The Treachery of Literature

...Harrison's problems stem from insufficient thought about the precise questions he wishes to consider...

...What must be described instead, as Hannah Arendt attempted with some success in On Revolution (also missing from Harrison's bibliography), is the central place in democratic thought of a commitment to "due process of law," and its absence from fascist thought...

...Consequently, the real dimensions of literary fascism?and the place in its history of his authors??are hardly even suggested by his book...

...Failing to delineate the subtle relationship between literature and politics of any kind, The Reactionaries is not a very effective brief for democratic values either...

...It is the "academicians" who advance exorbitant claims: "Literature as a discipline, literature as a final refuge for cultural and humane values, literature as history, literature as sociology, literature as Nature...

...The unso-phistication is crucial, for another important fact about fascist intellectuals is that they were all secondraters at best...

...and this leads?and not paradoxically, when you think about it??to a much more thorough-going devotion to "literature as Nature" than accomplished artists of our time have found tenable...

...Harrison begins with Orwell's suggestion that Yeats' "tendency" was fascist, yet nowhere explores the implication that it was less the ideas of Yeats and the others than their characteristic way of feeling that was fascistic (or was not...

...Since both books examine men who combined literary careers with active involvement in anti-democratic politics, they would have helped Harrison define the traits of the literary fascist...

...and yet it seems to capture the quality of the literary fascist...

...This, in turn, would have brought him to what seems to me the important conclusion about all but one of his writers: Although their political rhetoric, larded with references to the need for cultural unity, does indeed have much in common with the Continental literary fascists, they were not fascist...

...maybe Orwell was wrong...

...It is of course possible to confine fascism as a concept to the experience of certain European countries during the period 1922-45...

...They were much more than lobbyists for a state where great art would be possible, and if they succumbed to the temptation of fascism, we owe them a description of that temptation in all its proximity, so that we feel its force...

...In a passage that Harrison does not give us, D. H. Lawrence describes a certain modern type "who is half an artist, not more, and so can never get away from it or free himself from its dictates...

...The Reactionaries, for example, fatally ignores important distinctions among various kinds of anti-democratic responses to a democratic society...

...Again, instead of trying to determine why these authors were attracted to fascism, or its consequences to them and to their readers, he merely offers facile, hom-ilitic rebuttals of their ideas at the end of each paragraph...

...Nor do their writings manifest the simple-minded preference for literary values as guides to right action that characterized the Continental fascist intellectuals, whose "politics" was a series of intuitive responses to political regimes reminiscent of a critically unsophisticated reader's "responses" to poetry...

...Writing about T. S. Eliot, Poirier singles out the "tension in him between creative and de-creative movements" ?"de-creative" meaning consciously hostile to the claims of literature??as the essence of Eliot's work...

...They were not fascist for the obvious reason that??excepting Pound ??they were not actively involved in anti-democratic politics...

...Fascism's attempt to build a political system on "substantive" rather than "procedural" foundations??while hardly confined to fascism, as Hannah Arendt makes clear??seems to have exercised a strong fascination for the poetes manques who have bedeviled our political life in this century...

...Only a thoughtful statement of the true challenge of fascism can reveal its contemporary relevance...

...certainly it does not include Yeats, Eliot and Lawrence himself...

...Instead, he duly notes that Lawrence celebrated the blood and Yeats condemned democratic emotion and, gee, so did Hitler...

...His effort to fit them to the bed of certain of their most readily accessible dicta results in a distortion of their views and their significance...

...in the general chapters with which he begins and ends, the author never succeeds in articulating what he means by "fascism...

...The type has strong yearnings for literary achievement without the ability to bring it off...

...Harrison shows no suspicion of this tension in Eliot or the others, so that he misses the irony in Yeats' famous lines, "Surely some revelation is at hand/Surely the Second Coming is at hand," although the reiterated "surely" is a nearly excessive reminder of the inflated tone of much modern writing, to which Yeats' characteristic spareness is the more effective reproach...

...Not being up to the suspension of disbelief in fascist thinking that his subject requires, Harrison rushes to what he calls "arguments of sympathy" to "rebut" his authors: Either you like Auschwitz or you don't...

...Harrison is correct in stating that one's sympathies are ultimately what determines where one stands on these questions, but he completely fails to articulate the objects of the competing sympathies...

...Here his preparation is very clearly inadequate: Important works like Eugen Weber's study of the Action Franchise and Fritz Stern's penetrating The Politics oj Cultural Despair are not found in his bibliography...

...What must be explained about them is the difference between their "tendencies" and those of, say, Charles Maurras or Moeller van den Bruck...

...Harrison makes nothing of the rather significant fact that the most consciously fascist of his authors??wyndham Lewis??was by far the least gifted of them...

...In one dimension, such a description might be, as Harry Levin said of Madame Bovary in a very relevant essay on Flaubert, a "classic demonstration of what literature gives and what literature takes...

...The confusion of literary and political views that distinguished fascist thought in the years before and during World War II, and continues to do so today, seems to derive from an unawareness of the treacherous-ness of literature...

...While his book has been warmly received by some, I suspect the enthusiasm is more a reflection of interest in his subject than a tribute to any qualities of this distressingly superficial and weak-minded production...

...But even if one were to concede to Orwell that the "tendency" of these writers was fascist, and to Harrison that he has adequately described this tendency, the objection to it cannot be simply that Germany produced Auschwitz and America has not...

...Indeed, the assertion that extermination camps or a society of which they were the symbol held any special attraction for Yeats and Eliot outrages common sense...

...Thus Yeats is transformed from a witness into an accomplice...

...This may describe Lewis...

...And in the light of the continued failure to free the concept from those particular historical circumstances, it might be wise to describe the broader phenomenon I have in mind by the term "cultural despair...

...Unfortunately, he never makes up his mind what use to make of this phenomenon, why it is worth chronicling and analyzing...

...Reviewed by MICHAEL SCHWARTZ John Harrison, a young English academic, has had the good sense to recognize that the attraction of some of England's finest modern writers to authoritarian political creeds deserves explanation...

...In his own career, of course, Yeats lived both in Pater's world and in the warier one of Eliot and Joyce...

...But by any name, the impatience of some literary intellectuals with the democratic process?or, as Poirier's essay on Eliot points out, with literature itself??and their yearning for an "existential politics," to use Norman Mailer's phrase, should have been revealed in a book with the ambitions of The Reactionaries...

...But as Richard Poirier has recently observed, it is the signal virtue of the greatest writers of our time that they "treat literature as a kind of enemy...

...He seems to have done no more than read the works of his authors?Yeats, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot and Lawrence??looking for remarks on political and social questions and methodically setting down what he found...

...One can go further: The appeal of fascism lies in its dreams of public ceremony, the realization of racial myths, a politics of gesture??a "revelation," a "Second Coming"??to replace the less dramatic democratic process...

...In short, Harrison has written a lazy book on a set of problems that requires both restraint in judgment and considerable imagination...

...The attempt to make public life "genuine" as literature presents grave threats to liberty as it has traditionally been conceived, and this problem is not adequately explored by summarizing the familiar and not very interesting Spenglerisms found in some of the cultural essays of Harrison's authors...