by K. R. Bolton
three-wheeled, with rotten hay half-stacked.
Where are the farmer and his bride
who came from their honeymoon in spring
filled full with gaudy hope and pride,
and made the farm a good paying thing? . . .325
SOCIAL CREDIT
In 1931 Fairburn was introduced to A. R. Orage,326 who had published New Zealander Katherine Mansfield. He was also editing the New English Weekly which was bringing forth a new generation of talents to English literature, including Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Orage was a “guild socialist,” advocating a return to the medieval guilds which had upheld craftsmanship and represented interests according to one’s calling rather than one’s political party. Orage met C. H. Douglas in 1918 and had himself become a seminal influence on Social Credit. Orage probably introduced Fairburn to Douglas around 1931.327
Fairburn had read Spengler’s Decline of the West at least as early as 1930. He saw that New Zealand, as a cultural outpost of Europe, was just as much subject to Spengler’s cyclical laws of decline as the Occident.328 It would have been with the fatalist eyes of a Spenglerian that Fairburn observed London and bohemian society and recognized in them the symptoms of decadence of which Spengler wrote, retreating to rural England where cultural health could still be found.
However, Fairburn felt that the vitality of individuals could be the answer to a reinvigorated culture, and break the cycle of decay, rather than the rise of a Caesar that Spengler stated was a kind of “last hurrah” of a Civilization before its eclipse.329 This was despite Fairburn’s earlier belief that Social Credit could only be “ushered in by a dictatorship.”330 This anti-statist, individualist belief reflects two major influences on Fairburn, that of Nietzsche and of D. H. Lawrence,331 who espoused “heroic vitalism” as the basis of history.332
Spengler, however, also had much to say on the role of money and plutocracy in the final or “winter” epoch of a civilization, and of the last cultural resurgence that saw the overthrow of money by “blood,” or what we might call the instinctual.333 It is not too speculative to believe that Fairburn saw Social Credit as the practical means by which money-power could be overthrown through economic reform rather than through an authoritarian “Caesar” figure. Fairburn returned to a Spenglerian theme in 1932 when writing to his communist friend, the poet R. A. K. Mason: “A civilization founded on Materialism can’t last any time historically speaking of course. But it may be necessary to go through the logical end of our present trend of development before we can return to the right way of life.”334
While Fairburn agreed with Marx that capitalism causes dehumanization, he rejected the Marxist interpretation of history as based on class war and economics. Materialistic interpretations of history were at odds with Fairburn’s belief that it is the Infinite that touches man. Art is a manifestation of the eternal, of pre-existing forms. It is therefore the calling of the artist to see what is always here and bring it forth.335
Fairburn met the Soviet press attaché in England but concluded that the U.S.S.R. had turned to the 19th-century Western ideal of the machine. He did not want a Marxist industrial substitute for capitalist industrialism. Hence Fairburn’s answer amidst a decaying civilization was the vital individual: not the alienated “individual” thrown up by capitalism, but the individual as part of the family and the soil, possessing an organic rootedness above the artificiality of both Marxism and capitalism. Culture was part of this sense of identity as a manifestation of the spiritual.336
Not surprisingly, Fairburn became increasingly distant from his communist friends. He was repelled by communist art based on the masses and on the fetish for science, which he called “false.” He writes: “Communism kills the Self—cuts out religion and art, that is today. But religion and art ARE the only realities.”337
Fairburn also repudiated a universal ideal, for man lived in the particular. New Zealand had to discover its own identity rather than copying foreign ideas. Another communist friend, the photographer Clifton Firth, wrote that the “New Zealand penis was yet to be erect.” To this Fairburn replied: “True, but as a born New Zealander, why don’t you try to hoist it up, instead of tossing off Russia? Why steal Slav gods? Why not get some mud out of a creek and make your own?”338
The artist and poet William Blake appealed to Fairburn’s spiritual, anti-materialist sentiments, as a means of bringing English culture out of decadence. Blake was for Fairburn “the rock on which English culture will be built in the future, when Christianity dies of an inward rot,”339 Blake’s metaphysic holding forth against the tide of industrialization and materialism.340 Fairburn also saw in D. H. Lawrence “a better rallying point than Lenin.”341 He was similarly impressed with Yeats.342 In 1931 he wrote to Guy Mountain that “Lawrence is the big man of the century as far as we are concerned.” To Clifton Firth he wrote of a lineage of prophets against the materialist age: William Blake, Nietzsche, and Lawrence.343 To Mason, he wrote: “our real life is PURELY spiritual. Man is not a machine.”344
While social reform was required, it was the inner being that resisted the onrush of materialism, and Blake “was a great old boy” for what he had offered to those who fought against the material: “Social reform by all means: but the structures of the imagination are the only ones which, fortified by the spirit, can resist all the assaults of a kaleidoscopic world of matter.”345
In 1932 Fairburn wrote an article for the New English Weekly attacking materialism. He feared that the prosperity that would be generated by Social Credit monetary reform would cause rampant materialism devoid of a spiritual basis. He saw the aim of monetary reform as being not simply one of increasing the amount of material possessions, but as a means of achieving a higher level of culture.
