Op. 41
PORTRAITS -
POWER AND GLORY VIS-À-VIS FORM
AND CONTENTMENT
Biographical Sketches
Copyright © 2013 John
O'Loughlin
____________
CONTENTS
1. Malcolm Muggeridge
2. Arthur Koestler
3. Jean-Paul Sartre
4. Norman Mailer
5. Adolf Hitler
6. Josef Stalin
7. Eamon de Valera
8. Benito Mussolini
9. Charles de Gaulle
10. Andre Malraux
11. Albert Camus
12. Lawrence Durrell
13. Anthony Burgess
14. James Joyce
15. Ezra Pound
16. T.S. Eliot
17. Oswald Spengler
18. Bertrand Russell
19. J.B. Priestley
20. Kenneth Clark
21. Herbert Read
22. Salvador Dali
23. Francisco Franco
24. Teilhard de Chardin
25. V.I. Lenin
26. David Ben-Gurian
27. Simone de Beauvoir
28. Christopher Isherwood
29. Aldous Huxley
30. Thomas Mann
31. Wilhelm Reich
32. Carl Jung
33. W.B. Yeats
_______________
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
I have read most of this great journalist's
writings, and have derived, besides pleasure, much useful information and
knowledge from them. I particularly
admired Chronicles of Wasted Time, Vol. II, which mainly dealt with his
wartime experiences in Intelligence and Administration. I also admired The Diaries, which span
the greater part of his adult life. He
has an amazing facility with words, spinning them with seeming effortlessness
across vast tracts of the imagination in a style both fluent
and complex, graceful and robust.
Few people could have been more fluent or
articulate in speech either, and I always found it a pleasure to listen to him
on Radio 4's 'Any Questions'. His was
one of the few voices to enliven the programme, and not simply in his
tone-of-voice but, more importantly, in what he said with it. For, unlike most people, Malcolm Muggeridge spoke his mind and, again unlike most people's,
it was an intensely individual mind, which made it all the more worth hearing.
Few people have exploited free speech like
him; for, indeed, few people truly know the meaning of free speech. It takes both intelligence and courage,
intellectual courage, to speak one's mind freely and frankly, and this great
man had both. His death was a great loss
to both letters and freedom. For of all
the major public personalities of his time, he came
the closest to being a guru and God's Englishman. Not for me to begrudge him that!
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Few people could
have been more admired in print and less known in speech than this British
citizen of Hungarian Jewish extraction who, not surprisingly, spoke English
with a markedly foreign accent. But if
he was unattractive and thus secretive in speech, he was more than adequately
compensated for this disadvantage in prose, spinning, for a foreign-born
journalist, some of the most word-perfect, complex, imaginative, and enlivening
prose ever recorded in English letters.
First and foremost a philosopher, Koestler pursued his evolutionary and 'holonic'
theories with a rigour, consistency, and patience seldom encountered in British
philosophical writings. In this respect,
he was closer to the French, particularly Sartre, with whom he was friendly for
a time during his Paris years. But, for
all his personal literary brilliance, Koestler was
flawed, perhaps partly on account of his foreign origins, by pedanticism, by too great a respect for past thinkers like
Darwin and Freud, and never really broke free of them to establish himself as a
major thinker in his own right.
Yet I cannot deny that, for a time, his
influence on me was considerable, even in politics, and I owe my own
ideological position in part to his thinking, which served as a springboard to
my intellectual freedom. Of all his
books, probably Janus - A
Summing Up (which I read, incidentally, before his much
earlier The Act of Creation) had the most influence on me, though I also
admired From Bricks to Babel, the more recently-published selective
anthology spanning several decades. Koestler may not have been a genius of the first rank, but
he was arguably one of the cleverest men of his time.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
During my
youth Sartre was, for a while, my favourite author, particularly with regard to
Nausea, his first and, in my opinion, best novel, which I must
have read at least eight times by the age of 22, identifying, in some degree,
with its antihero, Roquentin. Of all French authors, probably Sartre came
closest to being a guru and hero of French youth. Unattractive in appearance, he was yet
attractive in prose, both fluent and profound, though not always true.
As, for instance, in Anti-Semite
and Jew, his little book against anti-Semitism, wherein I read of the Jews
as Israelites! Israelites? But there was, at the time, no Israel in
existence and hadn't been so for some two millennia! How therefore could Jews be identified with a
non-existent nationality? In such fashion,
starting from a bogus premise, Sartre completely fails to grasp the cold logic
of an anti-tribal, closed-society perspective, and consequently came out
against anti-Semitism.
Well, I'm not here encouraging people to be
anti-Semitic - far from it! An open
society does not permit of a supertheocratic
opposition to tribalists ... except on the basis of a
lunatic fringe, a basis that can entail serious penalties if taken too
far! No, but in relation to Nazism,
which was the relationship Sartre was mostly writing about at the time,
anti-Semitism was a logical ideological procedure, even if cooked-up for the
benefit of the masses in some crasser, more tangible guise that makes no
reference to Jews as tribalists (though the
expression 'submen', also applicable to Gypsies,
autocrats, priests, and communists, whether Russian or Polish, carries
approximately the same weight).
Well, Sartre was certainly wrong in his own
logical position, which is, after all, only to be expected from a French
bourgeois writer, since the French, along with the British and to a lesser
extent the Americans, usually prove themselves ethnically and ideologically
incapable of coming to intellectual grips with extreme ideological positions,
particularly when, as in the case of National Socialism, such positions are of
a supertheocratic bias, albeit one that was seriously
flawed and therefore of no real credit to religion.
Yes, I read Sartre but, like all the other
authors I shall be writing about, I eventually grew out of and beyond him. After all, the bourgeois is a dying breed.
NORMAN MAILER
Although I
haven't read everything of Norman Mailer's, I have certainly enjoyed most of
what I read, and that included Barbary Shore, The Prisoner of Sex,
and, more recently, Pieces and Pontifications,
which was by far the most interesting, if not always the most convincing. I have always felt sceptical about Mailer,
particularly in view of his worldly success as one of America's most celebrated
and best-paid authors.
The worldly and the spiritual don't go
together to any appreciable extent, and it is no surprise for me to learn that
Mailer is a staunch democrat - that worldly ideology par
excellence - and has been married several times. Neither was I surprised to learn, again from Pieces
and Pontifications, that he disapproves of plastic, indeed, equates
it with the Devil! For how could such a
naturalistic down-to-earth man possibly understand plastic, or things made of
plastic, and see them in their true supernatural light? It is as though the Jew in him is too strong,
too deeply ingrained, obliging allegiance to the Creator in some quasi-Judaic
holy paganism.
No, I was not bound to rave about Norman
Mailer, though I will admit he possesses a lively facility with words and an
admirable ability to quickly spin ideas from them, which connotes with his
fellow-worldly intellectual, Arthur Koestler. Probably his best idea, from my evolutionary
point-of-view, concerns the metaphorical correlates or manifestations of the
Devil and God in the world at any given time, battling for hegemony over it. Although he sees the Devil, so to speak, in
the antinatural, particularly of all things in
plastic products, he is none too sure about the metaphorical status of God,
since his notions of the supernatural are hazy and constrained by worldly
criteria, making him more partial to the natural, which is precisely the world,
and hence the real.
Like most Jews, American or otherwise, he
suffers from a blind spot concerning the supernatural; for were he to
distinguish more objectively between the Devil and God, as between materialism
and idealism, he would sooner or later find himself in the unhappy position of
discovering that the last ideological manifestation of God in the world,
appertaining to a crude approximation to the Second Coming, was Hitlerian fascism, and that this supernatural idealism was
defeated not simply by the Devil ... in the guise of communist materialism, but
by a combination of the Devil and the World (meaning the allied West), over
whose democratic realism Nazism had for a time seemed so triumphant.
Needless to say, Mailer is not going to
abandon his worldliness for the sake of a fascist supernaturalism. Whether he would be prepared, in due course,
to abandon it for a Centrist transcendentalism ... must remain open to doubt. I, for one, would be sceptical!
ADOLF HITLER
Curious
that Hitler, for all his faults and Nordic shortcomings, should have
appertained or, at any rate, struck me as appertaining to a crude approximation
to the Second Coming in the world ... in the face of antichristic
communism. Few people in the democratic
West seem to realize that the real barbarism and evil afoot at that time was
Soviet Communism, and I suspect one could cite the extent of Western decadence
as if not an honourable factor in this respect, then at least an extenuating
one. For the West was far gone in
decadence even then, and when you get a falling away from realism towards
materialism in a democratic context, it is almost inevitable that sooner or
later a counterbalancing idealism will emerge to attempt to stem the decadence
and save what remains of the soul from the jaws of ravenous materialism.
In England, people have long been
conditioned to regarding National Socialism as an ideological manifestation of
the Devil, purely and simply, with the denigratory
epithet 'Nazi' reserved for all those who succumbed to what is perceived to
have been one of the worst manifestations of barbarism of all time. Now, admittedly, to the extent that we take
the title 'National Socialism' literally, there would be adequate grounds for
considering it an indication of materialist barbarism. Yet the fact remains that, whilst a degree of
literal nationalistic socialism may have accrued to the ideology, Hitler
and most of his closest followers in the Party never took the idea of socialism
too seriously, but, on the contrary, constantly fulminated against it in the
name of idealistic values, values which diametrically opposed socialist
materialism ... as represented, in particular, by the Soviet Union; communism
being identifiable, in Hitler's mind, with out-and-out barbarism, an ideology
only fit for those who stood lowest in the scale of civilization, the 'chalk'
with which no mixture of fascist 'cheese' was possible, the German people no
less racially superior to the Russians, in Hitler's eyes, than ideologically
superior, no democratic-type compromise being possible between idealistic ürbermenschen and materialistic untermenschen, the Slavs having put themselves
beneath the realistic pale through communism and therefore not being entitled
to the more lenient, educative treatment accorded to defeated Westerners.
How, then, can one equate this National
Socialist ideology with barbarism? And
how explain why a people long regarded as one of the most cultured in
Coming late to Empire and losing what
little it had acquired to the victorious Allies following World War One,
Germany was in a position, like no other country on earth, to adopt an
idealistic stance in the face of decadent realism on the one hand and barbarous
materialism on the other, and, inevitably,
it turned against both with all the vengeance of legitimate hatred. In Hitler it had found its saviour. But the ambitious Führer
was unable to prevent the eventual defeat of the German people under the
combined weight of the overwhelming forces massed against them. Democracy won the day and, until
comparatively recently, the Antichrist sat enthroned not only over the former
Soviet Union, but over much of Eastern Europe as well!
There was, however, a certain truth in one
of Hitler's last statements, where he claimed to have been ahead of his
time. For idealism, in the guise of
National Socialism, was no match for the combined opposition of democratic
realism and communist materialism, the former of which still holds the
day. As remarked earlier, Hitler seems
to me to have been a crude approximation to the Second Coming, the first
attempt by idealism to challenge the forces of materialistic disintegration
and, like most first attempts at anything, it was doomed to failure, an early
crack at the bull's-eye, so to speak, that was bound to miss the central
target, if only because further practice and rethinking of policy were
inevitably required.
When Hitler also claimed that National
Socialism would one day rise again, he was approximating to the truth,
necessarily from his own doomed point-of-view, but nevertheless in the broader
and higher sense that idealism could never be written-off or entirely
vanquished from the world, since idealism was the key to the future defeat of
materialism and banishment of the Antichrist from the world in the name of the
Second Coming, in order that the 'Kingdom of Heaven' could be established on
earth, to lead mankind towards a transcendent salvation.
As before ... so again, materialism is but
a passing phenomenon destined for liquidation from God's transcendental
point-of-view, whether we are referring to the 'before' of the lower
supernaturalism in the Roman Catholic culture of the Middle Ages, which
superseded the materialist barbarism of the Dark Ages, or to the 'again' of the
coming higher supernaturalism in the Social Transcendentalist culture of the
future free-electron age when, no less surely, the second 'Dark Ages' of
communist/liberal barbarism will be globally superseded by the light of
ultimate truth - the supertruth of the more genuine
manifestation of the Second Coming, though not, in all probability, without a
global struggle.
Yes, idealism will eventually rise-up
again, but Hitler couldn't have foreseen exactly how or in what guise, given
his National Socialist limitations, his misfortune to have been chosen by fate
as a forerunner and not literal embodiment of the Second Coming, to have been
born into a people who, despite their high cultural reputation, could not have
served as a true 'chosen people' for the development of idealism towards the supertheocratic level of the true religion of ... Social
Transcendentalism.
JOSEF STALIN
Although
far less cultured and intuitively intelligent than Hitler, there is a sense in
which Stalin was cleverer, by which I mean shrewder and more cunning, better
able to pursue a single objective, no matter how odious or seemingly trivial,
and, above all, more realistic, less given to grandiose schemes or false
delusions of grandeur. For all his
personal faults, Stalin was no internationalist stooge, like Trotsky, but a
down-to-earth Soviet 'nationalist' for whom 'socialism in one country' (though
the Soviet Union was in fact a hotchpotch of disparate nations) was the means
to consolidating and developing communism for possible subsequent external
expansion and/or assistance.
If Trotsky was the communist idealist,
fanatically bent on perpetuating revolution on a permanent basis, analogous in
a way to Mao, then Stalin was very firmly communism's realist, and by taking
the Soviet Union, battered and war-weary, off the idealistic pedestal of
international revolution, one might almost say off the ideological 'gold
standard', he not so much betrayed the revolution as ... rejected a chimera of
wishful thinking. Too bad if some people
have never been in a position, either ethnically or ideologically, to
appreciate this apparent volte face at
its true value!
