nineteenth-century European bourgeois culture, heterogeneous as they were: Rémy de Gourmont and Gustav Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and W. B. Yeats, Henri Bergson and F. H. Bradley. (One should not be misled by the fact that the artists – though not the philosophers – maligned bour-

Introduction

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geois culture. They were all bourgeois themselves, as were Lewis, Eliot, and Pound.) Their strategy was to capture and transform nineteenth-century aesthetic culture, thereby creating a new class – neither bourgeois nor aristocratic – of intellectuals who would act as a counterforce to the masses on the one hand, and to the oligarchs on the other. That was the purpose of Eliot’s Criterion, of Pound’s Cantos, and of Lewis’s multifarious prose effusions. (This strategy was the target of Julien Benda’s 1927 La Trahison des Clercs, a book that upset Eliot. As we will see, Benda argued that artists should stick to their vocation of creating timeless works of art and leave politics to others.) A largely tacit – with the exception of Pound with whom it was explicit – part of their program was to construct a society in which artists like themselves could survive in a culture and society that provided no means of support for the artist other than the marketplace. Unless some alternatives to the marketplace were found, they believed, the poet, painter, novelist, or musician had no option but to produce what the market – that is the mass – wanted. Thanks to that perception, it became a foundational principle of modernist aesthetic theory that popular success of an artwork was proof of its triviality, closing that route to the serious artists – as was not the case in the nineteenth century. Only Pound had any idea what the new culture and society might look like – and that was fascist Italy (with, admittedly, some improvements over the actuality). The Christian Society of which Eliot dreamed during and after World War II is an impossibly nostalgic fantasy and does not address the problem of the artist’s role – unless we imagine the artist in such a society as a pseudo-cleric, supported by a cultural branch of the Church, a scenario that Eliot never articulated. Oddly, Pound, who had most to say about the economic plight of the artist, did not even pretend that fascism provided a resolution of that problem. Lewis was less concerned with the issue of the artist’s economic welfare than the others. His preoccupation was the propensity of advanced industrial nations ruled by oligarchs to engage in wars. Everyone believed that war in the machine age was profitable for industrialists, who sold the machines of death to governments. The threat of war – which had been the normal condition in Europe since 1815 – as opposed to actual combat, was sufficient for the

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industrialists, since it required nations to buy armaments even if they were not used. However, actual wars were even better, accelerating the replacement of weapons far beyond what aging machinery and creeping obsolescence could achieve. At least so Lewis – and many others of all political stripes – believed. Representative works of the period presenting such an analysis are The Great Illusion (1909) by the British journalist Norman Angell, and The War of Steel and Gold (1914) by another British journalist, Henry N. Brailsford. Angell’s book, which argued that wars – as opposed to preparation for war – made no economic sense for modern industrial societies, spawned clubs and debating societies in Britain and attracted a grant of £30,000 from the Carnegie foundation (Sheehan, 31). Brailsford was not convinced, pointing out that although “war is a folly from the point of national self-interest; it may nonetheless be perfectly rational from the standpoint of a small but powerful governing class” whose military and civil service careers were advanced by war – especially if conducted outside Europe (84–5). Brailsford, writing from a socialist perspective just after the outbreak of war in August 1914, accurately predicted that the nationalist sentiments of the British, French, Italians, Germans, and Russians would trump class solidarity (14–15). Somewhat presciently – though too optimistically – he hoped that Europeans “may in the end come to understand that this has been as much a civil war as the American struggle of North and South, and that it must end in the same way, in the unity of a continent” (168). As we now know, it took another European “civil war” before the dream of European unity could be achieved by peaceful means. I have not found any reference to either work by Eliot or Pound, though both mention later works by Angell. Pound is hostile to Angell’s analysis. I have not found any comment by Eliot on The Great Illusion, but he dismissed Angell’s proposed cure for the Depression in Can Government Cure Unemployment (a collaborative work with Harold Wright) as one emanating from “Mensheviks of the London School of Economics pattern” (“Commentary,” The Criterion 12 (Jan. 1932): 269). Pound’s references to Angell are invariably hostile, but give no clear indication of what it was that he found objectionable in Angell’s analysis. Somewhat atypically, Pound sent Angell a poison pen letter in April of 1935, challenging him to a duel. Angell reproduces the letter in his autobiogra-

Introduction

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phy (288–89), adding: “I did not reply to Pound in any way but he continued to send me letters at intervals, all in the same strain, and to discuss them in an Italian fascist magazine. He continued to describe me as a ‘bastid’ (his spelling was peculiar) and ‘louse.’” Angell saw the award of the Bollingen Prize to Pound as evidence of “a certain prevailing worship of incomprehensibility” (298). Only Lewis commented directly on The Great Illusion, praising it in The Hitler Cult (242) even though he had explicitly rejected Angell’s arguments against war in Left Wings over Europe (1936): “I am not on the side of the Angels (either Norman or otherwise) – definitely” (19–20). In 1936, Angell was recommending a robust response to German and Italian belligerence, while Lewis was recommending appeasement. Three years later, when he wrote The Hitler Cult, war had broken out and Lewis was anxious to disassociate himself from his previous pacifist arguments. Lewis had erroneously concluded that arguments like Angell’s exaggerated the belligerent intentions of Mussolini and Hitler, playing into the hands of the armament industries. Only Hitler’s invasion of Poland convinced Lewis of his error – so far as Mussolini and Hitler were concerned. But he did not abandon his belief that war and industry went together – a perception shared by President Eisenhower in 1961 when, in his final speech as president, he warned of the “military industrial complex.”6 Eisenhower saw a vigilant democracy as the best protection against the possibility of nations becoming hostage to arms manufacturers – a view not shared by our three. The failure of capitalist democracies to allocate resources fairly and rationally – one factor that motivated our group’s hostility to popular democracy – became urgent during the economic crisis of the Great Depression of 1929–39. The failure of the democracies to respond rationally and efficiently to the crisis added to their disenchantment with capitalist democracy since it was perceived – with some justice – that fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the communist Soviet Union all responded more successfully. Though all three of our artists were hostile toward Marxism, they tended to agree with the Marxist perception that the Depression represented the death throes of capitalism. Lewis, for example, in his unfortunately7 titled 1939 book, The Jews, Are They Human?, judged “the economic and political system for which we are all responsible” to be “so absurd and so unjust that I should feel myself a very

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objectionable hypocrite if I gave myself airs regarding a person who had availed himself of some hole in the net of an oppressive chicanery” (73). Pound had found a ready-made solution to the crisis in the policies of Major Douglas’s Social Credit movement. Douglas’s scheme called for the distribution of a “national dividend” to every man, woman, and child in the nation. The funds for the dividend would be provided by the simple expedient of directly expanding the money supply to match increased national production of goods and services. The key was to bypass the banks, no longer permitting the banks to issue loans in excess of their deposits and collect interest on such “fiat money.” Such a distribution, Pound believed, would abolish poverty and at the same time free the artist to pursue his or her craft without the need to cater to popular taste. The intransigent refusal of the democracies to adopt Social Credit policies persuaded Pound that dark conspiracies controlled them – leading to the ruin of his life, and seriously compromising his poetry. While Social Credit policies were not complete lunacy – as is often alleged – they were based on invalid assumptions and careless arithmetic.8 Neither Eliot nor Lewis went so far off the rails in response to the Depression. For them it was merely another piece of evidence corroborating their conviction that popular democracy could not provide competent governance of modern industrial nations. Like Pound, Lewis looked to tyranny as a viable alternative to popular democracy. The relatively more successful response to economic difficulties by Italy and Germany reinforced his tendency to place confidence in an individual rather than in institutions and procedures – such as parliaments, courts, and elections. However – unlike Pound – Lewis was sufficiently perceptive to abandon his chosen tyrants – Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler – as they proved unworthy of his support. Lewis’s was less concerned with the preservation and distribution of wealth than was Pound. His overriding motivation was fear of another war between European nations. “We live today in the backwash of a great war,” he observed in The Jews, Are They Human? “Slump has followed slump, and we none of us can see how it can end, except in further convulsions. Germany suffered for a time more intensely than we did, with the results that we all see today.

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But the whole of Europe has been crawling about like the asphyxiated occupants of an ant-hill hit by a shell, for nearly a couple of decades now” (92). Like Brailsford his preferred remedy was European union. In his last book, The Writer and the Absolute, Lewis alluded to “Napoleon’s plan to unify Europe,” observing that many people, himself included, “considered it perhaps a misfortune for Europe that France did not have its way” (63). In this respect, at least, events have taken the path he wished for. The Treaty of Rome, beginning the long process of European unification, was signed on 25 March 1957, the year of Lewis’s death. But I do not wish to argue that any of these men were prescient in their cultural and political commentary. What I would claim is that their motivation should not be regarded as malign, nor their analysis as completely wrong-headed. The interwar period was one in which it was very difficult to see one’s way clearly. As already noted, very few observers at the time considered the status quo of liberal,9 democratic capitalism to be viable in the twentieth century. The fact that democratic capitalist governments have prevailed in the post-war, should not blind us to the plausibility of the interwar conviction that democratic capitalism could not survive unaltered. Between the wars the leading alternatives were socialism/communism, on the one hand, and fascism/nazism, on the other. The Cold War period that followed the defeat of the Axis powers (Germany and Italy) and Japan (which, incidentally, was a limited monarchy, like Britain), removed fascism/nazism from the political scene.10 During the Cold War, when an either/or opposition between the “Free World” and “Communism” dominated the ideological scene” scholars examining Eliot, Pound, and Lewis tended either to ignore their political affinities as much as possible, or to pillory them as fellow-travellers of fascism/nazism. The present study charts a course between those two strategies by contextualizing their political prose in the interwar period. Communism was not then an external military threat – as it was during the Cold War – but an internal threat – either of intellectual persuasion or of violent revolution. Moreover the behaviour of the democracies after (and during) the Peace of Versailles did little to encourage the hopes of those like Angell and Brailsford for a new, peaceful Europe. Instead democratic and capitalist Britain, France, Germany, and

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Italy continued their old rivalries and competing imperial ambitions – notably in the Middle East and North Africa. The following discussion is organized chronologically. Chapter I, “Dreams and Nightmares,” surveys the state of opinion prior to World War I about the future of Europe and America. Chapter II, “A Twentieth-Century Renaissance,” explores the extent to which our trio participated in the general optimism of the day. Chapter III, “The War as a Symptom of Cultural Decay,” details the very different ways in which World War I affected Lewis, Pound, and Eliot – who first met one another at this time – and examines Eliot’s great success following the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. Chapter IV, “The Response to Fascism,” follows the three friends beyond the immediate post-war as Europe begins to sort out a response to the threat represented by the Bolshevik Revolution. Chapter V, “Things Fall Apart,” traces their attempt to position themselves politically and culturally as the Europe created by the Treaty of Versailles begins to fail and Europe slides once again toward war. Chapter VI, “Looking Back” closes the discussion of their political engagement with an examination of how their views altered, or failed to alter, as war broke out, and in the Cold War period when they were in their sixties, still active and articulate – and still in communication with one another. The Appendix provides a brief examination of a non-literary, American radical whose analysis of the interwar period was very similar to that of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis, but whose solution was at considerable variance to theirs.

i Dreams and Nightmares As democracy and reason develop within peoples and individuals, the need to have recourse to violence diminishes. Let universal suffrage affirm itself; let a vigorous secular education open spirits to new ideas and develop the habit of reflection; let the proletariat organize and group itself according to a law ever more fair and generous; let all this happen and the great transformation that will liberate mankind from oligarchic property will be accomplished without the violence that, 110 years ago, bloodied the democratic and bourgeois revolution, ... Jean Juarès, L’Humanité 18 April 1904 Revolutions closely resemble romantic dramas: the ridiculous and the sublime are mixed so inextricably together that we are often unsure how to judge men who seem to be at one and the same time buffoons and heroes. Georges Sorel, La Revolution Dreyfusienne, 1908

The story of literary modernism in English, if viewed from the perspective of the two prominent American expatriates – Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot – can be understood as an American conquest of English letters. Although the conquest was certainly not complete, it has been enduring. British writers today are at least as likely to look to American writers as models to imitate, or reputations to challenge, as American writers were to look to British writers in the early years of the twentieth century. No doubt, the change reflects the reversal in relative strengths – economic, military, and cultural – of the respective nations. Britain no longer rules the waves, nor does it determine fashion in cultural affairs for the English-speaking world as it did up until the first Great War. Although everyone recognized that the 1914–18 war and the Peace of Versailles rep-

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resented a watershed in the cultural, political, and economic life of the North Atlantic nations, it was not so clear to contemporaries that it represented the twilight of British global power and the diminished status of the Continental “great powers,” in the face of the advent of American political, economic, and cultural ascendancy.1 Indeed, between the wars, Europe – in particular continental Europe – was a more potent magnet for the aspiring American artist than it had ever been. Admittedly the advent of Prohibition in the United States in 1919 intensified the attraction of Europe for Americans. That said, the great artistic reputations – authors, painters, and composers – were still found in Europe, even if some – like Pound and Eliot – were not themselves European. Our trio, of course, noticed the shifts in political, economic, and cultural power between Europe and America. Pound, however, did not think the shift had progressed very far in the pre-war period. In his 1912 homage to his native land, Patria Mia, Pound saw the United States as a backwater whose time had not yet come: “America’s position in the world of art and letters is, relatively, about that which Spain held in the time of the Senecas. So far as civilization is concerned America is the great rich, Western province that has sent one or two notable artists to the Eastern capital. And that capital is, needless to say, not Rome, but the double city of London and Paris” (Patria Mia, 31). In 1912 those “one or two important artists” were not himself and Eliot, but Henry James and James Whistler, both of whom Pound invokes in the following pages, saying of Whistler that he proved “being born an American does not eternally damn a man or prevent him from the ultimate and highest achievement in the arts”(35). It is important that we have in mind the dynamics of the relations between Europe and America as perceived by Eliot and Pound if we are to understand their careers. Since we ourselves inhabit the post-European age2 (if I may so call it), an act of imagination is required to reconstruct the sense of cultural inferiority that both men felt. No doubt their own view of the relation between Americans and Europeans was coloured by the novels of Henry James, the greatest American literary reputation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His great theme was the American in Europe. The Jamesian formula is to place an innocent and aesthetically deprived American in the context of “experienced,” aes-

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thetically gifted, and ethically challenged Europeans. Typically the Jamesian American was wealthy, and the European financially deprived, reflecting the American view that Europe was economically as well as morally decadent. In contrast to the Jamesian American heroes and (mostly) heroines, our poets were very self-confident about their own abilities – in Pound’s case one might say pathologically confident. Nonetheless they could not entirely escape the sense of cultural inferiority they had imbibed in their youth. And, unlike the Jamesian Americans, neither was personally wealthy – though Eliot came from a wealthy background. Any sense of inferiority they may have felt was expressed in aggressive bluster. For example, within two years of arriving in England, Pound mocked A. E. Housman (1859–1936) in “Mr. Housman’s Message” (a poem in Canzoni, a slim book of poems published in 1911 by Elkin Matthews, a premium English poetry press, reprinted in Collected Early Poems, 163). It evinces little respect for a great English reputation. (Housman’s reputation had been established rather belatedly by A Shropshire Lad, privately published in 1896, fifteen years earlier): O woe, woe, People are born and die, We also shall be dead pretty soon therefore let us act is if we were dead already. And so forth. Here the robust American – dubbed “The Idaho Kid” by T. E. Hulme – mocks the effete European. While the roughhewn Jamesian American male – Caspar Goodwood of Portrait of a Lady, for example – had expressed much the same sort of sentiment about effete Europeans, the reader of a James novel is expected to be embarrassed by such crassness. Obviously Pound expects no such response to his mocking of Housman. Nor does his stay in London diminish Pound’s brash self-confidence. In a short time he became a sort of protegé of W. B. Yeats, then one of the greatest reputations in English letters; he had also befriended Ford Madox Ford, Conrad’s collaborator, and married Dorothy Shakespear, daughter of Yeats’s first lover. So, by the time he published “Moeurs Contemporaines” in the Little Review in the

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last year of the war, Pound was well placed within the London artistic scene and not at all overwhelmed by it. “Moeurs Contemporaines” is a series of satirical portraits of the English men and women he had met in his nine years in London. “Soirée” is typical of the series: Upon learning that the mother wrote verses, And that the father wrote verses, And that the youngest son was in a publisher’s office, And that the friend of the second daughter was Undergoing a novel, The young American pilgrim Exclaimed: “This is a darn’d clever bunch!” The satirical poetry of Eliot’s early years does not target the British particularly, but bourgeois life in general. Though he admits, in a March 1915 letter to his aunt, Eleanor Hinkle, that “the average of culture is far higher” at Oxford and Cambridge, Eliot doesn’t “think that there is any more brains here than at Harvard” (Letters, 92). On the other hand, writing to his Harvard friend Conrad Aiken, in late December 1914, Eliot complained that his fellow residents in the London pension where he was staying were “not very interesting” being “mostly American” (Letters, 74). Like Pound, he soon found his feet in England. After marrying, and deciding not to return to Harvard to take up a teaching fellowship, he told the graduate chair, J. H. Woods (in April 1919), that he was already a “much more important person” in England than he would be “at home” (Letters, 285). In that same letter Eliot adds, that he has “acquired the habit of a society so different that it is difficult to find common terms to define the difference.” Eliot’s adoption of British habits and mores – culminating in his declaration in 1928 that he was classicist in literature, Anglican in religion, and royalist in politics – is in strong contrast to Pound’s contention in Patria Mia: “it would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness, or a Frenchness, or a European-ness that is more than half a skin deep” (49). There is no little irony in Pound’s remark given that despite remaining always the American

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in Europe, he threw in his lot with Mussolini and fascism, thereby earning an indictment for treason and imprisonment in his native land. Eliot, in contrast, adopted British manners and habits, and was honoured and fêted in America. Of course, Eliot kept his nose reasonably clean in the political and ideological realms – though latterly he, too, has been brought to task for his political views – of which, more later. Patria Mia – which expressed Pound’s belief that America was promised a vigorous future that would eventually displace the exhausted civilization of Europe – was written during a six-month visit to the United States from July 1910 to February 1911. It was his first visit home since his departure two years earlier, and was to be his last until the brief quixotic visit in 1939 mentioned above. Patria Mia’s declared thesis is “that America has a chance for Renaissance” (11). The following remark, which first appeared in November 1912,3 reflects the circumstance that he spent most of his time in New York, a city he had not previously known well: I see … a sign in the surging crowd on Seventh Avenue (New York). A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigour unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at. There is none of the melancholy, the sullenness, the unhealth of the London mass, none of the worn vivacity of Paris. I do not believe it is the temper of Venice. One returns from Europe and one takes note of the size and vigour of this new strange people. They are not Anglo-Saxon; their gods are not the gods whom one was reared to reverence. And one wonders what they have to do with lyric measures and the nature of “quantity.” One knows that they are the dominant people and that they are against all delicate things. (Patria Mia, 13–14) Here the American who is “against all delicate things” stands in for the mass man later identified by Ortega y Gasset, though Pound praises his vigour, whereas Gasset fears his gullibility. Curiously enough, Empire, a recent influential cultural and political study by the American Michael Hardt and the Italian Communist Antonio Negri, echoes Pound’s sentiments about empire and

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the crowd. Much as Pound was looking to the dawn of a new age in 1910, so Hardt and Negri look forward to the end of the old era of “Imperialism” and its replacement by the new era of “Empire”: The agents of the crisis of the old imperial world became foundations of the new. The undifferentiated mass that by its simple presence was able to destroy the modern tradition and its transcendent power appears now as a powerful productive force and an uncontainable source of valorization. A new vitality, almost like the barbaric forces that buried Rome, reanimates the field of immanence that the death of the European God left us as our horizon. Every theory of the crisis of European Man and of the decline of the idea of European Empire is in some way a symptom of the new vital force of the masses, or as we prefer, of the desire of the multitude. (Empire, 376–7, my emphasis)4 The triumphalist tone of Pound’s 1910 remarks is not maintained in his subsequent prose compositions. Whereas Hardt and Negri were inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 study, A Thousand Plateaus, Pound seems to have been inspired by the 1909 Futurist Manifesto where Marinetti similarly celebrated the metropolitan crowd: We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smokeplumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.5 As we will see, Pound retained neither his enthusiasm for Futurism, nor his admiration for the ethnically mixed New York crowd.

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But both his Pollyanna attitude toward an as yet unrealized future and the notion that European civilization was exhausted and needed to be renewed does stay with him. He transfers his enthusiasm from New York and America to the darker risorgimento emerging in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. But that is still to come. Shortly after the end of Great War, in the 1920 poetry sequence, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Pound is still convinced – like Arnold a halfcentury earlier – that an old world is dying and new one is waiting to be born. In “Mauberley” he laments the human losses of that war as an unwarranted sacrifice for a worn-out civilization. Once again he seems to be echoing Marinetti, whose tenth principle was, “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.” Though Pound is not recommending the destruction of libraries, he does appear to dismiss the European heritage as of little importance: There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization, Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books. But the story is complicated. Pound’s evident contempt for the state of civilization and culture in Europe evinced in these writings is best understood as the lament of a Europhile for a perceived decline in an admired civilization. Forty years after “Mauberley – after the rise of fascism, after the Second World War, and his imprisonment for treason – in the 1960 Paris Review interview with Donald Hall, Pound reaffirmed his faith in Europe, claiming that he was “writing to resist the view that Europe and civilisation is going to Hell. If I am being ‘crucified for an idea’ – that is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated – it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever other cultures, in whatever universality”(Plimpton, Writers at Work, 57). While there

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is, no doubt, some special pleading in this remark, it nonetheless rings true if we remember that Pound spent his entire life ransacking the European past for nuggets of wisdom and beauty. Of course, in 1960 Pound would have included the Americas in “European civilization.” On this point, Edgar Ansel Mowrer’s 1968 comment on his 1928 book, This American World, is instructive: “In retrospect, my conception of Europe as a unit and my prediction of a single Atlantic bloc (unless communism seized Europe first) seem more timely than my very qualified acceptance of Oswald Spengler’s theory of history. Meanwhile, I insisted, ‘although the period be “American,” the epoch is still “European” and Americanism is merely the form in which Euro-American civilization will conquer the earth.’ Even my anticipation of America (not Russia!) as the ‘new Rome,’ although previously made by others seemed new to many” (Triumph and Turmoil, 190–1). Eliot endorsed Mowrer’s assessment of American civilization as a continuation and intensification of European civilization – both of its good and of its bad features in his preface to the Faber edition of This American World: The majority of foreigners think either of Americanization as something to be welcomed and exploited, or as a plague to be quarantined; and either point of view is apt to be superficial. Mr. Mowrer goes farther. He inquires into the origin, as well as the nature, of Americanism; traces it back to Europe; and finds that what are supposed to be the specifically American qualities and vices, are merely the European qualities and vices given a new growth in a different soil. Europe, therefore, in accepting American contributions, the danger of which Mr. Mowrer certainly does not palliate, has contracted a malady the germs of which were bred in her own system. Americanization, in short, would probably have happened anyway; America itself has merely accelerated the process. (This American World, x-xi) Eliot was less supportive of Mowrer’s dependence on Spengler, explicitly rejecting the historicist view that historical events are determined (and therefore predictable) because they follow discoverable laws:6 “It is evident that Mr. Mowrer has been affected by

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his reading of Spengler;7 but he is too reasonable to commit himself either to the pessimistic determinism of Spengler or the optimistic determinism of Wells and Shaw (but the optimism of Wells and Shaw is taking on slowly a darker colour). He recognizes that if one looks far enough ahead, none of these things that are happening seem either good or bad: they are merely change. Our task is simply to see what we are, and to know what we want in the immediate future, and to work towards that” (xiv).

pollyannas and c assandras In these remarks, Eliot sets out what will be a leitmotif of this study – the debate between the Pollyannas and the Cassandras. Clearly Pound is a Pollyanna, as were Wells and Shaw and the Fabians generally. In 1928 the most convinced Pollyannas were the Marxists – especially the Russian Marxists. Leszek Kolakowski in his authoritative Main Currents of Marxism, describes “the naive avant-garde belief of communists ... that all old-world institutions should be doomed to wither away: the state, the army, the school, nationality, and the family.” They believed “that a new world was coming into existence in which effete institutions and traditions, sanctities and taboos, cults and idols would collapse into dust before the triumphant power of Reason; the world proletariat, like another Prometheus, would create a new age of humanism” (Main Currents, 825). Although many literary figures were drawn to communist utopianism, very few of the generation with which we are concerned were so drawn. Kandinsky and Picasso are the only ones that come to mind among those artists who reached maturity before World War I. However, both optimistic communist Pollyannas and pessimistic Cassandras like Yeats and Spengler succumbed to a fatalistic determinism. Both tended to believe that events would unfold in one way or another regardless of human behaviour. Obviously Eliot does not belong to the deterministic camp, observing, as he does: “Our task is simply to see what we are, and to know what we want in the immediate future, and to work towards that” (“Preface” to Mowrer, This American World). Eliot, Lewis, and Pound all acted on that advice, but despite beginning in broad agreement, they each came to a different conclusion about what they were, what they wanted, and how to get there.

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Pound – definitely a Pollyanna – shared Mussolini’s futuristtinged embrace of the new and rejection of the recent past in favour of a remote past – Imperial Rome in Mussolini’s case, the Renaissance and Confucian China in Pound’s. Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, was also a co-founder of fascism, which was quite a different movement than nazism.8 Hitler copied Mussolini’s street-fighting Blackshirts, and military-style organization, but not his celebration of an Imperial Roman past. Instead, the Nazis celebrated a quasi-mystical and pagan Aryan past as the antitype of Latin culture. Nor did Mussolini share Hitler’s obsession with Communists and Jews as malignant forces putting German culture in peril. Mussolini was a former Sorelian Communist, and his longstanding mistress, Margherita Sarfati was Jewish. Certainly the Fascists fought Communists in the streets, and imprisoned them when in power, but fascist hostility to communism was more a naked struggle for power than a consequence of an ideological incompatibility, and it had no racist component – even though Mussolini was ultimately bullied into adopting anti-Semitic laws. Despite his unmistakable pessimism, Wyndham Lewis initially endorsed fascism, recommending it as a superior alternative to communism for “the Anglo Saxon countries” in The Art of Being Ruled, his first political book (320–1). He shortly reversed himself on this point, dismissing fascism in Time and Western Man, published the following year (1927), as “an adaptation, or prolongation, only, of futurism” (35). (Lewis was an early foe of Futurism, having attacked it in the first number of Blast in 1914.) Because the categories of Pollyannas (those who anticipate a bright future for the world) and Cassandras (those who see the world going to Hell in a handbasket) cross the political fault lines of Left and Right, they are useful categories for this discussion. To dispose Pound, Lewis, and Eliot on a simple dyadic scheme of Left and Right distorts the reality of their engagement with the politics of the period. Adding pessimism and optimism as additional parameters permits, I believe, a more accurate graphing of their developing political views. Pollyannas and Cassandras agreed that European civilization was undergoing epochal changes. The only point at issue between them was whether those changes would be for good or ill. As is probably always the case, there were more who regretted or

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abhorred the changes than there were those who welcomed them. One index of epochal change was the evident rise of the United States of America as an economic juggernaut, an emerging military power, and a potent – if rather philistine – cultural force, and the relative decline of Europe. The rise of Japan as a military and industrial power was even more alarming, but for the most part was not seen as impacting upon European culture and civilization.9 However, America’s relative rise as a world power challenging Europe was exacerbated, from the European perspective, by the rise of Japan as a regional power challenging Britain’s far Eastern hegemony. Pound’s celebration of the rise of America in Patria Mia was not particularly eccentric, except that it was a celebration rather than a lament. No doubt there was an element of bravado in it, reflecting his lingering sense of American inferiority vis à vis Europe. All the same, no one doubted that American “civilization” was a branch – for some, the growing tip – of a European root stock. The idea that European civilization was degenerate was virtually a leitmotif in cultural journalism by the turn of the century, having been broached by the Cassandra Max Nordau’s (1849–1923) Degeneration in 1893. Translated from the original Entartung into English in 1895, Degeneration went through six printings in that year and was later reprinted in 1898 and 1913.10 Nordau’s argument was that nineteenth-century developments in the arts – Aestheticism, Symbolism, Impressionism, and so forth – were the product of mentally disturbed individuals. The acceptance of their works by the aesthetic elites was an index, he believed, of the decline of European civilization. It prompted a rebuttal from George Bernard Shaw, published in 1895 by the American anarchist Benjamin Tucker, in his journal Liberty and then issued in Britain as a book, The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists Being Degenerate, in 1908. Shaw acknowledged the currency of Nordau’s polemic: “In the Easter of 1895 ... Nordau was master of the field, and the newspaper champions of modern Literature and Art were on their knees before him, weeping and protesting their innocence ... ” (6–7). The publisher of The Sanity of Art was The New Age, A.R. Orage’s Fabian journal, in which Pound’s “Patria Mia” appeared a little later. Shaw was one of the “angels” supporting The New Age financially.

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By “degenerate” writers, painters, and composers, Nordau meant individuals with mental health issues. Although he did not draw any political conclusions from the domination of the art scene by the psychologically unfit, his predictions of social consequences in the twentieth century are surpisingly accurate – among them the increased use of recreational drugs, and the advent of homosexual marriages. Nordau regarded both as equally reprehensible – in contrast to twenty-first century attitudes, which see the latter as an index of ethical and social progress, and tolerate recreational drug use, or even celebrate it as liberating. Nordau hoped that the triumph of healthy, robust, practical men over fey artists would forestall such regrettable developments: Let us imagine the drivelling Zoroaster of Nietzsche, with his cardboard lions, eagles, and serpents, from a toyshop, or the noctambulist Des Esseintes [hero of Huysmans’ A Rebours and Là Bas] of the Decadents, sniffing and licking his lips, or Ibsen’s “solitary powerful” Stockmann, and his Rosmer lusting for suicide – let us imagine these beings in competition with men who rise early, and are not weary before sunset, who have clear heads, solid stomachs and hard muscles: the comparison will provoke our laughter. Degenerates must succumb, therefore. They can neither adapt themselves to the conditions of Nature and civilization, nor maintain themselves in the struggle for existence against the healthy. (541) Nordau’s view was not one that any artist would be likely to endorse, and it certainly was not shared by any of the artists under consideration here. Although Wyndham Lewis’s attack on modernist artists in The Apes of God and Time and Western Man has some affinities with Nordau’s critique – as does later Nazi propaganda against “Jewish” art – I have not found any mention of Nordau in Lewis’s publications or letters. And even though Nordau anticipates many Nazi attitudes toward the arts, it would be unjust to portray him as a proto-Nazi. He is anti-Wagner and anti-Nietzsche, the two cultural divinities of the Nazis. Moreover, he is a non-observant Jew, deeply offended by Wagner’s anti-Semitism and Nietzsche’s celebration of the Aryan “blond beast,” and was co-founder, with

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Theodor Herzl, of the World Zionist Organization – hardly the cv of a proto-Nazi. Nonetheless, Nordau is an early voice decrying a perceived general malaise in European culture – a malaise for which the Nazis offered a draconian solution, the purging of all who were not of pure Aryan stock and in good physical and mental health from the lands controlled by the Third Reich. Of course – in contrast to both Nordau and the Nazis – modernist writers regarded Symbolism, Ibsen, Impressionism and the like as the vanguard of the new cultural awakening they represented. Where Nordau saw a falling away from permanent standards of aesthetic clarity and health, the modernists saw a breaking away from adherence to outworn aesthetic norms, and the expression of a new sensibility appropriate to the conditions of an industrial age characterized by technical innovation. Indeed, the Pollyanna Shaw in his rebuttal of Nordau, articulated a theory of the avant garde which Pound, Eliot, and Lewis would have certainly endorsed: to the people who would not read Liszt’s explanations and cared nothing for his purpose, who had no taste for symphonic poetry, and consequently insisted on judging the symphonic poems as sound patterns, Liszt must needs appear, like Wagner, a perverse egotist with something fundamentally disordered in his intellect: in short, a lunatic. The sequel was the same as in the Impressionist movement. Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt, in securing tolerance for their own works, secured it for what sounded to many people absurd; and this tolerance necessarily extended to a great deal of stuff which was really absurd, but which the secretly-bewildered critics dared not denounce, lest it, too, should turn out to be great, like the music of Wagner, over which they had made the most ludicrous exhibition of their incompetence. (The Sanity of Art, 36–7) Although stressing the continuity of novelty, rather than the difficulty of recognizing the “really new,” Eliot‘s remarks in “Tradition and Individual Talent” (1919) belong to the same general theory of culture as Shaw’s. His observation that “for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if

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ever so slightly, altered” is certainly conservative in its insistence on the maintenance of “order,” but at the same time, it places a great burden on the reviewers and the artistic audience who must somehow rejig “the whole existing order.” Small wonder that – as Shaw observes – many fail to come up to the mark. Eliot’s response to the stylistic innovations of Ulysses is in the same avant-garde vein: “The strange, the surprising, is of course essential to art; but art has to create a new world, and a new world must have a new structure. Mr. Joyce has succeeded, because he has very great constructive ability; and it is the structure which gives his later work its unique and solitary value” (“London Letter,” 216, my emphasis). In contrast to Nordau’s recoil from Symbolism, Eliot was famously energized by his discovery in 1908 of Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature, a book that celebrated exactly those developments in literature that Nordau deplored. In his 1930 review of Peter Quennell’s Baudelaire and the Symbolists, Eliot confessed that “the Symons book is one of those which have affected the course of my life,” adding “all English poetry that matters” derives from the Symbolists (Criterion 10, 357). The influence of Symbolism on Eliot’s poetry is a commonplace of critical commentary, but if we recall the view Eliot expressed in 1921 that a “dissociation of sensibility set in” in the seventeenth century, from which “we have never recovered,” we must conclude that he believed Symbolism to have suffered from that malaise as well (Selected Essays, 287). On those grounds, Eliot’s view of Symbolism is not so different from Nordau’s; they both regard Symbolism as symptomatic of a dysfunctional cultural condition. Like Nordau, then, Eliot was more of a Cassandra than a Pollyanna. At least he was so in his view of the current cultural situation in 1921, 1925, and 1930, which – despite his own aesthetic avantgardism – had affinities with Nordau’s views of 1893. Where Nordau saw the stylistic innovations and the representation of internal psychological states in nineteenth-century art as the product of what he called “degenerate” minds, Eliot saw similar developments in the arts in his own day as symptomatic of a general cultural malaise from which no one was immune. In short, they both diagnosed a malaise, but for Eliot the malaise was an inescapable consequence of cultural disintegration, while for Nordau it was merely a regrettable vogue for the musing of pathological personalities.

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More importantly, Eliot believed that the arts offered a diagnosis of the malaise, as opposed to Nordau’s view that they were merely a symptom of it, and therefore he offered hope for a cure. To put it another way, Eliot’s view of art – like that of Pound and Lewis – is primarily expressivist, whereas Nordau’s analysis rested on a mimetic view of art. From an expressivist view the authenticity of a work of art is dependent on its sincerity, on its faithfulness to the intellectual and emotional state of the author. On either expressivist or mimetic grounds it makes sense to extrapolate from a diagnosis of a work of art to the state of the culture in which it is found. For the expressivist, the artist is representative of the culture, whereas for the mimeticist, it is the consumer of the art who represents cultural tastes, and who needs to be corrected. Hence Nordau denigrates any art that did not represent the world in such a way that l’homme moyen sensuel would recognize it. He understood expressivist distortions found in nineteenth century art as evidence of psychological malaise in its creators, as in the following remark: “The curious style of certain recent painters –‘impressionists,’ ‘stipplers,’ or ‘mosaicists,’ ‘papilloteurs,’ or ‘quiverers,’ ‘roaring’ colourists, dyers in gray and faded tints – becomes at once intelligible to us if we keep in view the researches of the Charcot school into the visual derangements in degeneration and hysteria” (Nordau, 27). Nordau’s remark, incidentally, reveals his reliance on psychological theories that attribute psychological pathology to genetic factors. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93) was a Parisian physician who believed that “hysteria” was the result of a neurological disorder, and essentially untreatable. Thus Nordau did not see artworks manifesting traits of neurotic or psychotic states as symptomatic of a cultural malaise – as Eliot did. For Nordau the problem was simply that society accepted the expression of deranged individuals as admirable artworks. For him the appropriate remedy was to denounce such artworks, and replace them with the products of healthy individuals.

psychology and cultural theory Charcot’s students, incidentally, included Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. Psychology – the attribution of mental phenomena and behaviour to either biological or emotional causes – was the

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new glamour science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was not something that an artist could easily ignore but, at the same time, no artist could be pleased to be told that his or her expression was essentially a species of pathology – even if the pathology were cultural rather than personal. Eliot’s cultural commentary derives entirely from such principles – even though he retained a faith in the power of persuasion to administer to the pathology, as opposed to relying on a therapeutic response such as the sexual and somatic therapy preached by D. H. Lawrence. Freud’s psychoanalysis, placing emphasis on early childhood development as the seedbed of mental disease, eventually displaced Charcot’s neurological theories. But Freudianism – although first fully articulated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) – was not to prevail until the 1930s. For example, Lyndall Gordon reports an incident that suggests that Eliot’s early poetry was perceived by his elders as exemplifying just the sort of mental pathology that Nordau found in Symbolism and Impressionism: “When, in spring 1914, Conrad Aiken took ‘Prufrock’ to a ‘poetry squash’ in London and showed it to Harold Monro, the editor of Poetry and Drama, Monro flung it back saying it was ‘absolutely insane’ (T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, 68). And perhaps Monro’s response was not so inappropriate, since Eliot was, indeed, attempting to portray the “dissociated” or “disintegrated” personality, as described by the French psychologist Pierre Janet (1854–1947).11 Monro apparently understood the poem much as its admirers do, but he saw it as psychological pornography – the representation of a sick mind, something unsuitable for a respectable journal. Then, as now, a leading issue in psychology was the extent to which mental phenomena were autonomous or merely epiphenomena of physical causes. Janet disagreed with the physiological explanations of Charcot, and – just four years earlier than Freud – posited a subconscious in which painful experiences were “disassociated” from the consciousness – essentially equivalent to Freud’s “suppression” theory. Janet’s term is “désagrégration” – variously translated as “dissociation” and “disintegration” – both of which Eliot employs at different times. It is a pathology in which the “dissociated” individual experiences what contemporary psychologist call a “fugue state.” Mr Hyde roughly exemplifies such a state in the 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and

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Mr. Hyde. Hyde’s violent behaviour is entirely out of character for Dr Jekyll; it was the way Dr Jekyll behaved in a “fugue state.” Of course, the physical changes in Dr Jekyll caused by the potion are not part of Janet’s theory. In “The Metaphysical Poets” Eliot applies Janet’s psychological theory to culture, describing the Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning, as poets all right, “and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.” In other words, their personalities were “disassociated.” It was not their fault, for – as Eliot famously asserted: “In the 17th century, a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered” (Selected Essays, 288). The “disassociated sensibility” clearly derives from Janet, as does Eliot’s conviction that a healthy culture must reintegrate the psyche by attaching emotional impulses to those things of which the conscious mind can approve – as in religious ecstasy. Janet and William James both considered mystical experience to be phenomena involving just such integration. And Eliot was quite familiar with both men’s psychological theories.12 Despite asserting that “we” – that is, Western culture – have never recovered from the disaster of the disassociated sensibility, Eliot also maintained, in a well known passage from the same early article, that the poet is somehow exempt from this disability: “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes”(287). Perhaps the clause “when a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work” is intended to rescue Eliot from self-contradiction. The salient point is the claim that poetry can function as a therapy for the perceived malaise of the disassociated sensibility. The belief that art is therapeutic to the psyche is, of course, the basis of Romantic expressivist aesthetic theory. In the Clark Lectures of 1926 Eliot attempted to develop what he called a “theory of the disintegration of the intellect in modern Europe.” Here again, he invokes Janet’s notion of désagrégation. As with the “dissociation of sensibility,” he locates the “disintegration”

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in the seventeenth century – though now he says it began as early as the thirteenth (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 158, 228). The idea that the two aspect of the human psyche – emotion and intellect – were once “integrated,” but have become “disintegrated” or split apart, is much subtler than Nordau’s crude theory of degeneration, but tends to the similar conclusion that art serves as an index of a society’s cultural health. Whether it holds water as a cultural theory is another matter. In any case, in 1926 Eliot still regarded such pathology as an unavoidable stage and believed it was the artist’s role and duty to administer to it. And he was somewhat optimistic that Europe had reached such a stage of disintegration in 1926 that a new cultural order would not be long to seek. He told Herbert Read, in a letter of December 1925, while he was still working on the lectures: “Disintegration, which, when the world has crystallised for another moment into a new order, can be treated as a form of generation; but which the historian at the present time, who does not anticipate, must regard partly as the history of corruption” (11 December 1925, Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria, Eliot’s emphasis). In 1926 – only a year before his baptism as an Anglican – Eliot was still holding out hope for cultural renewal. We can class him as a tentative Pollyanna. For at this time – prior to the Great Depression – he looked to a future in which the malaise of the present would be cured, though he knew not how. Eliot’s tentative optimism is very different from Pound’s enthusiastic welcoming of the “New Age.” Pound seemed not to feel any anxiety at the iconoclasm of the arts in his own generation and the one before him, believing that it was a sort of hygiene, cleansing the world of festering cultural deposits, and he was much more sanguine than Eliot that the world would crystallise “for another moment into a new order.” In the 1915 New Age series “Affirmations,” Pound struck an unqualifiedly optimistic note: “A certain number of fairly simple and now obvious ideas moved the renaissance; their ramifications and interactions are still a force with the people. A certain number of simple and obvious ideas running together and interacting, are making a new, and to many a most obnoxious, art. I need scarcely say that there were many people to whom the art of the quattro-cento and the paganism of the Renaissance seemed equally damnable, unimportant, obnoxious” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 115).

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Another index of Eliot’s belief that Anglo-American culture was in the doldrums during his youth is found in his Criterion “Commentary” for April 1934, where he reminisces about his time in Paris in 1911, revealing some of his interests at the time, as well as his sense that Paris was an intellectual centre against which London or Boston paled: “Younger generations can hardly realize the intellectual desert of England and America during the first decade and more of this century ... The predominance of Paris was incontestable.” He then lists the luminaries who dominated the intellectual landscape of Paris at that time, among them the literary figures Anatole France, Remy de Gourmont, Charles Péguy, and Maurice Barrès. Amongst the academics at the Sorbonne, he recalls, “Faguet was an authority to be attacked violently; the sociologists, Durkheim, Lévy Bruhl, held new doctrines; Janet was the great psychologist; at the Collège de France, Loisy enjoyed his somewhat scandalous distinction; and over all swung the spider-like figure of Bergson. His metaphysic was said to throw some light upon the new ways of painting, and discussion of Bergson was apt to be involved with discussion of Matisse and Picasso” (451–2).13 The absence of Nordau from this list, even though Degeneration was still in print, suggests that he was no longer au courant in 1911. Oswald Spengler, the most famous of all the Cassandras of the period, had not yet appeared on the scene, the first volume of his Decline of the West appearing only in 1918. Like Degeneration it was an immediate best seller, selling out in six months. The original German text was never translated into English. The English version we have is based on a text Spengler revised under the influence of Leo Frobenius and published in 1922, together with the second volume.14 Like Nordau, Spengler perceived an endemic malaise in European culture and civilization, but he drew with an even broader brush, not confining his diagnosis to works of art. Eliot did not find Spengler to his taste because of Spengler’s historicist bias – that is, his attribution of cultural processes to impersonal factors and forces. In addition to his disparaging comments in the 1925 introduction to Mowrer’s This American World cited above, Eliot complained in a 1927 Criterion “Commentary” of the “Spenglerish view” of a pamphlet under review. He objects to Spengler’s Cassandralike pessimism as well as to his historicism. “The Criterion,” he wrote,

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“cannot assume as axiomatic the statement that tout est foutu. To assume that everything has changed, is changing, and must change, according to forces which are not human, and that all that a person who cares about the future must or can do is to adapt himself to the change, is a fatalism which is unacceptable.” This remark illustrates Eliot’s activist notion of cultural change as clearly as anything he committed to print, and is in contrast to the standard understanding of The Waste Land as a lament for the inescapable cultural disintegration in post-war Europe. However, it is difficult to see how the poem as published could serve as therapy for the cultural disintegration it articulates. Eliot also observed in his commentary that Spengler’s work was “an exemplification of the modern time philosophy discussed by Mr. Wyndham Lewis in The Enemy” (Criterion 5, June 1927, 282). Lewis’s take on the cultural scene as represented in his distinctly Cassandra-ish work Time and Western Man was published later in that year (1927). (Eliot had already seen much of it in Lewis’s journal, The Enemy.) Eliot and Lewis both thought that Western culture was in a state of crisis, and in need of treatment. In this, they were out of step with the Pollyanna Pound, who perceived the crisis as a turning point toward a bright future. But even though Lewis and Eliot agreed on the need for cultural repair, their views increasingly diverged on just what prescriptions to apply. Spengler’s view, in contrast, was entirely fatalistic, and all three rejected his analysis. Time and Western Man is a broad-based attack on what Lewis calls “time philosophy,” represented in its most extreme form for him by Oswald Spengler. Although Lewis’s animus spreads his net too wide and too fine to persuade anyone today, in 1927, many thought he had a handle on the malaise of the period. The following is a reasonable example of the catch-all nature of his category “time philosophy”: “Spengler’s book on the theoretic side is simply the elaboration (on a basis of Bergsonian, or Italian idealist philosophy) of the widely-held belief that everything whatever – as much a scientific theory as the hat you wear – is a phenomenon of fashion, a Time-phenomenon – a “history,” and not a “truth,” whatever its pretensions to be the latter” (266). Lewis included Einstein and the whole of modern physics, Alfred North Whitehead, and Filippo Marinetti – amongst others too numerous to mention – as hated time philosophers. But Spengler is the prize exhibit.

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Quite apart from the shotgun nature of Lewis’s cultural critique, it is distinct from both Pound and Eliot in its focus on what one might call the “style” of the age, as opposed to its substance. He objects to the relativism of the age – that is, the widespread presumption that absolute truth or incorrigible knowledge is unattainable and we must therefore rest content with partial truths. The corollary of such philosophical relativism is that our “versions” of the truth must be temporary and constantly changing. It is the constant change of received “truth” that Lewis finds intolerable and that he denominates “time philosophy.” I think it is fair to say that such relativism is the default position of virtually all Western intellectuals in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century with the exception of religious believers and Marxists. Despite his endorsation of Lewis’s critique, Eliot did not really subscribe to it at that date. Indeed, he described himself as a relativist in a January 1916 exchange of letters with Norbert Wiener (Letters, 81). While most literary modernists were hostile toward Spengler, William Butler Yeats admired The Decline of the West as a corroboration of his own theory of historical phases and his belief that the world currently occupied a degenerate phase in the cycle. Despite being Yeats’ protegé, Ezra Pound found little to admire in Spengler: “To understand Spengler’s writing one must begin by recognizing that Spengler has never seen a picture, has never heard any music, and that the sum total of his acquaintance with literature might, for all evidence to the contrary, be confined to Goethe and a few sagas (“Correspondence,” letter to the editor, Criterion 10, July 1931, 730). Pound makes no objection to Spengler’s historicism, merely to his aesthetic taste. Spengler’s error, in Pound’s view, is to perceive the contemporary cultural scene as decadent in contrast to Pound’s belief that the West was experiencing a renaissance. He makes no objection to the general hypothesis of historical cycles, just to Spengler’s conclusion that the European “Faustian” cycle is coming to an end. When Pound later comes to champion Frobenius’ cultural theories, he gives no indication that he recognized Frobenius’ influence on Spengler – whose cultural theory, like that of Frobenius and Pound, takes stylistic features as revelatory of deep-seated cultural forces – what Frobenius called the paideuma of a culture.

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The rejection of Spengler by our trio reflects their adherence to the Enlightenment conviction that human beings create their own destiny, a conviction which Eliot, Pound, and Lewis share – however much they may diverge on just whither society is headed or toward what it should strive. Pound, above all, believed in the perfectibility of man and waxed apoplectic at mankind’s failure to follow his lead toward such perfection. In this respect he is in agreement with Marx, who envisaged a utopian future from which economic want and war would be abolished. Eliot, Lewis, and – most particularly – T. E. Hulme (who died before Spengler’s work appeared) were more realistic. Hulme’s insistence on the reality of original sin is an explicit rejection of Enlightenment optimism and profoundly influenced Eliot. While they all believed that mankind creates its own destiny, Hulme, Lewis, and Eliot also believed that the faults and weaknesses inherent in humankind preclude the possibility that such a destiny would be entirely benign. Pound said nothing directly about human fallibility, but he certainly believed in human greed and gullibility. For those reasons alone it is inappropriate to classify any of them with the utopians like Marx, who believed that a perfectly just and prosperous society is possible if only men and women would follow their lead. Of course no one in 1928 – whether Cassandras or Pollyannas – foresaw the horrors that lay ahead for the world. Yeats’ prediction of a “rough beast” slouching “towards Bethlehem to be born” eight years earlier did not have the resonance it has since acquired. And, in any case, Yeats was reacting to local violence in Ireland – the “troubles” that eventually led to the independence of Eire – rather than broad developments in Euro-American civilization. Closer to 1928, Yeats’ contribution to apocalyptic literature, A Vision (1926), first published in an edition “for subscribers only,” received only one review, and that by his friend George Russell. The revised trade edition, published by MacMillan in 1937 fared a little better, but most of Yeats’ admirers found it an embarrassment. Despite a fair number of comments on Yeats from Eliot’s pen, including a designation of him as “the greatest poet of his time” (“A Commentary,” Criterion 14, July 1935, 612), so far as I can discover Eliot never mentions that embarrassing work, and I have never seen any comment by him on “The Second Coming.”

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managing the future Though they belonged to the nineteenth century, the historical predictions of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were probably the most influential – certainly the most powerful – prognostications available to observers of the social and political scene in the early twentieth century. Although our writers were not admirers of Marx (Lewis and Pound both flirted a little with Marxist theories), they were all quite aware of the influence of his political and economic theories. I will consider their reaction to Marxism and communism in later chapters. Here I want to invoke an influential Marxist analysis of the cultural state of Europe in the mid-twentieth century. Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, written and published in the usa (in German) in 1944, blamed “the indefatigable self-destructiveness of [the] enlightenment” for the rise of fascism. As Marxists they adopted a thoroughly historicist posture – directly in contradiction to the Enlightenment faith that mankind is the master of its own destiny. They regarded fascism and humanism as equivalent products of Enlightenment beliefs, which, in their words, “the brazen fascists hypocritically laud and pliable humanist experts naïvely put into practice ...” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, xi.). The American cultural domination that Pound and Eliot both thought likely to come to pass was regarded by Horkheimer and Adorno as a triumph of humanism and a dire fate – one on which they looked with horror.15 Eliot was not particularly happy at the prospect either, though for quite different reasons. As is well known, Eliot became a diligent opponent of humanism, but – as we will see – only a lukewarm opponent of fascism. To illustrate Eliot’s views on the issue of Americanism we must return to his preface to Edgar Ansel Mowrer’s This American World, published in 1928, the year before the stock market crash on “Black Thursday,” 24 October 1929. The Great Depression was a disaster no one saw coming, certainly neither Eliot nor Mowrer, who predicted (accurately enough) that the United States of America would come to dominate the world. The recent destruction of European capital stock in the Great War had accelerated the arrival of that dominance, but Mowrer did not believe that it had caused it.

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Though an American, Mowrer was not particularly happy at the prospect of American world hegemony: “Unhampered by much cultural tradition or by the finer scruples, mighty in the increment of a continent tamed by a science he [the American] understands supremely to exploit, fresh with the faith of unbroken successes, directed by mass motives inherited from pioneer fellowship in a primeval waste, sole beneficiary of the most destructive of all wars, drawn by spiritual vacuum and capital scarcity elsewhere, our citizen goes forth blithely to reap the profits (and incidentally, spread the benefits) he has learned most to cherish. Mental democracy and machine organization triumph, and in the process Babbitt16 buys the world” (This American World, 47–8). In many ways, Mowrer is spelling out the “new world order” that many expected the application of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” in the 1919 Peace of Versailles to inaugurate. (It is striking that President George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev used the same phrase, “New World Order” – whether consciously or not, I do not know – to describe the state of world relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In neither case did the new order prove to be as benign as its proponents had hoped.17) Now largely forgotten, Mowrer was a journalist of considerable reputation between the wars.18 As an American in France, he did not consider enlisting on the outbreak of war. In this respect he was just like the Americans in Britain. In contrast to their British friends – Lewis, Hulme, and even the much older Ford Madox Ford – neither Pound, nor Eliot, nor Jacob Epstein considered enlisting in the British forces. However both Eliot and Pound made some moves toward signing up with the American forces after the usa entered the war, but they came to nothing. Eliot’s introduction begins by placing This American World in the context of the “literature of Bolshevism” and the “literature of fascism” as parallels to the “literature of Americanism,” thus categorizing Americanism as a distinct ideology like the other two (ix). He described Mowrer’s book as “a study in the philosophy of history, in the same sense as the work of Spengler,” though not as doctrinaire. It is, he said, “written with a lighter hand,” and is an ambitious “study of the future of Americanism both within and outside of America” (x). As we have seen, Eliot endorsed Mowrer’s view that “Americanism” is “merely the European qualities and vices

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given a new growth in a different soil,” something that, he says, “would probably have happened anyway; America itself has merely accelerated the process”(xii). He cited with approval Mowrer’s characterization of America as divided between “later arrivals” and “the older stocks,” qualifying that opinion only by noting that the new arrivals are not exclusively concentrated in the cities as Mowrer claims. The result, in Mowrer’s view, is that “New York often seems to an old stock American as alien as Vienna or Amsterdam” (xii, quoted from Mowrer, 61). Where in Patria Mia Pound had seen a burgeoning energy in the cosmopolitan crowds of New York, Eliot and Mowrer saw a threat to the integrity of American culture. It is the presence of the Irish, Southern, and Eastern Europeans (code for Jews) that troubled Eliot and Mowrer. They maintained silence on the issue of Black and Native Americans, and seem oblivious to the irony of asserting continuity between European and American “civilization,” while bemoaning its adulteration by European immigration. The unstated opinion is that the Irish, Italians, Poles, Russians, and Jews are uncivilized – or (still more bizarre) not “European.” Agreeing with Mowrer’s worry about such adulteration, Eliot took the trouble to assert his own pure Anglo-Saxon provenance as one that “Mr. Mowrer would recognize.” “I am,” he wrote proudly, “myself a descendant of pioneers somewhat like Mr. Mowrer.” But Eliot added that his personal experience was “different from that of the native European and from that of many Americans” (xiii). The difference he identifies is one that highlights the fact that American culture is not homogeneous even among pure AngloSaxons like himself and Mowrer. Eliot claimed to be a sort of American hybrid in that he had one foot in the Midwest of St. Louis, his home city, and another in Massachusetts where he spent summers from an early age and where he was educated – both in boarding school and in university. In this way he drew attention to the cultural divide between the Southwest and New England. Interestingly, he did not allude to his status as an American expatriate in England of a full decade’s duration at the time of writing. As Americans, Eliot and Mowrer naturally have a different perspective on American culture and civilization than do Europeans like Spengler, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Even though they both might fairly be described as Europhiles, they retain the optimism

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characteristic of Americans. All the same – much like Henry James – they look with some trepidation upon the triumph of the culture of their native land over older, richer, and subtler cultures, as many American intellectuals do today (2011), when Mowrer’s prediction of American cultural hegemony over the entire globe has largely come to pass: “Americanism as understood by Europe is therefore not only probable but practically inevitable. But not Europe alone is to be asked to submit to it ... the entire civilized world is destined to be thus Americanized ... For there nowhere exists a living, nonAmerican culture capable of offering any serious resistance to the new forces” (205–6). Forty years before Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “global village,” Mowrer anticipated that condition: “Furthermore, the world of wireless telephony and broadcasting, picture transmission and airplanes, is, under present conditions, too small for more than one civilization to exist at once” (206). It is striking that similar predictions have been made more recently – notably Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992). But while cultural diversity is being relentlessly ground down, resistance to cultural homogenization remains stubborn and often violent. Eliot’s introduction to This American World was written just months after his baptism – on 29 June 1927. Given his commitment to Anglo Catholicism (as he preferred to call his Anglican faith) he must have been struck by Mowrer’s prediction that resistance to American cultural hegemony would take the form of a return to religion, especially to Roman Catholicism: “Enthusiasm for quantity [a leading characteristic of American culture in Mowrer’s view as well as Horkheimer’s] is so essentially childish,” Mowrer wrote, “that to share it requires a deliberate puerilizing of the adult mind. And though the age is not without its adequate problems and rewards, the new type of successful leader is often so nauseous to the developed character that entire renunciation seems preferable. Therefore many spirits are already taking refuge in that Gibraltar of consolation, the Roman Catholic Church, and more will do so. But the moment of the faltering spirit that would mark that Church’s triumph, is still immensely remote” (208). Eliot did not respond to this observation in his “Introduction,” but it must have struck a responsive chord. Of course, he did not regard his adoption of the Anglican faith as a withdrawal – as Mowrer did, who characterized the anticipated renewal of faith as a rush to

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“refuge” in the Church – but rather as commitment to a set of values that could save the world from itself. Despite this negative characterization of American culture – one that can still be found in American and European academic commentaries and in American journals with pretensions to intellectual sophistication – Mowrer remained an admirer of American culture, even while seeing it as ineluctably European: “In the broader frame of history, America and Europe are parts of the same system” But he added: “At present European civilization has to be re-baptized EuroAmerican simply because at this period the qualities America possesses supremely further the general development more successfully than those of the mother countries”(220–1). Mowrer rejected the socialist vision of the future of the “Atlantic Community,” dominant in Europe at that time, on grounds – somewhat surprisingly – of its egalitarianism and atheism: Natural Equality is the credo of the European socialist, but the majority of non-socialist Europeans both scoff at it and fear it. It runs counter to tradition and human experience and bluntly stated as a fact, provokes the derision of the adult mind. To understand it mystically, as the American understands it, there must be added some such words as “before God.” These words European rationalism has progressed too far to accept, and only a spiritual renewal could subdue mature rationalism. The Old Country moreover has far too large a bump of accumulated experience ever to believe that men are born “neutral protoplasm” whose shaping is a matter of environment and chance (210–11). Eliot does not comment on these remarks, but he would certainly have approved of them. Mowrer’s remarks remind us that the threat of socialism – whether of the revolutionary Marxist variety or the non-violent Fabian or Revisionist variety – had been for many decades the dominant political issue in Europe. Despite the Bolshevik Revolution, the First War had in some ways lessened that threat to the capitalist world. The international character of socialism was dealt a severe blow at the outbreak of the war when socialists of all stripes put national loyalty ahead of socialist solidarity. After the war, the Spartacus revolt of January 1919 in Germany failed to attract the

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support of the German proletariat, and was brutally suppressed – largely by the irregular Freikorps who arrested and summarily executed Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebnecht, two of the Spartacus movement’s leaders. A Frenchman who objected to his efforts to forestall a war had assassinated Jean Jaurès, another prominent socialist, on the eve of the war (31 July 1914). Although the successful revolution of October 1917 in Russia no doubt made the liberal democracies nervous, it also tended to damage communism within the capitalist countries by eroding its international character. Communism came to be identified with the Soviet Union, and for good reason. The International was controlled by the Kremlin – at least by 1920. Mowrer thought that, given all of this, there was hope that Europe could be brought to its senses, and return to the robust ways of free market capitalism from which it had threatened to stray. Eliot had no interest in Mowrer’s choice of a new “path,” which was essentially the same as the global free market economy that was once again in vogue until the great hollowing out of 2008–09 (nor, indeed, did any of the world’s governments after the crash of 1929). Even though it was clear that the status quo ante could not survive after the terrible and senseless slaughter of the Great War, and the Bolshevik Revolution – which many thought inaugurated the Communist Era19 – there was no consensus on what the future held. The Peace of Versailles was widely regarded in Britain as an unwise experiment imposed upon Europe by a naïve and idealistic American President and a vindictive France. Both Eliot and Wyndham Lewis accepted that view, most influentially articulated by J. M. Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).20 Of course, opinion differed widely on what sort of future was desirable or probable. Despite his Anglicanism and purported Royalism, Eliot remained on the “liberal” Enlightenment side of the issue, believing that individuals and institutions could shape and mould the future of societies and cultures. Indeed, his founding of The Criterion in 1921 was a conscious effort to play a role in the formation of the future of Europe, a motivation clearly indicated in the “Manifesto” he printed in the last number of Criterion’s first year: “A literary review should maintain the application, in literature, of principles which have their consequences also in politics and in private conduct.” (Criterion 1, July 1923, 421). In pursuit of

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this project he invited articles from prominent Continental writers on politics, among them conservatives like Henri Massis (1860–1970) and Julien Benda (1867–1956, author of La Trahison des clercs, 1927).21 Eliot published the translation of an excerpt from Massis’ Defence de l’occident as “Defence of the West” in Criterion 4. Like Nordau and Spengler, Massis believed that the “future of western civilisation, indeed the future of mankind, is to-day in jeopardy” (224). But unlike them, he located the threat in the East, in particular in what he regarded as the mystical and orientalizing influence of bolshevik Russia and Weimar Germany. In later years Massis was a principal author and signator of the 1935 Manifeste des intellectuels français pour la défense de l’Occident et la paix en Europe, which was in support of Mussolini’s adventure in Ethiopia.22 He had begun his career as a Bergsonian, but later attached himself to Maurras and L’Action Française, and still later served in Pétain’s Vichy government. Throughout his long career Massis sounded the alarm at the encroaching influence of Slavs and Teutons in Western Europe, warnings that appear hysterical and paranoid today, but are very similar to Eliot and Mowrer’s fear that Irish, Italians, Poles, Russians, and Jews would dilute or damage American “civilisation.” Such fears as Massis expressed must have resonated in the period 1933–45 when Germany did succumb to the quasi-mystical racism of the Nazis, and the Soviet Union had succumbed to the “oriental” tyranny of Joseph Stalin. In any event, Massis was forgiven his political errors by the French, and was elected to the Académie Française in 1960. Eliot’s association with these conservative French figures was personal as well as professional. According to his friend, Montgomery Belgion23 – himself a conservative, and controversial figure – “Eliot had little more than a nodding acquaintance, [with Maurras, but] with both Massis and Maritain he became friends, and his friendship with them is still close to-day [1948] (Montgomery Belgion, 57). Seymour-Jones cites a letter (10 March 1926) from Vivien to Mary Hutchinson reporting that Eliot has “another marvellous Frenchman” coming to visit. It was Henri Massis, editor of the La Revue Universelle, who was lecturing in London. But she makes no further mention of him (Painted Shadow, 431). Eliot eventually came to regard Massis as unsound, telling Montgomery Belgion in

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1945 that he found Massis’ quick book on the French defeat, Les Idées restent (Ideas Remain, 1940), “not very nourishing,” adding that he now found Massis’ “Occident and Orient” “rather boring” (letter of 17 April 1945, Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria). That Eliot should have dismissed Massis’s ideas on the eve of the Cold War – which, in dividing the world into East and West, seemed to confirm Massis’s fears – is a little ironic, but no more so than the standard inclusion of Japan in the “West” during the Cold War. Despite his later disaffection with Massis, Eliot obviously thought his views deserved a hearing in 1926. And apparently Eliot’s lowered opinion of Massis’s political thought did not interfere with their friendship. Certainly Eliot shared Massis’s anxiety about the threat to “Latin” civilization, as his Criterion “Commentary” for August 1927 indicates. In that article Eliot rejected “the Idea of Nationality” as an appropriate principle by which to organize the world. “Like most of Woodrow Wilson’s ideas,” he said, nationalism “was agèd when he [Wilson] discovered it; it will not explain fascism any more than it will explain bolshevism. Not how Europe can be ‘freed’; but how Europe can be organized, is the question of the day” (my emphasis). In place of Nationalism, Eliot proposed “The European Idea,” which may be found in such diverse places as Valéry’s “meditation on the decay of European civilization” (presumably Le Cimetière Marin), Spengler’s philosophy of history, or “the intense nationalism as in the work of Henri Massis.” Although these men share very little, none of them – to their credit, in Eliot’s opinion – have an “obligation ... to nineteenth-century socialism or to the humanitarian sentiments out of which the League of Nations arose.” The European Idea arises, Eliot believed, from “a new feeling of insecurity and danger” stemming from “the most important event of the War ... the Russian Revolution.” More than the War itself, that revolution, he wrote, “has made men conscious of the position of Western Europe as (in Valéry’s words) a small and isolated cape on the western side of the Asiatic Continent. And this awareness seems to be giving rise to a new European consciousness.” The new consciousness Eliot had in mind is not new in the sense that both Pound and Marinetti thought of a new consciousness or that the Marxists did. They imagined a New Man who would displace the modern rational man as he had displaced the medieval

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man of faith. Eliot, in contrast, was thinking of some sort of panEuropean accommodation of the major cultures of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, mentioning the Italian journalist and novelist G. B. Angioletti and the German medievalist E. R. Curtius as others working toward such an accommodation along with himself and Massis (Criterion 6:97–8). For their part, Pound and Marinetti never succeeded in providing their New Man with the required novel attributes beyond a love of speed for Marinetti, and a paratactic cast of mind for Pound. Eliot’s New Man was simply a panEuropean Christian, that is, the medieval man of faith. Although in these remarks Eliot seemed to be sliding toward the Cassandra posture that dominates Wyndham Lewis’s writing, he did not despair at the state of affairs, but took heart: “It is a hopeful sign,” he continued, “that a small number of intelligent persons are aware of the necessity to harmonize the interests, and therefore to harmonize first the ideas, of the civilized countries of Western Europe.” He is hopeful that this harmonization will lead to the “reaffirmation of the European tradition,” a reaffirmation that may arise from an analysis of “its constituents in the various nations of Europe; and proceed finally to the further formation of such a tradition” (“A Commentary,” Criterion 6, August 1927, 97–100). These optimistic sentiments are from the pen of the author of The Waste Land, a work written less than six years earlier, and widely received as bemoaning the disintegration of European civilization. Perhaps it would be more in the spirit of the author to regard The Waste Land as providing an inventory of the components of European civilization, now in a state of dis-integration, but awaiting a re-integration. Massis’s comment in his Criterion piece on the state of civilization in the wake of the war is very much in the spirit of The Waste Land. The “inhuman and hideous division” to which Massis referred is the Reformation, which he regarded as a German breach in European unity culminating in World War I: “We are confronted to-day with the tragic epilogue to this inhuman and hideous division. It is civilisation, the idea even of civilisation, of which Europe claimed to be the holder, that is most deeply wounded. In the eyes of that part of the world, which lived in the illusion of our homogeneity, civilisation seems vanquished. The war has made it unrecognisable” (“Defence of the West,” 228–9). Massis saw “the soul of the West” as under attack by the “East,” by which he means Germany

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and the Slavic countries, not China, India, or the Islamic countries of the Middle East. Massis’s article borders on the hysterical. He believed the West was vulnerable because its “soul” was “divided, uncertain of its principles, confusedly eager for spiritual liberation, and all the more ready to destroy itself, to allow itself to be broken up by Oriental anarchy.” The “root-ideas of the West,” which are allegedly being abandoned are “personality, unity, stability, authority, [and] continuity.” Eliot and Lewis would not disagree with that list. Nor did they recoil from Massis’s lament: “We are asked to break these to pieces for the sake of a doubtful Asiaticism in which all the forces of the human personality dissolve and return to nothingness” (231). Even though Massis’s analysis is shamelessly Franco-centric and special-pleading, the events of 1939 to 1945 could only have reinforced his view of European decline and German barbarity. It is not clear – in what I have read of Massis’s work – whether Britain would count as German or Latin for him. (Hitler considered both the French and the English to be Aryans.) But there is no doubt that Eliot believed that Britain belonged within the European community of nations. As early as “Tradition and Individual Talent” (1917) Eliot had expressed his belief in a single European culture, asserting there that “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Selected Essays, 14). He never strayed from that view – which is free of nationalist prejudice so far as Europe is concerned. Toward the conclusion of Paleface: The Philosophy of the “Melting Pot,” published early in 1929, just two years after Eliot’s remarks in the Criterion, Lewis also comments on Massis’ Défense de l’occident. Like Eliot, Lewis drew the cultural divide further east than Massis’s Latin Europe so as to include Germany – still excluding Poland and Russia: “If you tried to make of gaelic chivalry and Italian science, german music and norse practical enterprise, one thing, that would be a strange monster. Which is demonstrated by Mr. Massis in his Défense de l’Occident, where his “west” is confined to the latin soil.” However, Lewis saw Massis’s strategy as “an evasion only of the problem it is just against that separatism as between the different segments of the West that we have most to contend. We should have – should we not? – our local Melting-pot” (256). Indeed,

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although nostalgic for the old cultural dispensation, Lewis accepts the need for a European “melting pot.” Paleface is largely motivated by Lewis’s fear of another great war – a fear that most did not share in 1929. Lewis saw the choice as lying between armed separation of distinct European societies (and the inevitability of armed conflict) and the blurring of national distinctions. He prefers the latter: “Of these two attitudes – the melting and the non-melting – the American appears to me by far the better: I am heart and soul upon the side of the Melting-pot, not upon that of the Barbed Wire” (275–6). Like Eliot, he desired a united Europe, pointing out that Europe was once unified as Christendom: “If it is objected that there is no unifying principle in Europe to compare with americanization, it is necessary to recall that only five centuries ago the whole of Europe possessed one soul in a more fundamental way than America can be said to at this moment” (277–8). Unhappily, the only unifying factor that Europe possessed in 1929, according to Lewis, was race – hence his title, Paleface. (As noted above, Lewis’s dream of a United States of Europe has pretty well come to pass, and for much the same reason he gave – the avoidance of war.) Like his friends, Lewis believed himself to be “a man of the ‘transition,’ we none of us can help being that.” Although he disclaimed any “desire to walk into the Past,” he still felt that “what we have lost was not absolutely to be despised, and should be bitterly regretted if nothing is put in its place as good as it” (83). He feared that “no one will have the genius or the bonne volonté even to do anything but batten upon the ruins and call that the ‘New World’” (84). Lewis, then, was far more apprehensive of the future, ten years after the war than was Eliot, who seldom commented on the danger of a new European war, and never – even after the fact – condemned the terror bombing tactics of both sides. Pound’s assessment of the state of civilization in the immediate post-war period was angrily dismissive, and his comments are largely devoid of any comprehensible analysis of the state of European civilization. He seemed to have been irritated at his failure and that of his friends to capture the attention of a broad public. Lewis may well have had Pound in mind when he spoke of those who would “batten upon the ruins and call that the ‘New World’.” In a letter of 1920 to Harry Turner, the editor of Much Ado, Pound declared

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“an itch for founding a wholly new sort of university.” Such an institution was needed because, Pound believed, “It is absolutely necessary to start the new civilization whether one builds it inside the decaying cortex of the present one or on the scraps doesn’t seem to me much to matter. The present one will go to pot all quickly enough without one’s pushing ... It is foolish to scrap all the past (as it is foolish to carry corpses): European civilization is too rich, really rich, to chuck altogether. But the good apples damn well want to be taken out of the barrel, and they want a bit of hunting for in the muck” (“Here’s Your Chance,” EPPP, 116). It is, of course, impossible to discover from these remarks just what it was about the state of cultural affairs in 1920 that Pound characterized as a “decaying cortex.” A contemporaneous letter to the New York Evening Post suggests that it was pique at the public neglect of himself and his friends: “I think you will make a frightful ... mistake if you don’t realize at once how utterly gone to pot England is, vie intellectuel et littéraire, at this moment, after the five years of war and two of muddle. The manner in which any vital idea, any idea which really hits anything, is excluded from the whole press is amazing ...” (“A Letter from Ezra Pound,” EPPP, 4:126). Unlike Eliot and Lewis, Pound’s perspective in the immediate post-war remained focused on cultural politics pretty well to the exclusion of national and international affairs. What he shared with his friends was discontent with the way things were. Although they differ on much, it is clear that Eliot, Lewis, Massis, and Pound are on the same page in their rejection of socialism and communism, on the one hand, and of President Wilson’s “humanitarian sentiments” on the other. In short, they rejected both the Left and the Liberal middle. As a consequence they inevitably found themselves in the neighbourhood of fascism when it manifested itself in 1922. Certainly fascism purported to address the same issues as those that concerned our artists – most particularly the alleged moral and intellectual bankruptcy of liberal democratic capitalism and its attendant nationalism and imperialism. But it does them a great injustice to read their comments in the twenties in the context of the Italian and German belligerence in the thirties, and still more in the context of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”24 We can see from this brief survey of their post-war remarks prior to the Depression and to the outbreak of hostilities in the thirties

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that all three assumed that the political and economic status quo was unsustainable, and that they therefore lived in an age of transition. In this they were not alone. But the politicians in the democracies were carrying on business as usual. The attention of political actors was focused on the threat of communism. Communism was not seen as a military threat – as was the case during the Cold War – but rather as an internal threat through subversion. Entrepreneurs were carrying on as usual, brokering deals, exploiting new protectorates and old colonies, and keeping wages low. Pound, Eliot, and Lewis all suffered from the hubris of supposing that their credentials as artists permitted them to offer solutions to the challenges facing Europe in the post war. They were in intellectual waters that ran too deep and too fast for them. Eliot swam against the current and managed to survive. Lewis decided to swim with the current, all the while protesting that a cataract lay ahead, which eventually engulfed him and Europe. Pound thought that in Social Credit he had found a barque that would see him safely to the farther shore, but it became mired in a fascist bog. The intellectual, political, and military milieu in which the political postures of Eliot, Lewis, and Pound were formulated has received a great deal of attention, but very little of it is non-partisan. In some ways this study is a response to Vincent Sherry, who asks at the end of his 1993 study, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism, “May one admire the artistic achievement of Lewis and Pound, then, by detaching it from the social value it discovers so stubbornly in their work?” I am not here concerned with the greatness of their artistic achievement, but rather with the degree to which their “social values” are egregiously reprehensible. On the other hand, my argument would tend to support Sherry’s fear that “One may argue that the aesthetic of authority immanent in the work of the Anglo-Americans develops, through the twenties, into the imminent apocalypse of dictatorial fascism” (187). I do not support the causal relationship between aesthetics and political action that Sherry’s comment implies. What I do support is a claim that Lewis’s and Pound’s aesthetic views informed their political postures – which is perhaps what Sherry meant. Perhaps we are now far enough from that era to consider it dispassionately. The fact that our own global political landscape is just as troubling and puzzling in the early years of the twenty-first cen-

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tury as theirs was in the early years of the twentieth should instill a little humility in us as we attempt to understand their behaviour. It must have been just as difficult to see one’s way to the desirable future of a world relatively free of war, deprivation, disease, and political dysfunction in the 1920s as it is today. Then, as now, pundits proclaimed a “New World Order.” But then, as now, an interested observer would see that the widespread disorder and violence reported daily in the media failed to match pious nostrums about the new world order. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Spartacus uprising in Germany in1919, Japanese expansion in the Far East, old-fashioned European imperialism in the Near East and Africa, the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians in Turkey in 1922, the failure of democracy in Italy with Mussolini’s seizure of power in the same year, the British General Strike of May 1926, Stalin’s massacre of the Ukrainian Kulaks beginning in the Fall of 1929, and the Stock Market crash in the same year, all bespoke a dangerous, uncertain, and frightening future. And, of course, the Great War itself provided an alarming example of how badly things could go wrong. The Great War was the disaster that dominated the thinking of all those who addressed political, cultural, and economic issues as well as international relations. As Margaret MacMillan puts it in Paris 1919: “For four years the most advanced nations in the world had poured out their men, their wealth, the fruits of their industry, science and technology, on a war that may have started by accident but was impossible to stop ... Four years of war shook forever the supreme self-confidence that had carried Europe to world dominance. After the Western Front, Europeans could no longer talk of a civilizing mission to the world” (xxvi). The Europeans – in our case, Wyndham Lewis – perhaps could not, but our two Americans persisted, quixotically, in agitating for a renewed transatlantic European civilization.

ii A Twentieth-Century Renaissance We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! ... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, 4 and 9, 1909

culture wars Ezra Pound sailed from New York for Europe in early February 1908. He was leaving a teaching post at Wabash College in Indiana, having been bought out by the administration for reasons that remain somewhat obscure, but which involved a female member of a travelling acting troupe.1 He landed at Gibraltar; then trained to Venice, where he published a slim volume of poetry, A Lume Spento (“With Taper’s Quenched”). That volume was marked by his admiration for William Butler Yeats and the style of the British “Nineties.”2 At this stage Pound was just a skilful imitator of current European fashions, leavened with some late Medieval Spanish and Italian spice. His poetry was far from representing the fresh breeze from the “Idaho kid” – as T. E. Hulme later dubbed him. By September he had found his way to London, where he quickly established himself as a minor literary figure. Except for an extended visit home, Pound remained in London until 1920, when he left for Paris, unhappy, as we have seen, with the London literary establishment, despite having had considerable success in carving out a place for himself on its fringes.

