One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is to trace the connexion between “tendency” and literary style. The subject-matter and imagery of a book can be explained in sociological terms, but its texture seemingly cannot. Yet some such connexion there must be. One knows, for instance, that a Socialist would not write like Chesterton or a Tory imperialist like Bernard Shaw, though how one knows it is not easy to say. In the case of Yeats, there must be some kind of connexion between his wayward, even tortured style of writing and his rather sinister vision of life. Mr Menon1
is chiefly concerned with the esoteric philosophy underlying Yeats’s work, but the quotations which are scattered all through his interesting book serve to remind one how artificial Yeats’s manner of writing was. As a rule, this artificiality is accepted as Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity because he uses short words, but in fact one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech. To take the nearest example: 1. The Development of William Butler Yeats by V. K. Narayana Menon.
Grant me an old man’s Frenzy,
My self must I remake
Til I am Timon and Lear
Or that Wil iam Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Til Truth obeyed his cal .
The unnecessary “that” imports a feeling of affectation, and the same tendency is present in all but Yeats’s best passages. One is seldom long away from a suspicion of “quaintness”, something that links up not only with the nineties, the Ivory Tower and “calf covers of pissed-on green”, but also with Rackham’s drawings, Liberty art-fabrics and the Peter Pan never-never land, of which, after all, “The Happy Townland” is merely a more appetizing example. This does not matter, because, on the whole, Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is often irritating, it can also produce phrases (“the chill, footless years”, “the mackerel-crowded seas”) which suddenly overwhelm one like a girl’s face seen across a room. He is an exception to the rule that poets do not use
poetical language:
How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toils of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes’ guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?
Here he does not flinch from a squashy vulgar word like “loveliness”, and after all it does not seriously spoil this wonderful passage. But the same tendencies, together with a sort of raggedness which is no doubt intentional, weaken his epigrams and polemical poems.
For instance (I am quoting from memory) the epigram against the critics who damned The Playboy of the Western World:
Once when midnight smote the air
Eunuchs ran through Hel and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by;
Even like these to rail and sweat,
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.
The power which Yeats has within himself gives him the analogy ready made and produces the tremendous scorn of the last line, but even in this short poem there are six or seven unnecessary words. It would probably have been deadlier if it had been neater.
Mr Menon’s book is incidentally a short biography of Yeats, but he is above all interested in Yeats’s philosophical “system”, which in his opinion supplies the subject-matter of more of Yeats’s poems than is generally recognized. This system is set forth fragmentarily in various places, and at full length in A Vision, a privately printed book which I have never read but which Mr Menon quotes from extensively. Yeats gave conflicting accounts of its origin, and Mr Menon hints pretty broadly that the “documents” on which it was ostensibly founded were imaginary. Yeats’s philosophical system, says Mr Menon, “was at the back of his intellectual life almost from the beginning. His poetry is full of it. Without it his later poetry becomes almost completely unintelligible.” As soon as we begin to read about the so-called system we are in the middle of a hocus-pocus of Great Wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon, reincarnation, disembodied spirits, astrology and what not. Yeats hedges as to the literalness with which he believed in all this, but he certainly dabbled in spiritualism and astrology, and in earlier life had made experiments in alchemy. Although almost buried under explanations, very difficult to understand, about the phases of the moon, the central idea of his philosophical system seems to be our old friend, the cyclical universe, in which everything happens over and over again. One has not, perhaps, the right to laugh at Yeats for his mystical beliefs — for I believe it could be shown that some degree of belief in magic is almost universal — but neither ought one to write such things off as mere unimportant eccentricities. It is Mr Menon’s perception of this that gives his book its deepest interest. “In the first flush of admiration and enthusiasm,” he says, “most people dismissed the fantastical philosophy as the price we have to pay for a great and curious
intellect. One did not quite realize where he was heading. And those who did, like Pound and perhaps Eliot, approved the stand that he finally took. The first reaction to this did not come, as one might have expected, from the politically minded young English poets.
They were puzzled because a less rigid or artificial system than that of A Vision might not have produced the great poetry of Yeats’s last days.” It might not, and yet Yeats’s philosophy has some very sinister implications, as Mr Menon points out.