More than anyone else, Stalin was
responsible for saving the Soviet Union from the tragic fate that would surely
have overtaken it had an unreasoning idealist like Trotsky been in the driving
seat. And not only in peacetime,
either! For it is inconceivable that the
Soviet Union could have fought the 'Great Patriotic War' against Hitler's
invading armies as well or as bravely as it did ... had not 'socialism in one
country' been the battle cry, sounded under the banner of Slav nationalism, for
several years past.
The defeat of Nazi Germany inexorably led
to the extension of this Slav ideology to Eastern Europe, thereby vindicating
Stalin's line of first things first and a little at a time. Whereas Trotsky was an idealistic aberration,
Stalin was history in the making. He was
a devil without peers.
EAMON DE
Stalin may
have been a devil without peers, but minor devils there has been no shortage
of, and de Valera - 'Dev' to his friends - could well
be cited here in respect of his ardent republicanism, even though he was less
of a republican than some of his Sinn Fein and, subsequently, Fianna Fàil comrades.
More than any man, he was responsible for
the Irish Civil War that erupted in the swift wake of the withdrawing British,
his intransigent republicanism a grave stumbling-block to peace on the basis of
the 1921 Treaty, which granted Southern Ireland Dominion Status within the
British Empire. For de Valera and his followers, however, it was republicanism or
nothing, and although a republic eventually emerged, if only on the 26-county
basis, it was paradoxically long after the Anti-Treaty rebels had been
defeated.
Yet even with republicanism handed to him
on a plate by Sean Costello, leader of the Fine Gael-dominated coalition
government, de Valera was not satisfied with
Ireland's partitioned status and vigorously campaigned, as before, for its
annulment ... on the basis of popular consent.
Here he was barking up the wrong tree, but he continued so to bark,
sometimes more fiercely, sometimes modulating his tone in an attempt to placate
the loyalists, and always, no matter how often, with negligible results.
In Partition, de Valera
met his match, indeed was outmanoeuvred and ignominiously defeated. His lifelong dream of a united republican
Catholic Ireland was never realized, can never be realized, which, alas, is a
thing that most of his Fianna Fàil
successors have singularly failed to appreciate, since they also speak in terms
of a united republican Ireland achieved through popular consent!
In terms of the ultimate solution to
Ireland's tragedy of partition and its ideological concomitance of sectarian
intransigence, republicanism is a lost cause, an abysmal failure. Its true value lies not in itself as an ideal
end, but, on the contrary, in itself as a means to an ideal end, which can only
be realized through Social Transcendentalism, the ideology, if you will, of the
Second Coming, or of one who most corresponds, in his own
philosophically-derived estimation, to a Messianic equivalent vis-à-vis the
possibility of an interpretation of 'Kingdom Come', as expressed in his best
theoretical writings, which he regards, not without reason, as both religiously
sound and politically sustainable.
However that may be, it is within this republican soil that the seeds of
Social Transcendentalism should be sown, to sprout Ireland's true freedom ...
not merely from the British but, more importantly, for the Holy Spirit.
De Valera
couldn't have understood this and it must remain doubtful, were he alive today,
that he would support it. For it entails
nothing less than the democratically-engineered total eclipse and supersession of the Republic ... by what I term 'the
Centre', with the inevitable corollary of the replacement, completely or
partially, of the tricolour - that unitary delusion of Tonean
grandeur - by the Y-like inverted CND emblem of what is potentially if not
actually, at this point in time, the religion of 'Kingdom Come', verily a
reformed, and hence true, Cross - the absolutist 'Cross' of a free
transcendentalism.
BENITO MUSSOLINI
If de Valera was something of a petty Devil in relation to
Stalin, then it could be claimed that Mussolini's status was that of a minor
God in relation to Hitler, who, through force of will and breadth of vision,
towered over the fascist partnership.
But Mussolini was accustomed to being dominated, and the fact that he
had less political freedom in which to manoeuvre than the Führer
only contributed, I suspect, to his subservience before the latter, who was
comparatively free of both papal and monarchic constraints.
Probably, family man that he was, Mussolini
felt morally inferior beside the ascetic German leader, whose relationship with
Eva Braun, his only mistress, was always less than passionate. There also quickly arose before Mussolini's
conscience or vanity a succession of military defeats and blunders which could
only be atoned for, in some degree, through deference towards Hitler, who was
somewhat inconvenienced by them and obliged, as far as possible, to intervene
on behalf of fascist prestige, his own not excepted.
What emerges from our record of the Duce's behaviour is a weak, vain, pretentious man who
lacked in practice what he advocated in theory, always something of an actor
and poseur. Yet, for all his
bluster and pretence, his on-stage pomposity and Latin snobbery, Mussolini was
basically a more intelligent man than Hitler and certainly cleverer, being
well-versed in three languages (in addition to his native Italian) and no
stranger to the arts, particularly literature, of which he was a minor
practitioner.
But his rational intelligence and foresight
were no compensation for his overweening vanity and arrogance, and what he made
up for over Hitler in cleverness he lacked in daring. Paradoxically, it was Hitler who was the
demonic genius, with Mussolini as the clever-clever hanger-on and
second-fiddle, unable to either stem or approach the Führer's
vision, with its fanatical ardour for world conquest.
In the end both men contributed to each
other's downfall and were, alike, broken by fate. Yet, unlike Hitler, Mussolini's downfall and
utter humiliation engendered a penitential awakening accompanied by
remorse. By contrast, no-one could have
been less penitential or remorseful than Hitler at the final hour, and,
although he married for the sake of Eva Braun, he went to his death as an
unrepentant god, not as a defeated man!
CHARLES DE GAULLE
De Gaulle
was neither god nor devil but ... bourgeois realist, if with a leaning towards
the Divine. Arguably the greatest
Frenchman since Napoleon, he was not so much a revolutionary as a bourgeois
reformer who, more than anyone, saved France from disintegration under the
Fourth Republic, which, with its twenty-four governments in half as many years,
seemed hell-bent on continuing from where the chaotic, not to say anarchic,
Third Republic had left off ... before the Nazi interlude.
De Gaulle had not dedicated the War Years
to fighting for and freeing France just to see it handed over to a bunch of
parliamentary squabblers, whose predominantly
left-wing sympathies were seriously at odds with the concept of France that the
General had long cherished. If the
German occupation of France had achieved anything, it was to put an end to such
party rivalry and sectarian bickering, symptomatic of a materialistic
decadence. With the Germans removed,
however, it was up to Charles de Gaulle to ensure that nothing similar broke
out again, the most obvious way being to assume power in the name of national
unity as head of a provisional government, and seek to amend the Constitution
in the direction of a presidential executive, with more power for the President
- the sort of power that presidents of the Third Republic had manifestly
lacked!
Alas, for de Gaulle, temporary power did
not enable him to implement the desired reforms, the mandate for which was duly
rejected by a majority of the electorate, including, needless to say, the
Communists. So he felt obliged, scorning
impotence, to resign from office after less than eighteen months ... to remain
in the political wilderness during the subsequent Fourth Republic, until the
crisis of the Algerian revolt, some twelve years later, brought him back to
power on a wave of popular unrest, and the Fifth Republic was duly proclaimed,
the General successfully extricating France from the Algerian quagmire and
continuing to rule on the basis of his Presidential Constitution for some ten
years, before the student-led riots and strikes in the summer of 1968 brought
about his final downfall.
As a beacon of light in a storm-tossed sea,
de Gaulle brought sanity out of madness and order from chaos, if only for the
duration of his rule, which, despite its success, was always threatened by the
disintegrating elements of Marxist barbarism and party-political squabbling,
and ultimately succumbed to both. In
spite of the gains made for the Presidency under the Fifth Republic, the
current of materialist decadence continues to drag France down and away from de
Gaulle's La France towards some unholy France awaiting
Judgement.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX
If de
Gaulle was the leading political star of the French bourgeoisie, then André Malraux was the literary moon which shone in the light of
his master's brilliance and for a time served under him as Minister of Culture
in the R.P.F. (Rassemblement du Peuple Français)
the right-wing party founded by de Gaulle in the interests of national unity.
Considering that Malraux
had for so long been a communist or, at any rate, a 'fellow traveller', who
fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and fought no less ardently against
Hitler in the Second World War, it is perhaps surprising that he should have
turned coat, so to speak, and joined forces with the nationally-minded de
Gaulle in his crusade against parliamentary squabbling and socialist
disintegration. But turn he did, and, as
his Anti-Memoires attest, France acquired
her first and most distinguished Minister of Culture, who was no less
determined, in his new capacity, to serve bourgeois idealism than he had
formerly been to serve proletarian materialism.
Apart from continuing to write on art, his
great peacetime love, Malraux became famous or,
depending on one's point-of-view, notorious for his cultural internationalism,
an ambitious project designed to place art treasures from all over the world
and from virtually any era in museum-like juxtaposition, so that, instead of a
national culture perceived in its epochal context, a timeless internationalism
would be suggested which was intended to reflect, through apparent contrasts,
the essential unity and similarity of great art as a tribute to the Eternal.
Perhaps, after all, such a cultural
internationalism is a stage on the road to a truly universal culture of
supra-national provenance? If so, then Malraux's project must surely rank as a significant
landmark in the evolution of world culture, all the more remarkably so in that
it was projected from a Gaullist base.
Doubtless, the great French adventurer perceived fresh possibilities for
the development of his internationalism in a political compromise with de
Gaulle. Power had its consolations!
ALBERT CAMUS
Unlike Malraux, Albert Camus had been
active in the French Resistance as an ardent communist and editor of the
clandestine periodical Combat. When the
enemy is superidealist, or fascist, then the most
credible opposition must come from submaterialism, or
communism. Submen
against supermen, with the humanistic middle-ground either helplessly looking
on or, as in Malraux's case, fighting in a more
official capacity as part of the French army of liberation.
Later, when France was victorious or, at
any rate, liberated, these two approaches and identities were bound to clash,
and clash they did, with, inevitably, unfortunate consequences for the
Communists, who were to be denied power by de Gaulle, even though he was
shortly obliged to resign the Provisional Presidency on constitutional
grounds. With little prospect of a
post-war communist France, many former Resistance fighters, both physical and
intellectual, grew disillusioned with communism, and Camus
was among them, his disillusionment sharpened by Soviet Russia's attitude
towards and actions against its satellites.
No less surely than Malraux
abandoned communism, so did Camus, who perhaps was
too religious and moral, deep down, to be able to take communist nihilism and
amoral opportunism for granted - apparently unlike his one-time friend and
'fellow traveller' Jean-Paul Sartre, who sought to harmonize Existentialism
with Marxism in an attempt to justify and exculpate communist and, in
particular, Soviet amoral behaviour (man never so free as when he acts ... no
matter how or against whom).
By contrast, Camus
seems to have taken a moral stance, supporting the liberty within an ethical
context of individual conscience against the tyranny, as he saw it, of collective
expedience, as though to say, à la Burke,
no revolutionary change is worth the pain and blood-sacrifice it entails. Needless to say, he was severely castigated
for bourgeois revisionism and reactionary humanism by the Communists, not to
mention Jean-Paul Sartre, who attacked The Rebel, Camus'
long indictment of ideological tyranny, on these and similar grounds.
Undaunted, Camus
continued to cling to a precarious liberal realism until his premature death,
in a road accident, a few years later.
What is surprising is not that he abandoned communism but ... that he
ever took up with it in the first place.
Youthful works like his brilliant essay Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer suggest an innate predilection towards idealism. But he was, after all, an Algerian of mixed
French and Spanish extraction for whom the Ideal was more likely to be seen
through the objective ambience of sun, sea, and sand than through any
subjective criterion. At least, this was
the case for the early Camus, who gave the world a
contentment with ‘the Given’ in the guise of Patrice Mersault,
the protagonist of both The Outsider and A Happy Death,
two of his most memorable novels.
Yet Albert Camus
was essentially an evolutionary type in his work as in his life, and if he
abandoned hedonistic idealism in Algeria, he later came closer to embracing a
Christian idealism in metropolitan France, communism being for him, as for Koestler, a 'God that failed'.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
Reading
Lawrence Durrell is to take a dip in the deep-end of
literary genius, of bourgeois writing at its best, which is to say, most
poetic. Undoubtedly, The
Alexandria Quartet is his classic masterpiece, written at a pace and with an
intellectual vigour scarcely matched in the whole of Western literature. It is difficult to be critical of Durrell; for he gives so much so well, both technically and
imaginatively, that most other contemporary authors, with the notable
exceptions of Anthony Burgess and Norman Mailer, seem mean and mediocre by
comparison.
And yet if criticism is due ... from my own
anti-bourgeois standpoint, then it must be on account of his complacent
acceptance of and willingness to deeply immerse himself in bourgeois criteria,
in a world teeming with middle-class references ... from country houses to wealthy
merchants, from passionate lovers to dispassionate priests, from expensive
clothes to precious jewels - a whole world of open-society phenomena which Durrell objectively portrays with an acumen and stylistic
brilliance worthy of the very greatest literary talent, albeit it remains
strictly bourgeois, the impartial artist open to a vast panorama of the Given,
the antithesis to the revolutionary.
One is almost won over, almost converted by
Durrell, but not quite! Despite the manifest genius of his writings,
a lacuna opens-up in the soul and remains there on account of the disparity
between the contents of the page, natural as well as bourgeois, and one's
inability or unwillingness to relate to them.
