by K. R. Bolton
However, in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the advent of a Labour Government in Britain, and the domination of the US over Europe, Eliot’s focus for change moved from Britain to the Continent, and to the survival of European civilization as a whole. In 1945 he expressed concern that what lay ahead was “centuries of barbarism” ushered in by the supremacy of technology.223
In 1946 he gave three radio talks to a German audience, which were reprinted as an appendix to Notes, entitled “The Unity of European Culture.” He began by lauding the English language as the best specifically for writing poetry, but also as a language that itself represented the unity of European culture, in synthesizing German (Saxon), Scandinavian (Danish), French (Norman), Latin, and Celtic. Most importantly to the poet, each contributed its own “Rhythms,” a composite of so many different European sources.”224 Of the fundamental unity among Europeans, “no one nation, no one language, would have achieved what it has, if the same art had not been cultivated in neighboring countries and in different languages. We cannot understand any one European literature without knowing a good deal about the others.” European poetry is “a tissue of influences woven to and fro.” Those poets who only knew their own tongue were nonetheless subject to influences from wider sources. The vitality of poetry must be maintained by a continual interaction from outside, while also having sources that are “peculiarly its own.”225
While there had in recent times been an influence from Oriental sources, and Eliot did not advocate cultural isolation, he nonetheless stated that it is a shared history that provides the basis for a unitary cultural organism where “countries which share the most history, are the most important to each other, with respect to their future literature,” as well as for the other arts. “Wherever a Virgil, a Dante, a Shakespeare, a Goethe is born, the whole future of European poetry is altered. . . . Every great poet adds something to the complex material out of which a future poetry will be written.”226 Hence, a tradition is accumulated and transmitted, and forms the foundation for the future.
With The Criterion, Eliot had aimed for an interchange of new ideas across Europe, and this had been proceeding through contact with similar journals in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. What emerged however, because of the political situation and the rise of national antagonisms before the war, was a cultural isolation among Europeans, which had a “numbing effect upon creativity” in each nation.227 Eliot saw politics as divisive for culture.228 Hence, we might understand why he chose to remain “neutral” on issues that preoccupied the intelligentsia, such as the Spanish Civil War. What The Criterion had sought, above political and national differences, was “an international fraternity of men of letters, within Europe, a bond which did not replace, but was perfectly compatible with, national loyalties, religious loyalties, and differences in political philosophy.”229
Eliot viewed with concern political nationalism that denigrated other European cultures. But for the post-war world there emerged the problem of “the ideal of a world state in which there will, in the end, be only one universal world culture.” Culture was an organism that had to grow and be nurtured like other living organisms, and could not be contrived through the machinery of government, including world government. The cultural health of Europe required that the culture of each country should remain unique, and that each should realize their relationship to the other on the basis of a “common element,” “an interrelated history of thought and feeling and behaviour.”230
Eliot sought to define culture to delineate the “material organisation of Europe” and the “spiritual organism of Europe.” “If the latter dies, then what you organise will not be Europe, but merely a mass of human being speaking several different languages.” One thinks immediately here of the artificial construct of the EEC.
Under such contrivances, even differences in language will no longer matter, since there will no longer be anything left to say that cannot be said in any other language. Further, there is a differentiation of “higher” and “lower” cultures, “higher” being “distinguished by differentiation in function,” with a “less cultured and more cultured strata of society.” While the culture of a laborer, a poet, a politician, a painter will all be different, “in a healthy society these are all parts of the same culture,” and all these classes “will have a culture in common, which they do not share with other people of the same occupations in other countries.” 231
Hence Eliot’s conception of society and culture was organic and repudiates not only cosmopolitanism of all types, but notions of class struggle and economic determinism.
As always, the ultimate unitary factor for European culture remained, for Eliot, the Christian faith. “If Asia were converted to Christianity tomorrow, it would not thereby become a part of Europe.” Christianity has shaped the arts and laws of Europe. The individual, although not personally confessing Christianity, will nonetheless have been shaped by that heritage.232
This organic, cultural unity is of a different character to that of the political loyalty demanded by statist ideologies. Here we have a reason why Eliot could not support fascism. It is also why he risked condemnation as being “pro-Nazi” for refusing to support Oxford’s boycott of Göttingen University’s bicentennial celebrations on political grounds: “No university ought to be merely a national institution, even if it is supported by the nation. The universities of Europe should have their common ideals, they should have their obligations towards each other.”233 They should serve cultural, not political ends, to preserve learning, pursue truth, and attain wisdom, rather than existing to fill a state’s bureaucracy.
