Wet thatch and Gaelic women poets
I am reading a book called ‘B’ait leo bean’, by Mairin nic Eoin (1998), so it is “aspects of gender ideology in the [Irish] Gaelic literary tradition”, but in Irish. (Gender is “inscne”.) This is not my field of knowledge, I am finding the Irish very difficult but it is also a good learning experience, so I want to persist. You don't find much writing which explores social divisions in the Gaelic world, as opposed to a kind of conservative blurred memory in which there were no conflicts and everyone could afford to pay their rent.
Nuala ni Dhomhnaill wrote that essay (1994) where she remembers being told often as a child “Three things you don’t want in a village: wet thatchers, close sowing, and a female poet”. The wet thatch is one put up badly so that it leaks, the wheat seeds have to be several inches apart or they will stifle each other and you won’t get any grain. As for the female poet, what problems could she cause? That was interesting but I have not been able to find any trace of this proverb anywhere else. I think the problem with female poets was that they had the ability to curse people and this left a bad memory. It is my guess that this anxiety stems from the ban-fhili’s power of curing (or admonishing and commanding?) and that the role of Gaelic poets was not simply to create poems to entertain and to please. I think this partly because of the Scottish analogies. But actually male poets could curse people (and humiliate them) so the issue isn’t cursing, in fact, but the fact that male poets had very strong alliances with the church and with (male) heads of land-owning families and this gave them status.
I forgot to record that this "cursing by proverb" didn't stop ni Dhomhnaill.
I saw a story somewhere about female poets in Scotland being buried face down so they couldn't come back to life; a quick Google search turns up this version of it: “Even as late as the end of the 17th and early 18th C, tradition records that at least two female Gaelic poetesses, Mairghread nighean Lachlainn, (of Mull) and Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, (associated mainly with the MacLeods) when they died were said to have been buried face down due to having composed in metres that were the prerogative of the male poets.” (The source proposed is O’Baoill C, Mairghread nighean Lachlainn Song–maker of Mull, (2009, 20). I think the paraphrase has added the idea that it was using the wrong metres which brought the danger, I think this is a 21st century interpolation. I doubt O'Baoill said that.) Surely it was the ability to curse people which people were afraid of.
The website of Historic Environment Scotland has this about Mairi nic Leoid (circa 1615- circa 1707): “NicLeòid began composing while working as a nurse for the MacLeod Chief of Dunvegan in Skye but she was exiled to the Isle of Scarba because of her art. It is believed that the Chief banished her when she wrote a song that praised one of his relatives too highly. She was eventually allowed to return but on the condition that she stop writing songs."
The surname includes daughter of and is a female version of the name “Macleod”. Further: “NicLeòid is buried in St Clements church in Rodel, Harris, the village where she was born. She is thought to have been buried face down in the south transept of the church.”
(It is of interest that nic corresponds to nighean and in Irish is just ní, or Nic in front of vowels. The reconstructed Old Gaelic form is inigena, which is attested in an Ogham inscription and looks a lot more like Continental Celtic relations.) The form “nic Leoid” is standardised, but she was evidently referred to in daily speech as “Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh”. Carmichael Watson's edition of her songs (the first ever to be printed) gives three versions from folklore of why she was exiled and adds a fourth which is his own speculation. The folklore is rich and we should doubt that she was literally buried face down: I guess that this was a standard tale about female poets and that as she was a female poet who had many stories told about her this one got attached along with the rest. However, we don’t know of any tales of male poets being buried face down!
Watson says “a third [version[] is that of Miss Tolmie, who suggested that it was due to fear that her over-praise of the young children of the house would bring ill-luck upon them.” He records “She directed that she should be placed face downward in the grave—" beul nam breug a chur foidhpe "; her burial-place is still known in the south transept of Tùr Chliamain, St. Clement's church in Rodel.” The phrase means “the mouth of the lies [to be] put underneath”, which could refer to flattery and over-praise. Again, the story is memorable but may not actually be true. (Variant “[Gus] beul na brèige a chumail dùinte”.)
Anne Frater did a doctorate on (Scottish) Gaelic women poets, and her essay on Mairi Nic Leoid is on-line. “Both Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and her fellow poetess Mairearad nighean Lachlainn from Mull are said to be buried in a manner, which, in Norse times, was reserved for those believed to have been witches. Why they should have been treated in this way, when the only traditions that have come down to us about them concern their songmaking, is a mystery. Perhaps they were considered to have infringed on the domain of the bards, especially by daring, as women, to compose panegyric verse.” The story must be confined to those two poets, or Frater would have mentioned other instances of it.
In Nic Eoin’s excellent book we find matter on cursing or at least mocking. The role of cainteoir, apparently always female, is described in the Irish law codes always in negative terms. It is a role which the law does not institute or approve – we are likely to think that has a reality external to the law. Of course the idea of connecting a role in 8th C society with a proverb heard, reprovingly, in the 1940s, is rife with problems. The problem I have is that Nic Eoin records a marginal, even accursed, place being given to women poets (of the cainteor type) in the Irish law codes and this seems to connect to the “buried upside down” ruling. But the codes belong to the 8th C AD, in the text we have, and are probably older. It is very problematic to see an attitude, and correlated artistic activity, continuing for such a stretch of time. I badly need more evidence. It is fairly clear that cainteor, “woman satirist”, although literally identical with the word cainteoir “chatterbox”, is functionally a different word. It presumably comes from the “can” root, meaning “speak”. “Satirist” is a standard translation but pretty misleading, functions like cursing, humiliating, the evil eye, tell you more about the reputation of these women. (There is also a form ban-chainte.) It is frustrating that we don’t have any record of the verse they composed (or at any rate Nic Eoin does not mention it). Moreover, they were just one of a group of defined classes of poet who were disapproved of by the law.
A cainteoir deployed specialised language to fulfil functions other than that of creating beautiful verse for entertainment. If we had their verse in written form it might be hard for us to consume or even to interpret. I am also guessing that, however prominent their function of cursing, admonishing, or prohibition, this was just part of their range and might be only a consequence of a social status and associated power which they enjoyed. Verse form may have been a way of clothing significant speech– we are more interested in what that significance was than in the verbal form.
The role of priests is often to admonish, to prohibit, to condemn, and even to satirise. Surely the medieval sermon absorbed all the contents of satire as it was known in Classical times. Admonishing is just an aspect of social power. The cainteoir may have a pre-Christian origin and may have had access to supernatural forces in some form (associated with asarlaíocht, sorcery). We might think about translating the word as witch rather than satirist. A cainteoir might also have strong knowledge, eloquence, and even supernatural power – not just glittering malice.
I was expecting to find a discussion of the ‘wet thatch’ proverb cited by Ni Dhomhnaill in Nic Eoin’s book, but it is not mentioned at all. Certainly Nic Eoin is describing the ideology of gender in Gaelic literature, not in society as a whole. She does list a group of anti-female proverbs from Irish collections. I have been unable to find a context for the ‘wet thatch’ proverb.
John MacInnes (quoted by Frater) has another explanation which is bizarre and does not seem to fit well with 17th C conditions. He recalls that both poets mentioned are said to have had a female companion who accompanied them, and devised (wordless) choruses for the songs and set them to tunes. MacInnes suggests that this other women was a double, or fetch, and that they engaged in trances where the double was sent out to sea or elsewhere while the real person was unconscious, entranced. This may be part of the “face down” story without actually being true of the historical people to whom the stories got attached. (It also belongs with an RL Stevenson story called “Thrawn Janet”, which you will remember, I expect.) I like the idea that the double did not have articulate speech and so only composed the refrains, “ho ro hug o” and so on.