All these lovers long-suffering in exotic spaces - what can they mean to
a man who regards love as a bourgeois ideal and marriage as an outmoded
tradition?
One reads, as with so many novels, from a
higher moral-ground, call it supertheocratic or superproletarian, and no matter how impressive the style or
poetic the metaphors, one is still unable to really admire something to which
one cannot relate, because it reflects a lower stage of evolution. This is the old world, Western civilization,
and it is destined for extinction.
Poetic novels are no less obsolescent from a revolutionary point-of-view
than philosophical novels and literary novels, the Conservative-Labour-Liberal
triangle of idealism, materialism, and realism clinging to life with desperate
intent but doomed, sooner or later, to severance from it. Only bourgeois diehards and moral hypocrites
would pretend otherwise!
ANTHONY BURGESS
Taking
another novelist to write about may not seem the most logical thing to do at
this juncture, but I have to confess to a begrudging admiration for Anthony
Burgess, whose End of the World News was one of the most
fascinating and innovative novels I have ever had the privilege to read, a
novel divided, as I recall, into three parts, or 'books', juxtaposed in an
overlapping fragmented arrangement (undoubtedly decadent) that encourages one
to follow three stories simultaneously, the main story, viz. End of the
World News, concerning the destruction of the world by and through cosmic
mishap, an unusual and perhaps understandable variation on the theme of global
holocaust, which documents the gradual approach through the Galaxy of 'Lynx', a
foreign planet destined for collision with the Earth, and telling of the
desperate attempts by various people to escape from the doomed world by
spacecraft; while the other two stories deal with Trotsky and Freud
respectively - the one a dramatised version of Trotsky in New York before the
Bolshevik Revolution, the other a more or less complete biographical sketch of
Freud that highlights, in particular, his life in Vienna during the early years
of the Third Reich.
Here, then, is a bourgeois revolutionary, a
novelist or, rather, antinovelist who presents us
with an unprecedented combination of facts and fictions, and all in consummate
style. Indeed, so radical is his
departure from the previous novel, the epic Earthly Powers, that an
analogy with James Joyce comes to mind, and one is tempted to think that
Anthony Burgess consciously planned to emulate Joyce by following what will
probably be regarded, in years to come, as his literary masterpiece with a more
radical and complex work paralleling, in some degree, Joyce's progression from Ulysses
to Finnegans Wake. And one is tempted to think this all the more
doggedly in view of their author's well-known admiration of and professional
insights into the works, especially the above-mentioned ones, of the great
Irish expatriate. No less than they come
at the climax to Joyce's career, it seems feasible to contend that Earthly
Powers and End of the World News mark the climax to the
career of Anthony Burgess.
But analogies with Joyce can be misleading,
particularly in the private sphere, since whereas the Irishman rejected
Catholicism and preferred secular freedom on the Continent to theocratic
bondage in Ireland, the Briton of predominantly Irish extraction is an avowed
Catholic for whom, as with Graham Greene, consolations of the Faith are as
yeast to his work.
JAMES JOYCE
Abandoning
his homeland for permanent exile on the Continent, James Joyce became, with the
publication of Ulysses, the most controversial and, later, famous novelist of
his time. More an antinovel than a
novel, Ulysses could only have been the work of a mind well-versed in
classic and, in particular, Homeric literature, from which it derives its Greek
title, but of a mind able to draw contemporary parodic
parallels with The Odyssey ... in the 'adventures', during
one day in Dublin, of a certain Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, or archetype
wanderer, with whom Joyce was evidently inclined to identify or, at the very
least, empathize.
Certainly Joyce had no great love of the
Irish, from whose Catholic fold he had 'fallen' into socialist exile, and it is
equally evident, from their initial attitude towards his work, particularly Ulysses,
that most of the Irish had no great love of him either, since he was hardly
typical of the race - what genius ever really is? - but a self-professed rebel
against traditional values whose ideological sympathies lay with socialist
republicanism. Of course, latterly
things have changed somewhat, at any rate to the extent that republicanism, in
particular under the banner of Fianna Fàil, has acquired a certain respectability, if not
long-term credibility, in many Irishmen's eyes, and Joyce is now regarded by a
significant section of the Irish people as Ireland's greatest modern writer,
though more by Fianna Fàil
supporters, one suspects, than by those who favour Fine Gael!
Poor Ireland! I could not share in the annual celebrations
of 'Bloom's Day', nor hold Joyce in such high esteem, even if, as seems
probable, he is the greatest of the moderns; for genius that he may be, he was
yet a traitor to his race, a socialist materialist whose particle (as opposed
to wavicle) bias is only too well exemplified in the
technical layout of much of Ulysses, that Fabian novel par excellence. If Joyce served evolutionary progress in
Ireland, he served it negatively rather than positively, as a destroyer rather
than a builder, a devil rather than a god, and it is doubtful that a Social
Transcendentalist transformation in Ireland would encourage the continued
admiration of his works by a materialistic minority. For a superfolkish
Ireland would not uphold the same criteria as a petty-bourgeois one!
EZRA POUND
Like James
Joyce, the American poet Ezra Pound favoured exile from his native land, first
in England, then on the Continent, and also, like Joyce, he was multilingual, a
scholar and translator. But, unlike
Joyce, he was a great poet, perhaps the greatest poet in English of his
generation, if we discount men like Auden, Eliot, and
Yeats, as I, for one, would be only too prepared to do!
However that may be, he dedicated himself
with a single-minded fidelity to the production of his poems, many of which, in
free verse and unrhymed, are technically way ahead of his contemporaries,
including Eliot, and even after incarceration in a lunatic asylum in his native
America for alleged insanity, he continued with his principal vocation,
producing, in the late Cantos, work of undoubted poetic quality,
even if, at times, somewhat obscure, arcane, and over-complex, not to mention
over-politicized.
But, then, Ezra Pound was a political
animal, his wartime collaboration with Italian Fascism, which took the unusual
form of Social Credit broadcasts to the U.S.A., having got him into deep
trouble when the Americans eventually liberated Italy, trouble which was only
partly mitigated by his apparent insanity, with consequences already noted.
Doubtless Pound's standing as a poet
suffered greatly in the West in view of his war-time sympathies, and his
twelve-year spell behind hospital bars could hardly have enhanced or restored
it. The popular image of a cranky old
man who wrote some nice lyric poems in his youth persists in spite of all the
evidence to the contrary. And yet, if
America's greatest succeeding poet, Allen Ginsberg, owes anything to any of his
predecessors, it must surely be to Ezra Pound for liberating poetry from the
straitjacket of bourgeois form in which it had traditionally languished, a
captive to philistine conventions.
T.S. ELIOT
If one poem
more than any other typifies Eliot's genius for concise and free verse, it is The Waste
Land, with its doomsday foreboding and confessional guilt of the 'hollow
men'. Antithetical in character and
style to Pound, who, after all, was an idealist, Eliot stands closer to Joyce
... as a materialist bent on chronicling the creeping decadence of Western man,
the 'hollow man' - superficial as soulless automata, falling ever deeper into
capitalist materialism, utterly incapable of spiritual redemption, destined for
materialist damnation and an end to the remnants of realism, all liberal
pretences, as barbarism closes-in ever closer for the kill, no way out, Eliot
(like Dante before him) trapped in the soulless hell and just as surely a part
of it - witness his predilection for a steady nine-to-five bank job - as those
whom he is writing about or, rather, alluding to in poems such as The Waste
Land.
An antipoet whose
prose-like style confirms his own decadence in left-wing materialism, fallen
away from love no less than from poetic realism, The Love
Poem of J. Alfred Prufrock a bitter
testimony to heartless degeneracy ... presented in the cruel metaphor of an
ageing man, himself a microcosmic reflection of the decline into old age and
concomitant moral senility of the once-proud West.
Impossible for me to like
or admire Eliot, another of the great exiles from his native America, turned,
like Henry James but unlike Ezra Pound, British citizen. That America gave birth to two such
contrasting major poets as Pound and Eliot within the same generation, must
surely be one of the great literary enigmas of the twentieth century! Certainly it provides ample testimony to
democratic relativity, albeit a type of relativity in which, under nuclear
pressure, the component parts diverge towards the extremes of fascism and
communism respectively.
OSWALD SPENGLER
If Eliot
recorded Western decline as both victim and spectator, then Spengler,
by contrast, documented it as a critic and opponent, his monumental The Decline
of the West a savage indictment of Western decadence, as reflected, amongst
other things, in the decline of Christian faith and seemingly inexorable rise
of materialism. Only Germany, in Spengler's estimation, could save Western Europe from the
jaws of a grisly fate at the hands of Marxist barbarism since, true to its
great cultural traditions, Germany alone had the strength of will to combat
disintegration in the name of cultural idealism.
Doubtless Hitler paid some attention to Spengler's thesis, though he didn't require its guidance to
set Germany on such a world-saving path, and it is ironical that, when National
Socialism finally came to power, Spengler was less
than enthusiastic - indeed, almost hostile in his scepticism.... Although he
didn't live long enough to see it full-blown, so to speak, and victorious over
half of Europe, including decadent France, with the Soviet Union gravely on the
defensive - an outcome that would surely have brought him firmly into the Nazi
fold, no longer in any doubt as to its anti-communist bent.
Even more than his above-mentioned magnus opus, The Hour of Decision takes
up the challenge of German idealism, going into the causes and curses of city
decadence, the evils of Marxism, racial degeneration, European materialism,
etc., with a zeal reminiscent of Mein Kampf, and it would be unduly academic to contend that Spengler and National Socialism were completely
unconnected, or that books like this didn't have a seminal influence on
Germany's fate, an influence scarcely to be expected in the decadent West;
though parallel influences, as, for example, in the works of Benedetto Croce and Ortega y Gasset,
were of course at large in Italy and Spain.
As to the central thesis of Spengler's principal work, concerning the rise and fall of
successive independent civilizations and the distinction within any given
civilization between what he calls 'Culture' and 'Civilization' (roughly
corresponding to a religious phase and a secular phase), there can be no doubt
of its relative truth, which I long ago recognized and subsequently used as a
springboard to my own philosophy of history ... before I came to a wider
overall evolutionary perspective stretching from alpha to omega.
For a time I revered Spengler
almost as much as I had previously revered Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and if
his work has never been too popular in the decadent West, it is for the good
reason that he told the truth about it and must now endure the neglect, if not
obloquy, that a victorious and ongoing decadence entails. Of all great German thinkers, he is the one
who most suffers from abridgement, and, unfortunately for him, abridgement of The Decline
of the West has long been the rule rather than the exception!
BERTRAND RUSSELL
I had been
a sort of admirer of Bertrand Russell long before I read any of his works, and
largely on the basis of information I gleaned from various literary and media
sources that he was fervently anti-Christian and thus a kind of atheist. To me, born a Catholic though struggling
against Baptist inculcation in the Children's Home to
which my mother had cruelly and selfishly dispatched me at the tender age of
ten, following the death of my ethnically protective Catholic grandmother,
Russell's antipathy to Christianity was a kind of crutch and moral support
which I badly needed in order to fortify my own somewhat tenuous position
vis-à-vis the various Protestant assaults (subsequently including High School
Anglicanism) on my over-sensitive sensibility, and I had a small photo of him
tacked to the wall above my bed in the dormitory, where he seemed to occupy the
role of a guardian angel, if a rather unconventional, not to say unlikely, one!
Many years later, when I got around to
reading such books as Unpopular Essays, In Praise of Idleness, The
Conquest of Happiness, and the seminal History of Western Philosophy,
he was less of a crutch than a mentor and source of enlightenment. In fact, I soon realized that he was one of
the greatest prose masters of the English language, not simply a philosopher or
mathematician or political theorist, but a true-born, if belated, philosophe, meaning someone in the tradition of Diderot, Voltaire, etc., who is really a combination of a
great many intellectual tendencies and more than the sum of his parts - indeed,
a kind of guru and intellectual homme de lettres.
So much for the praise! There was also, in due course, criticism and
even disillusionment. For this British
guru was no messiah, but a sort of follower of the Antichrist, a man who, in
turning against Christianity, had fallen, like so many others, into the Marxist
trap, where he was fated to remain on a moderately petty-bourgeois level of
democratic compromise. Castigated by
hard-line Marxists for his liberalism, it is nevertheless surprising that he
should have become a socialist at all, since of aristocratic lineage. Clearly an earl who is also a Democratic
Socialist is more decadent than genuine, an autocrat in theory or appearance,
but a democrat in practice or essence - a paradoxical and, in this day and age,
not entirely uncommon phenomenon!
For the British cling to feudal traditions
and the administrative structures thereof like virtually no other people on
earth, and it is perhaps ironic that a people who, throughout the duration of
their Empire, acted as a crutch to and liberator from jungle primitivity of so many backward peoples ... should
seemingly be incapable of standing on their own two political feet and
dispensing with such autocratic traditions in the name of socialist or, at any
rate, democratic liberation. When oh
when, one asks oneself, will the British people democratically throw off the
monarchic yoke and grow into full political maturity?
But of course the answer to this highly
rhetorical question is: never! If they
are ever liberated from constitutional monarchy and its aristocratic or feudal accoutrèments, it will only be either in
consequence of closer European integration or through the efforts of a more
radical power following, in all probability, a revolutionary upheaval, or
both. In the meantime, no serious criticism
of the monarchy is permissible for the British people, despite their ostensible
free speech which, contrary to appearances, is really a rather limited affair
appertaining to democratic criteria and to the continuing service of the
bourgeois status quo. Free within
democratic bounds but ... ah! there's the rub.