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A few months before Pound made his way to London, a wealthy Italian poet, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, published the “Futurist Manifesto” in the influential Paris journal Le Figaro (20 February 1909). It was prefaced by the account of an automobile accident that had befallen Marinetti as he raced his powerful car on the streets of Paris. The preface set the tone for his celebration of the machine and speed in the Manifesto itself – as in the fourth principle: “a roaring car ... is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” The eighth principle expressed what we have seen to be a widespread perception, that Europe – or mankind – was at the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one: “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! ... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed” (Marinetti: Selected Writings, 42). Marinetti’s celebration of machinery and speed was accompanied by a more portentous celebration of machismo, violence, and war in “principle” number nine: “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman” (43). Such remarks may have seemed harmless in 1909, but after 1914 they took on a serious colouring, and the last remark will raise everyone’s hackles these days. However, Marinetti remained an enthusiast of machines and violence even in the face of machine guns slaughtering the youth of Europe in France, Belgium, Russia, and the Tyrol. In the preface to his 1915 volume of poems, belligerently titled, War: The World’s Only Hygiene, he called for Italy to join the war. (Uncertain whether to back Germany and Austria or France, England, and Russia in the war, Italy delayed – in the end declaring war on Austria on 23 May 1915, almost a year after the beginning of hostilities in August 1914.) Early in 1918 – even before the end of the war, Marinetti founded the Futurist Political party in Italy and established fasci throughout Italy. Although Mussolini’s new Fascist party absorbed Marinetti’s Futurist party within a year, Mussolini’s economic policies were too conservative for Marinetti, and he later opposed Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany, as well as the

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anti-Semitic laws that Mussolini introduced in 1938 (Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1982, 214 ff). Although Eliot never showed much interest in Futurism, Pound and Wyndham Lewis were intrigued by it. So much so that, prompted by the London exhibitions of Italian futurists in 1912 and 1913, they concocted their own movement, called Vorticism, as a response. In the latter year (on 18 November) Lewis and others organized a dinner to welcome Marinetti, charging three shillings per person. Marinetti was back in London the following year and published yet another manifesto in the Sunday Observer on 7 June 1914. A few days later (12 June) he gave a lecture at the Doré galleries on Bond Street (delivered in French), which Lewis attended with accomplices, intending to make a scene (Meyers, 60–1). His objective, of course, was to advertise Vorticism. Lewis’s account in Blasting and Bombardiering provides a good sense of the combative high spirits within the artistic community, scarce months before the declaration of war: the excitement was intense. Putsches took place every month or so. Marinetti for instance, you may have heard of him! It was he who put Mussolini up to fascism. Mussolini admits it. They ran neck and neck for a bit, but Mussolini was the better politician. Well, Marinetti brought off a futurist Putsch about this time. It started in Bond Street. I counter-putsched. I assembled in Greek Street a determined band of miscellaneous anti-futurists. Mr. Epstein was there: Gaudier Brzeska, T. E. Hulme ... There were about ten of us. After a hearty meal we shuffled bellicosely round to the Doré gallery. Marinetti had entrenched himself upon a high lecture platform and he put down a tremendous barrage in French as we entered. Gaudier went into action at once. He was very good at the parlez-vous, in fact he was a Frenchman. He was sniping him without intermission, standing up in his place in the audience all the while. The remainder of our party maintained a confused uproar. (Blasting, 36) The facetious nature of the account – though it was written post-war, and long after Mussolini’s successful putsch of 28 Octo-

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ber 1922 – catches the spirit of gamesmanship that characterized the aesthetic politics of the pre-war period, when anything seemed possible, and most things were permissible. As Lewis put it: “Life was one big bloodless brawl, prior to the Great Bloodletting” (Blasting, 39). Vorticism was launched in a new magazine two months after the Doré Gallery kerfuffle. Given that it first appeared on 4 August 1914, three days after Germany declared war on Russia, and eight days before Britain declared war on Germany and Austria, Blast was a somewhat unfortunate title. However, the aesthetic conflict was not grounded on a fundamental aesthetic, philosophical – or indeed, political – conflict. It was initially just a contest for attention. Pound’s description of it as “a new futurist, Cubist, Imagist Quarterly,” when telling Joyce about Lewis’s project for a journal in April of 1914, implies an extremely eclectic program (Read, 26). Looking back on these early “culture wars” in Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis wondered if they were as innocent as he had thought: “Really all this organized disturbance was Art behaving as if it were Politics. But I swear I did not know it. It may in fact have been politics. I see that now. Indeed it must have been but I was unaware of the fact: I believed that this was the way artists were always received; a somewhat tumultuous reception, perhaps, but after all why not? I mistook the agitation in the audience for the sign of an awakening of the emotions of artistic sensibility. And then I assumed too that artists always formed militant groups” (my emphasis. 35). This comment reveals the assumption by Lewis that artist always formed an avant-garde – an assumption clearly shared by Pound and Eliot. Blasting and Bombardiering was written after Time and Western Man, Lewis’s attempt to sort through the ideological confusion that prevailed among artists in the pre-war period, a confusion that was not alleviated by the war, nor by the Peace of Versailles. Sadly, the war did remove some of the participants in the pre-war cultural conflicts. Within a year or so, T. E. Hulme and Henri Gaudier had both perished in the trenches with hundreds of thousands of less renowned combatants. Lewis (who saw combat), Marinetti, Pound, and Eliot (who did not) survived the war to carry on the pre-war cultural conflicts under new conditions. A brief digression on the aesthetics of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis will help, I think, to clarify the complex interaction between the

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three men, who regarded themselves as allies in the struggle to reconstruct the tired cultural and political world they had inherited – at least for a time. Lewis was the first to break ranks, attacking Pound as a “revolutionary simpleton” in Time and Western Man. But he was careful not to alienate Eliot, and Eliot continued to praise both Lewis and Pound in the pages of the Criterion, as well as publishing both of them in Criterion. Although Pound and Eliot certainly went separate ways on the political front, they maintained their friendship – even through Pound’s indictment for treason and incarceration at St. Elizabeths in Washington. Clearly they shared more than personal friendship. Part of what they shared was an aesthetic that underpinned their art and informed their political and cultural outlook, and that aesthetic was primarily expressivist, with perforce, a formalist component. Pound and Lewis were the principal figures in the Vorticist “movement” – if it deserves so grand a designation. Although it did develop an identity less scattered than the eclectic “Futurist, Cubist, Imagist” movement of Pound’s description, it remained a public relations venture more than a new direction in art. Pound’s principal attempt to define Vorticism in a talk given early in 1914 is not very helpful: “We are all futurists to the extent of believing with Guillaume Apollinaire that “On ne peut pas porter partout avec soi le cadavre de son père.” [“A man cannot carry the corpse of his father everywhere with him.”] But ‘futurism,’ when it gets into art, is, for the most part, a descendant of impressionism. It is a sort of accelerated impressionism” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 82). Pound understood Futurism, then, to be focused on the relation between the artist and the world, as is the case with Impressionism. Impressionism expects artworks to represent accurately the artist’s perception of the world at a particular time and place, or in a particular mood – as opposed to representing the world, as it is known (or believed) to be. But Pound misrepresents Futurism, whose focus is very different than Impressionism’s. Marinetti’s point of departure was the observation that the nature of the man-made world has changed through technological developments. In order to represent accurately that altered world, he believed that art must also change. The principal feature of the modern world for Marinetti was its speed, therefore futurist art must somehow represent rapid

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motion. (Hence Pound’s characterization of Futurism as “accelerated impressionism.”) Impressionist art, in contrast, aspires to represent the artist’s perception of the observed world, and, while Impressionist painting does represent the human environment, in contrast to futurist painting it shuns machines and architecture, and is contemplative rather than kinetic in mode. However, Pound is right that both movements justify their style on mimetic grounds. Pound, Lewis, and Eliot shared the futurist perception that the man-made world had changed profoundly and, indeed, was constantly changing. And they agreed that the new human environment required a new artistic style. But, adhering to an expressive, rather than a mimetic, aesthetic they believed that it is the artist’s task to assimilate the “new reality” creatively and imaginatively, rather than merely mimicking some of its more superficial aspects – such as speed and mechanical movement. And, since the assimilating imagination of the artist ineluctably incorporates the cultural past, they were not willing to chuck it out as the futurists were. Their aesthetic strategy – as undergraduate lecturers have stressed for generations – was to juxtapose the past with the present. An early articulation of this strategy is found in Eliot’s well known Dial review of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps: “The spirit of the music was modern, and the spirit of the ballet was primitive ceremony ... Whether Strawinsky’s [sic] music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modem life; and to transform these despairing noises into music” (“London Letter,” 453). Two years later, Eliot claimed the method for himself and his cohort of artists, in the famous Dial review of Ulysses: “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the

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immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Selected Prose, 177). Although commonly cited to illustrate the formalist tendency of the modernists, the remark is even more clearly expressivist. The “mythological method” is a means of expressing the modern world, which Eliot sees as lacking purpose and order.3 More than thirty years after the event Lewis protested Partisan Review’s claim that Pound was a prime mover in Vorticism: “That Blast was my idea, that I was the editor, that in short the whole show was mine, finally that vorticism was purely a painters’ affair (as imagism was a purely literary movement, having no relation whatever to vorticism, nor anything in common with it) need not worry you.” He also maintained that “It was with regret I included the poems of my friend Ezra Pound: they ‘let down,’ I felt, the radical purism of the visual contents, or the propaganda of same.” (April 1949, Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 491–2). It is understandable that Lewis wanted to correct Pound’s version of the history of Vorticism, for Pound’s aesthetic is at odds with Lewis’s. We have seen that Pound described Vorticism as “expressionism, neo-cubism, and imagism gathered together in one camp.” And he stressed the polemical nature of Vorticism as a reaction to Futurism, comparing their conflict to the nineteenth century clash between Symbolism and Impressionism – that is to say, between a quasi-mystical expressivist movement and a quasi-scientific mimetic one. Pound contrasted the futurist’s “curious tic for destroying past glories” with Vorticism’s lack of a “desire to evade comparison with the past.” The Vorticist’s are, he said, “wholly opposed to his [Marinetti’s] aesthetic principles” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 90). Pound invoked Kandinsky, the founder of abstract expressionism, as a fellow traveller with Vorticism, and also recruited James Whistler as a proto-Vorticist. Pound claimed for himself and his friends – Lewis, Eliot, Gaudier-Brzeska – the Romantic capacity to see into the heart of things, revealing the permanent and universal where others saw only the fleeting and local: “Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form. If sound, to music; if formed words, to literature; the image, to poetry; form, to design;

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colour in position, to painting; form or design in three planes, to sculpture; movement, to the dance or to the rhythm of music or verses” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 18). He compared art to algebra, which he called “analytics:” “The statements of ‘analytics,’” he says, “are ‘lords’ over fact. They are the thrones and dominations that rule over form and recurrence. And in like manner are great works of art lords over fact, over race-long recurrent moods, and over tomorrow” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 91–2). Although neither Eliot nor Lewis commented directly on these remarks of Pound’s, it is unlikely that they would have endorsed his aesthetic, which has more in common with Swedenborgian inspired Symbolism than with their more secular expressivism. Even though Pound’s notion of “primary form” sounds rather like archetypalism, it is distinct from archetypalism on two grounds: 1) he is not claiming that the artist has special access to a World Soul or Collective Unconscious – as his mentor, Yeats, believed; 2) Pound’s “primary form” is an empty vessel akin, as he argues, to algebraic symbols. Just as one can assign any value to the symbols on one side of an algebraic equation, so the insights contained in great works of art can be re-expressed in a manner appropriate to a different time and place. The general point is that while artistic revelation is permanent, artistic styles and modes can and do change. Instead of observing a noumenal realm in a Swedenborgian manner, Pound imagined the artist seeing into the soul of mankind, itself permanent and unalterable in its fundamentals, though – because it is responsive to external circumstances – infinitely malleable in externals. Art expresses/reveals those fundamentals – albeit encumbered with inessential details that require constant re-expression in each new “age.” Pound articulated this view most clearly in a part of “Affirmations: Analysis of the Decade,” not reprinted in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir: The vorticist is expressing his complex consciousness ... One, as a human being, cannot pretend fully to express oneself unless one express instinct and intellect together. The softness and the ultimate failure of interest in automatic painting are caused by a complete lack of conscious intellect. Where does this bring us?

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It brings us to this: Vorticism is a legitimate expression of life. ... To be civilised is to have swift apperception of the complicated life of today; it is to have a subtle and instantaneous perception of it, such as savages and wild animals have of the necessities and dangers of the forest. It is to be no less alive or vital than the savage. It is a different kind of aliveness. (“Affirmations II,” EPPP 2 5) In this remark we have Pound’s version of the unified or “integrated” sensibility that Eliot believed was lost in the seventeenth century. Pound found that unified sensibility to be exemplified in the Italian Renaissance and believed it was now manifest once again in some few exceptional souls in the early twentieth century. Recognizing that Modernists all adhered to a formalist and expressivist view of art explains how there could be fundamental disagreement about the content of the message without destroying their commonalty of purpose. Since they agreed on very little, they had to emphasize the formal aspect of art to the exclusion of content in their mutually supportive polemics.4 Moreover they really did agree that the transformation of the human environment that their cohort group had experienced required a transformation of artistic form. It was no longer possible, they believed, to pour new wine into old bottles. Even though they had divergent religious, political, social, and economic views, and dissimilar predilections, prejudices, and convictions – which were by no means incidental to their poetry or fiction – they could ignore those differences in their mutual self-promotion. So when Lewis spoke of “art behaving as politics,” he put his finger on an aspect of the cultural dynamics of the period prior to the Great War. As already noted, the avant-garde was persuaded that they stood on the threshold of a new age, a world in which everything was up for revision or rejection – not just aesthetic styles, but also scientific theories, political practices, and social and economic relations – all of which had been relatively stable in Europe since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 put an end to the momentum of the French Revolution. As a consequence everyone was jockeying for position – either to be on the right side when the “change” came about, or to play a role in determining its nature.

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real and virtual politics A remarkable feature of the “revolutionary” sentiments and attitudes of the aesthetic modernists is that none of them were much interested in communism, the pre-eminent revolutionary movement of their day. Not only were they not attracted to communism, prior to the Great War, they did not seem to regard it as likely to determine the future state of affairs in Europe or America. As we have seen, Eliot and Pound were inclined to see American popular democratic capitalism as the wave of the future – a future Eliot contemplated with alarm and which Pound welcomed with enthusiastic anticipation. Their neglect of communism – and their hostility toward it when they bothered to think about it – has earned them the label “reactionary.” That “reactionary” is a label from the communist lexicon, which makes very little sense outside of communist discourse, has not prevented literary scholars from applying it to our trio.5 From a communist perspective, a reactionary is one who seeks to retard the advent of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the eventual withering away of the state. Any who resist that inevitability are ipso facto “reactionary.” Given that we are now a century and a half beyond the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and that Marx’s apocalyptic view of history still awaits fulfillment, it might be time to cease categorizing all political postures as either reactionary or progressive as Marxists have long done. Even though Marxism is alive and well in the American and European academy, academic Marxists no longer adopt the label, nor do they seek fundamental political, economic, and social change but only cultural and psychological “consciousness raising.” And the term, “reactionary” has indeed been set aside in favour of versions of “politically incorrect,” a term of Marxist polemic from the fifties, when it was coined to replace “revisionist.” Revisionists were those Marxists who renounced violent revolution in favour of incremental reform by means of the ballot.6 The “politically incorrect” were any Marxists who failed to adhere to the party line promulgated by the Kremlin. In academic and journalistic usage today, it is applied to anyone who supports the status quo – which is variously characterized as “logocentrism,” “phallocentrism,” “Eurocentrism,” etc. Those who employ such terms often do not recognize

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the Marxist provenance of the term “politically incorrect,” but have fully embraced the ad hominem and accusatory style of paleoMarxist polemic. Much of the older critical assessment of the literary modernists has been from a cold-war perspective of a mutually hostile world duopoly of democratic capitalism confronting dictatorial Soviet communism; or – alternatively described – of egalitarian, socially conscious Marxism confronting elitist and exploitative capitalism. Michael North takes much the same view as mine in “Eliot, Lukács, and the Politics of Modernism,” arguing that the opposition of the political right and left in the interwar period tends to occlude their shared opposition to liberal democracy: “the convergence of right and left should suggest a theoretical realignment in which left and right join against a common enemy: the liberalism behind modern democracy and laissez-faire economics. For both conservative and socialist proponents of romantic anti-capitalism see humankind in collective terms rather than as individuals, both stress historical values over ahistorical principles, and both decry the effects of the capitalist economy” (174). The reactionary/progressive dyad, then, is no longer inescapable, and was always inappropriate for men and women born in the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century, as were Eliot (1888), Pound (1885), Lewis (1884), Hulme (1883), and Joyce (1882). While that cohort group of individuals born in the 1880s included many communist activists, the leading Marxist theorists and activists were of the previous cohort group or older – Sorel was born in 1847, Jaurès, 1859, Lenin, 1870, Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 – moreover none of them wrote in English. The most prominent political actors of our subjects’ cohort group were Benito Mussolini (1883), Josef Stalin (1879), F. D. Roosevelt (1884), Adolf Hitler (1889), and Charles De Gaulle (1890). To look at other historical figures whose birth lies within or just outside the decade we have: Bertrand Russell (1872), Winston Churchill (1874), Albert Einstein (1879), Martin Heidegger (1889), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889). Even this mere catalogue of names gives one some sense of the profound cultural, political, and intellectual turmoil in which our subjects found themselves.7 One could go on listing the birth dates of prominent players in the thirties and forties, but my point is not to propose some sort of

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astrological determinism based on time of birth. Obviously the place and circumstances of an individual’s birth determine his or her future prospects, conduct, and attitudes far more than birth date. But all of the literary artists under consideration here were males, born in middle class circumstances in Britain, the usa, or Canada.8 And, since we are concerned with intellectuals, it is important that the books to which they were exposed – at least the new ones – were necessarily drawn from the same stock. Obviously the world events that impinged on their lives were the same, as were the technological and social developments to which they were exposed. It might be helpful to have in mind what some of the technological developments were. Among those that came about either shortly before 1880, or shortly thereafter, are the electric light bulb, the phonograph and the typewriter (1878); the internal combustion engine (1879); motion pictures (1895); Marconi’s first radio broadcast – Morse code only – (1901); the Wright brothers’ powered flight (1903). The first audio broadcast, by Fessenden, was in 1906, but commercial broadcasting did not begin until 1920, being delayed by the war – just as commercial television, which was first achieved in the thirties, was delayed until after World War II. All of these technological innovations transformed a world dominated by steam and rail, into which our subjects were born and raised. They came to maturity in an electric world – for it was electricity that made possible telephones, telegraphs, motion pictures, the radio, and – with the electrically ignited internal combustion engine – the airplane and the automobile.9 The futurists, of course, explicitly celebrated these developments – in particular the speed of the automobile. Oddly Marinetti does not seem to have been impressed by the twentieth century’s harnessing of electricity, the sine qua non for all of the other developments – perhaps because he was not technically competent. The preface to the first Futurist Manifesto relates a wild drive through Paris streets in a powerful car, ending with an upset in a deep ditch from which the locals retrieve the automobile. Undaunted, Marinetti and his friends remount his mechanical steed, and with a lover’s ardour: “They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and

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there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins! And so, faces smeared with good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot – we, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth”(Selected Writings, 41). So far as I know, neither Pound nor Lewis ever learned to drive an automobile. Eliot did drive, at least occasionally. T.S. Matthews reports: “In August 1932 Eliot and his wife went in their tiny Morris, an uncertain performer, which Eliot drove uncertainly, from London to the Frank Morley’s farm for the christening of his goddaughter Susanna” (Great Tom, 108). In the years of their young manhood, automobiles were the toys of the wealthy, like Marinetti. On the other hand, Pound and Eliot were among the first major poets in English to compose on the typewriter (first commercially produced in the 1870s), and both exploited the new medium of radio – Pound, with disastrous results. Pound and his circle all agreed that it was the role of the artist to articulate a sensibility appropriate to this electric age – though, as we shall see, they did not agree on what the characteristics of that new sensibility would be. Pound was an early and uncompromising Pollyanna, articulating the role of the artist as an avatar of the twentieth century “renaissance” – or risorgimento – as he often labelled the advent of the new cultural dispensation. His early – indeed, premature – articulation of that view is due in considerable part to the fact that he was paying the rent through literary journalism. His principal outlet was Alfred Orage’s journal, significantly titled The New Age.10 He published a series of articles in that journal after the United States had entered the war, when it was clear that the allies would soon declare victory. In that series, “What America has to Live Down,” he addressed the political/cultural situation that he thought would prevail in the post war. He is no longer quite so confident as he was in “Affirmations,” written on the eve of the war. “at present,” he wrote in capitals, “the intellectual sees himself threatened by bolshevism on one side and the y.m.c.a. on the other, while the raging three-headed Kultur-bitch devastates things in the middle.” It is typical of Pound’s eccentric cultural commentary that he chose the Young Men’s Christian Association as a representative of the Christian status quo. It is not so clear just what he means by “the

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three-headed Kultur-bitch,” but his use of the German term and the triple headedness of the monster, suggests that he may have in mind the dominance of Hegelian philosophy in Germany, Britain, and the United States.11 This supposition is supported by his reference to “the speeches and essays of Missouri professors” to which he is indifferent. The intellectual’s task, he feels, is to attempt “computations for the salvage of some scraps of civilisation.” He goes on to list other things the intellectual does not want – “labouring men and their families mowed down by the machine-guns of militia subsidized by the capitalist;” he does not want “labour to bull-doze civilisation;” “he does not want bolshevism;” and he “does not want reactions into outworn superstitions” – by which he meant religious belief, in particular, Christianity (The New Age 23, 12 Sept. 1918, 314). Since he was hostile to Christianity, Pound was not attracted to Charles Maurras’ Action Française, a movement founded during the Dreyfus affair by self-appointed defenders of the Catholic faith and the honour of the French army. Maurras turned it into a Royalist movement, attaching the slogan, classique, catholique, monarchique to the Journal de l’Action Française. Although Pound does not name the movement, he denounces “French neocatholicism” in “What America Has to Live Down” as “a decadence, a decay; French modern mysticism, the poorest of mysticisms yet a ready trap for the transatlantic reader who is not forewarned for the menace behind it” (314). (The “transatlantic reader” he had in mind was no doubt his friend T. S. Eliot, who found much merit in Maurras, echoing his slogan in the 1928 preface to For Lancelot Andrewes where he declared himself to be “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”) Pound was militantly anti-Christian, uninterested in monarchy – though drawn to strong men – and indifferent to the fixed standards that classicism entails. Lewis falls between the two, often characterizing his views as classical but shying away from both Christianity and monarchy – though very much in favour of fixed standards. Although Pound is clear in rejecting both capitalism and the leading candidates in Britain to replace it at that date – Fabianism, Marxism, and Chestertonian Distributism – he does not articulate just what he thinks the politics of the new civilization should be. To

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get some idea of that, we have to return to the double series he wrote for the New Age in1912, during a lengthy visit to his native land after three years abroad (subsequently published as Patria Mia). There he rejected all “the fine dreams of empire, of a universal empire,” because “it came to no sort of civic reality, either in the high sheriffage of Charles the Great [Charlemagne], or in its atavistic parody under Napoleon”(49). If one remembers that World War I was essentially a war between the old imperial powers of Britain, France, and Russia on the one side and the even older imperial power of Austria and the rising imperial German state on the other, Pound’s rejection of “the dreams of empire” seems wise. (Italy’s ambivalence and lateness in entering the First World War reflects in part its non-imperial status – a lack Mussolini would later attempt to repair.) “On the other hand,” Pound observed, “the free cities now here, now there, contrived to hold out against the feudal system and are become the model for our present constitutional governments.” The principal virtue of the free city, in Pound’s view, seems to be that it is small enough to permit participatory democracy: “In principle it would seem that any scheme which demands the agreement of an infinite multitude of people before it can become effective is little likely to achieve itself” (49). Of course, Pound’s thoughts on the matter are informed by the example of the Italian Renaissance, which was, indeed, fostered by independent cities. He makes the parallel explicit: “if one will study the cinquecento minutely, one will perhaps conclude that the earlier renaissance had two things requisite, the first, indiscriminate enthusiasm; the second, a propaganda. I mean that and just that. There was behind the awakening a body of men, determined, patient, bound together informally by kindred ambitions, from which they knew that they personally could reap but little” (53–4, my emphasis). Pound’s political thought never really rises above this unsophisticated belief that coteries of like-minded, enlightened, and public-spirited individuals make history. For a time Eliot and Lewis shared Pound’s Pollyanna belief that a determined cadre of like-minded, enlightened men could reform society. All three of them devoted enormous effort to assemble the ideas and policies that would bring about a culture and civilization successor to the one in which they found them-

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selves. Unlike Marx, Engels, and Lenin, they did not contemplate any direct political action themselves. Nor, of course, did they contemplate the destruction of “bourgeois” culture. On the contrary, they hoped to renew it, and conducted themselves as heralds of the new dispensation, pointing out the new ideas and practices that would bring about the renewal. Despite their early cooperation in the culture wars, they were far from acting in concert on the political front. Pound and Lewis kept abreast of Eliot’s political and cultural theorizing, but neither of them endorsed it. After dismissing Pound’s political ideas in Time and Western Man, Lewis largely ignored Pound in his polemical publications. Eliot, for his part, remained respectful of Lewis’s views – though he did not share them. So far as Pound is concerned, Eliot was indulgent, finding Pound’s enthusiasm for Mussolini’s ideas and practices more embarrassing than anything else. And both Eliot and Lewis flirted somewhat with the Social Credit economic critique to which Pound exposed them, but they otherwise disregarded or mocked his political agitation. But even though our poets and novelist were not men of action like Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler, when those political actors came on the scene they employed rhetoric very similar to that of our literary figures. They, too, maintained that new social, cultural, and technological conditions called for a new political structure. Indeed, as already noted, Mussolini’s fascist party absorbed the futurist political organization that Marinetti had established in Italy after 1918. On the other hand, the “German Worker’s Party,” which Hitler turned into the Nazi party, had no similar literary or aesthetic antecedents. The rhetorical similarity and shared political opponents between himself and the fascists did not deceive Eliot, but Lewis was seduced by those aspects of fascism into endorsing Mussolini briefly – soon dumping him in favour of Hitler. Pound, as is well known, succumbed completely to Mussolini’s rhetoric and never seemed to perceive the mismatch between Mussolini’s speeches and his actions.

a modern renaissance Pound’s hope for an American renaissance – or “awakening” as he sometimes called it – was not just a passing phase. His three-part

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series in Harriet Monroe’s Chicago magazine, Poetry, entitled “Renaissance,” (February and March 1915) is essentially a quixotic program for an American renaissance, complete with analogies to the Italian renaissance of the quattro- and cinquecento: “The first step of a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing. We have had many ‘movements’ movements stimulated by ‘comparison.’ Flaminius and Amaltheus and the latinists of the quattrocento and the cinquecento began a movement for enrichment which culminated in the Elizabethan stage, and which produced the French Pléïade ... The romantic awakening dates from the production of Ossian. The last century rediscovered the middle ages. It is possible that this century may find a new Greece in China. In the meantime we have come upon a new table of values” (“The Renaissance I: The Palette,” 5, my emphasis). The choice of China as the twentieth century equivalent of the quattrocento’s Byzantium reflects Pound’s reception of the notes of the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa from Fenollosa’s widow in March 1914. Those notes set him on a life-long exploration of the poetic power of the Chinese ideogram and of Confucian political thought. (Fenollosa’s theory of the ideogram influenced Pound’s political thought as well as his rhetoric, but that is another story.) Confucius provided Pound with a philosophical model compatible with totalitarianism. What we need to notice is that Pound assigned to Fenollosa’s notes on China the same role as that played by the rediscovery of Greek philosophy for the Italian Renaissance, of Ossian (an idiosyncratic choice) for British romanticism, and of the rediscovery of the Middle Ages for the Victorians. The point to take is that Pound early on saw history as a cyclical story involving cultural degeneration, followed by a renewal triggered by the reception of alien or forgotten cultural values and practices. Pound believed that the role of the artist was to “discover” and then to facilitate reception of those renovative values and practices. Pound may well have picked up his notion of a new renaissance arising from the cross–fertilization of Western and Eastern culture from Fenollosa’s widow, whom he had met in 1910 at the flat of the Bengali poet Sarojini Naidu.12 Certainly Fenollosa held such a view. He had written in the Atlantic Monthly that the fusion of East

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and West “shall create in both hemispheres a far more rounded civilization than either has ever known.” Fenollosa thought that Japan, not Europe and America, would be the beneficiary of that transformation. “Through her temperament, her individuality, her deeper insight into the secrets of the East, her ready divining of the powers of the West, ... it may be decreed in the secret council chambers of Destiny that on her shores shall be first created that new latter-day type of civilized man which shall prevail throughout the world for the next thousand years” (quoted in Chisholm, 96). Painful as this assessment by an American is in the light of Pearl Harbor and Japanese excesses in China, Japan has nonetheless proven to be adept at adopting Western ways to its own culture and besting Europe and America in many commercial/industrial areas. Pound believed that he, Eliot, Lewis, Gaudier, Epstein, and Hulme, among others, represented just such “a body of men” as those – Valla, Ficino, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Pico de la Mirandola – who ostensibly generated the Italian Renaissance. His 1914 talk on Vorticism invoked such a “body of men”: “It cannot be made too clear that the work of the vorticists and the ‘feeling of inner need’ existed before the general noise about vorticism. We worked separately, we found an underlying agreement; we decided to stand together” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 93–4). In other words, Pound and his collaborators were responding to a Zeitgeist that embraced them all – the spirit of modernity. However, Pound was not a revolutionary in the sense that he wished to destroy or abandon the residue of the past: “There need be little actual change even in the existing machinery” (58). One of Pound’s recurrent slogans is “Make It New,” by which he does not mean that one should discard the artifacts and ideas of the past – as the slogan is often interpreted – but rather that they should be renovated in the light of new conditions and new possibilities. In the New Age piece “Affirmations VI: Analysis of the Decade,” also published in 1915, Pound listed the features of the “renaissance” of which he was herald and instigator. The first is “le mot juste” which he attributed to Flaubert via Ford Madox Ford. The second is his own idea of “the image,” a prototypical element of artworks that is permanent and transferrable between times and cultures. The third is an echo of Futurism, which he called a “sense of

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dynamics” and attributed to Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier, and Edward Wadsworth – all Vorticists (115–16). He expanded on this last element, drawing rather strained parallels between the Italian renaissance and the anticipated twentieth-century Anglo-American one, with clear echoes of futurist worship of the machine: I consider this one of the age-tendencies, springing up naturally in many places and coming into the arts quite naturally and spontaneously in England, in America, and in Italy. [The omission of Russia, France and Germany is worthy of note.] We all know the small boy’s delight in machines ... This enjoyment of machinery is just as natural and just as significant a phase of this age as was the Renaissance “enjoyment of nature for its own sake,” and not merely as an illustration of dogmatic ideas. The modern sense of the value of the “creative, constructive individual” ... is just as definite a doctrine as the Renaissance attitude “De Dignitate,” humanism. As for external stimulus, new discoveries, new lands, new languages gradually opened to us; we have great advantage over the quattro- or cinque-cento. (116) Pound went on, once again, to allude to his discovery of the Chinese ideogram through the Fenollosa manuscripts and offered it as equivalent to Crisolara’s recovery of the Greek Hermetic manuscripts in the service of Cosimo Medici – who then had the young Marsilio Ficino taught Greek so that he could translate them. It is painfully obvious that Pound’s list of the features of the new cultural dispensation is rather pathetic when placed against the cornucopia of achievement in art and science of the Italian quattrocento and cinquecento. Had he been more literate in philosophy and the social and physical sciences, and more alert to technological achievements, he could have generated a much more impressive list to support his thesis. The mention of such names such as Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers (movies), and the Wright brothers in technology; Henri Bergson, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead in philosophy; Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Max Planck in physics; Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim in sociology: J.M. Charcot and Sigmund Freud in psy-

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chology; Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in painting; Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schönberg in music – all of whom had already achieved breakthroughs in their respective fields by 1915 – is sufficient to highlight the eccentricity and shallowness of Pound’s cultural perceptions. However, had he been better informed, he would simply have had more reason to believe that his culture and civilization was on the cusp of a new age. Clearly Pound’s enthusiasms in the early years of the century were marginal to the intellectual revolution that was taking place in the first decades of the twentieth century. And his relative neglect of the First World War, raging as he wrote, is striking. Though, it must be admitted, the appalling casualties of the Somme and Verdun had not yet taken place. Despite the inconsistency and eccentricity of Pound’s cultural thinking in the immediate pre-war years, his expectation of changes in the culture and civilization of Europe and America were entirely justified – even though the changes did not conform to his predictions, and the forces he identified proved to be marginal at best. Pound’s choice of Confucius as his social and ethical guide is certainly more idiosyncratic than Eliot’s choice of Anglicanism as his guide. And Pound’s decision to adopt Mussolini’s putatively benevolent tyranny as a political institution is less acceptable than Eliot’s choice of Royalism. But it is difficult to find much good to be said about either man’s choices as likely solutions to the evident stresses and strains that produced the unprecedented violence of the twentieth century. Wyndham Lewis’s choices were hardly more successful. Although he shared a sense of a cultural crisis with his two friends, his enthusiasms only occasionally overlapped with theirs. An endemic inconsistency in Pound’s cultural speculation is that, despite his belief that the modern rebirth, like the Italian renaissance, would be engineered by a coterie of exceptional individuals, he exhibited a strong strain of historical determinism in his analysis of current events: “And this force of external stimuli is certainly not limited by ‘what we do;’ these new masses of unexplored arts and facts are pouring into the vortex of London. They cannot help bringing about changes as great as the Renaissance changes, even if we set ourselves blindly against it” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 116). Pound seems to waffle between confidence in the inevitability of the new civilization as a consequence of the current Zeitgeist and

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the belief that there must be an organized elite if the new order is to come about. An instance of this inconsistency is that, in contrast to the programmatic recommendations in “Renaissance,” his earlier series in Poetry, he drew back from a programmatic approach to reform in “Affirmations” and insisted on the necessity of “the individual impulse”: “The Renaissance sought for a lost reality, a lost freedom. We seek for a lost reality and a lost intensity. We believe that the Renaissance was in part the result of a programme. We believe in the value of a programme in contra-distinction to, but not in contradiction of, the individual impulse. Without such vagrant impulse there is no art, and the impulse is not subject to programme” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 117). That he identifies the Modernist’s program as the search for a “lost reality and a lost intensity,” despite his gestures toward the novelty of the human condition in the twentieth century suggests some confusion on Pound’s part. But the renaissance also saw its innovations as the revival of lost wisdom – hence the label (admittedly applied by eighteenth-century French historians). Pound’s Modernism was, in fact, a backward-looking enterprise – or, perhaps more accurately, a palingenetic one. It was, in short, a sort of cult of “rebirth.” Just as the Italians in the cinquecento looked back beyond the Middle Ages and Rome to rediscover Greek learning, the Europeans of the twentieth century would, Pound believed, look back beyond Socrates and Plato to the pre-Socratics and the Chinese. Nor was Pound particularly idiosyncratic in this respect. Nietzsche had begun the vogue for the pre-Socratics in The Birth of Tragedy; the Cambridge anthropologists, Jane Harrison and F. M. Cornford perpetuated it in England, and later Heidegger, a younger contemporary of our trio, reinvented Nietzsche in Germany. All of these thinkers saw their program as a rejection of the mainstream empirical tradition, which separates knower and known, in favour of a more intimate or participatory model of knowledge. The balance of Pound’s poetic career plays out this program. Where the Renaissance Italians had found new inspiration in Plato, Plotinus, and the whole range of neoplatonic thinkers, Pound casts his net more widely. To be sure, the Renaissance neoplatonists are retained in his new cultural dispensation, but he adds Confucius, Fenollosa, and the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius. Armed

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with this somewhat polyglot collection of new wisdom, Pound set out to articulate the new civilization in his untitled epic poem – still known today simply as The Cantos. Its first portions were published in the third year of the war, appearing in Poetry as “Three Cantos.” Although this particular start proved to be abortive, Pound persisted in his ambition to write an epic of the New Age, until he was no longer able to write. The last fragments of his monumental poem were published in 1968, four years before his death (in his eightyseventh year) in 1972, when the future of which he had dreamt was perhaps further away than ever. Pound’s ambition to write an epic dates from his youth. As a Masters candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, the twenty-year-old Pound wrote a poem while studying at the British Museum. He dedicated it to Katherine Ruth Heyman (identified only as K.R.H.), a pianist fifteen years his senior whom he had known since his undergraduate days at Hamilton College. The speaker is supposed to be looking down from the heavens on his inamorata. Its interest for this discussion is the persona’s reference to “that great fortyyear epic ... yet unwrit”: When I see thee as some poor song-bird Battering its wings against this cage we call Today, Then would I speak comfort unto thee, From out the heights I dwell in, when That great sense of power is upon me And I see my greater soul-self bending Sibylwise with that great forty-year epic That you know of, yet unwrit.13 Although these are the sentiments of a still-crass American youth writing in an archaic style that the mature Pound dismissed in a foreword to the 1964 reprint as “stale creampuffs,” he did, in fact, spend – not forty but fifty-three – years writing his epic of the new age waiting to be born. There is little in “Three Cantos” to indicate that they were written during the darkest days of the First World War. The disastrous Anglo-French Somme offensive was launched on 1 July 1916 and continued until 18 November. Despite the stubborn persistence of the British command, it succeeded in little more than slaughtering

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tens of thousands of men. Casualties – about half fatalities – were 520,000 for the British, 200,000 for the French, and 500,000 for the Germans. At the same time the German offensive at Verdun – which had begun earlier (on 21 February) – continued into December, claiming 550,000 French and 434,000 German casualties. The German Verdun offensive was no more successful than the Anglo-French Somme offensive. Such fruitless slaughter traumatized the European public, but seems to have had little effect on the expatriate Americans. “Three Cantos” begins with an address to Robert Browning, as the author of Sordello, a poem whose meditative narrative set in late medieval Italy Pound proposes to emulate in his epic. It was to jump about from the present to the distant pasts of Egypt, China, and Europe. Pound invokes those people, times, and places that he had already appealed to in the optimistic prose effusions we have examined: How shall we start hence, how begin the progress? Pace naif Ficinus, say when Hotep-Hotep Was a king in Egypt – ................ Say it was Moses’ birth year” Exult with Shang in squatness? There is not the slightest gesture toward the current horrors in Europe in the first of “Three Cantos,” and no more is there in the second and third. “Canto II” does turn to the martial theme proper to epic, but it is to the Spanish epic of resistance to the Moors, El Cid, and Lope da Vega’s play Las Almenas de Toro, rather than to the contemporary battles in France and Flanders. The third canto invokes the Elizabethan astrologer John Heydon and Marsilio Ficino before closing with a translation of part of Book IX of the Odyssey.14 No one reading the poem could guess that it was written in the midst of the greatest slaughter in history. Instead of the contemporary horrors, it reflects Pound’s pre-war preoccupation with an “awakening” of European civilization renovated by the co-optation of alien or forgotten cultural values. Despite the absence of the war from the poetry he wrote during the war, Pound was not indifferent to it. In the 1918 New Age series

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of articles, “What America Has to Live Down,” he castigated his countrymen for having been so slow to come to the aid of the British: “England is our noble ally, she has saved civilisation (along with France, Italy, Portugal, Japan, Serbia, Montenegro, Belgium) [all allies against Germany and Austria]. She has been perhaps more splendid, in so far as she could have kept out. So could we have kept out, to the eternal loss of our position, as England to the ultimate loss of her Empire” (“What America Has to Live Down,” The New Age 23, 5 Sept. 1918, 297). Such a call to arms is rare in Pound’s wartime prose. He was primarily concerned with the cultural consequences of the war, with how it would affect his project for a renovated civilization along the lines he had outlined in the prose works we have examined. As we saw in the first chapter, Pound’s post-war reaction was ambivalent to say the least. His lament in “Mauberley” V that so many died “For an old bitch gone in the teeth/ For a botched civilization” is more a “farewell and good riddance” to that “botched civilization,” than an elegy for the dead. And the preceding poem IV similarly focuses on the duplicity of national leaders who conducted the war, as much as on the suffering of the combatants: Died some, pro patria Non “dulce” non “et decor” walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy; usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places. The reference to “usury” reflects Pound’s recent discovery of the radical economic theories of Major Douglas, the engineer founder of Social Credit. We will return to that topic in a later chapter. Here the point I want to make is that the Great War did not represent for Pound – nor for Eliot – the great watershed in European civilization that it did for Lewis and many other Europeans. It was a regrettable incident in the march of events toward a glorious future, but not a turning point.

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The turmoil that followed the war was not confined to the brutal civil war unleashed in Russia by the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. There were unsuccessful revolutions and uprisings elsewhere as well: the Spartacus revolt in Germany, Bela Cohen’s uprising in Hungary, and D’Annunzio’s freelance seizure of Fiume15 on behalf of Italy. All – except the Bolshevik Revolution – ended in failure for the insurgents. Pound does not react to the first two, but does take note of the last in another of his series of commentaries on current affairs, “The Revolt of Intelligence,” which purported to show the way to a better future. (The series extended to ten parts – appearing between 13 Nov. 1919 and 18 March 1920 in The New Age.) One would have expected Pound to endorse the adventure of a fellow artist acting in the political arena. (Gabriele D’Annunzio was a well-known Italian poet and playwright.) But in the first number of the series Pound disapproved of the adventure. He did, however, contrast D’Annunzio favourably to Woodrow Wilson, the American president whose “Fourteen Points” called for a post-imperial Europe made up of independent states based on the principle of self-determination and the removal of trade barriers. Pound exhibited some disapproval of D’Annunzio’s habit of haranguing crowds from balconies, but saw the Fiume incident as a paradigm of coming conflicts between free spirits and stifling bureaucracy: “The D’Annunzio matter is almost wholly a duel between the type D’Annunzio and the type Woodrow Wilson. D’Annunzio is, unfortunately for our little demonstration, not a pure type, but in the main he represents art and literature (with rhetorical detriments, mais passons). He represents the individual human being, the personality as against the official card-index and official Globe Wernicke system. And this being so, Fiume represents and precedes more important, if less melodramatic, conflicts between art, literature, intelligence, and card-index and officialdom” (The New Age 26, 13 Nov, 1919, 21, my emphasis).16 D’Annunzio’s “impurity” was specified in the third entry of the series (18 Dec. 1919) as his nationalism: “It is a misfortune that D’Annunzio has followed the same error, yelling ‘Italia’ in Fiume, instead of standing simply for civilisation, by the contention, perfectly sustainable, that Italy represents a finer stage of civilisation than Jugo-Slavia [sic]” (“Revolt of Intelligence III,” The New Age, 18 Dec 1919, 107).

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Pound will hold consistently to this preference for imperialism over nationalism throughout his troubled career. In Pound’s case it derives from a species of “internationalism” that foresaw the triumph of a transatlantic civilization in which the United States of America will inevitably play a leading role. As we have seen, this was also Edgar Ansell Mowrer’s view in This American World. The French sociologist André Siegfried was another who predicted the triumph of the American style of civilization in his 1927 book, America Comes of Age: A French Analysis. Siegfried’s assessment of American civilization in 1926 is remarkably similar to Pound’s in 1912 and 1914 – even to labelling it a “re-awakening”: “Having first cleared away all hampering traditions and political obstacles, the American people are now creating on a vast scale an entirely original social structure which bears only a superficial resemblance to the European. It may even be a new age, an age in which Europe is to be relegated to a niche in the history of mankind; for Europe is no longer the driving force of the world. The old European civilization did not really cross the Atlantic, for the American re-awakening is not, as is generally supposed, simply a matter of degrees and dimensions; it is the creation of new conceptions” (Siegfried, 347, my emphasis). Even though Eliot is the only one of our subjects who is known to have read Siegfried, the French sociologist is worth some attention, for he offers a fascinating witness on the inter-war period. His remarks on the anticipated future hegemony of America in the wake of the European nations having bankrupted themselves in the war uncannily anticipated the state of affairs in the twenty-first century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the only rival to American world dominance after World War II: In this [American financial dominance] lies the danger that America may feel she can do as she likes without consideration for any one else, she can act as arbitrarily as she pleases. She can strangle whole peoples and governments, or she can assist them on her own terms. She can control them and indulge in the pleasant sensation of judging them from her superior moral height, and then impose her verdict. This is bad not only for Europeans, who are humiliated, but also for Americans; for their sovereign independence makes them less and less willing to accept international obligations. Always being sought after as

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the rich are by the poor, and always giving without receiving, tends to destroy any consideration for the borrower, such as arises from free exchange on an equal footing. They are gradually and surreptitiously assuming the role of a missionary bailiff or of an ambitious man in search of power, and from this may arise a new and subtle imperialism unlike anything we have known before. (227) That these remarks fit the current state of world affairs (in 2010) so well, should give us pause.17 It is very easy to judge the errors of the men of 1914 in the light of what we know, nearly a century later, about subsequent political, military, social, and technological developments. Although we cannot put ourselves in their shoes, the shoes we are fated to wear in the first decades of the twenty-first century are not much more comfortable than those they wore in the first decades of the twentieth. Between the First and Second World Wars observers were no more able to foresee what the future would hold than we are today between the Cold War and whatever future conflict awaits us – Islamic terrorism, a resurgent China, or perhaps a “rogue state” triggering a world conflict. Like Pound in 1920, Hardt and Negri in 2000 professed to know what the future holds, predicting that “Empire” and “multitude” will replace nations and citizens: “The twentieth century theorists of crisis [they cite Weber and Wittgenstein] teach us, however, that in this deterritorialized and untimely space where the new Empire is constructed and in this desert of meaning, the testimony of the crisis can pass toward the realization of a singular and collective subject, toward the powers of the multitude. The multitude has internalized the lack of place and fixed time; it is mobile and flexible, and it conceives the future only as a totality of possibilities that branch out in every direction. The coming imperial universe, blind to meaning, is filled by the multifarious totality of the production of subjectivity. The decline is no longer a future destiny but the present reality of Europe” (380). The stock market crash of October 1929 and the subsequent world-wide depression, which persisted for most of the following decade, forced everyone – optimists and pessimists alike – to rethink their predictions, and perhaps their hopes as well. But before we consider the sorts of revisions of opinion in which our

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principals engaged during the Depression, we need to look at how English – and some French – observers viewed developments. The most important of these, for our purposes is Wyndham Lewis, but T. E. Hulme and Julien Benda are also important witnesses for our story on the war and the inter-war period. Their response to events does not follow quite the same curve as that of the Americans expatriates.

iii The War as a Symptom of Cultural Decay He is representative of the present generation, sick with its own knowledge of history, with the dissolving outlines of liberal thought, with humanitarianism. He longs for a narrow, intolerant, creative society with sharp divisions. He longs for the pessimistic, classical view. And this longing is healthy. T. S. Eliot, from his 1917 review of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence When the war broke out, all the reactionaries in England and France began to speak of the danger to democracy, although until that moment they had opposed democracy with all their strength. They were not insincere in so speaking: the impulse of resistance to Germany made them value whatever was endangered by the German attack. They loved democracy because they hated Germany; but they thought they hated Germany because they loved democracy. Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction, 1916

Of the men under consideration here who collaborated in the cultural wars of 1912 to 1914, only British and French nationals served in the war. Two of them – T.E. Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska – were killed. Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth (both Vorticist), Richard Aldington (who married Pound’s undergraduate sweetheart, Hilda Doolittle) and Herbert Read (who later collaborated with Eliot on The Criterion) – even Ford Madox Ford, despite his age – all served and survived. Pound memorialized those of his friends who served in the war in canto XVI (published in 1925 and modelled on the Purgatorial section of Dante’s Commedia). The preceding canto is generally called the “Hell canto,” hence Pound’s portrayal of the war in his epic poem is commonly read as a painful purgation of a damned civilization:

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And because that son of a bitch, Franz Josef of Austria ... And because that son of a bitch Napoléon Barbiche ...1 They put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench dug through corpses With a lot of kids of sixteen, Howling and crying for their mama, ............................. And Henri Gaudier went to it, and they killed him, And killed a good deal of sculpture, And ole T.E.H. he went to it, With a lot of books from the library, ............................. And Wyndham Lewis went to it, With a heavy bit of artillery, The canto goes on to list several more of Pound’s acquaintances who served in the war, including Ernest Hemingway, before transcribing a letter in French, written at the front by the sculptor, Henri Gaudier. Gaudier, writing from Verdun, complains of the stench, filth, incompetence, and death – citing the (exaggerated) figure of five million dead – and also expressing empathy for the German troops who, he says, attack to get food. Pound closes the canto with an anecdotal account of the October Revolution in Russia (he based his account on a lecture he heard the American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, give in Paris in 1924.) That Pound placed his only extended poetic attention to the 1914–18 war in a canto he identified as a Purgatorio strongly supports the notion that he regarded the war as a turning point – as the last convulsion of the old regime. Of course, he was not alone in that belief. As we have seen, the term “New World Order” was widely applied to the immediate post-war world – though what ensued was very little like order, and not very new. Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union was trumpeted as the vindication of capitalism in the 1990s, in the 1920s the democracies regarded their victory as vindication of their political and economic structures, making social and economic reform even more difficult to achieve than it had been before the war. The Wilsonian principle of self determination was selectively applied, as Niall Ferguson notes:

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“none of the peacemakers saw it as applying to their own empires – only to the empires they had defeated” (161). Nor was the peace a triumph for economic equality. Many states instituted repressive measures against labour unions, which they justified by the bolshevik threat. And the victors continued in their old colonial ways, carving up the Ottoman Empire – primarily to the advantage of Britain and France, and much to the irritation of the Italians. As Ferguson puts it, though the Peace of Versailles “spelt the end of four dynasties and the creation of ten new independent nation states, the end of the war did not mean the end of empire. The British and French empires grew fatter on the remains of their foes’ domains” (184). (We are still, in 2010, reaping the consequences of the victor’s cavalier disposition of the Turkish possessions in the Middle East.) But the failure of the New World Order belongs properly to a later chapter, where the challenge of fascism and nazism to the democracies and to the Soviet Union will provide the context for the developing ideological postures of our principals. The communist revolutions in Germany and Hungary of 1919 were quickly put down. And, although D’Annunzio’s proto-fascist seizure of Fiume of the same year lasted a little longer, by and large, by 1920 Europe seemed safe from any radical change of political structure. But that calm was brief. Mussolini’s overthrow of the fragile Italian democracy in 1922 forced everyone to re-examine the status quo. As a symbol of the epochal change that fascism purportedly represented, Mussolini introduced a new calendar, taking 1922 as year one of the Era fascista. Although no one had any illusions about the dictatorial nature of Mussolini’s regime, many in the democracies admired in for its supposed efficiency – “making the trains run on time,” as S.S. McClure famously claimed in his 1928 New York debate with Vincenzo Nitti on the merits of fascism (Nitti took the negative position). The lack of democracy in Italy was tolerated in the democracies on the grounds that the tyrannical nature of fascism was essentially a domestic Italian matter. However that attitude did not last as fascism gained admirers – Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound among them – and similar militant conservative movements arose in the democracies: Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in Britain, and Howard Scott’s Technocracy movement in the usa.

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Action Française in France long predated fascism, but it shared its authoritarian nature and gained some credibility from Mussolini’s early successes. In the 1920s intellectuals looked back to the pre war in search of the causes of the debâcle of World War I, and forward apprehensively toward an uncertain future. Lewis described the mood, looking back from 1952: “Then came World War I, etc. ... Python-like the world required some time – a few years – to digest what had somehow got into it. When it had, there was a great change. There was a very steep plunge indeed from that deceptive [pre-war] freedom to speculate, to criticize, to create, down to what amounted to the beginnings of dictation. We plunged from a social vacuum into a scene packed with partisans, where everyone was saying the same thing in the same tone of voice, like a chorus of parrots ...” (The Writer and the Absolute, 37–8). For Lewis, far more than for Eliot or Pound, the Great War represented a watershed; on either side of which the world was completely different. He spent the rest of his life attempting to come to terms with that new world, which he mostly disliked and sought to amend.

julien benda Probably the first book-length assessment of the consequences of the war to appear was Julien Benda’s Belphégor, mostly written before 1914, but not published until late in 1918. Pound admired it and recommended it to Eliot, who was “much pleased with it” (Letters, 392, 13 July 1920). A month later (10 Aug. 1920) Eliot wrote to his Harvard friend Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial, telling him that “Benda’s book is ripping ... I hope you can print it in full” (Letters, 401). (Thayer did print a translation – in four monthly instalments from September to December 1920.) Wyndham Lewis also read it, and in Time and Western Man opined that Benda described “exactly the same process” of decay as Spengler did in Decline of the West, but “with as much disgust as in the case of Spengler it is pointed to with gusto” (283). Benda nowhere explains his title, but Belphegor is a malign Assyrian divinity, considered a devil by the Hebrews. He seduces people by promising them ingenious inventions which will make them rich and is said to have been the Devil’s ambassador to France. His name means

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“Lord of the Opening.” The title alone, then, tells us that Belphégor belongs with Nordau’s Degeneration as a Cassandra-like prophecy of coming disaster if nothing is done to reverse current trends. Pound reviewed both Belphégor and Benda’s 1912 polemic Bergsonisme, ou une Philosophie de la Mobilité, in the Athenaeum. He approved of Benda’s dismissal of Bergson and William James, whom he lumped together as men who hold “the belief than any wheeze that works is God’s verity.” (Of course, that is a caricature of their views.) He endorsed Benda’s complaint that American pragmatism (that is, the philosophy of C.S. Peirce and William James) offers “great solace to democracy and a great convenience to democratic governments as we know them” – a feature of pragmatism that was sufficient ground for Pound to dismiss it. He found Benda’s “analysis of the kindred diseases of journalism, mysticism, subjectivity, in their various somewhat inflated exponents – Barrès, Bourget, Claudel, the later Maeterlinck, Corlette” to be accurate. And he endorsed Benda’s hostility to democracy and religion (“Foreign Literature,” 62). Pound also praised Benda in The Dial: “if Benda is not the rich loam in which a new literature may germinate he is at any rate a fine disinfectant ... if one has had any sort of Faith in France one can but be refreshed and delighted when in the midst of a rather depressing jungle one finds this clearing of common sense, this place open to wind and light” (“The Island of Paris: A Letter,” 106). Eliot, too, approved of Benda’s analysis of the decadence of Western civilization, writing to Bonamy Dobrée (12 Nov. 1927): “Oh I suppose the only thing to be done about W[estern] Civilisation is to think as clearly as one can. The first thing is to understand the disease, if there is a disease. Benda is rather sound in this way” (qtd in Tate, 75). At least one contemporary observer thought that Benda and Eliot were on the same page. Ramon Fernandez (whom Eliot later published in Criterion) aligned Eliot’s early social commentary with Benda’s in his assessment of Eliot’s career: “Nothing seems to have distinguished Eliot’s thought from that of M. Lasserre and of M. Benda – the same horror of minor mysticism, the same care for rational argument and focus.”2 Fernandez was writing in 1925 – two years before Eliot’s baptism in the Anglican faith – hence he was speaking of Eliot’s early, pre-Anglican commentary – in particular, the essays in The Sacred Wood, where Eliot cites Belphégor with

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approval, remarking: “Much of his analysis of the decadence of contemporary French society could be applied to London, although differences are observable from his diagnosis” (“Imperfect Critics: The French Intelligence,” The Sacred Wood, 44–5). Benda deplored the adherence of contemporary French art to the doctrine of what he called “mystic participation with the essence of things,” a property he attributed to the influence of Bergson (Belphégor, 3). That attribution would have rung true with Eliot, who had long since exchanged his early enthusiasm for Bergson’s vitalism for a deep-seated hostility towards it. According to Benda the doctrine of “mystic participation” required artists to avoid the distortion that the intellect allegedly imposes on everything it touches. Benda agreed with Descartes that such “deformation” is the glory of the intellect, rather than a mark of its inauthenticity (16–17).3 Anticipating Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and Individual Talent,”4 Benda complained in Belphégor that French writers are preoccupied with “internal,” psychological matters (he said matters of the “soul”), which lead to a focus on the personality and emotions of the artist to the exclusion of his ideas and his technical facility – a tendency that Benda claimed also penetrated philosophy and science (48–58). Unsurprisingly, he found such a tendency to be exemplified by Symbolist works, targeting in particular Maeterlinck’s symbolic drama (63). This internalization of art leads, Benda complained, to a focus on style and manner to the exclusion of substance and sense, an attribute that he believed reflects a dependence on emotion to the exclusion of intellect (68–75). These themes and attitudes are the same as those that occupied Eliot in the immediate post-war years. Clearly Eliot’s reading of Benda helped him to formulate his own social criticism and aesthetic priorities. Of course, Eliot did not concede that his own focus on style and manner represented the triumph of emotion over intellect, having argued in “Tradition and Individual Talent” – written the year before he read Benda – that for him such a focus represented an escape from emotion and personality, rather than a submission to it. There are other aspects of Benda’s case that did not please Eliot. An example is Benda’s mocking of Bergson’s contention that artworks can expand (“dilater”) the consciousness, independently of

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their intellectual content, through emotional uplift. Despite his apostasy from Bergson, in his 1929 “Dante” essay Eliot articulated a view of aesthetic appreciation very similar to that which Benda attributes to Bergson. Eliot famously declared there “that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” (Dante, 8). And this was no casual remark, for he repeated it four years later in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: “If poetry is a form of ‘communication,’ yet that which is to be communicated is the poem itself, and only incidentally the experience and the thought which have gone into it” (30). Another disagreement between Benda and Eliot was the former’s hostility toward Charles Maurras. Even though both Benda and Maurras championed classicism over romanticism, Benda has nothing good to say about Maurras and the Action Française. Eliot did not overlook Benda’s hostility to one of his heroes, remarking to Herbert Read: “At the end of Belphegor [sic] an appendix has some acid words about the romanticism of the anti-romantics, which is palpably aimed at Maurras” (Letter of 11 Dec. 1925, Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria). No doubt Benda’s hostility toward Maurras has as much to do with the latter’s anti-Semitism as with his aesthetic principles. In any case, that seems to have been Eliot’s view, for in the same letter, he draws attention to Benda’s Jewishness: “As for religion, I should say he was very much the Jew, no doubt a very emancipated Jew, but perhaps still responsive to le mysticisme juif.” Eliot’s remark is very odd, given that the whole of Belphégor is an attack on mystical tendencies in contemporary letters. It reflects the casual bigotry toward Jews that was widespread amongst middle-class Christians early in the century – whether Protestant or Catholic, English or American, French or German. Not surprisingly, Eliot’s enthusiasm for Benda’s analysis of the cultural malaise did not survive his conversion. Just months after his baptism (on 23 Feb. 1928), Eliot published a review of Benda’s next book, La Trahison des Clercs, in the Times Literary Supplement.5 La Trahison des clercs is an attack on French intellectuals (les clercs) for having entered into partisan politics, where Benda believed they have no proper place. It is quite a different book than Belphégor’s assault on contemporary art in France. Eliot gave his review the title “Culture and Anarchy,” invoking Matthew Arnold’s famous 1882

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work of the same title in which Arnold called for abandonment of religion in favour of humanistic culture in advanced societies. Eliot’s review articulates his new Anglican perspective, one hostile to the humanist perspective shared by Arnold and Benda. Nonetheless, Eliot still endorsed the negative aspects of Benda’s analysis – in particular his focus on the unfortunate dominance of emotion in European culture. Here is Eliot’s summary of Benda’s criticism, with which he agreed: “These passions and the passions of nations, have much more to do with pride than with interest. War, whatever economic or practical interests may tend to bring it about, is sustained by the pretence of a war of cultures, by the pretence that one form of civilization is being maintained against another. The national emotion, cause of so much hatred between nations as well as the class emotion and the race emotion, has become a kind of mysticism (there is no English equivalent for la mystique)” (my emphasis).6 Eliot’s review reveals something about the motives of his conversion that is not often remarked upon – that Christianity offered a pan-European perspective as a counterforce to the triple threats to European peace and prosperity: nationalism, class-hatred, and race-hatred.7 Arnoldian humanism had offered the same thing, but Eliot was persuaded of its inadequacy in the face of the challenges of the post war. In Eliot’s view Anglican Christianity offered a means of blending intellect and emotion that the Arnoldian religion of art did not, since the latter’s strategy of preserving the trappings of religion in the absence of belief is, not unreasonably, seen by Eliot as a suppression of intellect. Lewis’s criticism of current cultural trends in his early studies of cultural decay, The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man, was heavily influenced by Belphégor, which he cited at length. In The Art of Being Ruled he said of Benda: “No one has explored the regions of post-war decay so brilliantly, if superficially, as Julien Benda. And the pages in his Belphégor, where he describes the organized hatred of the intellect existing everywhere today in our society, are so just that I can do no better than quote from them.” He then cites Belphégor: “One of the most curious traits of this society [is] its hatred of the intelligence ... This violent dislike, conscious and organized ... constitutes something entirely new in French society ... [It] will be the mark of our time in the history of French civilization” (221). In order to explain this phenome-

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non, Benda distinguished two broad types of sensibility. The first, friendly to the intellect, is the “plastic” and “musical.” It is grounded in touch and sight (which Lewis regarded as the definite and clear senses respectively). The second, friendly to the emotions, is grounded in hearing, smell, and taste (the indefinite and indistinct senses).8 The distinction Lewis drew in Time and Western Man between Bergsonian “time philosophy” and the stable world of spatial dimensions is essentially the same.9 Benda directly confronted the accusation – not uncommon at the time – that the cultural degeneration he deplored arises from the influence of Jewish mysticism and irrationality on Christian Europe. Benda admitted that the cultural tendencies he attacked could be found in Jewish thinkers – Bergson among them. He called such tendencies “Alexandrian” – a thirst for the indistinct, the indefinite, and the mysterious, which he said, collapses the distinction between subject and object. So far as Jewish thinkers are concerned, Benda divided them into two camps – Hebrews and Carthaginians, that is, devotees of Jahweh and of Belphégor respectively. He illustrated the Hebrew tendency by Spinoza, and the Carthaginian by Bergson. In this way Benda argued that the European Jew does not represent a particular kind of intellectual attitude and influence, but rather a range of attitudes and influences, much like any cultural or ethnic group. Moreover, he pointed out that even if one attributes the unwelcome “Alexandrian” influence to particular Jews – such as Bergson (as he does himself) – one must admit that the nominally Christian French society would not have accepted such an “alien” doctrine if it were not predisposed to it (Belphégor, 155–8). Despite his disagreements with Benda, Eliot quoted and endorsed a passage from Belphégor in The Sacred Wood (1920): “As for society itself, one could foresee that the care which society takes to experience emotion through art, will in its turn render the thirst for this pleasure more and more intense, the attempt to satisfy it more and more covetous and more perfected. The day can be foreseen when French high society will once more repudiate the little support that it gives today to ideas and organisations in the arts, and will no longer be interested in anything but the high jinks of actors, the representations of women or children, the howling of poetry, the ecstasies of fanatics ...” 10 Given that some reviewers characterized The Waste Land as just such meaningless “howling”

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when it appeared less than two years later, Eliot’s approval of Benda’s remarks is a little ironic. In addition, Lady Rothermere’s bankrolling of The Criterion would give the lie to Benda’s prediction that high society will repudiate the support it has given to “ideas and organisations in the arts.” Those ironies aside, the point to take from Eliot’s and Lewis’s reading of Benda in1920 is their agreement that European culture was in decline as a consequence of a privileging of emotion over intellect. Clearly Eliot believed that the critical and aesthetic activities of himself and his friends, Pound and Lewis, offered a potential therapy for that cultural pathology.

war Of course, all stripes of political opinion – from communism through liberalism to fascism – regarded the war as the result of pre-existing political, socio-economic, and cultural conditions. But they differed on what the relevant conditions were. Eliot, Lewis, and Benda were in agreement that the causes were cultural and intellectual, almost to the exclusion of social and economic conditions. Left-wing thinkers – even moderate ones like Angell and Brailsford – believed that the principal cause of the late war – as of all recent wars – was to be found in the socio-economic conditions created by unfettered capitalism. Liberal thought – as represented by Woodrow Wilson and J. M. Keynes – believed wars were primarily caused by nationalism – either by the rivalry of sovereign states like Britain, France, and Germany (Keynes) – or by the frustration of the national aspirations of subjected peoples (Wilson). On such an analysis, no radical social, economic, or cultural changes were required to secure a permanent peace, only the abandonment of nationalist rivalries and the recognition of legitimate national aspirations – conditions more difficult to realize than either man recognized. Extreme conservatives – like Maurras, Mussolini, and Hitler – were prone to exacerbate national rivalries on grounds of the putative superiority of their own society and culture, and hence, to celebrate the glories of armed conflict – either in heroic defence of sacred soil (Maurras) or in glorious conquest of “inferior” people and societies (Mussolini and Hitler). In contrast to the attribution of bellicosity to capitalist competition for markets and resources of leftists such as Angell and Brails-

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ford, the liberal-democratic view was that the late war was caused by a failure of capitalist values in those nations held responsible for instigating the war – the sclerotic Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires and the belligerent Prussian Reich. H. G. Wells famously expressed such a view in his 1914 book The War That Will End War and returned to the topic in the 1916 autobiographical novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through – though the latter book criticized the allies as well. Wells’ solution was much the same as that proposed by Angell and Brailsford – an international body dedicated to the preservation of peace. Of course, such a body was established after the war as the League of Nations. The liberal democratic strategy hoped to preserve the status quo and preserve the peace by means of this new, trans-national democratic institution, avoiding the wholesale reorganization of society proposed by communism. Fascism also presented itself as the defender of the status quo so far as the economy and society were concerned. It required only a replacement of allegedly inefficient democratic government with supposedly efficient dictatorial government. However Italian fascism also glorified war and conquest. The Wilsonian view that wars were caused by imperial frustration of nationalist sentiment – as manifest in the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand by the Serbian nationalist Gavril Principe – was, of course, influential, but few Europeans shared Wilson’s view. After all, they had experienced centuries of national rivalries, not infrequently erupting into armed conflict, so they tended to regard nationalism itself, rather than the imperialist frustration of nationalist aspirations as the principle cause of war. The lack of public protest in response to the eager expansion of the empires of Britain and France into the territories of the former Ottoman Empire, emphatically illustrates the prevalence of that attitude. As Ferguson puts it in The War of the World, “The British and French empires grew fatter on the remains of their foes’ domains” (184). Despite Wilson’s support for the idea of an international body as a guarantor of peace advanced by Angell, Brailsford, and Wells, the American Senate refused to ratify American participation in the League of Nations. Eliot was not hostile to such institutional solutions, but he had very little faith in them, regarding them as band-aid solutions for what was, in his view, a cultural, not a political, crisis. He had found-

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ed The Criterion in hopes of administrating to the cultural malaise he saw afflicting Western civilization – as well as of advancing his career. “It is the function of a literary review,” he wrote in a sort of manifesto in the last issue of the journal’s first year (1922–23), “to maintain the autonomy and disinterestedness of literature and at the same time to exhibit the relations of literature – not to ‘life,’ as something contrasted to literature, but to all the other activities, which, together with literature, are the components of life” (“Notes,” Criterion 1, July 1923, 421). As we have seen, Eliot took a long view on the political scene in his August1927 “Commentary,” where he unequivocally expressed the view that “a new European consciousness” was required to meet the current malaise. He invoked “the European idea,” and rejected both socialism/communism and liberal humanism – as represented by the League of Nations – as solutions. This European idea, he claimed, arises from “a new feeling of insecurity and anger” occasioned by the Russian Revolution, which made Europeans realize that Western Europe is “(in Valéry’s words) a small and isolated cape on the western side of the Asiatic Continent” (“A Commentary,” The Criterion 6, Aug. 1927, 97–8). Although neither Benda nor Maurras are among the analysts invoked by Eliot, he retains Benda’s perception that the problem facing Europe is that its policies and speculation are governed by emotion more than by reason. He does not specify what the cultural awakening will be, but given that he wrote this “Commentary” shortly after his baptism as an Anglican, one can guess what it would be. In this respect he is on the same page as Pound and Lewis, though the nature of his “awakening” is unlike theirs. Nonetheless, Eliot’s posture here is still hopeful – more Pollyanna than Cassandra. The enthusiasm for Belphégor that Pound, Eliot, and Lewis expressed was based on Benda’s concern with the place of the arts in modern society. Eliot drew attention to that feature of Benda in his 1926 review of La Trahison des clercs “The Idealism of Julien Benda”: “he puts a problem which confronts every man of letters; the same problem which Mr Wyndham Lewis has solved for himself in his own way by writing his recent books; the problem of the scope and direction which the activities of the artist and the man of letters should take to-day” (485). Benda’s “solution” that the man of letters (his clercs) should refrain from entering into political debate was not

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the route chosen by our three. Lewis published a steady stream of political commentary – often ill considered; Eliot pontificated from his Criterion pulpit, and Pound published political books like Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and maintained a steady stream of articles and “letters to the editor” on political and economic themes. In La Trahison Benda lamented the situation in Europe in the twenties when there was hardly anyone who was not touched, or believed himself to be touched, by racial, class, or nationalist passion, passions that had been elevated to a level never before seen. He does not turn to the role of intellectuals until Part II, where he defines the clercs as those men who do not seek practical ends, but who confine themselves to art or science, or metaphysical speculation. Although Benda appears to mock them for acting as if their “kingdom is not of this world,” he identifies their “treason” as having abandoned that disinterest by adopting political passions themselves. In his review of La Trahison, Eliot rejected Benda’s claim that the intellectual ought to remain au dessus de la mêlée. While conceding his point about race, class, and nationalism, Eliot believes that “no one is sure what class is; every one is conscious of nationality and race ... but no one is sure who or which or what is what or which race; or whether race is divided north and south or east and west or horizontally; or whether any of us is anything but a mongrel” (“The Idealism of Julien Benda,” 486). His general point is that confusion and uncertainty of identity, of belief, and of loyalty – rather than political passion – is the hallmark of the contemporary European. Thus, Eliot adds, “the meddling of men of letters in practical affairs, to which M. Benda objects, is only one phenomenon of a general confusion” (487). Moreover, he points out that even the most disinterested of philosophers, such as Henri Bergson, can excite political passions in his readers, citing Charles Péguy as an example of such influence (488). In the end, Eliot rejects Benda’s plea that intellectuals avoid taking sides in contemporary political conflict: “The only moral to be drawn, therefore, is that you cannot lay down any hard and fast rule of what interests the clerc, the intellectual, should or should not have. All you can have is a standard of intellect, reason and critical ability which is applicable to the whole of a writer’s work” (488). Lewis was less hostile to La Trahison than was Eliot, though his comments came decades later, in his intellectual autobiography,

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Rude Assignment, and are perhaps modulated by his own unhappy experience as a social and political commentator. Lewis noted that Eliot was inclined to “complete assent” with Benda’s “general criticism of the political passions of the present time” (“The Idealism of Julien Benda,” 485). Lewis agreed, remarking that Benda’s “denunciation was, and is, fully justified” (32). But he denied that Benda was hostile to intellectual activism in general – as Eliot believed – claiming that his (Benda’s) target was “the false intellectuals” alone, “the bellicose professors and bloodthirsty men of letters who were such a novel feature of the years immediately preceding world war I” (34), men Benda discussed in the first two parts of the book. But Eliot was not so forgiving, returning again and again in his “Commentaries” to the issue of the role of the man of letters – always with Benda’s apostasy in mind. A typical example is the following from his “Commentary” for April 1929 in which he dismisses the Fabians: “Meanwhile, in spite of Monsieur Benda, men of letters will go on worrying about the principles of politics. They are in fact the only men who do worry about its principles. Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, though birds of the same nest, do not always agree; and the pair of them seem to have little in common with Mr. Wyndham Lewis ... Yet they are all worried about politics, and they all incline in the direction of some kind of fascism ... The aging Fabians, like the solitary artist, are more and more sympathetic towards some kind of autocracy.” This is a rare instance of Eliot bending the truth to aid a friend. Wells certainly never endorsed fascism – as Lewis did – and it is hard to believe that Shaw had much good to say about Mussolini.11 Of course, Eliot’s characterization of fascism as an “autocracy” is not an egregious slur. Mussolini himself stressed the authoritarian nature of his regime, even while insisting that it was democratic: “In rejecting democracy fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism [sic], the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress. But if democracy be understood as meaning a régime in which the masses are not driven back to the margin of the State, then the writer of these pages has already defined fascism as an organised, centralised, authoritarian democracy.” (“Political and Social Doctrine” in Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions 23). Presumably an “authoritarian democracy” is one in which citizens are periodically invited to

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endorse the leadership but are not offered the choice of an alternative leadership – as was the practice in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Despite his unabashed authoritarianism, Mussolini was still well regarded in the democracies in 1929 – especially in the United States, where he had been running a series of ghost-written12 personal bylines for United Press since January 1927. (Mussolini’s first career was as a journalist, but he had no English). His (also ghostwritten) autobiography appeared in eight instalments in The Saturday Evening Post beginning in May 1928, coming out as a book later in the year (Scribner’s). S. S. McClure (1857–1949), the aging editor of the famous muckraking journal McClure’s Magazine, brokered the autobiography. As noted above, McClure, a fan of Mussolini, debated Vincenzo Nitti on the merits of fascism on 11 March 1928 in New York, coining the maxim that Mussolini made the trains run on time. The onset of the Depression after the Stock Market crash of October 1929 did not diminish the admiration of some Americans for Mussolini’s fascism. Hearst, who had been running the United Press pieces in his papers, decided in 1931 to buy directly from Mussolini, signing an agreement with him on 24 April of that year (Cannistraro, 359–61). These details help to give some perspective on how fascism was perceived in the democracies before Hitler’s election in 1933, before the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in1936, and before the infamous Munich appeasement of September 1938. In short, fascism was not perceived in the 1920s as the face of evil – either by the man in the street, by the media, or by the leaders of democratic nations. The ideological bogeyman most feared by the citizens and governments of capitalist democracies in those years was bolshevism. fascism offered a more palatable alternative to captains of industry than bolshevism, if the capitalist, democratic status quo in Britain, France, and the usa could not be maintained – as many feared it could not. Niall Ferguson claims that the public at large in Britain (he ignores French public opinion, probably because it was pacifist) were supportive of collective security through the League, and were neither pacifist nor supporters of appeasement. According to Ferguson, the appeasers were principally men of power and influ-

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ence, though their motives were mixed. Sir Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, for example, was in regular communication with his German opposite number, Hjalmar Shacht, and was inclined to believe that moderate opinion in Germany would hold Hitler in check (337). Ferguson goes on for several pages to list English men and women who warmed to Hitler. He eventually concedes that there were presentable reasons for such sentiments: “Among the many arguments for appeasement perhaps the best was this: that even as late as 1939 Hitler had done nothing to compare with the mass murder that Stalin had unleashed against the people of the Soviet Union ... Such was the Establishment consensus” (344). Lewis fits neatly within that “Establishment consensus.” Ferguson’s comparison of British rightwing sentiment with that of the left also tends to palliate Lewis’s error: “Many a Tory grandee may have knowingly shut one eye to the realities of Nazi rule, but an even larger number of people on the British Left had shut both eyes to the horrors of Stalinism – and they took much longer to open their eyes” (Ferguson, 344). Ferguson is little interested in Mussolini, but the Italian dictator was in power a decade before Hitler, and certainly had attracted more favourable attention in the democracies. For its admirers, Italian fascism represented discipline – among other less attractive elements. Eliot and Lewis both regarded discipline as desirable on philosophical grounds, understanding it as the regulation and control of the emotions by the intellect. (Pound was far less enamoured of discipline.) Of course, the critics of fascism were repelled by its appeal to men and women’s baser motives – class envy, xenophobia, belligerence, and so forth – as well as by its authoritarian nature, and its resort to violence as a political tactic. Its admirers were willing to overlook those shortcomings in the name of order – as indicated by the title of Jean Cocteau’s 1926 book Rappel à l’ordre. Eliot’s most perspicuous expression of this aspect of his political conservatism is found very early – in his 1916 review of Aristocracy and Justice by the American humanist Paul Elmer More. Although they later became epistolary friends, neither man knew the other at this date, when Eliot was committed neither to conservatism nor to Anglicanism. Nonetheless Eliot’s characterization of More’s conservatism fits perfectly Eliot’s later views: “The fundamental beliefs

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of an intellectual conservatism, that man requires an askesis, a formula to be imposed upon him from above; that society must develop out of itself a class of leaders who shall discipline it; distrust of the promises of the future and conviction that the future, if there is to be any, must be built upon the wisdom of the past – this is what we find in all of Mr. More’s writings” (“An American Critic,” 234). In 1916 these are More’s views, not Eliot’s, but that he came to approve of them is amply demonstrated by his later correspondence with More (between 1928 and 1937).13 More’s brand of conservatism is based on the perception that self-discipline (“askesis”) founded on a code of conduct to which civilized men and women adhere, can properly be extended to the political sphere. Such a political creed is unsympathetic to a liberalism founded on laissez-faire economics, in which the “discipline” of the market and “enlightened self-interest” replace both governmental regulation of private behaviour and ethical constraints. The lack of an autonomous ethical component in liberalism was a component in all three of our subjects’ hostility to it. And the failure of laissez-faire economics to deliver general prosperity, or even a tolerable sufficiency in the 1930s offered an opportunity to gain popular support for a disavowal of liberal, capitalist democratic political structures in favour of one based on ethical principles instead of economic ones. The ethical version of governance that Eliot and Lewis recommended was collectivist. Collectivism assumes that the welfare of the community is often at odds with the desires and self-interest of the individual, and therefore restraints on individuals are required. Socialism, communism, and fascism are all collectivist ideologies, as is British Toryism. While collectivism does not entail authoritarian government, it tends in that direction. Of course, all models of government – even anarchism – include some constraints on individual behaviour – as in criminal codes and commercial regulations. Communism proposed to replace both enlightened selfinterest and ethics with the class-consciousness of the proletariat – at least after the disappearance of classes permitted the withering away of the state. Fascism for its part relied on nationalist sentiment and the Führer Prinzip – that is, blind obedience to the leader who was supposed to embody the spirit of the nation, the Volk. Eliot and Lewis dreamt of government by an enlightened and ethically supe-

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rior elite (such as themselves). In Eliot’s case, his vision of the ideal state was one in which a “Company of Christians” would be the arbiter of ethical standards to which the governing classes would adhere – a theocratic system not unlike that currently prevailing in Iran, but without a formal institutional embodiment of the Company of Christians. Pound’s motives were much the same as those of Eliot and Lewis, but he was far less cautious, and much more given to simplistic solutions. The kindest thing that can be said about his political thought is that it was – at least in the beginning – well meant. He naïvely supposed that if men of intelligence and good will were heeded, good governance would result, largely confining his energy to the denunciation of the fools and knaves who currently ruled the world. An instance is the following remark appearing in William Carlos Williams’ journal, Contact: “In a world politically governed by imbeciles and knaves, there remain two classes of people responsible; the financial powers and the men who can think with some clarity” (1 Summer 1921). His political journalism is addressed to those “who can think with some clarity.” Unfortunately, Pound was not such a person – so far as politics and economics are concerned. Although wiser and more perspicuous in his political observations than Pound, Lewis was no more able to devise a plausible model of governance than were Pound and Eliot. A typical comment from him is the following absurd recommendation from The Art of Being Ruled (1926): “For the sake of the ruled – that is my argument – the ruler should be forced to rule by force, ostensibly, responsibly, as does (to the great disgust of our western liberals) the soviet or fascist government” (94). The agency that is to force the ruler to rule wisely is left unidentified, but the “force” Lewis no doubt had in mind was a moral imperative – perhaps exerted by a mandarin class of intellectuals like himself or Eliot’s Company of Christians. Such a government by the wise and virtuous is technically an aristocracy, and is what all three supposed was the best form of government. Of course, they had no use for existing hereditary aristocracies, but neither would they have favoured a “meritocracy,” unless one could inject an ethical component into “merit.” Unlike Eliot, Pound and Lewis did without any appeal to divine sanctions, and held true to Enlightenment principles, relying solely on the light of reason.

