by K. R. Bolton
Crowley moved to Cefalu where he established his “Abbey of Thelema” in a ramshackle house. The death of follower Raoul Loveday resulted in Crowley’s expulsion from Italy in 1923, by which time he had become an embarrassment to the Fascist regime.138 However, one eminent individual who must have discerned a proto-fascist element in Thelema, before himself becoming one of the more significant spokesmen of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British fascism, was J. F. C. Fuller, who achieved fame as the architect of modern tank warfare and as a military historian. Fuller was one of Crowley’s earliest devotees, having first heard of him in 1905. Like Crowley, he was a Nietzschean with occult interests who regarded socialism as a leveling creed: “the scum on the democratic cauldron.” His opposition to Christianity was likewise Nietzschean.139
Fuller met Crowley in London in 1906 and wrote Crowley’s first biography, The Star in the West, which was the winner (and only entrant) of a competition to promote Crowley’s poetry. Although Fuller’s interest in the occult and mysticism was life-long, he broke with Crowley in 1911, embarrassed by Crowley’s escapades that drew blazing headlines from the tabloid press.
In 1932, Fuller was still writing in Nietzschean terms of socialism and democracy as products of Christianity. Joining the British Union of Fascists and becoming Mosley’s military adviser, Fuller remained a lifelong Mosleyite, even after the Second World War, but refused any further contact with Crowley.
While Fascists (particularly “clerical-fascists”), guild socialists, Social Creditors, Distributists, syndicalists et al. attempted to resolve the problems of the machine age, and Evola offered something of a practical plan in his Men Above the Ruins, Crowley’s Thelemic social conceptions remained as otherworldly as his mysticism, and few of his followers seem to have given much attention to the political implications or implementation of Thelema.
Crowley, a poet and a mystic, not an agitator or a politician, had his own conception of historical cycles, albeit somewhat limited, in which the Aeon of Horus, the new age of “force and fire,” would emerge with Crowley as its prophet. Just as Marx assured us that the victory of communism was the end of an inexorable historical process, Crowley thought the Thelemic world order would arise as a product of cosmic law. And just as Marx called upon socialists to become active agents of this historical process, Crowley envisioned that the ordeals demanded by his Holy Order would give rise to Thelemic Knights who would wage jihad against all the old creeds:
We have to fight for freedom against oppressors, religious, social or industrial, and we are utterly opposed to compromise, every fight is to be a fight to the finish; each one of us for himself, to do his own will, and all of us for all, to establish the law of Liberty. . . . Let every man bear arms, swift to resent oppression . . . generous and ardent to draw sword in any cause, if justice or freedom summon him.140
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
September 2 & 3, 2010
CHAPTER 3
T. S. ELIOT
The First World War brought to a climax a cultural crisis in Western Civilization that had been developing for centuries: money overwhelmed tradition, as Spengler would have put it141 (or, to resort to the language of Marx, the bourgeoisie supplanted the aristocracy).142 Industrialization accentuated the process of commercialization, with its concomitant urbanization and the disruption of organic bonds and social cohesion. This has thrown societies into a state of perpetual flux, with culture reflecting that condition.
It was—and is—a problem of the primacy of Capital. Marx is the most well-known supposed opponent of Capital, to which many of the literati turned (especially in the aftermath of the Great War). Others, however, turned to the Right and rejected capitalism not only on the basis of economics, but more importantly by rejecting the Zeitgeist of Capital of which Marxism was merely a reflection rather than an alternative. Among these latter were T. S. Eliot, one of the most influential luminaries of contemporary English literature.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis Missouri in 1888. He attended Harvard University, Merton College, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. Like Ezra Pound, the New Zealand poets Rex Fairburn and Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, and many others on the colonial peripheries of European civilization, Eliot sought out whatever was left of the cultural epicenter and settled in England in 1915, becoming a naturalized British subject in 1927.
Eliot’s choice to settle in England and become a naturalized Briton gets at the heart of the crisis of European culture, and of alienation. Peter Ackroyd—despite his conventionalism and lack of insight in summing up Eliot’s concern about advancing barbarism—does provide some rare insight on the cultural alienation that was felt by Eliot and others:
To what territory or tradition did he belong is another question, and one in which he himself found it difficult to resolve: in a letter to Herbert Read he remarked how he . . . did not believe himself to be an American at all. He was a “resident alien”. . .
