Travelogue- More notes

Travelogue- More, blog 4

I am wondering about the dataset of “poetry relating to the Third World and Britain” which I used. It stops at 55 titles, although I have just added one more. Is there an excuse for not going up to 100? Yes, that it would just bulk out the book without adding new ideas. But, of course, there must be more such books of poetry, and there must be ideas I don’t know about.

From an email: “But I couldn't find any poetry saying that the Empire should be shut down. It was about to happen, but nobody wrote a poem saying, go ahead and do it. People were too concerned with the condition of the working class, and with European politics. This is my main result and I’m quite unhappy about it.

It is embarrassing. There should be an Adrian Wetherspoon, who was at Oxford with Auden, got a Blue in flower arranging, had an affair with Spender, and wrote a 1936 book called “Give the Empire back, you chaps!”. Worked for the BBC. Became professor of Suburban Studies at the university of Wellingborough.”

Last night (night of 25 July) I had a dream in which I found a new example for the Travelogue of poems, a complete set of poems about Egypt written by Peter Porter. I am flailing to find examples and this even in my sleep. Of course, those Egypt poems don’t exist. The joy of finding has taken me over.
Porter does in fact mention Ancinet Egypt:

And victims sitting in the tireless hall
Before the second paper of the afternoon
Are answering shadows. Who’d start
The heron of the Eighteenth Dynasty
From painted reeds; who’d say Paul
To a persecutor from a quarterly?
The blind man is called in as
Adviser and the tone-deaf President
Buys Wagner’s bed – our only protection
Sacred objects with a patina
Of fear. And that there are too many
Of us will never refer to one.

(from ‘There Are Too Many of Us’ in The Last of England, 1970)
This is just a passing moment, two lines long. I am glad to say that my unconscious was not completely making stuff up.

* There is an argument that modernist poetry in Britain was inherently anti-imperial because it started with rejection of the inherited British values. I have not written the book in these terms. Local enemies of modernism disliked it from the point of view that the youth of Britain had to be super-patriotic in order to provide the raw material for future Imperial wars. They vocally objected to Modernism and other things, because they distracted from this super-patriotism. But their whole position was poorly considered and inaccurate. We can’t just take over their ideas about modernism. Mostly, they amount to one more deposit of bad language which we don’t need to consult.
I do admire the courage of certain individuals in the inter-war period, breaking with family values, parental values, the school’s values, the Church, and so forth. It is unusual for artists to forgo approval. There was a biographical drama involved in becoming modern. You can argue that to enter modernist art is to lose the old values, dissolved in doubt, if only for three hours, or for the duration of an evening. But the outcome of this “deprogramming” was to re-program yourself and connect with a small elite, say 1% of the population of Europe. This actually meant becoming international, in a certain way. If we consult Haftmann’s Modern Painting (1964 version), for example, it has a helpful appendix listing 1200 Modernist painters (up to 1964), and almost none of them belong to the Third World. We do find the Cuban Wifredo Lam and a couple of Mexican muralists. This is pointing in the wrong direction – it moves you away from empire-building but gives you a wholly European perspective. Apparently, the phase of doubt then stops, as you simply come to identify with the modernist world and its members.
Modernism did have an imperialist wing – Marinetti and a whole group of Futurists sympathising with Mussolini.
I like the modernists. I think they started with a deep scepticism about authority. That certainly is a threat to the psychological bases of the empire, because its narrative had so many utterly impressive authority figures, the ones they made statues of. But the anti-authority attitude would be equally scathing about the leaders of the new democracy which the freeing of any colony would bring into being. I am just not impressed by blanket rejection of authority. I think you can have people who are hypersensitive, who withdraw into private worlds, who create entire artistic worlds as a sequel to that… that does not automatically make them political geniuses.
I think the principle of doubt can take you anywhere. It certainly doesn’t reach the end of its potential quickly, if at all. I just don’t think that scepticism can instantly be redefined as being anti-imperial. That definition would surely be satisfied by a statement like, “I believe in democracy and no colony is democratic”.
Am reading Sathnam Sanghera’s book on the aftermath of the Empire. He says “the British Empire was the single most significant incubator, refiner, and propagator of white supremacy in the history of the planet. […] Most British imperialists were proudly racist and, as British imperialism peaked, prominent journalists and authors throughout the British empire corresponded and conspired to spread ideas of white supremacy across the planet. Many of the proudly white supremacist politicians, thinkers and diplomats of British empire coalesced around various international racial ‘crises’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…” This is terrific, and if you don’t get this you don’t get anything. (Empireworld, p. 176) Modern sensitivity to racial epithets (and so on) follows from an era where racial abuse, and its congeners like corporal punishment and humiliation, were daily practice wherever white people encountered coloured ones. It is easy to forget this, because the memory has been whitewashed; but it is necessary to remember.
This is something where the norm (of abuse) which was there in the 1950s was replaced – first of all in the (verbal) manners of a tiny minority, say 1%, and which spread, often via the media. But, the spread to 100% of the media didn’t mean a spread to 100% of the population. Modernisation has had geographical, social, educational limits, like other processes. So today maybe 30% of the population haven’t given up the ground-level racism – and these are the Reform UK voters. And there is this sharp separation between the verbal-attitudinal norms in the media and the norms in the group of people they associate with. So, their out of date attitudes to race have been coupled to a resentment of the media, and of the kind of person who works in the media.
There are probably hundreds of major works on the Empire, and its connection to the homeland, which I haven’t read. But none of the ones I have read pays attention to poetry. This is the gap which justifies me in writing. I pick up what other historians regard as unimportant.
I googled ‘imperialist poetry’ and got a list of 10 poems which included ‘The Waste Land’. Allegedly, it refers to many cities which are a part of empires. I don’t really buy this. The cities were part of empires at various stages of their history, because almost all of Europe and south west Asia was in that category, and that is the imaginative world in which Eliot’s poems in Waste Land and its group were set. So, this is a wrong note. But linking it to a Spenglerian view of history is reasonable…. Of course, we never really get an explanation in the poems of what that view is, and it isn’t a reproduction of Spengler, it takes his framework and produces a shadow of it, changing all the terms. Spengler had that sort of suggestive power. Eliot’s characters all seem to live in a state of exhaustion and indifference, and that isn’t really affected by the exotic cities which they visit. “Burbank with a Baedeker”, so he is engaged on cultural tourism, and the poem is set in Venice – but the poetry visits many cities, so it doesn’t much matter which one it is. The idea of ancient cities links up to the idea of a culture which is too old and a person who is too cultured. The poem refers to ruins, and Venice is the capital of an empire that ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century, but the poem doesn’t say if that outcome is good or bad. The Grail story is set in an Arthurian realm which is theoretically part of the Roman Empire, which he was defending. Does that make Waste Land, with its Grail theme, a poem about Imperialism? This is attractive but meaningless.
Sanghera also talks about “the rule of law” as an aspect of the imperial order. But, if the government itself displaced earlier governments by force, and abolished the customary and communal law of the land, and then imposed laws with no need for consent or democratic consultation, is that actually law? It is rule, but how can it be law if the government itself is illegitimate? He is partly paraphrasing another scholar (Keally MacBride), but the point is very well made (Empireworld, p. 158).
I have had a leaflet put through my door which promotes the Restore Britain party. It has a lot about repatriating legal immigrants, not just illegal ones. Send them all back, in a word. They are simply aiming at people who think that Reform UK is too far Left. And, they got 7% of the votes cast in the last by-election in England. This is the atmosphere I am writing in.