Translated into political terms, Yeats’s tendency is Fascist. Throughout most of his life, and long before Fascism was ever heard of, he had had the outlook of those who reach Fascism by the aristocratic route. He is a great hater of democracy, of the modern world, science, machinery, the concept of progress — above all, of the idea of human equality. Much of the imagery of his work is feudal, and it is clear that he was not altogether free from ordinary snobbishness. Later these tendencies took clearer shape and led him to “the exultant acceptance of authoritarianism as the only solution. Even violence and tyranny are not necessarily evil because the people, knowing not evil and good, would become perfectly acquiescent to tyranny… . Everything must come from the top. Nothing can come from the masses.” Not much interested in politics, and no doubt disgusted by his brief incursions into public life, Yeats nevertheless makes political pronouncements. He is too big a man to share the illusions of Liberalism, and as early as 1920 he foretells in a justly famous passage (“The Second Coming”) the kind of world that we have actually moved into. But he appears to welcome the coming age, which is to be “hierarchical, masculine, harsh, surgical”, and is influenced both by Ezra Pound and by various Italian Fascist writers. He describes the new civilization which he hopes and believes will arrive: “an aristocratic civilization in its most completed form, every detail of life hierarchical, every great man’s door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few men’s hands, all dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God dependent on a greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the family, an inequality made law.” The innocence of this statement is as interesting as its snobbishness. To begin with, in a single phrase, “great wealth in a few men’s hands”, Yeats lays bare the central reality of Fascism, which the whole of its propaganda is designed to cover up. The merely political Fascist claims always to be fighting for justice: Yeats, the poet, sees at a glance that Fascism means injustice, and acclaims it for that very reason. But at the same time he fails to see that the new authoritarian civilization, if it arrives, will not be aristocratic, or what he means by aristocratic. It will not be ruled by noblemen with Van Dyck faces, but by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and murdering gangsters. Others who have made the same mistake have afterwards changed their views, and one ought not to assume that Yeats, if he had lived longer, would necessarily have followed his friend Pound, even in sympathy. But the tendency of the passage I have quoted above is obvious, and its complete throwing overboard of whatever good the past two thousand years have achieved is a disquieting symptom.
How do Yeats’s political ideas link up with his leaning towards occultism? It is not clear at first glance why hatred of democracy and a tendency to believe in crystal-gazing should go together. Mr Menon only discusses this rather shortly, but it is possible to make two guesses. To begin with, the theory that civilization moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that “all this”, or something like it, “has happened before”, then science and the modern world are
debunked at one stroke and progress becomes for ever impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning to an age of tyranny. Yeats is by no means alone in this outlook. If the universe is moving round on a wheel, the future must be foreseeable, perhaps even in some detail.
It is merely a question of discovering the laws of its motion, as the early astonomers discovered the solar year. Believe that, and it becomes difficult not to believe in astrology or some similar system. A year before the war, examining a copy of Gringoire, the French Fascist weekly, much read by army officers, I found in it no less than thirty-eight advertisements of clairvoyants. Secondly, the very concept of occultism carries with it the idea that knowledge must be a secret thing, limited to a small circle of initiates. But the same idea is integral to Fascism. Those who dread the prospect of universal suffrage, popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of women, will start off with a predilection towards secret cults. There is another link between Fascism and magic in the profound hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.
No doubt Yeats wavered in his beliefs and held at different times many different opinions, some enlightened, some not. Mr Menon repeats for him Eliot’s claim that he had the longest period of development of any poet who has ever lived. But there is one thing that seems constant, at least in all of his work that I can remember, and that is his hatred of modern western civilization and desire to return to the Bronze Age, or perhaps to the Middle Ages. Like all such thinkers, he tends to write in praise of ignorance. The Fool in his remarkable play, The Hour-Glass, is a Chestertonian figure, “God’s fool”, the “natural born innocent”, who is always wiser than the wise man. The philosopher in the play dies on the knowledge that all his lifetime of thought has been wasted (I am quoting from memory again):
The stream of the world has changed its course,
And with the stream my thoughts have run
Into some cloudly, thunderous spring
That is its mountain-source;
Ay, to a frenzy of the mind,
That al that we have done’s undone
Our speculation but as the wind.2
2. The last three lines actually read:
“Aye, to some frenzy of the mind
For all that we have done’s undone
Our speculation but as the wind.”
Beautiful words, but by implication profoundly obscurantist and reactionary; for if it is really true that a village idiot, as such, is wiser than a philosopher, then it would be better if the alphabet had never been invented. Of course, all praise of the past is partly sentimental, because we do not live in the past. The poor do not praise poverty. Before you can despise the machine, the machine must set you free from brute labour. But that is not to say that Yeats’s yearning for a more primitive and more hierarchical age was not sincere. How much of all this is traceable to mere snobbishness, product of Yeats’s own position as an impoverished offshoot of the aristocracy, is a different question. And the connexion between his obscurantist opinions and his tendency towards “quaintness” of language remains to be worked out; Mr Menon hardly touches upon it.
