forgotten poets - the 1970s

Additamenta

Notes on peripheral work for the project on “poetry of the 1970s”.

John Smith. It was necessary to read Smith because he was made a Poetry Book Society choice twice, in 1958 and 1973, and this is probably unique. I started with Entering Rooms (1973), which includes the poem 'The Prologue'. This describes someone entering a featureless white room and being unable to detect small features because the white blanks out differences. So the human is in an artificial environment, one where all information is withheld and has to be acquired by sensory exploration.

Curiously enough you will at first refrain from touching it

Though unaware of the reason. You will kneel down

And gaze upon it for a long time. Because there are no shadows

You will not at once discover that it possesses a small groove

Encircling it some one and a half inches from the top.

Not until you touch it with your fingers will you know this.

So it may be a box, a box with no fastener.

However the lid, if it is a lid, refuses to lift

Though refusal, for such an inanimate block, is a word

Too human and personal, say rather it will not move.

Therefore it may merely be a solid cube of wood.

This is intriguing, although it is striking that he has devised a white cube without connecting to the “white cube” which was so much discussed in avant garde art. My guess is that this is a significant poem but Smith has not gone through that door into real mystery and the unknown because he felt alone, he was not in contact with a community of experimental writers who would have both competed with him and encouraged him to go beyond. It is not a great poem, because its real charge is conceptual but it is weighed down by a literal description of the space, which discourages us from conceptual exploration. My feeling about the book is that he went into the unknown but came back too quickly. I certainly liked that poem. It reminds me of 'The Cut Pages', by Roy Fisher.

I looked also at Excursus in Autumn (1958). The wrapper has a design deriving from the “Festival Design Group”, using physical forms acquired from looking through a microscope– compelling for me. It looks like a textile print. The text around it has familiar themes from the 1950s reaction – the poet is meritorious because he has abandoned modernity and thinking about ideas and has no ambition. So much for the sales tactics! You shouldn’t swallow these, and indeed Smith offers us an 18-part poem on the life of the Buddha which hardly fits into 1950s-style restrictions. He wasn't in revolt – but he also hadn't taken on the cultural politics of the 1950s, he isn't using the set themes of the time, the clichés of the academic poets born in the 1920s. JS was born in 1924, and this was already his fourth book (omitting one early one). In 1990 he published a book or pamphlet, 'For Paul Klee'. Depressing in a way – I mean that, if he had accepted in 1948 that poetry had to be MODERN in the same way that Paul Klee's art was MODERN, he might have been a more powerful poet (even if the conservatives around him would have made his life hell). Further – Klee was a generation older than him, the classic formulation would be to get with art which is totally modern and also from your generation, your contemporaries. There is a poem, already in 1958, about a Klee etching:

Now see: two mandarins in this desert meet

Naked and bald as coots; their spindle-shanks

Spider the sand with flat and horny feet;

A scrubby hair spouts from their scrawny flanks.

Who could suppose that scarecrow shapes like these

Would court such ceremonial niceties

As to consider their respective ranks?

This isn’t bad, but it's so conventional compared to Klee even though he is providing the subject matter (which is two people meeting when each thinks that the other is of higher rank). The ability to make an argument in tight verse is astounding, I don't think people can do that any more. John Holloway or Roy Fuller could do that. I think “formalist” is the word, and as Homberger says this was on the way out by 1964. The book also includes 'Winter Morning':

The razors of the wind have shaved the sky
To apple brightness of astringent green
And on that glass rock-crystal geese are strung
Frozen like sharp stars necklacing the sun
Till midday melts the wires on which they hang
And to the swan-white woods they squawk and fly.

Well, this is good. We can't deny that. It has the qualities of decorum and repressed tension you look for in Fifties poetry. but it doesn’t suggest something great. I don't want to push Smith back out of history, but this isn't going to rewrite the story of that Twenties-born generation. The symmetry of the verse gives it a serenity which poetry no longer has – the impersonality fixes it into position. The love poems don't attempt wisdom and this gives them a vulnerability. The serene framework gives us a serene view of uncertainty, frustration, vulnerability. The framework doesn’t have to shake because the subject is excited. The love has a reality outside the person feeling it. This may be because it can have a life longer than the short time frame of self-consciousness. Love songs of the era before rock and roll are out of fashion but they still bear listening to. There was a selected poems (1948 to 82) which includes a long poem, new in 1982, in what looks like a formalist and avant garde style. I only got a brief look at this, it looked original, witty, but not a game changer.

