by Kerry Bolton
One could argue that here again the process of industrialization and the type of economic system that it entails, along with urbanization and the primacy of the city, are not conducive to anything other than the creation and sustaining of a frenzied, hurried mass on an economic treadmill. Every part of life is becoming subjected to the need for haste, even gastronomically in the form of “fast food” as the modern era’s cuisine. The need for longer working hours proceeds contrary to the early expectations that the machine age would usher forth an era of more leisure during which the multitude would have time to reflect upon and even to create great art and literature, as per the utopian ideals of early socialist aesthetes such as William Morris and Oscar Wilde. Lewis’s hope that individuals might one day be compelled to relax in solitude in order that they might become real individuals is further away than ever.
Return to Socialist England
In 1939, Lewis and his wife went to the United States and on to Canada where Lewis lectured at Assumption College, a situation that did not cause discomfort, as he had long had a respect for Catholicism even though he was not a convert.
Lewis, the perpetual polemicist, began a campaign against extreme abstraction in art, attacking Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists.
He returned to England in 1945, and despite being completely blind by 1951, continued writing. In 1948, his America and Cosmic Man portrayed the US as the laboratory for a coming new world order of anonymity and utilitarianism. He saw the US as not a country but a “Cosmopolis.”[393] He considered the American commitment not to national patriotism but to “brotherhood,” because Americans are of “mixed race,” and now to Lewis “brotherhood is a rather good thing to fight for,”[394] a combination of “puritan ethos and revolutionary politics . . .” a lesson to the world of “how to make the lion lay down with the lamb.”[395]
As has been seen, Lewis paradoxically ridiculed Pound’s belief in Social Credit but was also well aware of usury and the “Emperors of Debt.” He considers this further in 1948 when writing:
Monopolistic interests, with all the power such great interests dispose, set their face against any change in an antiquated system which has served their purpose so well, and which has so many advantages from their standpoint over a new model.
The fairyland of bank capital and grandiose universal usury, out of which region a deep fog of unreality forever drifts overt into politics . . . is an Arcanum, of the very existence of which the average educated man is ignorant . . .
All that need be said is that the great artificiality of politics, which in these pages I have been endeavoring to describe, is at least equaled, if not outdone, by the artificiality of economics. This is true of England as much as of America, though the United States is now the headquarters of world finance.[396]
Returning to England, Lewis received some “official” recognition when he was commissioned to write two dramas for BBC radio and became a regular columnist for The Listener.
A post-war poem, “If So the Man You Are,” autobiographically continues to reflect some of Lewis’s abiding themes; that of the creative individual against the axis of the herd, of “High Finance, and Bolshevism”:
The man I am to blow the bloody gaff
If I were given platforms? The riff-raff
May be handed all the trumpets that you will.
Not so the golden-tongued. The window-sill
Is all the pulpit they can hope to get.
What wind an honest mind advances? Look
No wind of sickle and hammer, of bell and book,
No wind of any party, or blowing out
Of any mountain blowing us about
Of “High Finance,” or the foothills of same.
The man I am who does not play the game![397]
Lewis felt that “everything was drying up” in England, “extremism was eating at the arts, and the rot was pervasive in all levels of society.” He writes of post-war England: “This is the capital of a dying empire—not crashing down in flames and smoke but expiring in a peculiar muffled way.”
This is the England he portrays in his 1951 novel Rotting Hill (Ezra Pound’s name for Notting Hill) where Lewis and his wife lived. The Welfare State symbolizes a shoddy utility standard in the pursuit of universal happiness. Socialist England causes everything to be substandard including shirt buttons that don’t fit the holes, shoelaces too short to tie, scissors that won’t cut, and inedible bread and jam. Lewis seeks to depict fully the socialist drabness of 1940s Britain.
Unlike most of the literati who rebelled against Leftist dominance in the arts, Lewis came to uphold an ideal of a world culture overseen by a central world state, and a humanity that would become “Cosmic Man,” seeing the US as the prototype of a future global society which the rest of the world would embrace.[398] He wrote his last novel The Red Priest in 1956. Lewis died in 1957, eulogized by T. S. Eliot in an obituary in the Sunday Times: “a great intellect has gone.”
Henry Williamson
HENRY WILLIAMSON, 1895–1977, was a member of the generation that fought the First World War, during which the experiences of the front gave rise to a new but eternal worldview. Williamson, like Knut Hamsun in Norway, saw man’s place in nature as the ultimate source of our being—an idealization of nature as a reaction against the machine and the bank. His hope was of a new springtime for the West in Spenglerian terms. He was a partisan of the rural against the urban, rootedness in the soil and working the land against the nebulous city masses. It was what Spengler had called the final battle of civilization: “blood against money.”[399]
Yet, while Williamson, Pound, and Hamsun were recognized for their crucial impact upon twentieth-century literature, they were consigned to oblivion for decades following the Second World War. This is because they not only identified with new political forms but also (unlike some of their contemporaries) never repudiated them. Williamson’s outlook, shaped by both his experiences in the trenches and in his attachment to nature, led him to National Socialism, with its concept of “Blood and Soil,”[400] and to the distinctly British Fascism of Sir Oswald Mosley.