Nic Eoin does not quote any verse composed by (or, possibly composed by) a cainteoir. This is disappointing but it may confront us with necessary thoughts about the limited nature of the written record. This was certainly associated, very often, with monasteries, the church, and with the courts of lords and petty kings. Those were strongly male environments. We have seen that the law-codes represented a point of view which was different from what society as a whole thought, and which reproved certain professions which were apparently quite thriving. We have excellent evidence for bards passing tests, writing poetry of incredible technical difficulty and being patronised by kings and nobles. That is not to say that people who did not receive that formal training did not compose poetry – for other social purposes and in simpler, “folk”, verbal form. The point may have been that they did not compose panegyric, but other genres of poetry. The function of praise is symmetrical to the function of scolding or satire. In fact they are part of a single function, of assigning status and merit, and there is a single scale on which individuals are rated as good and bad. It is hard to imagine a person who could do honour but who could not dishonour. The symmetry breaks down when the scolding part includes cursing and laying spells on people. Obviously there is more money in writing praise poems; praise poets could become part of princely courts and their poems were able to be transcribed and collected and preserved by the families of the princes and lords. The scolding poems didn’t have the same propaganda value or the same chance of surviving in a recopied manuscript until modern times. Maybe the manuscript record, vast as it is, has specific points of view, as do the law codes and the Church.
There is a very interesting folk-tale about the Cliar Sheanchain, discussed by John Shaw. This describes an era when the Cliar (Seanchan was a 7th century Irish poet but bands of wandering poets were called Seanchan's in memory of him, Sheanchain in the genitive) used to visit land-owners, benefiting from the Gaelic laws of hospitality, and ate him out of house and home. A large and hungry band of these individuals descended upon a certain MacDonald of Clanranald one day (perhaps in the 16th century?) and demanded a feast of beef every night. Expelling them would have breached a quite fundamental law of Highland behaviour. “In any case Clanranald sent out an invitation to every bard and rhymer and lampooner on his lands, and even those on the adjoining bounds who were counted to be exceedingly sharp tongued, but nevertheless their cutting speech was only as the blow of a hammer on cold iron compared to the Cliar Sheanchain. By then they had been in Nunton for nearly a year and Clanranald was fully weary of them; they had humiliated and disgraced him, eaten and drunk up his store, his reputation was in danger, his stock diminished in the fields.” A female poet of the laird’s household caught the Cliar at a sensitive moment and composed a devastating short poem which wrapped up numerous true facts about their visit and ridiculed them in the most merciless way. A law for poets was that if they were humiliated without having the ability to reply wittily they had to leave. So that is what they did and the last food reserves of the laird were spared. What strikes me is the cursing and humiliatory aspect of the female poet’s utterance. Someone with such powers could well be a candidate for a face-down burial. What is also interesting is that the story shows a cainteoir in a favourable light, so in the way in which they would have considered themselves. To be exact the victor in the story I have just quoted is not a female poet, but the editor remarks of a whole group of such tales “Here, and in a number of other versions, it is made explicit that the poets were defecating al fresco when approached. The appearance of a woman–usually a poetess–as verbal challenger in the scenario seems to be geographically widespread and thus unlikely to be a recent innovation. In a variant recorded in 1968 from the renowned Tiree reciter, Donald Sinclair (Domhnall Chaluim Bain), the company is confronted by a woman whom he identifies as An Aigeannach, the eighteenth-century poetess, Mary MacDonald from Mull,[.]” The paper is titled ‘what Alexander Carmichael did not print”, referring to the folklorist of that name. John Shaw cites two versions of this story in which the victor is Mairi nighean Alistair Ruaidh.
The Cliar were wandering poets and the word is similar to the Welsh clerwr, a minor poet, and clera, go on a poetic tour. The word is agreed to be from a Latin word, which would be cleric or clerk in English. Perhaps literate individuals were simply called clerks in early Gaelic society.
It is fair to mention that Shaw, after collecting so many Scottish Gaelic versions of this story about the expulsion of poet-vagrants, traces the whole story back to a written Irish story, of which the first record is circa 1638. I am interested in the temporal spread (so from a manuscript in 1638 to a recital in 1968) and the story is likely to be older than the oldest (surviving) written record.
A web page on Lilias Adie, d. 1704, of Fife, says “Her intertidal grave is the only known one in Scotland of an accused witch – most were burned.” She died before coming to trial. So it doesn't look as if there are physical examples of witches being buried face down. Actually we know that Adie was buried under a huge stone but not what her burial position was. To state the obvious, convicted witches were burnt and not buried at all.
I should clarify that Nic Eoin does mention sagas in which poems by women characters feature. They are referred to as banfhaidhe, “female poets” not cainteoir. Faidh is cognate with the word vates which appears in Latin poetry and is a high grade of poet. The sagas are set in a fictional time, of late paganism, so that St Patrick can appear as a character in some. We have poems by Feidhealm in The Tain and others in texts known as Immacallam in druad Brain ocus inna banfhaitho Febuil and Tochmarc Treblainne. The verse which Nic Eoin quotes is remarkably archaic, very stiff and ornate.
Wednesday 17 April 2024
Wednesday 3 April 2024
On collapsing and spreading horizontally
sixth blog on new book
I had a spreadsheet which listed 1700 poetry titles (by single authors) coming out in 2019. I have checked the spreadsheet line by line and the total has shrunk to 1648. Which is a less pleasing number. Anyway the point is that thousands of people want to be poets, lots of them are good poets, and this makes it difficult to attack the people in charge. However tired the managers are, the atmosphere of the scene is attractive and this is such a good thing that other features slide out of view.
I have just finished proofing ‘Beautiful feelings of sensitive people’, my new book about 21st century poetry, and my feeling about it is that it is not attacking the way things happen. That sort of radical cultural criticism doesn't suit the current climate. The function of welcoming people into poetry, making them feel they have status in a real community, making them feel that they can say what they want to say, is more important. The idea that there is some much better way of doing things which is readily available and familiar to people enough that they could move into it without vast effort does not seem to hold true. The modernist thing is available, but after 50 years (or do we mean 100?) it is clearly a minority position rather than the future. Exposing people for not being properly modernist does not seem to be a convincing verbal manoeuvre. It has instead become clear that what people were really excited about, and hoping for, in the Sixties was derepression. This is quite different from modernism. And we now have it. It may look like chaos but the principle of derepression is actually a sort of module of design which has been applied everywhere to build the landscape we actually see.
It is difficult to see how you can count 1650 titles coming out in one year and also complain that the scene is restrictive, conservative, repressive, elitist, etc. So if you abandon that line of argument you end up with something else. Quite possibly the ‘gatekeepers’ are tired and don’t want to defend standards, and the quality control is poor. Yes, but that is in keeping with the collective wish for derepression, and there are positive results which we can all appreciate.
That total is roughly twice the figure for titles coming out in the 1980s. The landscape was mature then, not underdeveloped, so this kind of growth is genuinely impressive. It does not argue for persistent blunders by the people with influence. The growth rate is probably understated by doing a count, because of the proliferation of Internet activity which does not use paper at all, and which would represent a much more rapid growth rate. I can't measure it but surely a lot of poets are bypassing the paper world. The count of titles does express the relationship of poetry to its budget controllers and its audience, so the economic basis. There is a relationship between the Basis and the ideology of the participants, but also it is hard to repress anything. That function is vacant.