He was a literary agent. This meant he was making money for writers. He was also editor of Poetry Review for two or three years, and no doubt published a lot of poets. This kind of thing makes you friends. I think this goes some way to explain his double victory with the PBS panel. I am not saying that the books aren't worth reading, rather that they aren’t triumphs and we don't have to rewrite history to accommodate them. He doesn’t feature in the anthologies and this is a wrong outcome – you can’t simply rely on the anthologies and a mainstream anthology may not capture all the good mainstream poets.

I also read 'Artorius', by John Heath-Stubbs. I read at least one review when this came out, in 1973, and have managed to spend 45 years avoiding it. But finally, I read it. It is almost as bad as I expected. It is not going in my list of “long poems of the 1970s”. It is difficult to rehabilitate Heath-Stubbs – Jim Keery included a poem of his in JK's (as yet unpublished) Apocalypse. An Anthology which I rather liked. Working out why someone didn't write well involves too many unknown quantities – but Heath-Stubbs was gay and unable to write frankly about his feelings – and too culturally conservative to put real energy into a revolt against social and stylistic norms. Myth, specifically Christian myth, was the most likely path for him to write about his deepest concerns in a linguistic pattern distanced and ornate enough to disguise the personal origins. He did write about myths and saints, quite a lot. But myth was so much the special subject of the Apocalyptics, and he felt so trapped as a conservative of a generation which was swept away by aggressive conservatives in the early Fifties, that this promising solution area was fraught with powerful inhibitions (and not able to offer a release from inhibitions). George Barker was his natural model (and the collected is dedicated to him with “homage”), but the chances of him writing barkerian poetry were blocked off behind mine-fields and marshes. He was not a courageous writer. His natural bent was to regress to the 19^th century, not to take on the 20^th with its alarming demands for frankness, sincerity, and individuality. He was forthright in conversation, there is that famous anecdote of him saying to Martin Seymour-Smith “I am a Christian, a homosexual and a poet”, while the vessel with the dinner in it heated up and exploded. If he had written poetry about the validity of being a Christian homosexual, it could have been great poetry, but of course he never did that. I can't really write about him as a gay poet because he had walled it off too successfully. (Martin was there with someone, can’t now remember who.)

The poem in 'Apocalypse. An Anthology' is 'The Hill', published 1946:

All night long in the garden under the cypresses

I heard the song of the childish dead, chirping

With black dried lips, like crickets in the beams,

And the silence of the stream whose watery tongue is gone.

But now with a sound of trumpets

The sun, of golden feathers, beating his wings

Through the granular ether, out of his eastern cave

Of darkness comes – a bird, whose iron beak

Is pointed at my dry and singing brain.

And so early in the morning I climb to this hill

Islanded in blue intense of the circling air,

Hearing only the long melancholy line of the shepherd’s piping

Or calling to his dog down there in the valley.

I couldn't work out what the plot of this poem is, it sounds like part of the New Testament but the pattern has been broken up and re-fitted wrongly. The early poems at around pages 219 to 330 of the Collected are worth thinking about. Not 'Artorius'. Those poems are apparently based on known myths but are also unparaphrasable – the plots go wrong. The obscurity provides a vague area in which original events can emerge, protected by half-light. It is as if we had a collection of Classical paintings of saints being martyred and Greek gods doing various extreme things, in exotic landscapes, and they were being subtly repainted, not to get rid of the naked bodies and the extreme experiences, but to change the story and make it even less natural. But also – the poem fits perfectly into Apocalypse. An Anthology and Heath-Stubbs' repeated and petulant cry that he had nothing to do with them is denying what everyone else can see. Anxiety and obscurity fight their way to centre stage and the rest is hidden behind them.
Francis King's autobiography has an anecdote about Oxford poets circa 1945. John Lehmann, the most influential publisher of new literature, was visiting Oxford, and asked for a young poet to stay in the same house with him to act as guide. Lehmann was owed a lot of favours and liked to spread his favours around. The top boys had a meeting to deal with this, and the solution found was to offer Heath-Stubbs. Even Lehmann wouldn't make a pass at him, he wasn't good-looking enough.