Williamson was born on December 1, 1895, in London, the son of a bank clerk. As a child, he had an intense love of nature, spending much of his time exploring the nearby Kent countryside. He was intent on closely observing things for himself, this faculty remaining with him throughout his life and providing the basis of his career as the author of famous and well-loved nature books.
World War I
Williamson enlisted in the army on the outbreak of the First World War and fought on the Somme and at Pas-schendaele, where he was seriously wounded. He was invalided home in 1915 but was back as an officer in France in 1916. He came out of the war as a captain with a Military Cross.
An enduring experience for Williamson was the Christmas Truce of 1914, when Germans and Englishmen left their trenches to fraternize and play soccer. Men such as Williamson returned from the war far from hating Germans and determined that never again would “brother Europeans” fight among themselves for the sake of greed and selfishness. The end of the war brought Williamson the numbing realization that the old world had died, and that such a war “must NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.”[401]
Man of the Soil
After demobilization, Williamson returned to his family home and entered employment with the Weekly Dispatch in Fleet Street. He had his first articles published in several major periodicals.
In 1919, he read The Story of My Heart by the nineteenth-century English nature writer Richard Jefferies. This was to have a crucial impact upon Williamson as a revelation that he—the individual self—is more than an isolated echo but a link that stretches without beginning or end in a cosmic flow. Jefferies wrote of the rhythms of nature and of the soil, of seeking to reconnect with the earth, in a personal mystic union: “I see now that what
I labored for was soul-life, more soul-nature. To be exalted, to be full of soul-learning. Finally I rose, walked half a mile or so along the summit of the hill eastwards, to soothe myself and come to the common ways of life again.”[402]
Jefferies ends his idyllic vision of nature with a hope that the world, properly reorganized, will allow man the abundance of available resources without recourse to continuous labor; and that a system might develop that allows leisure time to create and to think, rather than to toil.[403] It was a problem that was to preoccupy many, from non-doctrinaire socialists of similar romantic bent, such as Oscar Wilde,[404] to Social Credit banking reformers, and was reflected in the agricultural policies of British Union and its post-war successor, the Union Movement.
Williamson returned to Jefferies in his autobiographical Children of Shallowford, where again he contemplates fraternization between Germans and British on Christmas Day, 1914 and states that, “Later still, I learned that one of the battalions mingling in comradeship with our volunteer battalion on that immortal day . . . was the List regiment, from Bavaria, in which served as Austrian volunteer named Adolf Hitler.”
Williamson takes down his “worn copy of Jefferies’ Story of My Heart,” reading from the writer he refers to as “a prophet crying in the industrial wilderness.” The passages Williamson cites here from Jefferies refer to the desire to pass something better along to future generations, and to the transient, superficial character of “the piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of immense commerce . . . these objects are so outside my idea that I cannot understand them, and look upon the struggle in amazement. . . . It is the human being, as the human being of whom I think . . .” Williamson remarks, “Richard Jefferies, the poor Wiltshire farmer’s son, wrote that in 1875,” ending with a tribute to Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists as being the means by which these ideals might be accomplished:
Illness, neglect, poverty—an early death—the usual fate of English men of genius. But Jefferies was not dead—he lived in the English flow of consciousness—he was immortal! He was with me, I was a trustee, in so far as my talents must be used, of the same ideas! . . . It was not until ten years later that I found, in British Union, an organization of men which was struggling to create a new world; and thereafter, I was among friends.[405]
In 1921 Williams embarked on The Beautiful Years, the first volume of the four-volume Flax of Dreams. In 1922, Williamson returned to the countryside and rented a cottage that had been built in the days of King John, next to the local church in Georgeham, North Devon. Williamson lived here hermit-like and studied nature in detail, tramping the countryside and sleeping out. The doors and windows of his cottage were always open, and he gathered about him a family of dogs, cats, gulls, buzzards, magpies, and an otter cub.
Williamson had rescued the otter after a farmer had shot its mother. He named him Tarka (meaning little water wanderer). The otter would walk like a dog alongside Williamson. One day Tarka walked into a rabbit trap, panicked, and fled. Williamson spent years looking for Tarka, following the rivers Taw and Torridge. He didn’t find the otter, but he was inspired to write his most famous nature book, Tarka the Otter. Published in 1927, this popular book was an intimate description of the English countryside and gained Williamson the Hawthorne Prize for Literature in 1928.