For a freedom of speech, whether in or out
of print, beyond this level is perceived as a sort of subversive threat to
democratic freedom rather than as a manifestation of or means to a greater,
higher freedom ... such as accrues, for example, to my own Social
Transcendentalist bent. The British are
slaves to their parliamentary democracy and constitutional autocracy, and such
they will remain so long as Britain remains comparatively sovereign.
Yet such sovereignty can only be assured by
preventing, at all costs, both the development of closer European integration
and the outbreak of revolution. Hence
the importance attached by the bourgeoisie to both domestic sovereignty and
international peace. And there will be
others, not least of all among the people, who will say: 'Better alive under a
monarchy than dead without one', as though their own measly little lives were
of more importance than the march of history and the bringing to pass of a
moral-world-order! But what about the
notion: 'Dead because of your having lived under a monarchy (a peerage, a
parliamentary democracy, a Protestant Church, etc.), dead because guilty by
default, implicated, willy-nilly, in the capitalist status quo, and never more
so than when you cry out for peace?
Yes, undoubtedly a hard notion for such
people to swallow, but nonetheless valid for all that! Still, I am not, after all, the mouth for
British ears, so, in all probability, they won't be obliged to swallow it. Instead they will have to continue swallowing
the lies and half-truths of essentially well-meaning though fundamentally
deluded people like Bertrand Russell, who was passionately opposed to war but
not inclined to the sort of revolutionary activism which might have led to an
end to the domestic situation which, by its very existence, both justifies and
perpetuates war, meaning the bourgeois/aristocratic establishment.
For no matter how futile the attempt may
have been, Russell was himself a part of that establishment and no more
disposed to battling it in the name of republican values than the next
peer. Neither are the great majority of
those who live under it disposed to battling it, if for no other reason than
that they prefer to take orders from above rather than to do their own thing in
social self-determination. And even
where, in all but a minority of cases, this isn't the case, there is a slinking
suspicion that the battle would be lost even before it had really begun. For if they are slaves to tradition, it is
because they have masters, and those masters, whether aristocratic or
bourgeois, have generally got the better of them!
J.B. PRIESTLEY
Like
Bertrand Russell, J.B. Priestley also professed to being a Democratic
Socialist, although, unlike Russell, he was no decadent aristocrat but a petty
bourgeois who genuinely identified with Democratic Socialist criteria. I confess, in spite of this and of my own
sharp political differences, to a grudging admiration for Priestley; for he was
probably the finest, most outspoken English writer since D.H. Lawrence, and he
wrote with a similar heartfelt conviction and no-nonsense, down-to-earth sanity
of mind.
Priestley is like a breath of fresh air in
a cobwebbed charnel house, blowing over the bones of the contemporary dead
with, at times, a windy gusto that threatens to blow away one or two of the
cobwebs and reclothe them in the flesh of earthly
enlightenment. Such a book, for example,
as Rain Upon Godshill must put new life
into many a creaking carcass, inspiring it with contempt for its pitifully
cobwebbed condition or rage at its powerlessness. Not all the book, of course, but certainly
that part of it which points up the inveterate right-wing bias of official
Britain, against which men of Priestley's stamp battle and battle, seemingly,
in vain, all the more enraged because of the apparent futility of it all, to be
battling from such a minority standpoint.
Well, not for me to be seen to unduly
sympathize with the left-wing predicament; though I confess, Irishman that I
am, to a certain sympathy deriving from an acknowledgement of the relativity of
politics from an Irish point-of-view, which suggests that what is provisionally
relevant to an Irishman in Britain is essentially irrelevant to one in Ireland,
and vice versa. Right-wing
in Ireland, left-wing in Britain; pro-Holy Ghost in Ireland, anti-Christian in
Britain; superfascist in Ireland, socialist if not
communist in Britain. A strange
paradox but, there again, life is paradoxical, and so it will doubtless
continue to be for some time to come!
Priestley, then, has my sympathy, albeit
qualified, and I am sure that if the Left don't or can't prevail in the short
term, something analogous will eventually emerge, even if it takes increased
pressure from the European Community [latterly Union] or, failing that, a
revolutionary upheaval. However, getting
back to Priestley, who, despite his anti-right spleen, lived to a ripe old age
and continued to smoke his pipe, it should not be forgotten that, besides being
an astute political commentator, he was a knowledgeable literary critic and
accomplished man-of-letters, though I confess to not having read any of his
plays, detesting the genre too much to bother, nor any of his novels right
through, since they are too English and 'Northern' for my taste, I who, in any
case, avoid novels as much as possible these days, deeming them too bourgeois.
However that may be, Priestley was another
of that populous breed of twentieth-century anti-bourgeois bourgeoisie, though
doubtfully as anti-bourgeois or, which usually amounts to the same thing, petty
bourgeois as writers like Sartre and Malraux, the
English more middle-of-the-road and urbane, as a rule, than their French
counterparts. I am not really the man to
comment in depth on Priestley, but if there is a book that stands out above the
five or six of his that I've read, it must be Literature
and the Western Man, which is surely his critical masterpiece and, except
possibly in the case of The Novel Now by Anthony Burgess,
a work unparalleled in its time. Yet
whereas the Burgess is really about twentieth-century novels and, to a lesser
extent, novelists, Literature and the Western Man ranges across the
entire spectrum of literature, both past and present, and reveals a breadth and
depth of reading which few men, even when well-advanced in years, could claim
to match. Priestley may be a bourgeois
summing up bourgeois literary history for a bourgeois audience, but what a
bourgeois! Such works almost deserve the
highest praise.
KENNETH CLARK
If Jack
Boynton Priestley was something of an anti-bourgeois bourgeois, then the art
historian Kenneth Clark was, by contrast, a pro-bourgeois bourgeois, a grand
bourgeois for whom the world of art history primarily meant the great men of
the Renaissance - Botticelli, da
Vinci, Michelangelo; the great Dutch and Flemish masters - Brueghel,
Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer; the great Romantics - Blake, David, Delacroix,
Turner, Constable; the leading Impressionists - Manet,
Monet, Renoir; and various by and large early twentieth-century masters,
including Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian. Not to mention various architects and
sculptors from each of those schools or periods, including Bernini
and Rodin.
Thus, fundamentally, Clark was culturally
conservative, even if, as has been claimed, he leant a little to the Left in
politics, though doubtfully towards the Labour Left. His forte was representational art,
or bourgeois realism of one kind or another, and it quite surprised him to
discover, one day, that he could derive some aesthetic pleasure from Mondrian's art, which may be described as petty-bourgeois
idealist.
Certainly a distinction exists in
twentieth-century art, as in politics, between the materialistic and the
idealistic, with Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism on the one side, and
Impressionism and Abstract Impressionism (more usually termed Post-Painterly
Abstraction) on the other side, as though between Labour and Tory, Democratic
Socialist and Conservative, levels of political absolutism, with Classical (bourgeois)
Realism and Modern (petty-bourgeois) Realism serving as the painterly
equivalents to Liberalism and Liberal Democracy - those middle-of-the-road
atomic kinds of realism.
Whether Kenneth Clark would have agreed
with me here, I don't know. But it is
patently obvious that painterly art, meaning all art on canvas, appertains to a
democratically relative tradition, as though inherently a kind of
middle-of-the-road art coming in-between autocratic sculpture on the one hand
and theocratic light art on the other, so that even the most abstract examples
of this art will appertain to that same democratic tradition, albeit pushed to
a decadent extremism of materialistic/idealistic confrontation, with realism,
scarcely perceptible or credible, sandwiched in-between - a sort of Liberal
anachronism hanging-on in the ideological background as a memento to what was
but no longer is, Tory and Labour extremes having won the democratic day, a
contrast between wavicle impressionism and particle
expressionism the degenerate norm, all compromise discarded, as each side
pursues its absolutist bent irrespective and seemingly oblivious of the other,
the reduction of atomic form to the particle materialism of Abstract
Expressionism no less obnoxious to the parliamentary (canvas) Extreme Right ...
than the elevation of atomic form to the wavicle
idealism of Abstract Impressionism is obnoxious to the parliamentary (canvas)
Extreme Left.
Is not twentieth-century art this
tug-of-war between the conservatism of painterly idealism and the socialism of
painterly materialism ... with the liberalism of painterly realism helplessly
looking on, unable, in countries like Britain and France, to halt the
divergence of the two absolutes, absolutes which lead, in due course, to yet
more extreme absolutes that completely transcend the parliamentary (canvas)
traditions, with a bias one way or the other, depending on the country in
question?
No doubt in my mind, at any rate! And if, on the avowed strength of his
art-historicising theories, Kenneth Clark can be ascribed any particular bias
... it would surely be as a liberal looker-on lamenting the death of realism,
unable to comprehend or sympathize with the decadent extremes of Western
civilization, longing for the day when realism would be resurrected - wishful
thinking? - and art returned to something like its traditional representations,
saved, as it were, from the ogres of partisan absolutes.
Ah, poor Kenneth! I fear that no such return is possible for
Western art except, ironically, in the alien guise of Socialist Realism, a type
of realism that you, with your romantic and humanistic leanings, would surely
find unattractive and uncongenial.
Knowing your books as I do, including the two-part autobiography, I can
only suppose that Modern Realism was your last hope and solace before the
grave, soulless by comparison with Classical
Realism perhaps, but nonetheless preferable, in its Liberal Democratic
urbanity, to the militant barbarism of Socialist Realism.
HERBERT READ
In contrast
to Kenneth Clark, Herbert Read was a champion and elucidator of 'modern art',
writing about a wide variety of twentieth-century artists ... from Picasso and Kandinsky to Moore and Hepworth,
and writing as one of the moderns, a sort of petty-bourgeois intellectual for
whom abstraction, whether of the Left or the Right but preferably the former,
was the bread of contemporary life - at least in art. A leading art critic, Read was also a poet
and philosopher, and it was to such philosophically-biased works as The
Redemption of the Robot that I instinctively gravitated, as
though in search of a twentieth-century Nietzsche - poet, philosopher, and art
critic all rolled into one!
To be sure, it came as no surprise for me
to learn that Read had been an ardent admirer of the great Polish-German philosophe and ill-fated genius whose works
were to have such a profound influence on the twentieth century. Like Coleridge before him, Herbert Read was
one of those rare Englishmen who transcend the narrow parochialism of English
letters for the broader, deeper world of European culture, a 'Good European',
as Nietzsche would say, and, not altogether surprisingly, he was aware of what
was happening on the Continent.
As for his philosophy ... well, certainly
the machine must be harnessed to human needs and not be allowed to dominate or
blight the spirit, a sort of mechanical slave or servant which frees man for
higher cultural and religious realization, progressively unburdening him of the
past. Herbert Read was no reactionary in
this respect, but welcomed the liberating potential of the machine, much as
Oscar Wilde had done a generation or two earlier. And the machine, tamed and perfected, must
lead, in due course, to the next civilization, a civilization of truly global
proportions ... developed and furthered by Western man, world civilization a
kind of extrapolation from Western civilization rather than a completely new
and independent phenomenon - such, in brief, was how Read reasoned, and we
needn't be surprised that he, a Westerner and Briton himself, should take such
a comforting, not to say convenient, line!
The truth, I fear, is somewhat different,
closer, in fact, to Spengler, with whom Read was
conversant, though not, apparently, in complete accord. For nothing could be further from the truth
than to imply, as Read does, that the West, contrary to being a decadent
civilization limited in time, is capable of saving both itself and the world in
due course, spreading the ultimate civilization to every corner of the globe in
the name of mechanical liberation, with, no doubt, the probability of the wider
dissemination of abstract art thrown in for good measure ... as a sort of
cultural corollary to the above!
No, here Read deceives himself and,
unwittingly, his readers ... if he thinks the West capable of such a
Houdini-like escape from the manacles of manifold decadence. Were he a Catholic Irishman writing about
Ireland and the possibility of that country's becoming a catalyst for supertheocratic revolution throughout much of the Third
World, then we or, at any rate, I could take his philosophy of redemption more
seriously. But, as things stand, it is
little more than an assertion of Western decadence, and that is no more likely
to prevail in the long term than ... universal communism. We can admire Herbert Read his global
perspective, but not the terms in which it was couched! Being British carries its own inherent
limitations, both culturally and intellectually, and, no less than the other
great Britons I have mentioned, Read was most assuredly their unwitting victim!
SALVADOR DALI
If I sketch
in my impressions of a painter here, it is primarily because he was also a
number of other things, not least of all a writer of some scope and imaginative
flair, as amply demonstrated by both Hidden Faces, his only novel,
and The Unspeakable Confessions ..., a sort of
antinovel-cum-autobiography which embraces, besides 'portraits' of his personal
life and background, examples of his rather arcane philosophical contentions
and proofs of a no-less arcane, one might even say bizarre, scholarship. In short, a kind of Sadian/Milleresque
hotchpotch of views and experiences making for a uniquely Dalian
cosmology, which was, I found, an extraordinarily entertaining trip!
Dali, the painter with a great mind, not a
second-rate artist but a genius unique in his time, as unique as Bosch or
Rubens on even Dadd in their respective times, the
creator of unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpieces of transmuted realism -
Surrealism a kind of idealistic realism suggesting a right-wing liberal bias,
an abstract enigma in form. Admittedly,
there are surrealist works that, whether or not by Dali, suggest just the
opposite - namely the materialistic realism of a left-wing liberal bias. But, generally, Dali's works display a wavicle rather than a particle painterly technique, an oily
smear of fastidiously-applied brushstrokes which are the very antithesis to the
dotty, smudgy, lumpy, cubic applications of paint favoured, as a rule, by
left-wing schools, whether pointillist, cubist, expressionist, abstract
expressionist, tachist, or whatever.