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revolution Eliot and Lewis had met through Pound’s agency sometime in 1914 or 1915. Lewis and Pound, for their part, had met through the agency of Ford Madox Ford, probably in 1910 or 1911 (Meyers, 31–3). Since Lewis enlisted shortly after he met Eliot, their friendship did not develop until after the war. As for Pound, despite their collaboration on Blast, their friendship was never as warm as that between Eliot and Lewis – or between Eliot and Pound. Writing from France while on tour with Lewis in 1920, Eliot told Sydney Schiff that he had “enjoyed Lewis’s company very much, and have had a great many conversations with him. I do not know anyone more profitable to talk to” (Eliot to Lewis on 31 Jan. 1925 in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 150). Although they disagreed on many points, a shared distrust of popular democracy remained the foundation of their political analysis, and Eliot continued to respect Lewis’s political acumen. An index of Eliot’s respect for Lewis is his toleration of the latter’s recurrent tantrums. When Lewis complained – in a typically combative letter of January 1925 – of Eliot’s failure to print something Lewis had submitted to The Criterion, Eliot tried to mollify him, declaring that he wanted Lewis to appear in “every number of The Criterion” (The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 150–1). But their diverging political and religious views eventually drove them apart. In 1928 Eliot confessed to Herbert Read: “I could only work with Lewis to a very limited extent, as the things he wants (if I have any notion of what he does want) are probably quite different from mine [sic]” (Letter of 14 Jan. 1928, Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria). But just two months earlier, Eliot had given Lewis’s rambling attack on contemporary philosophical and aesthetic trends in Time and Western Man favourable notice in Criterion, remarking that his own views were “given a greater precision by the appearance of Mr. Wyndham Lewis’s book, Time and Western Man,” and adding: “Mr Lewis is the most remarkable example in England of the actual mutation of the artist into a philosopher of a type hitherto unknown.” (“Commentary,” Criterion, November 1927, 387). Eliot cited Lewis’s attack on “Time Philosophy” with approval in several places during 1927 (the year of publication of Time and Western

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Man) and in 1928. He did the same for Lewis’s Shakespeare study, The Lion and the Fox – also published in 1927. Although they drew apart philosophically, Eliot and Lewis remained on good terms right up to the latter’s death in 1957. Indeed, all three – Pound, Eliot, and Lewis – remained on good terms throughout the ups and downs of their very different careers, conflicting political loyalties. and divergent beliefs. As already noted, World War I was a personal watershed for Lewis as well as for world history. That was not the case for his American friends, neither of whom served in the war – although Eliot did try to enlist after the United States entered the war on 6 April 1917. In Rude Assignment Lewis looked back at those years, emphasizing the technological changes that coincided with the War: “Why 1914–18 is so dense and towering an obstacle for anyone whose life it traverses admits of no simple answer, for this wall was as complex in its composition, as in its origins. To take the least of the innovations coeval with it first, the very aspect of everyday life was radically altered. The internal combustion engine alone was a great revolution. It changed the streets of our cities into roaring machine-age gullies, literally from one day to the next, and broke into the remotest beauty-spot with a bang. Then the great development of the radio, the cinematograph, and the telephone all can be integrated in this almost mystical barrier” (38). Of course, those technological innovations mostly preceded 1914. Nonetheless Lewis and his contemporaries moved from a world of horses, steam, and telegraph to one of automobiles, airplanes, and radios. Philip Larkin catches the sense of that watershed in his nostalgic poem of 1960, “mcmxiv”: Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word – the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages, Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again. (Collected Poems 127–8)

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As we have seen, Marinetti and Pound (to a lesser extent) welcomed the change Larkin characterizes as a loss of “innocence.” Eliot and Lewis deeply regretted it. They would have spoken of an optimism betrayed, rather than an innocence lost, but all perceived the “Great War” as a watershed. The technical and social changes alone would have been enough to create deep societal disruption, but Lewis thought the war brought even more pressing disturbances: “such novelties as these could not alone have produced this Great Divide. Europe was turned upside down politically as well as physically, and these revolutions were simultaneous. First, there was the collapse and disappearance of the Central Empires [Austria and Germany], while the great German state became a chronically embittered slum. Great Britain was fatally shaken, economically and morally. The French people deeply demoralized and resentful: lastly – and above all – the Russian Empire of the Czars had gone up in smoke and out of its ashes a new religion had been born at once hard-boiled and puritanic, savagely militant and proselytizing” (Rude Assignment, 38–9). Lewis is the only one of the three to articulate so clearly and dramatically the profound disruption that he and other Europeans felt in the immediate post-war years. Perhaps Pound and Eliot did not feel it so keenly because they were expatriate Americans. In many ways, pre-war America had already accommodated itself to the telephone, the cinema, and the automobile (Henry Ford’s “Model T” went into production in 1909), and in any case, Americans tend to assume that change is inevitable, and usually benign. Eliot was a typical American in accepting the inevitability of change, but idiosyncratic in his conviction that some change was for the worse. Lewis – though born in Canada and raised to the age of seven in the United States – was culturally and emotionally thoroughly British. The personality and predilections of the eponymous character in Lewis’s first novel, Tarr, fit Lewis himself admirably: “If you really want to saddle me with that Swiss [Rousseau], I will help you. My enthusiasm for art has made me fond of chaos. It is the artist’s fate almost always to be exiled among the slaves. The artist who takes his job seriously gets his sensibility blunted. He is less squeamish than

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other people and less discriminating” (Tarr, 237). Like Tarr, Lewis was the reverse of squeamish in his cultural commentary, and in his personal relationships; he struck out at any and all who displeased him by their opinions or their tardiness in recognizing and rewarding his genius. He was also always anxious to be the first to endorse or condemn any particular cultural or political trend, rushing into print with extended commentaries on every twist and turn in the political and cultural roadway. Although Tarr’s remark sounds very Nietzschean, Lewis was vehemently opposed to Nietzschean proclivities, as he makes clear in the preface to Tarr (1918 version): In Europe Nietzsche’s gospel of desperation, the beyond-lawman, etc. has deeply influenced the Paris apache, the Italian Futurist “litterateur,” the Russian revolutionary. Nietzsche’s books are full of seductions and sugar-plums. They have made “aristocrats” of people who would otherwise have been only mild snobs or meddlesome prigs; as much as, if no more than, other writings, they have made “expropriators” of what they have made an Over-man of every vulgarly energetic grocer in Europe. The commercial and military success of Prussia has deeply influenced the French, as it is gradually winning the imagination of the English. The fascination of material power is, for the irreligious modern man, almost impossible to resist. (13) (The preface is dated 1915, though the novel was not published until 1918, and was mostly written prior to the war.) The novel itself – though set in Paris – has several German characters – all portrayed very negatively, reflecting the distaste for German society and culture Lewis had developed during his years on the continent (1902–08, mostly in Paris). Despite that bias, he later welcomed the Nazi regime as a viable alternative to “bankrupt” democratic capitalism – an approval he had briefly granted to Mussolini’s fascism in The Art of Being Ruled, but soon withdrew. Lewis began an analysis of what he regarded as the twentiethcentury’s dominant ideology in 1923, projecting a massive book with the working title The Man of the World. It was to be a polemic against modern tendencies. However it grew like Topsy, and he was obliged to break it up into four works: two discursive books – The

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Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927); and two novels – The Childermass (1928) and The Apes of God (1930) (Letters, editor’s note 137). These four works represent his major effort to identify the “spirit of the age”– and to propose an alternative to it. According to his biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, they were well received by British reviewers who apparently approved of Lewis’s views, which Meyers describes as those of “a determined authoritarian who disliked liberal, pacifist democracy, and advocated military efficiency and a stable society” (133–4). I would demur from the allegation that Lewis advocated military efficiency, but the rest of Meyer’s assessment seems just to me. The American political scientist Lyford P. Edwards panned The Art of Being Ruled in The American Journal of Sociology. Edwards had just published his own analysis of the current state of affairs, The Natural History of Revolution (1927), a work that is still well regarded. His brief review was dismissive: Anything that Wyndham Lewis writes is likely to prove fantastic and bizarre to the verge of lunacy. But his mind is as keen as it is cranky, and as capacious as capricious. The Art of Being Ruled is a type of book, which has become fairly numerous of late. It belongs to the failure-of-democracy series. It is not “An analysis of the structure of modern society,” as its jacket alleges, though it shows the impact of industrialism on political thought. It is a passionate potpourri, a bundle of brief and vehement little essays on all sorts of subjects: Rousseau and Nietzsche, Proudhon and Sorel, Chesterton and Shaw, arctic shamanism and the Roman exoletos, fascism and the matriarchate, hypnotism and the city-state of antiquity. All these topics and very many more are to be found in the chapter headings. It is a bit like old Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. These excurses are the book. Lewis becomes stimulating when he wanders away from his subject and roams at will through the modern intellectual woods. His defense of fascism is vitiated by his inability to discriminate between temporary post-war reaction and the long-time trend toward democracy. His ten pages on Chukchee shamans prove that he can popularize ethnology as well as Dr. Will Durant popularizes philosophy. The title of the book is the best indication of the peculiar intellectual flair of its author. (858, my emphasis)

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Edwards’ assessment of the book as one of the “failure-of-democracy” type, which had “become fairly numerous of late,” supports my contention that the end-of-an-era posture adopted by Pound, Eliot, and Lewis was common between the wars. And Edwards’ view that all these “failure-of-democracy” studies were short-sighted reactions to the shock of the First War is in accordance with my reading of Eliot and Lewis – though Pound seems to have been less discouraged by that catastrophe. Despite the currency of such views in the popular press, Edwards is representative of contemporary academic opinion in regarding them as cranky and ill-informed. However, it is clear in hindsight that Edwards underestimated the threat to democracy represented by fascism and communism, and that Lewis’s Cassandra-like apprehension was more justified than Edwards’ Pollyanna optimism. And like everyone else, Edwards failed to foresee the world-wide economic depression of 1929–39, and the great world conflict of 1939–45 that was – at least in part – a consequence of it. Nor, of course, did he or anyone else foresee the ensuing Cold War. Indeed, no one in the 1920s wanted to think about the possibility of war, or of economic depression. If one takes a longer view, the eventual defeat of the Axis powers and the much later collapse of the Soviet Union tends to support Edward’s opinion that “a long-time trend toward democracy” would prevail – even though much of the world still awaits its arrival eighty years – and counting – later. Despite Edward’s negative review, Jeffrey Myers says that The Art of Being Ruled “had an excellent press,” being admired by Aldington and Osbert Sitwell among others (The Enemy, 133). In The Art of Being Ruled (1926) Lewis is very supportive of both Lenin’s bolshevik rule in Russia and Mussolini’s fascist regime, infamously concluding that “some form of fascism would probably be best” – that is, better than communism – for “anglo-saxon countries as they are constituted today”(320). A little later he describes Mussolini’s fascism as an improved version of Marxism, and repeats his recommendation that it be adopted by Anglo-Saxon countries: “fascismo is merely a spectacular marinettian flourish put on to the tail, or, if you like, the head of marxism: that is, of course, fascism as interpreted by its founder, Mussolini. And that is the sort of socialism that this essay would indicate as the most suitable for anglosaxon countries or colonies with as much of sovietic proletarian

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sentiment as could be got into it without impairing its discipline, and as little coercion as is compatible with good sense” (320–1).14 Lewis soon dropped Mussolini in favour of the far more “efficient” Adolf Hitler, but at this date he found Mussolini’s rhetoric very much to his taste. It is worth noting that Lewis was well in front of Pound in his enthusiasm for Mussolini. Pound’s first pro-fascist work is Jefferson and/or Mussolini, written early in 1933 but not published until 1935. By the time Pound adopted Mussolini, Lewis had dropped him in favour of Hitler. It is worth noting that Lewis and Pound were not nearly so far out of step with opinion in Britain in these early post-war years as is commonly assumed. According to Niall Ferguson, “Aristocratic grandees, colonial press barons and society hostesses alike found that they genuinely sympathized with aspects of Hitler’s policy, including even its anti-Semitism ... Lord Londonderry, Secretary of State for Air from 1931 to June 1935, who also happened to be Churchill’s cousin, was so keen on Hitler that he wrote an entire book [Ourselves and Germany 1938] defending the Nazi regime, including its anti-Semitic policies.” Another was Viscount Halifax who visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and “liked all the nazi leaders, even Goebbels.” Still another was the Duke of Westminster, who “inveighed against the Jews and ... said that after all Hitler knew that we were his best friends” (Ferguson, 338). Ferguson could have added the Duke of Bedford, later Marquis of Tavistock, who was a Social Crediter, a Nazi sympathizer, and author of The Fate of a Peace Effort, which recounts his effort to broker a peace with Hitler in early 1940. (Tavistock is the model for Lord Darlington whose butler, Stevens, is the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel Remains of the Day.) Ferguson goes on to detail Nazi sympathizers at Oxford, in the bbc, Parliament, and London society (339). In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis first articulated the opposition between permanence and clarity in human affairs (of which Lewis approved) on the one hand, and fluidity and obscurity on the other (of which he disapproved). This tendency to an either/or opposition dominates the political thought of all three artists. Prior to the post–World War II vogue of Existentialism and the Cold War vogue of Derridean Deconstruction, few intellectuals would have disagreed with Lewis’s preference for permanence and clarity. For

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Lewis – as for Cocteau – authority is the corollary of permanence and clarity in human affairs – both intellectual and political – as opposed to Eliot’s less totalitarian “self-discipline.” Fewer were willing to follow Lewis there. No doubt Lewis’s qualified admiration of Mussolini derived in part from a shared Sorelian component in their political thought. But despite a penchant for rhetorical violence, Lewis objected to the real thing: “The tearing of men’s hearts out of their bowels, or the stamping on the pulp of their entrails ... is not the type of action that appeals to me ... I found myself in the blood-bath of the Great War, and in that situation reflected on the vanity of violence. So that side of Sorel seems to me too literary” (Art of Being Ruled, 122). But, like Eliot, he shared Sorel’s antipathy toward the romantic celebration of emotion. Sorel’s most read work, Reflections on Violence, appeared in 1908. It was extremely influential – and controversial – for its endorsement of violence as an appropriate tool in political struggles. Eliot reviewed the 1916 English translation (by T. E. Hulme) in The Monist and endorsed Sorel’s negative assessment of current political action. He warmed especially to Sorel’s hostility to romanticism. The substance of the book, Eliot wrote, “is a very acute and disillusioned commentary upon nineteenth-century socialism, and upon the politics of the French democracy for the last twenty five years.” Eliot noted “the influence of Renan and Bergson” on Sorel, and endorsed his (Sorel’s) “violent and bitter reaction against romanticism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our time” (review of Reflections on Violence, 478). Eliot did not comment directly on the matter of violence as a political tool. Instead he bemoaned Sorel’s “scepticism”: “But the scepticism of the present, the scepticism of Sorel, is a torturing vacuity which has developed the craving for belief” (478). Rather perceptively, Eliot identified an elitist component in Sorel that foreshadows Sorel’s influence on such conservative actors as Mussolini and the Nazis: “He hates the middle classes, he hates middle-class democracy and middle-class socialism; but he does not hate these things as a champion of the rights of the people, he hates them as a middle-class intellectual hates. And the proletarian general strike is merely the instrument with which he hopes to destroy these abominations, not a weapon by which the lower classes are to obtain political or economic advantages” (478, my emphasis).

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Looking back to The Art of Being Ruled in Rude Assignment, Lewis described his state of mind in 1925 as just that which I claim possessed Pound and Eliot: “I had recognised that a great revolution was under way; that an entirely new epoch had begun, for England and for the world.” While the new epoch was certainly occasioned by technological change and marked by political ferment, Lewis still, in 1950, believed that revolution “had its roots in those ferments of which Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism were intellectual expressions” (184–5). The roots of the revolution, then, in Lewis’s view, were neither technological innovations nor the collapse of established social practices but the “ferments” of new styles of works of art. That he viewed the arts as causes rather than symptoms of social ferment is in conformity with postmodern views, even though Lewis shares little else with postmodernism. Nothing expresses the “liberal” – that is individualistic – cast of Lewis’s thinking more starkly than the preface to The Art of Being Ruled, where he quoted Proudhon (via Sorel) to the effect that only “a few dozen” readers are necessary to make “the theoretic conviction of socialism pass into the general consciousness.” Along the same line, he told his prospective readers that his book “is not written for an audience already there, prepared to receive it, and whose minds it will fit like a glove. There must be a good deal of stretching of the receptacle, it is to be expected. It must of necessity make its own audience” (13). In this respect Lewis belongs to a tradition of political literature that stretches back to the Puritan partisan John Milton, whose Paradise Lost was addressed to “fit audience, though few.” Of course, Milton had in mind an audience of like-minded Puritan regicides, whereas Lewis hoped to create his audience. Despite what he said in Rude Assignment, the principle target of Lewis’s polemic in The Art of Being Ruled is what he called the “spirit of revolution.” (In Time and Western Man he broadened his target to include philosophy and science as well as politics. In that work he labelled his bête noir “time philosophy,” but the target is really the same: the modern privileging of change, perceived as progress, over the persistence of achieved wisdom.) His task was to discover something permanent that will serve the admittedly altered circumstances of the twentieth century. In this respect, he, Pound, and Eliot are on the same page – though they chose different com-

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ponents of achieved wisdom from the past. And Pound was not alarmed by rapid superficial change, as Lewis was. In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis rather idiosyncratically sees the leading antagonists in the post-war struggle for men’s minds and hearts as the competing communist schools – the Mensheviks (gradualists) led by Karl Johan Kautsky and the bolsheviks (revolutionaries) led by Vladimir Ilych Lenin. Lewis’s opposition of these two is in accordance with the Marxist scholar Leszek Kolakowski’s characterization of their relationship: “Kautsky’s basic conviction that socialism could not prevail until economic conditions were right for it, and his belief that socialism entailed democracy combined to make him firmly opposed to the October Revolution and the Leninist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Kolakowski, Main Currents, 394). Lewis got his knowledge of Kautsky from an article in the Labour Weekly (25 April 1925), entitled “Kautsky vs Lenin” in which Kautsky is reviled for his petit-bourgeois opportunism. Kautsky’s gradualist views are expressed most forcefully in his 1918 work, Demokratie oder Diktatur. In Kolakowski’s words, it was Kautsky’s prescient view in that work that if “the Leninists were able to keep their ‘Tartar socialism’ going long enough, it would infallibly result in the bureaucratization and militarization of society and finally in the autocratic rule of a single individual” (Main Currents, 5). A more common view of the ideological competition at the time was to see it as three-sided: between 1) the status quo of capitalist liberal democracy, 2) fascism (the authoritarian version of capitalism) and 3) socialism/communism. Lewis considered Mussolini’s fascism to be “an extreme form of Leninist politics” (The Art of Being Ruled, 71), rather than its contrary, as both the fascists and the communists publicly maintained. Given Lewis’s later hostility to communism, it is worth underlining the equivalence he saw between Leninist communism and Mussolini’s fascism in1926. What he found attractive in these regimes is their authoritarianism, their claim to be committed to nurturing the welfare of their populations, and their hostility to liberal democracy. Lewis returned again and again to the theme of authoritarianism. The issue of the day, he believed, was the opposition between democracy, which he characterized as “rule by a show of hands,” and dictatorship, which he characterized as “rule by the most vig-

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orous and intelligent” (The Art of Being Ruled, 72–3). His enthusiasm for authority blinded him to the facts on the ground, permitting him to declare that “the present rulers of Russia or Italy ... are imbued with a ‘creative,’ compassionate emotion for the human being.” He believed that such a compassionate concern expressed itself in a benign paternalism: “the wise ruler ... would see quite well – if I am correct, has seen – that there must be a master. Some one or other has to assume responsibility for the ignorant millions” (89). He went still further, arguing that individual freedom is something that no one actually wants: “People ask nothing better than to be types – occupational types, social types, functional types of any sort. If you force them not to be, they are miserable ...” (The Art of Being Ruled, 151). These views are compatible with Sorel’s and are likely derived from him. Zeev Sternhell points out, “Already in Sorel, the idea of class embraced not all of the industrial proletariat, but only an activist elite ready for every sacrifice” (The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 252). Kolakowski points out that this Sorelian elitism is also found in Lenin’s version of communism, in which the elite is identified with the Nomenclatura of the party (Main Currents, 758–9). In this remark on elites and “types,” Lewis echoed the principal political innovation of fascism, derived from Sorel’s syndicalism – the replacement of territorial or geographic representation with representation by trade and profession, called “corporatism.” Though Mussolini never acted on the corporatist agenda – nor did any other fascist regime – it remained a rallying point of the right. Instead of a voter’s constituency being determined by where he or she lives, trade or profession would determine it. D’Annunzio promulgated a constitution for Fiume, which outlined ten corporations based on the occupations of citizens – from wage earners through salaried employees to entrepreneurs as well as distinct sectors, such as agricultural workers, sailors, and so forth (“The Constitution of Fiume” promulgated on 8 Sept. 1920. Found in Griffin, 35–7). Corporatism was an innovation that its proponents thought might cure the ills of current democracies, all of whose constituencies were based on geographical representation. Though it was seldom stated, the fault of geography-based democracy in the view of its opponents was that it enshrined representation by pop-

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ulation, that is, majority rule. The occupation-based system could give – for example – doctors the same representation as farm labourers, and professors the same as factory workers, even though doctors were far less numerous than farm labourers, and professors than factory workers. Although he does not mention electoral practices, Lewis explicitly endorsed the corporatist idea that a man or woman is defined by his or her occupation. He saw that “fact” as a justification for tyranny, admitting that he was extrapolating from Sorel: “The majority of men should, and indeed must, be screwed down and locked up in their functions. They must be functional specialists – the doctor smelling of drugs, the professor blue-spectacled, bent, and powdered with snuff, the miner covered with coal-dust, the soldier stiff and martial, etc., etc. The only person who can be an “allround” man, eclair, full of scepticism, wide general knowledge, and “lights” is the ruler: and he must be that – that is his specialization. That is naturally not the way that the syndicalist puts it. But it is what is implied in the political system of Sorel and the other syndicalists” (The Art of Being Ruled, 31). Lewis’s remarks on the nature and role of the leader are reminiscent of the lecture that Mustapha Mond delivers to the Savage in Huxley’s Brave New World, published six years later than The Art of Being Ruled: An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work – go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized – but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren’t sacrifices; they’re the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he’s got to run. He can’t help himself; he’s foredoomed. Even after decanting, he‘s still inside a bottle – an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,” the Controller meditatively continued, “goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles ... (Brave New World, 179)

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Of course, Huxley is satirizing the totalitarian utopia ruled by Mustapha Mond, in which all conceptions and births are performed in the laboratory and all individuals are pre-designed for their occupational role. However, the alternative of the Savage’s emotionally intense, but demented, life that Huxley gives his readers is hardly more attractive. The central theme in Huxley’s novel of test-tube babies was inspired by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane’s 1924 novel Daedalus, which prophesied that by 1951 we would have achieved “ectogenesis,” that is, test-tube babies. Haldane, a distinguished geneticist, was affiliated with the Communist Party of Britain. Lewis was aware of Deadalus, but gives no indication that he knew of Haldane’s communist sympathies. He merely mocks the substitution of a clinical mode of reproduction for the messy and passionate standard method as an instance of scientific prudery (The Art of Being Ruled, 187–9). I have found only two mentions of Brave New World by Lewis. The first is in a 1934 letter to The Times in which he complained that he (Lewis) was being vilified by the “the strong Leftish political coloration of ... the majority of intelligent periodicals” and mentioned, as a fellow sufferer, “Mr. Aldous Huxley, whose “Brave New World” was an unforgivable offence to Progress and to political uplift of every description” (Letters, 226). Though Lewis allied himself with Huxley here, he was not sympathetic to the liberal sentiments of Brave New World. In The Writer and the Absolute, speaking of contemporaries who were or were not drawn to Marxism, Lewis remarked: “Aldous Huxley, liberal of course, when he came to give expression to his views upon such matters in Brave New World, turned out to be an uncompromising sceptic” (42). It is not entirely clear to me just what Lewis means by this remark; perhaps he was disappointed that Huxley predicted a dual dystopic world of antiseptic and passionless comfort on the one hand and superstitious passion on the other hand rather than a utopia. The futuristic fictions of Haldane and Huxley clearly participate in the general opinion at the time that human society was on the verge of unprecedented alterations in the manner of life of ordinary people, changes that would require radical transformations of political and social practices. Eliot, Pound, and Lewis all share that sentiment. As already noted, they initially thought principally in

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terms of cultural and aesthetic transformations, but all three soon came to realize that everything might well change. And they all recognized that technology was a principal engine of change – although, rather quixotically, they also supposed that the arts would be the ultimate determinant of the form those changes would take. Lewis was more explicit in his comments on the consequences of those technological developments than the other two: revolution, as we understand it today, is in origin a purely technical process. It is because our lives are so attached to and involved with the evolution of our machines that we have grown to see and feel everything in revolutionary terms, just as once the natural mood was conservative. We instinctively repose on the future rather than the past, though this may not yet be generally realized. Instead of the static circle of the rotation of the crops, of the infinitely slow progress of handiwork, we are in the midst of the frenzied evolutionary war of the machines. This affects our view of everything; our life, its objects and uses, love, health, friendship, politics: even art to a certain extent, but with less conviction. (The Art of Being Ruled, 23) Instead of embracing these changes as corollaries of their own aesthetic revolution – as Pound and the early Eliot did – Lewis opposed them from the very beginning – much as Ruskin and Morris had done before him, and Lewis’s older contemporaries G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were currently doing – though Lewis bristled at comparisons with these backward-looking reformers. There is one anticipated change that Lewis did welcome. Like Angell, Brailsford, Siegfried, and Mowrer, he thought that independent nations would increasingly succumb to some sort of world order. The fundamental “new reality,” he wrote, is “the fact of political world-control.” He welcomes it because it would bring an end to war: “With a world-state and a recognized central world-control, argument about the ethics of war would become absurd” (367). Less benignly, he regarded the inevitability of such a global “state” as further justification for some sort of authoritarian rule. Given the enormous power of such a global state he believed it would be necessary to replace messy and unpredictable parliamentary rule

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with the rule of “the best intelligences of the race” – much like the future Huxley imagined in Brave New World – though Huxley viewed that future with alarm. The penultimate paragraph of The Art of Being Ruled leaves no doubt about Lewis’s faith in rule by a benign caste of intelligentsia: “It is easy to see how the passing of democracy and its accompanying vulgarities, owing to which any valuable discovery has to fight its way in the market-place – and the better it is, the bitterer the opposition – must facilitate this putting of the intelligence on a new basis. The annihilation of industrial competition and the sweeping the board of the Small Man, commercially and socially, should have as its brilliant and beneficent corollary the freeing for its great and difficult tasks of intelligence of the first order” (375). Lewis’s belief that the ignorant masses will always resist benign innovations is a constant leitmotif in his writing, reiterated as late as Rude Assignment and obviously is a leading factor motivating his preference for benevolent tyranny over democracy, which he, Eliot, and Pound all regarded as rule by demagogues and/or oligarchs. The Art of Being Ruled restricts itself to a discussion of political theorists – primarily Sorel and Proudhon but also Marx, Kautsky, and Lenin. His target is revolution, by which he means any radical change, not just political revolution. He believed that the spirit of revolution underlies all the leading cultural, aesthetic, economic, and political tendencies of industrial democracies. “In such a fluid world,” he said, “we should by all rights be building boats rather than houses.” The Art of Being Ruled is offered as “a sort of ark, or dwelling for the mind, designed to float and navigate” in the coming deluge. Such a lifeboat is needed since we cannot, he believes, “rely on any conservative structures” (26). It is because he believed that the status quo was not sustainable that he endorsed the regimes of both Lenin and Mussolini, despite the fact that both were self-declared revolutionaries. But that approval was short-lived. A year later, in Time and Western Man, Lewis rejected both communism and fascism, a posture he maintained for the rest of his life. The change of emphasis seems not to have been motivated by any action of Lenin’s (who had died in 1924), or of the Soviet communists in the ensuing years. As for Mussolini, the infamous murder of Giacomo Matteotti in June of 1924 for having criticized the fascist regime preceded the publica-

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tion of The Art of Being Ruled. The closest Lewis came to explaining his change of view was the remark in Time and Western Man that he had “modified” his views of democracy toward greater tolerance. Now he lumps democracy and communism together as government by appeal to the masses: “no artist can ever love democracy or its doctrinaire and more primitive relative, communism.” Whereas Pound, the futurists, and, to a lesser extent, Eliot saw the ferment of new thinking and new technological developments as the harbinger of a new age, and a new civilization, Lewis recoiled from that ferment with much the same distaste as Wordsworth had from the early stages of the industrial revolution. Both men regarded the new ideas and social forces as threats to cultural and mental health. Wordsworth famously articulated that distaste in the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads: “A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place and the increasing accumulation of men in cities where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incidents which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” (1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, 735). Wordsworth had in mind the French Revolution and the subsequent counter-revolutionary European wars that were being excitedly reported in the “rapid communication” of the daily press as well as pell-mell industrialization and urbanization more advanced in Britain than elsewhere. As we have seen, the impetus for Lewis’s complaints was also war and social change. The spirit of his complaint is substantially the same as Wordsworth’s a century and a quarter earlier. However, there is a salient difference: while Wordsworth feared that the consequences of the accelerated pace of change would be to induce an intellectual and emotional torpor, Lewis thought the consequence would be universal conformity in “a trance of action”: “Everything in our life to-day conspires to thrust most people into prescribed tracks, in what can be called a sort of trance of action ... His life thrusts new problems upon him in profusion and simultaneously withdraws all possibility of his getting the time to grasp them, it would seem. This is the inherent difficulty that the modern man

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must in some way overcome” (Time and Western Man, vii). But there is not much difference in the end between “a trance of action” and “a savage torpor.” Today we have become accustomed to the notion that constant and rapid change in our social environment is an ineluctable condition to which we must adapt. But even in the late twentieth century, Alvin Toffler worried, in Future Shock (1970), about human societies’ ability to adapt to rapid and incessant change. Despite conceding that technological developments had irretrievably altered the human environment, Lewis clung to the rationalist belief that ideas can and should determine human behaviour. Technological and social developments are, in his view, the effects, not the causes of ideas. No doubt it was in part this belief that led him to abandon the materialistic determinism of Marxism and motivated his hostility to a grab-bag of targets – American Pragmatism, Bergsonian vitalism, gestalt and behavioural psychology, and Einsteinian physics – all invoked in the following prefatory remark from Time and Western Man: “The metaphysics of Relativity, the doctrine of “Behaviour,” of “Gestalt,” of “emergent Evolution,” and so forth, have an even more intimate, and a more insidious effect [than technological innovations such as “wireless, the petrolengine, and the cinema”] ... Ideas, or systems of ideas, possess no doubt an organism, as much as a motor-car or wireless set: but their techne, or application, and their components, the stuff out of which they are manufactured, are facts that are in a sense too vague to be readily accessible” (viii). It was his intention in this work, and in several subsequent ones to lay bare “stuff out of which they [ideas] are manufactured.”

cultural studies In effect Lewis was engaged in cultural studies before that mode of research was institutionalized. Of course the axiom of contemporary cultural studies – that cultural practices and values are context dependent, contingent, and multi-valent – is not one that Lewis would have endorsed. Nonetheless, like the cultural studies folks, he believed that people’s beliefs and their behaviour are governed by impersonal and supra-personal factors such as technological developments and commonly held beliefs (“ideology” or “false con-

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sciousness” in Marxist cultural theory). Where Lewis’s analysis departs from cultural studies is that he assumes that those commonly held beliefs are neither autonomous “ideas” – as they are for Hegel and those who follow him, nor the corollary of forms of life – as they are for Marx, but simply fashion – attitudes and practices adopted by the masses in imitation of fashion leaders such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Bergson, etc. In this respect his cultural theory is essentially the same as Nordau’s and Benda’s, and his targets are very similar. Lewis, of course, does not subscribe to the Marxist theory of false consciousness. For him ideas are the product of autonomous human cogitation – as indicated by his invariable practice of identifying ideas with individuals. Where his methodology and cultural studies overlap is in the shared belief that ideas – once concocted – take on a life of their own: “The ‘ideas’ of Plato can be shown at work. The philosophy of Hegel can be shown at work in Herzen, Bakunin and Lenin. The theories of Darwin can be shown at work all over the world. Nietzsche trumpets from the balconies of the Chigi Palace [where Mussolini addressed crowds]. I could show you many Bergsonians. Both Bonnot,15 the famous French chauffeur-gunman, and T. E. Hulme, the philosopher, were Sorelists, disciples of Georges Sorel, the roman catholic, pragmatist Marxian” (Time, x). From Lewis’s perspective there is nothing to choose between the divergent historicist views of conservative Cassandras like Spengler and revolutionary Pollyanna prophets like Marx and Engels, since they all saw human behaviour as guided, if not absolutely determined, by impersonal forces. Marx, of course, famously “turned Hegel on his head” in The German Ideology: “The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (The German Ideology, 8). Marx believed (at least at the date of The German

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Ideology) that the industrial form of life would necessarily generate a new consciousness in the proletariat suitable to factory production and urban life, which would in turn produce a communist form of governance. However, in the interim, the proletariat was unable to see its own self-interest because it was oppressed by a “false consciousness” imposed by its bourgeois masters. Since The German Ideology was not published until 1932 (though written in 1845–46), Pound, Lewis, and Eliot could not have been influenced by Marx’s theory of ideology in their own early cultural theorizing. Nonetheless, their presumption that the new technologies and scientific theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century called for a new cultural accommodation has affinities with early Marxism. Although they did not assume that technological change produced a new cultural mode, they did believe that it required a new mode as a response to those changes – or perhaps, more weakly – that it permitted a new cultural mode. (It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that Marx died in 1883, before any of the modernists were born. He did not see the hugely disruptive technological changes to which men and women born in the 1880s were exposed.) In contrast to Marx, Pound, Lewis, and Eliot all believed that life is determined by consciousness – that ideas govern human behaviour and generate cultures and societies rather than the other way around. A corollary of that belief is that ideas have a life of their own, independent of the men and women who generate them. Pound and Eliot believed that conscious and thoughtful individuals could adopt or reject any idea they encountered according to their own estimate of its worth. They also rejected the pre-Marxist notion of a Zeitgeist determining the actions and beliefs of individuals. For example, writing from America in his Criterion “Commentary” for January 1933 (12), Eliot contrasts his own view of the autonomy of thought to the reflexive, Zeitgeist perspective he found in Trostky’s Literature and Revolution and Calverton’s Liberation of American Literature: “There are also people who, while recognizing the interest of the work of literature as a document upon the ideas and the sensibility of its epoch, ... yet cannot help valuing literary work, like philosophical work, in the end by its transcendence of the limits of its age; by its breaking through the categories of thought and sensibility of its age; by its speaking, in the language of its time and in

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the imagery of its own tradition, the work which belongs to no time. Art, we feel, aspires to the condition of the timeless; and communist art, according to the sentence of those who would foretell what it is to be, is bound to the temporal”(248, my emphasis). Similarly, in Guide to Kulchur, written a few years later than Eliot’s remark, Pound explicitly contrasted his notion of “paideuma,” “the gristly roots of ideas that are in action,” to the Zeitgeist, which he characterized as including “the atmospheres, the tints of mental air and the idées reçues, the notions that a great mass of people still hold or half hold from habit, from waning custom (Guide to Kulchur, 59). Like Eliot, Pound believed that it is the artist’s function to – in Jacob Burckhardt’s metaphor – “break the cake of custom.” All three men sought to collect and disseminate those ideas they thought would foster a better culture and a more just or ethical society. They were willing to sacrifice the freedom of ordinary citizens in order to impose their superior notions of culture and ethics on them for their own good. Distrusting the masses, they were committed to a paternalistic view of social and political organization, which they believed necessary if the artist was to have sufficient freedom to perform his or her function as a bearer and creator of culture. Clearly such views are anathema to believers in democracy, but they have a long history amongst deep thinkers, going back to Plato’s Republic and continued by such divergent thinkers as Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche. It was the misfortune of our subjects that monsters such as Hitler and Stalin exemplified the rule of the exceptional man in their era. Earlier famous tyrants, like Cosimo Medici, Elizabeth of England, Peter the Great of Russia, and Napoleon, similarly attracted the praise of contemporary artists, but are generally conceded to have been less villainous and to have left a beneficial legacy. As early as 1915, Pound had articulated the view that democracy was inimical to the role of the artist: “If you endow enough men, individuals of vivid and different personality, and make the endowment perpetual, to be handed down from artist to artist, you will have put the arts in a position to defy the subversive pressure of commercial advantage, and of the mediocre spirit which is the bane and hidden terror of democracy.” He believed democracies were inherently unstable: “Democracies have fallen, they have always fallen, because humanity craves the outstanding personality. And hitherto

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no democracy has provided sufficient place for such an individuality” (“The Renaissance: III,” in EPPP 2: 84, my emphasis). With such a naïve view of political realities coupled with a supreme (and misplaced) confidence in his own wisdom, it is small wonder that Pound would later succumb to the charms of Mussolini. While it is possible to plot Pound’s political career as a straight line from overweening self-confidence to disastrous misjudgment, Lewis’s career is more tortuous. They shared a prejudice against the common man, and an overweening self-confidence, but Lewis’s career is characterized by a serial adoption of one or another “movement” as he searched for one that would foster the cultural and intellectual trends he cherished and suppress those he feared. Both men were essentially autodidacts. As such they were obliged to educate themselves as they went along.16 Like the proverbial homme moyen sensuel, they knew what they liked and what they disliked, but had to put themselves to school to discover what ideas, theories, and political movements would support their likes and dislikes. Lewis was far less eccentric in his choice of guides and targets than was Pound. But Lewis’s political tracts are organized around a commentary on works that it is obvious he had read for the first time in preparation for his sweeping analysis of contemporary culture. Pound also enjoyed serial enthusiasms, but, unlike Lewis, he relied on a few eccentric and little known writers as his guides – Ernest Fenollosa, Major Douglas, Leo Frobenius, and Silvio Gesell, among others – and dismissed everything that disagreed with them. Unfortunately, his guides did not always agree with one another. Also in contrast to Pound, who had a lot of difficulty finding publishers for his polemical effusions, Lewis had the mixed blessing of a supportive, indeed indulgent, editor in Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus, who seemingly would publish virtually anything Lewis wrote.17 As a consequence Lewis was able to rush into print with his latest enthusiasms or dislikes without being obliged to confront referees and copy editors who might have induced him to reconsider some of his judgments. The quality of his analysis also suffers from his ability to publish whatever he liked in his journal, The Enemy. Often his articles amount to little more than notes on his reading. He was then able to collect these hasty productions in a book, which Chatto and Windus would then publish with mini-

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mal revision. The result is disorganized, repetitive discourses, lacking balance and consistency. He surveys philosophical, scientific, political, and sociological ideas, and dismisses them from the perspective of an already formulated all-purpose hypothesis, which can be paraphrased as follows: “time philosophy dominates contemporary European thought and culture, suppressing individual freedom in favour of a herd mentality.” Many of the early reviewers ignored these faults because they were friendly to Lewis’s general argument that Europe was going to Hell in a handbasket. As we have seen, Lyford Edwards’ review of The Art of Being Ruled drew attention to the ubiquity of such a view, though Edwards did not share it, and he quite properly pilloried the book for its disorganization and tendentiousness. Lewis lashed out wildly at virtually everyone and every movement of which he was aware. But his general target was revolution itself, whether represented as a rebirth of some earlier cultural and political condition (as with Pound, Mussolini, and Hitler), or as the championing of a new cultural and political condition never before seen on earth (as with Futurism and Marxist or Proudhonian communism). “It is clear,” he said, “that we cannot go on for ever making revolutions which return merely to some former period of history. Yet that is what most ‘revolutions’ resolve themselves into ... .” He illustrated this generalization by reference to fascism’s origin in Futurism, followed by a degeneration into a pale imitation of ancient Roman glory. Then, with typical over-kill, Lewis segued to Freud’s focus on infant experience as another instance of a return to the past, and concluded: “So what we generally name ‘the new’ is the very old, or the fairly old. It is as well to point this out, and even to stress it, since it is an impressive fact not sufficiently recognized” (Time, 35–6). Consistency is not to be sought in Lewis’s arguments – except for his hostility to any political arrangement that privileges the “masses.” When he comes to discuss communism in Time and Western Man, in the same spirit as Pound, Lewis accused it of being democratic: “no artist can ever love democracy or its doctrinaire and more primitive relative, communism. The emotionally-excited, closely-packed, heavily-standardized mass units, acting in a blind, ecstatic unison, as though in response to the throbbing of some unseen music – of the soviets or fourierist18 fancy – would be the last thing, according

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to me, for the free democratic West to aim at, if it were free, and if its democracy were of an intelligent order. Let us behave as if the West were free, and as if we were in the full enjoyment of an ideal democracy” (Time, 26, my emphasis). Despite their shared distaste for democracy, Lewis chose to associate Pound – his old friend, and collaborator in Vorticism – with revolution, characterizing him as “a revolutionary simpleton” (38) and “a man in love with the past” (69). In this way Lewis tarred Pound with both communist and fascist attributes (79). He lumps together the past-loving Pound and the future-loving Marinetti: “Marinetti is rehabilitated by Ezra – music, provençal airs and ballads of Villon, as far as he personally is concerned, taking him paradoxically right to the great throbbing, singing heart of the great god, Industry. I should be tempted to think it had taken Ezra a decade to catch up Marinetti, if I were not sure that, from the start, the histrionics of the milanese prefascist were secretly much to his sensation-loving taste. I observe rather that he has not moved from where he was” (41). Lewis’s perception that, despite his Vorticist credentials, Pound was not truly hostile to Futurism is, as we have seen, well founded. Pound’s jousting with Futurism had more to do with creating space for his own clique within the pre-1914 cultural wars than with any fundamental disagreement. Marinetti’s basic idea that twentieth-century technology required a new and unexampled aesthetic was one with which both Pound and Eliot agreed – though they disagreed about what that aesthetic would look like. But their optimism in a fundamental cultural regeneration faded as the peace brokered at Versailles began to unravel and America joined Europe’s economic malaise and deepened after 1929. As they entered the second postwar decade, a radical resurvey of the political landscape was clearly required. But in 1927 Lewis was the only one of the three seeing only unwelcome trends. He underlined his solitary state by characterizing Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein as artists besotted by time philosophy – though he left Eliot alone. He concluded Book I by targeting Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West as the prototypical timebook (Time, 116). Time and Western Man is primarily concerned with artists, artworks, and art movements, but Lewis appended a discussion of the impact of technological innovation in an appendix to Book I. He there cited Marx on the revolutionary impact of technology (with-

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out identifying the particular text), and endorsed his materialistic analysis of cultural change: “The technical basis of production, the technique of industry, then, the engineer and his machine, is the true source of the inevitably ‘revolutionary’ conditions subsisting to-day, apart from any political creed.” Lewis demurred, claiming that instead those technical innovations merely provide “the opportunistic political mind” with an opportunity “to launch and to sustain a creed of political change, backfiring in a series of passionate revolts” (122). In this respect Lewis agreed with Eliot and Pound that the contemporary cultural, political, and social scene represented an interregnum between a dying past and a future yet to be born. It was the task of the artist, they all (rather quixotically) believed, to formulate the future. Lewis made that point quite explicit. After invoking the revolutionary role of science, and pointing out that a “very small number of men [are] responsible for this immense ferment,” he added: “What I am trying to show by these remarks is that what we call Revolution, whose form is spectacular change of the technique of life, of ideas, is not the work of the majority of people, indeed is nothing at all to do with them; and, further, is even alien to their instincts, which are entirely conservative” (123). His analysis of cultural change, then, is the inverse of Marx’s in The German Ideology. Where Marx saw technology (“the means of production”) as determining men’s beliefs and attitudes (their ideology), Lewis believed that “the entire spectacular ferment of the modern world,” is the product of the minds of “a very small number of inventive, creative men.” Far from the proletariat internalizing those changes in a new consciousness, Lewis believed that “in the course of democratic vulgarization” the “spectacular changes” were “watered-down and adapted to herd-consumption” (124). While it makes sense to describe popular art as a “watered-down” version of high art, it makes no sense to describe film, autos, iPods, etc. – the technological output of science, which generates the culture of the “herd” – as “watered down.” Lewis’s critique of cultural trends focused on those individual thinkers he held responsible for the ideas that he believed governed current cultural and political developments. His rogues’ gallery includes Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, John

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Watson, Sigmund Freud, and Oswald Spengler – among other less prominent figures. Of course, this is a very mixed set. Russell, it is true, admired Watson, and adopted behaviourist ideas for a while. But he had little use for Bergson, and Bergson had no interest in Behaviourism. It is true that Bergson and James built their respective philosophies on the foundation of Darwinian evolution. But in their seminal work, Principia Mathematica (1910–13), Russell and Whitehead did not; moreover, they followed very different philosophical paths in their subsequent careers. Bergson, James, and Whitehead all attempted to reconcile modern science and philosophy with religious belief, while Russell and Freud were militantly atheistic. Spengler – essentially a pessimistic German idealist – has little in common with any of the others. In sum, in his polemic against “time philosophy” Lewis was tilting at windmills taken for threatening giants. Disliking the advance of popular democracy, which he believed would cause a cultural levelling, Lewis engages in an amateurish analysis of cultural and intellectual trends designed to ratify his fears. Once those trends are identified, the remedy is at hand – opposition to them. It is as pure a case of reactionary thinking as one is likely to find. In spite of its failings – perhaps because of them – Lewis’s polemic stands as witness to the impact that the philosophical, scientific, political, and social turmoil of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had on an intelligent and passionate – though unschooled – observer. Twenty-five years later, after reading William Barrett’s 1947 book, What Is Existentialism, Lewis was startled to discover that Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit – like Time and Western Man, also published in 1927 – would have served as one of his “most valuable exhibits” had he been aware of it. In 1952 he saw the current vogue of Existentialism – largely derived from Heidegger – as corroborating the analysis offered in Time and Western Man, and was heartened to see that, despite the rejection of his analysis in 1927, “today I am very far from being the only person who rejects existentialism as nihilistic and a symptom not of our health and sanity, but of the reverse. I even, at last, am almost upon the side of the majority” (The Writer and the Absolute, 125–6). It is true that he was not alone, but in 1952, as in 1927, his was a minority opinion amongst Western intellectuals, most of whom warmly embraced Existentialism as articu-

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lated by the French – especially the Marxist fellow-travellers J.-P. Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Had he lived long enough, Lewis would no doubt have entered the lists against Jacques Derrida and his “deconstructive” followers, and would have been just as much a maverick intellectual then as he was in the thirties. Ironically, in his rejection of Existentialism in his old age Lewis found himself in agreement with the masses – though still opposed to the Left. The dominant attitude in the ‘twenties was that the spread of “Western” culture throughout the globe was inevitable. Siegfried’s America Comes of Age, published in the same year as Time and Western Man, Mowrer’s This American World, published the year after, and Pound’s Patria Mia of 1912 all agreed with Lewis on that point: “‘Western’ does respond to something that the European is responsible for, for good or ill; but of course there is every sign that before long the great asiatic populations will have been turned into ‘Westerners’ pur sang, and the factory hand of Wigan [a British industrial town] and Hangchow ‘meet’ long before the Trump of Doom, in a way that would have been quite inconceivable to Mr. Kipling”19 (Time, 138–9). Even though, in contrast to Pound’s enthusiastic embrace of the new world generated by Western science and technology, Lewis regretted its advent, all observers agreed that a profound change in social and cultural practices was underway and was inescapable. No one with an interest in literature in the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century could escape the influence of Matthew Arnold. His two most influential works were “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864) and the series of essays Culture and Anarchy (1867–68). The first essay assigned the artist a diminished role as the disseminator of “the best that has been thought and said,” which “thought” was to be found in works of philosophers and scientists – including the newly emerging social sciences. The Arnoldian artist’s role is to re-package those ideas in a form palatable to a general public. Culture and Anarchy was a response to the 1867 extension of the franchise in Britain to all adult males – in effect introducing popular democracy in Britain. Arnold addressed the middle-class fear that universal (male only in 1867) suffrage would lead to rule by demagogues – especially since the restraint that religious belief had previously

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placed on the behaviour of men was waning. He argued that “culture” – particularly literature – could fill the role of religion and the church. Artists would become the new clergy, and “the best that has been thought and said” would replace the Bible. The way, then, to guard against demagoguery was the dissemination of the “best ideas” by a well educated class of poets, thereby creating a culture of “sweetness and light.” Once again the poets are not seen as creators of culture but primarily as disseminators of it. It is clear, I think, that Lewis, Eliot, and Pound accepted the Arnoldian perception that “culture” must replace religion, but saw the artist as a creator, not merely a disseminator, of “culture.” Lewis explicitly rejected the rather passive role Arnold assigned the artist: “My conception of the role of the creative artist is not merely to be a medium for ideas supplied him wholesale from elsewhere, which he incarnates automatically in a technique which (alone) it is his business to perfect. It is equally his business to know enough of the sources of his ideas, and ideology, to take steps to keep these ideas out, except such as he may require for his work. When the idea-monger comes to his door he should be able to tell what kind of notion he is buying, and know something of the process and rationale of its manufacture and distribution” (Time, 140). Lewis’s artist is the arbiter who determines which of the ideas of philosophers and scientists deserve dissemination. Arnold’s focus, in contrast, was on the need to disseminate new ideas to a newly enfranchised electorate. Lewis’s focus was on preventing new ideas from commanding the field to the exclusion of old ones. He believed that new ideas are most often either bogus or harmful. Once again, Lewis is out of step with Pound, who saw himself as a propagandist for a new – or at least renovated – culture and civilization. Pound tended to find “the best that has been thought and said” in intellectual corners and byways that Arnold would certainly have shunned. Nonetheless, his project was compatible with Arnold’s. So, too, was Eliot’s journalistic project to make available the best modern thought in The Criterion – as we have seen. Even though Eliot’s Anglicanism seems inconsistent with a project of cultural renovation, he did not see it that way. In “Last Words,” Eliot’s account of his reasons for ceasing publication of Criterion in the January 1939 number, he reminded his readers of the hopes he had for cultural renewal in 1921, when he founded the journal, but sadly conceded that they

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have proven to be illusory: “The period immediately following the war of 1914 is often spoken of as a time of disillusionment: in some ways and for some people it was rather a period of illusions. Only from about the year 1926 did the features of the post-war world begin clearly to emerge – and not only in the sphere of politics. From about that date one began slowly to realize that the intellectual and artistic output of the previous seven years had been rather the last efforts of an old world, than the first struggles of a new” (271, my emphasis). This remark would place Eliot in the Pollyanna camp until 1926, when he reluctantly despaired of the advent of a new age. In contrast to Eliot, Pound was unwilling or unable to give up on his Pollyanna hopes – perhaps because he had incorporated his propaganda for the new age in his epic poem, The Cantos. To abandon those hopes would mean abandonment of the poem, fifty cantos long in 1939, when everyone had to take sides. Eliot’s poetry up to the twenties at least, had not evinced any of the optimism for cultural renewal that motivated the project of the Criterion. Most of Eliot’s poetry of the period could be characterized as satirical – either social satire like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” and the Sweeney poems or Jeremiads like The Waste Land, “Gerontion,” and “The Hollow Men.” But none of it outlined an alternative to the flawed present state of culture and civilization portrayed in his poems. Lewis, too, satirized in his fiction those trends he attacked in his polemical prose – notably in Apes of God (parts of which Eliot published in The Criterion). But, as with Eliot – and in contrast to Pound – Lewis’s imaginative work made no gesture toward adumbrating a better cultural dispensation. For the most part Apes of God ridiculed London literary society. For example, Zagreus (one of the names of Dionysus) and Lewis’s spokesman in Apes of God, describes society as a mechanism designed to prevent change: “Society is a defensive organization against the incalculable. It is so constituted as to exclude and to banish anything, or any person, likely to disturb its repose, to rout its pretences, wound its vanity, or to demand energy or a new effort, which it is determined not to make. ‘The small’ is merely that constant and stable, almost dead thing, which can be measured and abstracted. ‘The small’ is the abstract. ‘The great’ is the concrete. What we call ‘great’– what we call ‘great’– that is the reality” (274, original emphasis).

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These sentiments accord poorly with Lewis’s critique of current intellectual trends from an avowedly conservative position that at the end of the day there is nothing new under the sun, and that all pretensions to novelty are either cant or deliberate deception. Viewed from this sort of conservatism, Pound is, indeed, a “revolutionary” – and in many ways also a “simpleton”– as Lewis alleged. Astonishingly, Lewis admitted that he was not concerned with whether or not “the great time-philosophy that overshadows all contemporary thought is viable as a system of abstract truth,” but only “if in its application it helps or destroys our human arts” (Time, 112). It is hard to credit the parochial anti-intellectualism of this remark – especially coming from a champion of eternal truths like Lewis. The “very fundamental question,” he said, is “whether we should set out to transcend our human condition (as formerly Nietzsche and then Bergson claimed that we should); or whether we should translate into human terms the whole of our datum” (Time, 112). Nietzsche and Bergson have little in common beyond the belief that some supra-personal factors must be acknowledged as operative in human behaviour, and that their suppression can be harmful.20 It is a perception that Freud adopted as a basis for his therapy for mental disease. But Lewis will have none of it: “My standpoint is that we are creatures of a certain kind, with no indication that a radical change is imminent; and that the most pretentious of our present prophets is unable to do more than promise ‘an eternity of intoxication’ to those who follow him into less physical, more ‘cosmic’ regions; proposals made with at least equal eloquence by the contemporaries of Plato. On the other hand, politically, it is urged that a-thousand-men is a better man than one, because he is less ‘conscious’ and is bigger” (Time, 112). Lewis’s argument here is peculiarly tangled. He conceded that the theories of his antagonists may be correct, but rejects them anyway because they are harmful. Then he adds that they are not even new – Plato’s contemporaries held similar views. I share Lewis’s distrust of anti-intellectual and quasi-mystical arguments, but one could wish for a better champion of rationality. Lewis’s insistence that “we are creatures of a certain kind” aligns him with T. E. Hulme, who insisted on the reality of original sin – though Lewis did not put it that way – and with the Anglican Eliot.

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For example, in his 1929 article, “Second Thoughts about Humanism,” Eliot praised Hulme’s “discovery” of original sin: “It is to the immense credit of Hulme that he found out for himself that there is an absolute to which Man can never attain.” Eliot then cited the relevant comment by Hulme: “What is important, is what nobody seems to realize – the dogmas like that of Original Sin, which are the closest expression of the categories of the religious attitude. That man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature, who can yet apprehend perfection. It is not, then, that I put up with the dogma for the sake of the sentiment, but that I may possibly swallow the sentiment for the sake of the dogma” (Selected Essays, 481–91. The Hulme citation is from “Humanism and the Religious Attitude,” Speculations, 70–1). Except for the reference to religion and original sin, Lewis’s comment and Hulme’s are equivalent. And all three – Hulme, Lewis and Eliot – associate the denial of the fundamentally limited nature of the human condition with Romanticism and the recognition of its limited nature with classicism. In this respect they are aping Charles Maurras and the Action Française. Lewis put the point quite succinctly: “The ‘classical’ is the rational, aloof and aristocratical; the ‘romantic’ is the popular, sensational and ‘cosmically’ confused. That is the permanent political reference in these terms” (Time, 9). Although he did not speak of original sin in Time and Western Man, Lewis invoked Hulme’s “discovery” – with characteristic hyperbole – ten years later in Blasting and Bombardiering (1937): “Hulme is mainly distinguished as a ‘thinker,’ for having heard of the theological doctrine of Original Sin. No one else in England at the time had ever heard of it, or would, I am persuaded, have done so since, had it not been for him.” Lewis went on to draw the political corollary: “The notion of ‘progress’ is also involved, in this advertisement of Original Sin. And our world, of 1937, is greatly agitated by the warfare of those who believe in ‘progress,’ and those who do not. It is the principle of ‘humanism’ versus that of discipline and ‘authority.’ The doctrine of Original Sin has its uses quite outside of Christian dogma” (Blasting, 107, 108). Like Eliot and Hulme, Lewis believed that if we are to have peace, order, and good government, discipline is required in human societies. This is so because of the fallibility of human nature. “Discipline” is a word that appears often in the Eliot’s prose as well as in Lewis’s, but

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rarely in Pound’s. To be fair, Eliot is often speaking of self-discipline. Nonetheless, the conviction that men and women cannot trust their impulses and instincts is the firmest ground on which one can justify authoritarian regimes. For example, in a Criterion “Commentary” of 1926, Eliot praised “the impulse of Rome” which he said persists to “the present day,” and which “suggests Authority and Tradition.” The former and future Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s address to the Classical Association, in which he spoke of the Roman Empire in the context of Mussolini’s fascism, prompted the remark. Eliot was unwilling to grant Mussolini the distinction of being heir to that tradition, preferring such figures as Hooker, Laud, St. Ignatius, and Cardinal Newman. But Eliot was very much in favour of the Roman tradition of authority, which, he said, is “in fact the European idea – the idea of a common culture of western Europe” (Criterion 4, April 1926, 222). Six years later, in “Thoughts After Lambeth,” Eliot once again spoke of discipline, but in the context of asceticism rather than authority: “For some, the intellectual way of approach must be emphasized; there is need of a more intellectual laity. For them and for others, the way of discipline and asceticism must be emphasized; for even the humblest Christian layman can and must live what, in the modern world, is comparatively an ascetic life ... . Thought, mortification, sacrifice: it is such notions as these that should be impressed upon the young” (Selected Essays, 363). The notion of a pan-European Christian culture based on authority, discipline, and tradition was a constant theme of Eliot’s political thought through the vagaries of the political, economic, and military ferment of the ensuing decades. Its unsuitability to the times hardly needs to be stressed. Lewis had a very different view of the role of Christianity. Despite endorsing Hulme’s “discovery” of original sin, Lewis saw Christianity as fundamentally flawed because it harbours in its bosom two incompatible ethical and religious value systems: the “realistic” Old Testament ethic and the “idealistic” New Testament ethic. “The habits induced by the pious necessity of assimilating two such opposed things, the irrational gymnastic of this peculiar feat,” he said “installed a squint, as it were, on his [the European’s] central vision of his universe.” That squint led Europeans to behave in a “realistic” – that is, brutal – fashion toward foreigners, after which,

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Lewis claimed, “to the stupefaction of the survivors, or of his abject ‘native’ subjects, he began wiping away a tear from the corner of his eye ... exhorting the creature beneath his heel to gentleness and brotherly love.” Lewis finds the same sort of cognitive dissonance in European science, which brought about the horrors of industrialism, while at the same time prompting socialist dreams of future utopias (Time, 302–3). Lewis’s critique of industrialism and European imperialism fits very well with the criticism from the new left perspective prominent later in the century, even though it is based on a diametrically opposed philosophical perspective. Another “school” which criticized industrialism and imperialism in very similar terms was that of the Catholic converts and social reformers – G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in England, and Jacques Maritain in France. One would have expected Lewis to have regarded these men as allies because, on the grounds that the Catholic Church privileges reason over emotion, and intellect over passion, he considered it as an ally in his battle with time philosophy (Time, 373). However, Lewis did not embrace them. He dismissed Maritain as a “frantic, hallucinated, ‘soul’-drugged individual,” and Chesterton, as “a ferocious and foaming romantic.” “Were their orthodoxy rampant,” he thought, “they would be worse than the disciples of ‘Time’” (Time, 373). As we have seen, Lewis also attacked potential allies amongst his fellow artists, ridiculing Marinetti, Pound, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Eliot alone escapes his venom, being invoked only as an ally and fellow “credit crank,” that is, as a booster of Social Credit (170–3). Pound gets no points from Lewis for being a far more committed Social Crediter than either Lewis or Eliot.21 Among the targets of Lewis’s critique are the philosophers Samuel Alexander and Alfred North Whitehead.22 Both men had endeavoured to explain the philosophical and theological implications of the new physics for the general reader, which was sufficient cause for Lewis to attack them as “time philosophers.” He condemns Alexander’s conception of the divine as “a something that is nothing but a person, secure in its absolute egoism,” as a cult of personality – in contrast to what Lewis regards as the healthier “impersonal” God of pantheism (446). But both Alexander and Whitehead participate in what Lewis regards as a more serious error – their relativism, the claim that (in Lewis’s words) “there is

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no absolute truth ... but only a majority-judgment or belief” – a gross distortion of philosophical relativism. Lewis is offended at such an apparent democratization of truth and sets against it his conviction that: “our experience shows us that it is always a ‘heretical’ minority that imposes its truth upon the majority” (449). As noted above, Lewis is not very clear about just what he means by “time philosophy” – beyond the tendency to welcome the new and to disparage the status quo. But most of his targets subscribe to one or another variety of philosophical relativism, which – pace Lewis – is not equivalent to scepticism. Philosophical relativism merely asserts that human knowledge is ineluctably partial and incomplete. Philosophical scepticism, in contrast, denies that human beliefs have any truth value at all. Whereas the corollary of philosophical scepticism is that all claims to knowledge are equally bogus, the corollary of philosophical relativism is that competing views cannot be dismissed just because they appear to be incompatible. An example would be the persistence in physics of the corpuscular and wave theories of the propagation of light, each of which explains some phenomena, but not others. If we take philosophical relativism to be Lewis’s target, it must be conceded that he is correct to see it as the hallmark of twentiethcentury thought, but it has been a long-standing option within the Western philosophical tradition. Its contrary is orthodoxy – literally, “correct teaching.” Catholic Europe had a millennium or so of strict adherence to such an orthodoxy, before it was fragmented by the Protestant Reformation and – more or less contemporaneously – undermined by the challenge of the physical sciences from Galileo on. Although our cohort group, born in the 1880s, was far from the first to confront the challenge of a disintegrating European orthodoxy, the disintegration it faced took place on a much wider front than any previous generation had faced. Whitehead addressed this very issue in Science and the Modern World, a book Lewis criticizes in Time and Western Man: “The note of the present epoch is that so many complexities have developed regarding material, space, time, and energy, that the simple security of the old orthodox assumptions have vanished. ... The new situation in the thought of to-day arises from the fact that scientific theory is outrunning common sense ... Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth. We have

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recaptured some of the tone of the early nineteenth century, only on a higher imaginative level” (142–3). A distinguished philosopher, a generation older than Lewis and company, Whitehead was, like them, concerned with the modern dilemma of a world without faith. In his later works he attempted to articulate a philosophical position that would permit what he called a “rational religion,” but Lewis sees him only as a “Time Philosopher,” that is, a relativist. There were scarcely any traditional certainties that survived the first decades of the twentieth century. The Victorians had faced the challenge to Christian faith of Darwinian evolution and the palaeontological discoveries that underpinned it, but the social and political structures of their day held firm. Indeed, Herbert Spencer argued that the European class structure and European imperial exploitation of “inferior” races was justified by the Darwinian principle of “survival of the fittest.” And, of course, Newtonian physics still held for them. They did not have to deal with the challenge to a stable physical environment that Einsteinian relativity was seen to be. Nor were they faced with the challenge to human rationality that Freudian psychoanalysis represented. Certainly Marxist communism was a real and present political challenge in the nineteenth century, but the European’s confidence in the moral rectitude and practical efficiency of existing political and economic institutions still held, as well as their confidence in the viability – indeed the inescapability – of their class structure. That confidence permitted them to be comfortable with Europe’s dominant position in the world, and with European exploitation of “inferior” peoples. Although the First World War shook European confidence it did not break it. As we have already noted, the political elites assumed that things would go on post-war much as before. The aesthetic elites, however, took quite a different view – at least our gang did. They saw European culture, society, and civilization as disintegrating before their eyes. In Time and Western Man Lewis satirically portrays Pound, Joyce, et al. as enjoying the slide into philosophical chaos and anarchy. Pound does applaud the disintegration, regarding it as an interim stage between the old cultural accommodation and an emerging one, of which he and the other modernists are the harbingers. However, by the thirties, he too is becoming anxious. He registered that anxiety in a 1931 Hound and

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Horn article, critical of Eliot’s campaign of cultural reformation: “I am against stopping to argue about free will and the immortality of the soul in the midst of an explosion or a shipwreck. With European civilization going to Hell and America not getting on with the work fast enough to have a bearable civilization ready to take on when Europe collapses, I am against frittering away so much time” (“Criterionism,” 116). Although published in 1937, Blasting and Bombardiering was written over quite a long period, and therefore is roughly contemporaneous with Time and Western Man. Lewis told Pound in a letter of July 1930 that he had begun it two years earlier, but had set it aside (Pound/Lewis, 171). It was one of several war reminiscences prompted by the phenomenal success of Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1928. English war memoirs quickly followed: Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs were both published in 1929. Lewis was slower off the mark, but he benefited from his tardiness since in 1937 it was clear that Europe was headed for another cataclysm. Although published outside the period under consideration here, Blasting and Bombardiering addresses the state of mind of Lewis himself and others at the time of the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. Lewis portrayed the impact of the war with the parable of a bridge: “Upon one side of this bridge is a quite different landscape to what meets the eye upon the other side ... And the principal figure among those crossing this little bridge – that is me – does not know that he is crossing anything, from one world into another. Indeed, everybody else seems to know it except him” (2). In contrast to The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis now believed that neither communism nor fascism – about which “everybody’s talking” – were solutions to anything. “They are,” he says, merely purgatives that “shake out or shake off a lot of dead matter.” And he mocks the current political actors, comparing Karl Marx to the Marx brothers and Anthony Eden to Trilby O’Ferrel, the eponymous heroine of George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby: “The function of Karl Marx ... is that of the Marx Brothers; to disrupt – but comically, of course, since human life could not be serious if it tried. Mussolini is a most resourceful entertainer, who was obviously born to make a fool of John Bull. And obviously Haile Selassie was born for the same purpose. Mr. Eden is Trilby. What he sings when diplomatically

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entranced, enrages Herr Hitler; and as to Stalin he unquestionably was thought up to cover with ridicule my Highbrow colleagues. Trotsky manifestly is especially created to be a thorn in the side of Stalin. And Mexico was tacked on to the bottom of the United States to be an asylum for Trotsky” (17).23 Lewis maintained this flippant, mocking style throughout Blasting and Bombardiering despite the deadly serious nature of international affairs in 1937. No doubt he was hoping (in vain) to reach a wide audience as Remarque had done. Looking back to the immediate post-war, Lewis told his readers: “The War bled the world white. It had to recover.” During that period of recovery, “a sort of weed-world sprang up and flourished. All that was real was in eclipse, so all that was unreal came into its own.” What “came into its own” was the “time philosophy” he had so vigorously attacked in Time and Western Man. He seems to welcome the coming intellectual conflict: “now the real is recovering its strength. Beneath the pressure of this convalescent vitality our cardboard make-believe is beginning to crack and to tumble down. You see how damned interesting all that is going to be?” We can now “look back at the War with fresh eyes,” revealing it as a “silly” enterprise. On the eve of the Second World War he cautioned his readers against supporting British involvement in another war – which, counting the Boer war, would be Britain’s third “silly” war. With this brief preparation, he could now “start my story of the Great War, which has made possible, nay, inevitable, all the odd things we see going on to-day” (18–19). Lewis revealed that – rather uncharacteristically – he was drawn to some variety of conspiracy theory by his war experience. Reading Proudhon while at Ypres with his artillery battery, Lewis attempted a calculation of the costs of the enormous artillery bombardments in which both sides engaged. He was forced to give it up, not being “enough of an economist to fathom the depth of ruin this spelled for European society. But I did see that the merely military outcome was by this time meaningless. It was perfectly clear that we should all be ruined, and that some people meant us to be” (152). He does not say who those “people” were, but in Time and Western Man he had fingered the banks: “The decade that has elapsed since the termination of the War has been blackened in every country by the shadow of the colossal loan-finances involved

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in that event. And the shadow grows deeper as we recede from it” (Time, 156). Though Lewis never sank as deep into conspiracy theory as Pound, like Eliot, he assumed that democratic governments were in fact the tools of oligarchs operating behind the scenes. Lewis had a work (unspecified) of Karl Marx with him at Ypres, but he said that the pertinacity of mosquitoes prevented him from reading it (159). He claimed that he did not read Marx until after the war, and was favourably impressed at that time. But it was the experience of the war quite apart from anything he read that changed him: “I started the war a different man to what I ended it. More than anything, it was a political education” (185). Asking himself what the purpose of the war was, he had no ready answer. His search for an answer led him into the political, social and philosophical commentary that preoccupied him for the rest of his life (185–6). If we take Lewis at his word – and I see no reason not to – his radicalization is differently motivated than either Pound’s or Eliot’s. The principal factor in Pound’s radicalization was his acceptance of the heretical economic ideas of Major Douglas, which he happened to encounter during World War I. For Pound, the crucial world event was the Great Depression, not the war. Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism determined his political stance as thoroughly as Pound’s conversion to Social Credit did his. In Eliot’s case, it is arguable that his political views led him to Anglicanism, rather than the other way around. After all, his enthusiasm for Maurras precedes his conversion by more than a decade. What I hope to have shown in these first chapters is that the three men began from a very similar cultural and political posture – one that can be summed up as revolutionary in aesthetics, but conservative – that is, anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and anti-communist – in politics. That the war did not represent a life-changing experience for Eliot is evident from a letter to Herbert Read in which Eliot comments on Read’s1919 war book, Naked Warriors: “Not having had that experience myself – I speak not from extreme age but from the advantage or disadvantage of a G rating which kept me out of the army – I have been a disinterested spectator of the struggles of others with war and peace” (Letters, 386). Much the same can be said of Pound. Although he was a vocal supporter of the Allies in published articles, Pound remarks on the war very little in his cor-

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respondence. In a long letter to John Quinn, dated three days after the Armistice, Pound devoted most of his attention to Yeats’ friend, Maude Gonne, who had been arrested as a suspected dissident. He has little to say on the war or the armistice: “Thank God the war is mostly over. Am suffering from cold contracted on Monday, wandering about for hours, mostly in drizzle, to observe effect of armistice on the populace. The Allies will have to sit on the head of each individual German for the next eighty years and take their indemnity a pfennig at a time” (Letters of Ezra Pound, 201). Then he returns to criticism of Maude Gonne and the Irish independence movement. The dilemma faced by these artists, who thought of themselves as avant-gardistes, was their awareness that the future they had confidently imagined prior to 1914 was probably rendered impossible by the war. Of course, they had not articulated in any detail just what that world would have looked like, but everyone in the postwar – except perhaps Ezra Pound – was painfully aware that his or her expectations had to be revised drastically. Moreover, the war had fundamentally changed the balance of power in the world. Western Europe was in disarray and in decline relative to its rivals. The Bolshevik revolution frightened not only those supportive of the status quo but also democratic socialists fearful of violent revolution. For the first time since the Islamic expansion, European power was eclipsed by a foreign power, the United States. America largely dictated the terms of the Peace of Versailles and displaced Britain as the world’s dominant financial power. In the Far East, Japan – which, as an ally of Britain and France, was a participant in the Peace of Versailles – was a rising industrial power and had already begun its aggressive imperial expansion (MacMillan, Paris 1919, 310–11). These political and international pressure points were now laid on top of the philosophical, scientific, and technological transformations that immediately preceded the War, and were greatly accelerated by it.

iv The Response to Fascism The avant-garde did not know they were running their heads not against walls but against open doors, that a unanimous success would belie their claim to being a revolutionary minority, and would prove that they were about to express a new mass spirit or the spirit of the time. Hanna Arendt, Totalitarianism, 33

The scholarly understanding of fascism has undergone considerable revision in the last few decades. Principal figures in that revaluation are the Israeli scholar, Zeev Sternhell, and the British scholar, Roger Griffin. While these two students of fascism disagree on some aspects of its nature and origin, both see it as a broad ideological movement within European – or Atlantic, to be more inclusive – culture and society. The understanding of fascism articulated by those two scholars is foundational for the following discussion. Griffin focuses on those aspects of fascism that we have already found to be characteristic of the attitudes that Pound, Lewis, and Eliot formulated even before the First Great War: fascism was no freak display of anti-modernism or of social pathological processes in the special paths of development followed by a few nation-states. Its raw materials were such forces as militarism, racism, charismatic leadership, populist nationalism, fears that the nation or civilization as a whole was being undermined by the forces of decadence, deep anxiety about the modern age, and longings for a new era to begin, all of which are active ingredients in contemporary history. What made it possible for these ingredients to be forged together into popular, and even mass movements in the inter-war period and for two of them, fascism and Nazism, eventually to erect a new type of

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single party state, was an extraordinary conjuncture of acute socio-political tensions resulting directly or indirectly from the First World War and the Russian Revolution. fascism is thus very much a child of the twentieth century. (The Nature of Fascism, viii, my emphasis) Of course, the “deep anxiety about the modern age” was not felt by any of our principals until the disaster of the Great War. But they certainly felt “longings for a new era to begin,” an era of which they would be the harbingers and heralds, and they were alert to “the forces of decadence.” Griffin’s account leaves out the widespread distrust of democratic governments in the pre-war period. The Left was persuaded that democracies were merely cover for oligarchies or plutocracies. As we have seen, our conservative authors, rather surprisingly, agreed with the Left on this point. The Right, of course, feared popular democracy as tantamount to mob rule. And – again surprisingly – Pound, Eliot, and Lewis shared that fear. Fascism offered an alternative model of governance, which promised to resolve both Left scepticism and Right paranoia – what Griffin calls “the single party state,” and which its critics (more accurately) called dictatorship, or tyranny, and Mussolini called “totalitarianism.” Griffin’s term for the “longing for a new era” is “palingenesis,” that is a rebirth, or second birth. Christian baptism, for example, is a palingenetic rite. The term catches the Janus-like characteristic of fascism and nazism, both of which considered themselves to be revolutionary, but at the same time, to represent the restoration of an earlier state of affairs. Communism, in contrast, stressed rejection of the past, and it is utopian in the sense that it imagines, in Leszek Kolakowski’s definition, a “perfect and everlasting human fraternity” (Modernity on Endless Trial, 138). I am not aware that any of the literature labels the contrasting nature of fascism/nazism in this way, but to call the former “palingenetic” and the latter “utopian” catches the difference quite neatly. My title, Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia, attempts to catch the antinomial nature of the hopes of the three artists under discussion. They regarded themselves as looking forward to a new cultural and political dispensation, rather than backward to a former state – as, for example, Chesterton and Belloc did. It is true that Eliot came to offer cultural and political nos-

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trums entirely compatible those of the “Chester-Belloc” – as Pound called the two Catholic cultural critics – but we have seen that Eliot began in a different ideological place. Sternhell’s focus on fascism is quite different from Griffin’s – though compatible with it. He takes a longer view; he is primarily concerned to challenge what he perceives to be the prevailing scholarly opinion – that fascism was an aberration within European culture and society – and to demonstrate its origins in a resistance to the Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of man: “The apologetic interpretation of events consciously disregards the cultural history of Europe in the last hundred years, the fact that toward the end of the nineteenth century the opposition to optimism, universalism, and humanism developed into a general struggle that affected all areas of intellectual activity. At that time, an alternative political culture came into being; it sought to rescue Europe from the heritage of the Enlightenment, and naturally, when the crisis reached its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century, the attack was directed first against rationalism and humanism” (249–50). The late nineteenth-century’s opposition to “optimism, universalism and humanism” is identified by Sternhell with French socialist thought – in particular Proudhon and Sorel (24). Proudhon, of course, was a member of the Communist International. But that organization was taken over by Marx and Engels, leaving Proudhonians out in the cold. The Proudhonian legacy is anarchism, rather than communism. The Spanish Civil War exemplifies the difficulty of discriminating between the various “revolutionary” movements of the period. It was fomented by General Franco’s rebellion in February 1936 against the duly elected Popular Front government made up of Anarchists, Communists and a few Syndicalists. Anarchists, socialists, Communists, and anti-fascists from Europe and the Americas formed the famed International Brigade to support the elected government. The Russian Communists also sent aid to the Republicans, as the legitimate government was called. The democracies stood aside and watched as Hitler and Mussolini (ironically, a self-declared Syndicalist) sent substantial aid to Franco, who eventually prevailed, the last resistance to his forces capitulating on 1 April 1939. The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history as a prelude to World War II, which broke out only a few months later with Hitler’s