The book I wrote about the 1970s filled up and material got squeezed out. Some of the most neglected material was part of this, so it is going to stay neglected. Let me just mention 'Lusus', by George MacBeth – some of his best work.

B.C. Leale (1930-2018) seems to have engaged intensively in poetry but did not publish a book until 1984, when two came out –Leviathan and The Colours of Ancient Dreams. He published in many magazines – 40 are credited in Leviathan. A New and Selected Poems is said to be in preparation, but no actual books have appeared since 1984. I came across his name in a review by Peter Porter – I was going through all his reviews in the on-line archive of The Observer. Leale was part of The Group in the Sixties and Porter evidently knew him. I say this because Leale does not seem to crop up in any of the anthologies. (An exception is the Group anthology, in the Sixties.) Leale emphatically belongs with the terse, high-energy, and even violent poets. Leviathan is named for a poem about a whale which ends the book:

holy oil burning on the rim of night

baleful eye we would banish

down a forgotten hatchway

a cachalot engraved on paper

[…]

flailing white foundry rounding

on earth's emptiness

ivory nail scarring

the dark slate of the eternal.

The word appears again:

Hotels Royal, Imperial, Grand –

stranded leviathans drying out

at the city’s dead centre.

Furs, confections of feathers,

so gracefully taken,

jammed on hooks.

(‘Lost Worlds’)

The aesthetic is fairly obvious. The language is cut right down to allow primal and violent processes to emerge, and the main goal is to be kinetic. At page 49 we have two poems, one 20 words long and one 22 words long. Leale almost patented the one-word line. Ethics and psychological nuances are cut away – the objects or impact traces have to speak for themselves. This is not exactly unknown in the Sixties, but if Hughes, Harsent and MacBeth were so successful doing it, and coming out with ‘shots’ which had the impact of action cinema or advertisements, it was something the era wanted. Leale had realised the logic of the kinetic, startlingly so, and it is hard to see why he did not achieve a reputation. These poems have an instantaneous hit, even if that involves a touch of the perverse and the violent. They simply have a modern aesthetic. Take this account of a musician:

Goes out for a snack

or to write up his memoirs

or to crash the barriers of sound

in a jet that feathers down to Africa.

He hunts the last of

visible wildnotes in the life-mask

of Stravinsky or merely

finds a locked room

in which he's sitting

in Paris in London in New York:

bullet/bone shield/brain high-pitched shearing/dismembering.

Heifetz listens at a lager glass

to a pacific

whisper of foam.

(‘Visible Wildnotes’)

This reminds me of Jeremy Reed. The poem catches people in brief, shrill, instants; but that is not necessarily to delete their characters, rather their unavowed passions are caught as if by a light that cuts through flesh and cultural defences. The belief in the kinetic leads to the damage associated with high speed – a way of generating form. The passage a street of speed-/vibrated faces seems to encapsulate his view of the world – the special world visible when moving at speed. He had a photographer's eye but was more interested in motion than in a still moment.

Colours is a collection of surrealist poems – hard-hitting but somehow academic. I can't really explain their lack of impact, perhaps it is due to habituation on my part. Even the cover looks like dada graphics of the 1920s rather than graphics of today. The proposal to publish two books in one year involved differentiation, so this differs from Leviathan even if the poems in that book are closely related to Colours. It includes the poem "Fouquet’s”:

tweezerings of iced

volcanoes. Tumbrils whirl. Delicate

lit spindles. At Fouquet’s you replace your glass

excessively (a gramme of strength

gone from you). It’s charged with a pale deluge

of sipped grape. The imagination's Venice

crusted in snow.

The Piazza brimming with an unspilt light.

The sky’s gondola riding a harbour of stars.

You step into the street drilled by its

rough lexical strata.

Also, what seems to be a text found by cutting-up a Barbara Cartland novel:

The Duke walked through the shrubs holding his

big Balls and Receptions right on the edge of the sea.

Anoushka looked up at him, her eye no longer

propped against the side of the balcony.

Their kiss took a long time while the Duke

paid some of his tailor's bills

Under a glass sky (1975?)) is described by a bookseller as “concrete Poetry”. This would correlate, as most surrealist poets in the 70s surely did concrete work as well. But booksellers are not tied down by mere fact.

