by K. R. Bolton
MORE
ARTISTS OF THE RIGHT
by
K. R. BOLTON
EDITED BY GREG JOHNSON
Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.
San Francisco
2017
Copyright © 2017 by K. R. Bolton
All rights reserved
Cover image: Franz von Lenbach, Portrait of Richard Wagner,
circa. 1882–83, Lenbachhaus, Munich
Cover design by Kevin I. Slaughter
Published in the United States by
COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING LTD.
P.O. Box 22638
San Francisco, CA 94122
USA
http://www.counter-currents.com/
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-940933-19-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-940933-20-7
E-book ISBN: 978-1-940933-21-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bolton, K. R. (Kerry Raymond), 1956-
More artists of the right / by K. R. Bolton ; edited by Greg Johnson.
1 online resource.
Includes index.
Summary: "More Artists of the Right, K. R. Bolton's companion to his 2012 volume Artists of the Right, explores the work of seven artists who also made contributions to Right-wing political thought: composer and essayist Richard Wagner, occultist and poet Aleister Crowley, poet and critic T. S. Eliot, novelist and critic P. R. Stephensen, poet and essayist A. R. D. Fairburn, poet and essayist Count Potocki of Montalk, and novelist and essayist Yukio Mishima" -- Provided by publisher.
Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
ISBN 978-1-940933-21-4 (epub) -- ISBN 978-1-940933-19-1 (hardcover : alk. paper).
Literature--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Fascism and literature. 3. Fascism and music. 4. Music--19th century--History and criticism. I. Johnson, Greg, 1971- editor. II. Bolton, K. R. (Kerry Raymond), 1956- Artists of the right. III. Title.
PN56.F35
809'.93358--dc23
2015010835
CONTENTS
Foreword by Greg Johnson
1. Richard Wagner
2. Aleister Crowley
3. T. S. Eliot
4. P. R. Stephensen
5. A. R. D. Fairburn
6. Count Potocki of Montalk
7. Yukio Mishima
About the Author
FOREWORD
It is a perennial embarrassment to the Left that some of the greatest creative minds of the 19th and 20th centuries were men of the Right, and not just conservatives, but men of the far Right, such as fascists and National Socialists—or their precursors and fellow travelers.
Kerry Bolton’s More Artists of the Right offers political profiles of seven such artists: Richard Wagner, Aleister Crowley, T. S. Eliot, P. R. Stephensen, A. R. D. Fairburn, Count Potocki of Montalk, and Yukio Mishima. All seven were immensely accomplished artists and critics who made significant contributions to Right-wing political thought. Wagner is one of the most influential artists of all time. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mishima is one of the giants of 20th-century Japanese literature. Stephensen, Fairburn, and Potocki are best-known in Australia and New Zealand, but Bolton establishes that they deserve a much larger audience. Crowley and Stephensen’s purely artistic productions are somewhat marginal to their bodies of work; although a prolific and accomplished poet as well as a novelist, Crowley is best known for his occult writings, whereas Stephensen is best known as an essayist and publisher.
The present volume is a companion to Bolton’s 2012 volume Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence, which focuses on ten leading 20th-century literary figures: D. H. Lawrence, H. P. Lovecraft, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Filippo Marinetti, W. B. Yeats, Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Williamson, and Roy Campbell. The chapters on Stephensen, Fairburn, and Mishima are much expanded versions of chapters originally published in Thinkers of the Right: Challenging Materialism (Luton, England: Luton Publications, 2003).
I wish to thank Kerry Bolton for his hard work, patience, and good humor over the long process of bringing this project to birth. I also wish to thank Collin Cleary, John Morgan, Michael Polignano, and Kevin Slaughter for all their help.
Greg Johnson
March 12, 2017
CHAPTER 1
RICHARD WAGNER
Karl Marx reserved a special place of contempt for those he termed “reactionists.” These comprised the alliance that was forming around his time among all classes of people, high-born and low, who aimed to return to a pre-capitalist society. These were the remnants of artisans, aristocrats, landowners, and pastors, who had seen the ravages of industrialism and money-ethics then unfolding. Where there had once been craft, community, village, the marketplace, and the church, there was now mass production, class war, the city, and the stock exchange.