Of course, not all of Dali's paintings can
be classified as surreal. Far from
it! There are early works that are
realistic, purely and simply, and later ones that are effectively symbolist,
almost Christian in their religious directness, showing the influence of Op Art
and Kinetics, comparatively recent techniques applied to traditional religious
themes ... as though a metaphorical embodiment, in art, of Francoist
dictatorship, which ran concurrently with the greater part of the artist's late
period, when he was resident in his Catalan homeland, the adventurism of Paris
surrealism far behind him. If Dali's
late work is, on the whole, rather more mystical than realistic or surreal, it
should be seen, I believe, against this background of Francoism,
which gave the Catholic Church a new lease-of-life and preserved Latin
civilization, not least of all in the form of Dali's art.
Yet whilst I can, or could, admire much of
his painting, no matter how surreal or quasi-symbolist it may be, being a
writer myself, I chiefly admired his literary writings, particularly Hidden
Faces, which, in its treatment of the unrequited love of the Comte de Grandsailles, the male protagonist, so to speak, for Solonge de Cleda, dealt with a
theme all too familiar, and therefore perversely congenial, to myself, even
down to the substitution of the spiritual image of the loved one for her
physical presence ... in a sublimation - Dali terms it 'Cledarism'
- intended to compensate the victim of the passion in question for the absence
of more tangible satisfactions. Nowadays
I doubt that I would wish to re-read Hidden Faces, though at the time,
several years ago, I thought it one of the greatest novels I had ever read, a
novel seemingly ranking, in exotic sophistication, with Huysmans'
À Rebours and Roussel's
Locus Solus.
FRANCISCO FRANCO
It would be
tempting to regard de Gaulle as a French Franco was it not for the existence,
during the Occupation, of Vichy France under Pétain. Likewise it would be tempting to regard
Franco as a Spanish Mussolini were it not for the existence, before and during
the Spanish Civil War, of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, leader of the Falange, the Spanish Fascist Party. Clearly, a compromise has to be settled for
in Franco's case, since he seems closer to Pétain
than to either de Gaulle or Mussolini, a military dictator with fascist
leanings who nevertheless was not a fascist.
That honour rested with Primo de Rivera,
who, like Mussolini and Hitler, was a genuine idealistic revolutionary, too
revolutionary, it seems, for Franco's liking.
For de Rivera would have transformed Spain in a fascist way, debarring
or liquidating the royalist Right, whereas Franco was anxious to draw the
various right-wing strands together in order not only to placate the different
allegiances which existed, but to prevent the kind of internecine factionalism
endemic to the Left which, more than anything else, was ultimately responsible
for its downfall.
For Franco, however, a wavicle
cohesion of the Right was the only logical retort to the particle frictions and
squabblings of the Left, and although the outcome was
less than fascist, it at any rate served his purpose of crushing, on a broad
front, the Socialist-Communist-Syndicalist-Anarchist-Marxist-Soviet
opposition, and returning Spain, after protracted bloody warfare, to something
approaching stability.
As a dictator Franco was neither fish now
fowl, royalist nor fascist, but a pragmatic combination of both, if
intrinsically a man of the traditional Right.
Not for me to admire him for that, and he got scant admiration from
Hitler, who simply considered him a reactionary bourgeois. Yet he did at the very least save Spanish
civilization from the almost certain destruction that would have befallen it,
had the Left taken over and the Republic survived.... Which, as I see it, means
that, even after Franco, Spain is still capable of taking a path opposed to and
superior than communism, since barbarism did not triumph there and consequently
the future is undecided - at least in a manner of speaking.
What, then, is this alternative path? The reader familiar with my work will know
that I call it Centrism (pronounced Centerism), the supertheocratic ideology of what is potentially if not (at
this moment in time) actually a true world religion, which manifests itself on
the political front as Social Transcendentalism, and he will also know that
Social Transcendentalism is not a new nationalist ideology but a supra-national
ideology which desires nothing less than the establishment of a Centrist
federation.
The choice for the world is there ...
between the (Second Coming) ideology of Centrism, and the (Antichrist) ideology
of communism, and Spain has yet to make it ... thanks to Franco who, if he
failed to erect the highest and best, at any rate prevented the lowest and
worst from dragging Catholic Spain down to the particle materialism of the
Devil's last stand in the world.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
When I read
Activation of Energy by this French theologian and man of
science, this Gallic Sweitzer, it had the effect of a
revelation on me, confirming me in my own, at the time, tentatively-held
suppositions reached independently but tending in the same general direction,
the direction of 'Point Omega', a term
used by Teilhard de Chardin
to define the culmination of spiritual evolution ... achieved through a gradual
convergence, in 'centro-complexification', of pure
mind, corresponding to a 'noosphere' of cosmic
consciousness, towards this Omega Point - the entire process of heavenly
evolution interpreted in terms of a 'Christogenesis',
or realization of Christ in the Universe.
Baffling?
Yes, to the extent that, for all his scientific evolutionism, de Chardin is fundamentally a Catholic theologian, and he
remains one even in the context of such seemingly revolutionary terminology as
that to which I have just referred, which supplement and clarify his basic
Catholic allegiance.
Thus whilst in one sense de Chardin is revolutionary, in another sense he isn't so much
reactionary as ... traditionalist, and consequently held back, as though by an
ethical anchor, from the spiritual freedom of a truly revolutionary and
progressive ideological position, corresponding to a true world, or global,
religion. If he is the nearest thinker
to the formulation of such a religion within Christian terms and traditions, he
is yet limited by his Catholicism from achieving a genuinely revolutionary
breakthrough onto a higher plane - the plane, one might say, of the Second
Coming. He remains, deep down, a
Christian humanist whose 'Christogenesis', whilst
assuming spiritual implications, attaches too much importance to the
Resurrection and the articles of faith, deriving from this theological
postulate, of a spiritual Christ 'On High', consanguineous with the Holy
Ghost. We must, in de Chardin's estimation, follow Christ's example and attain,
in due process of Christogenesis, to the Omega Point.
This is all very well - up to a point! But still limiting us to Christian reference,
the very thing that will not and cannot serve as the basis of a truly global
religion, since one is of necessity dealing with millions if not billions of
people of non-Christian descent who would be unable to take kindly to the
notion or prospect of a quasi-Christian conversion!
However, for all his conservatism and
obvious identification with Western civilization, de Chardin
was an exceptional man, even a kind of genius, and we need not disparage such
terms as 'Point Omega' and 'centro-complexification'
(a self-explanatory term identified with the process of higher evolutionary
progress), even if terms like 'Christogenesis' and 'noosphere' are somewhat limited in global applicability or,
as in the latter's case, of doubtful authenticity.
Certainly I prefer not to think of the 'noosphere' as a kind of spiritual halo surrounding the
Earth, like a cosmic field, but as a level of pure mind which unites the
practitioners of transcendental meditation in a universal consciousness - a
consciousness transcending thought. The noosphere of the mind, then, beneath rather than above the
clouds!
V.I. LENIN
And the
Devil said: 'Let there be a new darkness in the world' and, behold! there was
Lenin, chief architect and beneficiary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a
revolutionary who knew better than to directly hand power over to the people,
like a naive Marxist, when they were in need of leadership. For the leadership of the people by a
revolutionary vanguard is of the very essence of Bolshevism, Lenin bringing a
sort of quasi-fascist centralism to bear on a predominantly anarchic
philosophy, saving the people from mass-participatory chaos - except in war -
while simultaneously damning them to a life of communist darkness - the
proton-particle equivalent to an anti-supernatural materialism.
Interesting how Lenin was so often made to
appear as a kind of Genghis Khan in Soviet iconography, features dynamic with
nihilistic intent, beard more pointed and dark eyebrows more arched ... than
ever the historical Lenin's were, although he was arguably far from saint-like
in appearance! Rather, something
inherently diabolic and malevolent there - a twentieth-century manifestation of
the Devil, determined to overthrow bourgeois civilization wherever it was to be
found, implacably opposed to 'God building'.... This isn’t really surprising,
since the Devil can hardly be expected to do God’s work, knowing little of and
caring nothing for the spiritual. Only
dialectical materialism, and the more of that the better - darkness throughout
the world the diabolic ideal, all bourgeois realism overthrown, proletarian
barbarism gloatingly triumphant over a burnt-out materialistic planet, red
everywhere the order of the day, a flame-like ardour intermingled with yellow
to confirm diabolic allegiance, only a people as traditionally backward or,
more accurately, snowbound as the Russians ... capable of being led along this
path to any appreciable extent - 'Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be
wise' (Gray).
Well, devilish or not, an historical
destiny, inescapable as Attila the Hun, whose barbarous hordes put decadent
Roman civilization to the sword, indirectly paving the way for the cultural
flowering, in the centuries that followed, of the Catholic Middle Ages. The World (First World) and
the Not-World, whether beneath and diabolic (Second World) or above and divine
(Third World). But while the
Devil may be busy in the world and have his day, so, too, will God be busy
there, erecting a new civilization in the name of the Second Coming, furthering
the transcendent among those peoples he has chosen to lead the way towards the
light of the Holy Spirit. Not for God to
save the World; for that is doomed. But
he will save his own from socialist materialism and elevate them, in the
process, to the divine superidealism in the ultimate
global religion of Social Transcendental Centrism.
Against this, the Devil will be powerless,
obliged to await the final reckoning with God, the final settling of accounts,
the inevitable unification of the globe in divine oneness. Lenin had hoped for the opposite, for global
communism. But the Divine does not
permit of a diabolic absolutism - world evil more applicable to a pagan age
than to an incipiently transcendental one, when, on the contrary, world good is
the most logical goal for evolutionary progress to achieve.
Formful, as
befits the diabolic, Lenin lies entombed in his giant mausoleum, a mere shell
devoid of soul, the lowest-common-denominator of physical appearance.
DAVID BEN-GURIAN
There is a
sense in which David Ben-Gurian, the pioneer founder
and first prime minister of Israel, could be regarded as an Israeli Lenin. For he was certainly a socialist who fought long
and hard for the birth of a state which the tragedy of the holocaust made all
the more poignantly imperative.
Like Lenin, Ben-Gurian
was small in stature but large in mind, and also, like Lenin, his mind
encompassed several languages and a great deal of scholarly reading. He was, moreover, a prolific author, writing
on the need for a Jewish homeland and, later (when such a dream had been at
least partially realized), on the history of the
Israel he had created and, for a number of difficult years, successfully led.
Yet Ben-Gurian's
Israel, unlike Lenin's Russia, was not to be a Godless state, but one
sympathetic to the Jewish religion and capable of encouraging a religious
rebirth, of serving as the physical cradle, so to speak, for the future realization
of Jewish spiritual hopes. Thus it could
never be a communist dictatorship, officially atheistic in its ideological
posture; for atheism is a philosophy of the Devil or, more literally, of his
followers on earth, and the Jews have always been aligned with God, even if
only with the most primal stage of God ... in the Creator as Jehovah.
Doubtless the coming of the Messiah will
alter all that, transmuting Jewish religious allegiance from the most primal to
the most advanced stage of divinity via the enlightenment of the Second Coming,
not to be confounded with Christ but a sort of minor transcendental divinity
approximating to the Jewish concept of a true world messiah, a messiah whose
teachings really could apply to the entire world in the course of time, as, globally
considered, the world is led towards a universal religion.
But atheism denies God all along the line,
including the concept and realization of a Second Coming and its corollary of
an aspiration towards the establishment and furtherance of pure spirit in the
Universe. Atheism appertains to the
Antichrist, that proton-particle diabolism of Marxist communism, and, as Lenin
reminded his followers, there could be no 'God building' in the Soviet Union or,
indeed, anywhere where communism had established its materialist hegemony. Materialism and idealism are antithetical,
not contiguous, and therefore we cannot expect the Devil to further God's
work. It isn't for the Antichrist to
build the next civilization but, so far as he's concerned, to destroy the
existing or Christian one. What he puts
in the place of the latter would bear little resemblance to a spiritual
aspiration, an aspiration towards Holy Spirit.
So much for socialism!
Yet Ben-Gurian,
whom we were discussing, was not interested in destroying a civilization but
only in establishing a state, and to that extent we must account him a realist,
if one with strong left-wing sympathies.
And the Jews needed his realism at that time, besieged as they were from
all sides, hunted in Europe and opposed in the Middle East, a ramshackle
garrison under permanent siege. Ben-Gurian had no illusions about the situation, nor about the
need of the Jews to fight tooth-and-nail for their right to a homeland. For the tragedy of the holocaust, whilst it
might evoke pity and sympathy in some Gentile hearts, wouldn't automatically
lead to a Jewish state. Only the Jews
could finally determine whether or not they were to get one, and under Ben-Gurian's dauntless leadership the life-and-death struggles
which ensued with their Arab opponents duly led to Jewish victory and to the
foundation of the State of Israel, a foundation upon which subsequent leaders
were to build and are still building today.
For Israel can never take chances, slacken its will to survive, else the
winds of Arab nationalism may blow across it to devastating effect! It must be strong, and in this strength,
coupled to future messianic insights, lies its destiny ... in opposition, if
necessary, to Islamic reaction.