Porter said about Colours: "Smiles, cameras, glass, blood, murder, Paris and composers dominate this book. There are lots of good jokes but some fine seriousness as well." I am relieved that Porter also finds the surrealist poems academic (he says "quirky, old-fashioned look").

And about Leviathan: His ideal miniature would be a grenade and language for him is certainly booby-trapped. Porter quotes an entire poem, ‘Der Heiligenschein’:

The aura around his head on the dewy grass

the observer stooped down to & gingerly picked

wrought of strong sunlight & water

and put it into his briefcase

without a

spilt drop

an excess of virtue carried

through subways furtively

as if he had robbed heaven.

(The title means ‘halo’.)

Leale belongs to a moment of the immediate present which I associate with the halcyon period 1965-74. He seems uninterested in his own personality, certainly in his social position, uninterested by the past. The kinetic objects of his poems are speeding through the exit from their own past. For this reason it is difficult to wrap him in some kind of cultural nostalgia. I just don't understand why his poetry has disappeared from view.

Saunders Lewis, unacknowledged and tainted depths

Saunders Lewis, unacknowledged and tainted depths, Maurice Barres

I read Maurice Barrès' 1904 novel Leurs figures, which turned up in a second-hand bookshop in Nottingham. The title refer to the shocked faces of French deputies on hearing a speech which threatened to break the Panama scandal – 150 deputies had accepted bribes, so the sense of guilt and fear was dramatic.

Leurs figures is dedicated to Edouard Drumont. An internet encyclopaedia says that Drumont's La France juive became “France's largest bestseller since Joseph-Ernest Renan's La vie de Jésus (1863)”. Drumont was the first person who became a full-time anti-Semite, thus leaving behind a long but insecure career as a journalist. If you see Marcel Ophuls' documentary Le chagrin et la pitié, it has a clip from a Nazi newsreel of 1940 which shows Nazi troops in front of the building housing Drumont's Anti-Semitic Institute and saluting it – this is where I first heard of Drumont. Hitler had great respect for him – he pioneered anti-Semitism as a “modern fake science”, moving it on from sermons by Catholic friars about “the murderers of Christ”. He removed the theological basis from the myth, even though it was completely theological for almost all of its career.

The Panama Canal was started in 1881, but not completed until 1914. The French project failed completely, which is why the Americans took over. The French version ran out of capital – the labour force kept dying of yellow fever, so the schedule kept slipping and slipping. The Canal Company had paid off a lot of journalists and deputies to get the initial capital offer approved and taken up, and went in with this to get more injections of capital (nine stock issues) to get past the delays due to the terrain and the mosquitoes. Eventually, paying people blackmail so they wouldn't reveal the bribery to the public was taking up more of the capital than digging and draining. Work was stopped in 1889, leading to bankruptcy, affecting very numerous share-holders (perhaps 800,000 of them). The parliamentary scandal followed in 1892. (Work in Panama resumed in 1904.) Barrès' novel blames two Jewish characters, one (Reinach) a go-between for bribes and one (Herz) very obscure but apparently blackmailing the go-between. He gives much less blame to the 150 corrupt deputies – this is where it gets odd, all the people who took bribes were French but he only makes out the two Jewish characters (recent immigrants from Germany) to be villains. He repeatedly attacks the parliamentary system – he doesn’t say what he wants instead, but since Barrès was a boulangiste deputy it is probable that he wanted a dictatorship by a “charismatic leader”, with plebiscites to link him to the popular will. The nation is like an army, following its great Leader. This would also have involved “la revanche”, a war against Germany to take back Alsace-Lorraine. If you put all this together, it does sound like a slate Hitler could use – fascism didn't exist in 1904 (publication date of Leurs figures) but Barrès and his allies had put the whole programme together in theoretical form.

The Panama thing was taken as proving that a parliamentary system was fundamentally flawed, an argument accepted by a range of opinion in France, right up to the 1950s probably. When Pétain abolished democracy, a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief, because they didn't want to be ruled by politicians. Why a dictatorship would involve less bribery, I don't know. You hate the press, you hate elected deputies – this argument worked for Hitler in 1933. 