Fairburn wished for a post-industrial craft and agricultural society. The policy of Social Credit would achieve greater production and increase leisure hours. This would create the climate in which culture could flourish, because culture requires sufficient leisure time beyond the daily economic grind, not simply for more production and consumption (as the declining cultural level of our own day shows, despite the increasing quantity of consumer goods available). It was the problem that Fairburn had seen admirably but impractically addressed by Oscar Wilde. However, the practical solution of it could now be sought in Social Credit, which moreover did not aim to abolish private property but to ensure its wider distribution as a means of achieving freedom rather than servitude.
In June 1932, Fairburn wrote to Mason that if the Labour Party rejected Social Credit economics,346 he would start his own movement on returning to New Zealand:
If I were in NZ I should try to induce Holland347 and the Labour Party to adopt the Social Credit scheme. Then, if they turned it down, I should start a racket among the young men off my own bat. A Nationalist, anti-Communist movement, with strong curbs on the rich; anti-big-business: with the ultimate object of cutting NZ away from the Empire and making her self-supporting. That party will come in England hence, later in NZ. I should try and anticipate it a little, and prepare the ground. Objects: to cut out international trade as far as possible (hence, cut out war); to get out of the clutches of the League of Nations; to assert NZ’s Nationalism, and make her as far as possible a conscious and self-contained nation on her own account. I should try, for the time being, to give the thing a strong military flavor. No pacifism, “idealism,” passive resistance, or other such useless sentimentalities. Then, when the time came, a Fascist coup might be possible.
But Social Credit and Nationalism would be the main planks and the basis of the whole movement. Very reactionary, you will say. But I am quite realistic now about these things. No League of Nations, Brotherhood of Man stuff. “Man is neither a beast nor an angel”: but try to make him into an angel, and you will turn him into a beast, idealism is done with—over—passé—gone phut.
Behind the labels, of course, all this would be a cunning attempt to get what we are actually all after: de
cent living conditions, minimum of economic tyranny, goods for all, and the least possible risk of war. Our Masters, the Bankers, would find it harder to oppose such a movement than to oppose communism. And it would be more likely to obtain support.348
In commenting on this, Murray stated that Social Credit drew from both the Left and the Right: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound being Social Credit adherents from the Right, while New Zealand author Robin Hyde, a Leftist, also embraced Social Credit. As for Fairburn, Murray describes him as “probably one of the most notable campaigners for Douglas’s ideas in New Zealand [who had] flirted with at least the theories of fascism early in the decade.”349
On his return to New Zealand, Fairburn, instead of launching his own movement, wholeheartedly campaigned for Social Credit, mainly through his position as assistant secretary of the Auckland Farmers’ Union, which had a Social Credit policy, and as editor of its paper Farming First, a post he held until being drafted into the army in 1943. As Trussell says of New Zealand during the early 1930s, “Everywhere now Douglas Credit was in its heyday,” and in 1932 the Social Credit association was formed, followed that year by the adoption of Social Credit policy by the Auckland Farmers’ Union. “Rex Quickly slipped into the routine of a campaigner,” speaking at Social Credit meetings, and engaging in public debates.350
As Trussell accurately observes, although the Social Credit association did not field candidates,351 the victorious Labour Party incorporated some of Social Credit’s “more useful concepts.”352
NATIONAL CULTURE, ORGANIC SOCIETY
Around the closing years of the war, Fairburn began to paint in earnest and made some money as a fabric designer, necessitated by the need to provide for a wife and four children.
He spurned abstract art, and particularly Picasso, as falsifying life. Abstraction, like rationalism, was a form of intellectualism that took life apart. Fairburn believed in the total individual. In art this meant synthesis, building up images, not breaking them down: “If art does anything it synthesizes, not analyses, or it is dead art. Creative imagination is the thing, all faculties of man working together towards a synthesis of personal experience resulting in fresh creation.”353
While Fairburn believed in innovation in the arts and had earlier adhered to the Vorticist movement founded in England by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, et al., he also believed that art should maintain its traditional foundations, which was a feature of Vorticism: its classicism was quite unique among the new forms of art arising at the time. Art is a product of an organic community, not simply the egotistical product of the artist.
Fairburn, however, saw many artists as not only separate from the community but also as destructive, calling Picasso for instance, “a bearer of still-born children,” and referred to the “falseness of abstract art” and its “nihilism.”354 By way of example, Fairburn pointed to the contemporary French and Italian artists, writing of the “French Exhibition” that few of those who either scoff or praise see the art for what it is: “the great monument to industrialist and materialist civilisation.”