This is a very short book, and I would greatly like to see Mr Menon go ahead and write another book on Yeats, starting where this one leaves off. “If the greatest poet of our times is exultantly ringing in an era of Fascism, it seems a somewhat disturbing symptom,” he says on the last page, and leaves it at that. It is a disturbing symptom, because it is not an isolated one. By and large the best writers of our time have been reactionary in tendency, and though Fascism does not offer any real return to the past, those who yearn for the past will accept Fascism sooner than its probable alternatives.
But there are other lines of approach, as we have seen during the past two or three years.
The relationship between Fascism and the literary intelligentsia badly needs investigating, and Yeats might well be the starting-point. He is best studied by someone like Mr Menon, who can approach a poet primarily as a poet, but who also knows that a writer’s political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be laughed away, but something that will leave their mark even on the smallest detail of his work.
Horizon, January 1943; Cr.E.; D.D.; C.E.
44. Letter from England to Partisan Review
3 January 1943
Dear Editors,
It is just on two years since I wrote you my first letter. I wrote that one to the tune of A.A. guns, when we were in desperate straits and also on what appeared to be the edge of rapid political advance. I begin this one at a time when the military situation is enormously better but the political outlook is blacker than it has ever been. My last letter but one, which I wrote in May of this year, you headed on your own initiative “The British Crisis”. Well, that crisis is over and the forces of reaction have won hands down.
Churchill is firm in the saddle again, Cripps has flung away his chances, no other leftwing leader or movement has appeared, and what is more important, it is hard to see how any revolutionary situation can recur till the western end of the war is finished. We have had two opportunities, Dunkirk and Singapore, and we took neither. Before trying to predict the consequences of this, let me sketch out the main tendencies of this year as I see them.
Although the individual incidents don’t fit in so neatly as they might, the rule has held good that the Government moves to the right in moments of success and to the Left in moments of disaster. Collapse in the Far East — Cripps taken into the Government, Cripps’s mission to India (this was probably so framed as to make sure that it should not be accepted, but was at least a big concession to popular feeling in this country).
American victories in the Pacific, German failure to reach Alexandria — Indian Congress leaders arrested. British victory in Egypt, American invasion of North Africa — tie-up with Darlan and fresh bum-kissing for Franco. But over the whole year — indeed I have mentioned it in earlier letters — there has been visible a steady growth of blimpishness
and a more conscious elbowing-out of the “reds” who were useful when morale needed pepping up but can now be dispensed with. The sudden sacking of Cripps merely symbolizes a process which is occurring all over the place. Apart from the general rightward swing there have been two other developments which seem to be significant.
One is the Second Front agitation, which reached its peak about July and thereafter took on a more definitely political colour than before. The North African campaign has temporarily silenced the clamour for a Second Front, but in the preceding months the controversy had not really been a military one but was a struggle between pro-Russians and anti-Russians. The other development is the growth of anti-American feeling, together with increased American control over British policy. The popular attitude towards America has I believe changed in the last few months, and I will return to this in a moment. Meanwhile the growing suspicion that we may all have underrated the strength of capitalism and that the Right may, after all, be able to win the war off its own bat without resorting to any radical change, is very depressing to anyone who thinks.
Cynicism about “after the war” is widespread, and the “we’re all in it together” feeling of 1940 has faded away. The great political topic of the last few weeks has been the Beveridge Report on Social Security. People seem to feel that this very moderate measure of reform is almost too good to be true. Except for the tiny interested minority, everyone is pro-Beveridge — including leftwing papers which a few years ago would have denounced such a scheme as semi-Fascist — and at the same time no one believes that Beveridge’s plan will actually be adopted. The usual opinion is that “they” (the Government) will make a pretence of accepting the Beveridge Report and then simply let it drop. The sense of impotence seems to be growing and is reflected in the lower and lower voting figures at by-elections. The last public demonstrations of any magnitude were those demanding a Second Front in the late summer. No demonstrations against the Darlan deal, though disapproval of it was almost general; nor over the India business, though, again, popular feeling is pro-Congress. The extreme Left still tends to be defeatist, except as regards the Russian front, and at each stage of the African campaign its press has clung almost desperately to a pessimistic interpretation of events. I think it is worth noting that the military experts favoured by the Left are all of them defeatist, and haven’t suffered in reputation when their gloomy prophecies are falsified, any more than the cheery optimists favoured by the Right. However, this comes partly from jealousy and “opposition mentality”: few people now really believe in a German victory. As to the real moral of the last three years — that the Right has more guts and ability than the Left — no one will face up to it.