My interest in Barrès is partly because he was Saunders Lewis' favourite writer, and I read (part-read) a book about the links between Fascism and Plaid Cymru which irritated me because its approach was so stupid, it didn't ask any sensible questions and so came up with no answers. (It was Richard Wyn Jones' book 'Y Blaid Ffasgaidd Yng Nghymru'.) It compared Lewis' writing to German and Italian Fascism and came up with no matches, but Lewis was a francophile and the only meaningful search is to compare him with the French Far Right of his youth– mainly Maurras and Barrès. To recall, Lewis was leader of Plaid Cymru from 1926 to 1939 but had to resign because the party's left wing found him too associated to the European Far Right, which was increasingly in the news during the Thirties and less attractive than it had been in 1926 (when the Plaid was formed). Wyn Jones seems to be completely a hostage to Welsh nationalism, his conclusions are not credible because he has avoided looking at any relevant evidence. I think the Left of the Plaid were right and it's unfair to them to air-brush Lewis' clerico-Fascist sympathies out of history. A quick search has found two websites which do explore the Lewis-Barrès links in a more open-minded way.

( https://www.iwa.wales/click/2014/09/know-a-hero-by-his-heroes-saunders-lewis-beyond-apologetics/

and https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/09/saunders-lewis-151993-1985-tainted.html )

It is quite hard to find people who write about Welsh nationalism without being taken hostage and simply trying to efface the truth. If Drumont was the founder of modern anti-Semitism, how do you get over the Lewis-Barrès-Drumont link without finding that Lewis was an anti-Semite? At the very least, you have to discuss this. At the risk of duplication, let me quote Tim Williams' on-line account of Lewis, which I think makes all the necessary points:

>>I took the same view in a piece I wrote on Lewis for the Jewish Chronicle in the early 90s (‘Judge a hero by his heroes’) which led me to incur considerable verbal violence. Have a look at the absurd attack on me by the then editor of Planet, entitled ‘Tim Williams, Saunders Lewis and the Jewish Chronicle’ where I was berated for pointing out Lewis’s anti-semitism and affection for Franco, Salazar and Petain, his denunciations of the French Resistance and support for Vichy. Plaid’s view of Mussolini was also benign especially after his Concordat with the Vatican. Their take on Hitler varied throughout 30s largely because of his obvious paganism though his anti-Bolshevism was clearly welcome. However, Y Ddraig Goch couldn’t hide its excitement when Hitler mentioned Plaid and the burning of the bombing school at the Nuremburg Rally in 1938  – ‘Hitler knows that Wales is a nation!’ screamed the party’s paper and nothing he did so outraged Plaid or Lewis that they felt compelled to join the European resistance to him.

Plaid’s neutralism throughout the Second World War, meaning their acceptance of a Nazi-dominated Europe as a consequence, has always been difficult to explain away and offended many of their own supporters (and leaders: Ambrose Bebb amongst them). It was no accident and didn’t stem from Christian pacifism but from their own nationalist opposition to Britain, which they saw as a greater threat to Wales than Hitler, and their anti-Communism. The Party paper as the thirties closed cited Jewish influence over the British media as a source of the drive to war as Jones must know but to which he does not refer.<<

(URL as above)

I can see that nationalists would be happy if this wasn't true, or failing that if Tim Williams wouldn't recall it to conscience and memory. If you read Lewis' works, it's clear that he has a whole world of assumptions, or maybe knowledge, behind him, which he never explains because it is so familiar to him. Welsh readers may have assumed that this mountain he is standing on was either worked out by Lewis or is objective truth, but I don't think it is either of those things. I think it comes from the right-wing thought of Paris, circa 1900 to 1925. It is difficult to say anything intelligent about Saunders Lewis without a proper grasp of that extensive area of thought – something few people have, because their ideas were wrong at the time, obsolete today, and influential on people like Hitler and the Vichy ministers. Barrès never joined Action française and was much more subtle and less fanatical than Charles Maurras – it's no good just folding Barrès within the Action française category. Likely, though, that he was the main source of ideas for Maurras. He wasn't a Fascist because no-one born in 1864 was, it was a slightly later development.