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invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. It is often regarded as a clear case of the failure of the democracies to respond to the threat of fascism/nazism – as, indeed, it was. However, it is better understood as an index of the confused state of power politics in the inter-war period, for it reveals that the capitalist democracies feared socialism/communism as much as they feared fascism/nazism. They wished for neither side to triumph, consequently democratic governments offered support to neither side, and even took measures to prevent their nationals from volunteering for the International Brigade. The point of mentioning the Spanish Civil War is to take note that Proudhonians and Sorelians were on opposite sides of the struggle in that conflict, even though Sternhell sees Proudhon and Sorel as joint progenitors of fascism. Here is how Sternhell resolves the apparent incoherence of his position: “When these leftists of all shapes and colours come to the conclusion that the working class had definitely beaten a retreat, they did not follow it into this attitude. Their socialism remained revolutionary when that of the proletariat had ceased to be so. Having to choose between the proletariat and revolution, they chose revolution: having to choose between a proletarian but moderate socialism and a non-proletarian but revolutionary and national socialism, they opted for the non-proletarian revolution, the national revolution” (27). The fascist revolution on the Sorelian model, Sternhell contends, would “eradicate the liberal democratic regime and its moral and intellectual norms without destroying all the structures of the capitalist economy” (27). So we have come back to the point I have pressed in previous chapters: the common feature of Left and the Right is a shared opposition to liberal democracy, which for the Right represented materialism – as did communism – and for the Left represented exploitation of the masses. The materialism – by which the Right meant atheism, not consumerism, which the term is often used to mean today – of liberal capitalism was not something that troubled any of our three poets (prior to Eliot’s conversion). They were somewhat distressed at the way in which capitalism maldistributed wealth, but, as we have seen, their primary concerns were cultural, and neither economic nor religious. Pound and Lewis were incensed that democracies valued artists too little and paid insufficient attention to their

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advice. Eliot tended to agree, though less stridently. Lewis’s primary concern was the tendency of capitalist democracies to wage war. All three supposed that more “personal governance” (that is, tyranny or dictatorship) would be more amenable to the advice of wise men like themselves. Finally, they all agreed that European culture had become moribund and needed renewal – akin to the notion of palingenesis (rebirth) that Griffin attributes to fascism. I cannot improve on Terry Eagleton’s characterization of the relation of the Modernists with fascism in “Nudge-Winking,” his review of Jason Harding’s excellent, The “Criterion”: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain – despite Eagleton’s use of the much-abused term “reactionary”: In fact, Eliot was not a fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost on those of his critics who, in the words of Edmund Burke, know nothing of politics but the passions they incite. Ideologically speaking, fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynamically ahead into the gleaming technological future. Like Modernism, it is both archaic and avant-garde, sifting pre-modern mythologies for precious seeds of the post-modern future. Politically speaking, however, fascism, like all nationalism, is a thoroughly modern invention. Its aim is to crush beneath its boot the traditions of high civility that Eliot revered, placing an outsized granite model of a spade and Sten gun in the spaces where Virgil and Milton once stood. (6) Harding, himself, it should be noted, also dismisses careless characterizations of Eliot’s political posture as fascist (“The Criterion,” 184).

lewis and fascism We have seen that Lewis was the first of the three to respond positively – in The Art of Being Ruled (1926) – to Mussolini’s fascist revolution, declaring that “some modified form of fascism should probably be best” for “anglo-saxon countries” (320–1). However, that remark should be placed in the context of Lewis’s preceding,

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and stronger, endorsation of Soviet communism: “I have already said that in the abstract I believe the sovietic system to be the best. It has spectacularly broken with all the past of Europe; it looks to the East, which is spiritually so much greater and intellectually so much finer than Europe, for inspiration. It springs ostensibly from a desire to alleviate the lot of the poor and outcast, and not merely to set up a cast-iron, militarist-looking state” (Art of Being Ruled, 320, my emphasis). Here Lewis sounds like the most star-struck of Western fellow travellers. However, despite such high praise for bolshevik communism, Lewis believed it had no prospect of succeeding in “anglo-saxon countries” (by which he presumably meant Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States of America). Fascism, he thought, was more compatible with the political culture of Britain. The career of Oswald Mosley illustrates the permeability of political boundaries in the inter-war period. He had begun his political career as a Conservative Member of Parliament, elected in the 1918 election in which he ran as a returned soldier. He left the Tories for the Labour party in March 1924, and then left Labour in February 1931. After some uncertainty, Mosley founded his own party, the British Union of fascists, in October of 1932. Like Pound he was “converted” by an interview with Mussolini during his 1932 fact-finding visit to Italy (Skidelsky, Mosley, 295). On returning to Britain Mosley wrote an enthusiastic article for the Daily Mail praising the Duce’s machismo: “The great Italian represents the first emergence of the modern man to power; it is an interesting and instructive phenomenon. Englishmen who have long suffered from statesmanship in skirts can pay him no less, and need pay him no more, tribute than to say, ‘Here at least is a man.’” (Quoted in Skidelsky, 285). Skidelsky adds that in Mosley’s view “the great constructive achievements of fascism ... far outweighed the loss of the ‘right to blather,’ which [loss] English liberals so deplored.” Unlike Lewis, Mosley stuck with his fascist beliefs, and was interred after the outbreak of hostilities. Fearing the same fate, Lewis fled to Canada. As Jeffrey Meyers puts it: “Lewis’s support of Hitler in 1930 led, indirectly but inexorably, to his exile in 1939” (247). Fascism, then, represented itself as a solution to the problems of “modernism” – perceived as atheism, internationalism, rationalism, and rule by the ignorant masses. None of these attributes were

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perceived as a threat in the United States where Christian beliefs, American exceptionalism, and egalitarianism were still strong, and where rationalism had not been a political force since the early days of the Revolution. No doubt for those reasons, there never was a political movement in the United States of America that could fairly be called “fascist.” The only serious candidate for that label is the Technocracy movement as modified by Howard Scott.1 Howard Scott and Thorstein Veblen founded Technocracy in 1919. Veblen articulated its principles in The Engineers and the Price System, a collection of essays first published in the Dial in 1921 – the year in which Eliot’s Waste Land appeared in the same journal! Veblen argued, in Henry Elsner’s summary, that “A violent revolution by the oppressed and exploited is neither probable nor, if it occurred, could it succeed.” In America, not only would a successful revolution not follow the Russian example, but it would “necessarily also be of a kind which has no close parallel in the history of revolutionary movements.” Previous revolutions were military and political, but a twentieth-century American revolution would be industrial, technological” (Elsner, 20). On the evidence of Patria Mia, Pound would have found Veblen’s technocratic arguments sympathetic, but I have found no indication that he ever read the articles – even though Pound appeared fairly regularly in The Dial between 1921 and 1923.2 By the mid-twenties the original Technocratic movement had been disbanded, but with the help of Walter Rautenstrauch, chairman of Industrial Engineering at Columbia University, Scott revived it in 1932 – in the depths of the Depression. They turned what had been primarily an academic theory of industrial organization into a political movement. Scott was prone to bluster and threats – as in the following remark of 1932: “It is their ship of state and if they cannot find a solution, the force majeur of continental conditions in the next few years, will bring forth those who can. These problems transcend all social theories and partisan politics – even government. It is civilization itself. Technology has written ‘mene mene tekel upharsin’ across the face of the price system” (quoted by Elsner, 5). Elsner concedes that “Most commentators on the technocratic movement have assigned it, especially in the Technocracy Inc. phase, to the category of fascism,” but he challenges that assessment on the grounds that it was not anti-commu-

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nist or anti-labour (208). However, it did adopt some of the trappings of Mussolini’s fascism such as uniforms, emblems (the Monad symbol), and mass rallies. Although Pound took no note of the early Technocratic movement he did comment on Scott’s version in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, dismissing it on the rather whimsical grounds that its association with Columbia University discredited it (48, 88). Pound seems to have regarded Technocracy as a rival to Social Credit and was unwilling to share the glory of having discovered the fact that modern power production altered economic realities. Although Technocracy did attract a number of intellectuals – most notably Harold Loeb, Stuart Chase, and the historian Charles Beard, I have not found any evidence that either Lewis or Eliot ever evinced any interest in Technocracy. As we have seen, Lewis was not alone in admiring Mussolini’s fascism, but he was eccentric in his endorsation of both fascism and Soviet communism: “The sovietic or the fascist chiefs, like other people, have to do the best they can with the material to their hand: and they are not perfect themselves. What they have done in a short time in the way of organization must be the admiration of the world” (The Art of Being Ruled, 75). (Pound, too, praised Lenin in Jefferson and/or Mussolini; the American radical, Lawrence Dennis, rather idiosyncratically regarded fascism, nazism, and communism as interchangeable.) Lewis was aware that Mussolini had been a member of the Italian Socialist party – Partito Socialista Italiano (psi) – before he concocted fascism out of a combination of Sorel’s syndicalism (with its legitimation of violence), Marinetti’s Futurism, and Italian nationalism. Hitler followed much the same formula – though without the worship of technology characteristic of Futurism. Both fascism/nazism and communism represented themselves as revolutionary, and both claimed to represent the common man against the interests of commerce and industry, but communism was formally an international movement, rejecting nationalism as one of the chains with which the bourgeoisie restrained the proletariat.3 In the Art of Being Ruled Lewis had given roughly equal prominence to Proudhon, Sorel, and other communist and fascist thinkers, regarding all of them as sharing a revolutionary program – a posture he sees as an inevitable consequence of the mecha-

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nization of society. In a pseudo Marxist argument, we have seen Lewis in The Art of Being Ruled attributing the taste for innovation and revolution to the ubiquity of machines, replacing the “static circle of the rotation of the crops” (23). Those sentiments anticipate Eliot’s celebration of the natural cycle in “East Coker I”: Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death. (ll. 41–7) Lewis also lamented the advent of the modern condition that Eliot had evoked so powerfully in his early poetry. Quite uncontroversially Lewis saw mechanization to be a consequence of scientific advances and hence deplored the scientific temperament that had brought it about, and which he believed would inevitably infect the entire population: “Science makes us strangers to ourselves. Science destroys our personally useful self-love. It installs a principle of impersonality in the heart of our life that is anti-vital. In its present vulgarized condition science represents simply the principle of destruction: it is more deadly than a thousand plagues, and every day we perfect it, or our popular industrially applied version of it” (The Art of Being Ruled, 24, my emphasis).4 Lewis could hardly have sounded more Wordsworthian, despite his scorn for sentimental romanticism. Although D.H. Lawrence and Lewis agreed on very little, Lawrence expressed a very similar antipathy for industrial society in Women in Love, written during the Great War. Gerald Crich, one of the principal figures in the novel, and the manager of a coal mine, represents the mores of industrial society in the novel: “His vision had suddenly crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What

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mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else mattered” (223). Lawrence explained in the foreword (dated 1919) that the novel was written between 1913 and 1917: “So that it is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.” Later in the foreword, Lawrence emphatically marks his sense of historical crisis presaging a violent new beginning: “We are now in a period of crisis. Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul. The people that can bring forth the new passion, the new idea, this people will endure. Those others, that fix themselves in the old idea, will perish with the new life strangled unborn within them. Men must speak out to one another” (485). This kind of apocalyptic talk did not come naturally to Pound, Eliot, or Lewis, but they shared Lawrence’s antipathy for the new industrial society, and his sense of crisis. Both Lewis and Lawrence saw the problem much as the eighteenth-century Luddites had done. The Luddites went about destroying power looms in the futile hope of saving their form of life as cottage weavers. As we have seen, Lewis offers The Art of Being Ruled as a sort of Noah’s Ark of the mind and claimed the Soviet Union as an ally in his opposition to the baleful influence of science: “One of the greatest innovations, and the most beneficent, of the sovietic rule has been the check it has begun to put on the popularization of science” (48). And he even recruits fascists to his Luddite cause: “By the agreement of the workers of the world, through their accredited representatives, to align themselves with the sovietic and fascist power, that unity would immediately be achieved” (54). Since in 1926 there existed only one fascist “power” (Italy) and one communist “power” (the Soviet Union), Lewis is calling for an alliance between Moscow and Rome, oblivious to their mutual hostility. Lewis’s naïve strategy seems to be based on the perception he shared with Lawrence Dennis that socialism and fascism are really two faces of the same phenomenon – tyranny or dictatorship: “everyone today is somewhere on the Left: all except fascism, which is a faction of the extreme and militant Left who have burst round and through to the Right, as it were – circumnavigated, boxed the compass ... The principle conflict today, then, is between the demo-

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cratic and liberal principle on the one side ... and on the other, the principle of dictatorship of which Lenin was the protagonist and the first great theorist, proving triumphantly in action what he had arrived at speculatively beforehand. He discarded all the confusions that the legacy of a century of liberal thought involved, and all the concepts of democracy and mass-control were rooted out of his system” (70). The compelling choice facing society in 1926, in Lewis’s opinion, is not how to organize the production and distribution of goods – whether through government ownership and control (socialism/communism), oligarchical control (fascism), or on laissez-faire grounds (capitalism). For him the choice is simply between (allegedly dysfunctional) parliamentary democracy and (enlightened) dictatorship: “The political ferment expressed by the fierce opposition of the principles of democracy or liberalism on the one hand, and dictatorship on the other resolves itself into the secular question of the One and the Many: of a unification of the world as opposed to a plurality of nations; of the rule of the minority as opposed to rule of the majority; of rule by the most vigorous and intelligent as opposed to rule by a show of hands”5 (72–3). Although Lewis abandoned the notion that fascism and bolshevism are equivalent, that view is not as bizarre as it might appear. Hannah Arendt also saw an essential equivalence between the two in Totalitarianism, published in1951, twenty-five years later than The Art of Being Ruled: “Practically speaking, it will make little difference whether totalitarian movements adopt the pattern of nazism or bolshevism, organize the masses in the name of race or class, pretend to follow the laws of life and nature or of dialectics and economics” (11). Later, having become hostile to communism, Lewis conflated liberalism and communism as Eliot did: “What people get if they become too liberal we have all now been able to observe. They get the cheap salvationist imperialism of marxian communism” (Men Without Art, 319). Insofar as liberalism is perceived to be a “bourgeois attitude,” Arendt tends to agree with Lewis on this point. She supposed: “bourgeois attitudes are very useful for those forms of dictatorship in which a ‘strong man’ takes upon himself the troublesome responsibility for the conduct of public affairs.”6 However, she believes that only the non-ideological tyrant can tolerate liberal

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attitudes, noting, “they are a positive hindrance to totalitarian movements which can tolerate bourgeois individualism no more than any other kind of individualism” (Totalitarianism, 11). Arendt’s view corresponds quite precisely with what Lewis’s expected from dictatorship. His error was that the ideologies he briefly espoused – bolshevism, fascism, and nazism – were not simple tyrannies, but totalitarian movements. Eliot saw Lewis’s objective in The Art of Being Ruled as being to construct a political regime favourable to the conduct of art, as did other “conservative” thinkers, placing him with “such critics as Benda, Babbitt, or Maritain, whose approach is very different.” In Lewis’s defence Eliot explains that the “artist in the modern world ... finds himself, if he is a man of intellect, unable to realise his art to his own satisfaction, and he may be driven to examining the elements in the situation – political, social, philosophical or religious – which frustrate his labour.” Although, Eliot adds, such neglect of the artist’s proper role may be criticized, “it is likely that some of the strongest influences on the thought of the next generation, may be those of the dispossessed artists” (“A Commentary,” Criterion 4, June 1926, 420). There is more than a touch of “whistling in the dark” in these remarks, but they manifest the belief shared by all three of our subjects that the artist is both victim of and therapist for social malaise. Finding a form of governance disinclined to wage war was even more important for Lewis than preserving “bourgeois attitudes.” The thought that industrial democracies were more inclined to military aggression than dictatorships might seem bizarre to us in the twenty-first century, but it must be remembered that Lewis grew up in the twilight of European Imperialism, which had brought wars of conquest to the farthest corners of the globe. The principal nineteenth-century imperial powers – Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany – were all either full democracies or limited monarchies. As for capitalism, it was widely believed that trade followed guns.7 It was not as obvious in 1926 that it would be Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo who would once again plunge the world into total war, and not Stalin. And not all dictators waged aggressive wars. For example, neither the Spanish dictator Franco nor the Portuguese dictator Salazar engaged in any wars of aggression.8 So I cannot agree with Frederic Jameson’s assertion, in his influential 1979 study of modernist art and politics, Fables of Aggression:

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Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, that aggression is an inevitable concomitant of conservative political thought. My analysis of Lewis’s politics is at odds with Jameson’s – largely because I reject the historical determinism and class analysis that animates his study. Read today, his rhetoric is distressingly aggressive and jargon-ridden, but at the time of publication, Jameson was well ahead of the wave of French-inspired neo-Marxist criticism that dominated the North American academy in the late eighties and nineties – a wave he helped to start. Jameson sees modernists as “protofascists”: “Protofascism may be characterized as a shifting strategy of class alliances whereby an initially strong populist and anticapitalist impulse is gradually readapted to the ideological habits of a petty bourgeoisie, which can itself be displaced when, with the consolidation of the fascist state, effective power passes back into the hands of big business” (14). Neither Lewis, Eliot, nor Pound could plausibly be accused of populism, but their “anticapitalist impulse” is manifest. Lewis’s Hitler makes Jameson’s classification of him as protofascist quite plausible – as would Eliot’s championing of Maurras. Pound did become a fascist booster, and hence the poster boy for protofascism among artists, despite his opposition to big business, and poor populist credentials. Jameson identifies two erroneous ideological strains in play in the interwar period – much as I see three. We agree that one of the strains is liberalism, which Jameson lumps with “left-oriented idealism.” He claims that liberalism “aims essentially at the transformation of the self, at some fundamental transformation of our own consciousness (which will then make an external revolution in the institutions unnecessary).” Clearly neither Lewis, Eliot, nor Pound fits this strain, for all three see the necessity of institutional change, and in any case all identify liberalism as a worn-out creed in need of replacement. They clearly belong to what Jameson calls “the culture critique of the Right” (129). What Jameson means by “the culture critique of the Right” is “the diagnosis of pernicious attitudes and toxic ideas” – as if his own discourse were not such a diagnosis. Through that analysis, he says, “the agents of cultural decay are specified in advance and can be no other than the very guardians of culture, the intellectuals themselves, by definition disgruntled and embittered, failed artists

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and would-be unsuccessful politicians – in short, the very archetype of ressentiment at its purest” (131–2). In these remarks, Jameson is reducing the cultural and political discourse of Lewis and friends to a rather coarse caricature of Julien Benda’s Trahison des Clercs, a work, as we have seen, they found not to their liking – in contrast to his earlier Belphégor. Nonetheless, Jameson’s remarks have some bite so far as Lewis is concerned, for he did direct his polemic primarily at fellow artists and thinkers, though he scarcely regarded them as “disgruntled and embittered.” That characterization is required to permit Jameson to apply the Nietzschean term, “ressentiment,” a word that possessed much greater cathexis for postmodern critics than its English equivalent, the plain white bread term, “resentment.” Although Jameson is characterizing Lewis’s cultural criticism, he applies the term, ressentiment, to Lewis himself and by extension to his fellow cultural critics, Eliot and Pound – neither of whom were much inclined to identify other artists and thinkers as their antagonists, except within strictly cultural controversy. Through this sort of analysis, Jameson is able to cobble together an account in which the undoubtedly aggressive behaviour of Hitler and Mussolini is seen as a mirror image of the rhetorical aggressiveness of the Modernists, arising out of their resentment at being displaced from the centre of the cultural life of the Englishspeaking democracies. There is no doubt that all three of my subjects were distressed at their marginal role in the life of industrial capitalist democracies, but it is surely a canard to reduce their cultural commentary to nothing more than sour grapes, the complaints of disgruntled artists. Like the similarly marginalized Marx and Lenin, they sincerely thought they could contribute to making the world a better place. Insofar as it is Marxist, Jameson’s cultural critique is avowedly a priori (a term much avoided in favour of “theory”) and therefore immune to disconfirmation by mere testimony. That is very much not the case for Lewis. Indeed, inconsistency seems to be a hallmark of The Art of Being Ruled; for example: although Lewis criticizes Nietzsche,9 his contempt for the “small man” is compatible with Nietzsche’s celebration of the Superman: “He [the “small man”] is not only the enemy of a unification of the intelligent forces of the world; he is the symbol of what has always held back

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our race, held up all that challenged his self-sufficiency and small conservatism” (104). The expression “our race” is not just a careless use of the term, for Lewis articulates an attitude toward racial distinctions in this work that is far more uncompromisingly articulated in Paleface three years later (1929): “The differentiation of mankind into two rigorously separated worlds would not be on the old ‘class’ lines at all, to begin with. It would be like a deep racial difference, not a superficial ‘class’ difference. This would entirely remove the sting of ‘inferiority’ and the usual causes of complaint. A beaver does not compare itself with a walrus or an antelope. There is no ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ between a cat and a dog. So it would be with the new species of man” (127). It is as if Lewis were channelling Mustapha Mond, the supreme ruler in Brave New World. But Lewis imagines individuals being sorted into categories by a system of competitive examinations that he supposes would aid in the creation of “another type of man,” rather than by selective in vitro breeding as in Brave New World: “Such a separation as would be obtained by an examination system instead of heredity, perhaps; or such a separation as the instinctive growth and differentiation of another type of man, heredity serving a biologic and not a social end: that is one solution of the present difficulty” (129). Lewis apparently assumes that intelligence would breed true. Earlier he had advanced the eugenic argument that racial purity is essential for the maintenance of a healthy polity, pointing to the Roman absorption of alien freemen as the principal cause of Rome’s decline (108–9).10 To be fair, Lewis consistently criticizes European imperial behaviour as an immoral and inexcusable exploitation of men and women of different skin colour and culture. And I think his protestation that there is no hierarchy of races can be taken as sincere. At the same time, he regards the differences between the “races” as not merely superficial – skin colour, hair, etc. – but as in some sense fundamental. I have no recollection of Lewis articulating what that difference would be, but I suppose it would be in the nature of cognitive habits – as opposed to capacities; sub-Saharan Africans, South Asians, East Asians, and American aboriginals all “think” differently than one another and differently than Europeans. This sort of view was very common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. One celebrated articulation of it was Lévi-Bruhl’s The

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Savage Mind, a work that Eliot cited in his dissertation and discussed favourably in a 1916 review.11 Like most of those who distrust democracy, Lewis has little faith in the wisdom, diligence, or energy of most human beings: “Absence of responsibility and automatic and stereotyped rhythm, is what men most desire for themselves. All struggle has for its end relief or repose. A rhythmic movement is restful; but consciousness and possession of the self is not compatible with a set rhythm” (130, my emphasis). Fulfilling one of the characteristics both Griffin and Sternhell identify as a hallmark of fascism, Lewis explicitly rejects Enlightenment faith in the nobility and perfectibility of mankind: “The libertarian slogans of the closing decades of the Eighteenth Century were based, I assert, upon unreal premises. They ascribed to man impulses that are not normally his. They deal in aspirations which, if realised, would be disagreeable to the majority” (130). He presses the point home a little later, after asserting that a society of “free men,”12 though desirable, is an impossibility: “For in the mass people wish to be automata; they wish to be conventional; they hate your teaching them or forcing them into ‘freedom;’ they wish to be obedient, hard-working machines, as near dead as possible – as near dead (feeling less and thoughtless) as they can get, without actually dying” (Art of Being Ruled, 151). Lewis not infrequently sinks into such misanthropic rants, and he has a well-deserved reputation for arrogance and irascibility in personal relations. But, despite these rather unattractive personal attributes, he was genuinely appalled at the slaughter of World War I, and terrified at the prospect of even greater slaughter in a subsequent war. He saw himself as a Cassandra valiantly striving to save his fellow Europeans from walking into a disaster he foresaw clearly. If he were truly a misanthrope, it is difficult to see why he would care. A plausible answer might be that he sought to save the abstract entity, “culture” or “civilization,” not the men, women, and children who make up the society within which a culture must subsist. In this respect Lewis’s social and political thought is of a piece with Eliot’s and Pound’s. All three thought of a society primarily in terms of its capacity to generate and support culture, that is, the arts. (They thought of science as the antitype of art, and hence an aspect of technology, not of culture – though they acknowledged that both science and technology impacted culture.) For Lewis the

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sine quae non was the deference due to the artist by society at large – an attitude that gives some credence to Jameson’s attribution of ressentiment to Lewis. What Pound wanted most was a guarantee of freedom from economic necessity for the artist. Eliot’s later political thought was dominated by his conviction that religious belief was essential to a healthy culture, and hence for artistic creation. He expressed that view most uncompromisingly in Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, where he denounced the “widely held” reciprocal errors “that culture can be preserved, extended, and developed in the absence of religion,” or, alternatively, “that the preservation and maintenance of religion need not reckon with the preservation and maintenance of culture” (30). One of the issues that concerned intellectuals in the early decades of the twentieth century (and still today in the first decade of the twenty-first) was how to maintain civil society without the sanctions provided by religious belief. The “liberal” alternative was humanism, influentially articulated by Bertrand Russell’s 1903 essay “The Free Man’s Worship” and Anatole France’s 1908 satirical fantasy Penguin Island. Both works targeted Christianity specifically, and religion generally, attributing the sanguinary nature of human history to the stirring of men’s passions by religious superstition. Although Lewis was not a believer, he took a more benign view of the influence of religion. His take on Christianity is pretty much the same as Marx’s, that religion was the “opiate of the masses:” “Christ’s perfection was full of impossibilities, on the mundane plane, and to stage them he had to take his audience out of life altogether. His doctrine was a drug: beneath its influence men saw their wrongs being righted, saw ‘the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely’ punished, and humble faith rewarded, the last first and the first last. Is it the action of an honourable man to give people these flattering visions? Is not the modern benefactor of big business (possibly sometimes of the type against which Christ inveighed) really the eternal rich man justifying himself, stealing a march on the magician and so-called Saviour?” (Art of Being Ruled, 371). Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, Charles Maurras, and Benito Mussolini were all atheists, but they all wished to retain religious practices, precisely for the reason that Marx wished to abolish them: religious practices tended to preserve the status quo. Lewis

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leaned toward Marx’s view, though he occasionally countenanced the humanist tolerance of religious superstition. Somewhat inconsistently, Lewis discredited all varieties of socialism on the grounds that they are “simply the religion that has superseded christianity, built largely on it” (278) – a judgment that Eliot reiterated in his Criterion review of fascist literature. Lewis rejected “Proudhon, Bakunin, Pelloutier,13 [and] Sorel” as “in one degree or another, just the same” (279). “They are all,” he declared, “without exception, and very strictly (whatever may be said about them), utopian and other-worldly ... No religious teacher promising paradise could be harsher in his disciplinary proposals than Sorel. They are indifferent to the ‘happiness’ of others not because they are heartless, but because they are fanatical, and because they believe that their proposals are ad majorem dei gloriam [“for the greater glory of God,” the Jesuit motto]. They would willingly throw people to the alligators for saying the world is flat, if socialism at the moment requires it to be round” (278–9). In effect, then, Lewis dismissed socialist reformers as impractical and fanatical dreamers who would bring disaster on those societies they manage to reform. Agreeing with the socialists that the status quo is not supportable – either morally or practically – Lewis’s solution in The Art of Being Ruled was benevolent tyranny, as exemplified in Lenin’s rule in the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s in Italy: “His [Mussolini’s] government is doing for Italy ... what the soviet has done for Russia. The more militant liberalist elements are being heavily discouraged in a very systematic way ... What will shortly be reached will be a great socialist state such as Marx intended, rigidly centralized, working from top to bottom with the regularity and smoothness of a machine ... Complete political standardization with the suppression of the last vestiges of the party system, will rescue masses of energy otherwise wasted in politics for more productive ends. All the humbug of a democratic suffrage, all the imbecility that is so wastefully manufactured, will henceforth be spared this happy people” (321). One must recall that Lewis is writing in 1925 and 1926, when the regimes in Italy and Russia had so far restricted their violence and oppression largely to political opponents – the “systematic” discouragement Lewis mentions. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and Stalin’s engineered starvation of Ukrainian “kulaks” were still

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a decade in the future. Nonetheless, Lewis’s easy acceptance of tyranny as the price of peace and prosperity is not to his credit – either on moral grounds or as an instance of political wisdom. Lewis ended The Art of Being Ruled on a Pollyanna note, seeing the present time as hopeful just because things are so bad: “the ever closer and more mechanical association of the great masses of people into an ever more and more rigid system of clans, societies, clubs, syndics, and classes” is driving “the original man” outside where “these odd men out stand at present glaring at each other as usual ... But the time must arrive when they, too, in spite of themselves, form a sort of syndic. That will be the moment of the renascence of our race, or will be the signal for a new biological transformation” (364). We can see a eugenic tinge to Lewis’s political thought in the last sentence, as well as his usual presumption that salvation can come only from extraordinary individuals. That the “syndic” of “odd men out” will be an association of “geniuses” is made clear in Paleface: “As ... society becomes, instead of an organic whole, a mass of minute individuals, under the guise of an Ethic there appears the Mystic of the Many, the cult of the cell, or the worship of the particle; and the dogma of ‘what is due from everybody to everybody’ takes the place of the natural law of what is due to character, to creative genius, or to personal power, or even to their symbols” (77–8). Lewis, then, is a poster boy for the ubiquitous view that the modernists were proto-fascists, except when they were not fascists tout court. His distaste for virtually all trends of scientific and philosophical thought of the modern era, his nostalgia for a past world, his faith in rule by a wise leader or elite group, his contempt for popularly elected democratic governance, his tolerance for “enlightened” oppression, and his inclination toward eugenic arguments – all align him with full-blown fascism. Two factors nonetheless distinguish his political posture from fascism – his pacifism, and his focus on the arts as therapy for a sick society. Lewis believed that art alone could provide an adequate response to the threat of the organized violence of war: “Where violence is concerned the aesthetic principle is evidently of more weight than the “moral,” the latter being only the machinery to regulate the former. One is an expedient, whose pretensions can easily be exploded: the other is the thing itself. As measure is the principle of all true art, and as art is an

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enemy of all excess, so it is along aesthetic lines that the solution of this problem should be sought rather than along moral (or police) lines, or humanitarian ones. The soberness, measure, and order that reigns in all the greatest productions of art is the thing on which it is most useful to fix the mind in considering this problem” (Art of Being Ruled, 64–5, my emphasis). Lewis’s faith that art alone can provide solutions to practical political, ethical, and economic problems in some ways anticipates postmodern privileging of the virtual over the actual.14 But, ironically, Lewis’s fiction and painting can hardly be said to further the political and pacifist project that his polemical prose is designed to foster, in that they express a contempt for the way things were rather than a model of how they could be.

eliot and charles maurras Eliot endorsed Lewis’s self-image as a pundit whose qualifications derive from his status as an artist, characterizing him, as noted above, as “the most remarkable example in England of the actual mutation of the artist into a philosopher of a type hitherto unknown” (“Commentary,” Criterion 4, Nov. 1927, 385). However, by 1927 Eliot had moved well away from Lewis’s positive views. Their disagreement about the attractiveness of fascism is evident in Eliot’s review essay, “The Literature of Fascism” a year later. The review examined five books on Italian fascism: J. S. Barnes, The Universal Aspects of fascism; Aline Lion, The Pedigree of Fascism; Gaetano Salvemini, The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, Vol. I; Luigi Sturzo, Italy and Fascism; and Luigi Villari, The Fascist Experiment. Villari, Barnes, and Lion defend fascism; Salvemini and Sturzo are hostile to it. Eliot began the review by declaring himself to be “a typical representative of the British and American public in the extent of my knowledge and ignorance of fascism in Italy,” and one as yet unconvinced by the critics of fascism. The question for Eliot is “whether fascism is the emergence of a new political idea, or the recrudescence of an old one, that may infect the whole of Europe as Parliamentarism infected it in the nineteenth century, or whether it is purely local” (281). Eliot’s implication that fascism and parliamentary democracy are equivalently pathological highlights his anti-democratic bias. It becomes apparent in the review that the “old idea” – of which he believes fascism is a recrudescence – is Maurrasian Royalism.

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For Eliot the central issue was not the struggle between alternative political regimes – democracy on the one hand, and fascism or communism on the other – as it was for most observers. He saw the issue to be one of belief, and regarded both fascism and communism as “movements” that offer bogus substitutes for religious beliefs and institutions. On this point he is in complete accord with Lewis. “The human craving to believe in something is pathetic, when not tragic; and always, at the same time, comic. I still believe, however, that religious beliefs (including, of course, Atheism), are on a different plane. Some so-called religious beliefs are really political beliefs in disguise; but many political beliefs are substitutes for religious belief ... So far as bolshevism is a practical way of running Russia if it is for the material contentment of Russians, it seems to me worthy of study. So far as it is a kind of supernatural faith it seems to be a humbug. The same is true of fascism. There is a form of faith which is solely appropriate to a religion; it should not be appropriated by politics” (“The Literature of Fascism”).15 Unlike Lewis, Eliot was “not concerned with the feasibility of fascism as a working programme for Italy. What matters,” he wrote, “is the spread of the fascist idea.” Once again we find the ubiquitous perception that democracy had run its course, and must be replaced by something else: “Now it is manifest that any disparagement of ‘democracy’ is nowadays well received by nearly every class of men, and any alternative to ‘democracy’ is watched with great interest. This is one point on which intellectuals and populace, reactionaries and communists, the million-press and the revolutionary sheet, are more and more inclined to agree.” But, rather surprisingly, Eliot confided that he could not “share enthusiastically in this vigorous repudiation of ‘democracy’” (287). But the democracy Eliot defended was one with a restricted suffrage; he deplored universal suffrage, which he said, will “send us on the way merely to government by an invisible oligarchy instead of a government by a visible one. But,” he added, “it is another thing to ridicule the idea of democracy. A real democracy is always a restricted democracy, and can only flourish with some limitation by hereditary rights and responsibilities” (288). In short Eliot’s idea of democracy was a limited monarchy with an entrenched aristocracy – exactly British democracy before the Reform Bill of 1867.

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Strikingly, the critique of democracy offered by Eliot and Lewis is very much the same as Mussolini’s in his article “Political and Social Doctrine”: After socialism, fascism trains its guns on the whole block of democratic ideologies, and rejects both their premises and their practical applications and implements. fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be levelled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage. Democratic régimes may be described as those under which the people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces. Democracy is a kingless régime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusively, tyrannical, and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant.” (Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, 21–2, my emphasis) Mussolini’s definition of fascism as “as an organised, centralised, authoritarian democracy” (23) fits perfectly what both Eliot and Lewis would like to have in place – though just how a centralized and authoritarian government answers to the label “democracy” is not self-evident. So far, we can see a broad agreement between Eliot and Lewis. But Eliot did not draw the same conclusions as Lewis (or Mussolini) about the suitability of fascism as a substitute for faulty democracies – which, for Eliot, included the United States. Eliot believed that the usa had ceased to be a democracy with “the presidency of Jackson, and the Pork Barrel System.” The need, he said, is to “build a new structure in which democracy can live.” He did not think that fascism represented such a structure. Admitting that “order and authority are good,” he lamented that in longing for them there is “a certain spiritual anaemia, a tendency to collapse the recurring human desire to escape the burden of life and thought.” Eliot believed fascism appealed to this inchoate and mute longing, a desire to “be benevolently ordered about.” Finally,

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he declared that whatever is to be admired in fascism can already be “found, in a more digestible form, in the work of Charles Maurras” (“Literature of Fascism,” 288). The Maurrassian polity is superior to fascism, in Eliot’s view, because it retained the “Kingship and hereditary class.” Even though Eliot had declared himself “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes published earlier in the year,16 he does not call for a restored Christendom in this review. Eliot’s rejection of fascism, then was not on grounds of its antidemocratic and totalitarian character, nor because of its overt celebration of violence,17 but because he found it inferior to the antidemocratic and totalitarian doctrines of Charles Maurras and the Action Française! Cautious as always, Eliot concluded the review with a remark designed to isolate his political and social thinking from identification with any party or ideology: “the function of political theory is not to form a working Party, but to permeate society and consequently all parties.”18 Despite his hostility to its humanistic bias, Eliot cited Fabianism as a model of such a permeation of society by political and social ideas. Russian communism and Italian fascism, by contrast, “have died as political ideas, in becoming political facts” (290). No doubt it is just such “permeation” of society that he quixotically imagined might be achieved by the discourse published in The Criterion. Like Lewis he expected some new political accommodation to follow democratic capitalism, and hoped to help formulate that accommodation. Unlike Lewis and Pound, Eliot never endorsed any established regime, but clung to the Action Française fantasies of a Christian, Royalist polity. An example of Eliot’s commitment to Maurras’ Action Française is found in his response a year earlier than this review to the papal condemnation of the Action Française and the works of Maurras on 29 December 1926. In his “Commentary” for November, 1927 Eliot included that condemnation as one of “three events in the last ten years” which have drawn men of letters to pay attention to political matters. The other two were the Russian revolution and the fascist coup in Italy (Criterion 6, 386)! There cannot have been many others who would have ranked the papal prohibition of the Action Française so high! When the Catholic writer Leo Ward published The Condemnation of the Action Française in 1928, defending the Vatican’s condemna-

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tion of Maurras, Eliot responded with a lengthy and tendentious defence of Maurras in his “Commentary” for March 1928.19 At the end of that piece Eliot remarked that he was moved to come to Maurras’ defence by “Ward’s suggestion that the influence of Maurras, indeed the intention of Maurras, is to pervert his disciples and students away from Christianity,” adding: “I have been a reader of the work of Maurras for eighteen years; upon me he has had exactly the opposite effect.” And in his 1948 “Hommage à Charles Maurras,” Eliot noted that he had written the date “1911” in his copy of Maurrras’ L’Avenir de l’intelligence, but he could not recall who recommended Maurras to him (Hommage, 6). It is reasonable, then, to suppose – as John Margolis and all later discussants do – that Maurras influenced Eliot’s political philosophy from a very early date. Indeed, Kenneth Asher points out that Maurras deeply influenced the Harvard French professor Irving Babbitt, and that Babbitt’s hostility to romanticism and fondness for the classic echoed Maurrassian views. Babbit passed on that attitude to his students, including Eliot (Asher 1998, 24). Margolis speculates that it was the papal condemnation of Maurras that led Eliot to adopt Anglicanism publicly, citing Paul Elmer More’s opinion that Maurras was an important element in Eliot’s conversion: “Some time between The Waste Land and For Lancelot Andrewes [Eliot] underwent a kind of conversion, due largely I believe to the influence of Maurras and the Action Française” (cited in Dakin, note 269). Before publishing his defence of Maurras in his March 1928 “Commentary,” Eliot had extended an invitation to Leo Ward to respond, and printed Ward’s response in the June 1928 Criterion number. It would be tedious to trace their respective observations point by point, but it is worth noting that Ward explicitly alludes to the rather bloodthirsty nature of the Action Française, which was born in support of the infamous treason conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer falsely accused of spying for the Germans: “In regard to national hatred the memory of any of the readers of this Review who have read the Action Française will supply abundant evidence. I recall especially its attitude towards the deaths from famine and alcoholism in post-war Germany. In the matter of class (or at least of party) hatred I would recall the conviction of M. Maurras for incitement to murder in the case of Abraham Schramek” (“A Reply to Mr. Eliot” 83).20 Eliot did not respond to

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these observations, nor to the following, which enrolls Wyndham Lewis on Ward’s side of the issue: “Most of M. Maurras’ political ideas were already to be found in Joseph de Maistre and his more rhetorical nationalist outbursts are easily outdone by Mussolini. I am wholly unable to believe that any fruitful inspiration is to be derived from what Mr. Wyndham Lewis has well described as ‘the senseless bellicosity of the reactionary groups of the Action Française type.’”(“A Reply to Mr. Eliot,” 83–4). Eliot, incidentally, was well aware of Maurras’ intellectual descent from de Maistre, the eighteenth-century French conservative and royalist. He had told Herbert Read in a letter of 14 September 1925 that he intended to do a book on Maurras, as one of a proposed series of Criterion books. The series never came to pass, but in a later letter (11 Dec. 1925) Eliot added: “When I do the Maurras book I shall have to look into Comte, Joseph de Maistre etc.” (Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria). It appears that he did look into de Maistre, for he refers to him on several occasions. One of them – in a 1937 review of Lewis’s Lion and the Fox – is worth repeating, for it links Maurras, de Maistre and (by implication Eliot himself) as neglected social and political theorists: “Of ideologues we find ... two kinds: the majority ideologue and the minority ideologue. The former, if he is a big one like Marx, anticipates the way in which things are going; if he is a little one like Mr. Laski or Mr. Strachey, he accepts the current of ideas (not quite the same thing as the current of events) as he finds it. The minority ideologue – a de Maistre, a Bonald, a Maurras, or a Charles Benoist – is against the current; and the best that he can expect is to be hailed some generations later (by people with whom he would very likely have little sympathy) as a forerunner. But his purposes are the same, (whether his ideas be more or less desirable), as those of the others” (“The Lion and the Fox,” 111). Eliot gave himself the last word in the exchange with Leo Ward. Responding to Ward’s observation that Maurras was not a believing Christian, Eliot resorted to an insincere ad hominem retort: “Mr. Ward, asserts again that Maurras is a profoundly anti-Christian thinker. How can Maurras be anti-Christian, when he admits that Catholic Christianity is essential to civilization? Mr. Ward would, on the same assumptions, be obliged to affirm that Mr. Irving Babbitt is ‘profoundly anti-Christian.’ What Mr. Ward says of M. Maurras,

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he ought to say of several other people of importance: and amongst persons of no importance, he might say it of myself” (“L’Action Française,” Eliot’s rejoinder, 84). This remark is at best a quibble, for Maurras and Babbitt, like Matthew Arnold, recommended retaining the trappings of religion in a cynical and paternalistic strategy to keep the masses in line. Eliot’s Christianity is of an altogether different nature. Indeed, years later, in his war-time meditation Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, Eliot inveighs against just such a secular view of religion: “The facile assumption of a relationship between culture and religion is perhaps the most fundamental weakness of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Arnold gives the impression that Culture (as he uses the term) is something more comprehensive than religion; that the latter is no more than a necessary element, supplying ethical formation and some emotional colour, to Culture which is the ultimate value” (Notes, 88).21 For Eliot the relationship between religion and culture is entirely the other way: “We may go further and ask whether what we call the culture, and what we call the religion, of a people are not different aspects of the same thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people” (28). Rather lamely, Eliot protests that despite Maurras’ sceptical humanism, his political ideas are compatible with Christianity: “ I say only that if anyone is attracted by Maurras’ political theory, and if that person has as well any tendency towards interior Christianity, that tendency will be quickened by finding that a political and a religious view can be harmonious” (“L’Action Française,” Eliot’s rejoinder, 87). That Eliot should have gone so far as to compromise his own deepest beliefs in defence of Maurras is a measure of his indebtedness to the French thinker. Even after Maurras had fatally compromised himself during the German occupation of France – so much so that he was convicted of treason and sentenced to death (though the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment) – Eliot continued to defend him. In the 1955 essay “The Literature of Politics,” Eliot portrayed Maurras as a tragic hero, and reiterated his admiration for his political thought: “I think of a man whom I held in respect and admiration, although some of his views were exasperating and some deplorable – but a great writer, a genuine lover of his country, and a man who deserved a better fate than that

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which he had in the end to meet.” Eliot wondered if Maurras could have avoided the “difficulties” he encountered if – like Eliot – he “had confined himself to literature and to the literature of political theory, and had never attempted to found a political party, a movement ...” If he had been more circumspect, Eliot thought that perhaps “those of his ideas which were sound and strong might have spread more widely and penetrated more deeply, and affected more sensibly the contemporary mind” (To Criticize the Critic, 142–4). I would not go so far as Kenneth Asher: “Simply put, it seems to me that from beginning to end, Eliot’s work, including both the poetry and the prose, was shaped by a political vision inherited from French reactionary thinkers, especially from Charles Maurras” (T. S. Eliot and Ideology, 2–3). But there is no doubt that Eliot’s political views derive in great part from Maurras, and that the latter’s influence on Eliot’s thinking began as early as 1911 – and was never renounced. With less hesitation than Margolis, Asher argued that it was politics that led Eliot to religion, rather than the other way around, as most commentators assume: “Politics led Eliot to religion but he rarely acknowledged the political element that constituted a central part of what he understood – and in his writings intended – by his religion” (9). But it is impossible to believe that Eliot’s religious beliefs are merely expedient. Even though Lyndall Gordon may have given Eliot’s religious temperament more prominence in determining his actions and attitudes than it deserves, her biographies have surely demonstrated beyond doubt the sincerity of his beliefs – if any such demonstration was necessary. Maurras’ appeal to Eliot was not based just on Maurras’ sanction of the social role of an ecclesiastical institution. He also admired his literary criticism, which he showcased in Criterion, rather than his political views. Eliot published Maurras’ 1898 article, “Prologue to an Essay on Criticism” in two parts (January and February 1928), translated by himself. Maurras’ “Prologue” insists on the equivalence of “creative” and critical writing, and assigns a high and noble task to criticism: “Literary criticism, properly so called, consists in perceiving and exhibiting the good and the bad in the works of the mind; and this perception presumes two operations which may be consecutive or simultaneous: feeling and choice” (Criterion 7, 13). The same is true, Maurras maintains, of the poet:

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“almost as the biological cell selects, among the juices available, that which it needs and rejects the others, so likewise the poet selects, among words and ideas, those which avail for his work, and throws aside the perniciously useless; so also the critic selects, among the artistic impressions which he has received from books, those which have pleased him, and rejects and excludes all the rest” (15). The affinity with Eliot’s critical views is obvious. One could go on citing affinities between Maurras’ critical views and Eliot’s, but those cited are sufficient to demonstrate that Maurras’ influence on Eliot was not confined to his political posture. Eliot echoes Maurrassian views as early as 1916 in his review of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (478). There he observes that Bradley’s monism “expresses that violent and bitter reaction against romanticism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our time” (576). As noted above, Eliot had purchased and read Maurras’ L’Avenir de l’intelligence during his 1911 stay in Paris.22 Despite that early exposure, I have found no expression of admiration for Maurras’ political views prior to the 1920s. And, even though the Action Française was a political movement, it is worth noting that most of its participants were literary figures, who – apart from their anti-Dreyfusard activities – sought to find a way for the arts to preserve their independence in a modern, commercial environment. Edward Tannenbaum stresses that aspect of the movement: “Although Maurras and his colleagues were ostensibly working for a restoration of the monarchy, what they really wanted was a world in which they could write their poems and essays without having to worry about where they would get money to live. Their sensitive natures revolted [sic] against the mercenary spirit of modern society. In order to earn a living they had to appeal to the general public. Since they could not satisfy its tastes, they also expressed their longing for a return to the Old Regime in their literary criticism” (Edward R. Tannenbaum, 60, quoted by Ward, 90). Thus the members of Action Française faced the same problems and issues as did our authors, though a generation earlier (Maurras was born in 1868, Eliot in 1888), and in the context of Republican France rather than egalitarian America and Imperial Britain. For all of them the issue was the survival of the autonomy of the artist, a concern that arose from a tacit Romantic conception of the artist as an individual possessing a special sensi-

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bility – as opposed to the classical conception of the artist as an individual possessing a special talent or skill. Perhaps the best assessment of Maurras’ influence on Eliot was penned by Eliot himself, in a letter to the editor of Time and Tide (17 Jan. 1953): “It is misleading to describe Maurras as a ‘Catholic Royalist.’ He was certainly a Royalist, though his form of Royalism proved unacceptable to the Pretender and his friends; and I understand that before his death he was reconciled to the Church and received the sacraments. But throughout his life he was explicitly a rationalist – a disciple of Comte: and it was precisely his support of the Church solely on political and social grounds that exposed him to ecclesiastical censure and led to the condemnation of the Action Française in 1926. . . .. It is also misleading to term Maurras a ‘fascist.’ He had formulated his own political philosophy long before ‘fascism’ was ever heard of. And if I am not mistaken, fascism and Royalism are fundamentally incompatible” (quoted by Kojecky, note 68). Notice that, in contrast to his defence of Maurras against Ward in 1928, Eliot admitted in 1953 that Maurras’ “support of the Church” was “solely on political and social grounds.” But he still bemoaned the Church’s condemnation of Maurras. And – as before – excused Maurras from the charge of fascism by pointing out his priority, rather than by citing any incompatibility in doctrines or beliefs, other than Royalism. Lewis was also familiar with Maurras. He claims to have met him (Meyers, 16), and certainly shared some of his attitudes – notably a distaste for democracy and romanticism. Lewis contrasted royalism and Catholicism to secular democracy in The Art of Being Ruled – though without naming Maurras or the Action Francaise: “A really good, out-and-out ‘reactionary’ journal is, at first, like a breath of fresh air in the midst of all this turbulent, pretentious, childish optimism. A royalist publication is worth its weight in gold. Catholicism, we feel, is essential to our health. We fly to the past – anywhere out of this suspended animation of the so smugly ‘revolutionary’ present” (32). But in the end Lewis opted for dictatorship and nationalism rather than royalism and Catholicism, abandoning Maurras – as Ward noted. However, Lewis did recurrently praise the Catholic Church in Maurrasian terms – commending its organizational wisdom – and he recognized it as an ally in his campaign of resistance to Time Philosophy: “The catholic criticism of “modernity” is as irre-

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trievably “historical” as the doctrine of Spengler. It is really a ‘time’doctrine too, as in the nature of things, perhaps, it must be. But the converse to that of the “evolutionist.” It attaches a disproportionate importance to one time, as its opponents to all time ... when we said there was no ‘opposition’ today [to time philosophy], that would, in this sense, be inexact: for there is, of course, always the catholic opposition” (Time and Western Man, 371–2).

pound and social credit In chapter II we saw Pound dismiss the Action Française as “French modern mysticism.” Pound’s radicalization did not stem from his religious views as did Eliot’s, nor from the shock of the First World War, as did Lewis’s. Although Pound’s radicalization coincided with the war, it was only tangentially related to it, being the consequence of his “discovery” that wars between – and economic malfunctions within – capitalist countries were the consequence of a misunderstanding of the nature of employment, interest and money. The source of that discovery was Major Douglas, a British engineer who had no economic training. I have discussed Pound’s engagement with Douglas’s economics at length in my 1999 study Pound in Purgatory so I will not go into great detail on that topic here. However, we need to have a clear sense of how these three men diverged in the decade and a half between the end of the war in 1918 and Hitler’s elevation to chancellor in 1933. Pound first alluded to economic skullduggery in his 1918 New Age series, “What America has to Live Down,” and even then rather elliptically: “England herself must answer the questions of international finance – whether or no Frankfort still works against New York in international banking ... Internationalism of capital is almost in being, capital can internationalise, and will do so, with a rapidity infinitely greater than that which is possible to labour” (23, 5 Sept. 1918, col. 1, 298). It is striking that Pound picks on the “internationalism” of capital as a mark of its infamy. This distrust of trans-national institutions and forces is in strong contrast to the supra-nationalist tendencies of Eliot and Lewis – even though their internationalism was confined to Europe and North America. Pound’s later commitment to fascist Italy reflects that same distrust of the trans-national.

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Major Douglas appeared at the offices of The New Age, A. R. Orage’s journal, sometime in 1917 with what he believed was a solution to the “business cycle,” that is, the recurrent cycle of booms and busts. Under Orage, The New Age was backed financially by prominent Fabians, among them George Bernard Shaw, as well as by wealthy individuals wishing to promote alternative religious views. Pound had been a regular contributor since 1909, owing a considerable portion of his income to the journal in which he appeared over his own name, and over the pseudonyms Bastien (sometimes Baptiste) von Helmholtz, B. H. Dias, and William Atheling. He spent a lot of time in their offices on Cursitor Street in London. He told John Drummond that Orage “did more to feed me than anyone else in England ... Orage’s 4 guineas a month ... wuz the sinews, by gob the sinooz” (Letters, 344). A journal of arts and letters, The New Age also published articles on religion, politics, and economics. In the early years of the war it welcomed articles from those promoting an economic and political strategy called “Guild Socialism” whose principal theorist was G. D. H. Cole. Guild Socialism was an effort to make the backward-looking ideas of John Ruskin, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc suitable for an industrial economy. It was because of that economic interest that Douglas thought The New Age would be hospitable to his economic theory. Orage dubbed Douglas’s economics, “Social Credit,” and spent several months with Douglas articulating the theory. As pound recalled in 1934: “The actual battle with ignorance, in the acute phase wherein I shared, began with Douglas’s arrival in Cursitor Street. The earlier Guild Socialism, and all other political or social theory had lain outside my view. (This statement is neither boast nor apology.) I take it I was present at some of the earliest talks between the two leaders. At an rate my economic study dates from their union, and their fight for its place in public knowledge” (“He Pulled His Weight,” 13). Pound also memorialized his economic enlightenment in Canto 46, first published in 1936 (the “fuzzy bloke” is Pound himself): Seventeen Years on this case, nineteen years, ninety years on this case An’ the fuzzy bloke sez (legs no pants ever wd. fit) ‘IF

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that is so, any government worth a damn can pay dividends?’ The major chewed it a bit and sez: ‘Y---es, eh ... You mean instead of collectin’ taxes?’ ‘Instead of collecting taxes.’ That office? Pound first wrote explicitly and at length about Douglas’s economic and political views in his New Age series “The Revolt of Intelligence.” It ran from November 1919 to March 1920. In Number 9 of the series Pound articulated an early version of his view of history as an either/or opposition between two contraries: “The function of civilisation, is to depreciate material values and to build up values of intelligence. The counter-force, the destroyer of civilisations, has presumably been the effort of ‘rulers’ to levy taxes in return. (Taxes, usury, tributes, etc., various forms of the same thing).” In his view – still not uncommon among conservative thinkers – a tax is merely a levy by the idle on the industrious, and is morally equivalent to the charging of interest (of which most conservatives approve) or the exaction of tribute by a conqueror from the conquered. He divides society into a simple duopoly of creators (artists, inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs) and parasites (not so carefully catalogued, but including merchants, professors and bankers). Pound accused “the usurer’s propagandists” of deliberately merging the productive members of society – whom he called “the super-worker,” that is, hard-working and ambitious people such as artists, inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs – “with the Capitalist.” In that way they conflate, “for purpose of propaganda, civilisation with exploitation.” In Pound’s view, the capitalist is the usurer par excellence, the financier who provides the entrepreneur (of whom Pound approves) with the necessary loan to build his factory, bridge or railroad, but does not support the artist while he paints, writes, or composes. An improvement “of the economic system will come,” Pound thought, only “when the super-labourer ... the organiser, the out-reacher, turns against usury; when he dissociates two ideas: leadership and exploitation” (New Age, 11 March 1920, 301). In April of 1920 Pound reviewed Economic Democracy, Douglas’s first book, in Margaret Anderson’s Little Review. He believed that

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Douglas’s economic theories represented a cognitive revolution equivalent to earlier world-shaking overturnings of ignorance and superstition: “Universitaire [sic] economics hold the field as nonexperimental science and catholicism held the fields in Bacon’s day and in Voltaire’s, and I have no doubt that the opposition to Major Douglas’s statements will take the track of making him out a mere Luther. Humanism came to the surface in the renaissance and the succeeding centuries have laboured, not always in vain, to crush it down” (6, April 1920, 40). Social Credit, he claimed, “offers an alternative to bloody and violent revolutions, and might on that account be more welcomed than it will be, but perspicacity is not given to all men, and many have in abuleia gone to their doom” (41). That is to say, by resolving the economic malfunctioning of capitalist economies, Social Credit renders communism unnecessary – if the ignorant and unperceptive do not block the Douglasite insights. We have seen that Pound was primed for just such a discovery, having been convinced from as early as 1910 that he lived on the eve of a renaissance or risorgimento equivalent to the Italian Renaissance. Given his predilections and humanistic education, he had thought of the new civilization in cultural rather than social or economic terms. But the response to the war articulated in the New Age persuaded him that social and economic factors were essential underpinnings to any cultural revolution. And, to be fair, he stressed the socially redeeming features of the Douglas scheme as well as its suitability for the preservation of the social structure – something that, like Lewis and Eliot, he regarded as essential: “If labour were paid for its produce at same rate as in xiv century, the amount of produce per labourer (using machinery) would bring him in about £5000 per year, i.e., counting for present cheapness of money ... Nothing new. Merely the middle ages had sense enough to dislike usury and we have let it become the basis of our alleged civilization” (“A Letter from London,” EPPP 11, 4). This remark demonstrates that Pound’s response to the promises of Social Credit – apart from the fact that it was seriously flawed as an economic theory – was heavily skewed by his Pollyanna attitude. £5000 per year was a fantastic salary in 1920, when £500 per annum was still a comfortable middle-class income. Although Pound was no doubt being consciously hyperbolic, such exaggeration could only harm his credibility.

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Pound produced a flurry of published comments boosting Social Credit from 1919 until the mid-1920s, declaring in a brief notice of Douglas’s Credit Power and Democracy in W. C. Williams’ journal, Contact: “The symbolist position, artistic aloofness from world affairs, is no good now. It may have assisted several people to write and work in the 80’s, but it is not, in 1921, opportune or apposite” (1, Summer 1921). But he eventually tired of the effort, declaring in 1927: “As to our joining revolutions’ etc. it is unlikely. The artist is concerned with producing something that will be enjoyable even after a successful revolution.” “The artist, the maker,” he claims, “is always too far ahead of any revolution, or reaction, or counter-revolution or counter-reaction for his vote to have an immediate result; and no party programme ever contains enough of his programme to give him the least satisfaction.” (“The State,” Exile, Spring 1927, in Selected Prose, 214–15). Although these sentiments are similar to Eliot’s view that it would be an error to enter into political action, Pound was not to stick with this withdrawal from political and economic engagement. Nonetheless, for several years he did refrain from commenting on the age, publishing very little prose, and concentrating on his epic, The Cantos – which, between 1921 and 1930, also avoided political comment. In the meantime, Pound abandoned Britain as essentially irredeemable. Moving back and forth between London and Paris for a time, he published barbs criticizing London and England in letters to British and American literary journals. In an open letter to Harry Turner, the editor of Much Ado, a journal based in St. Louis, Eliot’s home town, Pound mused about founding a university – a fantasy that he never entirely abandoned, although the closest he ever got was to dub his entourage at Rapallo, the “Ezuversity.” “It is absolutely necessary,” he maintained, “to start the new civilization’ whether one builds it inside the decaying cortex of the present one or on the scraps doesn’t seem to me much to matter. The present one will go to pot all quickly enough without one’s pushing.” Reflecting his disaffection with Britain, he wondered “whether I shd. emigrate to the U. S. now (probably prematurely) or wait till 1930 or 1940 or 1960?” (9, 1 Nov 1920, 2–3). In the event, he left London for Paris and, not long after, left Paris for Rapallo. The latter move was more for reasons of econo-

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my than from disaffection with Paris – though both factors were in play. Early in 1921 he told readers of the Chicago magazine Poetry: “The intellectual curiosity of this island [Great Britain] is nil. The desire for more precise ideation, for better prose, for international standards, is zero; and the young American who wants external stimulant for this thought would do better to turn his attention to Paris ...” (“Thames Morasses,” 17, 148). Earlier in 1921, Pound published a peculiar piece in The New Age, titled “Axiomata” (13 January 1921, 125), which articulated a kind of pagan agnosticism that has no apparent relevance either to Social Credit or to his dreams of a renaissance. The editor, Orage (who was himself soon to abandon the journal to become a missionary in New York City for Gurdjeffian beliefs), represented the article as Pound’s farewell to Britain, as well as his “intellectual will and testament.” Although it is mostly concerned with the articulation of a sort of pagan agnosticism, “Axiomata” also expresses distaste for “dogma,” which Pound characterized as “bluff based on ignorance.” In the spirit of “either/or” that we have seen to be characteristic of all three artists’ thinking, Pound identified two types of dogma: “benevolent” and “malevolent.” The former is “an attempt to ‘save the world’ by instigating it to accept certain propositions.” Presumably Social Credit would be such a benevolent dogma – one that he no longer wished to push so hard. “Malevolent dogma” is, he said, “an attempt to gain control over others by persuading them to accept certain propositions.” Dogma, then, is in itself, innocent. It is its use – rather than its truth or falsity – that separates benevolence from malevolence. There is a third, “nolent” type of dogma, “a sort of automatic reaction of the dogmatiser, who may have come to disaster by following certain propositions, and who, from this, becomes crampedly convinced that contrary propositions are true.” Pound rejected all varieties of dogma, asserting: “belief is a cramp, a paralysis, an atrophy of the mind in certain positions” (“Axiomata,” 125). Given Pound’s commitment to fascism in the next decade, these remarks are rather prophetic of his own dogmatism, for in the thirties and thereafter, because of its opposition to democratic capitalism he wilfully overlooks all the negatives that others saw in fascism. Shortly after his “conversion” to Social Credit, he identified democratic capitalism with the “malevolent dogma” of “usurocracy,” by

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which he meant the surreptitious governance of nations by financial interests for their own benefit. Here he is not so distant from his friends, for as we have seen, both Eliot and Lewis regarded Western democracies as in truth oligarchies. Pound’s analysis is simpler and more naïve than theirs, and he is more inclined to positing evil-doers opposing men and women of good will. But, like them, he believed that a heightening of awareness amongst an aroused public is required to repair the lamentable state of public affairs in the twenties. And, like them, he believed that such a heightening of awareness is the responsibility and duty of an elite, but an artistic, rather than a scientific, philosophical, political, or business elite. Most important for the curve of Pound’s political engagement is that he was convinced that Social Credit provided a recipe ensuring a peaceful and prosperous future for Europe and the world. That conviction meant, among other things, that – unlike Lewis – he was uninterested in the rise of fascism in Italy, even though he lived in Italy from late 1921. This point needs to be stressed because he became a convinced fascist booster in the ‘thirties, and remained so until his death. At the risk of boring my readers, something more needs to be said about the nature of Social Credit, which Pound scholiasts tend either to reject out-of-hand as nonsense, or to praise as valuable, though flawed, economic theory. I argued in Pound in Purgatory that it is neither, and I am supported in this judgment by J.M. Keynes, who paid Douglas measured tribute in his epochal 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: Since the war there has been a spate of heretical theories of under-consumption, of which those of Major Douglas are the most famous. The strength of Major Douglas’s advocacy has, of course, largely depended on orthodoxy having no valid reply to much of his destructive criticism. On the other hand, the detail of his diagnosis, in particular the so-called A + B theorem, includes much mere mystification ... Major Douglas is entitled to claim, as against some of his orthodox adversaries, that he at least has not been wholly oblivious of the outstanding problem of our economic system. Yet he has scarcely established an equal claim to rank – a private, perhaps, but not a major in the brave army of heretics – with

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Mandeville, Malthus, Gesell and Hobson, who, following their intuitions, have preferred to see the truth obscurely and imperfectly rather than to maintain error, reached indeed with clearness and consistency and by easy logic but on hypotheses inappropriate to the facts. (371–2, my emphasis) The truth that Douglas, Mandeville, Malthus, Gesell, and Hobson saw “obscurely” was that there was a monetary aspect to the business cycle – a possibility that orthodox economists denied. The basis of their denial was an economic axiom known as Say’s Law or the equilibrium principle. It ruled economic thinking until the revolution in economic thought brought about by Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. John Kenneth Galbraith’s assessment of the power of Say’s Law is more easily appreciated in the twenty-first century, when equilibrium theory is once more dominant in economic thought, than it was when Galbraith wrote: “Until Keynes, Say’s Law had ruled in economics for more than a century. And the rule was no casual thing; to a remarkable degree acceptance of Say was the test by which reputable economists were distinguished from the crackpots. Until late in the ‘30’s no candidate for a Ph. D. at a major American university who spoke seriously of a shortage of purchasing power as a cause of depression could be passed. He was a man who saw only the surface of things, was unworthy of the company of scholars. Say’s Law stands as the most distinguished example of the stability of economic ideas, including when they are wrong” (Galbraith, 218–19). Say’s Law held that the distribution of purchasing power in an economy is immediate, automatic, and inescapable. Those who questioned this axiom – Ruskin, Chesterton, Belloc, and Douglas – are called “underconsumptionists” because they believed that it was possible for an economy to produce more goods and services than its residents could purchase with legal currency. According to Say’s Law such a circumstance was impossible because every act of production, or provision of service, creates a balancing or equivalent amount of purchasing power in wages and profits to match the prices of those goods and services – hence its alternative label, “equilibrium theory.” Douglas seems never to have heard of Say’s Law – at least he never uses the tag. What he had seen was the operation of the busi-

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ness cycle, which seemed to contradict Say’s Law, since periodically thousands – even millions – of people lacked sufficient purchasing power to feed, house, and clothe themselves during the bottom phase of the business cycle. He thought he had discovered the cause – interest on loans. In the scheme I just outlined where wages and profits are necessarily in equilibrium with prices, there is no mention of the interest banks charge on loans. Pound incorporated this aperçu into Canto 38 (published 1933 in Orage’s new journal, the New English Weekly): A factory has also another aspect, which we call the financial aspect It gives people the power to buy (wages, dividends which are power to buy) but it is also the cause of prices or values, financial, I mean financial values It pays workers, and pays for material. What it pays in wages and dividends stays fluid, as power to buy, and this power is less, per forza, damn blast your intellex, is less than the total payments made by the factory (as wages, dividends and payments for raw material, bank charges, etcetera) and all, that is the whole, that is the total of these is added into the total of prices caused by that factory, any damn factory and there is and must be therefore a clog and the power to purchase can never (under the present system) catch up with prices at large. (Canto 38, p. 190) This underconsumptionist perception, then, is “the truth” that Douglas and the other heretics “saw obscurely.” Douglas described his discovery as a revelation not unlike St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus: “I had the idea that I had got hold of some specific technical information and I had only to get it accepted; I had the idea that I was like a clever little boy and that I had only to run to father and he would be very pleased about it” (quoted in Macpherson, 120). Pound’s reaction was similar, as can be seen from the follow-

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ing remark: “Those of us who saw the Major’s point in the first weeks of his first declarations find it rather difficult to unsee it, or to put ourselves in the role of non-perceivers” (“The Delusion of Super-Production,” Impact, December 1918, 161). Douglas was unique among underconsumptionists in identifying the cause of the chronic shortage in purchasing power as exclusively the interest that banks charge on the loans they issue. His theory is known as the A + B theorem. In a nutshell, it holds that aggregate payments to individuals in wages, salaries, and dividends (A items) plus aggregate costs of materials, interest charges, royalties, and taxes (B items) produce an aggregate price (P). Obviously P will always be larger than A, since it must include B. The theorem shows that the income of all citizens (the A figure) will be insufficient to buy the produce of the nation (Douglas, Economic Democracy, 28–9). There are many difficulties with the theorem. Most glaringly, it is simply an application of double entry book-keeping in a case where it is inappropriate. It is entirely inadequate to categorize aggregate transactions as either revenues or disbursements, since every disbursement is revenue for some other economic agent, and vice versa. Nonetheless the A + B theorem had the virtue of providing a simple, comprehensible and plausible account of the undeniable fact of endemic underconsumption. The “business cycle” was apparent to everyone – even economists. Britain and Germany experienced a sharp downswing in the cycle immediately after the First War, giving economic heretics an eager audience. A decade later, the worldwide depression of the thirties put a strong wind at the back of economic heretics, since orthodox economists had no remedies for the persistent economic malaise. Douglas’s innovation was to target the issue of currency and credit as the source of underconsumption. Few people realize that banks do not just lend the money that depositors place in their trust. In fact, they are “banks of discount,” that is, their loans exceed their deposits by some “discount factor.” Today the ratio between bank deposits and loans is call “leverage,” and can go as high as 60 times deposits – as was the case with several European banks in 2008. In short, banks create money and charge interest on it. Douglas saw this system as a species of fraud – particularly when governments borrow such fiat money from the banks when (as in

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World War I) they run deficits. As Douglas put it in Economic Democracy, “Now, it must be perfectly obvious to anyone who seriously considers the matter that the State should lend, not borrow, and that in this respect, as in others, the Capitalist usurps the function of the State” (124, my emphasis). His solution was blindingly simple: the state should deny the banks the power to create credit, and reclaim that power for itself. But he did not recommend an expansion of the money supply, accepting the orthodox view based on Say’s Law that such a policy would only cause inflation (Social Credit, 118). Instead Douglas called for the distribution of a “National Dividend” to “every natural born inhabitant.” This dividend would be calculated annually so as to bring the B items into balance with the A items, replacing the money currently “expropriated” by bank interest charges. Douglas also believed that the banks expropriated the increase of wealth society had created by what he called the “increment of association,” by which he meant the gains in productivity consequent upon technological innovation and superior organisation, such as Henry Ford’s assembly line (Social Credit, 206). Although there are serious difficulties with Douglas’s scheme, this is not the place to explore them. What I hope to have shown is that Social Credit offered a plausible and attractive solution to very real economic problems, problems for which orthodox economics had no answer prior to Keynes’s Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. (Neither Douglas nor Pound acknowledged Keynes as a fellow reformer.) The failure of Douglas’s ideas to gain acceptance increasingly radicalized Pound’s political posture, ultimately leading him to believe in a conspiracy of bankers to control and impoverish the mass of humanity. However, that process took more than a decade.23 Both Eliot and Lewis paid occasional measured tribute to Douglas’s theories, since they were both sympathetic to his negative criticism of industrial capitalism, and its failure to distribute wealth equitably, or even to maintain an efficiently functioning economy. In Hitler Lewis describes himself as a “credit -crank” and identifies Oswald Mosley and Eliot as fellow credit cranks (170–3). His economic argument in Hitler is an underconsumptionist one clearly derived from Douglas. And in The Jews, Are They Human? he endorses Douglas’s view of the banking industry, while being care-

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ful to disassociate himself from Douglas’s anti-Semitism: “The terrific usurious system of bank-capital, that fairyland of Credit in which we wander like herds of lost souls at the present day, is all our own doing, or the doing of men of our own race. Aryans like ourselves conceived it and established it; and it is better that we should realize that, and not blame it onto somebody else” (92). However, economic theory remains a marginal component of Lewis’s commentary. Eliot, too, was familiar with Douglas’s theories and gave them careful endorsement in a Criterion “Commentary”: “I hope that Major Douglas is right from top to bottom and copper-plated; but whether he is right or wrong does not matter a fig to my argument for the priority of ethics over politics” (12, Oct. 1933, 120). Eliot’s interest in economic arguments was even weaker than Lewis’s. For example, he corresponded over many years with Philip Mairet, the editor of the Social Credit journal The New English Weekly. They were both members of the “Chandos Group,” an informal discussion group on political and other issues. An index of Eliot’s high regard for Mairet is that he often published in The New English Weekly, including “East Coker” and “Dry Salvages.” One would expect some discussion of economic issues in their correspondence at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, covering the years 1939 to 1963, but there is none, and only one tangential mention of Social Credit. Like Lewis, Eliot was happy to endorse Douglas’s criticism of industrial capitalism, but was unwilling to commit to his positive solutions. Even in his correspondence with Ezra Pound, Eliot evades economic topics as much as possible, despite Pound’s constant harping on economic issues. In a letter of 5 October 1946 to Pound’s wife, Dorothy – apparently in response to queries about Social Credit issues, Eliot demurs from acting in that area: “ I can’t do anything about Ezra’s economic ideas, because I am no economist” (Beinecke). Pound’s Pollyanna attitude would prove to be his undoing, for when Douglas’s ideas failed to gain a hearing, Pound’s tendency to see things in black and white led him to fall back on the positing of evil-doers – that is, usurers – malevolently misinforming and misleading the public. Neither Eliot nor Lewis was quite so naïve. Both of the latter recognized that governance was a messy and uncertain affair involving the balancing of myriad competing interests, rather

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than a simple contest between good guys and bad guys. Nonetheless, the analysis by all three of the deficiencies of capitalist democracies in the decade between the signing of the Peace of Versailles in June 1919, and the stock market crash of October 1929 had much in common. Lewis’s emphasis on a division of classes is lacking from Pound’s program, and is much less prominent in Eliot’s criticism of democratic rule, but all three assume that mass democracy is unworkable at best, and a recipe for oligarchical rule at worst. And they all agreed that dictatorship is a lesser evil, disregarding Lord Acton’s observation: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Eventually, Lewis recognized the wisdom of this dictum and withdrew his support for dictators. For his part, Eliot muted his anti-democratic views, though he never entirely abandoned them, and he avoided endorsing any of the regimes on offer. Pound moved in the opposite direction, discovering Mussolini in the early thirties, and portraying him (and Lenin) as leaders in the mould of Thomas Jefferson in Jefferson and/or Mussolini – published in 1935, but written in 1933, that is, on the other side of the onset of the Depression, an occurrence that radically altered everything.

v “Things Fall Apart” One may be horrified by the activities of an industry which thrives on the greatest of human curses; still it is well to acknowledge that the arms industry did not create the war system. On the contrary, the war system created the arms industry. And our civilization which, however reluctantly, recognizes war as the final arbiter in international disputes, is also responsible for the existence of the arms maker. H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death

The Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of October 1929 confirmed the belief of both the Cassandras and the Pollyannas that the era of liberal, democratic capitalism had run its course. The Crash came just two years after Charles Lindbergh had inaugurated air travel by successfully traversing the Atlantic, landing at Le Bourget on 21 May 1927, greeted by a crowd the New York Times estimated at 100,000. The Times declared: “his feat electrified the nation and inspired enthusiastic interest in aviation.” In that same year Heidegger (1888–1976) published Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), a work that dismissed the whole epistemological tradition of philosophy from Socrates to Frege, Russell, and Whitehead in favour of the more mystical pre-Socratics. Heidegger’s great philosophical hero was Nietzsche – an enthusiasm he shared with Adolf Hitler. When Hitler appeared on the scene, a few years later, Heidegger welcomed him as a Führer who could save Germany from the plague of “modernism.”1 Wyndham Lewis’s rather similarly titled Time and Western Man also appeared in 1927. Although Lewis’s philosophical posture was the antithesis of Heidegger’s, he too would hail Hitler as one who could save Europe from the philosophical errors into which it had fallen. Before turning to a consideration of how our trio responded to the Depression, it will be instructive to consider a work that, so far

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as I can determine, Eliot was the only one of the three to have read, even though it was widely read at the time, and has continued to find readers to this day. The work in question is Ortega y Gasset’s La rebelión de las masas (1930), translated as Revolt of the Masses (1933). Gasset was a University of Madrid professor of philosophy of about the same age as our three (1883–1955). Like them, he saw himself as witnessing a turning point in the history of Western civilization. La rebelíon de las masas was published in the same year as Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, Pound’s A Draft of Thirty Cantos, and Lewis’s The Apes of God.2 I have not found any reference to Gasset in Eliot’s prose of the period, but he mentioned The Revolt of the Masses to Leslie Paul in his 1958 interview, “A Conversation with T. S. Eliot.” Eliot asked Paul if he knew it, adding – misremembering its date of publication – “It was published in the ‘20s, but it is certainly worth rereading now” (13–14). Gasset’s thesis was that there is a new kind of person in the modern world – neither a peasant, or a burgher, or an aristocrat, but a mass man or woman. “The mass,” he wrote, “is all that which sets no value on itself – good or ill – based on specific grounds, but which feels itself ‘just like everybody,’ and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.” He contrasted the mass individual to the elite, “those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties” (11). Even more than Eliot and Lewis, Gasset was perfectly frank about his “aristocratic” tendencies: “What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic” (15). Enlightenment ideas of the “sovereignty of the people” were harmless, he thought, so long as that sovereignty was regarded as an ideal, not a reality. But in the twentieth century the “sovereignty of the unqualified individual, of the human being as such, generically, has now passed from being a juridical idea or ideal to be a psychological state inherent in the average man”(17). This state of affairs had been brought about, he believed, by “two centuries of education of the multitude towards progress and a parallel economic improvement in society” (19). While these are good things

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in themselves, Gasset believed that they had brought Europe to a stage where political stability was undermined by an unpredictable volatility. Exacerbating that state of uncertainty was the tendency of the masses to feel that their age was “superior to all times past, and beyond all known fullness.” He attributed to the epoch the same sentiment that we have seen animating Pound’s decision to write an epic of the new age – a belief that this epoch is “more than all the rest,” but “at the same time feels that it is a beginning”(28). He cited the shrinking of the planet due to modern means of communication (even though radio was still in its infancy, and air travel only foreseen – thanks to Lindbergh’s feat) as a contributing factor. “This nearness of the far-off, this presence of the absent,” he said, “has extended in fabulous proportions the horizon of each individual existence” (29). Despite his alarm at the new state of affairs, Gasset had no use for such Cassandras as Nordau, Spengler, or Benda who spoke of the decadence of the modern age. Gasset insisted that the current age was, indeed, superior to previous ages, as the masses believed. However, he was equally dismissive of the Pollyanna belief that things were getting better every day in every way, dismissing “progressive Liberals and Marxist Socialists,” who assume “that what is desired by them as the best of possible futures will be necessarily realised, with necessity similar to that of astronomy” (34). Gasset set his liberal belief that destiny is an illusion and that events are determined by the actions of individuals in a contingent world against both the Cassandras and the Pollyannas,: “To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world.”(36). That is just what the mass man, in Ortega’s view, was unwilling or unable to do. He rejected both bolshevism and fascism as retrogressive and anachronistic (70–3). He characterized both ideologies as a return to the authoritarian state of the past: “The mass says to itself, ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’” (92). Despite his pessimism about the immediate political future of Europe, Gasset insisted on the continued vitality and resourcefulness of European civilization. The legacy of the great scientific and technical triumphs of Europe had created great prosperity in Europe and had spread around the world – through migration in the Americas, and through con-

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quest in Africa and Asia. In Europe and America they produced the mass man, whose sense of entitlement rendered him susceptible to authoritarian ideologies like fascism and communism, both of which Gasset rejected in the name of liberalism. Nonetheless he lamented that: The world to-day is suffering from a grave demoralisation which, amongst other symptoms, manifests itself by an extraordinary rebellion of the masses, and has its origin in the demoralisation of Europe ... . Europe is no longer certain that it rules, nor the rest of the world that it is being ruled. Historic sovereignty finds itself in a state of dispersion. There is no longer a “plenitude of the times,” for this supposes a clear, prefixed, unambiguous future, as was that of the xixth Century. Then men thought they knew what was going to happen to-morrow. But now once more the horizon opens out towards new unknown directions, because it is not known who is going to rule, how authority is going to be organised over the world ... No one knows towards what centre human things are going to gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has become scandalously provisional. (138) The remedy he offered for Europe appears rather prescient from the perspective of the twenty-first century, for – like Angell and Brailsford – he recommended the dismantling of the nation states of Europe in favour of a European union much like that which has in fact emerged. Such a European Union would, in his view, represent the triumph of liberalism. He was writing nearly a decade before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and more than a decade before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. He could not have foreseen that it would take the trauma of World War II and the subsequent Cold War to unite Europe. The Revolt of the Masses is a rare defence by an intellectual of liberalism and capitalist democracy in the face of the widespread consensus in the interwar period that both were bankrupt. It is striking that it should have come from a Spaniard, since Spain had little acquaintance with liberalism, democracy, or capitalism, but lots of familiarity with authoritarianism and dictatorship – and was shortly to have more. And, in contrast to our trio, Gasset was a political

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player. He was elected deputy for the province of León in the constituent assembly of the second Spanish republic; was leader of a political party, La Agrupación al servicio de la república (“The Association in the Service of the Republic”); and governor of Madrid. When Franco came to power, he had to flee Spain, living in exile in Argentina and Portugal.

eliot in the thirties Eliot also saw pan-Europeanism as the preferred future for Europe, but his vision was thoroughly nostalgic and anachronistic. In his “Commentary” for January 1930 Eliot waxed enthusiastic about the international cooperation represented by a European literary prize. Only through such international cooperation, he wrote, “can there be any direction towards that higher community which existed in some ways throughout the middle ages, which persisted into the eighteenth century, and which was only dissolved finally after the Napoleonic wars.” Moreover, he persisted in the belief that an “intellectual community” was essential, in contrast to political action such as “peace pacts, world congresses, disarmament discussions, and reform leagues,” which he saw as merely “concerned with the body and not with the soul” (Criterion 9, 182). And, like Gasset, he bemoaned the cognitive passivity of the “common newspaper reader,” who “allows his paper to ... select what is important and to suppress what is unimportant, to divert his mind with shallow discussion of serious topics, to destroy his wits with murders and weddings and curate’s confessions, and to reduce him to a condition in which he is less capable of voting with any discrimination at the smallest municipal election, than if he could neither read nor write” (184). A measure of the degree to which Eliot was preoccupied with the political and cultural state of Europe is that he turns to it in his bbc talk of the same year, “The Minor Metaphysicals: From Cowley to Dryden,” (broadcast 4 April 1930). There he compared the inter-war period to the English seventeenth century, which, he said, “was an age of lost causes, and unpopular names, and forsaken beliefs, and impossible loyalties ... ” He added, in a sentiment that anticipates Lewis’s sense expressed in Blasting and Bombardiering, that those who experienced the war had crossed a gulf: “In our own

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time, there is a chasm of isolation between living men and women who belong to the pre-War and the post-War period” (The Listener, 9 April 1930). As economic depression spread around the globe, Eliot turned his attention to economics, attempting – like Ruskin before him – to bring the dismal science within the orbit of ethics. His long “Commentary” for January 1931 was entirely devoted to that topic. He objected to the view expressed in a Times leading article that “politics has nothing whatever to do with private morals, and that national prosperity and the greatest happiness of the greatest number depend entirely upon the difference between good and bad economic theories.” “We need,” he declared in response, “more and better Economics. We need another Ruskin” (Criterion 10, 308). Eliot was alluding to Ruskin’s application of ethics to the dismal science in his Cornhill Magazine article of 1860, “Unto this Last.” Eliot also mentioned Major Douglas. Reading Douglas, he said, confirmed his “suspicion that conventional economic practice is all wrong,” but, in contrast to Pound, he admitted that he “can never understand enough to form any opinion as to whether the prescription or nostrum proffered [by Douglas] is right” (309). Alluding to his own “apprenticeship” in economics in “the City” when he worked for Lloyds Bank, Eliot complained that he “was never convinced that the authorities upon whom I drew, or the expert public which I addressed, understood the matter any better than I did myself – which is not at all” (310). Like Ruskin, he concluded that economics, if it is a science, is one that must recognize “the superior ‘scientific’ authority of Ethics” (311). In this “Commentary” he surveyed six new books on the current scene, including Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, but not Gasset.3 Among them is a new book by Edgar A. Mowrer, whose This American World was discussed in chapter I. Like Gasset, Eliot deplored the consumer society, and was rather contemptuous of the modern mass: “Instead of liberty, which most people can hardly appreciate anyway, we are offered licence; instead of order, we are offered mass-production of everything; including art and religion” (314). As a remedy he tentatively endorsed Mowrer’s call for “a new asceticism,” but – in contrast to Gasset – he thought that it must be imposed upon the many by the few: “But it will not do

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merely to call for better individuals; the asceticism must first, certainly, be practised by the few, and it must be definite enough to be explained to, and ultimately imposed upon, the many; imposed in the name of something in which they must be made to believe” (314, my emphasis). Eliot’s political thought seems to migrate frequently toward such school-masterly sentiments. Eliot repeated much the same sentiments, a couple of months later in “Thoughts after Lambeth.” The Lambeth Conference was convened to seek ways to bring the non-conforming British Christian denominations into the fold of the Anglican Church. Eliot was offended by the degree to which Anglican bishops were willing to water their theological wine in the name of ecumenism. His analysis of the current “dilemma” in this work is remote from virtually every other commentator we have surveyed. The present difficulties facing the world would not soon be overcome, Eliot believed, because the world had turned its back on Christianity: “Christianity, in spite of certain local appearances [such as the Lambeth Conference], is not, and cannot be within measurable time, ‘official.’ The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide” (Selected Essays, 387, my emphasis). Eliot’s anticipation of a new Dark Age, such as followed the Fall of Rome, is an extraordinarily eccentric assessment of current affairs in 1931 – as well as being an odd choice of analogy, given that Christianity rose from the ruins of the Roman Empire, to whose fall it had perhaps contributed. Admittedly, the Church played a crucial role in preserving civilized values and skills after the barbarian invasions, and it is perhaps that role that Eliot had in mind. Political events in Britain at that time turned Eliot’s attention away from long-term concerns to more partisan issues. The British general election of 1929 had produced a coalition government, which fell, necessitating another election in 1931, producing a solid majority for a new coalition under the leadership of the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald. Oswald Mosley was the employment minister in the previous coalition, but resigned in

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1930 over employment policy, and formed the New Party, which did very poorly in the 1931 election. Writing in April 1931 Eliot expressed some sympathy for Mosley’s employment program, but found it too timid. (He was writing before Mosley’s founding of the British Union of Fascists in October 1932.) In the same “Commentary” Eliot praised I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve American Southerners (New York: Harpers, 1930). It was the manifesto of the Agrarian movement, as it came to be known. Eliot agreed with their claim that industrialization had destroyed New England society and was quickly destroying Southern society as well. He also approved of their elitism – a ubiquitous feature of critics of modernity. Unlike Gasset, Eliot shared the Agrarians’ dislike of industrialization, and offered a criticism of it that reflects Major Douglas’ critique: “Unrestrained industrialism, then (with its attendant evils of over-production, excessive ‘wealth,’ an irrelevance and lack of relation of production to consumption which it attempts vainly to overcome by the nightmare expedient of ‘advertisement’), destroys the upper classes first” (Criterion 10, April 1931, 485). Politics and economics became ubiquitous topics in Eliot’s “Commentaries.” Where Gasset saw little to choose between socialism and fascism, Eliot sees little to choose between socialism and capitalism, since both rest on the base of an industrial economy: “some persons even suspect that socialism is merely a variant of Capitalism, or vice versa; and that the combat of Tweedledum and Tweedledee is not likely to lead to any millennium. Certainly, there are many people, and there will be more, who are seeking some alternative to both” (Criterion 10, July 1931, 715). This allegation of equivalence between capitalism and socialism or communism is a leitmotif in Eliot’s journalistic prose of the thirties. In his October “Commentary” on the British Socialist Harold Laski’s Introduction to Politics, Eliot took umbrage at Laski’s liberal principle “that neither race nor creed, birth nor property, shall be a barrier against the exercise of civic rights.” Eliot blusters in response: “Such a sentence merely provokes a fresh explosion of questions. For what end does the state exist? And why should not race, creed, birth and property, any one or more of them be a desirable barrier? And what are civic rights?” (66).