Eliot feared for the future of European culture, and the advance of barbarism via the primacy of technology. He appealed to “the men of letters of Europe” to transcend differences and preserve and transmit the common cultural legacy “uncontaminated by political influences.” He regarded the “spiritual possessions” of several thousand years as in “imminent peril.”234
His warnings were prescient. The nightmare of soulnessness was unleashed and has grown exponentially under the impress of globalization. It is superfluous to comment in detail; it is evident on a daily basis to anyone attuned to the rhythms of history. When one academic can nonetheless still state in a biography of Eliot that “the barbarians did not arrive in his lifetime,”235 that blindness is itself symptomatic of a cultural malaise.
One of Eliot’s great post-war feats was his leading role in securing the release of Ezra Pound from St. Elizabeth’s lunatic asylum in 1958, “largely as the result of Eliot’s collaboration with Robert Frost and Archibald McLeish in petitioning the American government.”236
Unlike Ezra Pound, during his lifetime Eliot seems to have mostly escaped the opprobrium illiberality attracts. However, after death he has become a figure of hatred, and in 1988 The London Jewish Chronicle condemned Jews who were involved in the T. S. Eliot Centenary Fund at the London Library.237 Such meanness of spirit would not have biased Eliot’s attitude towards others, including Jews, when considering the merits or otherwise of one’s creativity; any more than it did the supposedly rabid “anti-Semite” Ezra Pound.
What the liberal critic is incapable of conceiving is that a cultural luminary such as Eliot, Hilaire Belloc, or Pound could—like the Zionist—be conscious of the otherness of the Jew in the Gentile society, while not necessarily harboring antagonism towards Jews on a personal basis. One such example is Eliot’s letter of December 9, 1920 to Ezra Pound referring to the poetry of Louis Zukofsy as “highly intelligent and honourably Jewish.”238
For those concerned with the malaise of Western culture, the great contribution of Eliot was to define culture, and to establish, to use his own word, a criterion for art. It is a counterblast against those—the majority among today’s artists, art critics, patrons, publishers, gallery owners, curators, etc.—who toss about clichés claiming that art is too “subjective,” too personal to be defined; that there is no criterion, no standard, that
art can be “anything.” He also showed that tradition is not synonymous with stagnation and does not preclude innovation. Indeed Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others of that milieu were the great innovators of their time.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
September 25 & 26, 2012
CHAPTER 4
P. R. STEPHENSEN
Percy Reginald “Inky” Stephensen (1901–1965) was one of Australia’s pre-eminent “men of letters”—or “Australia’s wild man of letters” as one biographer called him.239 He also served as a ghostwriter of many books and as a mentor to aspiring writers. Like his New Zealand contemporary A. R. D. Fairburn, Stephensen sought to develop a distinct national culture for his homeland. His work as a publisher and political activist was dedicated to fostering this sense of “Australianity.” Like many others of the Right, such as Ezra Pound, Roy Campbell, and Knut Hamsun, Stephensen has seldom been acknowledged, despite his pivotal role in developing an Australian literature and defining an Australian culture.240
Born in Queensland in 1901 of Scandinavian descent, Stephensen had a polemical disposition from an early age and was inclined towards the Left as a university student. In 1921, he was a founding member of the Australian Communist Party.241 After graduating in the arts he took a teaching position in 1922 and formed a Communist association.242 He was also one of the first to write an in-depth review of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo, while serving as a writer for a Labour Party newspaper in Brisbane, The Daily Standard. Several years later in England he became Lawrence’s publisher.243 In 1924 he was selected as Queensland’s Rhodes Scholar and enrolled in the School of Philosophy and Political Economics at Oxford.244 He was one of the few members of the Communist Party at Oxford and was active in spreading propaganda in support of Indian independence.245 Despite qualifying for his Bachelor’s Degree in 1927 he never bothered collecting it. An Australian nationalist only obtained documentation of his studies in 2000.246
NIETZSCHE & BAKUNIN
Whatever Stephensen’s ideological commitment to Communism, it seems likely that his motivation was a reaction against bourgeois society. As the publisher of the London Aphrodite during the late 1920s, Stephensen wrote an article in praise of the Russian anarchist Bakunin with particular attention to him as a man of pure action and vitality.247 Stephensen’s admiration was based on his view of Bakunin as a Nietzschean-style figure.248 Stephensen describes Bakunin as what Nietzsche would have termed a “Higher Man,” as forerunner of the “Over-Man,”249 although it is doubtful whether Nietzsche himself would have applauded Bakunin’s anarchism250: “Only one man has lived dangerously—Michael Bakunin. While Nietzsche postulated the Fore-runner, here was a fore-runner in deed,” wrote Stephensen.