In Leurs figures, the go-between is Jacques Reinach – a fixer, someone who enabled the public issue of the Panama project to go ahead, a great feat if you take that canal (linking two hemispheres, as the caption goes) as one of the great achievements. He kills himself as the details of the bribes are about to come out, and Barrès makes a great play of how he was dug up, weeks later, to seek traces of poison – details of his guts spilling, of the smell coming out of the coffin after being opened, etc. Would these details have been included if he wasn’t Jewish? I doubt it. Aspects of the novel are like a Hollywood film –the two villains look repulsive, lack human feelings, are depersonalised. This is a rehearsal for much more thorough anti-Semitism and must be based on excited reading of Drumont's propaganda – linking to the dedication to Drumont, who was a Far Right deputy along with Barrès, at a time when the novel was being composed. Depressingly, it is a very good novel– Barrès was a great novelist but this isn't a great novel, evidently, it is more like a gripping TV series about a political scandal, say “Washington behind Closed Doors”. The description of the atmosphere, the conversations, the logistics involved in bribing 150 legislative leaders of a great country is brilliant and has presumably never been excelled. No credit is given to Reinach for fine feelings leading to suicide, such as guilt, empathy, wish to atone, or desire to protect his friends. Suicide is not a selfish act, so we normally attribute such feelings to someone in his position, especially when they have such great psychological talents and intelligence. But Barrès does not attribute such sentiments to a Jew.

A few weeks after reading the novel, I am much more aware of its anti-Semitism. Let me start by saying that I believe in an instinctive aversion to illness, in parallel to how apes react – reports of chimpanzees killing a band member who was visibly disabled (with polio, I think). This serves to protect the group against infection. Evidently, if you describe a character, in visual art or fiction, as ill, in certain terms, the reaction is aversion, and this can be manipulated to sweep away compassion. In Leurs figures, there is extensive description of how ill Reinach looks. This serves to express his state of mind in the few days leading up to his suicide. It speeds up the plot by suggesting both that he is ill and that a crisis is coming, in the course of which we will get to hear what really happened. This narrative function disguises the fact, obvious on later reflection, that we are reading a description of a Jewish character as physically repulsive and ill. This raises the aversion reaction. Bizarrely, it is the evidence that he is the villain - illness displaying moral infection. This image is combined with the so-called Feindschema or “schema of the Enemy”, where we only perceive the bad and aggressive traits of someone. Leurs figures is a profoundly anti-Semitic novel and this is only disguised by Barrès' literary gifts and the “documentary” function which means that the two characters concerned really were Jewish (and Reinach really did poison himself). If Reinach is described as “a rat behind the wainscot”, this simultaneously dehumanises him and defines him as a threat and a source of infection, even if it also evokes his state of panic (and his “behind the scenes” role in arranging certain deals). How can this not be anti-Semitic?

I don't think you can eliminate caricature, dehumanisation, and the “enemy schema” from political art. This doesn’t bestow a “get out of jail free card” on anti-Semitism; it makes me question the means of art, rather than excusing base malice.

I think it's reasonable to think that Lewis' idea of nationalism came from Barrès. There is the stress on “énergie nationale” – Lewis never resorts to sociology, in talking about the decline of the Welsh language, but always deals in terms of an energy, a national energy to be channelled by young idealists in an exalted mood, where Redemption can come despite all the facts and all the ordinary people who have decided to speak English. This national mission takes precedent over ideas of bringing social equality or of increasing national wealth, which Lewis saw as uninteresting and unworthy goals. Barrès was always preoccupied by the return of the German-speaking areas annexed by Germany in 1871, and Lewis took this over as his image of a political mission, to retrieve Wales from English domination. Barrès writes a lot about Lorraine (where he came from) as a bulwark against the east, the last rampart of classicism – Lewis also cast Wales as a relic of the Roman Empire, its poetry retaining classical Latin values in ways not always obvious to anyone except Lewis, the Norman overlords acting as channels for wonderful Franco-Latin culture. Barrès has a touching idea of Lorraine (this is a broad and vague concept but he meant French-speaking Lorraine, the department of Meurthe and Moselle, which was still French after 1871) as the home of douceur and natural life, as expounded in a very moving passage, a letter from one of the characters, over 30 or so pages at the end of Leurs figures. It is hardly in doubt that Lewis applied this image to Wales, and it is also clear that Lewis could not actually write convincingly about traditional Wales or the life of the people. There is no sociological component, almost no realistic feature, in Barrès' description of Lorraine, which serves as a foil both to his “Babylonian” idea of Parisian corruption and to his idea of the Prussian yoke (starting just a few miles away and taking in Metz and Thionville, as well as Alsace), so rhetorically necessary and not based on real life. Basing politics on unrealistic views of nationality was clearly Lewis' greatest fault. His views of economics were shallow, but it is not a great stretch to say that he saw the Welsh economy as being at the mercy of the English, and that they play the role which Barrès allots to the Jews (and the Germans) in his account of the Panama affair. So, it was clearly the fault of the English if Wales were not an idyllic pastoral land run by lords and priests (both patronising culture), and getting rid of the English would surely restore this state of affairs in short order. It seems that Lewis did not approve of trade at all.