Now a word about Anglo-American relations. In an earlier letter I tried to indicate very briefly the various currents of pro-and anti-American feeling in this country. Since then there has been an obvious growth of animosity against America, and this now extends to people who were previously pro-American, such as the literary intelligentsia.
It is important to realize that for about fifteen years Britain has differed from most countries in having no nationalist intelligentsia worth speaking of. The average English intellectual is anti-British, and though chiefly worshipping the U.S.S.R. has also tended to look on America as being not only more efficient and up-to-date than Britain, but more genuinely democratic. During the period 1935-9 the Left intelligentsia were taken in to a surprising extent by the “anti-Fascist” antics in which so many American newspapers indulged. There was also a tendency to crouch culturally towards America and urge the
superiority of the American language and even the American accent. This attitude is changing, however, as it begins to be grasped that the U.S.A. is potentially imperialist and politically a long way behind Britain. A favourite saying nowadays is that whereas Chamberlain appeased Germany, Churchill appeases America. It is, indeed, obvious enough that the British ruling class is being propped up by American arms, and may thereby get a new lease of life it would not otherwise have had. People now blame the U.S.A. for every reactionary move, more even than is justified. For instance, even quite well-informed people believed the Darlan job to have been “put over” by the Americans without our knowledge, though in fact the British Government must have been privy to it.
There is also widespread anti-American feeling among the working class, thanks to the presence of the American soldiers, and, I believe, very bitter anti-British feeling among the soldiers themselves. I have to speak here on secondhand evidence, because it is almost impossible to make contact with an American soldier. They are to be seen everywhere in the streets, but they don’t go to the ordinary pubs, and even in the hotels and cocktail bars which they do frequent they keep by themselves and hardly answer if spoken to. American civilians who are in contact with them say that apart from the normal grumbling about the food, the climate, etc., they complain of being inhospitably treated and of having to pay for their amusements, and are disgusted by the dinginess, the old-fashionedness and the general poverty of life in England. Certainly it cannot be pleasant to be suddenly transferred from the comforts of American .civilization to some smoky and rainy Midland town, battered by three years of war and short of every kind of consumption goods. I doubt, however, whether the average American would find England tolerable even in peacetime. The cultural differences are very deep, perhaps irreconcilable, and the Americans obviously have the profoundest contempt for England, rather like the contempt which the ordinary lowbrow Englishman has for the Latin races.
All who are in contact with the American troops report them as saying that this is “their”
war, they have done all the fighting in it, the British are no good at anything except running away, etc. The lack of contact between the Americans and the locals is startling.
It is now more than eight months since the first American troops arrived, and I have not yet seen a British soldier and an American soldier together. Officers very occasionally, soldiers never. The early good impression which the American troops made on the women seems to have worn off. One never sees them except with tarts or near-tarts, and the same thing is reported from most parts of the country. Relations are said to be better in Scotland, however, where the people are certainly more hospitable than in England.
Also, people seem to prefer the Negroes to the white Americans.
If you ask people why they dislike Americans, you get first of all the answer that they are “always boasting” and then come upon a more solid grievance in the matter of the soldiers’ pay and food. An American private soldier gets ten shillings a day and all found, which — with wages and income tax as they now are — means that the whole American army is financially in the middle class, and fairly high up in it. As to the food, I do not imagine that people would resent the troops being better fed than civilians, since the British army is also better fed, so far as the ingredients of food go, but the Americans are given foodstuffs otherwise reserved for children, and also imported luxuries which obviously waste shipping space. They are even importing beer, since they will not drink English beer. People point out with some bitterness that sailors have to be drowned in bringing this stuff across. You can imagine also the petty jealousies centring round the
fact that American officers monopolize all the taxis, drink up all the whisky and have inflated the rents of furnished rooms to unheard-of levels. The usual comment is “I wouldn’t mind if they were fighting, not just talking.” This is said out of spite, but it is a fact that the attitude will change deeply if and when the American army is engaged in Europe. At present the parallel with our own relations with Europe during the phony war is all too obvious.
Whether this state of affairs could be altered by better propaganda methods is disputable. I note that people newly returned from the U.S.A. or with knowledge of conditions there, especially Canadians, are concerned about Anglo-American relations and very anxious that the British war effort should be more loudly boosted in the U.S.A.