I have just seen a post by Norman Jope where he says: "Overall, if we were to estimate that as many as 0.1% of the adult population might be writing poetry to a publishable standard – which wouldn’t be that far off the mark in Plymouth, given the extent of participation in local groups – and each of them produced, say, two poems a month (which has basically been the measure of my output since I can remember), then that would mean that, across the UK, there would be approximately 50,000 poets producing approximately 1.2 million publishable poems annually. I accept that this is a demented exercise, but it’s also an honest attempt to quantify the sheer amount of poetry that is out there now.
The extrapolation is unsecured and the category of "publishable" is shaky, but this is a valuable contribution. The level of books being published is vitally connected to the pressure of poets swarming up the beaches, and it could cause serious problems if the level of frustration rose any higher. It's very helpful to look at the pattern from the other direction and try to pick up how if 1700 books come out then that might still leave thousands of poets barred from entry.
I suppose 1650 books in a year might mean 100,000 poems. So maybe 90% of "effective" poems don't get printed in a volume? But if you add in anthologies, the percentage shifts again. And if you add magazines. I look forward to the other six parts of this promised series of seven posts.
I am reading Tim Shipman’s book on the Tory problems at the June 2017 general election. It was published in 2017 so it doesn't have the benefit of hindsight. Shipman says (p.448) that “Labour won among voters with a degree by seventeen points, while the Tories won by a 22 per cent margin with those who left school at sixteen.” This is stunning, I had never seen this analysis before. Clearly Labour's later defeat at the 2019 election (down to 202 seats) was because they were struggling with the working-class vote. It is quite reasonable to think that the educated are behaving like a separate country.
The proposal is that education will make you more liberal, open your head to new possibilities, make you acceptable to a more diverse range of people, make new pleasures available to you, make you more tolerant and more perceptive. If you head in this direction you will get somewhere (and not just run out of space). That is the offer. Crudely, there is a Commodity, and poetry too offers this commodity. It is offering all the things I have just listed. They are part of the poetry Brand and we will be in trouble if poetry fails to deliver this commodity, or if something else offers more of it.
At the same time I think this group may be marching away from where the country is and I want Labour to be the party of the working class.
This puts anything I write about recent poetry into perspective. It makes the details invisible, I suppose. It means the differences between different parts of the poetic landscape are less important than a shared, if unconscious, sense of direction. Again, I think poetry is delivering what it has to deliver, and I wouldn't feel right attacking the scene for not moving in some different direction. It opens people up to a range of possibilities and that is a perfectly valid endeavour. So I can move back down to the detailed level and talk about individual books or poems. Of those books from 2019, dozens are interesting and start up lines of investigation and pleasure.
We have to ask “what does going to university” mean. I would rather leave this as a mystery than write it up as a supposedly known value. Students took over poetry in the 1960s. Other groups lost control, lost their stakes. In order to record the history of poetry you would also need to know the history of the student body and of university life. Of course that is a more complex question than just reading books full of poems.
If you accept that the artistically successful poetry is not confined to one stylistic area, but scattered over a large landscape, it follows that the audience is also divided and has different reactions to the same poem. Derepression means pursuing personal wishes, and being taught by them over time, and not accepting a social norm as the goal of artistic experience. This makes it difficult to write criticism, which after all presents one reaction pattern as a norm, or as success. So it is difficult to write down a consensus view. And pretty easy to annoy people.
I read a 1957 book called ‘Declaration’. It is statements about the state of culture by various English intellectuals, or supposed intellectuals. I went for a walk and paused in the pub in Mansfield Road and they had a bookshelf and ‘Declaration’ was one of the books. Lindsay Anderson's essay in it was striking because he was sure that he knew how people had to behave in order to be happy, he knew what films had to say, he knew the right way to make films, and he could relate the failure of English films to behave properly back to the financial structure of the industry and the interests of the company Board. He was absolutely granite in his certainty. It was impressive and you could also see why he was unemployed in the film industry. All that certainty is what derepression swept away. I can’t correlate one style with moral virtue and political progress. And the plurality of styles also implies a scattering of taste, which is why I can’t write criticism that a lot of people will not disagree with. I don’t even agree with Anderson, the kind of film he presses for is not my favourite sort of film. I can see that every time he saw a British film he rewrote the script to make it a much better film. This was his daily activity. But I also feel that he rewrote every person he encountered to be something else, not themselves, a projection of Anderson. That idea that the film can only be Good by symbolically destroying the people who had financed it, and redirected the script towards cliche, deference, and sentimentality (etc.), tends to produce bad films. Just in a different way. He was a critic writing, covertly, about the films he wasn't allowed to make.
If you grasp Anderson's sense of conviction, and moral authority, you grasp what "going to university" was supposed to do for you and also why educated people turned against that sense of authority and favoured something more diffuse and humanistic.
I am inclined to add Elizabeth David as a Fifties cultural voice imbued with certainty and authority. To be accurate, her comments on English cookery are just remarks made in passing but she makes it very clear that English cookery is hopeless and probably fatal. Her books were aimed at English cooks, almost by definition, so they were the subjects of attack as well as the recipients. I think this kind of thing can be addictive, so that people wanted cultural critics to be destructive and rigidly certain, they wanted to be told how culture had to be. But derepression released a hundred styles outside the central and worn-out style; derepression may have been a response to the convincing critique of hostile commentators, but it also made that critique obsolete. I suppose I miss it. Anyway I am not denouncing modern British poetry and I think it is too scattered to have a single point of failure. To denounce something, you have to have a cogent description of it first.
Anderson was strongly on the Left and David was, if anything, firmly on the Right and committed to an upper-middle-class lifestyle which was always surrounded by something unacceptable, lapsed, and ‘uncivilised’. But the sound they give off seems to be much the same sound.
Oh well. I certainly liked going for a walk, good for my blood pressure, and I certainly liked finding a book I didn’t know was there and being plunged back into the state of 1956. Maybe ‘Beautiful feelings’ will record some of the state of 2024.
I had a spreadsheet which listed 1700 poetry titles (by single authors) coming out in 2019. I have checked the spreadsheet line by line and the total has shrunk to 1648. Which is a less pleasing number. Anyway the point is that thousands of people want to be poets, lots of them are good poets, and this makes it difficult to attack the people in charge. However tired the managers are, the atmosphere of the scene is attractive and this is such a good thing that other features slide out of view.
I have just finished proofing ‘Beautiful feelings of sensitive people’, my new book about 21st century poetry, and my feeling about it is that it is not attacking the way things happen. That sort of radical cultural criticism doesn't suit the current climate. The function of welcoming people into poetry, making them feel they have status in a real community, making them feel that they can say what they want to say, is more important. The idea that there is some much better way of doing things which is readily available and familiar to people enough that they could move into it without vast effort does not seem to hold true. The modernist thing is available, but after 50 years (or do we mean 100?) it is clearly a minority position rather than the future. Exposing people for not being properly modernist does not seem to be a convincing verbal manoeuvre. It has instead become clear that what people were really excited about, and hoping for, in the Sixties was derepression. This is quite different from modernism. And we now have it. It may look like chaos but the principle of derepression is actually a sort of module of design which has been applied everywhere to build the landscape we actually see.