I guess that Lewis saw his injection of French culture into Wales as making him like a Norman overlord of the 13^th century, speaking French and raising Eastern Wales into the light of Mediterranean civilisation. I think he was also influenced by Action française, which took up most of Barrès' ideas. So if we see him inspiring the formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith, which bypassed electoral politics and popular support, and favoured action and shock tactics by fanatics, that sounds pretty much like Action française- which never put up any candidates. The idea that the mass of the population can be wrong, and exalted and illegal bands of enthusiasts can legitimately take political decisions for them, sounds like Maurras and Action française. The idea that a writer needs a “square mile”, or milltir sgwar, that the purpose of literature is to describe the blameless lives of local people who never travel more than five miles, in contrast to urban people who are to blame for everything, has eaten its way quite deeply into Welsh writing, but presumably is copied from a strand of French culture, conservative and anti-republican. It may be a passing fad. I can't point to any specific passage where Lewis describes the English, but the idea that history can be accounted for in terms of racial conflict and that there is a “national enemy” (for Barrès, the Prussians, obviously) seems ludicrous and is presumably copied from Barrès and his allies. Lewis' view of English people has almost no objective content at all. It does have a strong literary content, forming villains to animate plots. Is it a straight copy of Barrès' methods?

I said the Left of the Plaid threw Lewis out, but that doesn’t mean that the centre or Right of the party were pro-fascist or even vaguely tolerant of Fascism. Lewis was a fish out of water in Wales, other people weren’t Catholic and weren’t reading Barrès or thinking about Action française.

How was Barrès a boulangiste deputy at a date when General Boulanger had already committed suicide? I don't know. French politics are not transparent. It is fairly transparent that the Dreyfus affair, beginning with a forgery in 1894, sprang directly out of the Panama bribery row, and that Barrès was an instinctive anti-Dreyfusard.

Leurs figures has got the stereotype anti-Semitic novel (or film story, later) all worked out. 20^th C versions of the story derive from Barrès. But was he the first? I don't actually know. There are terrific histories of anti-Semitism, such as the one by Léon Poliakov, but they deal with factual books and speeches (pseudo-factual, obviously) rather than novels.

The components would be:

1) ruined ordinary people wondering Why

2) murky dealings involving positions of trust (political and financial); a conspiracy is involved

3) very high living involving exciting cocottes; the women wear great frocks, clearly sinful. Scenes of luxury and debauchery

4) the villains are Jews

5) the villains are sophisticated and reveal a degree of cynicism/abstraction which people in (1) can hardly understand. They are mocking.

6) total ruin of (4), in spectacular form

7) (4) are dehumanised, their skin is an unusual colour, their flesh is hanging slack, they evoke stereotypes of sickness and aversion

8) it is unclear how (4) make their money or what they produce; they do manipulations and become rich

9) there is a peaceful, natural life far away from the city and its fever. Its gains are only long-term and reached by hard work.