Rather than deploring capitalism, as one might suppose, Marx regarded this as an indispensable phase in the “wheel of history,” of the historical dialectic, which would through a conflict of thesis and antitheses result in a socialist and eventually a communist society. This was the inevitable unfolding of history according to Marx, based on a struggle for primacy by economic interests: class struggle, where primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism represented a linear progression. Hence, anything that interfered with this process was “reactionism.”1
Capitalism itself would go through a stage of increasing internationalization and concentration, whereby increasing numbers of bourgeois would be dispossessed and join the ranks of the proletariat that would make a revolution to overthrow capitalism.2 Hence, Marx sought to overthrow the traditions and ethos of pre-capitalist society. As “reactionary” historians such as Oswald Spengler3 and Julius Evola4 have pointed out, given that dialectics means that the new “synthesis” incorporates elements of what it has overthrown, Marxian-socialism was itself an aspect of capitalism.5
Marx came into a revolutionary milieu comprised of varying elements but which generally took inspiration from the French Revolution of 1789, with an emphasis on the “rights of man” that provided a reformist façade for the rise of the bourgeoisie. Hence these revolutionaries of the mid-19th century regarded themselves as “democrats” fighting for equality. However, they also saw the nation-state and the sovereignty of peoples as the liberating factor from princes, kings, dynasties, and empires that were seen as placing themselves above “the people.” Hence, nationalism became the revolutionary force of the century, albeit at times intended, like Jacobinism, as a prelude to a “universal republic.”
VOLK & NATION AS REVOLUTIONARY FORCES
The German Revolution moved in a völkisch direction, where the Volk was seen as the basis of the state, and the notion of a Volk-soul that guided the formation and development of nations became a predominant theme that came into conflict with the French bourgeois liberal-democratic ideals. J. G. Fichte had laid the foundations of a German nationalism in 1807–1808 with his Addresses to the German Nation. Like possibly all revolutionaries or radicals of the age, he started off under the impress of the French Revolution. However, by the time Fichte had delivered his addresses he had already rejected Jacobinism, and his views became increasingly authoritarian and influenced by the Realpolitik of Machiavelli.
Johann Gottfried Herder had previously sought to establish the concept of the Volk-soul, and of each nation being guided by a spirit. This was a metaphysical conception of race, or more accurately Volk (people, nation), that preceded the biological arguments of Count Arthur de Gobineau in his seminal treatise The Inequality of the Human Races, which was to impress Wagner decades later. Herder’s doctrine is ev
ident in Wagner’s, insofar as Herder stated that the Volk is the only class, and includes both king and peasant, and that “the people” are not the same as the rabble heralded by Jacobinism and later by Marxism. Herder upheld the individuality and distinctness of nations that had fortuitously been separated by both natural and cultural barriers, and held that these nations manifested innate differences, including religious ones.
Wagner’s rejection of French ideals in favour of Germanic ones, as one might expect, can be traced to aesthetic sensibilities, and his stay in Paris gave him a distaste for the “exaggerations” of French music.6 In France Wagner was acquainted with Jews whom he came to distrust and said of this period that it had promoted his consciousness as a German:
On the other hand, I felt strongly drawn to gain a closer acquaintance of German history than I had secured at school. I had Raumer’s History of the Hohenstaufen within easy reach to start upon. All the great figures in this book lived vividly before my eyes. I was particularly captivated by the personality of that gifted Emperor Frederick II, whose fortunes aroused my sympathy so keenly that I vainly sought for a fitting artistic setting for them. The fate of his son Manfred, on the other hand, provoked in me an equally well-grounded, but more easily combated, feeling of opposition. . . .