It is difficult to see how you can count 1650 titles coming out in one year and also complain that the scene is restrictive, conservative, repressive, elitist, etc. So if you abandon that line of argument you end up with something else. Quite possibly the ‘gatekeepers’ are tired and don’t want to defend standards, and the quality control is poor. Yes, but that is in keeping with the collective wish for derepression, and there are positive results which we can all appreciate.
That total is roughly twice the figure for titles coming out in the 1980s. The landscape was mature then, not underdeveloped, so this kind of growth is genuinely impressive. It does not argue for persistent blunders by the people with influence. The growth rate is probably understated by doing a count, because of the proliferation of Internet activity which does not use paper at all, and which would represent a much more rapid growth rate. I can't measure it but surely a lot of poets are bypassing the paper world. The count of titles does express the relationship of poetry to its budget controllers and its audience, so the economic basis. There is a relationship between the Basis and the ideology of the participants, but also it is hard to repress anything. That function is vacant.
I have just seen a post by Norman Jope where he says: "Overall, if we were to estimate that as many as 0.1% of the adult population might be writing poetry to a publishable standard – which wouldn’t be that far off the mark in Plymouth, given the extent of participation in local groups – and each of them produced, say, two poems a month (which has basically been the measure of my output since I can remember), then that would mean that, across the UK, there would be approximately 50,000 poets producing approximately 1.2 million publishable poems annually. I accept that this is a demented exercise, but it’s also an honest attempt to quantify the sheer amount of poetry that is out there now.
The extrapolation is unsecured and the category of "publishable" is shaky, but this is a valuable contribution. The level of books being published is vitally connected to the pressure of poets swarming up the beaches, and it could cause serious problems if the level of frustration rose any higher. It's very helpful to look at the pattern from the other direction and try to pick up how if 1700 books come out then that might still leave thousands of poets barred from entry.
I suppose 1650 books in a year might mean 100,000 poems. So maybe 90% of "effective" poems don't get printed in a volume? But if you add in anthologies, the percentage shifts again. And if you add magazines. I look forward to the other six parts of this promised series of seven posts.
I am reading Tim Shipman’s book on the Tory problems at the June 2017 general election. It was published in 2017 so it doesn't have the benefit of hindsight. Shipman says (p.448) that “Labour won among voters with a degree by seventeen points, while the Tories won by a 22 per cent margin with those who left school at sixteen.” This is stunning, I had never seen this analysis before. Clearly Labour's later defeat at the 2019 election (down to 202 seats) was because they were struggling with the working-class vote. It is quite reasonable to think that the educated are behaving like a separate country.
The proposal is that education will make you more liberal, open your head to new possibilities, make you acceptable to a more diverse range of people, make new pleasures available to you, make you more tolerant and more perceptive. If you head in this direction you will get somewhere (and not just run out of space). That is the offer. Crudely, there is a Commodity, and poetry too offers this commodity. It is offering all the things I have just listed. They are part of the poetry Brand and we will be in trouble if poetry fails to deliver this commodity, or if something else offers more of it.
At the same time I think this group may be marching away from where the country is and I want Labour to be the party of the working class.
This puts anything I write about recent poetry into perspective. It makes the details invisible, I suppose. It means the differences between different parts of the poetic landscape are less important than a shared, if unconscious, sense of direction. Again, I think poetry is delivering what it has to deliver, and I wouldn't feel right attacking the scene for not moving in some different direction. It opens people up to a range of possibilities and that is a perfectly valid endeavour. So I can move back down to the detailed level and talk about individual books or poems. Of those books from 2019, dozens are interesting and start up lines of investigation and pleasure.
We have to ask “what does going to university” mean. I would rather leave this as a mystery than write it up as a supposedly known value. Students took over poetry in the 1960s. Other groups lost control, lost their stakes. In order to record the history of poetry you would also need to know the history of the student body and of university life. Of course that is a more complex question than just reading books full of poems.
If you accept that the artistically successful poetry is not confined to one stylistic area, but scattered over a large landscape, it follows that the audience is also divided and has different reactions to the same poem. Derepression means pursuing personal wishes, and being taught by them over time, and not accepting a social norm as the goal of artistic experience. This makes it difficult to write criticism, which after all presents one reaction pattern as a norm, or as success. So it is difficult to write down a consensus view. And pretty easy to annoy people.
I read a 1957 book called ‘Declaration’. It is statements about the state of culture by various English intellectuals, or supposed intellectuals. I went for a walk and paused in the pub in Mansfield Road and they had a bookshelf and ‘Declaration’ was one of the books. Lindsay Anderson's essay in it was striking because he was sure that he knew how people had to behave in order to be happy, he knew what films had to say, he knew the right way to make films, and he could relate the failure of English films to behave properly back to the financial structure of the industry and the interests of the company Board. He was absolutely granite in his certainty. It was impressive and you could also see why he was unemployed in the film industry. All that certainty is what derepression swept away. I can’t correlate one style with moral virtue and political progress. And the plurality of styles also implies a scattering of taste, which is why I can’t write criticism that a lot of people will not disagree with. I don’t even agree with Anderson, the kind of film he presses for is not my favourite sort of film. I can see that every time he saw a British film he rewrote the script to make it a much better film. This was his daily activity. But I also feel that he rewrote every person he encountered to be something else, not themselves, a projection of Anderson. That idea that the film can only be Good by symbolically destroying the people who had financed it, and redirected the script towards cliche, deference, and sentimentality (etc.), tends to produce bad films. Just in a different way. He was a critic writing, covertly, about the films he wasn't allowed to make.
If you grasp Anderson's sense of conviction, and moral authority, you grasp what "going to university" was supposed to do for you and also why educated people turned against that sense of authority and favoured something more diffuse and humanistic.
I am inclined to add Elizabeth David as a Fifties cultural voice imbued with certainty and authority. To be accurate, her comments on English cookery are just remarks made in passing but she makes it very clear that English cookery is hopeless and probably fatal. Her books were aimed at English cooks, almost by definition, so they were the subjects of attack as well as the recipients. I think this kind of thing can be addictive, so that people wanted cultural critics to be destructive and rigidly certain, they wanted to be told how culture had to be. But derepression released a hundred styles outside the central and worn-out style; derepression may have been a response to the convincing critique of hostile commentators, but it also made that critique obsolete. I suppose I miss it. Anyway I am not denouncing modern British poetry and I think it is too scattered to have a single point of failure. To denounce something, you have to have a cogent description of it first.
Anderson was strongly on the Left and David was, if anything, firmly on the Right and committed to an upper-middle-class lifestyle which was always surrounded by something unacceptable, lapsed, and ‘uncivilised’. But the sound they give off seems to be much the same sound.
Oh well. I certainly liked going for a walk, good for my blood pressure, and I certainly liked finding a book I didn’t know was there and being plunged back into the state of 1956. Maybe ‘Beautiful feelings’ will record some of the state of 2024.
Saturday 24 February 2024
beautiful feelings
To my great pleasure, Shearsman have now accepted ‘Beautiful feelings’. I see I said in a blog that I had completed the book in January 2023, so I have spent the last year doing fine rewrites of it. Here is a contents list.
