The Intellectuals and the Masses

...Thus, Carey writes, "though it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is...

...As such, his book resembles other recent efforts of the British intelligentsia, like David Irving's cheeky claim that Hitler can't be definitively proved to have known about the Final Solution...

...Like Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, the book is pleasing enough as voyeurism, even if it does take an irresponsible delight in refuting theory with biography...

...He deplores the collectivism of the industrial world, "herding people into enormous mechanized masses...

...always reactionary...

...It was the suburban London clerks, with their red-brick68 The American Spectator March 1994 university educations and their subscriptions to Tit-Bits and their hunger for self-improvement, who alarmed the intelligentsia as interlopers and rivals...

...or Andrew Motion's idle imputation of Nazi sympathies to Philip Larkin on the basis of a childhood trip to Kreuznach and an adult affection for Margaret Thatcher...

...No one would argue that many literary figures haven't been shameful in their accommodation of totalitarianism...

...Carey uses the final pages of the book to set up his cheapest shot...

...But let's keep this in perspective...

...Call it the "like Hitler a lover of dogs . . ." method of guilt-by-association...

...Lewis, while clearly evil, was a silly little man...

...He takes the discovery—somewhere in the millions of words D. H. Lawrence put into print—of the sentiment "Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas," along with a statement by a character in the obscure novel Kangaroo, to show that Lawrence was moving towards acceptance of the kind of politics that would culminate in the building of death camps in Poland and Germany...

...Note that Carey finds no fault with Auden for the totalitarianism he did actively support: the Stalinism of the Great Terror...

...Or, he might have added, from the standpoint of Anne Frank or Raoul Wallenberg...

...T his mass-loathing was not a matter of left- or right-wing ideology (which Carey, apparently some kind of progressive, ignores anyway) but of class, and even of taste...

...Unfortunately, Carey is apt to overstate the degree to which characters speak for the authors who've created them, protecting himself behind a weak disclaimer...

...He juxtaposes Hitler's words and deeds with those of a host of twentieth-century writers taken seemingly at random...

...And Lewis's espousal of fascism, Carey fails to note, was the occasion of his irreversible fall from grace among intellectuals...

...W hat we're left with is a retrospective exercise in political correctness, a Catharine MacKinnonism that holds a blowhard or a phony as morally culpable as a mass murderer: —^ The American Spectator March 1994 69 Another respect in which Hitler's fantasies about the mass conformed to a common intellectual pattern was in his division of the mass into the bourgeoisie, which, like all intellectuals, he despised, and the workers...

...Then he records the consternation of Fabian socialists Edith Nesbit and Hubert Bland, who want to help the working classes but would prefer to have the ugly houses they live in torn down...

...One sees absolutely no one here of one's own class...

...And worse...

...elites who found their striving unseemly...

...Along the way, he trawls the work of nearly every major English novelist and poet of the years 1880-1939 and issues his indictment: England's modernists helped shape the world-view that would culminate in Auschwitz...

...70 The American Spectator March 1994...

...or Wyndham Lewis, who was in bed with the nymphomaniac heiress Nancy Cunard when another mistress returned from the hospital with their own newborn—Lewis had them wait outside in the cold...

...These werenot precisely Wells's sentiments, but he seems to have shared Masterman's exasperation...

...The fact that no one has ever heard of Rayner Heppenstall doesn't dim Carey's ardor any...

...English leftist intellectuals of the Auden group in the 1930s likewise set about proletarianizing themselves...

...Here is a good example of his method: The evidence suggests that [H.G.] Wells thought of women as by nature extravagant, and addicted to clothes, chatter and shopping...

...It is true," Carey adds as an aside, "that Hitler goes on to suggest that the feat of producing the great achievements of Western art effectively establishes the supremacy of the Aryan race . . ." Oh yes, but except for that, and the bit about the ovens, he and Steiner see eye-to-eye...

...If most people are dead already," says Carey, "then their elimination becomes easier to contemplate, since it will not involve any real fatality...

...they were "rewritten" as exotics and as peasantry by Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...

...The novelist Jean Rhys, for example, who left her newborn son near a window, giving him pneumonia, and spent the evening of his death drinking champagne with her husband...