Even at this time it delighted me to find in the German mind the capacity of appreciating beyond the narrow bounds of nationality all purely human qualities, in however strange a garb they might be presented. For in this I recognised how nearly akin it is to the mind of Greece. In Frederick II, I saw this quality in full flower. A fair-haired German of ancient Swabian stock, heir to the Norman realm of Sicily and Naples, who gave the Italian language its first development, and laid a basis for the evolution of knowledge and art where hitherto ecclesiastical fanaticism and feudal brutality had alone contended for power, a monarch who gathered at his court the poets and sages of eastern lands, and surrounded himself with the living products of Arabian and Persian grace and spirit—this man I beheld betrayed by the Roman clergy to the infidel foe, yet ending his crusade, to their bitter disappointment, by a pact of peace with the Sultan, from whom he obtained a grant of privileges to Christians in Palestine such as the bloodiest victory could scarcely have secured.7
This seemingly universalistic ideal of “humanity” is however at the root of his suspicion of the Jews as possessing traits inimical to “humanity.” Herder, Fichte, and other founders of German Idealism, including Kant, had taken the same view, their German nationalism including a certain universalism that saw the Germans as having a messianic world mission, just as the British, Jews, and Russians8 have all held themselves to be bearers of a world mission vis-à-vis the whole of humanity. It was in Frederick however, that Wagner “beheld the German ideal in its highest embodiment.” “If all that I regarded as essentially German had hitherto drawn me with ever-increasing force, and compelled me to its eager pursuit, I here found it suddenly presented to me in the simple outlines of a legend, based upon the old and well-known ballad of ‘Tannhäuser.’”9
THE DRESDEN REVOLT & BAKUNIN
Having returned to Dresden from Paris in 1842, Wagner secured a position as a conductor at the Royal Theatre, a profession that failed to enthuse him over the course of seven years. However, it was here that the arch-revolutionist of anarchism, the Russian noble, Mikhail Bakunin, despite being a fugitive, sat in the audience at the public rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Wagner, who wrote:
At its close [Bakunin] walked unhesitatingly up to me in the orchestra, and said in a loud voice, that if all the music that had ever been written were lost in the expected world-wide conflagration, we must pledge ourselves to rescue this symphony, even at the peril of our lives. Not many weeks after this performance it really seemed as though this world-wide conflagration would actually be kindled in the streets of Dresden, and that Bakunin, with whom I had meanwhile become more closely associated through strange and unusual circumstances, would undertake the office of chief stoker.10
Wagner had met Bakunin in 1848, while the Russian was a fugitive from the Austrian authorities, in the house of a friend, the republican leader August Röckel. Wagner described the visage of Bakunin when they first met: “Everything about him was colossal, and he was full of a primitive exuberance and strength. I never gathered that he set much store by my acquaintance. Indeed, he did not seem to care for merely intellectual men; what he demanded was men of reckless energy.”11
Bakunin looked to his fellow Slavs as what we might call the new barbarians, who could regenerate humanity, “because the Slavs had been less enervated by civilization.”12 He could cite Hegelian dialectics at length and was committed to the destruction of the old order, and saw in the Russian peasant the best hope of starting a world conflagration. The destructive urge of the Russian giant bothered Wagner. Bakunin cared nothing for the French—although he had started his ideological journey by reading Rousseau, like many radicals of the time—nor for the ideals of republicanism or democracy. Wagner however, feared that such forces of destruction, once unleashed, would annihilate all culture, and that nothing could arise again:
Was any one of us so mad as to fancy that he would survive the desired destruction? We ought to imagine the whole of Europe with St. Petersburg, Paris, and London transformed into a vast rubbish-heap. How could we expect the kindlers of such a fire to retain any consciousness after so vast a devastation? He used to puzzle any who professed their readiness for self-sacrifice by telling them it was not the so-called tyrants who were so obnoxious, but the smug Philistines. As a type of these he pointed to a Protestant parson, and declared that he would not believe he had really reached the full stature of a man until he saw him commit his own parsonage, with his wife and child, to the flames.13
While Bakunin was untempered fury, Wagner was a contemplative aesthete who was to ruminate for decades on revolution as a means to achieve a higher state of humanity. Ultimately, he influenced the course of history more so than his Russian friend.