Britain’s propaganda problems, however, are more complex than most people realize. To take one example, it is politically necessary to flatter the Dominions, which involves playing down the British. As a result the Germans are able to say plausibly that Britain’s fighting is done for her by colonial troops, but this is held to be lesser evil than offending the Australians, who are only very loosely attached to the Empire and culturally hostile to Britain. This dilemma presents itself over and over again, in endless variations. As to America, some propagandists actually hold that it is better for the Americans to be anti-British, as this gives them a good opinion of themselves and “keeps their morale up”.
Others are dismayed because we are represented in America by people like Lord Halifax — who, it is feared, may be taken for a typical Englishman. The usual line is “Why can’t we send over a few working men from Wigan or Bradford to show them we’re ordinary decent people like themselves?” This seems to me sentimentality. It is true, of course, that Lord Halifax is just about as representative of Britain as a Red Indian chieftain is of the United States, but the theory that the common people of all nations love each other at sight is not backed up by experience. The common people nearly everywhere are xenophobe, because they cannot accustom themselves to foreign food and foreign habits.
Holding leftwing opinions makes no difference to this, a fact which impressed itself on me in the Spanish Civil War. The popular goodwill towards the U.S.S.R. in this country partly depends on the fact that few Englishmen have ever seen a Russian. And one has only to look round the English-speaking world, with its labyrinth of cultural hatreds, to see that speaking the same language is no guarantee of friendship.
Whatever happens, Britain will not go the way that France went, and the growing animosity between British and Americans may not have any real importance till the war is over. But it might have a direct influence on events if — as is now widely expected -Germany is defeated some time in 1943 or 1944 and it then takes about two more years to settle Japan. In that case the war against Japan might quite easily be represented as “an American war”, a more plausible variant of “a Jewish war”. The masses in Britain have it fixed in their minds that Hitler is the enemy, and it is quite common to hear soldiers say “I’m packing up as soon as Germany is finished.” That doesn’t mean that they genuinely intend or would be able to do this, and I think in practice majority opinion would be for staying in the war, unless by that time Russia had changed sides again. But the question “What are we fighting for?” is bound to come up in a sharper form when Germany is knocked out, and there are pro-Japanese elements in this country which might be clever enough to make use of popular war weariness. From the point of view of the man in the street the war in the Far East is a war for the rubber companies and the Americans, and in that context American unpopularity might be important. The British ruling class has
never stated its real war aims, which happen to be unmentionable, and so long as things went badly Britain was driven part of the way towards a revolutionary strategy. There was always the possibility, therefore, of democratizing the war without losing it in the process. Now, however, the tide begins to turn and immediately the dreary world which the American millionaires and their British hangers-on intend to impose upon us begins to take shape. The British people, in the mass, don’t want such a world, and might say so fairly vigorously when the Nazis are out of the way. What they want, so far as they formulate their thoughts at all, is some kind of United States of Europe dominated by a close alliance between Britain and the U.S.S.R. Sentimentally, the majority of people in this world would far rather be in a tie-up with Russia than with America, and it is possible to imagine situations in which the popular cause would become the anti-American cause. There were signs of this alignment in the reactions to the Darlan business. Whether any leader or party capable of giving a voice to these tendencies will arise even when Hitler is gone and Europe is in turmoil, I do not know. None is visible at this moment, and the reactionaries are tightening their grip everywhere. But one can at least foresee at what point a radical change will again become possible.
There is not much more news. Another Fascist party has started up, the British National Party. It is the usual stuff — anti-Bolshevik, anti-Big Business, etc. These people have got hold of some money from somewhere but do not appear to have a serious following. The Common Wealth people have quarrelled and split, but the main group is probably making headway. There have been further signs of the growth of a leftwing faction in the Church of England, which has had tendencies in this direction for some years past. These centre not, as one might expect, in the “modernists” but in the Anglo-Catholics, dogmatically the extreme “right wing” of the Church.
The Church Times, which is more or less the official paper of the C. of E.3
(enormous circulation in country vicarages), has for some years past been a mildly leftwing paper and politically quite intelligent. Parts of the Roman Catholic press have gone more markedly proFascist since the Darlan affair. There is evidently a split in the Catholic intelligentsia over the whole question of Fascism, and they have been attacking one another in public in a way they usually avoid doing. There is still antisemitism, but no sign that it is growing. Our food is much as usual. The Christmas puddings, my clue to the shipping situation, were about the same colour as last year. It is getting hard to live with prices and taxes as they now are, and what between long working hours and then firewatching, the Home Guard, A.R.P. or what-not, one seems to have less and less spare time, especially as all journeys now are slow and uncomfortable. Good luck for 1943.
3. Church of England.
Partisan Review, March-April 1943