In 1925, Williamson married, and his first son was born the following year. In 1929, the family moved to Shallowford, Devon, where over the next thirteen years four more children were sired, and more books were published, including Salar the Salmon. From 1937–45 the Williamson family lived at the Old Hall Farm in North Norfolk, where many more books and articles were written, and a sixth child was born.
National Socialism
Like Sir Oswald Mosley and the many veterans who joined his British Union of Fascists, Williamson was appalled by the prospect of another war that would again soak the fields of Europe with the blood of closely-related peoples. Not only had the fraternity of the front on Christmas, 1914 forever affected him, but he was also greatly influenced by the act of the German officer who had helped him remove a wounded British soldier caught in barbed wire on the front line. On another occasion, Williamson had heard the weak cry of a German lad wounded on the battlefield, who in delirium was calling for his mother. Williamson assuring the boy that his mother was there. In spite of the particular horror of World War I, it is probably the last major war that retained a vestige of the Western chivalric ethos.
Jeffrey Hamm, Mosley’s principal post-World War II aide, reflecting on Williamson and the other veterans who joined Mosley, writes:
There were the soldiers who had been assured by the old men of the Establishment that they would return to “a land fit for heroes,” only to find that they had been cheated and betrayed. The returning ex-serviceman was thrown on to the scrap-heap of unemployment, and officers joined with the men they had commanded in selling matches and bootlaces in the streets of an ungrateful country. In bitterness and cynicism that the promised “land fit for heroes” had become one in which you had to be a hero to survive. In later years many of them turned to Fascism, in Britain and all over Europe.[406]
Williamson was therefore able to contrast what he knew of the chivalry of the Germans with the anti-German propaganda that the press had begun to resurrect with the advent of Hitler.[407] In 1930 he revisited Ypres and wrote The Patriot’s Progress, the story of a bank clerk invalided home who came to realize that the war was a “dirty trick” played on the younger generation by the older and was responsible for “most, if not everything, that was wrong with England.”[408]
Williamson saw in National Socialism a spirit that could bring a dying Western civilization back to the wellspring of its life. He felt duty-bound to raise a voice. He was one of the first to commit himself to Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, although he did not join the British Union until 1937.[409] He championed Hitler as the visionary leader of European rebirth. In The Flax of Dreams and The Phoenix Generation Williamson was to describe Hitler as “the great man across the Rhine whose life symbol is the happy child.” Another war against Germany would only serve “Oriental commissars” waiting “like jackals to grow fat on the killings.”[410]
The British Union of Fascists
Williamson saw in Mosley’s British Union of Fascists the movement most committed to agriculture and the country. Mosley, clearly influenced by the ideas of Oswald Spengler, warned in a speech that, “the roots of Britain are being dragged from the soil. . . . Any civilization that is to endure requires constant replenishment from the steady, virile stock which is bred in the health, sanity, and natural but arduous labour of the countryside.”[411]
British Union propagandist A. K. Chesterton wrote that, “unless they know, mystically, that beneath the concrete lies the earth which has nourished their race for a thousand years and . . . that it is their own earth from which their blood is shed and renewed, then they are a lost people, and easy prey for those who have lacked roots for many centuries.”[412]
Francis McEvoy, writing in BUF Quarterly, expressed nostalgia for the country he had known, addressing himself to the “peasant folk of Britain” who had been driven off the land, to the cities by the “blighting tyranny of modern capitalism.” Summoning his own experiences, McEvoy, somewhat reminiscent of Hamsun, referred to the simplicity of life and the rhythm of the seasons of which country folk are a part, only asking for a modest return to “live on the land of our fathers.”
Food imports were destroying British agriculture as part of a system that “crowds the people of Britain into offices and factories,” subjecting the dwellers of the great cities to “economic servitude.” This was leading to human standardization in the pursuit of “greed, materialism, triviality” and exploitation: “Long live the ‘little man,’ standardized like a mass-produced motor car, the swarm of Babbitts from the service flats and the s
uburbs, propagandized, exploited, and brutified, in ‘this England of ours’! . . . The death of the countryside portends the death of the nation, for from the soil springs all life, physical and spiritual.”[413]
Mosley’s agricultural adviser was New Zealand-born Jorian Jenks, who had been driven from his own farm because of the Slump. Jenks was a pioneer of organic farming. He had held government appointments as an agricultural specialist, and he was an organizer of the Rural Reconstruction Association.
With a commitment not only to a rural revival, but also to sincerely pursuing peace,[414] the British Union of Fascists, together with the qualities of courage and intelligence that Williamson saw in Mosley, had everything to commend it. He stated of Mosley in relation to his own commitment to rural life, “The spirit of the farm and what I was trying to do there was the spirit of Oswald Mosley. It was all part of the same battle.”[415]