Stephensen contrasted the character of Bakunin as a revolutionary colossus astride the world against the archetypical English liberal “statesman” and his credo:
This man, Bakunin, walked on the edge of precipices, and is a hero. I have little difficulty in preferring his character to that of, say, the much-esteemed Mr. Stanley Baldwin, whose inane posture of “Safety First” has actually been employed as a sedative to voters in the recent dull Elections in Britain. The Bakunin-principle of action was always “Safety-Last.” Bakunin is essentially revolutionary, the antithesis of Baldwin. His type is surely not extinct. It must re-emerge, stronger, or the world dies.251
When Stephensen apocalyptically stated that the “world dies” unless the “Bakunin-principle” re-emerges, he already saw forewarnings of the age of “Machinery and its accompanying sacrifice to profit-scrambling.” The First World War was a manifestation of this, which “has developed the Robot and crushed the man. We shall need the Bakunin-principle yet again.”252 He believed that any revolutionary theory that does not lead to street fighting is “fake, tepid air, not even hot.”253
Like Bakunin, Stephensen at this time saw the need for destruction. Further, it was not “anarchism” per se that was sufficient but specifically Bakunin, or the “Bakunin-principle” as the “essential valid stimulus for effective action,” expressed as “I destroy and I build.”
Despite Stephensen’s affiliation with the Communist Party and his positive references to Lenin and Trotsky in the same essay, he points out that Bakunin rejected communism as no better than capitalism. Nor was Stephensen under any illusions about the contemporary anarchists who had become irrelevant “entirely.” Rather, Stephensen cites Bakunin and Herzen who theorized early on that socialism would triumph, but it would make way for “a revolution unknown to us,” as part of a dialectical “flux and re-flux of history . . . the perpetuum mobile of life.” Stephensen regarded this as “the soundest possible revolutionary theory.”254
Stephensen’s polemic against Christianity was also a Nietzschean-revolutionary synthesis, expressed in a poem entitled “Holy Smoke.”255 He challenges God to perform a miracle to make believers in an unbelieving age:
. . . No answer. Sulk the felon stretching taut
Your wooden muscles on the gallows-tree,
Worshipped by sniveling women and masochists—
Abandon us in your abstract Kingdom of Heaven!
Keep your eternal Bliss!—I’m off to hell
To tempt the devil to place some orders for coal
In Britain, to relieve unemployment; even though
The devil is beyond temptation, being a Bolshevik . . .
—The Bishop will preach tonight to exhortation
To follow the Golden Rule, or the Rule of Gold . . .
Stephensen continues with his inquisitorial reproach, asking why Jesus did not strike back at the authorities in the Garden of Gethsemane:
. . . —But grant us, Old Gods of the North, to resist our foes,
Returning a stronger blow for each blow received!
Grant us hate with passion in our blood,
Grant us the death of heroes, unforgiving,
And failing a rescue, let us die with a curse . . .
This aversion to Christianity is not noticeable in Stephensen’s later political activities and writings in Australia. However, it is reasonable to think that it helped form a basis for co-operation between Stephensen and the Sydney businessman W. J. Miles, a prominent rationalist who funded Stephensen’s cultural and political nationalism, including the launching of The Publicist.
PUBLISHING
In 1927 Stephensen took over the Fanfrolico Press which specialized in limited editions, along with the literary journal the London Aphrodite.256 He went on to establish the Mandrake Press and published a book reproducing paintings by D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence’s Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and a volume of Lawrence’s poems, Pansies.257 Stephensen also helped to publish an underground edition of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was the first edition to be printed in England.
Stephensen’s innate rebelliousness is also displayed by his writing and publishing a biography of the infamous occultist and poet Aleister Crowley, who the sensationalist press was describing at the time as “the wickedest man in the world,” “The King of Depravity,” and “A Man We’d Like to Hang.”258 Stephensen had no interest in occultism or mysticism per se. As with his support for D. H. Lawrence, his work on Crowley was probably motivated by the latter’s opposition to bourgeois society. Crowley’s Nietzschean-style polemics against Christianity would also have appealed to Stephensen.
Israel Regardie, Crowley’s secretary at the time and a life-long devotee, wrote years later in the “Introduction” to Stephensen’s biography of Crowley that Stephensen and his wife, a classical ballerina, were “very charming and kind people. . . . Inky’s interest in Aleister Crowley was wholly literary. He had a good grounding in philosophy, but cared absolutely nothing for the occult.”259 Stephensen, for his part, regarded Crowley as a literary “genius.”260 Considering the furor around Crowley at the time, it is indicative of Stephensen’s disregard of conformity, which would re-emerge in his political activities when the Axis powers were widely
perceived as evil incarnate.
Stephensen’s Mandrake Press also published Crowley’s novels Moonchild and The Stratagem, and the first two volumes of a projected six-volume Confessions of Aleister Crowley, the third volume of which never got as far as proofreading.261 Stephensen wrote the biography in order to try and mitigate the damage done to the sales of Crowley’s books as a result of bad publicity about Crowley’s character, something which was hardly helped by the self-styled “Great Beast’s” own cultivation of notoriety.262 However, the biography did not sell well, The Confessions was boycotted by booksellers, 263 and Mandrake Press was liquidated.264