Chapter list
Introduction
Generalisations about the poetry world
Theories of style time
Language is made of rules
Foundation Texts (Loving Little Orlick; Ffynhonnau Uchel; Englaland; Incendium Amoris; Cloud. A coffee cantata
Identification
Their Trajectory Was Just Large (Flatlands; Terrain Seed Scarcity; Implacable Art; Unsung; Birdhouse; a.m.; The President of Earth; The Itchy Sea; Capital; The Hutton Inquiry; Natural Histories; Vacation of a Lifetime; Andraste's Hair; Galatea; The Missing; The Midlands; The Land of Green Ginger)
Cultural Asset Management
Verticegarden (Octet; Nekorb)
Insignificance; or, Structure Engulfed by Surface
Poems On Communal Wellbeing (Songs for Eurydice; Black Sun; Winstanley; Surge)
Local Knowledge (Birds of the Sherborne Missal; A Portland Triptych)
Serial: Lost In Data Labyrinths (The School of Forgery; Winter Journey; Exotica Suite)
Short Strings, Polyrecombinant (Duetcetera)
Splendours And Chagrins (Rendang; Plague Lands and other poems; Amnion; Katabasis; Writing The Camp)
Devolution/ Disassembly:
Anglo-Welsh (Edge of Necessary; stenia cultus handbook; Keinc; King Driftwood)
Scottish poets (Zonda? Khamsin? Sharaav? Camanchaca?; Hand Over Mouth Music; Florilegium; The Sleep Road; makar /unmakar)
British South Asian poets (Brilliant Corners; Small Hands; The Voice Of Sheila Chandra; The Routines)
West-bloc dissidents: alternative poetry (Arrays; Lines on the Surface; INSTANT-fLEX 718)
Triumphs And Panics (Ephemeris; False Flags; Somnia; Makers Of Empty Dreams; Forms of Protest; Self Heal; The Cook's Wedding)
The Human Voice (rabbit; Venusberg; Rookie; Soft Sift; Kim Kardashian's Marriage)
Pistachio Euphoria Sorbet (the arboretum towards the beginning; Leave Bambi Alone)
Sociolinguistics (Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy‑Machine!!!; Wilia; Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues; Northern Alchemy; Unquiet)
Privatisation and Religion (The Palace of Oblivion; Ascension Notes; Monica’s Overcoat Of Flesh; Stranger In The Mask Of A Deer)
Land And Sea (Disappearance; Green Noise; Continental Drift; Else)
I keep wanting to add new bits to it but really it is complete. Part of the concept is the centrality of personal and individual poems to the scene, which is actually what used to be called “bourgeois individualism”. I never use this phrase because I don’t value the Marxist consequences it comes attached to, but evidently the Marxist theorists identified what it was, possibly back in the 1930s or even the 1920s. So their version is roughly “writers who failed to face up to the consequences of industrialisation and class society wrote about their own feelings and appealed to the narcissism of the reader. Developments of style led to refinements which diminished the basic energy and evaded political issues. Reader and writer floated off in a little boat which was cut off from a wider reality.” My book is about the consequences of this. I call it Genre A. Evidently the individualism thing is bypassed by cultural critical poetry and by poetry about ecology and man-made climate disaster. We could call these genres B and C. They deal with the collective fate even if the matters presented are specific to the poet and written in an original style.
For reasons we need not go into here, I spent a lot of time, sometime in the 20th century, studying Soviet and East German literature. This has affected my frame of reference. The difference between Western literature and that other world of texts is rather striking, and the difference has a lot to do with individualism and narcissism and the small scale. With the artist’s personality, in fact. I think the Marxist analysis of culture is right at about 30 key points. It was developed by very intelligent people who between them had a very wide knowledge of the facts of cultural history. That thought does not extend to wishing to live under a dictatorship. But you have to have a perspective on the West from outside the West. There is so much to gain from that. This politicised analysis did not lead me to reject the West any more than I wished to wake up in East Germany and find myself without a vote or civil rights. If people were put in prison for practising “bourgeois individualism”, a few hundred years have to pass before you can legitimately use the term to discuss real people and real poets.
In a previous post, I discussed a level of poetry underneath genre A, exhibited in “open mike” events, where people did not aspire to a personal style and avoided poems about their personal lives. It looks as if Genre A is an ambitious endeavour, and unambitious poets are writing in a way which is more conventional (or colloquial) and less personal. It is difficult to practise Genre A. So identifying it with “Western style poetry” is not completely accurate.
The obvious reference point for narratives which deal with collective endeavour and objective facts, rather than individual feelings, is Fifties war films. I mention this because I am very happy with individualist poetry and indeed being a poetry critic in this era involves appraising that kind of poetry rather than promoting a Soviet-style civic poetry. That attitude would of course mean rejecting the poetry which is actually being published and talking about something which basically does not exist. Distinguishing between a hundred poets within the “Western“ style is only possible if you take an interest in that style, although of course if you are more interested in the Five Year Plan then variations of style are not really worth noticing. (I like some of those films, which I grew up with. Recently I watched Simon Heffer’s documentary on those films, where he regrets that the genre came to an end at a certain point, to be replaced by films where virtue and achievement played a very small role indeed.) Even at the time, there was no poetry which corresponded to those films: something in the unwritten constitution of poetry made it suitable for describing individual and intimate experiences rather than public and objective ones. We don’t have a body of “Fifties war poetry”.
The line of narcissism applies to the reader as well as to the poets. So we could draw a distinction between “believing in individual artistic experience” and “rejecting individual experience because it is simply an expression of deposited strata of imperialism, patriarchy, class bias, pro-Western bias, etc. etc., and is scheduled to be replaced by pure Theory administered by Experts”. If you reject the contents of individual experience, the fine vibrations of its reactions, then there is no point reading poetry. I am interested in nuances of sensibility, moments of identification, comparison between sensations, details of style. That is, I value the contents of consciousness and do not think it is able to be replaced by anything else (even Marxism).
There is a history of individualism. The arguments about national debt and borrowing in the general crisis following 2007-8 saw interesting gaps open up in Europe between countries where people paid their taxes and countries where people steadily avoided them. This was discussed in terms of a “southern tier” where Greece was the “most southern” and had the worst problems with taxes not being collected. So within Europe there was a southern band of individualism, and it contrasted with another variety where you had a developed bourgeois social structure but people respected the State enough to pay their taxes and to make accurate statements of income. And the ”black economy” was weak and not popular with the public. During these arguments it was possible to reflect, not just on the pervasive nature of an individualist (or “familist”) set of attitudes in Europe, but also that such attitudes did not necessarily bring about economic growth and perhaps only brought growth in special and unusual circumstances.
I scanned the Poetry Book Society pages and found that they have suggested/ listed another 540 titles since I finished the first draft of the book. Yes, I haven't read them.