No, one cannot be surprised that the West
didn't hand Israel to the Jews on a plate; for the West, with particular
reference to Britain, was itself an old civilization ... forced onto the
defensive by implacable opponents and mindful of its imperial interests
vis-à-vis certain Arab countries. Yet
whereas the democratic West was confronted, in its materialist decadence, by
the Devil, the Islamic East, with its resurgent fundamentalism, may eventually
find itself being confronted, in an ideological manner of speaking, by God, in order
that what is potentially the true world religion ... of Social Transcendental
Centrism ... may be spread as widely as possible ... to the lasting advantage
of the Divine.
Doubtless the Israeli Right, particularly
in its extreme manifestation, would be more sympathetic to this prospect than
the Left, and it is particularly to them that supertheocratic
appeals should be made. The time of
God's establishing a 'Final Covenant' with the 'House of Israel', the Knesset,
through the agency of the Second Coming has still to arise. But when it does, the transformations in
Israel may be so profound that it is doubtful that Ben-Gurian
would recognize the country, were he to return from the grave. Realistic materialist that he was, the
founder of Israel could have had no inkling of the ideological superstructure
to come; for he was, after all, a modern Samson struggling in the wilderness
against inclemencies of one sort or another in the
name of solid foundations. We need not
doubt their strength!
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
I first
became aware that Simone de Beauvoir was an
exceptional writer when, as a youth, I purchased a paperback copy of Must we
Burn Sade, and avidly read both her own
biography-cum-exegesis of the notorious Marquis and the extracts from various of
his writings that followed. Not only was
the long introductory essay on de Sade of exceptional
quality, it was all the more significant because the work of a woman, and no
ordinary one at that, but a genius in her own right, ranking with the greatest
writers of the twentieth century.
Certainly, subsequent perusal of her
extensive autobiographies, including The Prime of Life and Force
of Circumstance, confirmed me in this opinion; for few more intriguing and
brilliantly-conceived autobiographies have ever been written, treating, as they
do, of a myriad experiences, impressions, reminiscences, convictions, beliefs,
portraits, contentions, and expositions - whether with regard to her own
literary works or to various of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, on whom she
lavishes much biographical attention.
Only Stephen Spender's autobiography comes anywhere near, in my opinion,
to evoking a similar wealth of manifold dimensions, albeit on a smaller scale.
Yet if Simone de Beauvoir
is her own witness and critic, she is also very much a woman living for a man,
and few men can have been blessed with the constant companionship of such a
spiritual alter ego as Sartre, whose relationship with de Beauvoir
lasted from youth to the grave and was, along with Dali's love for Gala, one of
the great romances of the age, all the more significant for lying beyond the
bonds of matrimony in a kind of petty-bourgeois concubinage
of sexual liberation. So closely were
these two lives intertwined, that it is impossible to think of Sartre without
evoking thoughts of de Beauvoir, and vice versa. Birds of a feather flock together, and,
certainly, these two philosophical writers of communistic leaning had much in
common, so much, in fact, that they seem intellectual twins. In all their walks of life, from students to
teachers, from novel-writing to play-writing, philosophy to autobiography,
socialism to feminism, Marxism to Existentialism, France to the world, they
complement and reflect each other, as inseparable as Siamese twins. Impossible not to be slightly envious of
Sartre's luck!
And yet, whenever I read de Beauvoir, I remained conscious of the ideological gap that
opened-up between us and, inevitably, I became contemptuous, in spite of my
admiration for her literary abilities and temperamental resilience, of her
deeply-entrenched left-wing allegiance.
Not a communist, no; for, like Sartre, she values truth and intellectual
liberty too highly to risk ever having to toe a party line. But again, like Sartre, a fellow-traveller
and communist sympathiser nonetheless, and therefore at quite a remove from my
own ideological position.
Force
of circumstance ... you could argue?
And, to be sure, one can hardly begrudge her these left-wing sympathies,
earned, as they were, through historical expedience, and complementing her
temperament. Is not the proliferation of
autobiographical/philosophical writings, this century, a reflection of
left-wing sympathies, a kind of petty-bourgeois opposition and/or alternative
to bourgeois literature, a symptom of literary decadence? It is to me, at any rate, and I can well
believe the sincerity of Simone de Beauvoir's
sympathies, in light of her extensive autobiographical/philosophical
commitments. Not for her the road of
experimental or transcendental poetry that leads toward God. She prefers descent into the hell of
anti-literature, though not, it has to be admitted, too far. For she stays well short of the Devil and his
overtly communist allegiance, preferring, like Sartre, to cling to what freedom
remains available to one in a liberal society ... in the interests of truth.
So basically one of my sort, only ...
living under different conditions and with a very different historicity which
seemingly precludes the development of a Centrist identity. Beyond Social Democratic allegiance, yes; but
not capable of a Social Transcendentalist one, and all because of fate! Socialism with freedom, the freedom to
develop culturally and spiritually - an ideal of both de Beauvoir
and Sartre, impossible to realize except in the ideological guise of Social
Transcendentalism, which is necessarily anti-Marxist, scorning dialectical
materialism in the interests of dialectical or, rather, post-dialectical
idealism, aligned not with the Antichrist but with the Second Coming, beyond
all bourgeois realism in an 'above' rather than a 'beneath' sense, exactly what
Sartre and de Beauvoir unofficially upheld in their
heart of hearts while officially proclaiming, through force of circumstance,
the exact opposite ... for the benefit of ideological credibility in the wake
of Nazi occupation. Being spiritual in
materialist terms, the extremist paradox of this highly paradoxical couple!
Doubtless, history will judge them as
petty-bourgeois intellectuals who, together with Camus,
Malraux, Koestler, and
other such politically-conscious writers, clung to idealism in the face of
ongoing materialism. I shall not condemn
them for that, nor use de Beauvoir's extreme
left-wing sympathies as a cudgel with which to attack her intellectual integrity
and standing, along with the likes of Simone Weil, Agnes Heller, and Iris
Murdoch, as arguably one of the greatest female intellectuals of the twentieth
century.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
The English
author Christopher Isherwood provides us with a rare
if not unique example of a communist become transcendentalist. For if, during the 1930s, he was partial to
communism, particularly in its German manifestation, then the advent of Hitler
and the coming of World War Two somewhat changed all that, not in the sense of
his becoming pro-Nazi so much as by making Germany an unattractive place for a
young British writer of his inclinations, both political and sexual, to remain
in. As an active homosexual, Isherwood would have been doubly vulnerable to Nazi
censure, and like a good many others of a like-persuasion he opted to leave, to
abandon the Berlin of his youthful dreams and return home before things became
too uncomfortable.
Whatever we may think of Isherwood's predilections, or of his motives for going to
Germany in the first place, we must at least credit him with some kind of
consistency. For communism and
homosexuality are birds of a feather or, to put it less figuratively, two
aspects of an anti-natural, anti-realist allegiance. Anyone who is both communist and homosexual
to any significant extent is certainly well-integrated, whatever the general
climate of moral opinion may happen to be.
Whether Isherwood was both to any significant
extent, however, must remain open to doubt, all the more so given his upper
middle-class and Cambridge background.
Yet
if he was more of a sympathetic spectator than a committed participator, he at
any rate had some kind of engagé attitude
to the progress of communism, an attitude virtually de rigueur
in those momentous days after the frivolous lull of the self-indulgent Huxleyite 1920s.
Even Mr. Norris Changes Trains, a novel at first stylistically
reminiscent of Point Counter Point, leaves one in little doubt as to the
author's political (not to mention sexual) proclivities, which were nurtured at
Cambridge long before he ever abandoned chaste Albion for the decadent
enticements of the Weimar Republic. Very
unlikely, therefore, that the street battles between Communists and Nazis would
have struck his youthful imagination as a microcosmic metaphor for the struggle
between the Devil and God on levels, approximately, of the Antichrist and the
Second Coming for the right to 'take on' the World in due course, a right to which
only the victor could aspire, since the two spheres of influence must remain
forever separate and independent, not subject to duplication - the antinatural and the supernatural having next-to-nothing in
common.
Coming from a staunchly realistic, and
hence democratic, background, Isherwood could only
have been a spectator, though, as was noted, one with unequivocally communist
sympathies - no doubt, ample testimony to his own upper middle-class decadence,
which, partly taking the form of a predilection for communist materialism, was
rife among the fashionable products of English public-school and university
education at the time. How much Isherwood was simply following trends and how much he was
genuinely left-wing must remain open to dispute, since unknown quantities to
anyone writing from this distance. But,
bearing in mind his subsequent conversion to transcendentalism, I would be
inclined to grant more credence to the first supposition, which also takes into
account his class background.
However that may be, Isherwood's
subsequent departure for the United States in the company of Auden, shamefully conducted while Britain's fate hung in
the balance, led to a change of emphasis, as well it might, as the young author
sought and acquired the companionship of other British expatriates, including
Huxley and Heard, and gradually drifted away from his communist past, leaving Auden in New York while he set-up home on the West Coast,
where transcendentalism was fast becoming a growth industry thanks, in part, to
the oriental connections and sympathies of various of his fellow-countrymen
and, in part, to a growing demand for self-realization among the 'indigenous'
population, a demand doubtless fostered, in some degree, by geographical
factors not unconnected, despite the immense distance between the one side of
the Pacific and the other, with the Far East, and this in spite of Mao or,
perhaps - who knows? - by some subconscious desire to epatez les Communistes.
Paradoxical speculation aside, Isherwood soon became a devotee of oriental mysticism, with
regular stints of transcendental meditation under the professional guidance of
resident gurus. Thus his trajectory from
communist materialism to Buddhist idealism took him from one extreme to
another, from the Devil to God, with scant regard, seemingly, for the
middle-ground.
Yet if America gave Isherwood
a new ideological beginning and enabled him to write A Meeting
by the River, probably his most perfect work, conceived in the unusual form
of a one-sided exchange of letters in a way reminiscent of Rousseau, it doesn't
seem to have provided him with a new sexuality or tempted him out of his old
ways, which is all the more surprising in view of his evidently genuine
commitment to transcendentalism; though one cannot be blamed for seeing in The
World in the Evening, one of his most ambitious novels, a veiled attempt to
disguise his true leanings behind a façade of masculine friendship, as though
he were somehow uneasy about the relationship between homosexuality and
transcendentalism, which is nothing less than a contradiction between the antinatural and the supernatural, the material and the
ideal. Doubtless censorship
considerations played their part, as to some extent they do with any
author. But it seems ironic, all the
same, that, despite his professed transcendentalism, Isherwood
should still be a realist of sorts, stretched between divergent poles in
fidelity to a strung-out liberal integrity.
Not for me to suppose that he should be an out-and-out idealist, given
his English upper middle-class background!
Indeed, it would appear that he and, to a
lesser extent, Auden are to an upper middle-class
background what Kerouac and Ginsberg subsequently became to a lower
middle-class one ... paralleling, on their respective terms, this paradoxical
homosexual/transcendental disparity. As
is well known, Kerouac was slightly ashamed of his homosexual leanings, and if
novels like On the Road and the Dharma Bums are any indication of
his true sympathies, then we needn't be surprised! However, any form of sex is slightly shameful
from a transcendental standpoint, and it is probable that many heterosexuals
feel less than complacent about their fleshy indulgences on that account. Certainly, Isherwood
seems to have made much moral progress since his years as a communist, even if,
together with a majority of his liberal kind, he still professed to left-wing
sympathies.
One thing he most certainly isn't ashamed
of, however, is choosing not to draw any marked line between his novelistic and
essayistic work, as though the two were complementary and part of a continuous
spectrum of related ideas. Like a good
many other authors, the Barthean distinction between
'artist' and 'writer' is still maintained, although 'the writer' is all the
time gaining ground at 'the artist's' expense, as though in a
bourgeois/petty-bourgeois tug-of-war which can only be resolved, in the future,
by the unequivocal victory of the essayist over the novelist.
Needless to say, Isherwood
is too much of a liberal, at heart, to be overly partial to 'the writer';
though, like others in his predicament, he will go as far as to accord the
essayist, both in himself and in others, more respect than could ever be
expected from an out-and-out novelist like, say, Evelyn Waugh or even Graham
Greene, so that a kind of equalitarianism of the two genres and/or types of
author is upheld. In Barthe's
view, the age of 'the writer' has still to come, and we may believe that, in a
certain sense, this is quite true. For
liberal civilization, necessarily partial to 'the artist', has still not been
overthrown by socialist barbarism [which, in 2004, looks increasingly
unlikely!], and consequently, by establishment reckoning, 'the writer' per se
is something of a Marxian outsider, hammering on the door of novelistic
tradition but not yet capable of breaching it and, in rejecting everything
bourgeois, having things all his own way.
The lowest-common-denominator of writerly prose could only be ubiquitous under a left-wing
communist regime, and whether the West will ever suffer that must remain open
to doubt. Certainly the Soviets, with
their Socialist Realism, would have been less than enthusiastic about an
overtly journalistic, essayistic, notational 'literature' symptomatic of a Marxist
purism in proletarian materialism; though they would doubtless have encouraged
the study of Marx and Lenin, with especial emphasis on the latter. For whilst a proletarian 'literature' of
notational writing does and has long existed in the West, the growth of
essayistic writing at the expense of novelistic art within the bourgeois camp
could only have been regarded, from a Soviet point-of-view, as symptomatic of
decadence and degeneration, a particle splitting from an atomic whole -
appearance and essence going their separate ways.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
More than
any other author of his generation, Huxley deepened the novel, took it away
from literary realism towards a metaphysical idealism, and exploited it as a
vehicle from which to explore the paradoxical pathways of alternative religion,
particularly, from approximately Eyeless in Gaza onwards, those
which led to a Buddhist nirvana. He
could in some sense be described as an English Kerouac, though his interest in
oriental mysticism was rather more theoretical than practical, in deference to
his intensely intellectual temperament, and he never bothered to venture to the
East in search of enlightenment or spiritual fulfilment. Evidently there was enough scope for such
enlightenment in the Far West, as California might be termed, and also the
freedom to experiment with a variety of hallucinogenic drugs like mescaline and
LSD, in the hope of discovering an alternative, uniquely Western path to
Heaven.