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In the same “Commentary” he reviewed Lord Lymington’s Ich Dien [I Serve]: The Tory Path, but found Lymington’s views to be those of a Tory party “overrun by deserters from Whiggism and later by business men” (71). The only suitable society in Eliot’s view is an agricultural one: “agriculture ought to be saved and revived because agriculture is the foundation for the Good Life in any society; it is in fact the normal life. What matters is ... that the land of the country should be used and dwelt upon by a stable community engaged in its cultivation ... it is hardly too much to say that only in a primarily agricultural society, in which people have local attachments to their small domains and small communities, and remain, generation after generation, in the same place, is genuine patriotism possible; not the artificial patriotism of the press, of political combinations and unnatural frontiers and the League of Nations” (72). He expressed the same view a decade later in “East Coker I”: Round and round the fire Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles, Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth Mirth of those long since under earth Nourishing the corn. (ll, 34–40) Eliot articulated his agrarianism most fully in his 1933 lectures at the University of Virginia, written in the first flush of his baptism (published the next year as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy). Anticipating the challenge-and-response thesis of Arnold Toynbee, Eliot praised the New England culture in which he was partly raised: “It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile – or most favoured in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both; in which the landscape has been moulded by numerous generations of one race, and in which the landscape in turn has modified the race to its own character” (17). (The first three volumes of Toynbee’s Study of History where he first elaborated the

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challenge-and-response thesis were published the next year, 1934.) Alluding to the American Agrarian movement, Eliot said that he knew “very well that the aim of the ‘neo-agrarians’ in the South will be qualified as quixotic, as a hopeless stand for a cause which was lost long before they were born. It will be said that the whole current of economic determinism is against them, and economic determinism is to-day a god before whom we fall down and worship with all kinds of music.” But he did not back down, believing “that when anything is generally accepted as desirable, economic laws can be upset in order to achieve it; that it does not so much matter at present whether any measures put forward are practical, as whether the aim is a good aim, and the alternatives intolerable” (18–19). It would not be too much to say that Eliot pretty well wrote himself out of the political and ideological debates of his day by adopting an extreme Anglican posture that scarcely any Anglican bishop would have endorsed and an agrarianism that was even more uncompromising than the similar views of Chesterton and Belloc.4 It is doubtful that even King Edward would have dared to express the aristocratic and royalist views that Eliot espoused – if indeed he held such views. Nonetheless Eliot was given a platform to air his radically conservative views by the bbc, which organized a series of lectures under the title “The Modern Dilemma” in 1932. Other contributors were Christopher Dawson, representing the Catholic view, John MacMurray, representing the communist view, and Bertrand Russell, representing the Fabian view. Eliot gave four lectures in March and April – all published in The Listener.5 He left no doubt about the provenance of his views in his first talk, “Christianity and Communism”: “I believe that all our problems turn out ultimately to be a religious problem. Its most pressing form, probably, is the economic problem; but economic questions depend finally upon moral questions, as morals depend upon religion. Theology is, of course, the one fundamental science ... . in all that I say I shall speak from the point of view of orthodox Christianity” (7, 382.2). The modern dilemma in Eliot’s view was that we were obliged to choose between Christianity and atheist communism as the only viable creeds to live by – and he is quite belligerent on the point: “If we are incapable of a faith at

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least as strong as that which appears to animate the ruling class of Russia, if we are incapable of dying for a cause, then Western Europe and the Americans might as well be reorganised on the Moscow model at once. And you cannot hope to conquer merely with election cockades; merely with British Conservatism or British Liberalism, or British Socialism. Nor will you succeed in inventing another brand new religion to compete with communism there can only be the two: Christianity and communism; and there, if you like, is your dilemma” (383.1, my emphasis). Eliot’s model of a simple either/or opposition is less offensive than Pound’s view that we must choose either rule by financial interests or rule by benevolent tyrants, or Lewis’s that we must choose either irrational time philosophers or benevolent tyrants, but it is hardly less far-fetched. In his third talk, “The Search for Moral Sanction,” Eliot expressed his rather Luddite distaste for machinery: “There is the danger,” he said, “of mechanised pleasure – pleasure which gives the enjoyer less and less trouble to procure, and which requires less and less co-operation on his part, pleasure which can be enjoyed passively and stupidly (7, 480.1). The example he gave of this zombie-like pleasure is driving a car! What would he have thought of skidoos, seadoos, computer games, iPods, and Wii? He also proffered a genuinely Luddite argument that machines put people out of work: “It is now a commonplace of economics, apprehensible by the dullest of us, that the more machines you have, the more destitution you will get. The more easily and cheaply goods can be produced, the less manual labour required, the fewer people there are who can buy them, because they have not the money which can only be got by working” (480.1). Eliot did not mention Douglas’ solution to this problem – the redistribution of the wealth created by technological development through the National Dividend. Neither of them foresaw – as Gasset did – the enormous increase in the consumption of goods and services by the general public, shorter working hours, extended periods of education, and more holidays – which have to date maintained reasonable levels of employment in advanced industrial economies despite increasing automation of industrial production. Strikingly, Eliot made no mention of fascism or nazism, aiming his barbs exclusively at communism. He closed the last lecture with

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a remark that redefined the “modern dilemma” in a manner somewhat different from his opening remarks, identifying himself with what he calls a “hopeless minority:” “we loathe communism and we loathe the world as it is, and this is the dilemma” (“Building Up the Christian World,” 502.2). It is true that the notion that the world is broken was a leitmotif of virtually all commentary in the thirties, but the therapy preferred by most of those Western intellectuals who had given up on liberal capitalism was either socialism or communism. Intellectuals who had abandoned liberal capitalism and rejected both socialism and communism, like Eliot, Lewis, and Pound, were ineluctably drawn toward fascism as the only remaining political alternative on offer. Ortega y Gasset is a singular exception to this tendency in his belief that liberalism could still function – even in a modern industrial world dominated by the masses, whose role was no longer purely to toil at the production of goods and services, but was now also to consume the abundance produced by industrial economies. Of course, Gasset was writing before the wheels fell off liberal capitalist industrial economies in 1929. That calamity changed everything. Some minor adjustments, some fine tuning of the status quo such as Gasset recommended no longer seemed adequate even to the most sanguine. The world depression seemed an inescapable confirmation of Marx’s prediction that capitalism would collapse under the strain of its internal contradictions. And Eliot did not dispute that general point – though he did not concede its inevitability. His bbc talks illustrate the painfulness of the “dilemma” – which appeared to him to amount to a choice between individual liberty accompanied by widespread poverty on the one hand, and prosperity purchased by the surrender of individual liberty to the iron laws of historical determinism on the other. While atheism was the worst feature of communism in Eliot’s view, Lewis, Pound, and Gasset were unconcerned with the issue of religious belief. For them it was communist suppression of individual liberty in the name of collective prosperity and security that they loathed. With the advent of the Depression, prosperity became the overwhelming concern of all those who imagined they had the responsibility and the wisdom to show the way. But as the belligerence of Italy and Germany increasingly manifested itself, security concerns began to displace concerns

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about prosperity. Security was obviously a more urgent concern than prosperity, and – providentially – the effort to secure it conferred greater prosperity on the belligerent nations – at least initially, as they ramped up production of arms. The cure Eliot proposed for the problems that the democracies faced in the ‘thirties was Christianity, monarchy, and agrarianism. In comparison with Lewis’s flirtation with fascism and nazism in the same period, Eliot’s political views appear quaint and therefore harmless.6 But it must be admitted that they reflect a much poorer assessment of political, social, and economic realities than either Lewis or Pound displayed – however unwise their political choices. In seeing godless communism as his principal adversary, Eliot anticipated Cold War attitudes – no doubt contributing to his popularity in the Cold War period – but seriously underestimated the threat of fascism/nazism. In “Religion and Literature” (1935) Eliot mocked liberalism with a caricature of the sub-Darwinian view that public order can arise from the competition of unregulated individual speculation: “Ideas, views of life, they think, issue distinct from independent heads, and in consequence of their knocking violently against each other, the fittest survive, and truth rises triumphant.” And, with attacks on himself in mind, he added: “Anyone who dissents from this view must be either a medievalist, wishful only to set back the clock, or else a fascist, and probably both.” His rejoinder is that the liberal model of the free interchange of ideas (no doubt it is Matthew Arnold’s model that he had in mind) is a fantasy: “if the mass of the contemporary public were really a mass of individuals there might be something to be said for this attitude. But this is not [the case], and never has been, and never will be ... It is not that the world of separate individuals of the liberal democrat is undesirable; it is simply that this world does not exist.” Like Gasset, then, Eliot regarded the mass man as quite incapable of exercising selfgovernment: “there never was a time, I believe, when the reading public was so large, or so helplessly exposed to the influences of its own time ... . Individualistic democracy has come to high tide: and it is more difficult today to be an individual than it ever was before” (Selected Prose, 104, my emphasis). Mussolini shared Eliot’s view of liberalism, but of course he proposed totalitarianism rather than a peasant Christian society as a

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remedy in his encyclopedia article, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” (coauthored by Giovanni Gentile): Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism, which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. The fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist State – a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values - interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people. (Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, 10–11, my emphasis) If one were to substitute “Christianity” for each occurrence of “state” in this paragraph, it would represent pretty accurately Eliot’s political view. Though we have seen that Eliot rejected Mussolini’s fascism as inferior to Maurrass’s Action Française, he is peculiarly reticent to speak about fascism or nazism in the thirties – either to dismiss or to endorse them. For example, Eliot reviewed Was Europe a Success? by Joseph Wood Krutch in his “Commentary” of April 1936. Krutch’s book is an attack on communism and fascism from an essentially liberal and humanist perspective, sporting blurbs by Aldous Huxley and Albert Einstein. Eliot is unimpressed by Krutch’s argument that human nature cannot be fundamentally altered, and that therefore communism cannot prevail in the end. No doubt, Eliot is on firm ground in rejecting such a facile critique, but his silence on Krutch’s critique of fascism is striking (Criterion 15, April 1936, 458–9).

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Eliot’s reluctance to speak of fascism or nazism was maintained to the end of the run of Criterion. When he did comment on those movements, it was obliquely, as in his comments on Reactionary England by H. R. G. Greaves. Reactionary England sported endorsements by the Labourites Clement Attlee, Harold Laski, and R. H. Tawney. Eliot objected to the label “reactionary” for right wing movements (as I have done): “‘Revolutionary’ would be a more suitable word, as we now know that revolution is not always towards communism: but we have come to associate ‘revolution’ with a violent and sudden reversal of government, rather than with a gradual and hardly perceptible concentration of power.” He characterized that concentration of power as “the dictatorship of finance and the dictatorship of a bureaucracy under whatever political name it is assembled.” Eliot characterized the individuals and movements Greaves identified as “reactionaries,” as resisters of the dominance of finance and bureaucracy: “But the movement, towards the Right so-called, about which Mr. Greaves is apprehensive, is far more profound than any mere machinations of consciously designing interests could make it. It is a symptom of the desolation of secularism, of that loss of vitality, through the lack of replenishment from spiritual sources, which we have witnessed elsewhere, and which becomes ready for the application of the artificial stimulants of nationalism and class” (Criterion 15, July 1936, 667–8). That Eliot writes “nationalism and class” instead of “fascism” and “Communism” is an index of his reluctance to speak directly of those movements. At the same time his remark indicates that his sympathy for the “Right” that Greaves attacked does not include the Fascists or Nazis. The Spanish Civil War, now generally regarded as the first battle in the war between fascism/nazism and democracy, was seen by contemporaries as a battle in the struggle between communism and fascism. As we have seen, it became a cause célèbre among communists and left-leaning intellectuals in the democracies. Prominent recruits to the International Brigade were George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, W. H. Auden, and Norman Bethune. The International Brigade, which fought on the government or anarchist side, achieved a strength of almost 60,000. The war took on the form of a contest between fascism/nazism and communism when – on 18 November 1936 – Italy and Germany recognized Franco’s

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Falange faction as the legitimate government of Spain and sent forces to aid Franco. Shortly thereafter Stalin sent soldiers and materiel to the government side. Normally Eliot did not date his “Commentaries,” but he gives the “Commentary” of January 1937 the date “November 18, 1936,” alluding to the recognition of the rebels by Hitler and Mussolini on that date. Their intervention forced the democracies – principally Britain and France – to face the issue of a balancing intervention. They had already failed to act decisively against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935. The League did impose ineffective sanctions on Italy, but Britain dropped even those in June 1936. As in the case of Ethiopia, Britain and France decided not to intervene, and even attempted to stop their nationals from joining the International Brigade. However that decision had not yet been taken when Eliot wrote his “Commentary.” Eliot complained of the partisan nature of the British press’s coverage of the war. Readers of the Left-leaning New Statesman would, he wrote, conclude “that the elected Government of Spain represented an enlightened and progressive Liberalism,” and readers of the right-leaning Tablet would “be persuaded that the rebels were people who, after enduring with patience more than one would expect human beings to be able to stand, had finally and reluctantly taken to arms as the only way left in which to save Christianity and civilization” (Criterion 16, Jan. 1937, 289). Despite his anti-communism, Eliot was not persuaded that Franco represented Christian values: “The victory of the Right will be the victory of a secular Right, not of a spiritual Right, which is a very different thing ... And those who have at heart the interests of Christianity in the long run ... have especial reason for suspending judgment” (290). In the end, he recommended remaining neutral in the conflict. On 26 April 1937 German Stuka dive-bombers virtually destroyed the Basque village of Guernica. Excluding the Luftwaffe’s sporadic raids on London in the First World War, this was the first bombing raid on civilian targets in Western Europe,7 and it occasioned widespread outrage. The most famous testimony to that outrage is Picasso’s painting Guernica, reproduced as a mural at the United Nations building in New York.8 Eliot might have been expected to join in the general outrage, but he did not.

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Instead he accepted Franco’s claim that the town had been dynamited and then burnt by Anarchist Brigades: “On the First of May The Tablet provided its explanation of the destruction of Guernica: the most likely culprits, according to The Tablet, were the Basque’s own allies, their shady friends in Catalonia” (Criterion 16, July 1937, 670). By “shady friends in Catalonia,” Eliot means the Republicans. Six months later, Eliot was impelled to a bit of a rant by a peace petition attached to a catalogue of the 1937 Exhibition of the Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy, and Cultural Development. Eliot objected to the Exhibitors’ assumption that art is international, and called into question the notion of “cultural progress.” He further objected to the pacifist sentiment of the petition, dismissing it as naïve liberalism: “The temper of a statement such as that which I have been discussing is clearly that of the amiable liberalism which ... has become the political religion of England; and which, whether it has a bias to the right, or, as more frequently and in the present instance, a slight bias to the left, has little relation to events on the continent” (“Commentary” Criterion 17, Oct. 1937, 83). Aware that the alternatives to liberal democracy were communism and fascism, Eliot inserts a qualifying remark: “I am far from suggesting that any continental ‘ideology’ should be taken over in this country; only that the native one should be brought more up to date, with a more realistic appreciation of the forces at work” (83). Eliot gave no indication as to just what conclusions such a “more realistic” assessment would lead, if it were neither communism nor fascism, but he made sure his readers were aware that it was not democracy, observing that the term “democracy” is “used by people whose activities are really directed towards one kind of oligarchy or another – the kind of oligarchy you happen to prefer will always be the one which is ‘democracy’” (83). Eliot’s preoccupation with the political future of Britain and Europe is manifest in his review of Wyndham Lewis’s The Lion and the Fox, a book on Shakespeare’s plays Timon of Athens, Troilus, and Coriolanus. These are all political plays, and Lewis used them to comment indirectly on the contemporary scene, prompting Eliot to digress from Shakespeare to Lewis’s political affiliations, remarking: “As for Mr. Lewis’s politics, I see no reason to suppose that he

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is any more of a ‘Fascist’ or ‘Nazi’ than I am.” (Since Lewis had endorsed Mussolini and then Hitler in print, this seems a very incautious remark.) Eliot defended Lewis by reiterating his standard antipathy for “liberalism: “Anyone who is not enthusiastic about the fruits of liberalism must be unpopular with the anglosaxon majority.” His defence of himself and Lewis was to claim that – unlike other commentators – they were “detached observers.” He hastened to add that the “detached observer” is not a “dispassionate observer,” denying the status of detached observer to “the philosophers, the scientists, the artists, and [surprisingly] the Christians.” It turns out that by “detached observer” he means someone like himself and Lewis who rise above the parochial interests of their class, nation, and epoch: “There has never been a time, surely, when it was more important that the thinker and the artist should endeavour to get outside of their own country and own epoch, which means anything rather than running round all the rest, or settling oneself comfortably in some past age” (Review of The Lion and the Fox, 111–12). Despite this disclaimer, it is difficult to see where Eliot and Lewis would have been content other than in “some past age.” Eliot’s remarks incline one to suspect that his lonely and idiosyncratic political posture was not solely a consequence of his Anglicanism and Maurrasian Royalism but was also informed by his status as an expatriate. Eliot could identify neither with the America he had left, nor the Britain he had adopted. Indeed, he seems to have succumbed to that very weakness of “settling oneself comfortably in some past age,” that he dismissed in his review of The Lion and the Fox. A few months later in his “Commentary” for April 1938, Eliot reiterated his nostalgia for a nation of simple peasant folk. His topic in this “Commentary” is education, one of the “two most serious long-distance problems we have, apart from the ultimate religious problem.” The other is “the problem of the Land,” that is, “how to obtain a proper balance between country and town life.” While admitting that he would “find it as difficult to live in the country as to give up smoking,” he nonetheless believed “that the real and spontaneous country life – not legislated country life – is the right life for the great majority in any nation” (“Commentary,” Criterion 17, April 1938, 482–3).

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Like Gasset, he regarded the urban mass “as a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass, suggestible to head-lines and photographs, ready to be inflamed to enthusiasm or soothed to passivity, perhaps more easily bamboozled than any previous generation upon earth. Their minds cannot be influenced, if they have none: but their behaviour can be directed” (“Commentary” Criterion 17, July 1938, 688). Although Lewis shared Eliot’s contempt for, and distrust of, the half-educated and deracinated urbanite, he did not share Eliot’s fondness for the uneducated peasant – nor did Pound. It is difficult to understand how Eliot failed to see what Gasset saw clearly – that it was precisely to the deracinated urbanite that fascism and nazism appealed. Paradoxically, communism, which represented itself as the champion of the deracinated (their term was “alienated”) urban proletariat, appealed relatively little to the masses. Communism was primarily a movement of educated, bourgeois intellectuals and agitators. Eliot’s distaste for communism was motivated as much by its championing of the urban masses as by its atheism. He feared it as a creed competing with Christianity for the hearts and souls of the people. He seems not to have seen fascism/nazism in the same light – presumably because neither was militantly atheist. Eliot regarded them as pagan – a lesser fault in his view. That Eliot’s antipathy for communism was much stronger than for fascism is clear from his last comment on the Spanish Civil War in his “Commentary” for October 1938. In a preface to a book on the Spanish Civil War, the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain had refused to grant Franco’s claim that he was engaged in a Holy War against communism. In his “Commentary,” Eliot complained of those who were “inclined to attribute all the ‘holiness’ of this war to the party of Valencia and Barcelona,” that is, to the anarchist/communist Republican government. And he took the trouble to point out that he was not speaking only of Communists: “I do not refer, of course, so much to the small number of communists, as to the larger number of the heirs of liberalism, who find an emotional outlet in denouncing the iniquity of something called ‘fascism’.” Even at this late stage in the descent into war, the enemy Eliot feared most was liberalism; he feared it much more than “something called ‘fascism’.”

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He listed the dangers run by the “irresponsible ‘anti-fascist,’ the patron of mass-meetings and manifestoes”: they may be exploited by the foreign press; their “religious fanaticism” causes them to neglect real political issues; and “they distract attention from the true evils in their own society.” Those evils are three: 1) “the domination of Finance” (reflecting the Douglasite analysis), 2) “our ideals and system of Education,” “and 3) “our whole philosophy of life.” “What is fundamentally wrong,” he concluded – in what had become a leitmotif in his political prose – “is the urbanization of mind of which I have previously spoken, and which is increasingly prevalent as those who rule, those who speak, those who write, are developed in increasing numbers from an urban background.” His remedy is to return Britain to an agrarian state: “it is necessary that the greater part of the population, of all classes (so long as we have classes) should be settled in the country and dependent upon it” (“Commentary,” Criterion 18, Oct. 1938, 59–60, Eliot’s emphasis). The inadequacy of such an analysis of the malaise affecting Europe in 1938 is glaringly self-evident. Eliot’s analysis reflects, I think, a kind of intellectual paralysis that overtook him in the face of events that saw his preferred social and political ideology captured by unscrupulous (Mussolini) and evil (Hitler) men. Since Mussolini and Hitler represented themselves as enemies of the godless and classless Communists, Eliot was tempted to accept them as allies, and was unwilling or unable to acknowledge their opportunism, belligerence, malevolence, and racism. Eliot’s illiberal political posture – his Anglicanism, royalism, and elitism – need not inevitably lead to belligerence, racism, and genocide. Those consequences are no more inevitable than Stalin’s show trials, the Ukrainian mass starvation, and the Gulag are inevitable consequences of Marxist communism. After all the British royal family is guilty of subscribing to the same “reactionary” political, religious, and social posture as Eliot, but for all that have largely escaped accusations of fascist tendencies.9 Eliot’s failure to see where fascism/nazism was headed may be more reprehensible than his contemporaries’ failure to see where Stalinist communism was headed, but it is a matter of degree. After all, the engineered starvation of 7,000,000 Ukrainian so-called “kulaks” occurred in 1932–33 and Stalin’s show trials began in

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August 1936 – during the Spanish Civil War. By the same token, Hitler enacted the first anti-Semitic laws in 1933 and the Nuremberg Laws depriving Jews of citizenship, among other injustices and indignities, in 1935; Mussolini also enacted racial laws against Jews in July 1938. All of that preceded Eliot’s defence of fascism/nazism in his October 1938 “Commentary.” But we need to remember that Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were not yet seen as pariahs among nations – as the Munich Agreement bears witness. It must have been just days or weeks after Eliot wrote his October “Commentary” that Chamberlain returned triumphantly from Berlin (on 30 September 1938) with the infamous Munich Agreement partitioning Czechoslovakia in his hand. Standing in front of 10 Downing St., the prime minister’s residence, Chamberlain announced to the assembled press: “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time ... Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” While Chamberlain’s policy of “appeasement” has consigned his administration to infamy, it was not unpopular at the time, so strong was the British and French desire to avoid war. Klaus P. Fischer points out in Nazi Germany: A New History that although in retrospect the “strategy of appeasement appears politically indefensible and even cowardly ... at the time it was widely hailed as an act of sapient statesmanship. What motivated it was not so much ignorance or cowardice but fear and guilt – fear of another senseless war and guilt of having stripped Germany of its status as a great power and humiliating it in the process. Additionally, the appeasers were painfully aware of their own lack of military preparedness ... [and] their fear of Communism was far stronger than their fear of Hitler, a psychological fact that the passage of time tends to obscure for us today” (428–9). Neville Thompson is even stronger on the popularity of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement in The Anti-Appeasers: Until the end of 1938 “appeasement” was the most noble term in the diplomatic vocabulary. Far from carrying its later connotation of weakness, fear, and retreat in the face of bluff it suggested accommodation, conciliation, and the removal of just grievances. The very idea that it could mean “craven immorality”

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rather than “virtuous endeavour” simply did not occur to most Englishmen in the 1930s ... The first person to take exception to appeasement in foreign affairs was Clement Attlee who charged in 1937: “The policy of this Government throughout, right on from1931, has always been to try and appease the aggressor by the sacrifice of the weaker States, but the more you yield to the aggressor the greater his appetite.” But this was simply a straw in the wind. It was not until Munich that people began to inquire closely as to its precise meaning. Thereafter the term fell like Lucifer never to rise again, though there was at first some attempt to distinguish between true and false appeasement. (27) A month after Eliot’s defence of fascism/nazism, the infamous outrage known as Kristallnacht broke out in Berlin. It was a government-engineered riot against Jews and Jewish property in Germany on 9 and 10 November 1938. Over one hundred synagogues were destroyed and almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed. No rioters were arrested, but 26,000 Jews were. They were sent to concentration camps (which were not yet death camps at that date). To add insult to injury, the German government fined the Jewish community one billion marks for damages. Kristallnacht caused outrage around the world, and convinced the most hopeful of German Jews that their only hope was to leave Germany. So far as I have discovered, Eliot never referred to Kristallnacht. However, it may well have played a role in his decision to discontinue The Criterion. He explained his reasons for ending the journal in the next number, January, 1939. There he admitted that for him at least, the features of the post-war world did not “begin clearly to emerge” until 1926. “From about that date,” hope for a new future died, “one began slowly to realize that the intellectual and artistic output of the previous seven years had been rather the last efforts of an old world, than the first struggles of a new” (“Last Words,” 271, my emphasis). It is not self-evident why Eliot chose 1926. It was the year of the unsuccessful British General Strike, an alarming manifestation of socialist sentiment in Britain. But, probably more important for Eliot, it was the year of the papal condemnation of Maurras and the Action Française. It was also the year in which Vivien decided to

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leave Eliot for a new lover – possibly Haden Guest. She fled to Rome during the strike, which lasted from 3 to 12 May. However, she returned to Eliot, who “consigned Vivien to a sanatorium at Malmaison, outside Paris, and returned to England alone.” He later “returned to Paris, eventually bringing home a shamefaced and penitent Vivien” (Seymour-Jones, 440–3). Almost exactly a year later, Eliot was baptized (29 June 1927), but he stayed with Vivien for another five years and two months. Whatever his reasons for choosing 1926, Eliot found that after that year “communications became more difficult, contributions more uncertain, and new and important foreign contributors more difficult to discover. The ‘European mind,’ which one had mistakenly thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view” (“Last Words,” 271, my emphasis). He confessed that “during the last eight years or so” his “Commentaries” bear witness to “how obscure and confused my own mind has been” (272) – a confusion I have endeavoured to document. However, by the date of “Last Words” that confusion has been dispelled by a firm Christian conservatism: “For myself, a right political philosophy came more and more to imply a right theology – and right economics to depend upon right ethics.” Such views led him “to emphases which somewhat stretched the original framework of a literary review.” Conceding that perhaps he “devoted too much ... attention ... to the doctrines of communism,” he insisted that such an emphasis was justified because of what he perceived to be a vacuum in British politics. He found “the version of fascism, which was offered locally ... to have no great intellectual interest – and what is perhaps more important, was not sufficiently adaptable to be grafted on to the stock of Toryism, – whereas communism flourished because it grew so easily on the Liberal root” (272). This is a striking comment, for it implies that some version of fascism would have been acceptable to him – just not that offered by Mosley’s British Union of fascism, and it reiterates Eliot’s idiosyncratic view that communism is the fulfilment of liberalism. (For Eliot, Liberalism is defined by its focus on worldly prosperity and comfort, and hence is compatible with communism. From a political science point of view, liberalism is defined by its focus on individual rights and liberties, and is therefore incompatible with both communism and fascism; since their focus is on collective rights and duties.)

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Eliot concluded “Last Words” despondently: “In the present state of public affairs – which has induced in myself a depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to be a new emotion – I no longer feel the enthusiasm necessary to make a literary review what it should be” (274). But he had not decided to withdraw from the field of public commentary, for at the time he wrote “Last Words” he must have already been working on The Idea of a Christian Society, three lectures delivered in March 1939 at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In those talks he repeated his plea for a Christian Britain based on the village or shire – a vision that would have pleased J.R.R. Tolkien – and repeated his now familiar charge that Britain was not in truth a democracy but an oligarchy. He restated his antipathy for liberalism, accusing it of “destroying traditional social habits of the people,” of “dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents,” and of encouraging the masses to believe themselves capable of decision. He held liberalism responsible for the rise of totalitarianism, but conceded that totalitarianism – that is, both Soviet communism and fascism/nazism – is the contrary of liberalism. In “Last Words” he had characterized communism as the fulfilment of liberalism. Now, in The Idea of a Christian Society, he abandoned that eccentric posture but still blamed liberalism for the rise of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is, he argued, the consequence of the liberal values of individualism and tolerance, for they prepare “the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos” (12). This position is Maurrassian – the masses are imagined to need – indeed, to long for – order and discipline. Less compromised than Lewis, Eliot nonetheless took pains to modify his criticism of liberalism in the face of the imminence of war. He apologized if he had given “the impression that I think of Liberalism as something simply to be rejected and extirpated, as an evil for which there is a simple alternative.” Allowing that liberalism is a “necessary negative element,” Eliot softened his criticism to the rather weak observation that to make a negative element “serve the purpose of a positive” is objectionable (13). But he was confident that “the attitudes and beliefs of Liberalism are destined to disappear, are already disappearing” (14). In the face of that inevitabili-

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ty, we cannot rely, he said, on a visceral “dislike of everything maintained by Germany and/or Russia,” which “may lead us to reject possible improvements” or to “adopt uncritically almost any attitude which a foreign nation rejects” (15, Eliot’s emphasis). Such sentiments on the eve of the German invasion of Poland cannot have been very well received in Cambridge, even though – as always – Eliot modulated his tolerance of nazism by aligning it with communism, which had a significant, if decidedly minority, constituency in Britain. “The fundamental objection to fascist doctrine,” for Eliot, “is that it is pagan.” (Presumably he has in mind the Teutonic rituals of the Nuremberg rallies, and Nazi celebration of Wagnerian opera.) But he added: “we conceal [that objection] from ourselves because it might condemn ourselves as well.” While there “are other objections too, in the political and economic sphere,” to fascism, Eliot reminded his Cambridge audience that Britain had its own problems in those areas. Finally, he conceded that there “are still other objections, to oppression and violence and cruelty,” but, incredibly, he dismissed them on the grounds that they “are objections to means and not to ends” (15–16). This was said five months after Kristallnacht. It is striking that with all his talk of morality, Eliot is willing to turn a blind eye to the violent oppression practised in both Italy and Germany, to the open racism of Germany’s antiSemitic laws,10 and to the brutal and unjust treatment of Jews in the Kristallnacht outrage. Apparently he was blinded by his commitment to Christian belief, leading him to insist that (since he believed that liberalism could not persist) Europe was faced with a stark choice between Christianity, fascism/nazism, and communism: “To the quick and simple organisation of society for ends which, being only material and worldly, must be as ephemeral as worldly success, there is only one alternative. As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organisation which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term ‘democracy,’ as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike – it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous

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God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin” (Idea of a Christian Society, 50, my emphasis). But Eliot did not suggest any alternative political organization in this work – or elsewhere – after 1938. We are left to assume that a Christian polity would also be a monarchical one as Maurras envisioned – although Maurras regarded Christianity as merely a necessary buttress for a monarchy. Of course, the notion of a Christian monarchy could not have appeared entirely absurd to a Cambridge audience, all of whom would certainly have tolerated – if not warmly embraced – the status quo in Britain of a hereditary monarch, who was also the head of the Anglican Church. Despite the abundant evidence of the belligerent, brutal, and oppressive nature of the fascist and Nazi regimes available by March of 1939, Eliot still insisted that they were only marginally worse than parliamentary, capitalist, humanistic liberal regimes. The only effect that the march of events had on Eliot’s political commentary was to turn his attention away from the long-term political threat of socialism/communism toward the immediate military threat of fascism/nazism. He seems to prefer the latter to liberal democracy, if only it could be purged of its “oppression and violence and cruelty.” That preference appears to have been based primarily on a shared antipathy for the “licence” and atheism of liberalism. Eliot’s stance represents a striking failure of imagination on his part – if not worse.

lewis in the thirties Although Wyndham Lewis shared most of Eliot’s antipathies, he did not share his Anglican faith – or, indeed, any conviction beyond a belief in the right of what he called “genius” to rule the world. Like Eliot, he regretted the passing of an imagined organic agrarian society, and abhorred the urban society of isolated individuals that replaced it: “As this society becomes, instead of an organic whole, a mass of minute individuals, under the guise of an Ethic there appears the Mystic of the Many, the cult of the cell, or the worship of the particle; and the dogma of ‘what is due from everybody to everybody:’ takes the place of the natural law of what is due to character, to creative genius, or to personal power, or even to their symbols” (Paleface, 77–8). “The ‘dogma of what is due from

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everybody to everybody’” is, of course, Communism, whose slogan in the 1848 Manifesto was “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability.” In Paleface (1929) Lewis argued for the right of the white man to dominate other races, as a corollary of the right of the “genius” to dominate lesser men. In the infamous Paleface, Lewis articulated a more authoritarian, more racist, and more fascistic political posture than Eliot ever did. Although Eliot defended Lewis in his 1937 review of The Lion and the Fox, he refrained from commenting in print on any of Lewis’s more outrageous political tracts – Paleface, Hitler (both 1931), Doom of Youth (1932), Left Wings over Europe or How to Make a War about Nothing (1936) and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! Or A New War in the Making (1937). Like all of Lewis’s political prose, these works are patched together hastily, incorporating large chunks of other works, and expressing an increasing anxiety over the gathering war clouds. Like Eliot, Lewis saw fascism/nazism as a response to the malaise of the twentieth century. But, unlike Eliot, Lewis initially considered fascism/nazism to be a legitimate response worthy of his support. Lewis was preoccupied – even obsessed – by a horror of modern warfare, whereas Eliot’s concerns were almost exclusively cultural and religious. Lewis’s fear that another war would be marked by worse atrocities than the previous one turned out to be well founded: “Every Western government has now accepted all that the new conditions of gas and aerial warfare entail. No future belligerent will be able to make use of a propaganda campaign about ‘atrocities,’ as was the case in the last war: in advance every form of “atrocity” is taken for granted. That is an entirely new situation in the civilized european world. It imposes a formidable change of attitude upon any civilized government taking up arms today. The first thing on the declaration of war that all the airsquadrons of those governments engaged would have to do would be to go and bomb and murder the sleeping citizens of the nation on whom war had been declared” (Paleface, 244, my emphasis). And, in contrast to Eliot’s preoccupation with the restoration of an Anglican and agrarian society, Lewis’s concerns were shared by pundits, politicians, and ordinary citizens. As we have seen, there was broad public support for the Anglo-French policy of appeasement. Lewis’s fear that every form of atrocity would be taken for

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granted in the next war was unhappily fulfilled. Certainly the Nazis outdid even our Soviet allies in atrocities and outrages, but the Allied bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan puts to the lie democratic outrage at the Guernica atrocity. Unhappily, the aerial bombardment of civilians in time of war has indeed been “taken for granted” ever since. Paleface was written before Guernica, before, that is, any significant aerial bombardment of civilian targets. (As noted above, the Germans had bombed London, and shelled Paris with long range cannon in the 1914–18 war, but the casualties and damage had not been heavy, and was not much commented upon.). Although Lewis’s prediction of aerial bombardment of civilians was accurate, he wildly exaggerated its efficacy, estimating that “millions of people ... will be wiped out in a single night of fairly successful bombing” (25). Of course, bombing was not nearly so deadly. Estimates of the total fatalities in Europe from allied bombing throughout the war – terrible as they are – do not reach one million. The infamous firebombing of Dresden, whose population was swollen with refugees, killed probably 40,000 people (almost all civilians) and required three days of bombing by 1,300 heavy bombers. The 57day “Blitz” of London killed about 43,000 – again mostly civilians. The 1944 “Buzz Bomb” and V1 and V2 attacks on London lasted about 75 days and destroyed almost as many buildings as 12 months of bomber attacks had done in 1940–41, but killed fewer people. Even the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed “only” 70,000 immediately; plus a similar number who died within days from radiation poisoning. That almost all were civilians goes without saying. While it may seem ghoulish to recite these obscene numbers as evidence of Lewis’s exaggeration, I think it is important to have them in mind, as an index of Lewis’s almost hysterical state of anxiety in the interwar period. All of Lewis’s books share Gasset’s and Eliot’s elitist distrust of the masses, as well as their nostalgia for an earlier “organic” condition of society. Lewis was more plain-spoken on this point than the others, but there is no doubting the broad agreement among them. Like Eliot and Gasset, Lewis believed that Western civilization was currently in a transitional stage – one in which the artist has no secure place: “I am a man of the ‘transition,’ we none of us can help being that – I have no organic function in this society, naturally, since this society has been pretty thoroughly dismantled and put out

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of commission” (83). Like them – and like Brailsford and Angell – Lewis hoped for a supra-national political organization, noting that “all terrestrial societies [are] being called upon to coalesce into a vaster unit – namely a world-society.” And he was in favour of such a development if it “can be effected without more violence and confusion than the human organism is able to endure” (84). In this respect, Lewis anticipated the new supranational world order heralded by Hardt and Negri in Empire. However, where Lewis hoped for a new supranational regime rather like that now attained in the European Union, the neo-Marxists Hardt and Negri look forward to a transformation of the very nature of humanity through the advent of a Deleuzian post-industrial virtual reality: Empire takes form when language and communication, or really when immaterial labour and cooperation, become the dominant productive force. The superstructure is put to work, and the universe we live in is a universe of productive linguistic networks. The lines of production and those of representation cross and mix in the same linguistic and productive realm ... Production becomes indistinguishable from reproduction; productive forces merge with relations of production; constant capital tends to be constituted and represented within variable capital in the brains, bodies and cooperation of productive subjects. Social subjects are at the same time producers and products of this unitary machine. In this new historical formation it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value, or a practice that is “outside.” (385) It is difficult to guess what Eliot, Pound, or Lewis would have thought of such dreams of “variable capital in the brains,” but they might have warmed to the notion that “language and communication” would “become the dominant productive force.” In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis contrasted the writer’s habit of dwelling within language to behaviourism’s focus on overt behaviour: “We [that is, artists] live largely, then, in an indirect world of symbols. ‘Thought’ having been substituted for action, the word for the deed, we live in an unreal word-world, a sort of voluminous maze or stronghold built against behaviour, out of which we only occasionally issue into action when the cruder necessities of life compel us to. Some of us live in this world more than others, of course.

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Some of us actually like it” (341, Lewis’s emphasis.) But Lewis was interested in acting in the world. The focus on internal mental states that dwelling in “an unreal word-world” entails was the principal target of Lewis’s polemic in Time and Western Man: “In all movements we have under consideration the thing to be stressed more than anything else is the disposition to bestow “reality” upon the image, rather than upon the thing. The reality has definitely installed itself inside the contemporary mind, ... The external world is no longer our affair, as indeed it ceases to be ours in any civic or political sense” (Time and Western Man, 368–9, my emphasis). Lewis had proleptically identified the postmodern disregard of mere physical conditions and actions as a cultural tendency to which he was vehemently opposed. Quite apart from dreams of a future utopian world, Paleface reflects a fundamental confusion that tainted most of Lewis’s polemical writing between the wars. On the one hand, he was horrified – justifiably, as events proved – at the prospect of another war in the age of the machine. (In this respect, he is alone amongst those under consideration here, none of whom express any pacifist tendencies.) On the other hand, he was anxious to preserve the hegemony of the Europeans – his “palefaces” – in the world, a hegemony he believed to be justified by what he considered to be the inherent superiority of the European’s rational nature to the allegedly emotional nature of the “coloured races.” He did not fear an insurrection of the peoples subjugated by the Europeans, but a more subtle conquest – that the Europeans would adopt their modes of thought – that they would “go native.” He saw that coming to pass through the “romantic” “time philosophy” he excoriated in Time and Western Man. Even if one is inclined to grant some credence to Lewis’s worry about the apparent abandonment of long-standing Western cognitive practices descending from Aristotle, his attribution of irrational tendencies to the coloured races is ridiculous as well as offensive. It is a clear case of projection of those attributes one fears in oneself onto some “other.” Like Gasset, Lewis recommended a “melting pot,” such as the Americans practised with European immigrants, as a solution for Europe, and like Eliot, Lewis reminded his readers that Europe once had a unified culture under the Roman Church. It appears

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that Lewis’s European melting pot would exclude Arabs, Africans, and Asians, and would simply dissolve the national borders that he thought preserved national rivalries, which all too frequently led to war.11 It is striking that in the 1930s all factions seem to have agreed that a unified Europe was desirable, if not inevitable. Eliot, Angell, Brailsford, Gasset, Lewis, and the Communists all agreed on this point. The fiercest opposition to the hope of a unified European state was found in fascism/nazism, whose basic appeal was to the mystique of national identity. Of course, Nazi Germany did briefly unify most of Europe, but by conquest, not the kind of unification that our dreamers had in mind. Immediately after Paleface, Lewis published Hitler, perhaps his most infamous book. Published in 1931, most of it had previously appeared in Time and Tide in January and February of 1931. It was prompted by the Nazi party’s political success in the German elections of September 1930 – though still a minority party. Lewis’s attitude to Hitler in this book is much the same as that he had adopted toward Mussolini in The Art of Being Ruled. Indeed, he reminds his readers that he was in Rome on the occasion of Mussolini’s March on Rome, and was in Berlin in November, a few weeks after the Nazis’ electoral breakthrough (5–6) attending a rally at which Göring and Goebbels spoke: “it was impossible to be present and not to be amazed at the passion engendered in all these men and women, and the millions of others of whom these were only a fraction, by the message of these stormy platform voices” (11). He sketched a picture of Berlin under the Weimar Republic that is very much like Christopher Isherwood’s in Goodbye to Berlin. Unlike Isherwood, Lewis was not appalled at the violence and homophobia of the Nazis, largely sharing their antipathy for what he calls “Lesb and So” (lesbians and sodomites) – a feature of nazism that the homosexual Isherwood naturally abhorred.12 Lewis also excused the ubiquitous street violence of Hitler’s Brownshirts as a justified response to communist public rallies (16–21). He declared that “in Adolf Hitler, The German Man, we have, I assert, a ‘Man of Peace’.” While Lewis saw a similarity between the “militant nationalism” of the Nazis and “that much slighter affair, the Action Française’s nationalism,” he believed that nazism was based on a “much more substantial impulse than that animating its puny

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french counterpart. It is really national, in its extent and solidarity” (32–3). Lewis’s preference was the opposite of Eliot’s, who we have seen rejected fascism as inferior to the Action Française. Lewis does not deny the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but does not fully endorse it as he did in Paleface. Instead he enjoins his British readers to excuse Nazi anti-Semitism on the grounds of their shared Teutonic blood: “Do not allow these difficult matters to sway you too much (though decidedly warning this crude Teuton to be civil, when in your company). But still allow a little Blutsgefühl to have its way (a blood-feeling towards this other mind and body like your own) – in favour of this brave and very unhappy impoverished kinsman. Do not allow a mere bagatelle of a Judenfrage to stand in the way of that!” (42). In an effort to mollify his British readers, Lewis even ventures the opinion that “once he [Hitler] had obtained power he would show increasing moderation and tolerance” (48). We should bear in mind that although Nazi anti-Semitism was open and violent, Hitler was still only the leader of a minority party as Lewis wrote. He did not become chancellor until 30 January 1933. The infamous Nuremberg Racial Laws were not enacted until 1935, and the extreme violence of Kristallnacht was still seven years in the future when Lewis wrote Hitler. Inexcusable as Lewis’s toleration of Nazi anti-Semitism is, he could not have foreseen the brutality against Jews that was to come – still less the Final Solution. In preparation for Hitler, Lewis had read the as yet untranslated Mein Kampf. (It did not appear in English until 1933 in an abridged version.).13 He would have learned from it that Hitler intended to expand the German Reich to the East by military conquest, and to reunite the German peoples resident in parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland, as well as those in Austria, his homeland. Nonetheless Lewis dismissed any worry of German aggression, claiming that France’s overwhelming military superiority would hold it in check: “The military power of France today is so overwhelming, and Germany has been so scrupulously disarmed, that such an eventuality as a ‘war of revenge’ – or even, if the French were not there, an attack upon Poland about the famous ‘corridor’ – would be like asking a naked unarmed man to make a frontal attack upon a machine-gun nest (with a cloud of bomb-bearing aeroplanes circling overhead)” (56).14

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What is most shocking about Hitler is Lewis’s acceptance of Hitler’s argument in Mein Kampf that the world was faced by a Jewish conspiracy to control it – a paranoid fantasy Lewis had not previously expressed, despite his evident anti-Semitism.15 He regarded the Nazi race analysis of the cultural crisis as an explanation of the current economic malaise superior to the communist class analysis: “What the Nationalsocialist is, in reality, attempting to do, is to put Race in the place of Class” (83). “The Class-doctrine – as opposed to the Race-doctrine” – he continues, “demands a clean slate. Everything must be wiped off slick. A sort of colourless, featureless, automaton – temporally two dimensional – is what is required by the really fanatical Marxist autocrat” (84). A Nazi revolution, in contrast, Lewis believed, permits the preservation of the social structure ante. An element of Hitler’s analysis in Mein Kampf that attracted Lewis was his “absolute distinction between concrete and productive capital (great or small) upon the one hand, and Loan-capital (as the Hitlerist calls it) upon the other.” Lewis sees this as an improvement on Marx’s attack on capitalism: “The arch-enemy is not Das Kapital pure and simple, as with Marx, but Das Leihkapital, or Loancapital.16 Property – up to some specified, reasonable, amount – that Hitlerism has no objection to” (147–8). To Lewis’s mind Hitler’s analysis seemed to answer the question many were asking in the thirties: “[despite] man’s technical ability to produce and to transport great quantities of produce anywhere that is required ... yet everywhere in the world today the black cloud of economic disaster and of want – ‘Crise mondial,’ ’world-slump,’ it is called – settles down upon every land, more and more deeply and hopelessly? One word – there is only one possible one – is able to provide a satisfactory answer to that stupendous riddle. And that word is debt! The technique of Credit, as that is practised today – and its sequel in universal scarcity and in universal debt” (Hitler, 159–60, original emphasis). Lewis’s approval of this analysis reflects his exposure to Social Credit, whose analysis of the economic malaise also targeted banks and interest on loans – as we have seen. In a chapter entitled, “Credit-Crankery Rampant” Lewis invoked Oswald Mosley and T. S. Eliot as other credit cranks having something in common with Hitler in that they had addressed the dysfunctional nature of the current economic organization of the

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world. He quoted at length from Eliot’s “Commentary” for January 1931, discussed above, in which Eliot cast doubt on conventional economic wisdom, but also confessed his own puzzlement: “I cannot but believe that there are a few simple ideas at bottom, upon which I and the rest of the unlearned are competent to decide according to our several complexions; but I cannot for the life of me ever get to the bottom” (Criterion 10, 309). In an uncharacteristic expression of humility, Lewis added, “if Mr. Eliot understands ‘nothing at all’ upon this matter, I understand infinitely less” (173). If he understood more, he said, he too would be a credit crank (164). By the term “Leihkapital” or “Loan Capital” Hitler meant bank credit based on the “fiat money” that banks create and lend, charging the borrower interest. Pound, a committed Social Crediter, and by the date of the following remark a believer in the myth that there was a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, noted and approved Lewis’s comment: “Hitler’s statement on Leihcapital [sic] in ‘Mein Kampf,’ so masterfully cited by Wyndham Lewis and used as chapter head in his ‘Hitler’ already pre-existed as idea in J. A. Hobson’s exposition of the syphilitic venom of international lending”17 (“Symposium – I. Consegna,” Purpose 10.3, July/Sept. 1938, 165). Even though Pound is the most bona fide “credit crank” of the three, Lewis refrained from mentioning him. Lewis’s next book, The Doom of Youth (1932), is more cautious, focusing on the perception that Europe and the world are in “a state of transition:” “What is taken for granted in these pages is that the disintegration ... cannot be arrested, even if we would and ... is bound to contradict many things that are desirable ... .” He was confident that the disintegration of the old European social and cultural accommodation would be followed by a new integration, but he worried that much “that is purely destructive – indeed well nigh imbecile – is bound to get mixed into the integrating substance: and that is bad” (x). His title alludes to the apprehended slaughter of Europe’s youth in a new war that he feared as a consequence of the “disintegration.” Once again, we can say that events proved Lewis’s apprehension to be well founded. However, he was not so prescient in distinguishing what was destructive and imbecile from what was constructive and wise. In The Doom of Youth Lewis reiterated his anti-communism, bemoaning the disintegra-

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tion of society into warring classes. Indeed, its theme is that contemporary political discourse had degenerated into multifarious “classes,” each clamouring for special attention – the bourgeoisie and proletariat, of course, but also male and female, young and old, homosexual and straight, gentile and Jew. Whereas in Paleface Lewis had been on the side of trans-nationalism, in The Doom of Youth – having read Mein Kampf – he excoriated the internationalists – by which he meant capitalists and communists alike. This lumping together of capitalism and communism is new for Lewis and reflects Hitler’s conviction that a Jewish conspiracy aspired to world domination. From Hitler’s perspective banks and industry were in the hands of the Jews, and (incoherently) he saw socialism and communism as Jewish ideas, somehow combining to form a conspiracy for world domination. These fantasies were an unfortunate but common prejudice at the time.18 Lewis did not openly endorse either fascism or nazism, restricting himself to an allusion to “an alternative to communism” found in “France or Germany and, of course, Italy, and in all the smaller countries of the north and centre of Europe” (140). (The “alternative” in France is no doubt the royalist and Catholic program of the Action Française, much admired by Eliot.) As war clouds gathered, Lewis rushed two more books into print – Left Wings over Europe or How to Make a War about Nothing (appearing in June of 1936) and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! (appearing in April of 1937). Hitler’s army had occupied the Rhineland in March, 1936, abrogating the Peace of Versailles, but the French failed to take military action. Lewis was frantic by then, and no longer argued against the impending war on pacifist grounds – as he had done in Paleface. In Left Wings over Europe he saw the issue in terms that anticipate the later Cold War: “those who are so busy preparing the ground for this new Great War are either camouflaged communists, or dupes or tools of communism and of the great international interests [code for Jews] who have compacted with the communists”(50). He believed that German aggression was a fantasy conjured up by those “dupes of Communism.” He even went so far as to claim “that the war in which we were engaged from 1914–18 was in fact designed by fate (we are debarred from imagining a more concrete creator) to serve as a backcloth for the Russian communist revolution” (165). His focus in this work on

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the bogeyman of communism is a departure from his previous coupling of communism and fascism – probably motivated more by rhetorical strategy than by any new convictions. His objective was primarily to forestall a new war. Blinded by his hostility to capitalist democracy, Lewis was unwilling to believe that Britain and France were being driven to war with Germany by Hitler’s aggressive acts. With some justice, he rejected antipathy to dictatorship as a motive: “for after all they left Mussolini in complete peace for a decade,” and they left Stalin undisturbed despite “a permanent Reign of Terror and the massacre of millions of people” (239). He thought the real cause was friendliness toward communism in the democracies. Like Eliot – and probably influenced by him – he saw communism as a species of religion, in effect a secular form of Christianity. Communism, he wrote, “is an exploitation of the automatic christian [sic] responses and reflexes which have survived the extinction of Christianity among the western proletariat, or intelligentsia.” Communism is, he believed, “concocted out of the refuse of discarded emotions, ingrained in Christendom, and which cannot at once be extirpated – emotions of ‘decency,’ of ‘charity,’ of ‘kindliness,’ of ‘compassion,’ and of ‘selflessness’” (265). He does not add the observation that those “discarded emotions” are singularly lacking from fascism and nazism. It is true that there was a strong lobby for socialism/communism in both Britain and France. But there were also Right Wing movements of comparable popularity – Maurras’ Action Française in France and Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in Britain. Moreover, the strongest voice opposed to appeasement in Britain was Winston Churchill, who could hardly be accused of being a fellow traveller of communism, or a Leftist of any description. Nor could France’s De Gaulle be considered Left Wing. De Gaulle was just as opposed to appeasement as was Churchill – though from a far less influential position as a colonel in the French army. De Gaulle’s post-war assessment of the causes of the “catastrophe” of France’s defeat in World War II is not so different from that of our literary trio: “To many,” De Gaulle wrote, “the disaster of 1940 seemed like the failure of the ruling class and system in every realm” (cited in Judt, Postwar, 63). “It was,” believed by many in the post war, Judt observes, that “the politicians and bankers and busi-

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nessmen and soldiers of the inter-war years ... had brought their countries to catastrophe, ... had betrayed the sacrifices of the First World War and laid the ground for the Second” (Judt, 63). Of course, neither De Gaulle nor Churchill saw Action Française, fascism, or nazism as a remedy for those ills as did Eliot, Pound, and Lewis (respectively).19 Lewis conceded that Hitler and Mussolini were both dictators, and admitted the repressive nature of both regimes. But he cited J. S. Mill to the effect that an enlightened and benevolent despot might be the best sort of government in an emergency, and reminded his readers that they were, in 1936, facing an emergency. Then he praised Hitler as perhaps such an enlightened and benevolent despot: “This celibate inhabitant of a modest alpine chalet – vegetarian, non-smoking and non-drinking, has remained the most unassuming and simple of men. He is a man in mortal danger, every moment of his life, who has sacrificed himself, literally, to a principle; that of national freedom. That principle may be ill conceived or not: that I am not concerned to debate. But this man does not conform to the popular conception of a ‘tyrant,’ at least. He is more like one of the oppressed! He is more like Epictetus [a 2nd century Stoic] than like Nero” (280). Accustomed as we are to see Hitler portrayed as evil personified, Lewis’s portrait seems like deliberate obfuscation. But the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had a similar opinion of the German chancellor two years later when they both signed the Munich agreement. And we should recall that the butcher Stalin was portrayed in the Western media after 1941 as “Uncle Joe,” complete with pipe, walrus moustache, and benign smile. Necessity makes strange bedfellows. As we have seen, according to Niall Ferguson, Lewis’s assessment of Hitler was not seriously out of step with that of some of his aristocratic compatriots, nor with that of Charles Lindbergh (see Friedman, 106–7), nor of course with that of Mosley and his British Union of fascists (see Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 424–5). Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! Or a New War in the Making is another tract opposing British involvement in a war against Germany. Unlike the previous works discussed, it is thinly disguised as a work of fiction. Its publication followed closely on the heels of Left Wings over Europe, and it repeats the same arguments. Lewis’s

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views are expressed by Ned, a self-confessed Bolshoi-Tory, antiRussian and anti-John Bull. Ned repeats the observations already stated in the previous works: “There is no issue whatsoever but Communism, as the logical outcome of the progressive enslavement resulting from ‘Loan-Capital.’ If you accept one you must sooner or later accept the other. Something as near as damn it to Soviet Russia would ensue of its own accord” (Count Your Dead, 82, original emphasis). This is an outcome Ned wishes to forestall. In addition to this refrain of the evils of “Loan-Capital” Count Your Dead continued the anti-Semitic strain found in Hitler and Left Wings over Europe. But most of Count Your Dead is given to Launcelot, a caricature of a gullible English patriot. His twenty-four “Thoughts” articulate the “lies” about, and “misrepresentations” of, the international scene, focusing on the Spanish Civil war. His last “Thought” is entitled “Launcelot sees the Light.” Launcelot’s revelation is that France, Britain, and Russia are preparing for war against Germany!! The book concludes with Launcelot’s passionate plea: “I can see all the dead, each body with its group of mourners. I would like to say to these bereaved and helpless masses now, if I could reach them: Count your dead! I would take each one aside and shout: They are alive! Can’t you see that they are not dead yet – though people are preparing to butcher then in millions. For nothing at all. In a Great War, all about nothing. But it would make no difference, of course, if I did. No one bothers about death. It’s odd that you can’t rouse them at the threat of death. Are they so tired of life?” (358, original emphasis). Although Count Your Dead closes with this pacifist-sounding plea, it is mostly a sounding of alarm at the danger of communism, and an indictment of the capitalist democracies as toadies of “LoanCapital.” The democracies are excoriated for having failed to meet the challenge of communism, and Nazi Germany is praised for confronting it. Lewis continued to identify Jews as the principal beneficiaries of the status quo – as he had done since Hitler. When he looked back on these books in Rude Assignment, his intellectual autobiography, Lewis declared himself to be “in complete disagreement with much of the contents of Left Wings,” and characterized it as “a violent reaction against Left-wing incitement to war” (226). But who could agree with Lewis’s assessment – still in 1952

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– that the Left fomented World War II? Even Niall Ferguson does not make such a claim. Lewis is less apologetic about Count Your Dead, judging it to have been “a first-rate peace pamphlet, which would have resounded in a smaller, more instructed, society like the hammering of an alarmgong” (226). It is difficult to agree with Lewis on this point. The leaders of Britain and France did in fact pursue a policy of appeasement such as Lewis recommended until their hand was forced. As we have seen, the German historian, Klaus Fischer represents the motivation of the British and French to be very much the same as Lewis’s. It is true that Lewis did not regard nazism/fascism as just the lesser of two evils, but actively promoted some similar rightwing movement for Britain – as did Eliot – albeit in a much more cautious manner. In this respect Lewis was on quite a different course than the leaders of Britain and France, but – if Niall Ferguson is to be believed – not so far from the course of British high society. On the other hand, neither the British appeasers (Neville Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, and Lord Halifax), nor the French (Edouard Daladier and George Bonnet) could, Fischer writes, “be described as pro-Nazi or even pro-German.” That cannot be said of Lewis – though it can of Eliot. However, Fischer’s judgment that “no one could have anticipated the degree of infamy with which statesmen had to contend in their dealings with Hitler” applies to all the observers and commentators of the time (429). Blasting and Bombardiering, a personal memoir of Lewis’s experiences in World War I, was also published in 1937. There he professed not to have a preference for either communism or fascism – in clear contradiction of the books just discussed: “In 1937 everybody’s talking about ‘communism’ versus ‘fascism’. I am not one of those who believe that either ‘communism’ or ‘fascism’ is in itself a solution of anything. They are purgatives. Both are good as such” (17). He adopted a light, satirical tone in his comments on the political scene – in stark contrast to the earnest, even panicky, tone of the earlier books: “But have you ever reflected how in isolation none of these figures mattered so much as they do all together? Take Mussolini. He went on for over ten years ‘dictating’ away to his heart’s content in the south of Europe without anyone caring a tuppence, till Hitler popped up in Germany, and sent all the Jews

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flying. And these two together seem to have a very odd effect on old Stalin – who’d been a pretty sleepy old dictator up till then, polishing off masses of moujiks but nothing more serious than that” (17–18). His cavalier attitude to the orchestrated famine in the Ukraine and Hitler’s anti-Semitic laws is chilling. Although Blasting and Bombardiering offers an entertaining memoir of the London literary scene in the years just before and just after World War I, no one would have supposed that the author of this book had also written such works as Hitler, Left Wings Over Europe, and Count Your Dead.

pound in the thirties Although Pound was already a “credit-crank” (to use Lewis’s term) by 1919, his general views on civilization and culture were still very much in line with those of Eliot and Lewis at that time – including, it must be admitted, casual anti-Semitism. Like them he saw civilization not only as a good in itself, but as a product of intelligent actions – as opposed to some natural product of human nature, or, worse, of some particular sub-set of the human race, such as the white European, or, alternatively of a Bergsonian élan vital. Pound’s May 1921 review of a reissue of Edward Carpenter’s 1889 work, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure demonstrates such a view, even before Mussolini’s coup d’état in Italy. Carpenter is best known for championing what was then called “sexual inversion,” that is, male homosexuality. Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure proffers the echtRomantic argument that civilization is a pathological condition that could be cured by abolishing rules and prohibitions so that men and women could live in a state of natural freedom and harmony. Pound is not convinced – for reasons that resonate with the kind of anthropological arguments we have seen articulated by Eliot and Lewis. With the late trench warfare in mind, Pound dismissed Carpenter’s scenario as naïve: “it is not easy to share these visions thirty-two years later; we can see that civilisation is at war with the barbarian, both within and without; and the barbarian seems to have captured the weapons of civilisation ... If we do not practise deliberate infanticide ... we are certainly adept at killing adults” (“Civilisation and Barbarism,” 23).

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The “barbarian” is the new mass-man whose easily manipulable nature Eliot, Lewis, Gasset, and Pound all feared. At the same time, they all thought it was their responsibility to lead that same massman – or at least to guide and inform those who would inevitably lead him. We can see in these remarks a fundamental pacifism that persisted in Pound’s commentaries – though it is hard to see it in his polemical prose, which implausibly displaces the belligerence of Hitler and Mussolini onto the shoulders of Churchill and Roosevelt. Pound’s political posture was determined less by the rise of belligerent right-wing political ideologies such as that of Maurras, Mussolini, or Hitler, or the intricacies of international relations, than it was by the phenomenon of the world-wide economic depression from 1929 to 1938 or thereabouts. Although he moved from Paris to the Italian Riviera town of Rapallo in 1924, the move was not inspired by Mussolini’s installation as Duce two years previously (October 1922). Rapallo was a destination for many British and America literary figures, including Yeats and Max Beerbohm. It was inexpensive, had a benign climate, and boasted charming inhabitants. The earliest praise of Mussolini by Pound that I have been able to find is a letter to Harriet Monroe of 30 November 1926 – more than two years after his move – in which he said that he thinks “extremely well of Mussolini” (Paige, 279). In his book of praise for Mussolini, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound denied any interest in him at the time of his move: “Life was interesting in Paris from 1921 to 1924,” he wrote, “nobody bothered much about Italy. Some details I never heard of at all until I saw the Esposizione del Decennio [of 1932]” (Jefferson, 51). If we accept Pound’s claim that he wrote Jefferson and/or Mussolini between the ninth and twenty-second of February 1933,20 then it is plausible to conclude that it was written in response to his interview with Mussolini on 30 January 1933 – by coincidence, the very day that Hitler was installed as chancellor of Germany. The only other information that has surfaced about the interview is in a letter to the American historian, W. E. Woodward, of 28 November 1933, in which Pound boasted that he “had a long jaw with the boss [Mussolini] in Jan. (as I wrote you). He got to the 4th item on

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my questionnaire and said ‘ugh I have to think about that.’ ‘That’ bein’ remark that taxes are unnecessary”(Preda, Economic Correspondence, 76, original emphasis). Jefferson and/or Mussolini declares Pound’s admiration for Mussolini’s fascism in the subtitle, L’Idea Statale, Fascism as I Have Seen it. Pound had been attempting to get to see the great man since April of the previous year (Zapponi, 48–9). The meeting with Mussolini seems to have been the catalyst that made Pound an unqualified admirer of Mussolini, and a fascist. However, as early as 1931, Pound believed that he had found in Mussolini the man who could lead the masses in a manner of which he could approve. Claiming in “Fungus, Twilight or Dry Rot,” that the Depression demonstrated that “democracy does not foster a sense of responsibility,” he added: “I was perfectly right 25 years ago [in 1906!!] in not bothering about socialism. It was not the affair of my time” (314). Even so, he declared an admiration for Soviet communism because of its “aristocratic” government. Revealing the elitist bias he shares with Eliot and Lewis, Pound claimed that when “a country is governed by one percent of its population that one percent indubitably form an aristocracy.” In his view both “the communist party in Russia and the fascist party in Italy are examples of aristocracy, active. They are the best, the pragmatical, the aware, the most thoughtful, the most wilful [sic] elements in their nations” (315, 317). In advance of his interview with Mussolini, Pound had forwarded his “Volitionist Economics” manifesto, and a copy of Thirty Cantos. Rather pathetically, Pound was so impressed with Mussolini’s noncommittal remark on the Cantos – “But this is amusing!”– that he immortalized it in canto 41: “‘Ma questo,’/ said the Boss, ‘e divertente.’ / catching the point before the aesthetes had got there” (Canto 41, 202). Of course, Pound intended the Cantos to be instructive, not just amusing. (The latter attribute, incidentally, is one that few readers other than Mussolini have found in The Cantos.) Despite the clear disinterest Mussolini displayed in Pound’s poetry and economic nostrums, his interview with Mussolini sets him apart from his two friends – neither of whom ever had personal contact with any of the world historical figures who strode the political stage in the thirties. That Pound managed such a coup seems to have unhinged him. Henceforth he imagined himself a force to be reckoned with in the political sphere.

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By 1932, Pound’s admiration for Mussolini was firmly in place. Replying to a letter from John Drummond, a young English admirer and later acolyte, Pound cautioned: “Don’t knock Mussolini, at least not until you have weighed up the obstacles and necessities of the time. He will end with Sigismondo [Malatesta, one of Pound’s renaissance heros] and the men of order, not with the pus-sacks and destroyers ... Don’t be blinded by theorists and a lying press” (Letter of 18 February 1932, Letters, 320). Like Lewis and Eliot, Pound believed in “personal rule,” and hoped that if he could get Mussolini’s ear, he could persuade him to adopt the economic remedies proffered by Social Credit. It was in pursuit of this goal that he sent the newly published Thirty Cantos to Il Duce. In Pound’s defence, it must be conceded that Mussolini had charmed an entire nation, much of Europe and a good deal of the United States of America. As Richard Collier reports, Mussolini was a charismatic figure – something difficult to appreciate by those of us accustomed to later portrayals of him as a posturing buffoon: “His confiding, ingenuous manner, his voice, lowpitched and melodious, made most people take to him on sight. No less a being than Mahatma Gandhi lamented: ‘Unfortunately, I am no superman like Mussolini.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury saw him as ‘the one giant figure in Europe.’ Banker Otto Khan declared: ‘the world owes him a debt of gratitude.’ ‘He was,’ avowed Thomas Edison, ‘the greatest genius of the modern age’” (Collier, 93). Mussolini was still highly regarded in many quarters in Britain, France, and the United States in 1933, so Pound’s infatuation with him was not particularly culpable at that date. In 1933 the original “axis of evil” between Italy, Germany, and Japan had not yet been formed. Nonetheless, that Pound was so easily recruited as an apostle of fascism does not speak well of his political acumen. Eliot, and even Lewis, were much more cautious, and ultimately wiser. The extent to which his audience with Mussolini brought Pound to wildly overestimate his own importance is manifest in a letter of 7 February 1934 to the historian W. E. Woodward. Woodward had suggested that Pound visit his homeland to see for himself what the New Deal was doing (“F/D” is Franklin Delano Roosevelt): “I do not want to come to the U. S. that is I am puffikly content here/ and any time I spent on the ocean wd/ be unpleasant. and I don’t

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imagine fer ten minutes that anybody wants to see my moog in N.Y. At the same time I am willing to come if it wd/ be the least god damn use. ... If Muss/ who is more a man than F/D/ can take off a half hour to think about wot I say to him/ bigod I ain’t going to set in anybody’s front hall asking permission from anybody’s third footman to hang up me cap/ I am not offering any impertinence” (Pound-Woodward Correspondence, New York Public Library,21 original emphasis). Pound did sail to New York after all, in a quixotic effort to forestall America’s entry into the coming war. He was there from 21 April to 16 June 1939 and saw a few politicians in Washington, but he was taken no more seriously in Washington than he had been in Rome.22 Of course, the usa did stay out of the war, until it was attacked itself in December 1941. A lot was happening early in 1933. Adolf Hitler was installed as chancellor of Germany on the very day of Pound’s audience with Mussolini – 30 January. The Reichstag was set on fire on 27 February – blamed on the Communists, but probably the work of Nazis (Fischer, 271–2) – and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had won the presidential election of 1932, was inaugurated the next week – on 4 March 1933. He was immediately faced with a banking crisis, and famously assured Americans in his inaugural address that they “had nothing to fear but fear itself.” Roosevelt also singled out those who controlled financial matters in his speech: “Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men” (“Inaugural Address” in Looking Forward, 262–3, my emphasis.). That the president of the United States would make such an accusation renders Pound’s targeting of banks and other financial interests as the root cause not only of the business cycle, but also of war, appear less idiosyncratic than it might otherwise. Pound quoted Mussolini in Jefferson and/or Mussolini expressing almost the same sentiment as Roosevelt’s “plenty is at our doorstep”: “science has multiplied the means of producing plenty, and science prodded on by the will of the State should solve the other problem, that of distributing the abundance, and putting an end to the brutal

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paradox of grinding poverty amid plenty” (viii). It was not so obvious to contemporaries, as it is to us seventy-odd years later, that Roosevelt was sincere in his desire to redistribute income, and Mussolini was not. I would not go as far as Niall Ferguson does when he opens chapter 7 of War of the World with excerpts from Roosevelt’s inaugural address without identification, then appends the query: Who was this demagogue who so crudely blames the Depression on corrupt financiers, who so boldly proposed state intervention as the cure for unemployment, who so brazenly threatened to rule by decree if the legislature did not back him, who so cynically used and re-used the words ’people’ and ’Nation’ to stoke up the patriotic sentiments of his audience? The answer is Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the speech from which all the above quotations are taken was his inaugural address as he assumed the American presidency on March 4, 1933. Less than three weeks later, another election victor in another country that had been struck equally hard by the Depression gave a remarkably similar speech, beginning with a review of the country’s dire economic straits, promising radical reforms, urging legislators to transcend petty party political thinking and concluding with a stirring call for national unity. The resemblances between Adolf Hitler’s speech to the newly elected Reichstag on 21 March 1933, and Roosevelt’s inaugural address are indeed a great deal more striking than the differences. (War of the World, 223–4) Nonetheless, Ferguson’s rhetorical trick does draw attention to the difficulty of knowing just who was on the side of the angels, and who was with the devils in 1933. Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini is a typically ill-focused work – Lewis’s polemical prose is a model of perspicuity compared to Pound’s23 – but there is no mistaking its message: Mussolini is a great leader in the mould of the American founder, Thomas Jefferson. (Lenin is also praised, but less fulsomely.) Neither Jefferson nor Mussolini, according to Pound, believed in popular democracy: “Jefferson was one genius and Mussolini is another ... Jefferson guided a governing class. A limited number of the public had the franchise” (19).