Bakunin deplored Wagner’s intention to write a tragedy entitled Jesus of Nazareth, and implored Wagner to make it a work of contempt towards a figure whom Bakunin regarded as a weakling, while Wagner saw in Jesus the figure of a hero. Indeed, Wagner, a pantheist and heathen who sought the redemption of man through returning to nature and overthrowing the superficiality of a decaying civilization, nonetheless admired Jesus as a revolutionary hero whose message was redemption from mammon. He was to state to the Dresden Patriotic Club in the revolutionary year of 1848 that God would guide the revolution against “this daemonic idea of Money . . . with all its loathsome retinue of open and secret usury, paper-juggling, percentage and banker’s speculations. That will be the full emancipation of the human race, that will be the fulfilment of Christ’s pure teaching.”14
Yet paradoxically, again Bakunin betrayed his own repressed aestheticism when he intently listened to Wagner play and sing The Flying Dutchman and applauded enthusiastically. Wagner saw in Bakunin a man conflicted with the “purest ideal of humanity” and “a savagery entirely inimical to all civilization.” Wagner’s ideal was “the artistic remodelling of human society.” However, Wagner’s fears subsided when he found that Bakunin’s plans for destruction were as utopian as his own plans to reshape humanity through aesthetics. Also, for all his zeal, Bakunin had no real means or following.15
Bakunin was back with Wagner in 1849, after a brief sojourn to see if the Slavs could be incited, and it was in Dresden that both were involved in the city’s revolt against the King of Saxony. Wagner on his own account felt no great attraction to democratic politics, but assumed the role of revolutionary it seems through a dissatisfaction with life: “My feelings of partisanship were not sufficiently passionate to make me desire to take any active share in these conflicts. I was merely conscious of an impulse to give myself up recklessly to the stream of events, no matter whither it might lead.”16
Nonetheless, the German democratic revol
ution was seen by many, including Wagner, as the means of dismantling principalities for the purpose of creating a united German nation. It was where a dichotomy between the democratic and the völkisch revolutions arose, the first derived from French inspiration and Jewish intellectualism such as that of Heine, the second from the roots of Germany, and expressed by Fichte, Hegel, and Herder.
Wagner had already issued a clarion call for “Revolution” in an essay by that name just prior to the May 1849 revolt in Dresden. Like Bakunin, his revolution was a call to instinct and to vitalism, antithetical to the intellectualism of Jewish socialists and democrats. It was a romanticism of revolt that sought the overthrow of states because they suppressed the instinct, the vitality of life that welled up from within the Volk soul. He saw revolution as a “supernatural force” and referred to it as “a lofty goddess.” Wagner wrote: “I [the revolution] am the ever rejuvenating, ever fashioning Life.” “Everything must be in a state of becoming.” “Life is law unto itself.”17 Wagner’s ode to vital forces had no kinship with the theoretical disputations of Marx.
Yet, Wagner’s appeal was also to the kings and princes. He saw the ideal of the king as being the first among the Volk, and not as a debased hereditary ruler representing a single class. Wagner’s idea of kingship harkened to the primeval Germans who selected their kings from among the populace on the basis of their heroism. Like Herder, Wagner saw the populous as one class, the Volk, and what Wagner was really fighting against was a system that intervened between Volk and king. Wagner wrote a völkisch appeal for princes and people to unite against the East, albeit unpublished, possibly because it did not express the sentiments of certain Jewish liberal publishers: “The old fight against the East returns again today. The people’s sword must not rust / Who freedom wish for aye.”18 He wrote in an article published in the Dresdener Anzeiger on the intrinsic value of kingship, and posed the question as to whether all the issues debated by the democrats cannot nonetheless be met under the personage of the king?