Barrès' novel fulfils all these (except [3]). It is credible that gutter anti-Semitism, as it surfaced for example after the Wall Street crash of 2007-8, is recycling this myth or fantasy. There is a certain resemblance between Leurs figures and Lion Feuchtwanger's Jud Süss (1925). This may just expose my limited reading – Jud Süss is a great novel, and obviously Feuchtwanger wasn't an anti-Semite, being Jewish and quite far on the left. (There was an East German issue of stamps which included one showing Feuchtwanger.) How far is it true that the staple Marxist novel exposing the fantasies and wickedness of Babylonian-style bankers and speculators followed the same pattern as Barrès' novel, but with the lead characters no longer being Jewish? So points (4) and (7) are not present. I don't know. I try not to read that kind of novel. But I do have Friedrich Kaul's Kleiner Weimarer Pitaval, (East Berlin, 1959), a documentary account of various scandals and trials under the Weimar regime, which he was clearly a Communist opponent of before being the Democratic Republic's most celebrated lawyer. (He even appeared in a TV series from 1959-62, Fernsehpitaval, doubt I can get that one on DVD. 'Pitaval' means a 'collection of criminal histories', like the Newgate Calendar.) Kleiner Weimarer Pitaval is a cracking book, forget about Edgar Lustgarten. There is an unmistakable resemblance to Barrès (in 1904). If you disprove the banker myth, does Marxism collapse? I think the explanation of povety is a worthwhile endeavour, it's just that you can't resolve it by setting up stories about evil bankers and stockbrokers.
Michael Curtis said that fundamental features of Barrès were ambiguity and equivocation. This matches with what Jean Guéhenno (1890-1978) says about him (in Les années noires), where he tries to recall why he admired Barrès so much at twenty and despised him so much aged fifty. Guéhenno wrote: (27 January 1942)
 “I am returning to Barrès, ‘my old enemy’, always with the same pleasure. Yesterday I re-read Une impératrice de la solitude in Amori et dolori sacrum. What does it matter, after all, what he thought or believed that he thought, and his doctrinal positions and prejudices. He had the instinct of grandeur, and the very design of his sentences, this sort of rapture of pathos which it evokes, this feeling of discomfort in one’s own skin, this tension at the limit of one’s force, these discouraged collapses, this effort always begun again, moved me too much in my twentieth year, taught me too much, for me not to recognise my debt. And now that everything is destroyed, that all the ideas are in a heap on the ground, more than ever, these words, too vague, but which awoke the fervour of a twenty-year-old, ‘Having a soul’, seem to me to define the only possible revenge. Having a soul, to suffer thoroughly at least, if we cannot do anything else. Having enough soul to say no.”.

To clarify, “la revanche”, revenge, was Barrès’ lifelong preoccupation but meant at that time the return of Alsace-Lorraine; in January 1942, 19 years after his death, it still meant defeating Germany, but also defeating Barrès’ former associates on the monarchist and nationalist Right, who by now were working with Pétain. This is why the ideas of nationalism had fallen “to the ground”. Guéhenno was a dissident communist, in 1942, and quite indifferent to Barrès’ right-wing constructions. (At 20, he was a manual labourer plotting to find a way back into formal education.) Guéhenno’s remarks stress the vagueness, although his other remark on Barrès’ preoccupation with himself and with appearance is what Guéhenno always says about writers who weren’t socially committed. Describing Barrès for someone who hasn’t read his books is difficult, possibly more so than for any other writer. It is hard to evoke how someone can write a book called Le culte du moi (the cult of the self) and also be political, in fact a member of the Assembly for many years. This ambiguity is not truly complexity, as the contradictions don’t point to anything deeper. The uncertainty obviously helps with the composition of novels, we read them because not only the outcome but the theme is fundamentally uncertain.
The parts aren’t fastened together, but this subtlety covers up the negative implications of Right attitudes more than with any other writer. This was a cover-up – so that when Barrès lost his reputation, with the disillusion with wartime patriotism after 1918, it was a cover-up which fell apart. When people realised that it was nationalism which had made the war and its mass deaths come about, they questioned nationalism – and Barrès had been the most dedicated nationalist, its theologian. Barrès is not a detached narrator of nationalism, he is committed to it– its high priest. The implications of choosing war and “glory”, of putting territorial claims above any other questions, of defining the nation primarily as something unified by honour and aggression, of racial intolerance – these profoundly needed to be covered up. The First World War was not beautiful. Maurras is the dark side of Barrès, and Maurras pretty much invented fascism. 

I don't know why I am digging up these right-wing figures. A few weeks ago I wrote about the film version of The Valley of the Dolls; I suspect that writing about very high-quality, demanding poetry for so many years left me in a state where I wanted to write about trash. There is also the question of "right-wing artists and thinkers being excluded by a liberal consensus", a contemporary myth which is worth attacking. My copy of Leurs figures is from Livre de Poche – the biggest paperback house in France. As I said before, the Western media industry is dominated by the profit motive, not a "liberal consensus" which is able to silence its enemies.