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A noticeable aspect of Jefferson and/or Mussolini is that Pound inserts himself as an actor in, and intimate observer of, the international political field. In this vein he cites a remark that the Irish republican Arthur Griffith made to him personally (27); mentions conversations he and Mussolini had separately with the American journalist Lincoln Steffens on his return from Russia where he had witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution (31); alludes to a talk with the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius (32), to a conversation with Lawrence of Arabia “one evening after he had been with Lloyd George”(33); and a chance he had to “show up” Mr. Balfour (67) – among numerous other reports of conversations with less illustrious individuals. Surprisingly, he does not mention his interview with Mussolini. Pound supplied Jefferson and/or Mussolini with two prefaces when it was published in 1935. In the second preface, dated 18 September 1933, he observed that when he wrote the book in February of that year “almost nobody ‘saw Roosevelt coming’” (ix) – by which he must have meant that nobody realized how radical his administration would be. And Pound added the request that his British readers consider the case made in Jefferson and/or Mussolini “in relation to what has happened since 4th March, 1933, in the u.s.a. ... [from which they] may get some faint inkling of what to expect from our country” (x) – that is, the usa. Indeed the New Deal’s emphasis on public works such as the Tennessee Valley Authority was seen by some as an imitation of Mussolini’s earlier policy of public works – such as the draining of the Pontine Marshes to which Pound refers frequently. A striking difference between Pound’s political polemics and that of his friends is that whereas Eliot and Lewis had nothing but criticism of the status quo to offer their audience, Pound had a positive program – Social Credit – which he believed could cure the economic malaise afflicting the world – a malaise that most believed was the principal cause of war. It is true that like his friends, Pound had little use for democracy, preferring an enlightened despot – and for the same reasons as Eliot and Lewis. They believed that a despot could be persuaded by wise men like themselves to pursue wise policies that would benefit everyone, but the masses could be lead only by a demagogue. But neither Eliot nor Lewis had any wise policies to offer. Although they cautiously endorsed Douglas’ cri-

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tique of capitalism, they never embraced his solutions, and had nothing else positive to offer. Pound, in contrast, was confident he had the wise policies that would solve the world’s economic problems, and naïvely assumed that universal prosperity itself would render all political and social issues irrelevant. The handbill “Volitionist Economics” that Pound had sent Mussolini was intended to promulgate those policies. It contained a set of eight observations recommending monetary reform on Douglasite lines that Pound believed would bring about peace and prosperity all round. It was a sort of catechism, asking, “Which of the following statements do you agree with?” 1 It is an outrage that the state shd. run into debt to individuals by the act and in the act of creating real wealth. 2 Several nations recognize the necessity of distributing purchasing power. They do actually distribute it. The question is whether it shd. be distributed as favour to corporations; as reward for not having a job; or impartially and per capita. 3 A country can have one currency for internal use, and another good both for home and foreign use. 4 If money is regarded as certificate of work done, taxes are no longer necessary. 5 It is possible to concentrate all taxation onto the actual paper money of a country (or onto one sort of its money). 6 You can issue valid paper money against any commodity up to the amount of that commodity that people want. 7 Some of the commonest failures of clarity among economists are due to using one word to signify two or more different concepts: such as, demand, meaning sometimes want and sometimes power to buy; authoritative, meaning also responsible. 8 It is an outrage that the owner of one commodity cannot exchange it with someone possessing another, without being impeded or taxed by a third party holding a monopoly over some third substance or controlling some convention regardless of what it be called. (Quoted in Surette, Pound in Purgatory, 301) Notice that there is no mention of parliaments, elections, bureaucratic ministries, or their attendant regulations; nothing

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about religion or ideology; no mention of private property, the proletariat or the bourgeoisie; no call for a charismatic leader, no appeal that artists be heeded; and not a word about national destinies. In short, there is nothing about the handbill that can be identified as Liberal, Conservative, capitalist, socialist, Communist, or fascist; Christian, atheist, humanist or pagan; German, French, British, Russian or Italian. It is instead, a set of “technical” observations about the nature and role of money in the production and exchange of goods, and the provision of services, including government services. As such Pound’s “Volitionist Economics” handbill is ideologically neutral. Certainly there is nothing fascistic about it, as Mussolini’s indifference to it tends to corroborate. However, the subtitle – L’Idea Statale: Fascism as I Have Seen it – leaves no doubt that Pound endorses Mussolini’s fascism. The phrase, “Volitionist Economics,” follows Pound’s name on the title page without further explanation. The statements on the handbill do not appear in the book, even though part of Pound’s intention was to make the case that fascism is compatible with Douglasite economics. Unfortunately, Mussolini’s economic policies bore no relation at all to Social Credit policy recommendations. Nonetheless, Pound persisted in the illusion that there was some agreement between fascism and Social Credit – even in the face of Douglas’ repeated denial of any compatibility in correspondence with Pound. Pound was in correspondence with a myriad of people in the thirties. They included the economist Irving Fisher; his assistant, Hans Cohrssen; Major Douglas; and a fellow Social Crediter, Odon Por, amongst many others.24 A typical instance of his belief that Social Credit and Mussolini were compatible is found in a letter to Douglas of 14 April 1933 – a few weeks after finishing Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Pound defended Mussolini’s economic policies with a characteristically non-specific and cryptic assertion: “My belief is that the duce understands more real econ/ that Doug/ He (the Duce) not giving a damn about slips of paper (as an autotelic end)” (Preda, Economic Correspondence, letter 12, 92). Pound wanted Eliot to publish Jefferson and/or Mussolini as a series in The Criterion, but Eliot turned it down in a letter of 12 January1934 on the grounds that it was not suitable for a British audi-

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ence, and encouraged him to seek to publish it as a book in New York (Eliot-Pound Correspondence, Beinecke). And that is what eventually transpired when Stanley Nott published it in 1935, together with excerpts from a Pound letter Eliot had published in The Criterion in January 1935, and a new preface. The Criterion letter gives great prominence to a speech Mussolini gave in Milan on 6 October 1934 that Pound heard on the radio. He gives the time of day as well as the date: “Dead, at 4:14 in the Piazza del Duomo, Milano, anno XII. Scarcity Economics died. Scarcity Economics being that congeries of theories based on an earlier state of human productive capacity ... Lavora Garantito, that means that no man in Italy is to have any anxiety about finding a job” (vii). Pound returns to that speech recurrently for many years. No one else gives it such prominence as a statement of economic policy. Indeed, the primary purpose of the speech was to prepare the Italian public for news that Italian forces had invaded Ethiopia on the previous day. Pound’s reaction to Mussolini’s Milan speech is as good an indication as can be found of his radical disconnect from the reality of historical events in the thirties. Blind to Mussolini’s belligerence and economic conservatism, Pound could only see a leader capable of addressing pressing economic issues decisively. The strategy of Jefferson and/or Mussolini was to place Mussolini in conjunction with both Jefferson and Lenin as decisive leaders who were also suspicious of popular democracy.25 The discussion is held under the rubric: “The best government is that which governs least,” attributed to Jefferson (11). Pound pushed the argument that the best government is a benevolent dictatorship because all one wants from government is that it ensures an adequate supply of goods and services, and their equitable distribution. “The rest,” Pound believes, “is political ‘machinery,’ bureaucracy. flummydiddle. Jefferson, Mussolini, all hated or hate it. Lenin wanted to get rid of it: ‘All this political machinery, want to get rid of it,’ as Stef [Lincoln Steffens] reported Lenin’s opinion in 1918” (69–70). Such a view is politically naïve, but not inherently ill intentioned, and not so far from right-wing opinion in the United States in the twenty-first century. Pound’s political posture would have been more coherent if he had adopted Proudhon’s anarchist argument that government is unnecessary, but he does not. Even more than Lewis, he adheres to

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the illusion that governing a nation is analogous to composing a work of art: “I don’t believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid unless it starts from his passion for constitution. Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions” (33–4 original emphasis). Of course, there were plenty of “contradictions” to the image of Mussolini as a benevolent leader – among them his suppression of political opposition and his adventures of foreign conquest. Even though in 1933 Pound did not yet need to defend Mussolini’s Ethiopian war,26 he nonetheless went out of his way to defend Mussolini’s buildup of Italy’s military, and his celebration of military valour, finding a precedent in early American practice: “Jefferson was super-wise in his non-combatancy, but John Adams was possibly right about frigates.” (Adams had frigates built, and they played a crucial role in the war with Britain of 1812–14.) His attitude toward war preparedness was Churchillian: “Unpreparedness and sloppy pacifism are not necessarily the best guarantees of peace.” He dismissed pacifism – such as Lewis’s and Chamberlain’s – as hypocritical: “As to actual pacifism; there are plenty of people who think it merely a section of war propaganda, and until there is at last one peace society that will look at the facts, one may suspect the lot of corruption” (35). Despite his new-found antipathy for the British, Pound even goes so far as to praise them for their pluck in World War I: “I saw groggy old England get up onto her feet from 1914 to ‘18. I don’t like war, etc. ... but given the state of decadence and comfort and general incompetence in pre-War England, nobody who saw that effort can remain without respect for England-during-that-war” (67, original ellipsis). Pound posed the question, “Why Italy?”and answered it: “after the great infamy [that is, World War I] there was no other clot of energy in Europe capable of opposing any force whatever to the infinite evil of the profiteers and the sellers of men’s blood for money.” He went on to excoriate Britain and France for grovelling “before bankers and banker’s touts” (61, original emphasis). While it is true that the policies of the Western democracies in the face of the Depression were unwise, ineffective, and tended to be designed to protect the value of money – albeit without success – those policies would be more properly characterized as

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misguided than as malevolent. Moreover, Mussolini’s policies were little different. Pound was cautious on the issue of tyranny, but he defended “one party rule”– in part by the silly claim that “Jefferson governed for twenty-four years in a de facto one-party condition.”27 And, like Eliot and Lewis, he assumed that democracy in the United States of America was a fraud: “Secondly, when a corrupt oligarchy of any nature controls a country, they will very probably set up in theory a two-party system, controlling both of these parties, one of which will be ‘solid and conservative’ and the other as silly as possible” (125). He was writing immediately after the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but dismissed him, complaining that in the Presidential campaign the American “Press howls that we should give power to Roosevelt, i.e., to a weak man, or a man who has shown no understanding whatsoever, and no knowledge whatsoever of contemporary actuality.” However in the second preface to Jefferson and/or Mussolini, dated September 1933, Pound had altered his view of Roosevelt: “Recommending the book to a British public I could say, read it in relation to what has happened since 4th March, 1933 [the date of Roosevelt’s inauguration], in the U.S.A. and you may get some faint inkling of what to expect from our country ... Many of them [the American public], perhaps one might say most of ‘em, have been very much surprised by Mr. Roosevelt, and it might do them no harm to try to ‘place’ F. D. R. in relation to contemporary phenomena in other countries”(108). Pound’s enthusiasm for Roosevelt and the New Deal was not to last – in contrast to his enduring enthusiasm for Mussolini, even after the collapse of his regime and his death.

pound, eliot, and lewis compared Pound’s political posture is distinct from both Eliot’s and Lewis’s in several ways. Most importantly Pound focused on economic policy to the exclusion of ideology. Another big difference was his attention to American politics. Neither Eliot nor Lewis were much concerned with Roosevelt’s New Deal, nor with Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana, or the radio priest, Father Coughlin – all of whom figure significantly in Pound’s political prose. He wrote to both Long and Coughlin, and regarded them as allies in

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his campaign to save the world from the banks.28 About all that Pound shared with Eliot and Lewis on the political front was their mutual distrust of democracy and capitalism, and a preference for what Lewis came to call “personal rule,” borrowing Machiavelli’s term. In Rude Assignment, Lewis expressed a view very like Pound’s in Jefferson and/or Mussolini: “all government of late has approximated more and more to personal rule: Franklin Roosevelt was a demagogic autocrat, and Mr. Churchill, as war-leader, exemplified personal rule – though abruptly dismissed when the war ended.” Lewis added a qualification that demonstrates his superior political acumen: “Personal rule has the great disadvantage of its effect upon the person exercising it,” and admitted, “for one benevolent ruler you might get nine who were bad. And even one who starts harmlessly enough is apt to become unspeakably bad.” But despite that caveat, Lewis alluded to the case he made in The Lion and the Fox, approving Shakespeare’s celebration of “the Patriot King,” whose “interests are identified with those of the People – he stands between them and the rapacity and pride of the oligarchy, the ottimati. And so it may be: may be if the king is not a blackguard or a fool, and is really a patriot” (Rude Assignment, 179, original emphasis). In his review of The Lion and the Fox, Eliot had disassociated himself from such a view. “The modern ‘dictator,’ a Hitler or Mussolini,” Eliot wrote, “must be thought of rather ... as a highly paid leading actor, whose business is to divert his people (individually, from the spectacle of their own littleness as well as from more useful business)” (110). Reflecting his commitment to an Arnoldian view of the intellectual’s role, Eliot preferred to put his trust in “detached observers” such as himself, Lewis, and Machiavelli. He distinguished the “detached observer” from “ideologues,” exemplified by Marx, Mr. Laski, Mr. Strachey, “a de Maistre, a Bonald, a Maurras, or a Charles Benoist.” Eliot saw the Machiavelli type as a more admirable political thinker: “We do not need to believe that Machiavelli was an ‘ideologue’ of either kind. He was ... a mild, detached man, who could never be the dupe of an idea, but who would be rather inefficient in private affairs, the prey of pickpockets, and the recipient of many a leaden half-crown. What gives his book [Machiavelli’s The Prince] its terrifying greatness is the fact

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that he does not seem to care. He is not advocating anything, he is merely expounding and exposing” (111). That this Arnoldian pose of the dispassionate and disinterested observer was manifestly false has left Eliot open to justifiable criticism from the perspective of postmodernism, which denies that such intellectual objectivity is possible. Lewis and Pound were more forthright in presenting themselves as partisans for one view or another. Pound’s analysis of the political scene is not only distinct from that of Eliot and Lewis, but it is also far cruder, and – so far as Jefferson and/or Mussolini is representative – was expressed in a prose that is distressingly disconnected, cryptic, and even devious. Even though Eliot and Lewis leaned toward “personal rule” – that is, dictatorship – they were sufficiently in command of their critical powers to be cautious in associating themselves with the “personal rulers” on offer in their day – most notably Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. Pound, blind to what everyone else could see, clung to Mussolini: “I assert again my own firm belief that the Duce will stand not with despots and the lovers of power but with the lovers of order” (128). Such a faith was perhaps not entirely blind in 1933, when he wrote Jefferson and/or Mussolini, but Pound adhered to that assessment throughout the Second World War and beyond. For example, in a letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti of 7 August 1953, Pound repeated his claim in Jefferson and/or Mussolini that there was no censorship in fascist Italy: “The false picture of Italy/ smear so heavy that takes rock drill to get it into anyone that a fascist govt/ had given me freedom of microphone/ as per statement in Mercure de France. (You have a copy? if not will send at once)” (“I Cease not to Yowl,” 119). And, in the same letter, he reiterated his belief that World War II could have been avoided if only he had been listened to: “As to being right, there is now a faint perception that Roose [Roosevelt] was not a blessing to the U.S./Churchill, god damn him, has admitted the war was unnecessary, and wanted at the end to attack thru the Balkans. The “IF they had listened to E.P.” is at least proper subject for speculation / and the non-use of E.P.’s knowledge after the 600 days is mentionable.” The “600 days” is a reference to the period between Mussolini’s overthrow on 24 July 1943 and his summary execution by partisans on 25 April 1945. His mistress, Clara Petaci, was with him and was also killed. Both

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corpses were taken to Milan, where they were hung upside down at a service station. Pound’s memorializing of the latter vengeful act in canto 74, the first of the Pisan Cantos, is testimony to his continued admiration for Il Duce : The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed,29 Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano by the heels at Milano That maggots shd/ eat dead bullock digonos, but the twice crucified but the twice crucified where in history will you find it? (The Cantos, 445)

vi Looking Back From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Winston Churchill, Fulton, Missouri, 1946 In retrospect the post-war decades took on a radically altered significance. Once understood as the onset of a new era of permanent ideological polarization they now appeared for what they were an extended epilogue to the European civil war that had begun in 1914, a forty-year interregnum between the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the final resolution of the unfinished business left behind by his war. Tony Judt, Post War, commenting on the fall of the Soviet Union

pound’s war As we have seen, Pound sailed to the United States in 1939 in a quixotic effort to persuade the United States to stay out of the impending conflict. His intervention had no effect whatsoever, but it is worth reminding ourselves that in 1939 he was in line with majority American opinion on this point. Although Hollywood depictions of American involvement in World War II would lead one to believe that the United States was a leading opponent of fascism and Nazism, in fact, it stayed out of the conflict until it was itself attacked by the Japanese in December 1941. In January of

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that year Pound had begun broadcasting over Rome radio, intending to discourage his compatriots from entering the war, and to support the Axis cause. After the attack on Pearl Harbour he stopped the talks, but then began broadcasting once again, a decision that lead to his indictment for treason.1 Pound persisted in the belief that his broadcasts were not treasonous – on the grounds that they were anti-war, and not pro-Axis. However, the transcripts taken by American military authorities and published by Leonard W. Doob, clearly demonstrate that they were distinctly pro-Axis. There is no doubt where Pound’s sympathies lay during the war and after, for he continued privately to express support for the Axis powers during his incarceration in St. Elizabeths.2 As a consequence of the radio talks, the American army arrested Pound in 1945, held him for a time at a “Detention Training Center” near Pisa, and then flew him to Washington where he was indicted for treason. He was found mentally unfit to stand trial, and was confined in St. Elizabeths, a federal asylum in Washington for the mentally infirm, from 1945 to 1958, when he was released without ever having faced a trial and returned to Italy in “custody” of his wife. Pound’s incarceration has complicated the reception of his “political identity” in ways that are quite distinct from the reception accorded Eliot and Lewis. On the one hand, the fact of the broadcasts, and his indictment are objective matters that render his support for fascism beyond question. On the other hand, his “incarceration” has given him some “street cred” as a martyr. These conflicting responses were acutely manifest in the controversy when the Pisan Cantos – so called because they were written during Pound’s imprisonment at Pisa (from May to November 1945) and include the brief elegy for Mussolini cited above – were awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 (see Stock, 426–7). I have traced how the apolitical poet and dreamer of a new age that Pound was before World War I became an obsessive booster of Mussolini and fascism, and a rabid anti-Semite by 1939 in my 1999 study Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism into Anti-Semitism. Here I want to compare the development of his views with those of his friends, Eliot and Lewis. We have seen that Pound hitched his wagon to Mussolini largely because of his conviction that the capitalist democracies were in thrall to financial and manufacturing

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interests. Eliot and Lewis thought the same, and both considered Mussolini as a possible champion in the fight against the captains of industry, whose influence they saw as inimical to the future of Western civilization. Although Lewis did not share Eliot’s fantasy of a Europe renewed by a return to Christendom, they both argued for some sort of benevolent “personal rule” as the best available alternative to popular democracy, which all three regarded as a fraud disguising an oligarchy. I now want to examine the response of our trio to the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War. Pound’s case is the clearest. Once he had committed to the Axis, he never wavered in his conviction that the burden of virtue lay with Italy, Germany, and Japan – though he had little to say about the Pacific war. As an American living in Italy, it is just possible to understand his identification with Italy during the war. After all he was exposed to the Italian press and his hostility to what he regarded as corrupt regimes in Britain and France predisposed him to condone German and Italian aggression against them. However, it is much more difficult to find an acceptable explanation for his continued sympathy for nazism/fascism in the post war, when the Nazis’s “final solution” of the “Jewish problem” had been fully exposed. Tim Redman argued in Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (167 and 203) that Pound suffered from “semantic schizophrenia” and, in recent papers I have heard him read, Redman amends that to the hypothesis that Pound suffered from bipolar disease (formerly called “manic depressive syndrome”). Robert Casillo’s diagnosis of paranoid antiSemitism is less forgiving.3 In Pound in Purgatory I attributed Pound’s adherence to fascism – even to the point of embracing nazism, complete with its virulent anti-Semitism – to his radicalization by Major Douglas’s Social Credit analysis of economic factors. Pound was convinced that the application of the insights of Major Douglas to the function of industrial economies (supplemented by those of Silvio Gesell) would immediately bring an end to the worldwide depression. Given that conviction, he concluded that the failure of democratic governments to implement those policies demonstrated malignant intent on the part of the governing classes. According to Douglas the principal beneficiaries of the economic and fiscal status quo were banks; hence it was tempting to con-

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clude that governments were in the pay of the bankers. From there it was a short – though scarcely warranted – step to conclude that the international conspiracy of bankers was identical to the supposed international conspiracy of Jews outlined in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When one added to that the fairly common perception in those years that the armaments industry was similarly international in scope, and of course profited from wars, it was easy to believe that interested parties fomented wars for their own profit. While Pound’s views were extreme, they were not particularly eccentric. It was not uncommon in the inter-war period to suppose that industry and finance profited from war and the preparation for war. A Times Magazine review of two books on the subject – Merchants of Death, co-authored by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen, and George Seldes’ Iron, Blood and Profits – is a case in point. Merchants of Death was a Book-of-the-Month selection. The review article was entitled “Dragon’s Teeth,” alluding to the teeth of the dragon that Cadmus had slain. For reasons unexplained in the myth, Cadmus extracted the dragon’s teeth and planted them. They promptly sprouted warriors who fell upon one another in a bloody battle. Times Magazine can hardly be thought of as a radical journal – not to speak of the Book-of-the-Month Club – but the anonymous reviewer accepts as true the accusations these authors made of international collusion in the arms trade, and even alludes to an earlier Fortune Magazine article on the topic (another Luce publication that can hardly be considered radical): Last March Fortune -readers gasped at a devastating exposure of the international armaments industry (“Arms and the Men”). Last fortnight appeared two books on the same subject, one of them (Merchants of Death) sponsored by the Book-of-the-Month Club. The Senate has authorized an investigation of U. S. arms manufacturers. Old George Bernard Shaw might well have said: “I started it.” His play, Major Barbara (1905) contained the first popular warning against munitions makers but, like many another Shavian admonition, was taken as a joke. The four biggest arms makers are England’s VickersArmstrong, France’s Schneider-Creusot, Germany’s Krupp,

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Czechoslovakia’s Skoda. Their interlocking connections (which authors Engelbrecht and Hanighen show in charts) are almost incredibly complex; the only real competitor any of them has is peace. Says Author Seldes: “It is a recurrent paradox of the international gun trade that nations arm their enemies.” During the War German scrap iron at the rate of 150,000 tons a month was shipped into France, via Switzerland. French bauxite (aluminum) found its way into the construction of German submarines; German barbed wire helped defend Verdun. (Time Magazine, 7 May 1934) Note that the American publications do not take sides on the issue, but include British, French, and Czech armament manufacturers alongside German ones. The clear message is that it is not so much nationalism that promotes war, as it is the desire of the armament industry for profits. However, few if any were blind to the history of national rivalry and xenophobia that had dominated the bloody history of Europe for several centuries, and to which both Mussolini and Hitler explicitly appealed. For his part Pound ignored the very real anxiety felt in the capitalist, liberal democracies at the prospect of the spread of bolshevism. And he completely ignored the trauma of the Great War, which – far from rendering democratic leaders bellicose – caused them to seek every expedient that would permit them to avoid armed confrontation. All Pound can see is a desire on the part of the democratic leaders to preserve the status quo. In itself that narrow focus would be innocent enough, but he regarded the status quo as politically undesirable, economically indefensible, and culturally inimical. Despite his condemnation of the alleged war-mongering of the democracies – particularly of Britain and France, both of whom had imperial conquests which they retained and augmented in the Peace of Versailles – Pound was vocal in his support of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, and of the German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. And he continued to condemn the Allies and support the Axis powers during the Second World War. In short, the political, economic, and cultural concerns that underlay – however mistakenly – his initial attachment to Mussolini were in the end set aside by his partisan identification with fascist Italy.

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Pound’s most extended articulation of his posture on politics, culture, and economics is the little studied Guide to Kulchur, which Faber published in 1938. It is an idiosyncratic work even for Pound, but it is the best testimony we have to his political and cultural position on the eve of the war. In the preface he declared his “intention in this booklet to commit myself on as many points as possible,” adding that “very few men can afford” to do so “for the simple reason that such taking sides might jeopard [sic] their incomes” (Guide to Kulchur, 7). Pound began with a digest of the Confucian Analects, and throughout the work argued for the essential agreement of Confucian and fascist political philosophy. He declared: “Confucius offers a way of life, an Anschauung or disposition toward nature and man and a system for dealing with both” (24). He praised the benign influence of the Catholic Church, but he said it sank into decline “when its hierarchy ceased to believe their own dogmas” (27). He rejected the Arnoldian (and Maurrassian) compromise of an ecclesiastical institution with unbelieving worshippers. He represented Guide to Kulchur as “notes for a totalitarian treatise” (27). What he meant by that is to be found in the Confucian Analects: “Take the whole ambience of the Analects (of Kung fu Tseu), you have the main character filled with a sense of responsibility. He and his interlocutors live in a responsible world, they think for the whole social order” (29). In short, in a totalitarian polity, the few think for the many. Pound’s “either/or” view of political action is manifest in this work as elsewhere: “We know that there is one enemy, ever-busy obscuring our terms; ever muddling and muddying terminologies, ever trotting out minor issues to obscure the main and the basic, ever prattling of short range causation for the sake of, or with the result of, obscuring the vital truth” (31). For Pound, the enemy was not just the Jews, but also all those who supported the status quo of capitalist monetary policy, which Pound personified as Usura. Money and commerce are obsessive concerns of the book, but its principal focus was on the futility of standard European philosophical thought because of its alleged focus on “an arid and futile quibble over abstractions. Leading to desiccation of culture” (41). He contrasted the totalitarian ideas designed to “go into action” to such effete intellectualism. “The New Learning,” he hoped, “will

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get hold of ideas, in the sense that it will know where they ‘weigh in’. It will take the man of ideas when he ‘pulls his weight’ ... The history of a culture is the history of ideas going into action” (44). This posture is essentially anti-intellectual, and clearly echoes Mussolini’s dismissal of philosophical thought. As Mussolini put it in “Political and Social Doctrine”: “A doctrine must ... be a vital act and not a verbal display” (26). However, the economic ideas to which Pound gave a great deal of attention in Guide to Kulchur were never “put into action” by Mussolini – or, indeed, ever entertained by his regime. Pound gave a capsule account of the three stages of his own and Wyndham Lewis’s political thought over the period examined in the previous pages, culminating in totalitarianism: “If I am introducing anybody to Kulchur, let ‘em take the two phases, the nineteen teens, Gaudier, Wyndham L. and I as we were in Blast, and the next phase, the 1920’s. The sorting out, the rappel à l’ordre, and thirdly the new synthesis, the totalitarian” (95). “Rappel à l’ordre” (“A Call to Order”) is the title of Jean Cocteau’s 1926 book, which called for discipline in French political life. The “new synthesis” would replace democratic capitalism as found in Britain and France, nations Pound denounced with a rhetorical violence characteristic of his polemics in the late thirties: “America was largely acephalous. Russia is a barbarism. Spain is a barbarism. France and England have not even these partial alibis, their government a usurocracy, that is foetor, and its protagonists rotten” (132). Much later he evinced the distrust of the common man shared by all three of our subjects: “An advance wd. imply either in public mind or in the spirit of controlling oligarchies a preference for human rulers, and an intolerance of having lower animals ‘at the helm’”(302–3). Pound left little doubt about where his political sympathies lay. Praising Lewis for having “discovered Hitler,” he attributed that discovery to Lewis’s “superior perception. Superior in relation to my own ‘discovery’ of Mussolini” (134). Pound did disassociate himself from the German and Italian laws forbidding marriage between Jews and Gentiles (156), but his criticism was focused on Britain and France. Although his principal criticism of parliamentary democracy was that it is corrupt, he also portrayed it as an anachronism: “Obvious and archi-obvious and triple obvious: par-

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liaments as now run (Parliament, U.S. House of Representatives and Senate) are as obsolete as the Witenagemot. It is marvellous that the jaw-house has survived into the press age. Unbelievable that it can continue into the age of radio” (173). In this last remark we can see the survival of Pound’s early flirtation with Futurism’s belief that technology had changed the game of governance and culture. Pound argued that Europe must abandon its long submission to Christian doctrines. The “serious Victorians, from Hardy to Swinburne,” he claimed – accurately enough – “did not accept the current code of morality and ... they had a contempt for that church which, in the words of my great uncle Albert, interfered ‘neither with a man’s politics nor his religion’” (290). He was speaking of the Anglican Church. Pound had kinder things to say about Catholicism, but generally, he argued for the advent of a new form of belief. Speaking of the influence of the Victorian atheists and agnostics on his generation he said, “they bred a generation of experimenters, my generation, which was unable to work out a code for action. We believed and disbelieved ‘everything’ ... The best of us accepted every conceivable ‘dogma’ as a truth for a situation, as the truth for a particular crux, crisis or temperament” (291). Pound’s description of his generation as cut loose from any particular belief and willing to adopt any belief that seemed appropriate or helpful for “a particular crux, crisis or temperament” fits Pound and Eliot in their early years, and Lewis for pretty well his whole career. But, so far as his political beliefs are concerned, Eliot seems to have emerged from the head of Maurras fully formed. Pound took longer to find Mussolini and continued to forage among economic radicals well into the ’thirties. In an impossibly tangled paragraph, alluding to the watershed of World War I, Pound speaks of the discovery of a “new Synthesis” by “a few serious survivors of war” who managed “a dissociation of personal crises and cruces, that ... are so encumbered by, and entangled in, the root problems of money, that any pretended ethical or philosophical dealing with them is sheer bunk until they be disentangled” (291). In short, money is the key to that still unidentified “new synthesis.” Another component of that synthesis is the form of belief offered as a replacement for Christianity. Addressing Eliot directly, Pound

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offered for Eliot’s “reflection the thesis that our time has overshadowed the mysteries by an overemphasis on the individual.” He called his alternative faith “Eleusis,” alluding to the Greek mysteries: “Eleusis did not distort truth by exaggerating the individual, neither could it have violated the individual spirit ... No apter metaphor having been found for certain emotional colours. I assert that the Gods exist.” Pound’s faith for the modern age, then, is “corporative” rather than individual – in conformity with fascism – and polytheistic, which was his own bent, unrelated to fascism. By way of clarification of the nature of this faith, Pound added: “I assert that a great treasure of verity exists for mankind in Ovid and in the subject matter of Ovid’s long poem, and that only in this form could it be registered” (299). The poem he has in mind is Metamorphoses, a collection of accounts of theophanies by various divinities. Pound had celebrated such theophanies early in the Cantos, as in Canto 3: Gods float in the azure air, Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed. Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen. Panisks, and from the oak, dryas, And from the apple, mælid, Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices, A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake, And there are gods upon them, (Cantos 11) Pound professed to find some persistence of this pagan sensibility in Italy: “Only in basicly [sic] pagan Italy has Christianity escaped becoming a nuisance. Only there has it escaped the dastardly fanaticisms which grow into it in barbarous climates” (300). He pretended to approve of Eliot’s essay, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” calling it “one of Eliot’s most creditable essays.” But he characterized it as a “lot of dead cod about a dead god,” and added: “That anyone ‘believes’ seems now doubtful.” Citing George Washington’s approval of “the benign influence” of religion, Pound adopts an Arnoldian posture, placing his faith “in the benign influence of litterae humaniores” (301–2). Approximately the last third of the book is devoted to a quirky commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, the point of which

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seems to be that we need new ethical standards in the twentieth century. In any event, he concluded his commentary with six numbered observations. The first endorsed aristocracy, defined as “people shd. do what they like” (348). The second observation denounced oligarchy or plutocracy, somewhat whimsically described as “code of the luxury-trade magazines and swank hotels” (349). The third observation identified the approved elite: “Constructive element in society ... a few writers, a few senators and ministers (say a very few), a considerable number of engineers, inventors, etc.” (349). Four returns to the unapproved: the “Credulous, Crap, the book trade, retrospective writers, ‘the public,’ anyone ass enough to swallow editorials.” Five blesses “the workers and the well-disposed unemployed,” while six damns the “dregs, that is, the poor who are no better than the individual members of the oligarchy or of the ‘public’ or the credulous.” These last are held responsible for tolerating “the present infamies in England, France and America” (349). As political theory, or even political journalism, Guide to Kulchur is unsatisfactory to say the least, but it has been worth surveying to show the nature of Pound’s political thought – primitive as it is. Pound’s political science unfolds as follows: Everything hinges on the creation and equitable distribution of wealth (goods and services), and that, in turn, depends crucially on a proper monetary theory. Wealth – whether material or intellectual – is created by exceptional individuals, be they engineers, scientists, or artists. Unfortunately the individual of average intelligence cannot understand the innovations created by those exceptional individuals even when they benefit everyone. Hence popular democracy will remain susceptible to the blandishments of greedy and unscrupulous individuals bent on appropriating the product of artists and scientists. The best available solution is government by an intellectual elite, indirectly controlling the state through a wise leader. Quite apart from the naïveté of this political theory, Pound’s conviction that Italy’s fascist dictatorship instantiated such a polity, bespeaks a truly exceptional capacity for self-deception. Even worse is Pound’s persistence in the post-war to fulminate against the allies, and to defend Hitler and Mussolini in his private correspondence. A letter to Olivia Rossetti-Agresti of 31

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October 1953 will serve as an example. Pound had been reading Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944,4 and told ora – as he called Olivia Rossetti-Agresti – that Hitler was “crazy as a coot, as Mus/ noted on first meeting him. but with extraordinary flashes of lucidity.” The lucidity, he has in mind is that Hitler “smelled the idiocy of judeo-xtianity”– his target in Guide to Kulchur, fifteen years earlier. Recalling his focus in that work, Pound complained that Hitler “had no basis either in Aristotle or Confucius.” He derisively characterized nazism as “the Nietzsche-Wagner teutobobble wobble,” and disapproved of Hitler on the grounds that he had “NO ethical basis.” But we can take little comfort from this disapproval, for he extends it to Churchill: “Churchill just the same kind of grabber and without any extenuating charm” (I Cease not to Yowl, 130). Although it is difficult to extract any clear position from this farrago of remarks, it is clear that Pound still saw fascist Italy as possessing the balance of virtue in the recent conflict. That he dragged Machiavelli into his comments as a poor representative of Italian virtue probably reflects his exchange two years previously with Lewis on his reading of Rude Assignment (in February or March 1951). After a lengthy break in communication, Pound had reconnected with Lewis in the summer of 1946 – through the intermediary of Eliot (Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 394). Lewis replied with a friendly letter, and the correspondence continued for several years. Pound’s letters are remarkable for their vigour – though not for their wisdom, of which there is very little. In his sixty-sixth year, the sixth year of his incarceration in St. Elizabeths hospital, Pound was still eager to debate the issues that had preoccupied both of them for thirty-seven years. Lewis, however, had little stomach for such a debate, and did not reply to Pound’s detailed comments.5 Characteristic of the kinds of comments Pound made is the following speculation on the different political postures that he, Lewis, and Eliot had adopted: “Wonder if any use in speculation re/ dichotomy: WL conditioned by being riz in the rotting/ [Notting Hill]/ Poss O. M. 6 choosing the sinking, and Ez sticking to the rising (however Holly-Luced crass and tec/) but with some clean sprouts in the middan. Waaaqkk, ‘ear de eagul scream” (Rude Assignment, 276).

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Pound’s parenthetic remark “(however Holly-Luced crass and tec/)” translates as follows: “however much the culture has been debased by Hollywood and the Luce papers (Life, Fortune, and Time magazines).” I am not confident of the meaning of “tec/,” but suspect that he has in mind the degree to which technology drives social and cultural trends in the post-war world. The “clean sprouts in the middan” are his young acolytes who gathered around him on the lawn of St. Elizabeths – some of them decidedly unsavoury characters. The scream of the eagle invokes the United States of America, whose emblem is the bald eagle. Pound’s meaning was that he is loyal to America despite the influence of the inauthentic Americanism propagated by the Luce publications. He saw himself and his acolytes as fighting a rearguard action to “save” the Republic from its internal enemies. Pound’s holding forth to them on the lawn at St. Elizabeths, then, was the “scream of the eagle.” The abbreviations and abrupt shifts of this passage had been characteristics of Pound’s correspondence for many years – long before his troubles with the American authorities. Early examples of this epistolary style can be found in his correspondence in the late thirties and forties with the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, then resident in Rome. Santayana’s comment on Pound’s epistolary style to John Hall Wheelock – admittedly after Pound had been found incompetent to stand trial – gives some taste of how Pound’s epistles were received by his correspondents: “From Ezra Pound I continue to receive communications: the last was stark mad: a few unintelligible abbreviations on a large sheet of paper, and nothing else. Yet the address, although fantastically scrawled, was quite correct and intelligible. His madness may be spasmodic only” (16 Jan. 1947, quoted in McCormick, 410–11). In his comments on Rude Assignment, we find Pound noting much the same dichotomy between himself and Eliot with which we began this study. He sees Eliot as a Cassandra – “the sinking” – and himself as a Pollyanna – “the rising.” He didn’t place Lewis within this schema, merely attributing his (unclassified) posture to having been raised in Notting Hill, a region in Kensington. Pound and Eliot, of course, were both raised in the usa – as was Lewis until his seventh year. Nor was Lewis raised in Notting Hill, but in sever-

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al London districts: Highgate, Hampstead, Becking, and Ealing (Meyers, 4). In fact, Lewis cannot be situated on either side of this dichotomy. He was sometimes a Cassandra – as in his fear of the threat of communism; and sometimes a Pollyanna – as in his misguided hope for Hitler and nazism. He remained always an opponent of modernity and democracy, and still regarded democracies in the nineteen fifties as oligarchies functioning more or less as usual – that is, in the interests of moneyed men. It would be tedious to go through Pound’s detailed comments on Rude Assignment – even though deciphering Pound’s letters does offer a pleasure much like that of doing crossword puzzles. Many of his remarks simply share reminiscences of their shared experiences in London in the 1910s and 1920s. But Pound’s response to Lewis’s critique of Machiavelli’s celebration of “personal rule” – that is, dictatorship – is worth our attention because it offers another opportunity to put the three together. Lewis’s remarks in Rude Assignment are designed to “massage” his favourable portrayal of Machiavelli twenty-three years earlier in The Lion and the Fox, at which we have already glanced. Now, in 1950, Lewis claimed that The Prince articulated “the first scientific hard-boiled theory of the State,” one that exposed the state as founded on “criminal callousness.” He listed among Machiavelli’s “merits,” his complacent account “of a batch of murders perpetrated by his favourite politician.” Lewis sardonically placed such politic brutality beside the “big lovely piles of dead women and masses of Bosche brats left by our bombing raids.” (That he chooses to illustrate the callousness of war with the Allied bombing campaign is typical of Lewis’s tendency to rub the faces of his countrymen in their failings. Most British writers would have spoken of Guernica, Coventry, or Hiroshima to illustrate war’s brutality.) Lewis was unimpressed by Machiavelli’s honesty in openly counselling the murder of associates representing potential opponents. He doubted that we should praise Machiavelli for “his extreme frankness” as some (including Eliot) do. He admitted that “people in general are almost as unpleasant as he [Machiavelli] declares them to be,” but questions whether the greed, stupidity, and allround cussedness of ordinary people justify tyranny; asking “by what right do you go and plant yourself on them as a ruler?” (177–8).

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Pound’s response to all of this is defensive – but typically scattergun. (I have left Pound’s whimsical orthography uncorrected.) First he asked, “Was Macchiavel very intelligent? Register considerbl doubt. I shd/ think Caesare [Borgia?] was prob/ more intelligent. (Not saying this as untempered eulogy.)” This rather tangential remark is followed by a request for a reference to a critique of that other famous renaissance sceptic, Montaigne: “know of any good debunking of Montaigne??” Pound’s next query is more to the point: “How yu goin’ ter Define the struggle for order??? not too much of it, of course” (Rude Assignment, 277). The implication is that only “personal rule” – Machiavelli’s label for tyranny – can maintain order. In his defence of tyranny, Pound invoked a distinction between “power” and “authority” (277). He had previously drawn this distinction in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, where he claimed that Mussolini’s “authority comes, as Eirugina [sic] proclaimed authority comes, ‘from right reason’ and from the general fascist conviction that he is more likely to be right than anyone else is” (110). In other words, the personal ruler rules by right of his superior wisdom. Perhaps conscious that he does not have a very strong case, Pound then resorted to an ad hominem argument, accusing Lewis of bigotry towards Italians: “Undoubtedly Muss’s humanity gets under brit/ skin, even yours, the dam dago. No I distinguish/ it aint his humanity that gits under yrs/ its that he was a wop/ which is the last advice I got from another of ’em, at a given date” (277).7 There is no hint of a willingness on Pound’s part to admit any imperfections in Mussolini’s rule or in fascist governance. Pound’s intransigence contrasts quite strongly with Lewis’s capacity to learn from his mistakes, and to adjust his position in response to changing circumstances. As we have seen, Lewis acknowledged the risks of personal rule in Rude Assignment, admitting, “for one benevolent ruler you might get nine who were bad. And even one who starts harmlessly enough is apt to become unspeakably bad” (179). The flaws Lewis now sees in “personal rule” were corroborated by the case of fascist Italy. The historian Martin Clark points out that a “major weakness” of the fascist system “was the excessive personal power of the Duce himself.” Moreover, Mussolini did not exercise that power wisely: “He had a lively journalistic intelligence, but he was impulsive. He over-simplified and dramatized everything,

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and had no patience for prosaic long-term planning. He was also distressingly vulgar and vulnerable to flattery. Corruption and incompetence were tolerated, even encouraged” (240). Pound was oblivious to such faults – some of which he shared. Other wellknown “personal rulers” are Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Robert Mugabe – to name only those that come to mind. They serve to further corroborate Lewis’s judgment and to discredit Pound’s. As we have seen, Eliot came to the defence of Machiavelli in his 1937 review of The Lion and the Fox. He had already published two defences of him ten years earlier: “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” and “Niccolo Machiavelli,” both of which allude to The Lion and the Fox. In the same year (1927) Eliot came to Machiavelli’s defence in his response to Leo Ward’s justification of the Vatican’s condemnation of Maurras and the Action Française, favourably comparing Maurras and Machiavelli to Mussolini. In “Niccolo Machiavelli” (first appearing in TLS in 1927) Eliot had claimed that Machiavelli’s “first thought always is for peace and prosperity and the happiness of the governed” (For Lancelot Andrewes, 54). Like Pound, Eliot thought tyranny justifiable in some circumstances, invoking Machiavelli’s defence of tyranny as a justification for European imperialism: “You cannot govern people for ever against their will; and some foreign peoples you cannot rule at all; but if you have to govern an alien and inferior people – a people inferior in the art of government – then you must use every means to make them contented and to persuade them that your government is to their interest.” And he adds a chilling approval of strong-arm tactics: “Liberty is good; but more important is order; and the maintenance of order justifies every means” (58).8 Though it was not obvious in 1927 that Mussolini’s emphasis on “order” was a thinly disguised justification for tyranny, as Hitler and Franco came on the scene no possibility of doubt remained. Lewis was the only one of the three to come to recognize the plain facts of totalitarian oppression, perhaps because he was also the only one to see first-hand in 1937 the terrible conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw were living, long before the infamous “sealing” of the Warsaw ghetto in 1941. Pound persisted in his fantasy that Mussolini was a wise and benevolent leader

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despite Mussolini’s obvious aggression in Ethiopia, and he continued to promote the totalitarian or “Confucian” view of governance articulated in Guide to Kulchur, even after the outbreak of the European war. Eliot embraced neither Mussolini nor Hitler, but neither did he speak out against them or Franco, and he clung to Maurras, whose views on order were compatible with fascism – as Eliot himself admitted in his review essay “The Literature of Fascism.” The Idea of a Christian Society, delivered in March 1939 at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is an articulation of Eliot’s political and social views as they were on the eve of war. The lectures are based on four bbc talks broadcast in March and April of 1932. So it is evident that well before it was clear that war was inevitable, Eliot’s views had changed radically. Eliot was unwilling – even in 1939 – to concede much more virtue to the democracies than to Nazi Germany: “Certainly there is a sense in which Britain and America are more democratic than Germany; but on the other hand, defenders of the totalitarian system can make out a plausible case for maintaining that what we have is not democracy, but financial oligarchy” (11). He dismissed both Liberalism and Conservatism, claiming that they are not philosophies, but “merely habits.” Against such mere habits, instead of Maurrasian Royalism, he invoked a distinctly un-Arnoldian view of culture: “what I mean by a political philosophy is not merely even the conscious formulations of the ideal aims of a people, but the substratum of collective temperament, ways of behaviour and unconscious values which provide the material for the formulation” (my emphasis). In defence of totalitarianism, he claims: “it is this which totalitarianism has sought partly to revive, and partly to impose by force upon its peoples” (14). In short Eliot admired the Volkisch attributes of nazism, a species of Heimat primitivism we have seen him celebrating in “East Coker.” Though pulling up short of endorsing totalitarianism, Eliot saw it as a legitimate response to the modern condition in which those “ways of behaviour and unconscious values” have been eroded, if not erased. The label he employs for “ways of behaviour and unconscious values,” is “way of life” (41), perhaps a conscious echo of the German term for such Heimat virtues – Lebensform. We have seen Pound use the same term in the nearly contemporaneous

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Guide to Kulchur (1938). However, Pound preferred the neologism – paideuma 9 – borrowed from the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius. Pound defines paideuma as the “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” (Guide to Kulchur, 57): “When I said I wanted a new civilization, I think I cd. have used Frobenius’ term. At any rate for my own use and for the duration of this treatise I shall use Paideuma for the gristly roots of ideas that are in action” (58). Like Eliot, Pound distinguished the paideuma from the mere habits of thought, which he calls – using still another German term – the Zeitgeist : “I shall leave ‘Zeitgeist’ as including also the atmospheres, the tints of mental air and the idées reçues, the notions that a great mass of people still hold or half hold from habit, from waning custom” (58). Lewis remained an outrider on this point, sticking to his elite concept of culture as a conscious, hard-earned possession. But both Pound and Eliot vacillate. Pound did not want to erase book learning, merely to submerge it in a Volkiisch semi-consciousness: “Knowledge is not culture. The domain of culture begins when one has ‘forgotten-what-book’” (Guide to Kulchur, 134).

eliot’s war Even in 1939, Eliot refused to condemn fascism/nazism as a political doctrine totally antipathetic to Christian as well as to liberal values on the spurious grounds that British oligarchical democracy was equally culpable. This is a nearly desperate equivocation: We cannot condemn Nazi tyranny, brutality, and paganism, Eliot argued, because our own society is also infected with tyranny, brutality, and paganism. Even in the wake of the outrage of Kristallnacht, then, Eliot was still unwilling to condemn nazism – though he was equally unwilling to endorse it. Despite his rejection of Marxism’s historical determinism, Eliot shared the Marxist perception that industrial man was alienated, and that totalitarian regimes were the predictable result of “highly industrialised” societies. “The tendency of unlimited industrialism.” he wrote, “is to create bodies of men and women – of all classes – detached from tradition, alienated from religion and susceptible to mass suggestion: in others words, a mob. And a mob will be

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no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well hosed and well disciplined” (Christianity and Culture, 17). (Of course, Eliot knew very well that the Marxist theory of the proletariat’s alienation from its tools and materials is an echo of the long-standing theological notion of man’s alienation from God.) The only solution to this dilemma in Eliot’s view was a “Christian society” in which an elite “community of Christians” would provide the moral and cultural guidance for the “Christian State” and the “Christian Community” (23). Such sentiments would have been very well accepted in Franco’s Spain, or colonial New England, but scarcely anywhere else. They demonstrate a disconnect from the political and economic realities of the day almost as complete as Pound’s in Guide to Kulchur. Eliot’s qualification – “well fed, well clothed, and well hosed” (that is, possessing good stockings) – is almost cruel given that as he spoke millions were ill fed, ill clothed, and ill housed in the capitalist democracies and elsewhere. That was Eliot’s view in 1933 and 1939. We must ask if the experience of World War II led him to alter his attitudes. The principal document articulating his post-war view is Notes Toward a Definition of Culture. Although the first chapter is revised from four articles published in the New English Weekly in January and February of 1943, the balance was written for the 1948 Faber edition. And the Appendix is the English text of a talk first published in Germany in 1946 and broadcast over German radio in 1948. The dates are important because Eliot would not have had incontrovertible knowledge of the Nazi death camps in late 1942 when he was writing the New English Weekly series, but by 1948, when Notes was published, he would have had such knowledge. In The Myth of Rescue, William Rubinstein notes that although “the first knowledge in the West of Auschwitz and the other extermination camps has been frequently debated and examined,” reports of the slaughter of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen appeared as early as 1941.10 The earliest date of incontestable evidence Rubinstein gives is April 1944 (86). But he notes that the Jewish Chronicle (a British publication) for 11 December 1942 ran an article under the headline, “Two Million Jews Slaughtered / Most Terrible Massacre of All Time / Appalling Horrors of Nazi Mass Murders” (124). In the wake of that piece, British Jews and sympathizers formed the National Committee for Rescue

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from Nazi Terror in March 1943. It produced fourteen booklets and pamphlets on the Holocaust between September 1943 and January 1946 (The Myth of Rescue, 128–9). And Rubinstein notes that these reports were widely disseminated in Britain: “From virtually the moment that news of the Holocaust reached Britain, the magnitude of the evil being perpetrated by the Nazis was understood by Britain’s opinion-leaders in almost uncannily accurate terms. “The Greatest crime in history is now being perpetrated, the murder of a nation and the deliberate extermination of the Jews in Europe,” wrote the Archbishop of York, Dr. Cyril Garbett, in his 1943 New Year’s message to his congregants (Myth of Rescue, 131). Only chapter 1 of Notes was written before these revelations, and the whole was published well after them. The Allies liberated the extermination camps in the spring of 1945, and thereafter the fact of the Holocaust was no longer in any possible doubt. Newspapers around the world expressed shock and outrage at accounts and images of piles of human bodies and of emaciated survivors. Despite all of that there is no indication I can find in Notes or the Appendix that Eliot recognized that horror as a fact that he needed to take into account in his assessment of the past and future of European culture. Nor had Eliot changed his mind about the tenor of his thesis when Notes was reissued in 1961: “I re-read them for the first time for some years, expecting that I should have to qualify some of the opinions expressed therein. I found to my surprise that I had nothing to retrace, and nothing upon which I was disposed to enlarge” (7). He even reiterates his royalism, albeit with minor modification: “I should not now, for instance, call myself a ‘royalist’ tout court, as I once did: I would say that I am in favour of retaining the monarchy in every country in which a monarchy still exists” (7). Eliot’s silence on the most abhorrent manifestation of unmitigated evil in European history in his meditation on European culture bespeaks an evasion that is almost pathological. It is all the more remarkable when we recall, as noted above, that Eliot did protest the Vichy government’s participation in the German racial laws in a 1941 letter to the Christian News-Letter. Eliot’s infamous remark in After Strange Gods – “where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be

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fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of freethinking jews [sic], undesirable” (After Strange Gods, 19–20) – is often invoked as evidence of latent anti-Semitism. The remark has been plausibly defended on the grounds that it is to “free-thinking” that Eliot objects, not an ethnic community. But, since by no means all freethinkers in Europe and America are Jews, the singling out of Jews is still offensive. But despite that offensive gaffe, it is impossible to believe that Eliot was indifferent to the suffering of Europe’s Jews - to do so would entail regarding his professed Christian morality as pure hypocrisy. His silence, nonetheless, is deeply troubling. Eliot was out of step with progressive opinion in the democracies on the assimilation of Jews. The common view was that “free-thinking” Jews – that is, non-observant Jews assimilated to a humanistic post-Christian culture – did not represent any sort of problem, since they were like everyone else. Apart from the anti-Semites, most of those who believed there was a “Jewish Problem” in the inter-war period would have agreed with Lewis that it would be best if all issues of race and religion were laid to rest. When Lewis wrote, “if there were no Jews, there would be no Jewish Problem,” he was recommending assimilation within a pan-European identity, not extermination: “To a ‘good European’ it seems a pity that there must be ‘Frenchmen,’ ‘Italians,’ and ‘Germans’ any longer. And it is certain that, in the end, those troublesome political distinctions will disappear. It is natural for us to wish that such things should come about quickly. That is all I meant by expressing a wish that there were no ‘Jews’ any more” (The Jews, Are They Human? 106–7). The fact that the assimilated Jews of Germany, Holland, France, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were rounded up with their Orthodox brethren and sent to the gas ovens rendered “assimilation” a dirty word in the post war, but it was not so in the early nineteen thirties.11 I have not cited Eliot’s evasion of the Holocaust, or the remark in After Strange Gods, as evidence that he was anti-Semitic, for I agree with Harding and others that he was not. As Harding points out, tolerance of the Holocaust would have been impossible for a devout Christian like Eliot (Harding, 158). However, I cannot

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think of any presentable excuse for his silence. The only motive I can imagine is Eliot’s perception that his commitment to a homogeneous Christian culture for Europe would make any expression of outrage at the Holocaust appear hypocritical. It is not a judgment I would have made in his position. However one looks at his silence, it does not speak well of the carefully constructed Christian Europe that he imagined. Moreover, it suggests that Eliot’s worldview was not coextensive with Anglican Christianity, for Anglicans have had no difficulty in condemning the Holocaust. In Notes, Eliot for the first time adopted an explicitly anthropological notion of culture: “By ‘culture,’ then, I mean first of all what the anthropologists mean: the way of life of a particular people living together in one place. ... A culture is more than the assemblage of its arts, customs, and religious beliefs (Notes in Christianity and Culture, 120).12 This represents a significant change from his view as recently as the 1941 Listener article “Towards a Christian Britain,” in which he reminded his audience, “We must be sure that we are relying on God, and not merely clothing still one more ambitious human scheme in the vestments of Christianity” (525). However, his principal contention in Notes is that “no culture has appeared or developed except together with a religion” (15). While one can hardly dispute that historical observation, the prevailing opinion then, as now, is that European culture was (is) well on its way to a post-religious condition. Of course, it was just this tendency that Eliot hoped to reverse. Eliot’s strategy is Arnoldian. His view – constant since at least 1917 – was that “our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago” (Notes, 19), and his recipe for cultural repair was that an elite should “transmit the culture which they have inherited” to their less able fellow citizens. “It is the function,” he believed, “of the superior members and superior families to preserve the group culture” (42). Arnoldian humanists would not have used such language – certainly not “superior families” – but the notion that culture is made, maintained, and transmitted by superior individuals was certainly Arnold’s view. Such an understanding of culture was shared by all three, and accounts in large part for their hostility to Marxism, which holds the contrary belief that culture is epiphenomenal of the organization of the means of production.

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Rather surprisingly Eliot held up the Soviet Union as a nation governed by an elite, but he was not sanguine of its success: “Three things may happen. Russia may show us how a stable government and a flourishing culture can be transmitted only through elites; it may lapse into oriental lethargy; or the governing elite may follow the course of other governing elites and become a governing class” (45). (With the advantage of hindsight, we can choose between these options – none of which quite precisely fits what happened, though number three seems much the closest, insofar as it is appropriate to consider the nomenclatura as a class.) Eliot was not much more sanguine about the usa. Even with the New Deal well begun, he repeated his belief that the usa had been governed by an oligarchy since the civil war. France, he thought, had no ruling class – hence the well-known political instability of that nation (47). Despite protestations that he was not articulating “a defence of aristocracy,” that is in fact what he did – though he preferred to think he was defending classes, that is, “a continuous gradation of cultural levels,” as if a class structure did not entail a top and a bottom (48). His ideal society would instantiate a “way of life,” transmitted from parent to child and specific to occupations, regions, and “races.” “If we agree that the primary vehicle for the transmission of culture is the family, “he wrote, “and if we agree that in a more highly civilised society there must be different levels of culture, then it follows that to ensure the transmission of the culture of these different levels there must be groups of families persisting, from generation to generation, each in the same way of life” (48, my emphasis). Once again, we see that the “way of life” Eliot preferred for the bulk of society – not for himself – is rather like that of the Hobbits in Tolkien’s imagined Shire: “On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born. Family, class and local loyalty all support each other; and if one of these decays, the others will suffer also” (52). He believed that it is only in an intellectually impoverished state that a true community can subsist: “to be educated above the level of those whose social habits and tastes one has inherited may cause a division within a man which interferes with happiness; even though, when the

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individual is of superior intellect, it may bring him a fuller and more useful life” (99–100). In effect, Eliot’s social and political views had not altered from those he articulated in the twenties. He still saw the difficulty facing the West as “disintegration” – a perception poetically expressed as early as the conclusion of The Waste Land: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” “Education in the modern sense,” he now bemoaned, “implies a disintegrated society” (Notes, 105). And he expressed a shocking hostility toward the perceived desire of the masses for education: “A higher average of general education is perhaps less necessary for a civil society than is a respect for learning.” His recommendation of such forelock-tugging deference for one’s betters is grotesquely anachronistic in 1948. And his fear that an educational system which fostered equality of opportunity “would disorganise society, by substituting for classes, elites of brains, or perhaps only of sharp wits,” is impossibly condescending (100–1, my emphasis.). We have examined Eliot’s first full-scale attempt to articulate his cultural views in the Clark Lectures, delivered in January 1926. While in La Turbie, France, preparing the lectures, he had written to Herbert Read explaining his intentions: “The idea is briefly this: to take the XIII century – in its literary form, Dante – as my point de repère, to treat subsequent history as the history of the disintegration of that unity – disintegration inevitable because of the increase of knowledge and consequent dispersion of attention, but bringing with it many undesirable features. Disintegration, which, when the world has crystallised for another moment into a new order, can be treated as a form of generation; but which the historian at the present time, who does not anticipate, must regard partly as the history of corruption” (11 Dec. 1925, Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria, capitalization as in original, italics my emphasis). By cultural “disintegration” Eliot did not mean simply “decay” or “decline” but literally a falling apart – though he believed that decay and decline were the inevitable consequences of the failure of cultural integration.13 It is certainly true that modern Western culture is simply too variegated and complex for any one individual to master all aspects of it – from literature and religion through philosophy to the social and physical sciences. No one could pre-

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sume to write a Summa of twentieth-century culture as Thomas Aquinas did for medieval Europe. Eliot’s example of such cultural mastery in the lectures was not the philosopher, Aquinas, but the poet, Dante, to whom he contrasted the “disintegrated” Donne. In 1925 and 1926 Eliot still looked forward to a crystallization of the world into “a new order” that he and a few others would anticipate in their art. In Notes he recognized the impossibility of such a summa in the twentieth century and retreated to a notion that had appeared as early as “Tradition and Individual Talent” – now invoked as grounds for opposing universal education. Culture, he said, “cannot altogether be brought to consciousness; and the culture of which we are wholly conscious is never the whole of culture.” Since that is the case, “the more education arrogates to itself the responsibility, the more systematically will it betray culture” (Notes, 107). As I have already noted, the notion that the common folk possess an inarticulate wisdom because they share geography, history, and social practices has much in common with the German theory of the Lebensform exploited by the Nazis in their celebration of the Volk.14 Even in 1948, then, Eliot found himself in the intellectual company of fascists and Nazis who looked back to Roman or Medieval organizations of society in which the state, the church, or the folk replace the isolated, autonomous individual of liberal social theory as the ground of legitimacy. He looks forward with horror to a European future polluted by half-educated tourists: “there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards ... destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans”(Notes, 108). We have seen that Eliot shares this contempt for mass culture with many cultural analysts in the inter-war period such as Mowrer, Siegfried, and Gasset – not to speak of Pound and Lewis. Like Mowrer and Siegfried, Eliot attributed the spread of mass culture around the globe to the influence of his native land: “America has tended to impose its way of life chiefly in the course of doing business, and creating a taste for its commodities ... American economic expansion may be also, in its way, the cause of disintegration of cultures which it touches” (Notes, 92, my emphasis). We saw this

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view expressed by others in the 1920s and, of course, continue to hear it in the twenty-first century. “Coca-colonization,” the pun coined by European Marxists in the ‘sixties to describe American export of its popular culture, captures the same sentiment. That term has sunken into desuetude following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was supplanted for a while by an older term, “new world order.” (The first President Bush, when employing that phrase, was no doubt unaware of its currency following the First World War.) In its turn, “new world order” was supplanted by “globalization.” In all cases, the terms implied the inevitability of a flattening of cultural diversity in the world; a flattening that entailed a subservience of cultural values to economic and commercial imperatives. Despite the diversity of their cultural programs, and their very different vision of how a united Europe should be governed, Angell, Brailsford, Eliot, Pound, Lewis, and Gasset all looked forward to a united Europe. In his radio talk “The Unity of European Culture,” appended to Notes, Eliot revisited his experience with The Criterion. As in the manifesto he had published in the last issue of its first year, he described it as an endeavour to carry out the Arnoldian program to disseminate the best European thought: “In starting this review, I had the aim of bringing together the best in new thinking and new writing in its time, from all the countries of Europe that had anything to contribute to the common good” (Notes, “Appendix,” 115). He lamented that his aims “in the end” failed, and he attributed the failure “chiefly to the gradual closing of the mental frontiers of Europe. A kind of cultural autarky followed inevitably upon political and economic autarky” (Notes, “Appendix,” 116). Eliot’s recipe for a reunited Europe in Notes was not a political union like the European Union – a possibility to which Lewis looked forward in his post-war commentary – nor is it a return to the united Christendom of which Eliot had dreamt in The Idea of A Christian Society. Now his hopes were more modest, and less ecclesiastical. All he dared hope for was the survival of Christian values as a “form of life” even after the fading of belief – which is just what Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer had counselled a century earlier: “An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all

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spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche [unbelievers both]. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. ... If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made” (Notes, Appendix, 122). This represents an almost complete abandonment of the dream, to which he had clung for two decades, of a Europe purged of the heresies of humanism and liberalism and united under the banner of Christianity. In 1958 Leslie Paul asked Eliot if he still felt – as he had in 1939 when he wrote The Idea of a Christian Society – that the choice before us was between “the formation of a new Christian culture, or the acceptance of a pagan one.” Eliot’s reply makes it clear that the pagan culture he had in mind in 1939 was nazism: “Well, I don’t know whether or not I’d use those exact words. I think I should prefer now to say a new or renewed Christian society rather than ‘culture,’ ... You see, we’ve had since I wrote – or it was going on then – the attempt in Hitler’s reign to foster a Germanic culture, and that, if it wasn’t altogether an attempt to suppress Christian culture, was at least an attempt to bypass it” (“A Conversation with T. S. Eliot,” 12). Although the distinction Eliot drew in 1958 between a “society” and a “culture” is not particularly idiosyncratic, it is nonetheless worth pausing over. That he should have called nazism “a Germanic culture” is certainly peculiar, but it seems clear enough that he saw Hitler’s project as somewhat analogous to his own. Both he and Hitler hoped to impose a pre-formed “culture” on an existing “society” – nazism in Hitler’s case and Christianity in Eliot’s. Although Europe was nominally Christian when Eliot began his project, its Christianity was largely dormant and needed to be revived. In the same way, the Weimar Republic allowed German nationalism to decline. It needed to be reanimated if nazism was to prevail. Eliot’s Arnoldian instincts led him toward a “European” culture – as opposed to a British, French, German, or Italian – so it was natural for him to choose trans-nationalism as the carrot to draw Europeans toward Christianity. Hitler’s instincts were the reverse. Accordingly he chose nationalism and chauvinism as the

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carrot to draw Germans towards the Führer Prinzip – total obedience to a charismatic leader. Despite the example of Nazi Germany – which one might have thought demonstrated the inadequacy of social practices or “forms of life” as a protection against radical changes in collective behaviour – Eliot came to believe that social practices were more durable and resistant to change than “beliefs” such as Christianity, communism, or nazism. Though it was a painful realization for him, Eliot evidently took some comfort from it, for he was then content to hope for a renewed “Christian society,” that is, a society in which Christian values persist despite the near-extinction of Christian beliefs. That a seasoned Christian jouster against Arnoldian humanism should come to such a position represents a humiliating climb down. Perhaps it is also evidence of a little wisdom. But Eliot was still capable – in 1958 – of being aroused to indignation at the spectacle of contemporary mass culture. Paul complained to Eliot of the “mass entertainment culture, which is ... without any values at all – and yet is getting hold of the world.” Eliot was quick to agree: “I do think that what you are pointing to is exactly what seems to me to be happening.” He mentioned Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses as an early sounding of the alarm, and went on to complain of the “deterioration ... in the quality of amusement” that is purveyed by the “cinema first; now, television.” He predicted that the “purely materialistic civilization with all its technical achievements and its mass amusements” would end in boredom – provided “there’s no actual destruction by explosives.” But in the end, he admits that it is not so much the presence of mass culture that is the source of decadence, as it is the absence of religion: “A people without religion will in the end find that it has nothing to live for” (“A Conversation with T. S. Eliot,” 13–14). He added, “I did touch on this problem a good many years ago in an essay I wrote on the death of a great music-hall artist, Marie Lloyd” in his 1922 “London Letter” for The Dial (14), where he referred to an essay by W. H. R. Rivers in which Rivers argued that the natives of the Melanesian islands “are dying out principally for the reason that the ‘Civilization’ forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom.”15

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Anticipating his 1958 remarks, Eliot elaborated the point: “When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loudspeaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians” (Selected Essays, 459). How much more despondent must we be today with computers, cell phones, iPods, dvds BlackBerries, and the Internet. However, unlike the Melanesians, who were obliged to give up their practice of head hunting, we still have our wars and terrorist acts to get the adrenalin flowing. And religion seems no less important a motivator of human action today than it was in the Middle Ages when Europeans felt entitled to liberate the Holy Land from the Saladin. And today, radical Muslims have taken up arms to rid Islam of Western infidels. That Rivers’ account of the Melanesians made an impression on Eliot is apparent from his repetition of the same sentiment in “Thoughts after Lambeth” (1931): “Without religion the whole human race would die, as according to W.H.R. Rivers, some Melanesian tribes have died, solely of boredom ”(Selected Essays, 370). But Eliot was quite aware that alternatives to religion have also captured men’s passionate allegiance – nationalism, communism, fascism, and nazism, to name those most operative in the twentieth century. The adherents of those “faiths” did not seem to be expiring from inanition; on the contrary, they were turning the world upside down with their violent passions. Eliot feared humanism, a benign alternative to religion, even more than those passionate creeds. It is humanism that he had in mind in the following remark in “Thoughts after Lambeth”: “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide” (387). By 1958 Eliot has

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lost that confidence and concedes that the “experiment” of a non-Christian “civilized” society is not only possible but actually exists in Europe. Eliot’s antipathy for humanism is shared by the Marxist critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno, who – rather surprisingly – lump together fascism and humanism in their 1944 work Dialectic of Enlightenment, complaining that “the brazen fascists hypocritically laud and pliable humanist experts naïvely put into practice” Enlightenment beliefs (xi). We have seen that in his 1932 bbc series “The Modern Dilemma,” Eliot insisted that society would not “succeed in inventing another brand new religion to compete with communism.” He believed that humanism would be inadequate, and he gave a rather surprising reason – that humanism is too cool and rational: “if we are incapable of dying for a cause, then Western Europe and the Americans might as well be reorganised on the Moscow model at once” (The Listener 7, 16 March 1932, 383.1). Eliot’s taste for unreasoning passion must have been severely tested by the upsurge of passion during the Second World War. It seems fair to say, then, that Eliot’s antipathy for what is commonly called “modernity” was constant from at least the period of The Waste Land to the end of his career. I say this in spite of Eliot’s complaint in the very late work To Criticize the Critic: “I find myself constantly irritated by having my words, perhaps written thirty or forty years ago, quoted as if I had uttered them yesterday” (14). His irritation is justified with respect to his literary critical views, but we have seen that in an interview he gave in 1958 Eliot himself directed us to his comments in his 1922 tribute to Marie Lloyd – which provides evidence of the constancy of his Cassandra-like views on modernity.

lewis’s war Lewis was just as hostile to modernity as Eliot – though for different reasons. Unlike Eliot, he had adopted Hitler as a champion in the opposition to modernity. However, Lewis’s toleration of Nazi anti-Semitism changed radically after he and his wife visited the Jewish sector in Warsaw in October 1937. His experience of the miserable condition of the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto prompt-

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ed him to write the unfortunately titled, The Jews, Are They Human? decrying the abominable treatment of the Jews of Warsaw. And this was before the German conquest of Poland and the forced displacement of all the Jews of Warsaw into a sealed ghetto in October 1940. Lewis was appalled: “If anyone is desirous of forming an opinion upon the Jewish Problem they should visit the Ghetto in Warsaw. This inferno continued for miles upon miles – or so it seemed ... the percentage of diseased, deformed, and generally infirm persons is what strikes one most: that and the inexpressible squalor” (The Jews, Are They Human, 43). Cruelly, Nazi propaganda routinely used such scenes as Lewis witnessed to demonstrate the congenital inferiority of Jews. It is to Lewis’s credit that he did not respond in that way, but rather with sympathy for those so horribly disadvantaged. Neither Eliot nor Pound was ever exposed to such scenes. Even without such exposure, we have seen that Eliot did protest the persecution of Jews in Vichy France. Lewis’s unwise title alludes to the Dutch historian Gustav Renier’s whimsically titled 1931 book, The English, Are They Human? (Meyers, 245). The reviewer of The Jews, Are They Human? for The Jewish Chronicle managed to get past the title and gave the book a favourable review. Essentially, Lewis put forth the sensible argument that all human “races” are much the same and are differentiated only by circumstances and acquired cultural traits. In a typically incautious assessment he asserted that Jews are just like the rest of us – venal, duplicitous, greedy, and so forth: “It can, as a matter of fact, be very easily demonstrated how nearly every disobliging thing that is said about the Jew can with equal truth be said about the Gentile” (61). Contemporary readers might well be offended by his retention of the term “race,” when he is really speaking of ethnicity – that is, acquired cultural traits rather than some genetic distinction. But he makes it very clear that antiSemitism is indefensible. And, most particularly, he argues that Britain, and the democracies generally have a duty to admit Jewish refugees from the persecution imposed on them in Nazidominated countries.16 Lewis’s biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, is offended that Lewis compares the plight of the Continental Jews to the indigenous British poor and judges The Jews, Are They Human? rather harshly – charg-

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ing that it retains elements of anti-Semitism (244–5). I think that is too harsh. Lewis’s point in mentioning the British poor is to debunk the claim that “that there is no room” in Britain for the Jews. Until, he said, “we begin to show that we really care about our own destitute or semi-destitute people, we have no right to use that argument” (18). He saw the “Jewish Problem” – as expressions of anti-Semitism were then euphemistically labelled – as an aspect of the general “problem” of the moral and economic bankruptcy of the capitalist democracies that the Depression exposed: “As I have said, you cannot begin to master the Jewish Problem unless you are prepared to recognize how it is linked with the Problem of Poverty, and to turn your eyes – for however brief a space – upon the misery in which the great majority of all races live. Furthermore, if we solved our own economic problem, we should automatically solve all the racial problems. It is the crops that rot, the fish that are flung back into the sea, the milk that is withheld from the starving children of our own people, that are at the bottom of the Jewish Problem, or at least they are complementary issues” (39, original emphasis). With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that Nazi racial policies were rather more evil than Lewis realized, but no one in 1939 – not even the Jews of Europe themselves – imagined the death camps.17 In The Jews, Are They Human? Lewis inveighed against nationalism, returning to the internationalist posture he had abandoned in Hitler and The Doom of Youth. Now he saw Hitler as setting himself against “three great world-institutions ... the Catholic Church, the Jewish Community, and the Anglo-Saxons (the British Empire, with English-speaking America at the back of it)” (46). There is more than a scintilla of insincerity in his substitution of the Catholic Church for communism in this trio of those whom Hitler identified as his opponents. In fact, Hitler was not hostile to the Catholic Church – though the Church opposed his regime – and Lewis knew perfectly well that nazism/fascism represented itself as the only bulwark against godless communism. I suspect he expunged communism from his list of the foes of nazism because of the accusation by anti-Semites that communism is a Jewish-inspired and controlled movement. (Marx, of course, was Jewish – though secular.) Lewis explicitly dismissed “the charge against the Jew of being not only a destructive element in Euro-

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pean civilization, but the prime source of all the disintegration which we see going on around us.” Such “an accusation,” he said, “is self indulgent; it is to blame this stranger in our midst for troubles which we have brought upon ourselves, by our own actions.” While conceding that many “Jews took part in the destruction of Russian Czarist society,” he asked, “can anyone pretend that that society was worthy to endure? Had it not within itself the seeds of violent dissolution?” (89). With characteristic rhetorical recklessness, Lewis did not attempt to deny accusations that Jewish businessmen indulge in sharp practices. Instead he invoked the Proudhonian principle that “all competitive business is a racket, and often a particularly criminal one.” Moreover, a Jew often “gets the blame, because of his sinister reputation, for some racket at the bottom of which is a dear old bluff John Bull all the time.” In any case, since “the economic and political system for which we are all responsible” is, in Lewis’s view, “so absurd and so unjust,” that “I should feel myself a very objectionable hypocrite if I gave myself airs regarding a person who had availed himself of some hole in the net of an oppressive chicanery” (73). All in all, The Jews, Are They Human? reveals Lewis as humane and clear-headed – in contrast to the impression created by his previous agitated attempts to understand the forces leading to war. It is as if he had emerged from a state of turbulent waters into a flat calm. But in addition to his humanity, and the acuteness of his mind, it also displays his incapacity for persuasive writing. His argument that the anti-social behaviour of which Jews are accused is no worse than that committed by Gentiles has the weakness of admitting that some Jews are guilty of the charges that anti-Semites level against all Jews. Of course, it must be true that some Jews engage in criminal behaviour. To allege otherwise would certainly be racist. Nonetheless, it was probably imprudent in 1939 to stress the unexceptionable nature of the Jewish community, when it was evident that the Jews of Europe were in dire peril. His conclusion that “if there were no Jews, there would be no Jewish Problem,” was also imprudent. Of course, he was not recommending Hitler’s “final solution,” but rather the assimilation of Jews within a Europe in which there would no longer be Frenchman, Italians, or Germans either – perhaps tellingly, he

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does not expunge Englishmen (107). Lewis’s vision has to some extent come to pass in the European Union, which transcends national divisions as Lewis recommended. However, national identities seem to be far more difficult to expunge. Nor is it clear that humanity would be better off without ethnic and cultural diversity – even though such factors continue to fuel conflict around the world, even in Europe where the Balkans fairly recently erupted and Irish, Basque, and Muslim discontent continues to fester. Events were now overtaking Lewis, as they had Eliot. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later – though no major military actions ensued until the following May, when Germany attacked France through Holland and Belgium. To everyone’s amazement – not least the Germans – the Allied defence quickly collapsed, and France was forced to sue for peace on 2 July. In response to the outbreak of war, Lewis rushed into print with The Hitler Cult, a palinode for his previous pro-Nazi books. Its publication date was 7 December 1939, just three months after Germany invaded Poland. Rather disingenuously, in his Foreword he characterized his previous posture toward fascism/nazism as “neutral.” However he was “no longer neutral ... Today, to be neutral is to be anti-British. Further, it is to be anti-European culture, as I understand it.” His claim that he had “adopted ‘Neutrality’ ... because another war like the last one is hardly an event lightly to repeat. And to be on bad terms with Germany would entail that” is more honest (vii). And he quoted himself from The Jews, Are They Human? as evidence that he no longer excused Nazi anti-Semitism (19). Attempting to rewrite his political record, he further claimed that, like André Gide (a committed Communist), he “had succumbed to the charms of communism,” but – also like Gide – he now renounced that allegiance. The appeal of communism for him allegedly was that it promised “a classless society and a world in which barbaric social values have no part.” However, he professed to have been disappointed in the Soviet version of communism. It was that disappointment, he claimed – with some justice – that threw him “back upon the pisaller of the traditional Western scene, with its routine half-measures, of which National Socialism was a spectacular specimen” (21). While this account rather understates his hostility to the mass

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society, for which socialism and communism claimed to speak, it is not entirely inaccurate. Seeking further justification for his previous friendliness toward the Nazis, he invoked his distaste for “the stupid French Chauvinists’” (read Action Française); his admiration for “the views on finance of Herr Feder,” which reminded him of “our Major Douglas”– whose Social Credit arguments we have seen also attracted Eliot, and to whom Pound might be said to have sold his soul (26–7). As further justification he cited Germany’s economic and military weakness in the twenties. And he alluded to the common British sentiment that Versailles was unfair to Germany: “The ‘Versailles shackles,’ designed to immobilize the stricken German giant, seemed unnecessarily galling and oppressive” (27).18 In the wake of Germany’s invasion of Poland, Lewis aligned nazism with his long-time bête noir, Romanticism: “in order to be able to ‘place’ this political phenomenon, and to judge it at its proper worth, you must know something about the Romantic Movement in Germany” (33). He admitted that he “was badly taken in, in 1930.” He said that “more than anything else” what caused his “judgment to trip was that unusual trinity of celibacy, teetotalism, and anti-nicotine” that characterized Hitler’s personal conduct. He could not resist claiming that – despite his error about Hitler – he was wiser than most of his contemporaries, having seen the evil of bolshevik communism before others: “That Communism had become a racket seemed plain enough to some of us by 1930 – though it started from a great principle of social justice, and was planned as a great feat of social engineering. Today a majority probably of ‘the intelligent’ agree that Russia is a very imperfectly Socialist state ... But in 1930 the Anglo-Saxon political smart-alecs had just caught up with this big idea. Typically ... communism was discovered after it had ceased to be communism” (44). It was not just Hitler’s anti-communism that recommended him to Lewis. He had also seen Hitler as an ally in the supposed struggle of “the White European, submerged as he has been in a ‘dark’ flood of African barbarity.” However, he now realized that Hitler’s Germany “is surely another jungle;” by which “we are about to be submerged” (45–6, original emphasis). Now, like “those who

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regarded him as a handy antidote to a corrupt and savage version of the Socialist dream of the West,” Lewis has “had enough of Hitler” (46). Then he turned to a survey of the rise of nazism, drawing on Mein Kampf and Konrad Heiden’s 1936 Hitler: A Biography. (Heiden was a strong critic of Hitler and nazism.) Lewis perversely persisted in finding common ground between himself and Hitler, quoting Hitler’s view, as expressed in Mein Kampf, that “the trend of affairs” in 1914 “seemed bound to transform the world into a mammoth department store.” “That stirs an answering chord in me,” Lewis remarked. “For the world as ‘a mammoth department store’ is none too good a place.” He admitted: “a world war, as an alternative to a world store, has its disadvantages, and they are disadvantages to which Hitler is oddly insensible. He takes it for granted that a poison-gas attack is preferable to a bargain basement” (83). As in Blasting and Bombardiering Lewis struck a light and jocular tone here that seems inappropriate for the times. However, Charlie Chaplin had done much the same in his satirical portrait of Hitler, The Great Dictator, released the year before. But even in 1939 Lewis did not disguise his antipathy for mass culture and liberal, capitalist democracies. In what we can only see as a grotesque misalliance, he aligned Hitler “alongside of the Hollywood magnates” and “the ‘geniuses’ who invented the Yellow Press” as “a destroyer of culture.” And, shockingly, he declared that in his demagogic “hanging upon the emotional suffrage of the masses,” Hitler is “a typical democratic statesman – and this in spite of the fact that the agreeable laissez-faire of Western democracy has passed over, with him, into a demagogic despotism” (114–15). Accepting the inevitability of war, and unequivocally siding with the Allies, Lewis did not abandon his critique of the allied democracies: “Now we are at war, every soldier should go into battle with a charter of new liberties in his pocket. A solemn promise from his rulers of a new deal for him and his children. They should be handed to every conscript, as he is called up. Then, indeed, we should be on the side of the light” (184, original emphasis). The Hitler Cult, then, does not represent any real change of political position on Lewis’s part. His critique of the Western democracies remains the same – that they are in dire need of a radical overhaul that would involve a departure from the legacy of the

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nineteenth century: capitalism, democracy, and nationalism. He had imagined that some kind of totalitarianism might be a better option and had surveyed communism, fascism, and nazism as possible models. One by one, he had disassociated himself from these instances of totalitarian regimes. That he had entertained both Left and Right varieties of totalitarianism places him beyond the tolerance of virtually the entire literary community then and now – even, paradoxically, amongst those who share his critique of liberal, capitalist democracies (which today includes a significant portion of the literary community). Lewis’s difficulty, I think, so far as political engagement is concerned, was that he has a reasonably coherent critique of his culture and society but has no strongly held positive beliefs or policies that could replace the civilization in which he found himself and which he regarded as bankrupt. Eliot, in contrast, had a positive set of beliefs – Maurrasian conservatism, Anglicanism, and royalism – in which he was comfortable. However narrow the appeal of that accommodation among his contemporaries, it protected Eliot from the sorts of political blunders into which Lewis and Pound fell – and it permitted him to continue writing poems and plays expressing those views in terms tolerable to an audience that did not share them. Lewis’s lack of positive beliefs – as opposed to distinct dislikes – rendered him prone to identify with those individuals and movements that shared his dislikes. If we are to judge Lewis’s political stance charitably, we must assess his dislikes rather than his fleeting support for particular political movements. Indeed, since he supported, in turn, bolshevism, fascism, nazism, and finally “internationalism” – by which he meant some sort of super-state, not unlike the European Union, which he did not live to see – it is scarcely possible to characterize his political philosophy by referring to his enthusiasms. In this respect, Lewis is the truest conservative of the three, since it is change itself that he finds objectionable. He is too clearsighted to imagine that change can be avoided, but he is also too bloody-minded to accept change as a value in itself. He was torn between the conviction that all change was illusory – merely a matter of the surface, while the fundamentals remained unchanged – and the fear that a society and a culture could – indeed had – become so addicted to change that it could no longer perceive or

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imagine that solid fundament underneath it all. Had he been of a mystical, or even religious, cast of mind he might have rested content in the notion that, despite the superficiality of mass culture, an elite could maintain contact with that fundament and communicate its essence to the masses through ritual and sacrament. Eliot and Pound both managed to satisfy themselves in some such manner. But Lewis was the complete sceptic. He could not participate in the Romantic notion that some sort of sub-intellectual or sub-conscious communication took place between artist and audience. Unwilling to postulate quasi-mystical access to the noumenal realm, Lewis was constrained to insist that the surface of things was all that there was. He made this point quite explicitly in Time and Western Man: we are surface-creatures only, and by nature are meant to be only that, if there is any meaning in nature. No metaphysician goes the whole length of departure from the surface condition of mind – that fact is not generally noticed ... We are surface-creatures, and the “truths” from beneath the surface contradict our values. It is among the flowers and leaves that our lot is cast, and the roots, however “interesting,” are not so ultimate for us. For us the ultimate thing is the surface, the last-comer, and that is committed to a plurality of being. So what in a sense we have arrived at, is for practical reasons, the opposite to the conclusions of Kant’s “practical reason.”19 For the same reason we think it is most true and better to say there is no God. (387–8, my emphasis.) The italicized sentence reveals the conundrum Lewis faced. He believed in permanent “truths,” but did not believe – as Kant and Hegel did – that those truths are, or can be, instantiated in human societies. For Lewis those permanent truths “contradict our values.” Lewis was permanently conflicted on these points, for he was committed to art as not just a decorative and therapeutic activity but one that had serious cognitive content that could be expressed in no other way. Earlier in Time and Western Man he articulated a view pretty well contrary to that we have just examined: “If you want to know what is actually occurring inside, underneath, at the

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centre, at any given moment, art is a truer guide than ‘politics,’ more often than not. Its movements represent, in an acuter form, a deeper emotional truth, though not discursively.” In contrasting art to politics, he expresses the truthfulness of art hypothetically: “So if art has a directer [sic] access to reality, is a truer and less artificial and more like what it naturally grows out of, than are politics, it seems a pity that it should take its cue from them” (120, original emphasis).