His sense of being an alien in America was by no means unique, however. Ezra Pound used much the same terms to describe his own position in the United States—he was, he said, brought up in a place with which his forebears had no connection. But they were not simply aliens in one community or another; they were estranged from the country itself. They grew up in a time of great ethical and social confusion—the intercontinental railways were changing the shape of the country, just as the vast tide of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe was radically reforming the ideas of what an “American” was. This was a society which fostered no living or coherent tradition, a society being created by industrialists and bankers, and by the politics and the religion which ministers to them, for those who feel themselves to be set apart, and who have found in their reading of literature a sense of life and of values not available to them in their ordinary lives, there is a terrible emptiness at such a time . . . the consequence was that Pound and Eliot—and also near contemporaries . . . sought to create traditions of their own . . .143
Since then, the “cultural pessimism” that arose in the aftermath of World War I has shown itself to be realism, and the world has become “America” under the impress of what is overtly promoted as “globalization.” Money and standardization reign supreme. The traditionalist has few recourses other than self-exile and isolation or seeking out like company in fringe movements. However, for Eliot and Pound, Europe still offered opportunities.
Taking employment as a schoolteacher, and then with Lloyds Bank in the City, Eliot’s first published volume of verse was Prufrock in 1917. The Waste Land followed in 1922. He was by then an established literary figure: in 1922 he founded the small but influential literary journal The Criterion, and was appointed Director of Faber & Faber, the publishing house, a position which he retained throughout his life. In 1936, Collected Poems 1909–1935 was published.
As a playwright his works include Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959). A book of verses for children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, was published in 1939.
Eliot was also a renowned critic. A collection of his essays and reviews was published in 1920, entitled The Sacred Wood. Selected Essays appeared in 1932; The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism in 1933, What is a Classic? in 1945; On Poetry and Poets in 1957; Poetry and Drama in 1951; and The Three Voices of Poetry in 1953. In particular, Eliot’s social and political criticism is found in After Strange Gods (1934), based on a lecture to the University of Virginia in 1933; The Idea of a Christian Society (1939); and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). These three essays are particularly cogent expressions of Eliot’s criticism of liberalism and commercialism and his apologia for tradition.
In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature, followed by many honorary doctorates, honorary fellowships, and professorships in Britain and the United States. Although nothing deterred Eliot’s lifelong criticism of libe
ralism and defense of tradition, and despite the continuing occasional quips about “anti-Semitism,” and “racism,” Eliot managed to avoid the opprobrium and persecution that was meted out to his friend Ezra Pound. He never compromised his views in a post-1945 world in which democracy and egalitarianism had assumed idolatrous veneration.
Eliot’s turn to the Right was based on what has been called “cultural pessimism,” represented in particular by the historical doctrine of Oswald Spengler, who saw cultural decay as part of an all-encompassing cycle of decline of Western civilization. Fritz Stern called this “the politics of cultural despair” in his study on the intellectual and cultural critique of liberalism in Weimar Germany.144 Eliot’s cultural pessimism and his quest for solutions was reflected in his personal crises, expressed in early poems, in particular “The Hollow Men” and “The Waste Land.” The poet here becomes a microcosm of the crisis of culture as a whole. Having considered Eliot’s personal ups and downs, Alastair Hamilton nonetheless calls him a social commentator of substance, who remained “reasonable” in his critique of modern industrial society.145
SOCIAL CREDIT: AN ECONOMIC SOLUTION TO CULTURAL PROBLEMS
However, there was a practical solution that attracted Eliot, as it did in particular Ezra Pound. The new economic theory of Social Credit provided a practical scheme for eliminating the social dislocations caused by an economic system founded on usury. In addition, it had the advantage, from a traditionalist viewpoint, of eliminating the prospect—which then seemed imminent—of a Bolshevik revolution intent on destroying the social order from which high culture emerges, whatever the Left-wing intelligentsia might say otherwise.
In particular, Social Credit provides the practical mechanism for overthrowing the money power which, according to Spengler, rules in the late epoch of a civilization, and apparently without the Spenglerian recourse to bloodshed and the rise of a fascistic “Caesar” figure.
While few of the Right-wing literati concerned themselves with such practical details (most were aesthetic Rightists by and large), it is significant that the primary advocate of Social Credit, aside from Maj. C. H. Douglas, was A. R. Orage, editor of The New English Review and The New Age and one of the most important promoters of new literary talent. Although Orage was a luminary of the Fabian socialist movement, he was not an orthodox socialist and advocated guild-socialism.
Orage was a focus for both innovative art and innovative economic and social theories, and a few of the poets saw the importance of Social Credit as the means of overthrowing materialism. In particular there was Ezra Pound, a lifelong enthusiast for the doctrine, who was also Eliot’s patron in London. It was Pound who enabled Eliot to get published in both Britain and the USA, and who advised Eliot stylistically.146 Pound’s generosity was to be much later repaid by Eliot’s campaign for his mentor, when Pound was being accused of treason and pushed into a lunatic asylum.