Chapter list
Introduction
Generalisations about the poetry world
Theories of style time
Language is made of rules
Foundation Texts (Loving Little Orlick; Ffynhonnau Uchel; Englaland; Incendium Amoris; Cloud. A coffee cantata
Identification
Their Trajectory Was Just Large (Flatlands; Terrain Seed Scarcity; Implacable Art; Unsung; Birdhouse; a.m.; The President of Earth; The Itchy Sea; Capital; The Hutton Inquiry; Natural Histories; Vacation of a Lifetime; Andraste's Hair; Galatea; The Missing; The Midlands; The Land of Green Ginger)
Cultural Asset Management
Verticegarden (Octet; Nekorb)
Insignificance; or, Structure Engulfed by Surface
Poems On Communal Wellbeing (Songs for Eurydice; Black Sun; Winstanley; Surge)
Local Knowledge (Birds of the Sherborne Missal; A Portland Triptych)
Serial: Lost In Data Labyrinths (The School of Forgery; Winter Journey; Exotica Suite)
Short Strings, Polyrecombinant (Duetcetera)
Splendours And Chagrins (Rendang; Plague Lands and other poems; Amnion; Katabasis; Writing The Camp)
Devolution/ Disassembly:
Anglo-Welsh (Edge of Necessary; stenia cultus handbook; Keinc; King Driftwood)
Scottish poets (Zonda? Khamsin? Sharaav? Camanchaca?; Hand Over Mouth Music; Florilegium; The Sleep Road; makar /unmakar)
British South Asian poets (Brilliant Corners; Small Hands; The Voice Of Sheila Chandra; The Routines)
West-bloc dissidents: alternative poetry (Arrays; Lines on the Surface; INSTANT-fLEX 718)
Triumphs And Panics (Ephemeris; False Flags; Somnia; Makers Of Empty Dreams; Forms of Protest; Self Heal; The Cook's Wedding)
The Human Voice (rabbit; Venusberg; Rookie; Soft Sift; Kim Kardashian's Marriage)
Pistachio Euphoria Sorbet (the arboretum towards the beginning; Leave Bambi Alone)
Sociolinguistics (Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy‑Machine!!!; Wilia; Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues; Northern Alchemy; Unquiet)
Privatisation and Religion (The Palace of Oblivion; Ascension Notes; Monica’s Overcoat Of Flesh; Stranger In The Mask Of A Deer)
Land And Sea (Disappearance; Green Noise; Continental Drift; Else)
I keep wanting to add new bits to it but really it is complete. Part of the concept is the centrality of personal and individual poems to the scene, which is actually what used to be called “bourgeois individualism”. I never use this phrase because I don’t value the Marxist consequences it comes attached to, but evidently the Marxist theorists identified what it was, possibly back in the 1930s or even the 1920s. So their version is roughly “writers who failed to face up to the consequences of industrialisation and class society wrote about their own feelings and appealed to the narcissism of the reader. Developments of style led to refinements which diminished the basic energy and evaded political issues. Reader and writer floated off in a little boat which was cut off from a wider reality.” My book is about the consequences of this. I call it Genre A. Evidently the individualism thing is bypassed by cultural critical poetry and by poetry about ecology and man-made climate disaster. We could call these genres B and C. They deal with the collective fate even if the matters presented are specific to the poet and written in an original style.
For reasons we need not go into here, I spent a lot of time, sometime in the 20th century, studying Soviet and East German literature. This has affected my frame of reference. The difference between Western literature and that other world of texts is rather striking, and the difference has a lot to do with individualism and narcissism and the small scale. With the artist’s personality, in fact. I think the Marxist analysis of culture is right at about 30 key points. It was developed by very intelligent people who between them had a very wide knowledge of the facts of cultural history. That thought does not extend to wishing to live under a dictatorship. But you have to have a perspective on the West from outside the West. There is so much to gain from that. This politicised analysis did not lead me to reject the West any more than I wished to wake up in East Germany and find myself without a vote or civil rights. If people were put in prison for practising “bourgeois individualism”, a few hundred years have to pass before you can legitimately use the term to discuss real people and real poets.
In a previous post, I discussed a level of poetry underneath genre A, exhibited in “open mike” events, where people did not aspire to a personal style and avoided poems about their personal lives. It looks as if Genre A is an ambitious endeavour, and unambitious poets are writing in a way which is more conventional (or colloquial) and less personal. It is difficult to practise Genre A. So identifying it with “Western style poetry” is not completely accurate.
The obvious reference point for narratives which deal with collective endeavour and objective facts, rather than individual feelings, is Fifties war films. I mention this because I am very happy with individualist poetry and indeed being a poetry critic in this era involves appraising that kind of poetry rather than promoting a Soviet-style civic poetry. That attitude would of course mean rejecting the poetry which is actually being published and talking about something which basically does not exist. Distinguishing between a hundred poets within the “Western“ style is only possible if you take an interest in that style, although of course if you are more interested in the Five Year Plan then variations of style are not really worth noticing. (I like some of those films, which I grew up with. Recently I watched Simon Heffer’s documentary on those films, where he regrets that the genre came to an end at a certain point, to be replaced by films where virtue and achievement played a very small role indeed.) Even at the time, there was no poetry which corresponded to those films: something in the unwritten constitution of poetry made it suitable for describing individual and intimate experiences rather than public and objective ones. We don’t have a body of “Fifties war poetry”.
The line of narcissism applies to the reader as well as to the poets. So we could draw a distinction between “believing in individual artistic experience” and “rejecting individual experience because it is simply an expression of deposited strata of imperialism, patriarchy, class bias, pro-Western bias, etc. etc., and is scheduled to be replaced by pure Theory administered by Experts”. If you reject the contents of individual experience, the fine vibrations of its reactions, then there is no point reading poetry. I am interested in nuances of sensibility, moments of identification, comparison between sensations, details of style. That is, I value the contents of consciousness and do not think it is able to be replaced by anything else (even Marxism).
There is a history of individualism. The arguments about national debt and borrowing in the general crisis following 2007-8 saw interesting gaps open up in Europe between countries where people paid their taxes and countries where people steadily avoided them. This was discussed in terms of a “southern tier” where Greece was the “most southern” and had the worst problems with taxes not being collected. So within Europe there was a southern band of individualism, and it contrasted with another variety where you had a developed bourgeois social structure but people respected the State enough to pay their taxes and to make accurate statements of income. And the ”black economy” was weak and not popular with the public. During these arguments it was possible to reflect, not just on the pervasive nature of an individualist (or “familist”) set of attitudes in Europe, but also that such attitudes did not necessarily bring about economic growth and perhaps only brought growth in special and unusual circumstances.
I scanned the Poetry Book Society pages and found that they have suggested/ listed another 540 titles since I finished the first draft of the book. Yes, I haven't read them.
Sunday 21 January 2024
Fascist culture
Linehan
I was impressed by Thomas Linehan’s British fascism 1918-39 and especially by its two chapters on fascist culture. Since the fascists were just conservatives with a reduced level of inhibition and since there is no coherent statement about right-wing cultural attitudes in Britain, this fills a gap and gives us a moment of heightened awareness of how literature intersects with right-wing views of fantasies. (The lower-case f is a signal that he is dealing with a genre of tiny parties with vague allegiance to Italian fascist values, and not a single dominant brand – which arrived later.)
I think the situation is different with the BUF, which did not arrive until 1935, and which was in some ways radical and in some ways influenced by Nazism. However, the numerous fascist grouplets before that time were not influenced by Nazism, had little grasp of what Italian Fascism meant (a question hard to answer in concrete terms), and were strikingly similar to what Conservative voters uttered and favoured. Resistance to socialism and a burning wish to defend the Empire were prominent for all of them. Linehan can speak in exact and concrete terms because he is consulting particular texts, notably by CRF Boulton and Alexander Raven Thomson. I can’t disguise the fact that I regard a category of 70s-style definitions (usually Marxist in inspiration) of Right culture as hopelessly prejudiced and short on facts. They typically were confused about whether they were discussing German, French, Tsarist, American or British right groupings. They tended to paraphrase revered Grand Masters even where their writings had no reference to Britain and were decades out of date. There was a gap to be filled. It is difficult, on the other hand, to distill an ideology out of a right-wing world which dislikes generalisations, claims perfect individual autonomy, and also tends to build a wall between culture and politics. Right attitudes to culture certainly vary a great deal, all the same there is a set of unconscious inhibitions which are defended with frenzied energy when someone violates them. The set of these unconscious fixed positions is a cohering Fixed Position, and this is of interest to historians. There is a whole group of attitudes which tend to cluster together. The number of elements is fairly small – as is clear when one reads Linehan’s crisp analysis.