V Conclusion

Eliot’s assessment of himself and Lewis in a letter of June 1919 – “Lewis is not a sham, but a simple natural innocent, like myself” (Letters, 303) – is compatible with Lewis’s assessment of Pound in Time and Western Man as a “revolutionary simpleton.” All three men were babes in the woods in the realm of political philosophy and realpolitik. Lewis was more outspoken than Eliot, and more sensible and prudent than Pound. They were all anti-democratic, as is frequently alleged. But we should remember that popular democracy was a new thing in their lifetime. That they should have been suspicious of it is hardly surprising – however much we may disapprove of their failure to acknowledge the wisdom of the masses. They should have cited the democratic installation of Hitler as Führer in Germany as corroboration of their distrust of democracy, but they did not. Instead, they continued to inveigh against Britain, France, and the United States as examples of the failure of democracy, while pointing to the Soviet Union as the real threat to civilization and freedom. It is, I think, because they thought like artists rather than like political scientists, that they failed to recognize that the tyranny of such men as Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler represented a much greater threat to peace, order, and good government than the putative oligarchies of the liberal democracies. It is perhaps admirable that they believed that it was the duty and glory of the artist to, as we say today, “speak truth to power.” But the day when the intelligentsia could determine public policy was past – if it ever existed. In popular democracies political power was widely dissem-

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inated amongst a variegated electorate, “captains of industry” (including the media) and a professional civil service in addition to the politicians themselves. While governing elites still existed, they were more concerned with mass opinion than with the opinions of an educated “clerisy” – to use Eliot’s term (borrowed from Coleridge) in The Idea of a Christian Society. And elite artists like Lewis, Pound, and Eliot were useless for either gauging or manipulating mass opinion. The Americans, at least, had been born into a nation governed by an educated minority, most of whom had read the same books, attended the same three or four universities, and adhered to much the same political and ethical principles. Britain was very similar, with the difference of an influential aristocracy – even though most peers were men of commerce and industry raised to the peerage, or their sons. But that world was rapidly disappearing, being displaced – as they recognized – by one dominated by what Ortega y Gasset called “the masses” – an amorphous “crowd” thought to be amenable to manipulation through the mass media, and impermeable to “ideas.” Two principal factors governed their thinking about the world in which they grew up. One might be called the theory of the avantgarde, that is, the notion that each generation of artists was obliged to chart its own course, rejecting the practices and predilections of the previous generation. The second factor was their perception that they were experiencing unexampled changes in the human environment caused by technical innovation that impacted not only the details of daily life but also the very nature of culture. Radio and the cinema created for the first time a mass culture, that is, a culture not dependent on the written word but common to large areas – in contrast to folk culture, which was necessarily local. And, perhaps most important of all, these new media were not constituted to express the considered thoughts of a single individual. “Teams” of technical people, “creative” people, and performers generate movies and radio programs.1 They saw these two factors as representing a challenge to the status, role, and influence of the traditional arts in which they hoped to excel. Just as painting responded to photography by migrating away from representational verisimilitude, so literature migrated away from song and story toward a fragmented presentation. Indeed Pound told his father that the fragmented nature of his Cantos should be experi-

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enced as one experiences the disembodied voices of a radio drama: “Simplest parallel I can give is radio where you tell who is talking by the noise they make.” (Beinecke, cited in Surette, A Light from Eleusis, 126). They attacked the perceived demise of traditional culture with vigour and confidence. However, all of that aesthetic/cultural energy was skewed and ultimately perverted by what Tony Judt has called the long European civil war, 1914–45. Now we can see that war as essentially an old-fashioned confrontation between nation states competing for dominance, but contemporaries saw it as a struggle for civilization. It was the duty of artists to speak for civilization. Unfortunately, our trio was convinced from the outset that liberal, capitalist mass democracy did not stand for civilization, and looked everywhere else for someone or some group that did. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, we have to conclude that they failed to find any such saviour. Eliot’s choice of royalty and the Anglican Church can be seen as harmless, but hardly compelling. Lewis bounced from one tyrant to another, eventually giving up the game. Pound alone found a saviour in Mussolini – a disastrous choice. In 1952, once again looking back on World War I in The Writer and the Absolute, Lewis confirmed Eliot’s judgment of their political engagement in the immediate post-war period. “None of the young writers, who had started publishing only a short time before the war of 1914–18, or were beginning to write just before it, were socialists. Politically they adhered to no particular theory of the State, although highly unorthodox as writers.” Lewis claimed that their alleged political innocence left them in a minority position “when an extreme Socialist doctrine suddenly became a violent fashion among the ‘post-war’ young.” The vogue of socialism “was favourable for such veterans as Shaw and Wells, rather than for them.” It was a different matter for himself, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce “for whom,” he says, “the so-called Great War over, the main period of their production was to begin ... Politics did not enter into their scheme of things, as a first-line issue” (41–2, original emphasis). Of course, we can accept these assessments of their political innocence only if we take “politics” to mean an engagement in partisan politics. The preceding discussion has, I believe, demonstrated beyond doubt that from very early in their careers all three

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feared the levelling tendencies of popular democracy and popular culture – a fear they shared with most of their educated contemporaries, whether intellectuals or political actors. Marinetti and the futurists are an outstanding exception. They vehemently embraced the machine age and all that came with it – even the mass slaughter of men by machines in trench warfare. While it is true that Eliot and Pound at least attempted to accommodate popular culture in their own work, those efforts were abortive. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes was never finished, and Pound’s cracker-barrel philosophizing was largely confined to his prose and can hardly be judged a successful accommodation to popular taste. Lewis’s novels – though rhetorically conservative – never achieved a large readership. While it would be wrong to claim that their engagement with political thought was “innocent” in the sense that they should not be held accountable for their views, at the same time, it was ineffectual. It was “innocent” in the sense that no one other than themselves was helped or harmed by it, and “ineffectual” in the sense that their opinions and doctrines proved incapable of affecting the march of events. Only Eliot managed to create a loyal band of followers who continue to admire not only his art but also his religious, social, and political views. It would be egregiously unfair to hold them as in any significant way responsible for the disasters of the twentieth century. They were caught up in cultural, technological, and political earthquakes beyond their capacity to understand or influence. It is fair to ask, “Who of their cohort group did better?” Lewis claimed with some justice that their elders and their juniors alike largely opted for communism or socialism. However much communism represented a well-intentioned political philosophy in the hands of Marx and Engels, it proved to be little better than fascism/nazism in the hands of Lenin and Stalin. Moreover, Marxist communism offered no response at all to the challenge represented by the advent of the mass audience created by the cinema and radio. Of course, most ordinary men and women in the West opted for the status quo of liberal, democratic capitalism – at least until the Great Depression. That trauma suffered by capitalist democracies made the authoritarian ideology of fascism/nazism seem attractive to many ordinary citizens, as well as to intellectuals like Lewis, Eliot, and Pound – all of whom feared the judgment of the ordinary

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citizen. All three were also essentially internationalist in sentiment, and hence were predisposed to reject the nationalism and xenophobia that characterized fascism/nazism. Unfortunately that predisposition was insufficient to prevent Pound from embracing Mussolini’s authoritarian regime. Pound was convinced that only a benevolent dictator could combat the malign intentions of the financial oligarchy that he imagined controlled nations. Pound’s choice bespeaks very poor judgment, and his toleration of the crimes of the Axis powers is far worse – evincing a serious ethical lapse. Lewis was similarly tempted by dictators; but his moral compass proved more reliable than Pound’s, and he renounced his support of Hitler when confronted with the suffering of Europe’s Jews. Eliot had the same political and cultural predispositions as Lewis and Pound, but those predispositions were trumped by his conversion to Anglican Christianity. Unlike the other two, Eliot never considered communism a possible alternative to the allegedly oligarchic regimes of the capitalist democracies. Instead Eliot adopted early, and never abandoned, the fantasy that it was possible to restore European Christendom consisting of kingdoms in which contented peasants pursued a sempiternal way of life in harmony with the seasons. His reputation has suffered grievously for that fantasy – not just because it is out of touch with modern reality but also because it has affinities with the heimisch world of the blond, Aryan Volk of Nazi propaganda. Where Eliot hoped for a return to Christendom, Pound looked to the past for cultural and political models, which could be renovated or “made new,” and suitable for a modern, industrial society. He evinced no nostalgia for a pre-industrial society of uneducated peasants showing due respect for their intellectual and social betters. He believed that a future free from poverty and toil was possible if only men of good will would stand up and put an end to the oligarchy of financial and commercial interests who, he believed, perpetuated poverty by their greed and lust for power. Although Pound was not drawn to Marxism, his analysis of the future and present state of mankind was not much different from that of Marx and Engels. Where it differed was in Pound’s desire to preserve the best of what we have inherited from our fore-parents (revised to meet new circumstances), and to select the best of what has been newly discovered or created.

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In this vein, Pound stressed in an article of 1927 – before he had plumped for Mussolini and fascism – that the “capitalist imperialist state must be judged not only in comparison with unrealised utopias, but with past forms of the state.” He listed “the feudal order ... [and] the small city states both republican and despotic” as alternatives. If the capitalist state could not match achievements in “social justice” and in “art, science, literature” of those earlier styles of governance, then he wrote, “the onus of proof goes against it” (“The State,” Exile Spring, 1927 in Selected Prose of Ezra Pound, 214). But, as we have seen, Pound ultimately chose the “unrealised utopia” of fascist Italy, leaving Eliot to champion the feudal order. Pound’s disastrous choices demonstrate that a sensible strategy of selection is no guarantee that one will make wise choices, and Pound did not. Confucian political, social, and ethical thought may be admirable in itself, but the Confucian emphasis on the central, quasi-mystical role of the emperor was designed to guarantee stability and continuity, and is therefore ill-suited to the dynamic nature that has marked European culture and society since the Renaissance. Confucianism encouraged a simple-minded dualism of the virtuous and the malignant to which Pound was temperamentally predisposed, and which the social and political thought of both communism and fascism/nazism encouraged. That way lay disaster, and Pound went that way. Pound’s politics of “us against them” fit the post-war confrontation of “Democracy” and “Communism” much better than Eliot’s vision of peasant, squire, and priest living contentedly in harmony with the seasons. But Pound chose the wrong “us” and the wrong “them.” Both Pound and Eliot found themselves to be “deadenders” in the Cold War period. Eliot prudently stopped lecturing the public on political and cultural matters, and Pound was out of circulation in St. Elizabeths. Eliot has not escaped condemnation for his retrograde views, but his post-war career – indeed his entire career – was much more successful than Pound’s. Although Pound maintained his allegiance to fascism while at St. Elizabeths, and for some time after his return to Italy, he did eventually see the error of his ways and registered his regret on two occasions. The first was a 1963 interview with the Italian journalist Grazia Livi. He told her that he had “arrived at doubt too late.” She pursued the point, asking him, if that great doubt had come to you

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before, how could you have directed your life, your work?” In his answer, Pound renounced his entire political enterprise: “I would have avoided so many mistakes! My intentions were good but I missed the means of attaining them. I was stupid as a telescope looked through from the wrong end. Knowledge came too late. The certainty of knowing nothing came too late” (“Interview with Ezra Pound,” 42). The translator, Jean McClean, doubts the authenticity of the quotation, but I see no reason to doubt it. Indeed, Pound’s assessment of his political activities is in accordance with my own. The other occasion was in a conversation with Michael Reck and Allen Ginsberg in Venice five years later. He shocked his two admirers by asserting: “my poems don’t make sense.” Pound was mostly silent at that time, but he went on to denounce his own work: “My writing. Stupid and ignorant all the way through. Stupid and ignorant.” In response to their remonstrance that his poetry was wonderful, Pound added: “Any good I’ve done has been spoiled by bad intentions – the pre-occupation with irrelevant and stupid things. ... But the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism” (Reck, 27–8). Pound’s “apology” was well received by Reck and Ginsberg, but not by everyone. Pound’s admirers like Jean McClean – not surprisingly – are loath to accept Pound’s dismissal of so much of his work. And Pound’s detractors – equally unsurprisingly – are unwilling to accept such a late apology as sufficient recompense for Pound’s long-standing identification with Italian fascism and sympathy for German nazism – even its virulent anti-Semitism. Pound’s admission of error is better than persistence in error, but it certainly came much too late. One would like to know what prompted Pound’s change of heart, given that he persisted in his identification with the Axis nations throughout his time at St. Elizabeths. One can only speculate that his removal from the paranoid hangers-on that peopled his afternoons on the lawn at St. Elizabeths permitted him to see that the victors in the war were not as evil as he and his hangers-on imagined them to be. Lewis’s reputation was never as great as that of either of his friends. His literary and painterly achievements have never been granted the prominence enjoyed by the literary achievements of Eliot and Pound. Although Eliot – and Pound more so – have their

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influential detractors in the academy, their place in the canon remains firm, if diminished. Lewis’s political affiliations were less fixed that either Eliot’s or Pound’s, but his political views were nonetheless those of a dead-ender. His commitment to a quixotic polemic against philosophical relativism, and virtually the whole of modern science which underpins it, was amateurish, though heartfelt. But, as with Pound, it led him into dangerous and reprehensible enthusiasms. He had the good sense finally to drop all of that, but in so doing he was obliged to discard the core of his opposition to modernity. That said, Lewis’s involvement in ideological polemics was motivated as much by his horror of the senseless slaughter of modern warfare as it was by his dread of the levelling of popular democracy. Both concerns are prominent in the early work, The Art of Being Ruled, where he “showed, that these democratic masses could be governed without a hitch by suggestion and hypnotism – Press, Wireless, Cinema. So what need is there, that was my humane contention, to slaughter them?” (Time and Western Man, 120). And his sympathetic response to the suffering of the Jews of Warsaw is testimony to a moral compass that was evidently superior to that of his two friends. As an unreconstructed Pollyanna, Pound, alone of the three, maintained his social and cultural views from the first decades of the century well into the Cold War period. Those views were often wrong-headed, and never coherent, but Pound’s career represents a quixotic effort to formulate the Modern Age. As he said of himself in the 1962 Paris Review interview, “I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being ‘crucified for an idea’ – the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated – it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever other cultures, in whatever universality” (Plimpton, 57). In this respect Pound stands aside from his friends who wanted to preserve European culture as a pure strain – though they disagreed about just what that pure strain was. For Lewis it must exclude the “oriental” relativism he saw infecting European absolutism. For Eliot it was the purity of a society in which belief and knowledge were “integrated” – as they had been in the medieval period. But Pound’s project was to create a hybrid culture combining Western science and economics with Confucian ethics and

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political structure. Of course, Pound was woefully inadequate to the task of concocting a new hybrid culture and civilization – as even the most able would have been. The fact that he set out on such a quixotic task supports the diagnosis of egomania by the government psychiatrists who found him unfit to stand trial. None of these men, in my view, can be seen as reliable guides to toward a new social and political accommodation suitable to the unprecedented social, economic, and technological conditions of the twentieth century. That they felt qualified to offer themselves as such places them among the Romantic artist-geniuses who also believed they saw more, and with greater clarity, than ordinary mortals. To the Romantic hubris they added a Victorian conviction that they could offer moral and ideological guidance to their readers. Their dismissal of their Romantic and Victorian forebears was largely on grounds that the Victorians at least would have understood – essentially the historicist claim that new times require new ideas. Their self-perception as men qualified to show the way to others stands as a cautionary tale for those who persist in the Romantic view that artists somehow possess a wisdom denied to scientists, philosophers, scholars, clerics, entrepreneurs, engineers, lawyers, and the ordinary men and women in the street. As Pound put it: “The artist, the maker is always too far ahead of any revolution, or reaction, or counter-revolution or counter-reaction for his vote to have an immediate result; and no party programme ever contains enough of his programme to give him the least satisfaction” (“The State,” Selected Prose, 215). And in Jefferson and/or Mussolini he had claimed that Mussolini was himself an artist: “Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions” (34). In The Hitler Cult, Lewis’s palinode for having published Hitler, Lewis in his turn compared the tyrant to the artist, but less flatteringly: “The genus ‘artist’ is volatile, nervous, prone to emotional excesses.” Lewis goes on to demean politicians for being just as devoid of training and intelligence as the artist: “politics and art have much in common. Both are occupations that demand very little intelligence and no training to speak of; both are a refuge for people who could shine in no other walk of life – for human throwouts in short” (The Hitler Cult, 78, 75). Readers of Apes of God,

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Lewis’s satirical portrait of the interwar London artistic and literary scene, will recognize the satirist in these remarks. In that work his target was the London artistic circles, among them Bloomsbury, which cautiously welcomed Eliot, but neither Lewis nor Pound: “It is even possible that the English were the first in the field with the Ape art-type. The notorious amateurism of the anglo-saxon mind makes this doubly likely. In Bloomsbury it takes the form of a select and snobbish club. Its foundation-members consisted of monied middleclass descendants of victorian literary splendour ... In their discouragement of too much unconservative originality they are very strong. The tone of ‘society’ (of a spurious donnish social elegance) prevails among them. Where they have always differed has been in their all without exception being Apes of God” (Apes of God, 131–2). Hitler (1931) was written just after Lewis completed Apes of God (1924–30), and represented an advance over that satirical work only to the extent that he now ridiculed all artists, not just Bloomsbury, and added politicians. However, it was not the artist Lewis disdained so much as the average man, the Mass, the consumer. And he stuck to that disdain, repeating it in Rude Assignment: “in a mixed society, the sciences and the arts have to be protected against Caliban; against Matthew Arnold’s Philistine, Flaubert’s Bourgeois, or Swift’s Yahoo. Or rather to protect them adequately is an impossible task; the sciences are misdirected and misused, the Arts scorned – debased, diluted, vulgarised, brought to the level of an unintelligent pastime. Bitter impatience with the philistine or the bourgeois it is natural to experience; but that is an emotion very different in origin from a snobbish disdain. That is a distinction upon which I continue to insist” (203–4). Not all his readers have been willing to grant Lewis this subtle distinction. No doubt Lewis, Pound, and Eliot would have been wiser if they had been content to articulate the human experience for the rest of us who have had the experiences but missed the meaning. Indeed, that was pretty much the way they originally perceived their roles when young men. It was their misfortune that they lived through a period of violent upheavals that they could not hope to influence and could not understand – who could? The Cassandras – Eliot and Lewis – feared the upheavals; Pound, the Pollyanna – welcomed them, but understood them no better than his friends.

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Those upheavals distracted them from the core function of the artist – which I take to be to bear witness to the human condition – and led them to enter the lists of men of action, in ill-found hopes of influencing the future. They achieved little or nothing in that respect and almost certainly damaged the legacy of their achieved work. Nonetheless, it seems to me that their engagement in political debate was well intentioned: none of them, not even Pound, stood to gain personally from the political posture they adopted – quite the contrary. The champions of my three modernists would claim of them – collectively or severally – a clear-sighted recognition of the dangers confronting their culture and society. I have no claim for the perspicacity of their critiques of cultural and social trends in their troubled period. Although I have refrained from condemning them for their errors and ethical failures, I have not attempted to disguise or excuse them. I have attempted to articulate their analysis of cultural and social trends in such a way as to blunt accusations of malign intentions on their part. All three participated in the notuncommon prejudice against Jews that considered them to be an indigestible alien presence in the erstwhile Christian nations of Europe and America, but Pound was the only one to endorse the institutional anti-Semitism of the Nazis and later the fascists. Even Pound did not go so far as to approve the “final solution;” but he did denounce it very late in life. Lewis fled England for Canada, the land of his birth, on the advent of war in fear that his championing of Hitler would lead to his internment – as happened to Oswald Mosley. But he wrote nothing against the Allied cause during the war. And he renounced his endorsement of Hitler in The Hitler Cult. For his part, Eliot never flirted with fascism or nazism, and never wavered in his loyalty to Britain. He remained in London, and served as a fire warden during the Blitz. Pound, alone, threw in his lot with the Axis powers during the war. Prior to Pearl Harbour, there was nothing treasonous in his behaviour. He saw himself as condemning war, convinced, as he was, that Britain and France had fomented the conflict. His Italian residence, which exposed him to fascist propaganda, no doubt made that delusion possible. But he had access to French and British journals, which he peppered with letters to the editor deploring their economic and foreign affairs policies right

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up to the outbreak of hostilities. His hostility to the Allies was primarily motivated by his conviction that they were acting in the interest of international finance – dominated, he believed, by Jews. As I indicate in the Appendix, Pound was not alone among self-perceived loyal Americans in holding such views. Both Eliot and Pound tried to imagine a better world than the flawed one in which they found themselves. In this respect they belong in the “society” of Utopian dreamers that includes William Blake, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Morris – to mention only their literary forbears. History has been justifiably kinder to most of them, than to Pound at least, but Blake’s singing the glories of the American revolution did little to endear him to his countrymen, and Wordsworth’s youthful championing of the French Revolution would have put him beyond the toleration of his contemporaries had he not withheld it in youth, and withdrawn it in middle age. Lewis was not a Utopian, not a Pollyanna, but rather an unrepentant Cassandra whose darkest fears came to fruition in the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. He was the only one of the three to look frankly on the face of evil and to recognize it for what it was – even though he was initially seduced by its protective colouring. That he was also the only British-raised of the three – though all were born in North America – may, perhaps, account in part for his greater scepticism. More likely though, what distinguished Lewis from the other two – apart from matters of personality – was his experience of combat in World War I.

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Anyone who looks at the state of political opinion in the democracies in the 1930s will know that Pound, Eliot, and Lewis were not alone among self-described “loyal” citizens of the democracies in their distrust of capitalist democracy. Dissatisfied with the failure of capitalist democracies to deliver either peace or prosperity, many turned toward one or another variety of tyranny as a remedy. Nor was Pound alone as a citizen of a democracy who became a radio propagandist for the Axis powers. The Irish-American William Joyce, broadcasting from Hamburg as “Lord Haw Haw” during the war, was convicted of treason and executed by the British after the war, despite the fact that he was not a subject of his Majesty, King George VII. Also charged with treason was Iva Togari D’Aquino, a Japanese American, and one of several women who broadcast in English from Tokyo, collectively called “Tokyo Rose.” Unlike Pound, she was convicted (in 1949), sentenced to ten years, which she served. President Ford pardoned her in 1977, among more prominent malefactors. But there is little analogy between William Joyce and Ms D’Aquino, on the one hand, and Pound on the other, for the former were anonymous individuals chosen for their linguistic skills and largely motivated by pecuniary needs. Pound, in contrast, broadcast in his own person as a literary celebrity, and was largely motivated by his political convictions. Noel Stock notes that Pound lobbied for two years to get access to a microphone in order to promulgate his political and economic views, but he acknowledges that Pound, like William Joyce and Ms D’Aquino, also needed the money he was paid for the broadcasts (Stock 390–1).

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Another American Fascist sympathizer who was motivated by his political convictions is the mostly forgotten black American, Lawrence Dennis. Dennis never had access to a broadcast studio, but he was a vigorous print propagandist for the virtues of tyranny, and the exposure of the bankrupt state of capitalist democracies. He was a little younger than the artists we have been examining, having been born on Christmas day 1893 in Atlanta, Georgia to a woman of mixed African and Amerindian ancestry and a father of mixed French and Amerindian ancestry. Although he had rather kinky hair, he kept it short and was sufficiently pale of skin to pass as white – which he did for almost all his adult life (Horne 18 et seq). That he “passed” so successfully as an adult is all the more remarkable in that he had an early career as a black child evangelist. A heading in the 9 January 1899 New York Times read, “Negro Child’s Preaching; Crowds at Mount Olivet Church to Hear Lawrence Dennis.” He toured the usa and even travelled to Europe as a child preacher in 1904. After obtaining a scholarship to the Phillips Exeter Academy, Dennis put his career as a black child preacher behind him, even cutting off relations with his family. He entered Harvard as a white student, interrupting his studies to serve in France in 1917 as an infantry lieutenant. He remained in Europe for some time after the war before returning to Harvard, graduating in 1920. He entered the U.S. diplomatic service and served as chargé d’affaires in Haiti, Romania, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Unlike Lewis, who was radicalized by his wartime experience in the army, Dennis seems not to have been much affected by his brief military service. It was his experience of American economic colonialism during a 1926 Nicaraguan revolution that radicalized him. He resigned from the diplomatic service shortly after his Nicaraguan assignment – in 1927 (Stimely). He then took up a career as a journalist. He had the good fortune to have published several articles critical of the excesses of Wall Street in the Leftist journal the New Republic just before the crash of 1929. Those articles launched Dennis’s reputation as an economic and political commentator. Unlike Pound, Dennis did not identify himself with either the Left or the Right, melding the two as equivalent opponents of democratic capitalism – much as Lewis did (although Lewis ultimately abandoned communism).

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However, it was his support of fascism/nazism that got Dennis into trouble. His role as associate editor of the fortnightly journal The Awakening, which was “issued in New York by an American fascist group” backed by Mussolini (Horne 47) did not help. Throughout his considerable polemical writing, Dennis promoted fascism/nazism and communism as equally viable alternatives to democratic capitalism. As with Eliot and Lewis, the principal issue for him was the dysfunctional state of democratic capitalism. His 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism, exhibits a tolerance for virtually any sort of critique of the status quo in the democracies. He endorses Fascist, Communist, and even Catholic critics (no doubt he had Father Coughlin in mind): “Broadly generalizing, one may say that, in modern Christendom, only reformers thinking in the framework of the Roman Catholic faith, and the various schools of modern fascist and communist thought, have consistently and seriously attempted to work out social solutions in terms of an all-embracing social synthesis” (chapter I). Like Pound, Dennis admired Huey Long and Father Coughlin. He even visited Long in Baton Rouge, and boasted that Long read his publications (Horne 51). Cementing his identification as a Fascist sympathizer, Dennis defended fascism in a broadcast debate held in the Manhattan Town Hall on 30 May 1945 in which the merits of socialism, capitalism, communism, and fascism were debated. As Horne reports: “In his rebuttal, Dennis did not retreat. ‘I consider Senator Long, Father Coughlin ... and other champions of the discontent of the people as precursors of fascism ... I salute Senator Long, Father Coughlin and a great many other honest leaders ... I don’t agree with their particular views entirely,’ he said, leaving himself a narrow escape route, but ‘[they] deserve to be heard and will be heard’” (Horne 54). Thus, despite a radically different background – racially, socially, and professionally – Lawrence Dennis adopted a political posture very similar to those adopted by our trio of European based artists. Politically, he is closest to Pound in that he persisted in his support of the Axis powers even after Pearl Harbour. And, like Pound, he was punished for that behaviour, being indicted for sedition – not treason, as was the charge against Pound – on 25 July 1942. He was one of thirty accused, amongst whom was William Dudley Pelley. Pelley is of marginal interest in our story since he was the founder

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of the Fascist organization the Silvershirts and editor of the journal Liberation, a copy of which Louis Zukofsky had sent Pound in 1934. Pelley’s article in that issue, “The Mystery of the Civil War and Lincoln’s Death,” triggered Pound’s belief in a Jewish conspiracy – as I demonstrated in Pound and Purgatory (252–5). However, Dennis had no association with Pelley or the Silvershirts, and, unlike Pelley and Pound, was not a believer in a Jewish plot to control the world. Pelley, prior to his indictment for sedition with Dennis, had already been convicted of the same charge and sentenced to fifteen years. Another of the accused, George Sylvester Viereck, had also been convicted previously and sentenced “for failure to register as a German agent.” And a third of the co-accused, Gerhard W. Kunze, had been convicted and sentenced to fifteen years. In A Trial on Trial, an account of the trial published in 1946, co-written by Maximilian St. George (one of the defence lawyers) and Dennis, the authors claim that the inclusion of individuals already convicted of sedition was a ploy to tar the others by association (St. George and Dennis 73). Their defence was that Dennis, at least, was guilty of no offence and that the charge of sedition was so vague as to be impossible of proof. We will never know if their arguments would have prevailed because the presiding judge, Chief Justice Edward C. Eicher, died in his sleep on 30 November 1944, forcing a mistrial. However, the authorities never sought to re-indict (St. George and Dennis 43). The highly charged nature of ideological opinion at the time is illustrated by the career of Hermann Rauschning, the star witness called to the stand by the chief prosecutor, John Rogge. Rauschning was a former Nazi leader in Danzig who, renouncing nazism, fled to the United States and published Conversations with Hitler in 1940 (entitled The Voice of Destruction in the United States). It was an account of private conversations Rauschning allegedly had with Hitler between 1932 and 1934. Rogge called him as a witness because of his intimate knowledge of Nazi ideology. Rauschning’s career demonstrates the opportunism in the behaviour of so many individuals in the convoluted political world of the thirties and forties. Although Rauschning’s Conversations with Hitler was entered as evidence at the Nuremberg trials, as well as in Dennis’ sedition trial, it was later revealed by the Swiss historian

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Wolfgang Hänel in The Journal of Historical Review 4 (Fall 1983), that the book was a hoax. Hänel discovered that it had been commissioned by New York and London publishers as a propaganda weapon – although it is not clear that the publishers knew Rauschning fabricated the conversations with Hitler from various published statements plus some pure inventions. Despite the book’s fraudulent nature, “Virtually every major biography of Adolf Hitler or history of the Third Reich,” Mark Weber observes, “quotes from the memoir of Hermann Rauschning” (Weber, 1983) and it is still frequently invoked by various fringe groups as evidence of Hitler’s evil or prescience – depending of the bias of the individual citing it – as a cursory search of the Web will reveal. Rauschning’s story should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone confident that it is easy to separate the angels from the devils in the political landscape of the thirties. I do not mean to deny that the Nazi regime was evil, but I do mean to remind my readers that the communist regime of Stalin – one of the Allies – was only marginally less evil. In addition, we need to admit that in the heat of the conflict the democracies behaved in ways that were not always admirable. The dispossession and internment of individuals of Japanese descent in the United States and Canada is only the most egregious domestic injustice. German and Italian nationals in the Allied nations were also interned, and some dispossessed. None, however, were brutalized or executed merely for being Japanese, German, or Italian as were Jews, Gypsies, and Poles in Nazi-occupied Europe. While the oppression was mild in Britain, Canada, and the United States as compared to Germany, the Soviet Union, or Italy, it was nonetheless oppression. Unfortunately for Rogge, Rauschning did not corroborate the prosecution’s theory that Dennis’s writings expressed Nazi ideology. St. George and Dennis cite the following demurral by Rauschning (139. My emphasis): Yes, he says, even if I am not quite right, he uses the words, the American brand, or something like this, of National Socialism exactly this National Socialism of Germany, but to put it in contrast to International socialism. But as a whole, this book gave me the impression that we are on the threshold of the decline of Western civilization and that the old principles of our order are outmoded. Now if

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I may say, objectively, that the real thesis of this book is working in the line of National Socialism in the propaganda of Hitler. Out of the book alone one cannot say that the author is making National Socialist propaganda but definitely he is anti-democratic. He is more for a new order. I have italicized two sentences of his testimony because, in my judgment, they represent a fair and judicious description of Dennis’ political posture. Like Pound, Lewis, and Eliot, Dennis was distinctly anti-democratic, and looked forward to a new political order, but he was motivated primarily by his conviction that democratic capitalism was dysfunctional rather than by a particular fondness for the policies of Stalin, Mussolini, or Hitler. He was closer to Eliot and Lewis than to Pound, for Pound did persuade himself that Mussolini was pursuing wise and benevolent policies. As we will see, it was a dictatorial or oligarchic order that Dennis hoped to see established in the United States. He saw Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Soviet Union as versions of a new political order – seriously flawed but nonetheless preferable to the status quo of the capitalist democracies. He regarded all of them as unavoidable transitional stages between democratic capitalism and a very imperfectly articulated benevolent meritocracy. And, like Pound, Dennis reminded his readers repeatedly that an American fascism need not be bellicose and tyrannical like the European versions. For example in The Dynamics of War and Revolution (1940), he describes the desired polity in terms that Pound would have found compatible with Social Credit emphasis on technological imperatives: The new revolution everywhere stands for redistribution and reorganization in line with the technological imperatives of the machine age. The cause of the Allies is that of counter-revolution. It upholds the status quo and opposes redistribution according to the indications of need, capacity for efficient utilization of resources and social convenience. It seeks to reverse in Europe the dominant trends, technological and political, of the past century and, more particularly, of the past two or three decades. The democracies have displayed their inability to utilize their resources in a way to end unemployment. But they

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now propose a crusade in the name of moral absolutes to prevent worldwide redistribution of raw materials and economic opportunities. The real issue before America may be stated as being one of achieving redistribution at home or fighting it abroad. (Dynamics, 216, my emphasis) I have argued that Pound, Lewis, and Eliot were motivated by three leading anxieties – though not in the same degree for each of them. Those anxieties were 1) a distaste for, and fear of, popular democracy; 2) a conviction that capitalism was incapable of delivering prosperity for all; and 3) a belief that popular democracy and capitalism together promoted wars. We have already surveyed those motives for Pound, Eliot, and Lewis in some detail. The objective of the discussion of Dennis is to discover the degree to which his concerns and remedies coincide with theirs. Such a comparison is of interest simply because Dennis’s background, education, and life experience is so very different from the three European-based artists. He is considerably younger, is a black American living in the United States, and a former diplomat with first-hand experience of American imperialist behaviour in Central America. As the citation above indicates, Dennis’s concerns were very similar to those of Pound, Lewis, and Eliot. He distrusted popular democracy, was convinced that capitalism could not deliver prosperity for all, and believed that war was an inevitable consequence of the economic imperatives of capitalism. However, Dennis was more forthright – one might even say more clear-headed – than even Lewis, the most capable political observer of the three artists. Dennis’ clear-headedness, however, was his greatest weakness as a propagandist. For example, in the preface to his study The Dynamics of War and Revolution: A Study of the Hidden Economic Origins of Conflict, published shortly before Pearl Harbour, he equates German concentration camps with unemployment in the United States: “The Nazis cannot say that concentration camps are alien to their system and Americans cannot say that chronic unemployment is alien to our system. Facts are normative” (xxviii). Although Nazi concentration camps were not yet death camps in 1940, such a comparison could not have gained him many converts amongst his American audience.

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As already noted, unlike Pound, Lewis, and Eliot, Dennis saw no great difference between fascism and communism: “In the theory of this book communism (Russian style), fascism, and Nazism are merely different national variants of socialism.” And he saw all three as characterized by a combination of “many of the features of capitalism, laissez-faire and the free market with socialism, state capitalism and planning” (Dynamics, xxx). In short, Dennis perceived the regimes in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union as essentially the sort of mixed economy that Britain and France became after 1945, taking the full name of the Nazi party (“National Socialism”) seriously. Dennis overlooked the belligerence of the Italian, German, and Soviet regimes toward their neighbours, and the brutality of all three regimes toward their own citizens – features not characteristic of post-war Britain and France – but he did not overlook the eager seizure of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire by the French and British in 1919, nor, of course, the preexisting colonies of Britain and France in Asia. In short, he was selective in his condemnations. The only difference Dennis sees between fascism and Nazism on the one hand and communism on the other is their “manner of coming into operation. A vital element of the Fascist and Nazi way of coming to power was the taking of the big businessmen and middle classes into the socialist camp without resistance and, even, with enthusiasm on their part for a revolutionary movement which they lacked the social intelligence to understand” (Dynamics, xxxi). But most important for Dennis was his agreement with the critique of democratic capitalism mounted by the Fascists and Nazis: “Hitler’s revolutionary genius has consisted in understanding since the war [that is, World War I], as no liberal democratic leaders anywhere have understood, that capitalism is doomed, and in having always a will to do concrete things about it. Given an understanding of the situation and a will to action, plans and their execution follow as matters of course. Whatever else it may be, the result is action which is the only cure for stagnation” (Dynamics, xxv). Like Pound, Eliot, and Lewis, then, Dennis was motivated more by the shared perception that capitalist democracy has failed than by the particular ideological features of communism, fascism, or Nazism. As a consequence, he largely neglects the negative aspects of the European fascist and communist regimes. His argument is essen-

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tially that the democracies were no better – were just as belligerent, and just as careless of the welfare of their citizens. And he points out – with some justice – that the history of such democracies as Britain, France, and the United States is one of conquest and exploitation: “The liberal ideologist would have us believe that the new revolution of socialism is an orgy of blood and anarchy bursting upon the idyll of democratic peace, traditionalism and stability. The tradition of democracy is revolution; its essence, change and expansion; its characteristic incidents, territorial aggrandisement and easy wars” (Dynamics, 14). He points out, with more acumen than any of our artists, that the spread of commercialism and industrialism by Britain in the nineteenth century was itself a world revolution, and further claims that it is analogous to the revolution being preached severally by the Communists, Fascists, and Nazis. The earlier revolution, he says, “was imposed by coercion with the aid of a [British] world monopoly of sea power, maritime shipping, banking and industry” (15). Dennis believed that war is the inevitable consequence of industrial capitalism because war was the only means industrial capitalism has of maintaining its plants at full capacity so as to maintain full employment (Dynamics, 17). As we have seen, these arguments were familiar ones amongst pre-World War I analysts of European industrial nations such as Hobson, Brailsford, and Angell, and were echoed by Major Douglas. But Dennis does not cite any of these British writers. The writers he identified are American and continental rather than British: Frederick Jackson Turner, Vilfredo Pareto, Oswald Spengler, and Thorstein Veblen. Obvious omissions are Marx and Engels. Dennis noted that Communists, Socialists, Fascists and Nazis shared a critique of democratic capitalism as oppressive, exploitative, and dysfunctional, and that they invoked that assessment as justification for their “revolutions.” What he does not note is that the remedies brought to the table were very different for each of them – even though he was certainly not ignorant of that fact. Dennis was far too cynical for his own good, being willing to see Hitler’s ideological posture as mere political manoeuvering: “The anticommunist line got the capitalists, the anti-Versailles line got the army and the nationalists, the anti-Semitic line got the masses as well as the classes while, at the same time, sugar-coating the initial

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ill of anti-capitalism” (Dynamics, xxxiv). Dennis’s assessment of Hitler as a canny, unprincipled politician, rather than as the obsessive, power hungry, and homicidal racist that he was, is an error difficult to overlook or forgive. However, we must admit that Dennis’s assessment of Hitler was not as egregious – nor particularly uncommon, even in 1940 – as it would be in 1943 and later. Dennis’s assessment of Hitler is very similar to Lewis’s in 1930, but which he abandoned in the 1939 Hitler Cult. What Dennis said of Hitler is probably true of Mussolini and Huey Long – both of whom were admired by Dennis. Dennis apparently believed that these selfishly motivated politicians could nonetheless serve the public interest – on the dubious grounds that they could lead their citizens only where most of them wished to go in any case. Dennis’s rule that the enemy of his enemy is his friend explains his promiscuous approval of a range of mutually hostile ideologies and regimes. For example, where Pound – after an initial brief honeymoon – fulminated against the Roosevelt administration in his polemical writings and broadcasts, Dennis praised Roosevelt for advancing the economic and political revolution he (Dennis) desired, comparing him favourably to Hitler and Stalin: “President Roosevelt has driven more nails into the coffin of economic freedom in America than Hitler and Stalin. He has laid the institutional and bureaucratic foundations of the new revolution in America. Yet he may lead America into war against the new revolution in Europe which has gone a little further than he has yet had time or need to go in this country” (Dynamics, 174). In this respect, he is in agreement with the more virulent Republican attacks of the day on the Roosevelt administration as fundamentally socialist. Of course Dennis disapproves of the “economic freedom” Roosevelt’s opponents wished to preserve, regarding it as freedom to enslave and impoverish the majority of mankind. But both Dennis and the radical Republicans wanted the United States to stay out of the war. It is worth another citation to demonstrate Dennis’s views on the question of economic freedom, and at the same time his reckless rhetorical strategy of attacking on several fronts at once. (The advocates of free love, of course, are the American Communists): I have no hesitation or reservations whatsoever in declaring categorically that I personally find the ethics of economic freedom

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and individualism, as applied in today’s America, as despicable and intolerable as the ethics of free love. I make this statement forcefully because I am aware that my views and the way of totalitarian collective discipline are now being denounced generally in this land on supposedly high moral grounds. (Dynamics, 179) Fortunately, his critics were unaware at that date that Dennis was vigorously promiscuous (heterosexually), a behaviour that would have exposed him to an ad hominem response. Like Pound, Dennis’s political posture is motivated principally by his belief that technological developments had made it possible to achieve universal prosperity, and his belief that it was the nature of capitalism to co-opt the increased wealth it created for the few, denying the masses the prosperity now available to them as a result of technological developments. Both men concluded that the failure of capitalist democracies to deliver prosperity rendered political revolution necessary. As we have seen Dennis regarded the “cause of the Allies” to be one of “counter-revolution.” Although a more cogent, lucid, and concise statement of the issue than anything Pound – or even Lewis – ever wrote, Dennis’s assessment is essentially the same as theirs. Eliot was more concerned with cultural and religious issues than his friends, or Dennis, but Eliot would not have disagreed with the economic assessment on which Dennis based his political affinities. Where Dennis differs significantly is in his apparent belief that Nazism/fascism or communism promised “world-wide redistribution of raw materials and economic opportunities.” So far as I have been able to discover, neither Eliot nor Lewis took note of Dennis, but Pound did comment on him in his radio broadcast of 22 August (Ycal Box 130 of an uncertain year, possibly 1944). Pound began by comparing Dennis – somewhat ambivalently – to Brooks Adams: “Lawrence Dennis is not yet a Brooks Adams/ at least I don’t think so.” Pound was responding to a Dennis article that appeared in the spring issue of the Examiner. I have not found the article, but, judging from Pound’s remarks, Dennis is pushing pretty much the argument I have outlined above. Predictably, Pound complains that Dennis has not got “down to the natr/ of money.” In addition, he is disappointed that Dennis

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“does not keep hammerin on simple elements of the problem/ such as the great betrayal of the U.S. by Ikleheimer and Sherman/ in the 1860s” (Pound’s emphasis). This last remark is a reference to the infamous (and non-factual) intervention of European bankers in the American Civil War, which Pound found in Willis A. Overholser’s, A Short Review of the History of Money in the United States. (See my Pound in Purgatory for details of Pound’s reading of Overholser.) Some of his dissatisfaction with Dennis derives from Pound’s poor grasp of economic discourse. For example, after summarizing Dennis’s criticism of the disastrous policy of the Bank of England in its intervention in support of the pound sterling in the late twenties, which caused a collapse of British exports, Pound complained that Dennis did not explain what he means by “intervention.” Pound muses that he might mean “intervention in Europe and Asia/ which countries the interventioners know very little about.” Clearly Pound supposes that Dennis is speaking of some sort or military – or perhaps commercial – action external to Britain, when Dennis is using the term, “intervention,” in the standard way of economists to mean the efforts of a central bank to support its currency by buying it on the open market. After registering this uncomprehending complaint, Pound moves toward a conclusion of his assessment of Dennis by appealing to an opaque analogy, rejecting Dennis’s support of the New Deal and his praise of Fascists and Nazis: We see so many people tinkerin trying gadgets borrowed from fascism. Without any motor/trying to have a corporate movement/ or taking over spare parts of Italian and German mechanisms without any motor and engine; cant make an automobile out of gear shifts and stearin [sic] wheels/ which is what Rosefield [Roosevelt] and his brain rusters [trusters] tried to do. The “Brain Trust” was a group of American businessmen whom Roosevelt brought in to his administration. Also called “Dollar-AYear Men” because they were paid only that token amount. Pound’s point – such as it is – is that Roosevelt’s New Deal was insufficiently radical in its policies. Since he speaks of a “corporate movement,” he presumably faulted the New Deal because it was not cor-

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poratist, as Mussolini’s fascism purported to be. (Mussolini’s corporatism was derived from George Sorel’s syndicalism, which envisaged a political system based on industrial and craft unions, or syndics. However, Mussolini’s corporatism amounted to the government taking over unions and dictating terms advantageous to employers.) Pound – who knew nothing of industry or trade – never understood how corporatism worked in Italy. In point of fact, the Roosevelt administration did introduce legislation making it easier for workers to organize and negotiate better terms with their employers, but Pound was oblivious to all such details, focussing as he did on the “big picture.” As we have seen, Pound’s radicalization was prompted by contact with the monetary theories of Major Douglas, which revealed to him that the banking industry was based on a species of fraud, and eventually led him to the belief that the banks were allied in an unholy international conspiracy to maintain their power, influence, and outrageous profits. While Dennis knew nothing about Douglas’s Social Credit theories, he, too, saw capitalism as confiscatory and oppressive, and looked forward to the new order following the collapse of the power of money: “The old revolution of capitalism was revolt for economic freedom. The new revolution of socialism is a revolt against economic freedom. The old revolution was a revolt for power for money. The new revolution is a revolt against the power of money” (Dynamics, 163). Dennis’ assessment of the power and behaviour of the “money power” is very like that which Pound attributed to a conspiracy he called “usurocracy,” but Dennis does not succumb to the easy explanation of a conspiracy. More analytical than Pound, and more competent on economics than Lewis or Eliot, Dennis sees the problem as structural and ideological, rather than simply ethical: The money power can make millions jobless and destitute without once firing a single shot or emitting an audible sound or explanation of what it is doing. It is, of course, nonsense to try to personify or identify the money power as a given group, clique or individual in Wall Street, Lombard Street or anywhere else. The rare charm of economic freedom is that nobody is ever responsible for anything that happens. No conspiracy can be proved if international capitalists start taking their money out of one

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country, as our Committee of the Nation did in early 1933 ... The responsible capitalists ... neither know nor care what the result will be to which their individual acts contribute. They have the word of Adam Smith and all the pious humbugs rationalizing liberalism, democracy and capitalism ever since that the result can be only for the common good. An invisible hand guides all this. If you do not believe it, you lack faith in democracy and freedom. If it is not true, democracy does not work. (Dynamics, 165, my emphasis) (It is impossible to read this assault on international finance in 2010 without some frisson of fear that it may be an accurate assessment of capitalism.) Believing that faith in Smith’s invisible hand was misplaced, Dennis was convinced that capitalist democracy could not produce economic justice. Whereas Pound, Eliot, and Lewis viewed democratic governments as not true democracies but oligarchies dominated by the leading capitalists in each of the putative democracies, Dennis’s complaint about the democracies was more radical, and more damning. Writing in the midst of the Great Depression, he looked back on the history of the United States and Britain, and found it to be brutally exploitative and hypocritical: American intellectuals like Jefferson could write and talk endlessly about our government’s being founded on consent and law rather than force and violence, having all the while a plantation full of slaves, with armed overseers and manacles, and while fighting the Indians and the French more or less all the time. Thus was born Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy. ....... One of the great secrets of Anglo-Saxon success is the imposition on others of their canons of definition, taste and ethics. According to these canons, anything the Anglo-Saxons do in the furtherance of their interests is, by definition, not a use of force or violence. If they have slaves, theirs is still a government based on consent. When they worked nine year old children in textile mills, it was with the consent of the children whose right to freedom of contract Anglo-Saxon justice respected. (Dynamics 185)

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No doubt Dennis’ focus on slavery, force and hypocrisy was in part a consequence of his being the descendant of slaves. Nonetheless, his assessment of pre-Civil War America contrasts strongly with that of Eliot and Pound, who held up Jeffersonian democracy as a model to be restored. Dennis argued for a meritocratic form of governance, not so different from Eliot’s “clerisy,” in which a select number of wise and benevolent officials would govern the state and direct industry and commerce in a rational and efficient manner: Czarist Russia was a dictatorship of a bureaucracy, exactly like communist Russia, Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Only Czarist Russia attempted to perpetuate the dictatorship of a hereditary bureaucracy, which must always prove impossible. A dictatorship of a bureaucracy, to survive, must provide for the easy access to power of most of the elite. capitalism is a dictatorship of money, impersonal, anonymous and hard to put your finger on because of the ways of money under such a system. To work, it must provide opportunities for a large percentage of the elite to make money and must not perpetuate inherited fortunes too long. ... A non-hereditary bureaucracy is probably the most stable regime possible for human society to achieve. (Dynamics, 187, my emphasis) In these remarks he shows the profound influence of Vilfredo Pareto on his political thought. Pareto believed the democratic forms of government would always be co-opted by the wealthy and powerful. It was this belief that led Pareto to welcome the rise of fascism in Italy in his old age. Since he died in 1923, Pareto did not live to see the excesses of Mussolini’s regime. That Dennis was willing to accept Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany as way-stations on the road to a bureaucratic utopia bespeaks either a disregard for human dignity and liberty or a wilful blindness to the true nature of those regimes. The latter was clearly the case for Pound, but Dennis seems to have had few illusions about the oppressive nature of the European Communist and Fascist regimes. Instead of denying the “human rights abuses” of the Communists, Fascists, and Nazis, he equated them with the abuses of his own country: “it is

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good form in America to be indignant over the frustrations of European minorities and to ignore or deny the frustrations of the American unemployed or farm minorities. We cannot tolerate in Europe oppression of minorities but we have never been without it in America from the day the first African slave was landed and the first Indian aborigine was murdered for his land by the white man” (Dynamics, 214). It is clear from this brief summary of Dennis’s views that his radicalism, like that of Pound, Eliot, and Lewis, was motivated by the perception that democratic capitalist nations were incapable of securing prosperity and a just distribution of wealth within their boundaries. In addition those regimes were seen to be structurally disposed to foreign conquest and exploitation in order to secure markets for the industrial output that could not be consumed internally because of the mal-distribution of wealth. In short the motives of all four men were altruistic – albeit based on an analysis of the political forces of their day that was blind to the malignity of the regimes challenging democratic capitalism. In their defence it must be admitted that the imperfections of democratic capitalism which motivated their hostility were not – and are not – imaginary. However, the alternatives they championed were certainly more seriously flawed than is democratic capitalism.

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Notes

introduction 1 Forster’s novel Howard’s End, written between 1908 and 1910, reflects the class anxiety that the educated elite felt in those years. One of his lowerclass characters, Leonard Bast, is befriended by the upper-middle-class Schlegels who attempt to “improve” him – with disastrous results. The novel also reflects a Tolkienish nostalgia for an earlier England dominated by the rural squirarchy that Eliot absorbed so completely. 2 Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s recent study, Empire, attempts to salvage the Marxist dream of the withering away of the state by postulating a post-national condition, which they call “empire,” a global condition in which there are no longer any competing states, but only a “multitude” which has no need of state institutions. 3 If there were anything to choose between fascism/nazism and Communism on this point, probably the edge would go to the Communists. Although the Stalinist Soviet Union strictly regulated cultural products, there was no incident in the Soviet Union (or in fascist Italy) that had the dramatic force of the burning of books on 10 May 1933 at universities and libraries across Germany. 4 Somewhat ironically, Eliot was keenly aware of the failure of Machiavelli to influence events: “No history could illustrate better than that of the reputation of Machiavelli the triviality and the irrelevance of influence. His message has been falsified by persistent romanticism ever since his death” (“Nicollo Machiavelli” in For Lancelot Andrewes, 48–9). 5 Michael Tratner argues in Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats that Eliot was influenced by Gustav Le Bon’s 1895 book The Crowd

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(translated 1897), which warned of the danger represented by the masses – as were, he claims, George Sorel and Sigmund Freud, among less well known figures (1–2). Tratner cites chapter and verse for Sorel and Freud, but presents no evidence that Eliot ever read or heard of Le Bon’s book. Eliot was only ten years old in 1897 and unlikely to be reading books such as Le Bon’s. Of course, Le Bon’s critique of mass culture no doubt percolated through commentary in the early twentieth century much as, say Derrida’s critique of logocentrism did in the late twentieth. Sigmund Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921; English translation Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922) was explicitly based on a critique of Le Bon’s work. I am unaware of any reference to Le Bon by Eliot – though some of his comments on the crowd are compatible with Le Bon. Lewis does cite Le Bon in The Art of Being Ruled, but not from The Crowd. And Pound never mentions him, so far as I can discover. It is a stretch, I think, to credit Le Bon with formulating the modernists’ cultural analysis as Tratner does: Examining in detail the surprising similarities between modernist literature and contemporary theories of the crowd … upsets many critical commonplaces concerning the character of literary modernism … Modernism was not, then, a rejection of mass culture, but rather an effort to produce a mass culture, perhaps for the first time, to produce a culture distinctive to the twentieth century, which Le Bon called “The Era of the Crowd.” The contest between modernist and realist literary forms was thus not a contest between literature for a coterie and literature for the masses, but rather a contest between different ways of speaking to and from the mass mind, a contest based on different conceptions of how the masses think. (2) 6 Here is what Eisenhower said in 1961: Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State

Notes to pages 15–20

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house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. (Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, 1039) The unfortunate title was an allusion to Gustav Renier’s 1931 book The English, Are They Human? In fact The Jews, Are They Human? is intended as a defence of Jews – though perhaps not in a manner that would please everyone. For more on Pound and Social Credit see my Pound in Purgatory. I probably have to remind my readers that I am using “liberal” in the historical sense of a combination of a focus on individual, as opposed to collective, rights and laissez-faire capitalism, and not in the current American sense of “liberal” indicating social attitudes that tolerate such things as abortion, sexual freedom, atheism, euthanasia, etc. Even though fascism/nazism has retained a presence as a kind of ideological bogey-man to be invoked by the press from time to time, and by gangs of thugs who like to sport Swastikas and leathers, it has not represented a serious political force in any country since 1945. Italy is a possible exception, but even there fascism is a fringe movement, despite the presence of a Mussolini on the ballot in the form of Benito’s granddaughter.

chapter one 1 Although, as we shall see, at least two observers prophesied that the “New World order” (which the victors expected to emerge from the Peace Conference) would be dominated by the United States of America. Both Edward Mower’s This American Century (to which Eliot wrote an

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introduction), and André Siegfried’s America Comes of Age (which he read) predict American world hegemony – although neither is particularly happy about such an outcome. Both were published before the Great Crash of 1929, an event that cast doubt on the inevitability of the triumph of American “civilization,” characterized as “Fordism” by Siegfried. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in the first decade of the twenty-first century we are on the verge of the restoration of European power and prestige and the relative decline of America. The titles of such recent American books as T. R. Reid’s The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (New York: Penguin, 2004) and Jeremy Rifkin’s The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York: Penguin, 2004) proclaim such a view. The recent global economic meltdown, triggered by the practices of American financial institutions, however, reinforces the American economic and financial hegemony. It was first published as a double series in Alfred Orage’s The New Age: “Patria Mia” (5 Sept. 1912–14 Nov. 1912; and “America: Chances and Remedies” (1 May 1913–5 June 1913). It is perhaps not entirely inappropriate to note that, according to the Harvard University Press website, Negri is currently serving time in an Italian prison for terrorist activities. Like Pound he apparently acted on his convictions, and suffered the consequences. Pound, of course, committed no terrorist activities – unless his intemperate radio broadcasts count as such. F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Le Figaro (Paris), 20 Feb. 1909. This is the last of eleven “principles.” In Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 43. I am using “historicist” and “historicism” in Karl Popper’s negative sense as defined in The Poverty of Historicism, meaning “an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns,’ ‘the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history” (3). Popper’s main target is historical determinism. He saw both Communism and fascism as products of historicist assumptions. He divides historicists into two camps: 1. “pro-naturalistic or positive” and 2. “antinaturalistic.” The former favour the application of the method of physics to the social sciences, the latter do not. His most palpable hits are on the positivistic social scientists.

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Of course, Eliot is writing decades before Popper’s articulation of historicism, and therefore does not use the term. But his objections to Spengler are precisely in line with Popper’s arguments. “New Historicism” reverses the negativity of Popper’s critique. It is somewhat different from the classic historicism in that it is not primarily concerned with prediction but rather with exposing the false consciousness of particular historical periods. In that sense it looks back to Dilthey and Schleiermacher more than to Hegel. Michael North in The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound concocts a peculiar version of historicism to buttress his argument that Left and Right converge. According to North it is little more than historical nostalgia. Historicism, he says, “seems committed to the past, to a defence of tradition, or, in the worst case, to a simple reinforcement of the status quo” (11). North makes no mention of Popper. 7 For example, page 177 of This American World: “To Oswald Spengler, one of the greatest thinkers of the modern world, Americanism is merely the last sad phase of the European culture cycle which, having run most of its course, at this point necessarily hardens into materialism, money rule, democracy and the empery of soul-less reason. The only charm of Americanism for him is that it is inevitable.” This assessment of “Americanism” in 1928 – and by an American – is strikingly similar to that of Horkheimer and Adorno twenty years later. 8 I subscribe to Zeev Sternhell’s view on the distinct natures of fascism and nazism, in contradiction of Ernst Nolte’s contrary view. Here is Sternhell on Nolte: “Racism is ... not a necessary condition for the existence of fascism; on the contrary it was a factor in fascist eclecticism. For this reason, a general theory that seeks to combine fascism and Nazism will always come up against this essential aspect of the problem. In fact, such a theory is not possible. Undoubtedly there are similarities, particularly with regard to the “totalitarian” character of the two regimes, but their differences are no less significant. Karl Bracher perceived the singular importance of these differences, which Ernst Nolte (this was his chief weakness) completely ignored” (Sternhell, 5). 9 In the case of Japan the cultural exchange went mostly the other way. Japanese culture was virtually destroyed by the incursion of Western values and practices. Some few Americans did try to preserve elements of Japanese culture, notably Lafcadio Hearne and Ernest Fenollosa (whose influence on Pound will be discussed later), but for the most part Japanese influence in our period was confined to America and, so far as litera-

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ture is concerned – peaked in the forties. So far as Europe is concerned, the exotic influences were primarily Polynesian and African, and had the most impact on painting – particularly on Gauguin and Picasso. Apparently Eliot read it, or at least knew of Nordau’s argument, for Manu Jain reports that during his Harvard graduate year (1913–14) Eliot copied in his notebooks “Max Nordau’s view that mysticism is a characteristic of degeneration”(T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 172). Understandably, Eliot scholars have not paid a lot of attention to Nordau, but Louis Menand places his analysis of the decay of culture front and centre in Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context : “The 1890s is the missing chapter in many versions of the history of literary modernism, in part because all the issues in its cultural controversies appear to be overdrawn, so that it is not easy to know just how seriously to take them. If Nordau’s position seems absurd, Wilde’s seems deliberately calculated to provoke absurdity. But however selfconsciously extravagant it may have been, the aestheticist valorization of style had a significant role in the formation of the ideology of modern art, and the problem Nordau’s argument makes for it is a real one” (87). I cannot endorse Menand’s claim that the 1890s have been neglected in literary commentary on modernism. They have just gone out of style. My own study of the late nineteenth century, The Birth of Modernism (1993), postdates Menand’s study. See Nancy K. Gish, “Discarnate Desire: T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Dissociation” in Cassandra Laity, ed., Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 107–29; and Grover Smith’s earlier “T. S. Eliot and the Fragmented Selves: From ‘Suppressed Complex’ to ‘Sweeney Agonistes,’” Philological Quarterly 77 (Fall 1998), 417–37. See Donald J. Childs, “Fantastic Views: T.S. Eliot and the Occultation of Knowledge and Experience,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 39 (Winter 1997). Émile Faguet (1847–1916) was a French literary historian, elected to the Academy in 1900. One of his more influential works was Politiques et Moralistes du XIXe Siècle (1891), a study of Joseph de Maistre, De Bonald, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Royer-Collard, and Guizot. Not irrelevantly to my discussion, his focus was on how those nineteenth-century figures responded to the demise of religious belief. However, his thinkers all attempt to “save” Christianity, or at least some of its features.

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Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) was a French priest and theologian. He was a “modernist” who denied the literal truth of scriptures, including the New Testament. When he expressed these views most uncompromisingly in The Gospel and the Church, his defence of Catholicism in response to Harnack’s Das Wesen Des Christentum (The Nature of Christianity), he was excommunicated (on 7 March 1908). No doubt it is his excommunication that rendered him “somewhat scandalous.” It is striking that this is the only reference to Faguet or Loisy that I have discovered in Eliot’s published work or unpublished material, even though both would seem to have been concerned with the same issues that occupied him. The other figures mentioned are still well known or are discussed elsewhere in this study. 14 Spengler refused to permit a second edition of Untergang des Abenlandes to appear until he had completed revisions in the light of the cultural theories of Leo Frobenius, which he encountered after the appearance of volume I. See H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler. New Brunswick (U.S.A.[?]): Transaction Publishers 1992, 134. Pound, too, was an admirer of Frobenius, but came to him later. 15 In the preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment they leave no doubt about their distaste for the mindless prosperity of the consumer society they encountered during their exile in America: “In an unjust state of life, the impotence and pliability of the masses grow with the quantitative increase in commodities allowed them. The materially respectable and socially deplorable rise in the living standard of the lower classes is reflected in the simulated extension of the spirit. Its true concern is the negation of reification; it cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind” (xiv–xv). Though Eliot would not sympathize with their Marxist historical determinism, he shared their distaste for the culture of consumerism and for the mass man. In his 1958 interview with Ronald Paul he articulates a very similar view: “There’s a deterioration, it seems to me, in the quality of amusement as it becomes more mass entertainment and as the media for mass entertainment become more highly developed. The cinema first; now, television. It’s profitable to appeal to the largest audience and therefore to the lowest common denominator. I think that the end of a purely materialistic civilization with all its technical achievements and its mass amusements is – if, of course, there’s no actual destruction by

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explosives – simply boredom. A people without religion will in the end find that it has nothing to live for” (Paul, 14). 16 Mowrer is referring to George Babbitt, the eponymous hero of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt, and not Eliot’s former teacher, Irving Babbitt, after whom Lewis’s character is said to have been named. 17 Margaret MacMillan entitled “Part Two” of her study of the Paris Peace Conference Paris 1919, “A New World Order,” but refrains from drawing the parallel to more recent events. 18 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. includes Mowrer in a list of “the brilliant generation of foreign correspondents that had educated an isolationist America about the outside world in the years between the two great wars.” “They were,” he wrote, “a venturesome crowd, audacious, irreverent, resourceful, hard-playing, hard-drinking, and hardworking, and their ardent dispatches brought home to Americans the personalities, ambitions, intrigues, and dangers that were putting the planet on the slippery slope into the Second World War.” “A Man from Mars,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1997. Of course, in 1928 all that lay in an as-yet unimagined future. He had established himself in Paris in 1913 with the intention of becoming a writer. As a consequence of renting rooms above an art gallery he fell into an artistic crowd – Rose and Charles Vildrac, Georges Duhamel, and Romain Rolland. He read Du Coté de Chez Swann by the still unknown Marcel Proust, and Barnabooth by Valéry Larbaud, author of Les Lauriers sont coupés, the model for Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique (Triumph and Turmoil, 27–9). He planned to write “a sort of sequel to Arthur Symons’ Symbolist Movement in Literature,”[?] and a book on the plays of François de Curel (Triumph and Turmoil, 33). In the meantime he sent literary articles to various periodicals, among them: “[?]‘Discipline and the New Beauty,’ a short attack upon irresponsible aesthetic experimentation” and “The Dearth of Genius” – both appearing in Dora Marsden’s The New Freewoman ( 1 Nov. and 1 Dec. 1913 respectively), a journal in which Eliot and Pound also appeared. And Mowrer published “France Today, A group of Modern Thinkers” in its successor, The Egoist, for January 1914 (Triumph and Turmoil, 34–5). I have seen no indication that either Pound or Eliot read any of these pieces. Eliot’s contributions to The New Freewoman date from 1915, by which time Mowrer had abandoned his literary ambitions. Pound, however, began publishing in The New Freewoman as early as September 1913 and could well have read Mowrer’s contributions, though he makes no

Notes to pages 46–52

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mention of him that I have seen. Lewis does mention Mowrer in The Hitler Cult (49), but only in passing. Mowrer’s brother, Paul, chief of the (one-man) Paris bureau for the Chicago Daily News, hired Ansell in 1914 to tend the office while Paul was in the field covering the war. This appointment put an end to Mowrer’s literary ambitions and settled his fate as a journalist. He didn’t stay in Paris long, deciding to report on the war from Belgium. When Belgium fell to the Germans, he was deported to London by the British Army (Triumph and Turmoil, 42–62). He does not seem to have sought out the expatriate Americans in London – most likely because he was out of sympathy with the literary avant garde of the day, exemplified in England by Pound, Lewis, Hulme, and Eliot. In any case, Lewis and Hulme were in the army and out of circulation. Kolakowski remarks (Main Currents of Marxism, 737): “There can be no doubt that Lenin’s insurrectionary policy and all his calculations were based on the firm expectation that the Russian Revolution would touch off a world revolution or at least a European one, this view was in fact shared by all the Bolsheviks: there was no question of “socialism in one country” for the first few years after the Revolution.” Margaret MacMillan notes that The Economic Consequences of the Peace sold more than 100,000 copies and “helped to turn opinion against the peace settlements and against the French” (Paris 1919, 479). For an excellent discussion of the motivation and conduct of The Criterion see Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain. Eliot did not share Massis’ support for Mussolini’s Ethiopian adventure. In response to Pound’s invitation to Eliot to visit him in Rapallo, Eliot declined, refusing to visit Italy while Mussolini was invading Ethiopia (Letter to Pound, 4 May 1936, Pound-Eliot Correspondence, Beinecke). See especially Jason Harding, The Criterion. Harding points out that the infamous review of The Yellow Spot that Julius erroneously attributed to Eliot was written by Belgion – and clearly attributed to “MB” (143). Rather scandalously, that erroneous attribution is also found in Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (1985), C. K. Stead, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement (1986), and Christopher Ricks (who notes that the attribution cannot be certain) T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988). Harding provides a detailed account of Belgion’s association with Eliot and The Criterion (143–58). As Julius does in his comments on Montgomery Belgion’s review of The

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Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany in the Criterion – a review he attributes to Eliot, even though it is signed “MB” (T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, 168–70).

chapter two 1 Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, 43–5. It was his first – and only – teaching post. His subject was Romance Languages, but he held the post only for a few months, proving somewhat too bohemian for the college authorities. He was persuaded to leave, and was given a severance, which enabled him to try his luck as a professional writer in Europe. 2 He told Floyd Dell, writing from the steamer Mauritania – returning to Britain in January 1911, after six months in America – that he found his “sanity in Plato, Dante, Spinoza, Pater, Simons, Longinus,” and added praise of the “whole set of The Rhymes,” especially Ernest Dowson (letter of 20 Jan 1911. Quoted in G. Tansell, “Two Early Letters of Ezra Pound, American Literature 34 (March 1962), 114–19 at 117). We can safely conclude that even after eighteen months in Europe, Pound remained an admirer of the current dominant poetic style of the British “Nineties.” 3 That Eliot’s aesthetic was primarily expressivist hardly needs to be demonstrated, but the following remark from a 1927 talk is clear on the point: “The poet who ‘thinks’ is merely the poet who can express the emotional equivalent of thought. But he is not necessarily interested in the thought itself. We talk as if thought was precise and emotion was vague. In reality there is precise emotion and there is vague emotion. To express precise emotion requires as great intellectual power as to express precise thought” (“Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” Selected Essays, 135, my emphasis). 4 Their prudential focus on form was continued and intensified in the academy by the so-called New Critics, who tirelessly argued against any approach to literature so crude as to concern itself with the content or message of artworks. Postmodernism, with its Marxist bias, has overturned this tactic with a vengeance. I am attempting in this – as in other of my studies – to find a middle way between a Marxist-inspired exposé of politically incorrect content and a New Critical avoidance of content as anything other than a dance of contraries. 5 Kenneth Asher, for example, sets out to demonstrate that “from beginning to end, Eliot’s work, including both the poetry and the prose, was

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shaped by a political vision inherited from French reactionary thinkers, especially from Charles Maurras” (T. S. Eliot and Ideology, 2–3). Asher acknowledges that his study descends from John Harrison’s 1967 study, The Reactionaries (10). The judicious Jason Harding, in his excellent study, The Criterion employs “reactionary” as a description of Eliot’s political posture, even while he more accurately characterizes it in the same paragraph: Eliot’s habitual caution and prudence, or more charitably his Christian belief, make it impossible to characterize the Criterion as anti-Semitic. This is not a case of special pleading. It is quite simply to observe that what Eliot and Belgion had in common was a strain of reactionary, occasionally intolerant, orthodox Tory Anglican morality; a defining trait of the Criterion from the late 1920s onward. Unfortunately, Montgomery Belgion’s outbursts of bigotry were a caricature of the Criterion’s founding and highly cherished desire to fight a rearguard action on behalf of a tradition of Latin-Christian civilization. (158) 6 The term “revisionist” originated as a characterization of Eduard Bernstein’s (1850–1932) revision of the Erfurt program adopted by the German Social Democratic party in 1891. The program was posited on the expectation that capitalism would inexorably worsen the condition of the proletariat through monopolization of profit and thus bring about revolution. In the interim, socialists should seek lesser objectives such as a widened suffrage, direct taxation, and the like, and above all to educate the masses in preparation for the seizure of power (Schorske, 4–5). Bernstein proposed a “revision” of the Erfurt program, arguing that capitalism had learned to stabilize itself through cartels and world markets as well as through a more equitable distribution of wealth. This amounted to a renunciation of dialectical materialism and its corollary, the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Change would depend entirely on reform of the system through political action from within rather than on its sudden and violent overthrow through internal stresses (Schorske, 16). 7 It would be derelict of me not to cite Lewis’s rant against the sort of chronological pigeon-holing in which I have just indulged: Well, sure enough, the birth years of Mr. Pound’s little circle, including Mr. Pound himself, were “all sprinkled up and down,” as Eliot once remarked to me, “the Eighties of the last century.” And if being born in a stable makes you a horse, why then being born in the same years is liable, perhaps, to make you an identical human product. A mechani-

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cal theory at the best, for the purposes of the literary pigeonholing of a complex society this method is useless. According to this simplehearted rule, Herr Adolf Hitler is as like as two peas with any Cantonese or Peruvian born at the exact minute of the Eighties of the last Century at which Herr Hitler saw the light – irrespective of place, traditions, individual ancestry, glandular, nervous, and other bodily make-up – race, religion and what not! Here we have the time-philosopher’s classification with a vengeance! … There is only one sense in which any such a grouping of us acquires some significance – we all got started on our careers before the War. This was, I believe, an advantage. In other respects, Joyce brought up by the Jesuits – in Ireland – in the “Celtic Twilight”– trained as a medico – thereafter exiled in Trieste and Switzerland, and becoming an Italianate Irishman: what a different set of circumstances are those to the origins for instance and early environments of Eliot? (Blasting and Bombardiering, 289–90) 8 Wyndham Lewis was born to a British woman on a yacht belonging to his American father, moored in Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia. He was raised for his first nine years in the usa and then in England. However, he retained his Canadian passport throughout his life, and spent a few unhappy years in the Canadian cities of Windsor and Toronto during the Second World War. 9 No doubt automobiles could have done fine with non-electric diesel engines, but I have never heard of a diesel-powered aircraft. The late Max Nänny subtitled his 1973 study of Pound Poetics for an Electric Age. Nänny drew heavily on the then-popular theories of Marshall McLuhan as articulated in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1965). His general thesis – somewhat tentatively asserted – is that “the writer’s role, the form and function of his art have not been left untouched by the continuing and even accelerating transformation of the word through the pervasive and global spread of the electric media of intercommunication”(12). My interest is not in any formal consequences of the “electric age” that may have ensued. The point I want to make is that the men and women born in the decade of the 1880s witnessed unprecedented technological change in their early adulthood, as well as cataclysmic military and political events. While they could be certain that “the times, they are a-changin’,” they could have no confidence that those changes would be desirable, and – after 1914–18 – lots of reasons to fear that they would not be.