...There is not a single woman, complains the consumptive Masterman in [Wells's novel] Kipps, "who wouldn't lick the boots of a Jew or marry a nigger, rather than live decently on a hundred a year...

...Crosland, who blames the new class of clerks not only for overcrowding and tawdriness but also for vanguard social doctrines like vegetarianism, socialism, and feminism...

...But Carey is less interested in the intellectual roots of totalitarianism than in making use of a witty interpretation of Hitler's legacy for a kind of cheap moral stunt...

...Granted, Lewis is an easy mark, having written an appreciation of Hitler in 1931 and two more pro-totalitarian books in the, thirties...

...This is a reference to the movement to legalize cremation in the 1890s—which, Carey may need reminding, was for people who were already dead...

...Carey, Merton Professor of English at Oxford, formulates his theoretical framework over the first half of the book: The masses were objectified and undifferentiated, he says...

...To show that the modernists thought of the masses as "dead," Carey uses sentiments voiced by characters in the modernists' poems and novels, including one of the "voices" in The Waste Land, and the protagonist in Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, whom the novel is explicitly devoted to repudiating...

...Wells, and Wyndham Lewis...

...Auden wore a cloth cap, dropped his aitches and ate peas with a knife...

...According to Carey: Totalitarian regimes [Lewis believes] are to be admired for perceiving that human beings are naturally subservient...

...One line of thought saw them as dead...

...Angry that newspapers, radio, and cinema were reducing the artist's priestly importance, and despairing of keeping art as their private domain, modern writers resorted to illogic and ugliness to render their work incomprehensible to the mob...

...Any attempt to take the poseurs of modernism down a peg can only be welcomed, and we hardly need to be told that some of these literary intellectuals were pretty terrible people...

...In the early days of the movement he made sure members came to meetings without collars or ties, believing that this "free and easy style" would win workers' confidence...

...His preference for totalitarianism was based on a number of risible prejudices, including the hope that state monopolies would eliminate the need for advertising...

...By the extremist and the bloody-minded they were compared to vermin and bacteria...

...But Carey, who berates intellectuals for never seeing the "masses" as a collection of individual souls, seems unable to distinguish Adolf Hitler from a pompous London aesthete complaining about mouthwash billboards...

...yet he urges that this stultifying process should be stepped up, because as the mass becomes more and more comatose, the few "free intelligences will be isolated and thrown into prominence...

...Martin's Press/ 246 pages / $19.95 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL A ccording to John Carey, a good number of modern English writers were mere self-important snobs who felt a literally violent disdain towards mass humanity...

...Carey describes a suburb-baiting novel by one T.W.H...

...Then he begins the next paragraph: It is hard to see what could be accounted trivial, half-baked or disgusting about these propositions from the standpoint of early twentieth-century intellectuals, or, for that matter, from the standpoint of a late twentieth-century intellectual such as George Steiner...

...You can see where he's headed, but it is not until the concluding chapter, "Wyndham Lewis and Hitler," that Carey goes off the deep end, all but blaming England's literary set for the Final Solution...

...Carey: "Hitler would have readily understood...

...Carey doesn't stop there...

...He then wrote a stirring poem about the urban unemployed that might vouch for his left-wing credentials...

...Carey then uses the book's second half to test his theories out against one mass-loving writer (Arnold Bennett) and three who, to one extent or another, rued the masses' rise (George Gissing, H.G...

...The geriatric BBC functionary Rayner Heppenstall confided to his journal that he would "happily commit total genocide" against the Irish and the Arabs...

...The lumpen masses, too, are occasion for hypocrisy: Graham Greene, on a trip to proletarian Nottingham in 1926, wrote his fiancée that the city was a "ghastly" place that "destroys democratic feelings at birth...

...On this, as on other subjects, Lewis's vehemence issues in self-contradiction...

...Those modernists even had the logistics of the Holocaust covered: "As for disposal of the bodies, cremation was, as we have seen, firmly linked by intellectuals with the soulless masses some years before Hitler adopted it for his final solution...

...He first notes that Hitler admired Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, and classical Greece, deplored modern art, worshipped the artist as hero, etc...