It is the finest expression of that civilisation that has emerged yet. But as I happen not to be a materialist, I can’t accept any of the modern French painters as of any permanent importance. I’m all for Turner and the English landscape school, and for the Dutch. The Italians and the French can go and stuff themselves for all I care!355
Fourteen years later Fairburn elaborated in a radio talk:
Art is not the private property of artists. It belongs to the living tradition of society as a whole. And it can’t exist without its public. Conversely, I think it can be said that no society can live for long in a state of civilization without a fairly widespread appreciation of the arts, that is to say, without well-organized aesthetic sensibility.356
Hence there was a reciprocal interaction between the artist and the public. Both possessed a shared sense of values and origins, in former times whether peasant or noble, in comparison to the formlessness of the present-day cosmopolitanism. “The artist has brought contempt upon himself by letting himself be used for ends that he knows to be destructive. By doing so he has brought art and his own type close to extinction.”357
Geometric “form” in art is fundamental. It is the primary responsibility of art schools to teach “traditional techniques” then allow those who have genuine talent to work from there.358
Fairburn lectured in art history at the Elam School, Auckland University, the most influential of New Zealand’s art schools which produced Colin McCahon and others. McCahon is New Zealand’s most esteemed artist, whose splatters fetch millions on the market and whose influence upon new generations of artists endures. He was vehemently opposed by Fairburn, who considered his works devoid of form, “contrived,” and “pretentious humbug, masquerading as homespun simplicity.” “In design, in colour, in quality of line, in every normal attribute of good painting, they are completely lacking.”359
He also considered modern music sensationalist, without content, form, or order, reflecting the chaos of the current cycle of Western civilization.360
Fairburn, in accordance with his nationalism, advocated a New Zealand national culture arising from the New Zealand landscape. He believed that one’s connection with one’s place of birth is a permanent quality, not just a matter of which place in the world one finds most pleasant to live in.
In contrast to this rootedness of being, Fairburn had early come to regard Jews as a rootless people who consequently serve as agents for the disruption of traditional society,361 juxtaposing old England with that of the new in his 1932 poem “Landscape with Figures”:
In mortgaged precincts epicene Sir Giles,
cold remnant of a fiery race, consorts
with pale fox-hunting Jews with glossy smiles,
and plays at Walton Heath, and drives a sports362
Writing to Mason in June 1932, Fairburn had stated that the criterion of “fortune-hunting” in choosing where one lives cannot satisfy “anybody who is un-Semitic like myself.”363 Fairburn explained to Mason that the art which is manufactured for the market by those who have no attachment to any specific place is Jewish in nature:
The Jews are a non-territorial race, so their genius is turned to dust and ashes. Their works of art have no integrity—have had none since they left Palestine. Compare Mendelsohn and Humbert Wolfe with the Old Testament writers. When I came to England, I acted the Jew. I have no roots in this soil. In the end every man goes back where he belongs, if he is honest. . . . Men are not free. They are bound to fate by certain things, and lose their souls in escaping—if it is a permanent escape. . . . Cosmopolitanism—Semitism—are false, have no bottom to them. Internationalism is their child—and an abortion.364
Fairburn condemned the notion that a culture can be chosen and attached to “like a leech” without regard to one’s origins. He further identifies the impact of Jewish influence on Western culture: a contrived art that does not arise spontaneously from the unconscious mind of the artist in touch with his origins.
Jewish standards have infected most Western art. It is possible to look on even the “self-conscious art” of Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Pater—Coleridge even—as being “Jewish” in the sense I am meaning. The orgasm is self-induced, rather than spontaneous. It has no inevitability. The effect is calculated. The ratio between the individual artist and his readers is nicely worked out prior to creation. It does not arise as an inevitable result of the artist’s mental processes. William Blake, who was not Jewish, had perfect faith in his own intuitions—so his work could not fail to have universal truth—to have integrity. But the truth was not calculated . . . 365
This cosmopolitan influence expressed an “international” or “world standard” for the arts which debased culture. He wrote: “Is poetry shortly to be graded like export mutton?”366
The “racket of modern art” was related to economic motives:
. . . the infection of the market place . . . the sooty h
and of commerce. The “modern art racket” has the aim of “rapid turnover,” a rate of change that induces a sort of vertigo, and the exploitation of novelty as a fetish—the encouragement of the exotic and the unusual.
Fairburn’s biographer Denys Trussell comments: “Rex feared that internationalism in cultural matters would reduce all depiction of human experience to a characterless gruel, relating to no real time or place because it attempted to relate to all times and places.”367 In contrast, great art arises from the traditional masculine values of a culture: “honor, chivalry, and disinterested justice.”
Writing to the NZ Listener, Fairburn decried the development of a “one world” cosmopolitan state, which would also mean a standardized world culture that would be reduced to an international commodity:
The aspiration towards “one world” may have something to be said for it in a political sense (even here, with massive qualifications), but in the wider field of human affairs it is likely to prove ruinous. In every country today we see either a drive (as in Russia and the USA) or a drift (as in the British Commonwealth) towards the establishment of mass culture, and the imposition of herd standards. This applies not only in industry, but also in the literature and the arts generally. In the ant-hill community towards which we are moving, art and literature will be sponsored by the State, and produced by a highly-specialized race of neuters. We have already gone some distance along this road. Literature tends more and more to be regarded as an internationally standardized commodity, like soap or benzine—something that has no particular social or geographical context. In the fully established international suburbia of the future it will be delivered by the grocer—or, more splendidly, be handled by a world-wide chain store Literary Trust . . .368