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10 However, it must be admitted that the sense of the journal’s title had more to do with the current astrological sense – the advent of the Age of Aquarius – than with the advent of the electrical age. Nonetheless, it was a journal that counted among its angels George Bernard Shaw, as well as wealthy theosophists and Gurdjieffians, and included among its contributors the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton and the future-oriented and science friendly atheist H. G. Wells. 11 For example, Francis Herbert Bradley, whose philosophy Eliot chose to study for his Harvard PhD, was a Hegelian, as were most of the leading philosophers at Harvard in Eliot’s day. Eliot’s complaint in a letter to J. H. Woods (graduate chair at Harvard) of 28 Jan. 1915, of his Oxford professor Joachim’s “Hegelianism” (Letters, 84), reflects the influence of Bertrand Russell, who was at that date sharing his London flat with the newlyweds Tom and Vivien. My supposition that Pound has Hegel in mind is made the more plausible when one remembers that Hegel’s philosophy of history saw the Prussian state as the culmination of Spirit instantiated in history. However, British wartime propaganda focused rather more on the malign influence of Nietzsche on the Germans than that of Hegel. Of course, the triple-headedness of the “beast” suggests the triadic Hegelian dialectic: thesis / antithesis / synthesis. 12 Noel Stock dates their meeting as 1913 (Life of Ezra Pound, 148) – too late to have influenced “Patria Mia.” But Fenollosa’s biographer, Lawrence Chisholm, places it in 1910. Mary Fenollosa is known to have been in London in 1910, only several months after Pound’s arrival there. She and Pound both knew Laurence Binyon, the British Museum’s Far Eastern librarian. Chisholm reports that, according to Mary’s recollection, “Pound questioned her at length about her husband’s work and their life in Japan and was so enthusiastic about Fenollosa’s literary researches that Mrs. Fenollosa promised, on her return to America, to send him whatever translations and notes she had” (222). Pound also recorded their meeting – though many years later and without any date: “I met her at Sarojini Naidu’s [the Bengali female poet (1879–1949)], and she said that Fenollosa had been in opposition to all the profs and academes, and she had seen some of my stuff and said I was the only person who could finish up these notes as Ernest would have wanted them done” (Plimpton, Writers at Work 2: 49). Naidu was sent to England to study at the age of sixteen, but she returned to India in 1898 to marry, and I have found nothing in biogra-

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phies to indicate that she was in London in 1910. However, Douglas Goldring’s recollection of an evening at Yeats’ Woburn flat at which both Pound and Naidu were present corroborates Pound’s recollection (Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 2: 730) – though neither of them gives a year. Even though I have been unable to find anything to place Naidu in London in 1910, Mary Fenollosa was certainly there in that year and there is no record that Mary Fenollosa ever returned to Britain. Stock’s dating is no doubt based on the fact that the first mention of Fenollosa in Pound’s correspondence is in an unpublished letter to his mother of October 1913 – in which he also mentions Sarojini Naidu. In sum1910 seems the only possible year for their meeting, despite Pound’s silence on Fenollosa prior to December 1913, when he received Fenollosa’s papers by mail from America. A Lume Spento and Other Early Poems. Noel Stock in The Life of Ezra Pound says it was written in London in 1906 (29). For the text of these suppressed cantos, and commentary on them, see Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Three Cantos. The text is found on pages 53–73. Angered by the failure of the Versailles Treaty to grant Italy the Yugoslavian city of Fiume as promised, Gabriele D’Annunzio – a novelist, poet, and World War One hero – led about two thousand artists and irregulars in an invasion of the city of Fiume in September 1919. The allied forces occupying Fiume retreated in the face of D’Annunzio’s army. His style of governance included frequent speeches from balconies – said to have influenced Mussolini. Futurists were among those taking part in the exploit – which was brought to an end by the Italian military in December 1920. See Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1982. The Globe-Wernicke Company is credited with inventing the filing cabinet, circa 1910. Pound’s remark is an instance of his general distaste for orderliness – an attribute singularly lacking in D’Annuzio’s Fiume regime. Despite that shared predilection, Pound disapproved of D’Annuzio’s adventure – citing its Futurist tendencies. Admittedly, Siegfried did not foresee the economic might of a united Europe. The gdp of the European Union exceeded that of the United States of America in 2010. However, Europe’s ability to project its influence in the world has not returned to the levels of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, and pales in comparison to American global dominance. Michael North, in the preface to The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, also sees the dilemma that the modernists faced as still current: “I

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feel that modernism still has a claim on our interest precisely because it does not make good sense, because we find in it more of the unfinished business of our time than in any other literature” (viii).

chapter three 1 I presume Pound has in mind the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Prussia as a consequence of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had installed himself as Emperor of France in 1852. “Barbiche” is a reference to his goatee. 2 “Jusqu’ici, rien ne paraît distinguer la pensées d’Eliot de celle de M. Lasserre et de M. Benda: même horreur du mysticisme de la petite secousse, même soucie rationnelle de redistribution et de mise au point.” “Lettres Étrangères: Le Classicisme de T. S. Eliot,” Nouvelle revue française 24 (Jan.– Juin 1925) 246–51. 3 Dominic Rowland’s assessment of Eliot’s social criticism in “T. S. Eliot and the French Intelligence, Reading Julien Benda,” is at odds with my own. He writes: “Although he did find Belphegor sympathetic at first encounter, Eliot’s own work in 1920 was less concerned than Benda’s with the ways that literature functioned as a paradigm of cultural decline. His critique of literary culture, while polemical, was far more specifically directed against individual writers rather than the abstract movements of which they were representative” (36). While it is true that Eliot’s critical commentary is keyed to individual writers, nonetheless he invariably places them in the context of the general “sensibility” of the age – either unified or disassociated – just as Benda does. Of course, Eliot’s cultural analysis is not the same as Benda’s in every respect, but Rowland’s claim that Eliot has no broad thesis about cultural movements is not sustainable. 4 Although Eliot’s essay was published earlier than Belphégor (in 1917). Belphégor was “mostly written before 1914” according to its preface. Of course, there is no question of Eliot deriving the idea from Benda. 5 Dominic Rowland missed the TLS review in his otherwise excellent discussion of Eliot’s changing attitude toward Benda, “T. S. Eliot and the French Intelligence: Reading Julien Benda.” Rowland concludes that “Benda’s disinterested, though not dispassionate, critique of culture was subsumed by the affiliation that Eliot felt with Maurras’s ideas” (48). 6 T. S. Eliot, “Culture and Anarchy,” Review of La Trahison des clercs, TLS, 23 Feb. 1928. Gallup’s bibliography missed this unsigned review, which

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explains Dominic Rowland missing it in “T. S. Eliot and the French Intelligence: Reading Julien Benda.” Most likely by the term “race hatred” Eliot is thinking of the animosities between the various nationalities of Europe, rather than Nazi anti-Semitism. Although Mein Kampf had been published in two parts in 1924 and 1926, it had not been translated at the time Eliot was writing. Of course, Eliot could read German, but it is very unlikely that he knew of Mein Kampf at this date. Nor is it likely that he knew anything of Hitler as yet. In the May 1928 German elections the Nazis elected only twelve deputies (Leiden, 298). (Belphégor 40–1): “On peut définir plus au fond la tendance que manifeste ici la société moderne. Distinguons deux grandes sortes de sensibilité: ‘une – dont la vue et le toucher sont les principaux modes – qui, s’agrégeant autour de l’idée de forme, tire de cette origine un caractère spécial de netteté et de fermeté; appelons-la sensibilité plasticienne; l’autre – l’ouïe, l’odorat, le goût – qui, exemple d’un tell armature, consiste au contraire dans une sensation sans contour, incomparablement plus troublante; appelons – la sensibilité musicale.” In an April 1949 letter to Theodore Weiss, Lewis was attempting to demonstrate his suitability for a teaching appointment at Bard College. Lewis claimed that he was attracted to Bergson at first, and, like Eliot, attended his lectures at the Collège de France. He wrote that he found Bergson to be “an excellent lecturer, dry and impersonal,” and added that he, Lewis, “began by embracing his evolutionary system” (Letters, 488–9). However, I have not found any indication elsewhere to support an early enthusiasm for Bergson. Nor does Lewis mention attending any lectures at the Collège de France in the letters from Europe written during his six-year stay on the Continent (1902–08). It may be that he was telling Weiss what he thought Weiss wanted to hear. Here is the original from Belphégor,177–8: “Quant à la société en elle même, on peut prévoir que ce soin qu’elle met à éprouver de l’émoi par l’art, devenant cause à son tour, y rendra la soif de ce plaisir de plus en plus intense, l’application à la satisfaire de plus en plus jalouse et plus perfectionnée. On entrevoit le jour où la bonne société française répudiera encore le peu qu’elle supporte aujourd’hui d’idées et d’organisation dans l’art, et ne se passionnera plus que pour des gestes de comédiens, pour des impressions de femmes ou d’enfants, pour des rugissements de lyriques, pour des extases de fanatiques.” T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary:” “The Politics of Men of Letters,” 378–9.

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Eliot’s remark on Wells is a canard. He was not a libertarian, but believed in restraints on individual liberty as in the following comment in A Modern Utopia, 33: “Individual liberty in a community is not, as mathematicians would say, always of the same sign. To ignore this is the essential fallacy of the cult called Individualism. But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there is most law. A socialism or a communism is not necessarily a slavery, and there is no freedom under Anarchy.” Apart from Wells’ approval of socialism and communism, Eliot would certainly agree with Wells on this point. 12 By Mussolini’s mistress, Margherita Sarfati. She was Jewish and married to a prominent Venetian Jewish businessman. Mussolini was eventually forced to abandon her, taking up with Claretta Petaci, who was later murdered at his side by Partisans. 13 See Harries, “The Rare Contact: A Correspondence between T. S. Eliot and P. E. More,” 136–44. 14 Lewis’s perception that Marxism and fascism were essentially face and reflex of the same coin is very much at odds with opinion at the time, since fascism represented itself as a bulwark against Communism. However, the German scholar Ernst Nolte presented a similar assessment in Three Faces of Fascism (20–1): “Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement [sic] of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, with the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.” This definition implies that without Marxism there is no fascism, that fascism is at the same time closer to and further from communism than is liberal anti-communism, that it necessarily shows at least an inclination toward a radical ideology, that fascism should never be said to exist in the absence of at least the rudiments of an organization and propaganda comparable to those of Marxism. However, leading contemporary scholars, Roger Griffin and Zeev Sternhell, both reject Nolte’s analysis, and insist on fundamental opposition between fascism and Communism as ideologies, despite their similarities as tyrannical and oppressive political regimes. As we will see, the American radical Lawrence Dennis would have agreed with Nolte regarding fascism/Nazism and Communism as essentially interchangeable versions of the rule of an elite.

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15 Jules Bonnot, a French gangster and self-declared anarchist, was gunned down in April 1912 after a crime spree that included car chases. He was apparently the first criminal to use an automobile as a means of fleeing a crime scene. The pursuit of his gang was celebrated in the European press, and his exploits led to a general crackdown on anarchists and communists in France. 16 Lewis went straight from finishing at the bottom of his class at Rugby to the Slade School (of art) in London, and never saw the inside of a university (Meyers, 8–9). Pound had a ba and an ma in Romance languages, but he chose to profess expertise in economics and history, where he had no formal training. Eliot had the most advanced education of the three, completing a dissertation for a Harvard PhD, which was accepted, but he declined to cross the ocean to defend it and hence never took the degree. 17 Meyers, reports that “despite the impression that Lewis’ polemical books ... are hasty, careless and slapdash, his manuscripts and correspondence with publishers reveal the minute care he took with them.” Nonetheless, he admits that Lewis “wrote very rapidly” and that “Prentice was not strict in his demands for structural improvement” (The Enemy, 147). For his part, Pound had an entrée to Faber and Faber through Eliot, but Eliot tried to modulate Pound’s excesses. Indeed, he turned down Jefferson and/or Mussolini for The Criterion – though Faber did publish Guide to Kulchur, a work that not very many publishers would have considered, given its disorganization and other eccentricities. 18 Charles Fourier (1772–1837), a French utopian thinker who recommended the organization of society into “phalanxes” of trades and professions residing in “Phalantseries,” gigantic buildings in which all activities would be organized in a stratified social structure. However, individuals would be free to determine their place in the structure by their own efforts and capabilities. The town of Utopia, Ohio, was founded by followers of Fourier in 1844, but was disbanded two years later. 19 An allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s famous opening lines from “The Ballad of East and West” (1892): “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet / Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgment seat.” However, the lines do not represent either Kipling’s general view or the tenor of the poem. It opens and closes with four lines of which the foregoing are the first two. The second two are rarely cited. They express a robust machismo, but they do qualify the sentiment of incompatibility: “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed,

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nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!” 20 Nietzsche recommended the suppression of the “Apollonian” principium individuationis through the medium of the musical drama, which – he argued in The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music – releases the self from its isolation, permitting it to enter into a communal Dionysian ecstasy. Lewis also intended to raise the spectre of the Nietzschean superman, the “blond[?] beast” celebrated in On the Genealogy of Morals. Bergson’s view is quite different. I suppose Lewis read Bergson as recommending that we transcend our personal limitations by permitting intuition (which is in touch with the élan vital) to be expressed. While Bergson does argue that there should be greater integration of intellect and intuition, he does not call for the suppression of the intellect, as Nietzsche calls for the suppression of the ego, or principium individuationis, in a communal ecstasy. 21 Eliot was hardly a Social Crediter, but he did give Douglas’s ideas some cautious approval: “When I read, say, an economic article in the Referee, or any of the numerous productions of Major Douglas and his disciples, I am confirmed in my suspicion that conventional economic practice is all wrong, but I can never understand enough to form any opinion as to whether the prescription or nostrum proffered is right” (“A Commentary,” Criterion 10, Jan. 1931, 309). And he did publish occasionally in The New English Weekly, a journal founded by A. R. Orage, a co-founder of Social Credit. Harding (The Criterion, 188–9) disputes the claim made by David Bradshaw that “Eliot was a committed advocate of Social Credit, not a writer who made the odd reference to the theory in his literary journalism” (“T. S. Eliot and the Major,” 14). Harding points out that Eliot met Douglas only twice – in March 1920 with Pound and in November 1931 with Hugh MacDiarmid, but he does not mention that Eliot knew Orage, Douglas’s energetic apostle, not to say creator. Bradshaw also found an article Eliot published in Soddy’s journal New Britain “In Sincerity and Earnestness” (25 July 1934, 274). Bradshaw concludes that Soddy and Douglas prompted Eliot’s anti-Semitic remark in After Strange Gods, but Harding rejects that claim, pointing out that both Douglas’ Social Credit and Soddy’s Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt were unfavourably reviewed in the Criterion by J. McAlpin–Douglas in April 1925, 472 and Soddy in June 1928, 429 (189–90). And R. McNair Wilson reviewed a batch of

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Social Credit pamphlets in the Criterion (Jan. 1935, 342.) Eliot did publish Pound’s pro-Gesell piece, “The Individual in His Milieu” (Oct. 1935), but the economic theories of Silvio Gesell and Douglas were incompatible. Pound tried (unsuccessfully) to “sell” Gesell to Douglas. 22 The Alexander text is the Gifford Lectures for 1916–18 entitled Space, Time, and Deity. They were published in two volumes in 1920 and reissued in 1927. The Whitehead book Lewis discusses is Science and the Modern World (1926), the Lowell Lectures delivered at Cambridge in February 1925. Whitehead acknowledges Alexander’s Gifford Lectures as a formative influence on his own, which no doubt led Lewis to describe Alexander as Whitehead’s teacher. But Alexander was less than two years older than Whitehead and never taught at Cambridge. Ayers accepts Lewis’s erroneous assumption that Whitehead was a pupil of Alexander and also repeats Lewis’s canard that they were both “disciples of Bergson” (Time, 86). Here is Ayers assessment of the relationship: “Whitehead was a pupil of Samuel Alexander, whose Space, Time and Deity is also frequently maligned by Lewis. Alexander’s work is more substantial than that of Whitehead, more philosophically rigorous, while the latter is more of a populariser. But both are dwarfed by their mentor, Bergson” (Ayers, 74). Whitehead, Cambridge-educated, was never the pupil of the Oxfordeducated Australian, Alexander. Nor were either of them disciples of Bergson. And to describe Whitehead, senior co-author of Principia Mathematica, as a “populariser” is a canard. His reputation dwarfs that of Alexander, and – at least in recent years – outshines Bergson. Eliot was also a reader of Whitehead. Whereas Lewis found Whitehead too relativistic, Eliot found him not Christian enough. In his anonymous review of More’s The Demon of the Absolute. in Times Literary Supplement (21 Feb. 1929) Eliot approved More’s exposure of “some of the most remarkable ambiguities in Professor Whitehead’s theories, and asserts the uselessness of Professor Whitehead‘s God in religion.” 23 Hailie Selassie was the emperor of Ethiopia, invaded by Italy in 1935 in defiance of the League of Nations. In the novel Trilby is tone deaf, but is hypnotized by Svengali, enabling her to sing. She becomes a great diva. Svengali has survived as a clichéd figure, but his creation, Trilby, has sunk into obscurity. Leon Trotsky fled the Soviet Union in 1933, eventually finding refuge in Mexico in 1936, where Soviet agents assassinated him on 20 August 1940.

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chapter four 1 See William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream. Howard Scott (1890–1970) founded the technocracy movement with Thorstein Veblen in New York in 1919. That movement was disbanded by the mid-twenties, but in 1932 Scott formed the Continental Committee on Technocracy with Walter Rautenstrauch, Chairman of Columbia’s Department of Industrial Engineering. The renewed movement attracted a great deal of attention. Scott split with the cct to form Technocracy Inc., which was widely accused of fascist tendencies. The cct did not long survive the schism, but Scott’s Technocracy Inc. survives in pockets to this day. J. George Frederick published For and Against Technocracy (New York: Business Bourse) in 1933, a collection of essays intended to expose Technocracy as an undesirable political movement. The movement withered after a disastrous nationally broadcast radio speech by Scott on 13 January 1933 (Elsner, The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation, 15). Elsner disputes the standard assessment that Technocracy, as formulated by Howard Scott, was an American version of fascism: “The fascist, typically, is the little guy caught up in an increasingly organized society which threatens his status, power, and income; he would, if he could, return to the world of small business, the family farm, and private rather than corporate property, with marked income and status differences. But the technocratic future represents the most extreme extrapolation of the very urbanization-industrialization against which the fascist reacts; it is a completely bureaucratized society, with equalitarian income, universalistic recruitment of elites, and no property rights apart from immediate personal possessions” (209). However, to define fascism exclusively by the constituency to which it appeals, as Frederick does, fails to pay adequate attention to the differing socio-economic contexts of Europe and America, and – perhaps most importantly – to ignore the tendency of both movements to exploit nationalist sentiment and xenophobia while legitimating dictatorial, undemocratic governance. 2 Noel Stock notes that Pound was appointed a correspondent for The Dial in March 1921. The Dial was a venerable journal that Eliot’s Harvard classmates Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson had recently purchased (Stock, 229). Pound appeared only sporadically in The Dial over the next two or three years, but he was in regular correspondence with Thayer and was awarded the Dial poetry prize for 1927 (Stock, 272).

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3 Part II of The Communist Manifesto makes the point explicitly: “The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development, which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole” (23). 4 It is worth noting that Veblen, one of the founders of the original technocracy, held much the same view – though he considered the change in temperament to be benign. The following is Elsner’s paraphrase of Veblen’s assessment of the consequences of the mechanization of man: This state of affairs generates pressure for change but not of the sort usually foreseen by both radical strategists and the defenders of the status quo. For them, labour organization provides either hope or fear. Veblen, surveying the contemporary A[merican] F[ederation] of L[abour] and I[nternational] W[orkers] [of the] W[orld], saw little justification for such views. A violent revolution by the oppressed and exploited is neither probable nor, if it occurred, could it succeed ... In what is probably the most quoted passage of the Engineers, Veblen declares the technicians to constitute “the General Staff of the industrial system ... whatever law and custom may formally say in protest ... Therefore any question of a revolutionary overturn, in America or in any other of the advanced industrial countries, resolves itself in practical fact into a question of what the guild of technicians will do.” Indispensable to society’s livelihood, dependent on socially accumulated knowledge, “the technicians may be said to represent the community at large in its industrial capacity.” (20–1) The choice of the engineer Herbert Hoover as the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and his subsequent election, perhaps reflects Veblen’s faith in technical expertise. His failure to respond effectively to the crisis of 1929 discredited Veblen’s faith in technocratic expertise so far as the American electorate is concerned. 5 This stark choice between rule by the masses or by an elite is precisely that which the Spanish sociologist Ortega y Gasset offered his readers in The Revolt of the Masses (1930). Oddly, Lewis never mentions Gasset despite their broad agreement on this point and Gasset’s prominence. Of course, The Art of Being Ruled precedes The Revolt of the Masses by four years – and its translation by seven. Gasset, despite his distrust of the

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masses, regards liberal democracy as mankind’s best hope – not a view with which Lewis would be sympathetic. Eliot did read Revolt of the Masses, and spoke highly of it in a 1958 interview with Leslie Paul (“A Conversation with T. S. Eliot”), but I have found no earlier mention by Eliot. Eliot expressed a strikingly similar view in a 1934 “Commentary”: “to surrender individual responsibility to a party is, for many men, a pleasant stimulant and sedative” (“Luxembourg Gardens,” 453). He had made the same observation earlier in “The Literature of fascism,” where he spoke of the desire of ordinary folks to “be benevolently ordered about.” John A. Hobson’s influential 1902 study, Imperialism, A Study, saw imperialism as a principal cause of armed conflict in the nineteenth century: Earth hunger and the scramble for markets are responsible for the openly avowed repudiation of treaty obligations which Germany, Russia, and England have not scrupled to defend. The sliding scale of diplomatic language, hinterland, sphere of interest, sphere of influence, paramountcy, suzerainty, protectorate, veiled or open, leading up to acts of forcible seizure or annexation which sometimes continue to be hidden under “lease,” “rectification of frontier,” “concession,” and the like, is the invention and expression of this cynical spirit of Imperialism. (14) Hanna Arendt pays Hobson’s study generous tribute in Imperialism, Part Two of The Origins of Totalitarianism, calling it “a masterly analysis of the driving economic forces and motives as well as some of its political implications” of imperialism (note 42, 27). Despite a personal appeal by Hitler in September 1940, Franco refused to join Germany in the war against Britain (then the only Ally in Europe left standing) despite German offers of African colonies. (Weitz, 252–4). And Stalin seems to have had no intention of breaching the non-aggression pact he signed with Hitler in September 1939. Of course, that did not prevent Stalin from seizing Eastern Poland or invading Finland and making the Baltic States satellites of the Soviet Union. I suppose all that one can say for Stalin’s aggressive tendencies is that they were confined to weak and adjacent victims. For example, later in The Art of Being Ruled : “The influence of Nietzsche was similar to that of Bergson, James, Croce, etc. He provided a sanction and licence, as the others did, for life – the very life that he never ceased himself to objurgate against; the life of the second-rate and shoddily emotional, for the person, very unfortunately, smart and rich

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enough to be able to regard himself as an ‘aristocrat,’ a man ‘beyond good and evil,’ a destroying angel and cultivated Mephistopheles” (115). These remarks count as reasonably effective ridicule, but hardly evince any understanding of Nietzsche’s actual views. Lewis’s views seem to reflect the vogue of eugenics at that time. For a discussion of some Modernists’ attitudes toward eugenics, see Donald Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration. Childs does not discuss Lewis or Pound. With respect to Eliot, I disagree with Childs’ claim in chapter 5 that Eliot’s comments in his review of several books on eugenics, “Recent British Periodical Literature in Ethics” in International Journal of Ethics (Jan. 1918) 270–7, represent an approval of the eugenic project. In a review of C. J. Webb’s Group Theories of Religion and the Religion of the Individual, The International Journal of Ethics 27: 1 (Oct. 1916), 115–17. The term “free men” is doubtless an allusion to Bertrand Russell’s famous essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” first published in the Independent Review (December 1903), and reprinted many times. It presents the case for a humanistic atheism, concluding with the stirring call for man “to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life.” Fernand Pelloutier (1867–1901), a prominent French Syndicalist. Compare Hardt and Negri’s Deleuzian view as expressed in Empire: Empire takes form when language and communication, or really when immaterial labor and cooperation, become the dominant productive force. The superstructure is put to work, and the universe we live in is a universe of productive linguistic networks. The lines of production and those of representation cross and mix in the same linguistic and productive realm ... Production becomes indistinguishable from reproduction; productive forces merge with relations of production; constant capital tends to be constituted and represented within variable capital in the brains, bodies and cooperation of productive subjects. Social subjects are at the same time producers and products of this unitary machine. In this new historical formation it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value, or a practice that is “outside.” (385, my emphasis) For example, The Art of Being Ruled: The early christian insisted on the destruction of the world. Nothing short of that would satisfy him. He wanted to wipe out entirely every-

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thing that existed, in order to install his Kingdom of Heaven. Absolute denial of life is the logical solution of the thought of the religious fanatic: and whenever you follow him for long, you will find him leading you to destruction, so far as this life is concerned. Péguy, Proudhon, Sorel, Bakunin, Herten, etc., all desired the End of the World as thoroughly as any primitive christian awaiting with pious satisfaction that much-canvassed event. (281, original emphasis) 16 Eliot’s declaration in For Lancelot Andrewes shocked many of Eliot’s admirers. Perhaps one of the best informed on the issues in question was Curtius, a distinguished German scholar whom Eliot admired (see letter to Curtius, 28 Aug. 1922, Letters, 565–6), and whom he published in The Criterion. Harding paraphrases Curtius’ reaction as expressed in a 1929 article in Die Literatur: Curtius spelt out their critical differences. Calling Eliot “der Führer conservativer Geistespolitick” [“leader of conservative political thought”] in England, he proceeded to dismantle Eliot’s tripartite declaration. Curtius noted that Eliot’s “classicism” had more in common with reactionary French political thought than the civilization of Greece and Rome; his “royalism” ... made little sense outside of the French nationalism of Maurras’s Camelots du roi; finally his Anglo-Catholic via media and his essays on the Anglican bishops, Lancelot Andrewes and John Bramhall, signaled to Curtius a regrettable shrinkage and parochialism in his interests as a critic, a defection from literary criticism to lay theology, and worse, a retreat from “europäïscher Universalgeschichte” [“Pan European Studies”]. (Harding, 213) 17 Although Eliot probably had not seen Mussolini’s article, “Political and Social Doctrine,” its celebration of violence is faithful to fascism’s Futurist provenance: Fascism does not, generally speaking, believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace. It therefore discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renunciation in contra-distinction to self-sacrifice. War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it. All other tests are substitutes which never place a man face to face with himself before the alternative of life or death. Therefore all doctrines which postulate peace at all costs are incompatible with fascism. (Fascism: Origins, 19) 18 John Margolis thinks that Maurras’ career may well have offered Eliot a cautionary model, leading him to avoid any direct involvement in, or

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endorsement of, political movements (T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development, 97). Margolis does not draw the contrast to Eliot’s less cautious friends, Pound and Lewis. Despite Asher’s assertion that Eliot scholars have neglected Eliot’s relation with Maurrasian views, there is a long tradition of excellent commentary on that relationship, beginning with Roger Kojecky, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. John D. Margolis’ 1972 study, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development 1922–1939, supplements Kojecky’s article, but does not refer to it. No doubt it was written before Kojecky’s article appeared. Kenneth George Asher, however, had ample time to consult the earlier works. His T. S. Eliot and Ideology and “T. S. Eliot and Charles Maurras” do, however, add some details of interest. Jason Harding’s The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical networks in Inter-War Britain, while of great value in other ways, adds little to our knowledge of Eliot’s relation to Maurrasian thought. In defence of Asher’s claim that Eliot scholars have neglected the influence of Maurras, it is true that Lyndall Gordon makes no mention of him in any of her three biographies of Eliot. Nonetheless, Maurras gets at least a mention in most discussions of Eliot’s ideological posture. Abraham Schramek, as minister of the Interior in 1926, was responsible for disarming the private army of the Action Française, Les Camelots du Roi. After seven members of that group were killed in a confrontation, Maurras held Schramek responsible and wrote a letter to Schramek threatening to kill him like a dog. Maurras was imprisoned for that threatening letter. The fact that Schramek was Jewish exacerbated the offence. This distinction between his own view of culture and Arnold’s must be seen to modify Lobb’s assessment of the impact of Arnold’s social thought on Eliot – with which I largely agree: Eliot’s affinities with Arnold are frequently mentioned but seldom analysed: the complex pattern of shared ideas, influence, and opposition is most often reduced to a few generalizations about attitudes towards culture. Certainly the careers of the two men are parallel in many ways ... It is, in fact, in Eliot’s social criticism that Arnold’s legacy is clearest. The treatment of classes and elites, the approach to the question of culture, the concern for the whole life of man, even the sanctioning of force, all have their origins in Arnold’ work. (T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition, 76) Eliot said in his 1948 talk “L’Hommage de l’étranger” (delivered on the occasion of receiving the degree honoris causa from L’Université d’Aix-

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en-Provence), that he could not recall who recommended Maurras to him. He said that his assessment of Maurras was based principally on four books: L’Avenir de l’Intelligence, Anthinée, Les Amants de Venise, and La Leçon de Dante. He said that he could not recall who recommended the first of them, but that he had written the date “1911” in his own hand in his copy. He went on to speak of Irving Babbitt as a reader of Maurras, though he claimed that Babbitt rejected some of Maurras’s views as romantic (6). 23 For a fuller discussion of Pound’s engagement with economics see my Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism and Preda, Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940.

chapter five 1 Heidegger’s thought spawned the – primarily French – existentialist movement, which flourished in the aftermath of World War II. J.-P. Sartre was a principal figure in that movement and his L’être et le néant (1941) is a skeptical re-working of Sein und Zeit. Lewis seems not to have been aware of Heidegger until after the war. He is dismissive of him, and of Sartre, in The Writer and the Absolute (1952). 2 However, it is based on arguments in Gasset’s 1922 book, Espana Invertebrada; “Masas,” a 1926 article appearing in El Sol; and two lectures given to the Association of Friends of Art in Buenos Aires (1928). 3 The books reviewed include Edgar Mowrer, Sinon: or the Future of Politics (Kegan Paul); F. McEachran, The Civilized Man (Faber); and Hugh l’Anson Fausset, The Modern Dilemma (Dent). (He likes McEachern best of these three.) Of Fausset on progress, he remarks: “I am breathing the same old stuffy atmosphere of Matthew Arnold’s Cloud Cuckoo Land” (312). But worst of all, in his view, was Julian Huxley’s Conway Lectures, Science, Religion and Human Nature (Watts). Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (Hogarth) was his next target, linked with Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness (Allen and Unwin). He is dismissive of both. 4 But Eliot did consider his position to be compatible with that of Chesterton and Belloc as well as the American Agrarians. In footnote 1 to page 20 of After Strange Gods he aligned himself with Chesterton and the American Southern Agrarians, among others: “I should not like to hold any one of them responsible for my opinions, however, or for any that the reader may find irritating. I have in mind Mr. Chesterton and his ‘distributism,’ Mr. Christopher Dawson (The Making of Europe), Mr;

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Demant and Mr. M. B. Reckitt and their colleagues. I have also in mind the views of Mr. Allen Tate and his friends as evinced in I’ll Take My Stand, and those of several Scottish nationalists.” “Christianity and Communism,” 382–3; “Religion and Science: A Phantom Dilemma,” 428–9; “The Search for Moral Sanction,” 445–6, 480; and “Building Up the Christian World,” 501–2. Of course, Anthony Julius did not find them so in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, but his study is itself so prejudiced, that it is difficult to give it much credit. Terry Eagleton makes a canny comment on Eliot’s politics in his review of Jason Harding’s The ‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain that I find more balanced and just than Julius’ polemic: “conservatives do not regard their beliefs as political. Politics is the sphere of utility, and therefore inimical to conservative values. It is what other people rattle on about, whereas one’s own commitments are a matter of custom, instinct, practicality, and common sense. The Criterion was thus embarrassed from the outset by having to address an urgent political crisis while apparently not believing in politics.” Harding himself makes a similar point, less trenchantly: “With the prospect of war, the apparent collapse of liberal democracy, and following his rejection of fascism and communism, Eliot put his faith in the millennial programme of the notional idea of a Christian society” (201). By calling Eliot’s program “millennial,” Harding draws attention to its otherworldly, impractical quality. General Badoglio, with Mussolini’s approval, had dropped mustard gas from aircraft on military and civilian targets in Ethiopia in October and December of 1935. When the Red Cross revealed these atrocities, a Red Cross encampment in Ethiopia was “accidentally” bombed. However, these atrocities resonated much less with the European and American press than did Guernica. I cannot refrain from noting that during the debate over the American invasion of Iraq and the application of “Shock and Awe” tactics in the bombing of Baghdad in 2003, the mural was covered with a large sheet so as not to invite invidious comparisons. “Largely,” because Prince, briefly King, Edward (VIII) has been accused of such sympathies. My point is that, as literary scholars, we should not succumb to the sort of Manichaean oppositions that so distorted Pound’s political analysis, and insist on placing all players into one of the three camps: liberal capitalism, fascism/nazism or socialism/

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communism. Moreover, each of these “camps” permits considerable variation within it. Although Eliot was silent on the Nuremberg Laws prior to the fall of France, he did write a special commentary deploring the Vichy government’s anti-Semitic policies and expressing his hope that Christians would speak out against them (Christian News-Letter 97, 3 Sept. 1941, 1–2. Cited in Schuchard, “Burbank with a Baedeker,” 17–18.). But, even here, Eliot exhibited an ill-considered faith that the Vichy government of Maréchal Pétain would listen to ethical arguments. It is striking that while the pundits we have examined all speak of “Europe” as a geographical entity incorporating many nations, they speak of “America” as exclusively the United States of America, excluding Canada, Mexico, and the Central American countries – none of which participate in “American” culture any more than European nations do. The Nazi antipathy toward homosexuality was in spite of Hitler’s close deputy Ernst Röhm, leader of the Sturmabteilung (sa), being openly homosexual, as were many of his lieutenants. However, Hitler and Röhm fell out. Hitler had the sa destroyed and Röhm murdered in the purge known as “The Night of the Long Knives” even though it actually continued for three days, 30 June to 2 July 1934. Lewis might be the source of the common misrepresentation that Hitler was a house painter, for he describes him as “an Austrian house-painter, just over forty years old” (7). Of course, Hitler was an unsuccessful easel painter of landscapes, not a house painter. Lewis’s view may not be as wrong-headed as it appears in the light of the rapid fall of France to the German invasion in 1940. Klaus Fischer, among others, has argued that if the Allies “had struck at the Ruhr with all the power at their command while Hitler was preoccupied in Poland, they could have seriously crippled Germany, perhaps to the point of forcing Hitler to sue for peace.” But, Fischer adds, “Nothing of the sort happened.” (Nazi Germany, 451). And Ronald Powaski notes that “the French army ... was touted as the strongest in Europe” at the outbreak of war (Lightning War: Blitzkrieg in the West, 1940, 2). At the risk of pedantic excess, it is worth discriminating here between simple anti-Semitism as a form of racism and conspiracy theory, which alleges a Jewish plot to control the world. The fons et erigo of the latter variety of anti-Semitism is, of course, the phony Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is known to be a forgery by the secret police (the Okhrana) of

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Czar Nicholas II, issued in 1903. That forgery was based on Maurice Joly’s Dialogues aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (1864), as was revealed by a series of articles in the Times in August of 1922. Joly’s work was a satirical attack on the regime of Louis Philippe, and had nothing to do with a Jewish conspiracy. Gottfried Feder was a Nazi deputy in the Reichstag in 1931 and the Nazi economic critic. He blamed “loan capital” (Leihkapital) and “international finance” for the economic difficulties of the 1930s. Hitler endorsed Feder’s economic ideas in Mein Kampf (chapter 8). Hjalmar Schacht, the new Economics minister, dismissed Feder from the Reichsbank in the summer of 1934 (Weitz, Hitler’s Banker, 147, 181). Pound is referring to J. A. Hobson’s well-known 1902 study Imperialism. It came out in a third edition from George Allen and Unwin in 1938. Albert S. Lindemann observes in Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews that Hilaire Belloc’s assertion in his 1919 book, The Jews, “that Jewish Bolsheviks had spread anti-Semitism more widely than ever before was taken up by many others. It would find echoes even at the end of the twentieth century, most notably in the efforts of German historian Ernst Nolte to explain the Holocaust as stemming from Hitler’s fear of the Bolshevik’s Asiatic deeds” (434). Lindemann goes on to note that such sentiments were to be found in France and the usa as well (434–5). The famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was a prominent American anti-Semite, anti-Communist, and Nazi sympathizer, though not a believer in a conspiracy (see David Friedman). It is perhaps worth adding that none of our three writers warrant a mention in Lindemann’s study of anti-Semitism – no doubt because they are too insignificant in the history of anti-Semitism to be mentioned in his very detailed study of the phenomenon. Lindemann also overlooks Lindbergh. However, it is worth noting that neither Churchill nor De Gaulle was much concerned with Nazi brutality or its anti-Semitism. As Tony Judt delicately observes: “De Gaulle (like Churchill) was curiously blind to the racial specificity of Hitler’s victims, understanding Nazism in the context of Prussian militarism instead” (805). The post-war tendency to see World War II as primarily about the “final solution” does not reflect contemporary perception of the conflict. In The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis, William D. Rubinstein documents the depth of anti-Nazi sentiment in the United States prior to the outbreak of war, and notes that the racial policies of the Nazis were an important cause of that hostility (45–8). These senti-

Notes to pages 221–9

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ments were manifest despite popular support for American reluctance to offer sanctuary to Jewish refugees (50–1). However, he also points out that the scattered reports of the Holocaust were generally disbelieved, and when believed no plausible plan of action beyond the total war already in progress was available (85–7). In “Points,” a review of F. D. Roosevelt’s Looking Forward in the American Social Credit journal New Democracy (I, 25 Aug. 1933), Pound included the following note: “from the 9th to the 22nd of Feb. this year I was occupied in writing a book.” No doubt that book was Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Preda does not include this letter in her book, Economic Correspondence. Stock reports that Paul de Kruif, a journalist with whom Pound had been in correspondence, introduced him to Henry A. Wallace, the secretary of Agriculture. He also met Senators Borah, Byrd, Bankhead, and Wheeler, and Congressman J. Voorhis (Stock, 361). While none of his economic recommendations came to anything, Pound had been in correspondence with Borah. See Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political Correspondence, 1930–35. Another politician Pound befriended was George Tinkham. See “Dear Uncle George”: The Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts. Here, as elsewhere, Pound attempts to present the disorganized nature of his discourse as somehow a virtue: “I am not putting these sentences in monolinear syllogistic arrangement, and I have no intention of using that old form of trickery to fool the reader” (28). For a detailed account of Pound’s struggle with his commitment to Social Credit and the non-conforming policies of the fascist state see my Pound in Purgatory and Roxana Preda, ed., Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence 1933–1940. It is worth remembering that universal suffrage was a relatively new thing in the democracies in the period under discussion. Until the early years of the twentieth century only male property holders could vote in most democracies. Universal male suffrage followed in the early decades of the twentieth century, but female suffrage was much slower to gain acceptance. Distrust of the political sagacity of the common man and woman was not confined to “reactionaries” like our three in the twenties and thirties. The fact that Hitler gained the chancellorship through the electoral process did nothing to reassure those who worried about the consequences of universal suffrage. Lewis alluded to this failure of democracy in Left Wings Over Europe: “It was a pure parliamentary democ-

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racy that voted in – as nearly by democratic vote as it is humanly possible to get – and has periodically confirmed in power, the great patriot who is now the “Dictator of the German Democracy” (298). However, he did defend Mussolini’s invasion in “The fascist Ideal,” The British-Italian Bulletin 4, 16 (18 April 1936): “Italy does not need colonies ‘to employ’ her sons. Italy needs Abyssinia to attain economic independence, by which I do not mean written permission from the enemies of all mankind; I mean the material wealth, the raw materials necessary to feed and clothe the people of Italy. And I hope Italy gets every inch of it” (EPPP, 47). Of course, it was a fantasy that Ethiopia had anything of value to Italy – but one that the Italian press fostered. Of course, Jefferson served only two terms (1801–09). However, the Republican party, which he had founded, dominated American federal politics for twenty-four years. And Jefferson continued to offer advice as a senior statesman – giving some credence to Pound’s outrageous claim. The list could be extended. Once again, see my Pound in Purgatory and Roxana Preda’s Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence. The allusion to Manes, the founder of Manichaeism, unintentionally draws attention to Pound’s simplistic “either/or” schema of evil usurers triumphing over benevolent dictators. “Digonos” is a version of “Dionysus.”

chapter six 1 Pound began his biweekly talks in January 1941. After a break he resumed the broadcasts on 29 January 1942. He continued these inflammatory talks until 25 July 1943. In all there were 125 broadcasts, many recorded by American authorities. They were cited in Pound’s indictment for treason. See Leonard W. Doob, ed., “Ezra Pound Speaking:” Radio Speeches of World War II. 2 See in particular, Demetres Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette, eds. “I Cease not to Yowl”: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Agresti. Olivia Agresti was a former fascist, but a Catholic, and not an anti-Semite. She was also the niece of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The correspondence – most of it written while Pound was in St. Elizabeths – shows her castigating Pound for his persistent expression of anti-Semitic views – among other things. See my Pound in Purgatory for details of their relationship. 3 It cannot be denied that the Rome broadcasts exhibit paranoid antiSemitism, as do many of the letters Pound wrote to Olivia Rossetti-

Notes to pages 245–9

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Agresti. However, I do not accept Casillo’s argument that anti-Semitism was the motivating factor in Pound’s political posture. I was able to show in Pound in Purgatory that the anti-Semitism was a consequence of his economic views rather than a cause of them as Casillo believes. Of course, I do not pretend that my diagnosis excuses Pound in any way. Indeed, his moral failure is more marked if we accept my argument, since his antiSemitism was a moral – as well as a cognitive – failure rather than a mental pathology. In contrast to the spurious Conversations with Hitler (1940) discussed in the Appendix, Hitler’s Secret Conversations is a genuine record of Hitler’s “table talk.” It was published by Farrar, Straus and Young in the United States, with a preface by the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor Roper. The Letters of Wyndham Lewis does not contain any letters in reply to Pound’s comments, though there are several from the period to Pound or to his wife, Dorothy. In conjunction with Eliot, Lewis took an interest in securing Pound’s release from St. Elizabeths. But despite sympathy for his old friend, it would appear that Lewis saw no purpose in entering into a debate with Pound, given that Pound was rehashing the same misguided arguments he had been spouting for nearly twenty years. Bryant Knox attributes Lewis’s reluctance to debate with Pound to Lewis’s “inability to incorporate matters of substance” (262). I cannot agree with that assessment. Lewis’s correspondence reflects a still agile and perceptive intelligence in 1951 and beyond. It seems evident to me that he avoided engaging Pound on the issues because Pound’s views were wildly incorrect, often incoherent, and always incorrigible. Ever since Eliot was awarded the British Order of Merit in 1948, Pound commonly referred to him as O.M. – an epithet that replaced “Possum,” which had served Pound ever since Eliot stopped “playing possum” and openly declared his Anglicanism, royalism, and Classicism. Here Pound combines the two: “Poss O. M.” The accusation that Lewis was bigoted toward Italians is particularly inapposite. In The Lion and the Fox Lewis is practically adulatory of Renaissance Italy, crediting the Italians with virtually all the accomplishments of the European Renaissance, even – somewhat hyperbolically – asserting that “without Italy it is unlikely that Watts would have invented the locomotive, any more than a Tasmanian or an Esquimaux” (53). One should not make too much of Eliot’s approval of the maintenance of order by “every means.” Apart from the Bolshevik Revolution ten years

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earlier, the most prominent uses of violence to maintain order in 1927 were the suppression of the Spartacus uprising in Germany in 1919, the suppression of Hitler’s Beerhall Putsch in 1923, the murder of Giacomo Matteotti by fascist thugs, in 1924, and the British General Strike of 1926. Of these instances of the use of violence by the state, only the second last is clearly reprehensible, and it could hardly qualify as intended to maintain order, since Matteotti’s murder was prompted by a speech in the legislature denouncing the 1924 Italian election, which overwhelmingly returned fascists, as a fraud. However, in Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, with the example of fascist and Nazi order before him, Eliot defends the British rule in India on similar grounds: “no ruling nation has less to be ashamed of than Britain in these particulars; corruption, brutality and maladministration were too prevalent in India before the British arrived, for commission of them to disturb the fabric of Indian life.” However, he adds that British rule was a failure because “there can be no compromise between the extremes of an external rule which is content to keep order and leave the social structure unaltered, and a complete cultural assimilation. The failure to arrive at the latter is a religious failure” (90–1). In short, order is not a sufficient condition for cultural health. Presumably Eliot believed that the British could have succeeded in India only by converting all the residents of the subcontinent to Anglicanism! 9 Of course, “Paideuma” is just the German form of the Greek word paidea or “teaching” from which we get “pedagogy.” 10 The Einsatzgruppen were army units mandated to seek out and murder Jews – mostly in Russia after 1941. They did not typically round them up for shipment to death camps, but murdered them on the spot. 11 It is true, of course, that among Zionists assimilation was regarded as a betrayal. But as Lindemann points out, very few German-speaking Jews were attracted to Zionism (330). And prominent French Jews such as Julien Benda, Emile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, and Daniel Halévy were thoroughly assimilated into French culture (210). The historian and resistance hero Marc Bloch is an emphatic case in point. Before his torture and execution by the Gestapo, he wrote a “Testamentary Instruction” in which he asked not “to have read above my body those Jewish prayers to the cadence of which so many of my ancestors, including my father were laid to rest ... A stranger to all creedal dogmas, as to all pretended community of life and spirit based on race, I have, through life, felt that I was above all, and quite simply, a Frenchman” (177–8).

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12 Ronald Bush argues in “The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/Literary Politics” that Eliot’s interest in anthropology was first aroused by his visit to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1908. While that is no doubt true, Eliot resisted the necessarily humanistic view of culture animating anthropology until very late. 13 In the lecture itself, Eliot was more cautious: I have, in all probability, made this lecture difficult by keeping your attention upon two points at once: the nature of metaphysical poetry in general involves both the resemblances and the differences between Donne and Dante. The differences involve a certain theory of the disintegration of the intellect in modern Europe. Therefore I would remind you that I am here concerned primarily with poetry, not with modern Europe and its progress or decline; but that if and when I speak of “disintegration,” “decay,” or “decline,” I am unconcerned with the emotional or moral co-efficient of these terms. The “disintegration” of which I speak may be evitable or inevitable, good or bad; to draw its optimistic or pessimistic conclusion is an occupation for prophets and makers of almanacs, of whom I am not one. (Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 158–9) 14 For a discussion of the “Volkisch” movement in Germany see Anderson Arajuo, Into the Vortex: The Cultural Politics of Eliot, Woolf, Lewis, and Pound, 1914–1939. 15 Eliot does not mention what it was that civilization had deprived the Melanesians of. Rivers is not so squeamish. The Melanesians were head hunters. That they sunk into a cultural funk because deprived of such a barbaric cultural practice rather complicates the issue – which was much the point of Rivers’ essay. Eliot found it in W. H. R. Rivers, Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia. 16 While it is widely believed that the democracies turned away would-be Jewish refugees, Rubinstein maintains in The Myth of Rescue that although “barriers to the entry of refugee Jews to most countries did exist ... these barriers came down once it became apparent, following Kristallnacht, that Hitler intended to expel virtually all Jews from Germany and brutalize unmercifully virtually all who remained.” He adds that probably “the most important single reason for the failure [of Jews] to emigrate is that most German Jews assumed that Nazi anti-Semitism would ... ‘blow-over’ once the Nazi government became institutionalized.”(20). 17 Once again Rubinstein offers some perspective on the contemporary perception of Nazi anti-Semitism: “With post-Holocaust hindsight, there is,

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of course, virtually no country which cannot be criticized for erecting pointlessly high barriers for those faced – it transpired – with certain death. Such a view is profoundly ahistorical, for no one at this time – that is, until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 – could foresee genocide as the end result of Nazi anti-Semitism” (41). On the infamous refusal of Cuba, the United States, and Canada to accept the 930 German-Jewish passengers on the German liner ss St. Louis, made famous in the movie Voyage of the Damned, Rubinstein points out that they were eventually offered sanctuary in Britain and France. While most of those landed in France perished in the Holocaust, Rubinstein has harsh words for those who construe their acceptance by the French as tantamount to a death sentence, for it assumes that “the leaders of France (with a standing army of 1.5 million men) Belgium and the Netherlands ... were blindly moronic (if not somehow anti-Semitic) for not realizing: (1) that Germany would overrun and conquer their countries; (2) that the Nazis would fundamentally reverse their policies from exiling Jews to imprisoning and killing them; (3) that, beginning three years later, the Jews of western Europe would be deported to extermination camps in Poland, something unimaginable by anyone in 1939” (62). 18 Lewis does not cite Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace on this point, but two later books – G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions (London: Gollancz) and C. E. M. Joad, Why War? (Harmondsworth: Penguin (1939) – were both critical of the Versailles Treaty as too severe on Germany and a leading cause of German aggression. Keynes’ book was published in 1919. It had special authority since he had been a member of the British delegation to Versailles and had resigned in protest over the terms imposed on the Germans. Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’ biographer, details the book’s enormous success and defends Keynes’ pillorying of the Treaty, against his critics (John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920, 392–400). Margaret MacMillan records that “public opinion in Britain and the United States increasingly swung round to the view that the peace settlements with Germany were deeply unfair.” However, she points out that the reparations Germany actually paid to France – which are often cited as contributing to the rise of Nazism – amounted to “slightly less than what France, with a much smaller economy, paid Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71” (1919, 479–80). Germany regularly defaulted on its payments, and in the end paid much less than was required by the Treaty.

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19 Kant’s “practical reason” was the instantiation in mankind of universal laws that governed the cosmos. In saying that his position was the reverse of Kant’s practical reason, Lewis is denying any such harmony between man and the cosmos.

conclusion 1 It is true that the drama and symphonic music possess the same traits of being collective productions. However, the dramatist and composer retained their pre-eminence in the creation of symphonies and plays. The scriptwriters for radio drama and movies typically had no such preeminence. Indeed, both media were parasitic on the existing body of literature, which they re-packaged for the new media. Although there were original radio plays and movie scripts, they were the exception rather than the rule – and even then, the directors and players were more prominent in the public mind than the authors.

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appendix

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appendix

Index

Académie Française 47 Action Française 68 Adorno, Theodor W. 41, 43, 263, 305 Aestheticism 29 Aiken, Conrad 22, 34 Akin, William A. 321 Aldington, Richard 83, 84, 106 American culture 43 Angell, Norman 14, 17, 92, 93, 114, 184, 209, 211, 259, 293; Can Government Cure Unemployment 14; The Great Illusion 14; Lewis on 15; Pound on 14, 15 Angioletti, G. B. 49 anti-Semitism 28, 30, 89, 107, 179, 212, 213, 220, 237, 254, 263–5, 267, 279, 283, 316n7, 329n10, 330n18, 332n3, 335nn17, 18; Italian anti-Semitic laws 57 appeasement 201, 219 Arendt, Hanna: Totalitarianism 139, 149, 150, 323n7 Arnold, Matthew 89–90; and atheism 155; Culture and Anarchy

126, 127; and Eliot 193, 232, 233, 240, 250, 255, 259–61, 326; Eliot’s affinity with 127; Eliot on 164, 327; influence 126; Lewis on 127, 282; and Pound 25, 243; and religion 164 art: as politics 63; as diagnostic 33 Asher, Kenneth 162, 165, 310n5, 326n19 Atlantic Monthly 71 Atlee, Clement 195 Austria 56 Badoglio, General 328n7 Baldwin, Stanley 131 Barrès, Maurice 37, 87 Bedford, Duke of 107 Belgion, Montgomery 47, 309n24, 310n5 Benda, Julien 82, 118, 183, 315nn3–5, 334n11; Belphégor 86, 90, 91, 94, 152, 315nn3, 4; Bergsonisme, ou une Philosophie de la Mobilité 87; Eliot on 87–91, 94, 95; La Trahison des Clercs 13,

354

Index

47, 89, 94, 95, 152, 315n6; Lewis on 96, 90; Pound on 87 Bergson, Henri 12, 37, 38, 73, 117, 118, 220, 320n22, 334n11; and Benda 88; and Eliot 47, 89, 316n9; and Lewis 91, 118, 124, 125, 129, 319n20, 320n22, 323n9; Pound on 87 Bernstein, Eduard 311n6 Bolshevik Revolution 12 Bonaparte, Napoleon 120 Bradley, F. H. 12 Bradshaw, David 319n21 Brailsford, Henry N. 17, 92, 93, 114, 184, 209, 211, 259, 293; The War of Steel and Gold 14 Braque, Georges 74 British General Strike 54 Browning, Robert 35; Sordello, 77 Bruhl, Lévy 37 Brzeska, Henri Gaudier 57 Bush, President George 42, 259 Bush, Ronald 309n23, 314n14; The Genesis of Pound’s “Three Cantos” 314n14; “The Presence of the Past” 335n12 Cambridge University 22 Canada 66 Carpenter, Edward: Pound on 220 Casillo, Robert xi Catholic Church 44 Chace, Wm. M. xi Chamberlain, Neville 201 Charcot, Jean-Martin 33, 34, 73; and Nordau 33 Childs, Donald 12 China 71 Chinitz, David 10

Chisholm, Lawrence 72 Churchill, Winston 65 Civilisation: idea of 49; new civilization 52 Cohen, Bela 79 Cohrssen, Hans 228 Collier, Richard 223 communism xiii, 6–9, 12; appeal 199, 267; Dennis on 299; Eliot on 188, 190, 191, 203; and fascism 146, 292; the International 46; International Brigade 141; Mensheviks 110; neglect of 64; Pound on 171; pseudo-religion 216, 263; revisionists 64; scholarly attitudes toward 17, 65; Soviet version 276; threat of 53, 106, 134; utopianism of 140. See also individual authors Confucius 75 Cornford, F. M.: Nietzschean 75 Coughlin, Father Charles 231, 287 Coyle, Michael xi Curtius, E. R. 49, 325n16 D’Annunzio, Gabriele x, 79, 85 D’Aquino, Iva Togari: “Tokyo Rose” 285 Dakin, A. H. 162 Dante Alighieri 83; Commedia 83 Dasenbrook, Reed Way xi De Gaulle, Charles 65 Deleuze, Gilles 24; A Thousand Plateaus 24 Dennis, Lawrence 146, 148, 286, 292, 317n14; approval of fascism, Nazism, and communism 299; on capitalism 297; on

Index

Hitler 294; Pound on 295–7; on President Roosevelt 294; on slavery 298; and technology 295; and Wilfrid Pareto 298 Depression, The xiv, 12 Derrida, Jacques 126, 301n5 Dial, The 60 Dobrée, Bonamy 87 Doolittle, Hilda 83 Douglas, Major 16, 121, 137, 168; in Cantos 176; Eliot on 179; J. M. Keynes on 174, 175; Lewis on 178, 179; at New Age 169, 170; Pound on 16, 78, 170–2, 177 Durkheim, Emile 37 Eagleton, Terry: on Eliot and fascism 143 Edison, Thomas 223 Edwards, Lyford P.: on Lewis and fascism 105, 106 Einstein, Albert 60, 194; Lewis on 38, 124 Eisenhower, President Dwight D. 15; on military industrial complex 302n6 Eliot, T. S. passim, x; agrarianism 5, 188–90, 193, 198 200, 327n4; baptism 36; disassociated sensibility 35; isolated as expatriate 198; on Lewis 197, 198; on the mythological method 60, 61; on Sacre du Printemps 60; on Spanish Civil War 196, 197; on Wyndham Lewis 101, 102 works: Clark Lectures 35, 257; Criterion, The 13; “Commentary”

355

186, 188, 194, 196–201, 214, 316n11, 319n21, 323n6; Dante 89; “Dry Salvages” 179; “East Coker” 6, 147, 179, 189, 250; “For Lancelot Andrewes” 68, 161, 325n16; “Gerontion” 128; “Hollow Men, The” 128; “Idealism of Julien Benda, The” 95; “Metaphysical Poets, The” 35; “Minor Metaphysicals, The” 185; “Modern Dilemma, The” 190, 263; Murder in the Cathedral 12; Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats 10; Review of Reflections on Violence 166; The Rock 10; Sacred Wood, The 87; “Sweeney Agonistes” 5, 6, 10, 276, 306n11; This American World, Preface 26, 27, 41, 44; “Thoughts After Lambeth” 131, 187, 243, 262; “Tradition and Individual Talent” 31, 50, 88, 258; Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 89; Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, The 36, 335n13; Waste Land, The 18, 38, 49, 91, 128, 145, 162, 257, 263 Eliot, Vivien 47, 203, 313n11; flees to Rome 202, 203 Elizabeth I, Queen 120 Engels, Friedrich 41 Epstein, Jacob 72 Europe 20; Union of 51 Fabianism 27 Faguet, Émile 37, 306n13 Fascism passim, 6, 52; American response 235, 243; appeal of 7, 12, 17, 52, 93, 97, 98, 199, 211; Baldwin on 131; and Commu-

356

Index

nism 149, 150; Corporatism 112; defined 139, 141; Dennis on 287, 290–2; Eagleton on 143; Eliot on 42, 48, 96, 131, 158, 159, 161, 167, 197, 203, 205, 251; Era Fascista 85; Fascist Party 70; Ferguson on 97, 98; Gasset on 183, 184; Griffin on 139, 140; Horkheimer on 41, 263; Jameson on 150, 152; and Lewis 28; Lewis on 57, 100, 104–6, 110, 122, 156, 267, 268, 270; Mussolini on 85, 96, 159, 194; and Nazism 7, 28; New York debate on 85, 97; Pound on 222, 229, 233, 243, 248, 278, 279, 296; and Sorel 111; Sternhell on 141, 142; Vincent Sherry on 53; and William Dudley Pelley 287, 288. See also individual authors Fenollosa, Ernest 71, 75, 121, 305n9, 313n12 Fenollosa, Mary 314 Ferguson, Niall x, 84, 85, 97, 98, 217, 219, 225; on Hitler and FDR 225; Nazi Sympathizers 107 Fernandez, Ramon: on Eliot 87, 88 Ficino, Marsilio 77 Fischer, Klaus P. 219, 224, 329; Nazi Germany: A New History 201 Fisher, Irving 228 Fiume 79, 85, 111, 314nn15,16 Ford, Ford Madox 21 Ford, President Gerald 285 France, Anatole 37 France 46, 49, 56, 73, 89, 97, 216,

273, 286, 292; declaration of war 267; Dennis on 293; Eliot on 256, 264; fall of 329; and fascism 216; German reparations 336n19; imperialism 69, 85, 92, 93, 150, 239; Jews in 336; Lewis on 17, 212, 215, 283; occupation 164; Pound on 78, 87, 230, 241, 244; reactionaries in 83, 86; Spanish Civil War 196; Vichy government 47; war industry 238 Frederick, J. George 321n1 Freikorps 46 Freud, Sigmund 33, 34 Frobenius, Leo 39, 75, 121, 226, 251; and Spengler 37, 307 Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History 44 Futurism 24, 28, 57, 59–61, 66, 70, 72, 73, 104, 109, 122, 123, 146, 242, 276, 314n16, 325n17; “Futurist Manifesto” 56, 66, 304n5. See also Marinetti Gandhi, Mahatma 223 Gasset, Ortega Y 8, 23, 182–6, 188, 191–3, 199, 208, 210, 211, 221, 258, 259, 274; Eliot on 261; Revolt of the Masses 8, 182, 322n5, 327n2 Germany 15; Spartacus revolt 45, 46, 54, 79, 333n8; Third Reich 31; Weimar Government 47. See also Hitler Goebbels, Joseph 11 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von 39 Gorbachev, Mikhail 42 Gordon, Lyndall 34, 165, 326n19

Index

Gourmont, Remy de 12 Graves, Robert 135 Greaves, H. R. G.: Eliot on 194, 195 Griffin, Roger 111, 139–41, 143, 154, 317n14 Guattari, Felix 24 Guest, Haden 203 Haldane, J. B. S. 113 Halifax, Viscount 107 Hall, Donald 25 Hanel, Wolfgang: on Rauschning 289 Harding, Jason 143, 254, 309n21, 310n5, 319n21, 325n16, 326n19, 328n6 Hardt, Michael 23; Empire 23 Harrison, Jane: Nietzschean 75 Harrison, John xi, 310n5 Harvard University 22 Heidegger, Martin x, 65, 125, 327n1; Nietzschean 75; Sein und Zeit 181 Herzl, Theodor 31 Heydon, John 77 Heyman, C. David xi Heymman, Katherine Ruth 76 Hinkle, Eleanor 22 historicism 5, 26, 39, 41, 304n6 Hitler, Adolf xiv, 6, 52, 65, 120, 122, 150, 198, 249, 273, 316n6, 323n8, 329n12; anti- Communist 200; anti-Semitic Laws 201; Beerhall Putsch 333n8; and Catholicism 265; chancellor 168, 224; Charlie Chaplin on 269; compared to Stalin 98; and democracy 273; democratically elected 331n25; election 97; Eliot on

357

206, 232, 250, 260; English admirers of 107; fear of Bolsheviks 330n18; Final Solution 330n19; and Futurism 146; and Franco 323n8; on French and English 50; and Heidegger 181; and homosexuality 329n12; Jewish perception of 335n18; Kristallnacht 202; and Lawrence Dennis 290, 292, 294, 299; Lewis on 6, 15, 16, 107, 136, 181, 200, 211–15, 217, 219, 220, 263–5, 268–270, 277, 311n7; Lewis’s support of 144; Mein Kampf 330n16; nationalism 92, 239; and Nietszche 181; paganism 28; painter 329n13; personal ruler 233; popular leader 11; Pound on 221, 241, 244, 245, 249; racism 5; and Rauschning 288, 289; rhetoric of 70; and Roosevelt 225; and Spanish Civil War 141, 196; and Stalin 323n8 Horkheimer, Max: Dialectic of Enlightenment 41 Housman, A. E.: A Shropshire Lad 21 Hughes, H. Stuart 307n14 Hulme, T. E. x, 21, 40, 42, 55, 57, 58, 65, 72, 82, 83, 108, 118, 129, 130, 131, 308n18; “Humanism and the Religious Attitude” 130 Hutchinson, Mary 47 Huxley, Aldous 112, 113; Lewis on 113, 194 Huxley, Julian: Lewis on 327n3 Huysmans, Joris Karl 30; Là Bas 30; A Rebours 30

358

Index

Ibsen, Henrik 30 ideogram 71, 73 industrialism 14 internment 289 Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day 107 Italy 13, 16. See also Mussolini, fascism James, Henry 20; Portrait of a Lady 21 James, William 35 Jameson, Frederic xi, 150–2, 155 Janet, Pierre 33; “disintegrated” personality 34 Japan 17, 48, 50; Pearl Harbor 72 Jaurès, Jean 46 Joyce, James 308n18, 311n7; birth date 65; Eliot on 32, 60; Lewis on 123, 134, 275; Ulysses 32 Joyce, William, Lord “Haw Haw” 285 Julius, Anthony 309n24, 328n6 Kahn, Otto 223 Kandinsky, Wassily 27, 61 Kautsky, Johan 110, 115 Kenner, Hugh xi Keynes, J. M. 92, 174, 175; The Economic Consequences of the Peace 46, 336n19; Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 178 Kojecky, Roger 167, 326n19 Kolakowski, Leszek 7, 110, 111, 140, 309n19; Main Currents of Marxism 27 Krutch, Joseph Wood; Eliot on 194

Laski, Harold 195; Eliot on 163, 188, 232 Lasserre, M. 87, 315n2 Lawrence, D. H. x, 34, 147, 148 Le Bon, Gustav 301n5 Left Wings over Europe 215, 217, 218 Lenin, Vladimir Ilych 6, 7, 16, 70, 106, 115, 152, 233, 249, 273, 276, 309; birth date 65; Dennis on 149; Lewis on 110, 118, 156; Pound on 180, 225, 229 Lentricchia, Frank xii Lewis, Wyndham passim, x; 3–5, 6, 10–12, 14, 15, 18, 28, 30, 31, 38, 41, 50, 51; aesthetic views 53; agrarianism 206; art and politics 63; and fascism 70; futurism 57; hubris 53; on Pound 61; on technology 102; Vorticism 59, 62 works: The Apes of God 30, 105, 128, 182, 281, 282; The Art of Being Ruled 28, 90, 100, 116, 143, 144, 146, 158, 167, 209, 211, 280, 301n5, 323nn5, 9, 324n15; Blast 61; Blasting and Bombardiering 57, 58, 130, 135, 136, 185, 219, 220, 269, 311n7; Count Your Dead 207, 215, 217–20; Doom of Youth 207, 214, 215, 265; The Enemy 38, 106, 121, 318n17; Hitler 151, 178, 207, 211–13, 218, 220, 265, 281, 282; The Hitler Cult 15, 308n18; Left Wings Over Europe 15, 207, 215, 217, 218, 220, 331n25; The Jews, Are They

Index

Human? 15, 16, 254, 264, 267, 303n7; The Lion and the Fox 10, 102, 163, 197, 198, 207, 232, 247, 249, 333n7; Time and Western Man 28, 30, 38, 59, 70, 90, 91, 101, 105, 109, 115–17, 122, 125, 130, 133, 136, 168, 181, 210, 271, 273, 280; The Writer and the Absolute 17, 86, 113, 125, 275, 327n1 Liebnecht, Karl 46 Lindbergh, Charles: Hitler Admirer 217 Little Review, The 21 Lobb, Edward 326n21 Loisy, Alfred 37 Londonderry, Lord of: Ourselves and Germany 107 Longenbach, James xii Lope da Vega: Las Almenas de Toro 77 Luxembourg, Rosa 46; birth date 65 MacDiarmud, Lucy xi Machiavelli, Nicolo 11; The Prince 11 MacMillan, Margaret 54; Italian Futurist Party 56; Paris 1919 54 Margolis, John D. 162, 165, 325n18, 326n19 Marinetti, Emilio Filippo Tommaso 24, 25, 48, 103, 146, 276; breaks with Mussolini 57; and fascism 28; Futurist Manifesto 24, 55, 56, 66, 67; Italian Futurist Party 70; Lewis on 38, 57, 123, 132; non-combatant 58;

359

Pound on 61; and speed 49, 59, 60; and technology 123;War: The World’s Only Hygiene 56. See also Futurism Maritain, Jacques 47 Marx, Karl 41, 73, 115, 118, 119, 141, 152, 265, 277, 293; Communist Manifesto 64; and the Depression 192; Eliot on 163, 232; The German Ideology 118, 119, 124; and Lenin 276; Lewis on 135, 137, 156, 213; on religion 55; on technology 123, 124 Marxism 5, 7, 12, 119, 255; in the Academy 64, 65; alienation 251; Eliot on 251; levelling 9; Lewis on 106, 117, 317n14; Pound on 277; utopian 9 Massis, Henri 47, 49, 52, 309n22; Defence de l’occident 47; Eliot on 47, 48; Les Idées restent 48; Lewis on 50; on Western decline 49, 50 Matisse, Henri 37 Matthews, T. S. 67; Great Tom 67 Maurras, Charles 47, 92, 94, 130, 151, 155, 202, 204, 216, 221, 242, 249, 270, 310n5, 315n5, 325nn16, 18, 326n19; and Action Francaise 68, 166, 167; Eliot on 137, 159, 161–5, 167, 232, 326n22; and fascism 250; and Julien Benda 89; Lewis on 167, 168; Papal condemnation 161; Pound on 68; “Prologue to an Essay on Criticism” 165, 166; and religion 164; Royalism 198, 206, 250 McClure, S. S. 85

360

Index

McLuhan, Marshall 44, 312n9 Medici, Cosimo 73, 120 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 126 Meyers, Jeffrey 57, 101, 105, 144, 167, 247, 264, 318n16 Monro, Harold 34 Monroe, Harriet 71 Morley, Frank 67 Morrison, Paul xi Mosley, Oswald 144, 178, 187, 188, 213, 216, 217, 283; Eliot on 203 Mowrer, Edgar Ansell 26, 41–7, 80, 114, 126, 186, 258, 308nn16, 17, 327n3; This American World 26; Triumph and Turmoil 26 Munich Agreement 201 Mussolini, Benito xiv, 6, 69, 96, 98, 140, 146, 152, 200, 220, 221, 233, 237, 273, 287, 290; American view of 97; anti-intellectual 241; anti-Semitic Laws 201; atheist 155; belligerence 150; birth date 65; as charmer 223; compared to Roosevelt 224, 225; corporatism 111, 112, 297; and D’Annunzio 314n15; Dennis on 290, 294; “The Doctrine of Fascism” 194; Eliot on 194, 232, 249, 309n22; Ethiopian gas attack 328n7; Ethiopian invasion 196, 309n22; on fascism 96; Fascist Putsch 85; granddaughter 303n10; Lewis on 104, 106–8, 110, 115, 118, 135, 143, 156, 163, 211, 216, 217, 219, 248, 249; and Margherita Safarti 317n12; Milan speech 229;

nationalism 92, 239; Oswald Mosley on 144; overthrow 233; “Political and Social Doctrine” 160, 325n17; Pound discovers 180, 241, 242; Pound on 222, 223, 225, 226, 228–31, 248–50, 275, 277, 281, 332n26; Pound on interview with 224; Pound supports 236, 237, 239; Pound’s admiration 70, 74; Pound’s first praise of 221; Pound’s interview with 221, 222; and Sorel 108, 146; and Spanish Civil War 141, 196; Stanley Baldwin on 131; and technocracy 145, 146; “Volitionist Economics” 228 Naidu, Sarojini 71, 313n12 Nänny, Max 312n9 Napoleon, Bonaparte 69 Nazism 15; “Final Solution” 52. See also individual authors Negri, Antonio 23 New Age, The 67 New Historicism ix-x Nichols, Robert xii Nietzsche, Friedrich 30; Birth of Tragedy 75 Nitti, Vincenzio 85 Nordau, Max 32, 34, 36, 37, 47, 87, 118, 183; Degeneration 29–31; and Eliot 32, 33, 306n10; and Gasset 183; and Lewis 118 Norman, Montagu 98 North, Michael xi, 44; “Eliot, Lukács, and the Politics of Modernism” 65; The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound 7, 8, 304n6, 314n17

Index

oligarchies 3, 9 Orage, A. R. 29, 67, 169, 173, 176, 304n3, 319n21. See also The New Age, Social Credit Ottoman Empire 85 Oxford University 22 Pareto, Vilfredo 293, 299 Paris Review 25 Péguy, Charles 37 Peter the Great 120 Picasso, Pablo 27 Plimpton, George 25 Por, Odon 228 Pound, Ezra passim; aesthetic views 59, 60, 62, 63; anti-Christian 68; anti-communist 68; anti-democratic 69; and antiSemitism 332n2; archaism 75; artist as herald of the future, 67, 71; Blast 28; on corporatism 297; elitism 74, 75; on D’Annunzio and Fiume 79; epic ambition 76; Fenollosa notes 71, 73; and Futurism 57, 59, 60; Gaudier-Brzeska 36; Hamilton College 76; leaves America 55; on Hobson 330n17; on imperialism 80; on Jefferson 332n27; on Kandinsky 61; on logic 331n23; on machines 73; noncombatant 58; and Olivia Agresti 332nn2, 3; pro democracy 64; radio talks 332n1; reactionary 64, 65; and T. S. Eliot 3, 333nn5, 6; and vorticism 58, 59, 61, 62; Wabash College 55; in Washington 331n22; and World War I 74, 77, 78; and

361

Wyndham Lewis 61, 333n5; Zeitgeist 74 works: “Affirmations” 36, 67, 72, 75; “Affirmations II” 63; A Lume Spento 55, 31; “The Art of Being Ruled” 3, 59; Cantos, The 13; Collected Early Poems 21; “Fungus and Dry Rot” xiii; “Gaudier-Brzeska” 72, 74, 75; Here’s Your Chance” 52; “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” 25, 78; “The Island of Paris: A Letter” 87; “A Letter from Ezra Pound” 52; “Moeurs Contemporaines” 21; Patria Mia 20, 29, 22, 23, 43, 69, 126, 145, 304n5, 313n12; “Points” 331n20; “Primary Form” 62; “The Renaissance” 71, 75; “The Revolt of Intelligence” 79; “Three Cantos” 76; “Volitionist Economics” 227; “What America Has to Live Down” 67, 68, 78, 168 Principe, Gavril 93 prohibition 20 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 105; and anarchism 141; and fascism 142; Lewis on 109, 115, 122, 136, 146, 156, 266, 324n15; Pound on 229 Quennell, Peter 32; Baudelaire and the Symbolists 32 Rainey, Lawrence S. xi Rauschning, John Rogge 288–90 Read Herbert 36, 89, 101, 137, 163, 257 Remarque, Eric Maria 135

362

Index

Renaissance 69 Röhm, Ernst 329n12 Roosevelt, President F. D. R. 11; inaugural speech 1933 224; Lewis on 232; Pound on 231 Rowland, Dominic 315nn3, 6 Russell, George 40 Sarfati, Margharita 28 Sartre, J.-P. 126, 327n1 Sassoon, Siegfried 135 Schacht, Hjalmar 98 Schiff, Sydney 101 Schönberg, Arnold 74 Schramek, Abraham 162, 326n20 Scott, Howard 85 Selassie, Haile: Lewis on 135 Seymour-Jones, Carole 47, 203; Painted Shadow 47 Shaw, George Bernard: and Eliot 31, 32; Eliot on 96; Lewis on 105, 275; Major Barbara 238; and The New Age 169, 313n10; The Sanity of Art 29, 31 Sheehan, James J. 14 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 5 Sherry, Vincent 53; Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism 53 Siegfried, André 80, 81, 114, 126, 258, 303n1, 314n17; America Comes of Age: A French Analysis 80 Silone, Ignazio x Skidelsky, Robert 144, 217, 336n19 Social Credit 177–8. See also Douglas, Orage Sorel, George xiv, 19, 83, 105, 108, 109, 111, 112, 115, 118,

141, 142, 146, 156, 301n5, 324n15; birth date 65; on class 111; Eliot on 108; Lewis on 108, 112; and Mussolini 28, 297; Reflections of Violence 108, 166; syndicalism 111 Soviet Union 46, 85 Spanish Civil War 97, 141, 142, 184, 195, 199, 201; Jacques Maritain on 199; Lewis on 218; Pound on 239 Spengler, Oswald 26, 40, 47, 48, 118, 125, 168, 183, 293, 305n7; Decline of the West 23, 37, 86, 307n14 Stalin, Joseph 11; massacre of the Ukrainian Kulaks 54 Steffens, Lincoln 84, 226, 229 Stein, Gertrude: Lewis on 123 Sternhell, Zeev 6, 111, 139, 141, 142, 154, 305n8, 317n14 Stevenson, Robert Louis 34; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 34 stock market crash 54 Stravinsky, Igor 60 Svarny, Eric xiv Swedenborg 62 symbolism 29 Symons, Arthur 32 Tawney, R. H. 195 technocracy 85, 145, 146, 321n1 technological developments 66–7; delight in machines 73 Thayer, Schofield 86 Thompson, Neville:The AntiAppeasers 201, 202 Toffler, Alvin 117

Index

Toynbee, Arnold, 189 Tratner, Michael xii, 301n5 Tucker, Benjamin 29 Turner, Harry 51; Much Ado 51 tyranny 9 Valéry, Paul 48 Versailles, Peace of xiii, 17, 19, 42, 46, 58, 85, 138, 180, 215, 239; “Fourteen Points” 42 Vorticism 57, 58, 61, 63, 72, 109, 123 Wadsworth, Edward 73 war: casualties 77; Cold War 17; economic cost 178; futility of 14; Great War 12, 19, 54; imperial conflict 69; interwar period 17; watershed 242; World War II 12 Ward, Leo 162, 167, 249; and

363

Maurras 161–3, 166, 167 Warhol, Andy 10 Weber, Mark 289 Weber, Max 73, 81 Wells, H. G. 27, 313n10; Eliot on 96, 316n11; and fascism 96; Lewis on 275; Mr. Britling Sees It Through 93; The War that Will End War 93 Westminster, Duke of 107 Whistler, James 20 Whitehead, Alfred North 38 Wiener, Norbert 39 Williams, William Carlos 100, 172 Wilson, President Woodrow 42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 65 Woods, J. H. 22 Yeats, W.B.: “The Second Coming” 40; A Vision 40