* Am developing doubts about the history of the novel. The link of realism to tight series of observations, such as public accounts, is good. But reading about the ‘Tristan’ of Thomas makes me think that something completely different is happening, to do with recognising the inner narratives of characters. This would push us towards a less simple idea of Western literature, with multiple currents acting in different directions, even if in the same centuries. Of course, empathy involves close observation, and in general links to realistic knowledge because both work in rich, highly literate, self-conscious societies. But still they aren’t the same thing.

Can’t explain why I have written a history of fiction inside a book which is about poetry. I can’t write such a history of poetry. I think comparing poetry is more difficult. It is a lot easier to compare fantastic prose like the Early Modern Irish romances to the realist novel than to compare poetry from the same two periods. The prose is less subjective, in some way. Poetry since the rise of the novel assumes that the characters are part of a novel. This is a basic pattern of imagination since everyone began reading novels all the time. But, how to prove that.
I just don’t think psychology, as the growing force of change in Western literature since Tristan, is part of science. It is something different. The love theme involves idealisation, which is just about the opposite of observation. You have the court of Arthur and the perfection of the knights, objects which you envy and desire to imitate, nothing to do with historical truth or accountability. The fascination with the loved person, the introspection looking into what love means and how you really feel, are barely related to science. Searching for an ideal is quite different from searching for the truth.
Religion offers perfection (and unreality) in many ways. It can’t be true that psychology came into art from religion. Rather, Christian interest in the soul was weak in the beginning and developed very gradually. Some force made it develop, and this force was latent in the culture, and we have to seek its real origins, rather than presenting Religion as an effect which has no cause itself.
The increasing character complexity in the romances and their love stories is linked to literacy. But the audience for something like “Tristan” was not exclusively literate, rather it was for recitation to a mixed audience of whom some were not literate, even if they belonged to the richer strata.
Describing what is Western is basic to describing the differences between Westerners and the Third World people they have come into contact with. But, it is only going to appear in my write-up if it is simple enough to be described quickly. I don’t want 100 chapters on 100 features of the West.
The romances and their psychology do identify the West, because all that did not happen in Byzantium, despite its large numbers of priests and monks, its many literate individuals. Of course, that idea suggests that I should go and read late Byzantine literature, to see how far this idea is really true. By reading the early fiction, am I going to come up with a new idea about the history of changing cognition? Both the Thomas Tristan and Men of Maize are overwhelming in their scope, vortices which make me forget everything else.
If we say “the cultural industry in the West has thirty genres and shoots off in every direction”, the history of it collapses and becomes unwritable. Everything you can say is true and nothing is cogent.