I think this is of limited use in analysing poetry of the last fifty years. Very few poets have taken in these right-wing symbols. They may be wary of politics or of generalisations, but that is a different matter. What I do find in Linehan is a compact reference statement, which can be used to discuss whether a given set of symbols actually are right-wing. I have just been reading the Australian historian of Italy RJB Bosworth mocking Norberto Bobbio for saying “where there was culture there was no Fascism, where there was fascism there was no culture”. This is too much of a let-out for Italian writers and artists, quite a few of whom had a fascist (PFN) membership card. Bosworth is right, and equally it can't be true that English culture was free of imperialism or that English imperialism was free of culture. It can’t be true that English literati did not identify with British crypto-colonial domination of Egypt over an eighty-year period, or that all of them were instinctively against the Suez campaign of 1956 and the plan to take back control of the Suez Canal. We are talking about an unconscious investment which became conscious when it was challenged (by Egyptian anti-colonialism). Unfortunately Egypt is just one example out of forty different countries where Britain had colonial authority (whether disguised as some form of protectorate or not).
Linehan is good at describing earlier phases of which 1920s fascism was a certain successor – so the Imperial Preference alliance of opinion, rejecting free trade to reinforce imperial identity, and the current which supported a naval arms race against Germany from roughly 1890 to 1914. This is important because we have difficulty in connecting poetry to anything like inter-war British Fascism. Inspiration from Italy was not of much relevance, whereas the preoccupation with military power, territory, and with the nightmare of decline in both, was highly relevant. What was expansive in 1880 became defensive and conservative in 1920 without alterations at a deeper level. And attitudes towards culture discarded the idea of apolitical culture, to use it as a proxy for physical struggle over territory and authority.
There was during the 1940s and 1950s a Right Book Club. Richard Griffiths has used lists of names to point out the overlap between its selection committee and British Fascist or pro-Nazi groups up to 1940. This sounds then like an excellent source of evidence, but from a quick inspection there is a lack of statements at the theoretical level and the books chosen tend to be peripheral as well as anti-intellectual (or even anti-political). I am embarrassed to see that I have read some of them, but then some of the titles are comic and about social manners and not very political. (an Inn-Keeper’s Diary, by John Fothergill – he is a snob and makes a joke of this throughout. Of course he wants to make money and dislikes customers who don’t have any. Somehow this book expresses right-wing values but also makes them a source of laughs. He was also published by Penguin and Faber.) I am unclear how a biography of Dr Johnson could turn out to be a right-wing book. I am not impressed by earnest attempts to map modern politics onto the 1740s. No doubt Johnson was a Jacobite, he disliked the Hanoverian dynasty, and no doubt there is some kind of flow from Jacobitism into later versions of the Right, in particular supporters of various exiled dynasties... but there was no Right and Left in 1750. Am I supposed to define the Hanoverians as left-wing? Why did the Right Book Club publish the memoirs of Guild-socialist Eric Gill? This just isn't a high-garde source.
One can speak of a crisis of modernism between the wars, as the stimulus which brought about an anti-modernist reaction to drive it away. Linehan is very astute in describing the fascist rejection of any kind of modernism in the arts, and we have to acknowledged that while a stratum of people were becoming fans of modernism there was a whole other stratum which detested it altogether (whether examining it as evidence or rejecting it sight unseen). So for example Linehan quotes a report from a fascist who attended the Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 and saw it as an example of modern decadence. Since the focal experience for the Right was hatred of the new, the art they favoured was defined initially by features missing from it and not by any positive content. I think it is a waste of time to identify any formally conservative art with political conservatism. To start with we are looking at features which by definition are not there, to be looked at, and to go on with someone with a radical political message probably uses conservative artistic languages to reach the broadest audience. If the Soviet bloc used 19th C artistic conventions for propaganda, we cannot suddenly define that mass (slew?) of art as conservative. And evidently committed left-wing art in western Europe or north America has tended to use similar artistic conventions to carry a message.
I was tantalised by the appearance of Philip Mairet as joining the British People’s Party in about 1939 (they were a very fugitive fascist and anti-war group). Mairet probably provided some of the imagery for Four Quartets and represented a sort of anti-industrial, back to the land, organic farming, craft current which surfaces in Four Quartets. I had not defined him as a fascist and now realise I have some work to do to track down his intellectual biography. I now see that he wrote a large essay for a 1945 symposium edited by Maurice Reckitt, who was the leading Christian Socialist of the mid-20th century. The going may be soft in this district, but some more definite conclusion needs to be sought. I imagine that his goal was to protect Europe from war rather than to roll back socialism.
The shortage of right-wing poets goes back to the 1920s rather than the 1960s. Edmund Blunden was someone with Right positions and a dubious record of association with pro-Hitler opponents of the war. But does anyone read him any more? He was not a militarist.
Where we find writing about modern art, it is usually by people with a real interest in the art. There probably is a whole group of people who have conservative attitudes on many scores but also like modern art. This disguises the fact that so many people rejected modern art altogether. With poetry, one has to reckon with people who reject free verse altogether, even if they are not writing anything on the subject.
It is unpleasant to read quotes from a book justifying Hitler because the homosexual culture of Berlin had become intolerable, so in need of cleansing and constraint, along with descriptions of visibly gay people in parts of Berlin, and then find that the author quoted is Wyndham Lewis. Lewis is a good example of an English fascist. If you read his art criticism, he takes a whole series of ideas very productive in creating art, and demolishes them. For example, Paleface looks at artists connecting to Third World art, to myth and the unconscious, to pre-classical art, etc., and ridiculed them. But this idea has been one of the most productive in 20th C art. Lewis is very similar to someone denouncing modern art altogether – he never seems to find anything positive in modern art. I feel the key is his inability to identify with any kind of reformist political ideas – he dislikes anyone with radical ideas so much that in the end he detests radical ideas. This remains true even if he produced startlingly modern paintings. You have to look at his writing in isolation. With Lewis, the feeling is occasionally that he hates other people in general. But he liked Hitler.
There is a whole series of Far Right leaders, in this country, who admired Hitler and imitated him as far as they could. That strand has nothing to do with conservatism. The comparison I am making relates only to the fascists of roughly 1920 to 1935, who didn’t have much interest in race or in a radical transformation of society. Foreign comparisons are likely to be misleading where we are dealing with a mature political culture with a long history of debate being freely carried on.
I was impressed by Thomas Linehan’s British fascism 1918-39 and especially by its two chapters on fascist culture. Since the fascists were just conservatives with a reduced level of inhibition and since there is no coherent statement about right-wing cultural attitudes in Britain, this fills a gap and gives us a moment of heightened awareness of how literature intersects with right-wing views of fantasies. (The lower-case f is a signal that he is dealing with a genre of tiny parties with vague allegiance to Italian fascist values, and not a single dominant brand – which arrived later.)