THE JEWISH PRESENCE
The presence of Jews in commerce and as a factor in undermining tradition did not go unnoticed in many quarters of both Left and Right during this time, including Social Credit and artistic circles. Hillaire Belloc, the Catholic social theorist and author, wrote a book on the subject in which he considered Jews as collectively “an alien body within society.”147 Ezra Pound got into much trouble eventually, and there continues to be a good deal of hand-wringing as to whether Eliot was an “anti-Semite” or, if he was, whether he remained so.148
Eliot’s early poem, “Burbank with a Baedekker, Bleistein with a Cigar” (1919) examines the differences in mentality between two tourists in Venice, one tellingly named Bleistein, seeing nothing but commerce. Bleistein is characterised stereotypically:
But this or such was Bleistein’s way:
A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese . . .
On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.
The boatman smiles . . .
The following year Eliot evokes the stereotypical Jewish landlord in “Gerontion”:
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.149
A Jewish character is also portrayed in less than flattering terms in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”:
The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws . . .150
The common theme that emerges in the Jewish characters of Eliot’s verse is that of the cosmopolitan, vulgar Jew who epitomized “new wealth” and bought his way into high society, but was kept at arm’s length by England’s “old money,” who saw wealthy Jews as having the thinnest veneer of cultivation. It is certainly why Eliot’s characterization would not have been greeted with the outrage that it met in post-war years.
Over a decade later Eliot again alludes to Jewish influence in his lecture at the University of Virginia, advising that tradition can only develop where the population is homogeneous:
Where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large numbers of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.151
This passage concisely expresses all of Eliot’s primary views on the matter of tradition, and is the antithesis of everything that is signified by the word liberalism. Yet because there is a reference to Jews, and in particular, because it was published when Hitler had just assumed power, it becomes particularly problematic to those who admire Eliot’s work (or Pound’s, or Hamsun’s), but reach a crisis of morality when confronted with the writer’s illiberality.152 Professor Sharpe, for example, refers to “some extremely unlovely passages to do with Jews and Jewishness in Eliot’s writing.”153
Sharpe and others have pointed out that Eliot did not allow After Strange Gods to be reprinted in later years; nonetheless Eliot’s illiberality remained unredeemed, as indicated by his comment in 1961 that he saw nothing he would change for the reprinting of Notes Towards a Definition of Culture.154 The refusal to allow After Strange Gods to be republished seems to have been primarily because Eliot did not like the polemical style, and he regretted his criticism of Pound and D. H. Lawrence. The Catholic Herald asks why Eliot did not withdraw “Burbank with a Baedekker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” as he did After Strange Gods, if he had truly repented his previous convictions in the wake of the Holocaust:
After the war Eliot prudently withdrew this book from circulation and never re-published it. So why did he not withdraw the equally damning poem “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” from his Selected Poems, published in 1948 . . . ? It was still included in my own copy of his Collected Poems 1909–1962, published in 1963 and which I read that same year. Was it an oversight or did the magnitude of the Holocaust not impinge on Eliot’s consciousness?155
Why the Holocaust should be the criterion by which cultural critique is censored is yet, however, to be explained by any of these detractors other than in terms of a pervasive Western moral repentance that is as stifling to honest analysis as Lysenko’s dogma was to Soviet biology.
“CLASSICIST, ROYALIST, ANGLO-CATHOLIC”
Elio
t was primarily a Christian and a royalist. In Social Credit he saw the economic aspect of the Anglo-Catholic via media, or middle path between socialism and capitalism.156 His aim was to revive religion as the foundation for a cultural, aesthetic outlook. A. S. Dale comments that Eliot “wanted to affect the reader as a whole human being, morally and aesthetically.”157 This was not something that secular-humanist society, whether as capitalism or as socialism, was inclined to do.
While other aesthetes were choosing Communism or fascism, shaping up as the two great antagonists for the control of the world, Eliot chose “Anglo-Catholicism.” It was nonetheless a position on the Right, albeit critical of Hitler and Mussolini, but rejecting the Leftism of Bloomsbury.
Hence, when the intelligentsia was all aflutter over the Spanish Civil War in their near unanimous support for the Republican church-burners and nun-killers, in the interests of stopping Franco and Reaction, Eliot responded to a slanted survey on the issue circulated among the literati saying that he would remain neutral, itself a heresy in that milieu.158
Again, unlike others of the literati who joined Left or Right, Eliot did not propose a particular governmental system. However, he did believe that Christians should present their opinions on a solid Christian basis and form a community from which such ideals could emanate.159 Hence, when Eliot published Essays Ancient and Modern and Collected Poems 1909–1935, he drew criticism for attempting to establish a “Christian poetics” and for discussing a “Christian polity.”160