Writing about such drug-taking experiments
in The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, Huxley does not
dismiss the 'Artificial Paradises' obtained - as the great French poet
Baudelaire would probably have done under similar circumstances or, indeed, as Koestler actually did do - but, on the contrary, sees in
their otherworldly intimations a necessary reprieve from naturalism and the
attainment of expanded consciousness made easy - a not-unattractive proposition
in an age of technological expansion and artificial culture, and preferable, by
far, to continued recourse to such mind-contracting drugs as alcohol and
tobacco!
Despite his English origins and very
English cultivation, Huxley was no puritan, condemning drugs wholesale, but
flexible and realistic enough to perceive in the sensible use of certain kinds of
synthetic hallucinogens an alternative to pure religion, which, whilst
ultimately inadequate for spiritual salvation, was within the reach of most
people and of some benefit in the short term, if only as a means to combating
traditional dependence on the more sensual, because naturalistic, drugs, and
leading people towards a higher possibility - namely, self-realization achieved
independently of visionary experience through transcendental meditation. For whilst artificially-induced visionary
experience is preferable to alcoholic somnolence, true enlightenment lies in a
realm of pure mind necessarily beyond and above all appearances, a realm
corresponding to the utmost spiritual essence.
So Huxley was aware of the two approaches
to religious enlightenment, what in previous works I have called 'the romantic'
and 'the classic', or the indirect approach and the direct approach, which of
course find traditional parallels in the Christian distinction between Roman
Catholicism and Protestantism (with especial reference to Puritanism), and he
very wisely dismissed neither the one nor the other, as, in their opposite
ways, both Koestler and Jung were to do. America was moving towards artificial
appearances when Huxley experimented with hallucinogens, gradually abandoning
its puritan roots under pressure from various contemporary phenomena, some
ethnic, some technological, others social, and it is a trend that will
doubtless continue into the next civilization - the transcendental civilization
of what I have called Centrism ... in countries destined, in the short term,
for supertheocratic transformation. Appearances precede essences, and no less on
the transcendent level of artificial religion than on lower or naturalistic
levels - Social Transcendentalism the antithetical equivalent to Roman
Catholicism.
So Huxley to some extent participated in
alternative civilization within the decadence of puritan civilization, when
oriental mysticism was on the increase, and his findings were by no means
negative. On the contrary, they indicate
a strong sympathy for an alternative approach to religion, and Huxley is now
better known for writings concerned with mind-expanding drugs than as an
advocate of transcendental meditation - great though his interest was in all
aspects of oriental religion. Even Island,
his last and in some ways most radical novel, has its own variant on LSD called
'soma', and since his death an anthology of his writings on drugs entitled Moksha has appeared, as though in confirmation of this
alternative bias.
Certainly, I would never have taken to
Huxley had he been a typical, instead of highly untypical, Englishman, and
although he lived abroad - first in France and then in the United States - on
account of his eyes requiring a drier and brighter climate, one is never given
the impression that this was in any way an inconvenience to him, but, on the
contrary, can well believe that those countries were more congenial to his
intellectual temperament than England, with its deadpan academicism and philistine
conservatism. Doubtless Huxley would
never have achieved the spiritual standing he did, had it not been for this
exile abroad, which not only encouraged him to deepen the novel, but to expand essayistically towards imaginative horizons transcending
the narrow parochialism of British letters.
In the first if not the second respect, he resembles Lawrence Durrell.
THOMAS MANN
My first
experience of Thomas Mann came not, as might be expected, through one of his books
but, rather, through the film-adaptation of Death in Venice, starring
Dirk Bogarde, and I have to confess that, despite
some breath-taking scenery enhanced by some no-less beautiful music, I was
profoundly bored and only too glad when the tragic dénouement came and
we were released from the gruesome clutches of what seemed to me a disastrously
pretentious scenario. My only
gratification was to witness the beach-scene humiliation of the young boy with
whom the leading protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach,
had suffered the misfortune to fall in love, and which now brought about his
overdue demise through, if memory serves me well, a love-provoked heart
attack. My chief regret was that I
hadn't chosen to visit the studio next-door instead, where an adaptation of
Henry Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy was
simultaneously showing. But I suppose
the fact that I was in my reserved stepfather's company had precluded me from
doing so - largely, I suspect, on his account!
Hardly surprising, therefore, that my opinion
of Thomas Mann remained for several years less than enthusiastic, even though I
eventually got round to reading some of his novels, the most memorable
undoubtedly being Dr. Faustus, which, despite its pretentious stylization and
overmodest chapterization (the narrator-protagonist
seemingly afraid to bore the reader with long chapters), I found quite
educative, and, following that, Felix Krull -
Confidence Trickster, a more entertaining and, on the whole, enjoyable novel
which, so far as the above-named protagonist's endeavour to avoid being drafted
into the German army was concerned, had more than a little in common with D.H.
Lawrence's Kangaroo - the tale, in part, of someone who got himself
passed unfit for military service by faking ill-health.
And so I wasn't altogether indisposed to
Mann when, compliments of the local library, I eventually got my hands on the Diaries
1918-39, apparently a first instalment of his total output in this
subjective direction, and read through them with a certain amount of aesthetic
pleasure not unmingled, it transpired, with mounting contempt for and finally
exasperation at his bourgeois lifestyle, socialist pretensions, anti-Nazi
vituperations, literary projects, and snobbish upper middle-class socializing -
all of which construed to place him on a pedestal of cultural elitism and
political aloofness.
Of course, he had good reasons to be
anti-Nazi. For his work on the Joseph
sequence of novels, dealing with the Biblical account of Joseph and his
brothers, could hardly have endeared him to the Nazis, with their rampant
anti-Semitism. But it is doubtful, on
the other hand, that he would have welcomed a communist revolution in Germany
either, particularly in view of his own upper middle-class sympathies and
contacts. Essentially, he was a
theoretical Social Democrat for whom people's revolutionaries were so many
riffraff.
No, I didn't enjoy the Diaries
1918-39 which, though quite promising at first, became ever
more conservative and reactionary the further they progressed. It was almost as though, following the débacle of the Great War, Mann had been a proto-Nazi in
his socialistic nationalism before the advent of National Socialism, but then
became violently anti-Nazi afterwards. A
curious paradox perhaps, though proof enough that he was no people's champion,
but a bourgeois reactionary and incorrigible democrat!
WILHELM REICH
No such
accusation could be levelled at the German psychologist Wilhelm Reich, whose
politics was unequivocally socialist, and I mean socialist in a purely Marxist
rather than in either a Soviet or a democratic way. Indeed, his brand of proletarian socialism,
with its advocacy of the workers literally owning the means of production
themselves and being their own political masters, would not have looked
out-of-place in The Socialist Standard in Britain or in the no-less politically
radical La Cause du Peuple
in France, so hostile was it to any Bolshevik suggestion of hierarchical
control of the masses through revolutionary vanguards or elites such as have,
until quite recently, prevailed throughout the whole of Eastern Europe.
To be sure, Soviet Communism struck Reich
as equivalent to 'Red Fascism', given its autocratic control of the people
through a professional revolutionary organization with a built-in
hierarchy. He would much rather have
seen the people free to organize and express themselves, not least of all
sexually.... Which fact brings us to the other side of the in-many-ways
prophetic Reich - namely his advocacy, as a clinical psychologist, of sexual
promiscuity as an antidote to neurosis and depression. In short, his unequivocal condemnation of
celibacy and asceticism, and wholehearted commitment to heterosexual activism,
to the pursuit of mental and bodily health through natural sex. For in regular, emotionally-charged
heterosexual practices there lay, according to Reich, the key to sanity, which
alone would open the door upon human maturation and freedom from guilt.
To enter the 'promised land' of perfect
all-round health one had only to fuck regularly, though preferably with someone
whose looks and temperament inspired mutual love, since the key to sanity lay
in the orgasm, not in any old orgasm, whether involving masturbation or sodomy,
but in the purely heterosexual orgasm of a loving couple who, during the moment
of orgasmic fulfilment, were put directly in touch with the cosmic
scheme-of-things, became one with the Universe, and thus acquired life-renewal
energy. In such fashion, they would be
replenished by the orgasmic feedback of mutual oblivion, their spiritual
batteries in turn recharged with a cosmos so rich in the type of basic energy -
Reich termed it the 'orgone' - with which loving couples were alone able to get in
touch, and thus avoid the physical pitfalls and psychic delusions attending
celibacy or perversion which, so Reich contended in The Mass
Psychology of Fascism, led to ideologies like National Socialism - a
manifestation, in Reich's view, of sexual perversion and celibacy, the
ideological concomitant of widespread sexual repression in the masses, which
can only find perverse expression in the topsy-turvy world of fascist politics,
where demented leaders - men who, like Hitler, had never experienced genuine
mutual love or orgasmic feedback - canalized and exploited this repression to
further their own imperialist, tyrannical, and bloodthirsty ends!
Such was how Reich saw fascism, i.e.
through the distorting lens of his own sexological,
not to say atomic, philosophy, and the result could only be extremely partial
and opposed to a transcendental perspective.
If ever there was a man who lacked a transcendental perspective ... it
was Wilhelm Reich, for whom mysticism and transcendentalism were symptomatic of
sexual repression rather than manifestations of idealistic evolutionary
progress.
Not that National Socialism was
brimming-over with genuine transcendentalism - far from it! To some extent Reich was justified in
attacking the false mysticism he perceived in the adulation of the Führer. Yet sexual
deprivation alone hardly suffices to explain fascism, and neither does it
square with the fact that many top Nazis, including Goebbles,
Speer, and Bormann, were highly sexed - indeed,
oversexed ... if the size of their families was anything to judge by! But Reich didn't see this, preferring, in his
capacity of Freudian psychologist, to impose his own extremely partial
value-judgements upon an ideology which he evidently couldn't understand, not
least of all in light of his Marxian communism, and to cast a sex-smear over
all idealism.
Even Christ had to undergo Reichian modification in order to fit into his
salvation-through-sex philosophy, all idealism discredited in the interests of
a starkly realistic - even materialistic - view of the Saviour which, in The Murder
of Christ, focuses on Christ's status as a sexual being, a man who had and
endorsed regular fornication in contradistinction to any spiritualistic
asceticism, such as the Catholic Church has upheld down the centuries to the
detriment, in Reich's view, of Christ's true message of sexual love, a message
which the Church has denied, thereby effectively murdering Him.
Clearly, if the decadent West requires a
new view of Christ to accord with its sexual promiscuity and ongoing
materialism, then Reich is the man to provide it, so that salvation-through-sex
can be pursued on the authority of the Saviour Himself, and no-one need ever
doubt the spiritual validity of their copulatory
devotions again! Christ, too, can be
transmuted to suit the quasi-pagan Zeitgeist, and no degree of
transmutation is impermissible, seemingly, so long as it contributes to the
endorsement of thoroughly sensual behaviour.
So much for Wilhelm Reich, Germany's rather
more sophisticated, intellectualized, and all-too-earnest equivalent of D.H.
Lawrence, for whom sex is the key to salvation, a salvation achieved here below
rather than in any perverse mystical Beyond.
And so lacking in theocratic perspective was he, that even Soviet
Communism, with its totalitarian control of the masses, was unacceptable
because largely alien to him, a 'Red' manifestation of fascism and therefore
symptomatic of general sexual deprivation among the Soviet masses. No wonder that the Soviets, who were a lot
closer to being fascist Reds than vice versa, took a dim view of his books and
accordingly had them banned in the Soviet Union! Not being partial to Western decadence
themselves, they had every reason to protect the Soviet masses from the kind of
anarchistic and orgiastic nonsense which passes for wisdom among many so-called
enlightened people in the West!
Doubtless, an Irish Social Transcendental
Centre would take an even dimmer view of Reich than did the (former) Soviet
Union, and I fancy that his name would be anathema wherever superidealistic
men prevailed. Even the Americans
deserve some respect for having dealt with this dangerous and lunatic
subversive in the manner they did - namely by incarceration. More's the pity
that it wasn't in a mental institution, where Reich could have expounded his 'orgone' mysticism and no-less false mysticism of sex to
fellow inmates without fear of censure!
CARL JUNG
It was not
so much a taste for psychology as a distaste for Freud that drove me to Carl
Jung, the great Swiss psychoanalyst and one-time disciple of Freud who, like so
many disciples both before and since, was subsequently to turn against his
'master' and pursue his own less dream- and sex-oriented mode of psychoanalysis
... with quite spectacular results!
Unlike his Viennese counterpart, Jung was convinced that more factors
than sexual repression were at work in the overall development of neurosis -
indeed, that sexual repression was only one amongst a number of possible causes
and not necessarily the most important, nor even something that had to count at
all. In short, neurosis could stem from
any number of basic causes and develop along different lies from person to
person, depending on one's temperament, background, experiences, ethnicity, and
so on.