I think the situation is different with the BUF, which did not arrive until 1935, and which was in some ways radical and in some ways influenced by Nazism. However, the numerous fascist grouplets before that time were not influenced by Nazism, had little grasp of what Italian Fascism meant (a question hard to answer in concrete terms), and were strikingly similar to what Conservative voters uttered and favoured. Resistance to socialism and a burning wish to defend the Empire were prominent for all of them. Linehan can speak in exact and concrete terms because he is consulting particular texts, notably by CRF Boulton and Alexander Raven Thomson. I can’t disguise the fact that I regard a category of 70s-style definitions (usually Marxist in inspiration) of Right culture as hopelessly prejudiced and short on facts. They typically were confused about whether they were discussing German, French, Tsarist, American or British right groupings. They tended to paraphrase revered Grand Masters even where their writings had no reference to Britain and were decades out of date. There was a gap to be filled. It is difficult, on the other hand, to distill an ideology out of a right-wing world which dislikes generalisations, claims perfect individual autonomy, and also tends to build a wall between culture and politics. Right attitudes to culture certainly vary a great deal, all the same there is a set of unconscious inhibitions which are defended with frenzied energy when someone violates them. The set of these unconscious fixed positions is a cohering Fixed Position, and this is of interest to historians. There is a whole group of attitudes which tend to cluster together. The number of elements is fairly small – as is clear when one reads Linehan’s crisp analysis.
I think this is of limited use in analysing poetry of the last fifty years. Very few poets have taken in these right-wing symbols. They may be wary of politics or of generalisations, but that is a different matter. What I do find in Linehan is a compact reference statement, which can be used to discuss whether a given set of symbols actually are right-wing. I have just been reading the Australian historian of Italy RJB Bosworth mocking Norberto Bobbio for saying “where there was culture there was no Fascism, where there was fascism there was no culture”. This is too much of a let-out for Italian writers and artists, quite a few of whom had a fascist (PFN) membership card. Bosworth is right, and equally it can't be true that English culture was free of imperialism or that English imperialism was free of culture. It can’t be true that English literati did not identify with British crypto-colonial domination of Egypt over an eighty-year period, or that all of them were instinctively against the Suez campaign of 1956 and the plan to take back control of the Suez Canal. We are talking about an unconscious investment which became conscious when it was challenged (by Egyptian anti-colonialism). Unfortunately Egypt is just one example out of forty different countries where Britain had colonial authority (whether disguised as some form of protectorate or not).
Linehan is good at describing earlier phases of which 1920s fascism was a certain successor – so the Imperial Preference alliance of opinion, rejecting free trade to reinforce imperial identity, and the current which supported a naval arms race against Germany from roughly 1890 to 1914. This is important because we have difficulty in connecting poetry to anything like inter-war British Fascism. Inspiration from Italy was not of much relevance, whereas the preoccupation with military power, territory, and with the nightmare of decline in both, was highly relevant. What was expansive in 1880 became defensive and conservative in 1920 without alterations at a deeper level. And attitudes towards culture discarded the idea of apolitical culture, to use it as a proxy for physical struggle over territory and authority.
There was during the 1940s and 1950s a Right Book Club. Richard Griffiths has used lists of names to point out the overlap between its selection committee and British Fascist or pro-Nazi groups up to 1940. This sounds then like an excellent source of evidence, but from a quick inspection there is a lack of statements at the theoretical level and the books chosen tend to be peripheral as well as anti-intellectual (or even anti-political). I am embarrassed to see that I have read some of them, but then some of the titles are comic and about social manners and not very political. (an Inn-Keeper’s Diary, by John Fothergill – he is a snob and makes a joke of this throughout. Of course he wants to make money and dislikes customers who don’t have any. Somehow this book expresses right-wing values but also makes them a source of laughs. He was also published by Penguin and Faber.) I am unclear how a biography of Dr Johnson could turn out to be a right-wing book. I am not impressed by earnest attempts to map modern politics onto the 1740s. No doubt Johnson was a Jacobite, he disliked the Hanoverian dynasty, and no doubt there is some kind of flow from Jacobitism into later versions of the Right, in particular supporters of various exiled dynasties... but there was no Right and Left in 1750. Am I supposed to define the Hanoverians as left-wing? Why did the Right Book Club publish the memoirs of Guild-socialist Eric Gill? This just isn't a high-garde source.
One can speak of a crisis of modernism between the wars, as the stimulus which brought about an anti-modernist reaction to drive it away. Linehan is very astute in describing the fascist rejection of any kind of modernism in the arts, and we have to acknowledged that while a stratum of people were becoming fans of modernism there was a whole other stratum which detested it altogether (whether examining it as evidence or rejecting it sight unseen). So for example Linehan quotes a report from a fascist who attended the Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 and saw it as an example of modern decadence. Since the focal experience for the Right was hatred of the new, the art they favoured was defined initially by features missing from it and not by any positive content. I think it is a waste of time to identify any formally conservative art with political conservatism. To start with we are looking at features which by definition are not there, to be looked at, and to go on with someone with a radical political message probably uses conservative artistic languages to reach the broadest audience. If the Soviet bloc used 19th C artistic conventions for propaganda, we cannot suddenly define that mass (slew?) of art as conservative. And evidently committed left-wing art in western Europe or north America has tended to use similar artistic conventions to carry a message.
I was tantalised by the appearance of Philip Mairet as joining the British People’s Party in about 1939 (they were a very fugitive fascist and anti-war group). Mairet probably provided some of the imagery for Four Quartets and represented a sort of anti-industrial, back to the land, organic farming, craft current which surfaces in Four Quartets. I had not defined him as a fascist and now realise I have some work to do to track down his intellectual biography. I now see that he wrote a large essay for a 1945 symposium edited by Maurice Reckitt, who was the leading Christian Socialist of the mid-20th century. The going may be soft in this district, but some more definite conclusion needs to be sought. I imagine that his goal was to protect Europe from war rather than to roll back socialism.
The shortage of right-wing poets goes back to the 1920s rather than the 1960s. Edmund Blunden was someone with Right positions and a dubious record of association with pro-Hitler opponents of the war. But does anyone read him any more? He was not a militarist.
Where we find writing about modern art, it is usually by people with a real interest in the art. There probably is a whole group of people who have conservative attitudes on many scores but also like modern art. This disguises the fact that so many people rejected modern art altogether. With poetry, one has to reckon with people who reject free verse altogether, even if they are not writing anything on the subject.
It is unpleasant to read quotes from a book justifying Hitler because the homosexual culture of Berlin had become intolerable, so in need of cleansing and constraint, along with descriptions of visibly gay people in parts of Berlin, and then find that the author quoted is Wyndham Lewis. Lewis is a good example of an English fascist. If you read his art criticism, he takes a whole series of ideas very productive in creating art, and demolishes them. For example, Paleface looks at artists connecting to Third World art, to myth and the unconscious, to pre-classical art, etc., and ridiculed them. But this idea has been one of the most productive in 20th C art. Lewis is very similar to someone denouncing modern art altogether – he never seems to find anything positive in modern art. I feel the key is his inability to identify with any kind of reformist political ideas – he dislikes anyone with radical ideas so much that in the end he detests radical ideas. This remains true even if he produced startlingly modern paintings. You have to look at his writing in isolation. With Lewis, the feeling is occasionally that he hates other people in general. But he liked Hitler.
There is a whole series of Far Right leaders, in this country, who admired Hitler and imitated him as far as they could. That strand has nothing to do with conservatism. The comparison I am making relates only to the fascists of roughly 1920 to 1935, who didn’t have much interest in race or in a radical transformation of society. Foreign comparisons are likely to be misleading where we are dealing with a mature political culture with a long history of debate being freely carried on.
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