Compared to Freud, Jung seemed like a
breath of fresh air, a release from the charnel house of sexual fixation and
oedipal guilt, a sort of J.B. Priestley to D.H. Lawrence. He expanded the horizons of psychoanalysis
and psychology to a degree which made him interesting to men of letters, not
least of all to Hermann Hesse, and, in a way, he was
something of an artist or writer himself, his autobiographical Memories,
Dreams, and Reflections being of immense general interest and certainly one
of the most fecund autobiographies of the twentieth century - rich in
experience, speculation, imagination, recollection, and spiritual wisdom. It wasn't for nothing that the great
German-born novelist and poet alluded to above was an admirer and good friend
of Carl Jung, and the correspondence between the two men is ample testimony to
their mutual respect, taking its place beside the letters of Henry Miller and
John Cowper Powys, not to mention Lawrence Durrell
and Henry Miller, as a valuable record of contemporary literary friendship, in
this case having more than a little to do with their mutual interest in
oriental religion, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism, which influenced the
writings of both men; though Jung dismissed transcendental meditation in the West
as a false transplant which was out-of-place amid the noisy streets and teeming
skyscrapers of cities like New York and Chicago.
Neither was he particularly sympathetic to
such artificially-induced visionary experiences as could be engendered by LSD
and kindred synthetic drugs, preferring to regard mystical illumination as the
fruit of long meditative endeavour which could not and should not be
'gate-crashed' through recourse to artificial means, a viewpoint that Aldous Huxley sharply criticized for its naturalistic
conservatism in the face of new pharmacological breakthroughs which, in
conjunction with modern technology, would bring 'heaven' within everyone's
reach and with a minimum of effort, in accordance with the demands of
evolutionary progress. In other words,
mystical illumination made easy through mind-expanding drugs. And, of course, Huxley was right and Jung
wrong or, at any rate, somewhat reactionary in this matter, as well as
sceptical, if not contemptuous, of the value of transcendental meditation in
the urbanized West.
Thus a sage without a religious commitment,
for he wasn't a practising Christian and was little more than a theoretical
student of oriental traditions; though he did flirt with quasi-religious
National Socialism for a while, if only as a Swiss outsider who had no personal
contact with the Movement and little at stake to deter him from seeing in
Nazism the rise of a virile new ideology that would stamp on Western decadence
and communist barbarism with all the passion of the elemental forces unleashed
from the prison of subconscious repression - a testimony to the shadow side of
the psyche which Jung claimed for everyone, himself not excepted, and which had
to be respected in the interests of psychic hygiene.
To be sure, there was plenty of darkness in
Jung's psyche, which had brought him into contact with his own elemental forces
on more than one occasion, not least of all in the presence of Freud. Was not Jung a kind of twentieth-century
black magician after all, a man for whom alchemy and magic were no foreign
subjects but, for a time, of passionate concern to him? Again, we are reminded of Huxley's criticism
of Jung for having taken symbols too seriously in his quest for spiritual insight,
for having substituted symbolic appearances for mystical essences and become
bogged down in occult distractions to the detriment of inner wisdom, bedazzled
if not bedevilled by sacred mandalas and other
shrines to natural determinism.
And 'synchronicity', the more than
coincidental correspondences of seemingly unconnected events, phenomena,
patterns, signs, etc., which exercised such a deep fascination for Jung, and
led him to develop his own theory on the subject - what was that if not an
aspect of medieval alchemy and pagan animism in contemporary guise, another
manifestation of the occult in quasi-scientific dress ... to accord with the
rational diabolism of a secular age?
Hardly surprising that Jung's theories of 'synchronicity' were
subsequently to exercise such a profound fascination on Arthur Koestler, in many ways a kindred spirit who fought shy of
genuine transcendentalism under pressure from his political experiences and
scientific bent. One wonders whether
Cocteau would have seen Jung's numerological 'synchronicity' and the planetary
'synchronicity', defined by astrologers in terms of the cosmic pattern
prevailing at the moment of one's birth, as an example of the 'miraculous in
the commonplace' or as mere coincidence, had he chanced upon both kinds of
synchronicity on the same day?
Doubtless, Jung knew of the planetary kind, for he was not immune to
astrological speculation - far from it! - and had more than once invoked
astrology in the course of his occult investigations.
Yet, for all that, it is chiefly as a
clinical psychologist and theorist that Jung's international reputation stands,
and he undoubtedly made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the
psyche. Reading The
Portable Jung at a time when my own psyche was in need of
understanding, I became fascinated by his theory of 'psychological types',
which was based on an extrovert/introvert dichotomy, with its further fourfold
division of the psyche into thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition
functions - the first and third superior, or primary; the second and fourth
inferior, or secondary; the ratio of one to another varying from individual to
individual, and therefore giving rise to corresponding fourfold distinctions
between the principal 'psychological types'. [A predominantly thinking type
will have an inferior feeling function, a predominantly sensation type ... an
inferior intuition function; and, conversely, a predominantly feeling type will
have an inferior thinking function, a predominantly intuitive type ... an
inferior sensation function.]
Certainly this theory convinced me to begin
with, though I subsequently criticized some aspects of it, including Jung's
desire that the inferior functions, viz. feeling and intuition, [Though I
personally regard feeling and sensation as superior, or primary, and thinking
and intuition as inferior, or secondary.] should be brought up to the level of,
and thus equalized with, the superior functions, viz. thinking and sensation,
or vice versa, depending on one's 'type', so that a psychic equilibrium was the
equalitarian result - a desire which struck me as both unrealistic and
undesirable in light of one's inherent predilection one way or another, not to
mention the fact that it appeared to deny an evolutionary psychic progression
in the direction of greater spiritual freedom and a correspondingly lopsided
psyche.
Indeed, it seemed to deny the spirit
altogether, unless the spirit be equated with psychic feeling and the raising
of the inferior functions (assuming they aren't already predominant) is but a
first - and atomic - step on the road to their eventual overhaul of the
superior functions in furtherance of a free-electron psychic bias comprised of
a sort of Social Transcendentalist compromise between intuition and feeling,
[Or, as I prefer to see it, sensation and intuition, the former overhauled by
the latter.] regarding the one as of the State and the other as of the Centre,
in complete contrast to the proton and/or neutron psychic bias of thinking and
sensation ... [Or, from my standpoint, feeling and thinking.] corresponding
to Kingdom and Church respectively, a particle/wavicle
dichotomy on a fundamentally autocratic level of psyche that Jung wished to see
superseded by an atomic balance between intuition and feeling on the one hand
and thinking and sensation on the other, which is nothing less than a liberal
mean embracing an atomic compromise between reason and emotion, thereby
indicating a distinctly bourgeois point-of-view.
Clearly, if my hunch is correct then the
only logical step beyond Jungian psychic equilibrium lies not in the
furtherance of the so-called inferior functions to a point where they greatly
preponderate over the so-called superior functions, but in the furtherance of
the function which, within the framework of Jung's terminology, I regard as
both inferior (secondary/introvert) and germane to the Divine, viz. intuition,
at the expense of everything else, though in relation, primarily, to sensation,
the function most germane to the world, and consequently in reflection of a supertheocratic psychic integrity commensurate with a
free-electron, or classless, stage of evolution which is Social
Transcendentalist rather than Autocratic Socialist (communist), the difference
being that, in the one case, intuition would preponderate over sensation, whereas,
in the other case, feeling tends to predominate over sensation - at least
officially.
However that may be, one has to admit that,
when most true to themselves, most people tend to have such a psychic bias
anyway, rendering the need for Jungian adjustments quite superfluous. Regarded from a class point-of-view, it is
precisely those of a proton (feeling) or of a neutron (thinking) persuasion who
would be irrelevant to a people's or, rather, classless society.
W.B. YEATS
Of all the
poets I read and enjoyed as a youth, W.B. Yeats was the one whose work most
intrigued me and who, together with James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Robert Graves,
and Thomas Hardy, acquired a special status in my hierarchy of poets by dint of
the fact that I was able to commit so many of his poems to memory. In fact, some of his poems seemed to commit
themselves to memory, which was, I supposed, a mark of their poetical
worth. I especially admired The Second
Coming and Byzantium, particularly the former, which,
though poetically inferior to the latter, was possessed of a
politico-historical dimension that made it all the more interesting, in light
of my own burgeoning politico-historical predilections such that were to lead
me, in due course, to Spengler, with whom Yeats was
well acquainted.
Years later I was to find fault with the
second stanza of this tragic poem, because it seemed to do a grave disservice
to the concept of the Second Coming, likening it to a 'rough beast' with 'lion
body and head of a man' which 'slouches towards Bethlehem to be born' ... Yet,
by then, I had parted spiritual company with Yeats, whose poetry I no longer
read and whose philosophical views, including many of those expressed in that
remarkable book A Vision, the product of what might be
called a consummate 'lune', I would have been only
too ready to analyse in relation to his Protestant ancestry.
For, of course, Yeats was a Protestant
Irishman, and hence someone to distrust from a Catholic standpoint - or so I
reasoned. One could admire his apparent
attempt at ingratiation with the majority population through assimilation of
traditional Irish culture, as expressed in various poems and plays, but,
nevertheless, it was still difficult to take all that Celtic mythologizing
seriously, particularly from the pen of someone who had little or no ancestral
connections with it and was questionably Celtic himself! For me, the plays dealing with traditional
Irish themes were the least acceptable part of the Yeatsian
corpus, partly for the above reason and also partly because I had an inbuilt
distrust of drama, which eventually matured into a distaste for what I could
only regard as an extremely antiquated, not to say autocratic, medium of
literary expression, even more antiquated than narrative literature, whether novelistic
or otherwise, with its inherently liberal and bourgeois overtones. Television plays were another thing, but
theatrical plays I could not abide, and never read any these days.
Indeed, it is primarily because Shaw was a
playwright (horrible term!) that I have little interest in the man; though I
suppose the fact that Shaw, too, was a Protestant and therefore less than truly
or deeply Irish ... is another factor which has to be taken into account, as
also with his fellow-dramatist and bon viveur,
Oscar Wilde, one of the greatest shallow-pates of all time. All these men - Yeats not excepted - were
Anglo-Irish and accordingly descended from or connected with the Ascendancy, a
British phase, as it were, of 'Irish' culture and civilization which the Catholic
Irish have no great love of and consequently no reason to respect. Doubtless, the high literary reputations of
men like Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, and Yeats in England owes more than a little to
their Anglo-Irish origins, while Joyce's own not inconsiderable reputation with
the English in part derives from his anti-Irishness
and atheistic socialist bent, which could only have been out-of-place or, at
any rate, less than welcome in Ireland.
Hence his long exile on the Continent where, though nominally an Irish
Catholic writer, he functioned more as a European homme
de lettres within the Western
tradition than strictly as an Irish expatriate.
An Irish Social Transcendental Centre would certainly take a less than
indulgent view of Joyce's work, not to mention the works of Wilde, Shaw,
Beckett, and Yeats, who would also seem alien to Ireland's true destiny on a
properly idealistic level of people's evolution, where all forms of bourgeois
literature, together with all the other traditional arts, would be officially
beneath the ideological pale.
Returning to Yeats, it is interesting that,
in A Vision (a rare excursion into esoteric
philosophy), the poet wrote of a distinction between what he termed 'primary'
and 'antithetical' men, the former given to a cohesive and middle-of-the-road
view of life, the latter to a dichotomous and extremist view - a distinction
roughly corresponding to British and Irish alternatives. So much Yeats reasoned, though it apparently
didn't occur to him that the one is worldly, whereas the other reflects a
God/Devil dichotomy, in antithetical polarity, flanking and distinct from a
worldly view of life. If we apply Yeats'
classification to Christianity, we find that Catholicism signifies the antithetical
view while Protestantism, Yeats' own religious tradition, signifies the primary
one. In the former case, a distinction
between Satan and Christ, with Satan symbolic of evil and Christ symbolizing
good, being effectively Le Bon Dieu. In the latter case, no such dichotomy but a
cohesive Christ, abraxas-like in his dual integrity
between good and evil, a worldly figure who lacks true divinity by dint of his
inherently human, or atomic, integrity - a stage on the downhill road to the
secular humanism of communism, which denies bourgeois realism in the interests
of proletarian materialism, all idealism abandoned or scorned in the name of
the Antichrist (Marx).
So Protestant realism leads to communist
materialism as surely as the evening twilight to the darkness of night. God humanized becomes a stage on the road to
the secular deification of the proletariat through communist atheism. Protestant realism leads not up towards
Heaven, but down towards the hell of a godless materialism.
Yet what of the Catholic antithesis between
Satan and Christ, diabolic materialism and divine idealism? Does this not project towards a Second
Coming/Antichrist antithesis between Social Transcendentalism on the one hand
and Autocratic Socialism on the other, with a wavicle/particle
distinction on the evolutionary levels of electron superidealism
and proton submaterialism? Yes, I believe so, and he who, in his
transcendental extremism, corresponds to a Second Coming would recognize and be
recognized by the Catholic Irish people for his inherent idealism - no dualistic
worldly figure but one corresponding to Christ as the Catholics conceive of
Him: Le Bon Dieu who wishes
to establish His 'Kingdom of Heaven' here on earth in order that joy may reign
supreme, and all frictions and hatreds, not to mention aggressors and haters,
be consigned to the rubbish heap of history.
Obviously a long, difficult, and at times
arduous process, but not impossible once the world, or worldly and
anachronistic manifestations of life, have been overcome and all those who do
not recognize or relate to the Second Coming have been cast out of the heavenly
Kingdom ... of the Social Transcendental Centre. Would Yeats have recognized this
transcendental Messiah, this man of the Holy Spirit, had he appeared in the
world during the poet's lifetime? No,
not if the Antichristic image of The Second
Coming is anything by which to judge!
LONDON 1985 (Revised 2012)
